The two young people murdered last week had three things in common. They were 19 years old. They were first-year university students. They were women.
Now these young, idealistic South Africans looking forward to changing their worlds are dead even before they could complete their first year of studies.
Jesse Hess had just graduated from Table View High School in Cape Town, and had chosen to dedicate her life to service in a Christian ministry.
She was already a youth leader in her church and a mere hours before her death had won a Women’s Month award. “I have been saving to do something special for my gran and my aunt … who took me in,” she told Heart FM radio. No surprise that this young leader was registered to study theology at the University of the Western Cape.
Not far away, at the University of Cape Town (UCT), Uyinene Mrwetyana was in her first year of film and media studies.
She had arrived from the university town of Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown), where she had graduated as a top student from Kingswood College.
Uyinene came to university with great plans for her life, which included travel and exploration of new worlds far away.
Uyinene was killed inside a local post office, where a man bludgeoned her with a weighing scale.
Jesse was killed inside the family apartment, where she was left dead on a bed and her grandfather was tied up and killed in the bathroom.
Uyinene went missing for days before her body was found in a township by crack private detectives. Jesse’s body was found immediately. Both women were murdered off campus.
UCT became a centre of organisation and protest while the search for Uyinene’s body and her killer proceeded at pace.
In her case, private detectives were hired and the alleged murderer was quickly found even before the body was recovered. In record time, the case appears to be solved.
The University of the Western Cape did not seem to be as energised around the murder of Jesse – there were no night-time vigils on campus or a day-long shutdown of campus, as at UCT.
The search for her killer was in the hands of the SA Police Service, and as ordinary people have come to expect, there will be no instant results.
Women took to social media, making the point that the usual malice meted out against victims did not apply, such as blaming rape survivors for provocative dressing or late-night clubbing or drunken youth.
A modest Uyinene went to a post office in broad daylight to collect a parcel – and still, her life was taken. Her killer was evil, the devil himself, railed some. “Men are trash,” said others. Some poor soul made the mistake of responding on social media with the kneejerk defence, “not all men”.
Much more shocking has been the long silence of the president. Everybody wanted to know: where is our leader? What does he think? Can he at least say something to reassure us? What is our government going to do?
In desperation, we look for leadership, and despite the public outcry, not a whimper from the Union Buildings. The people feel stranded.
Not that the government cares about the serial murders of women. Some of the political men now expressing outrage over Uyinene’s murder are among the same people who mocked a terrified Khwezi (the alias chosen to protect herself) who alleged she had been raped by the former president. The hypocrisy is not surprising.
What is to be done? There have been calls for the reinstatement of the death penalty; that is a constitutional nonstarter, and it does not work.
Some have proposed a million-man march. Others, a national shutdown in which women across the board refuse to work. There has even been a call for parliament to declare violence against women a national state of emergency.
Such activism is necessary to build a national consciousness about femicide in our society.
The problem, however, goes much deeper into a misogynistic culture that afflicts all our institutions and whose uprooting requires much more considered action.
It is what men say at the bar and the braai about women. It is those insulting women jokes (not only blondes) that everybody laughs at. It is what boys witness when their fathers act with violence towards their mothers.
It is the muscular behaviour of male drivers on the roads, on the sports fields and inside those regular, violent bust-ups in parliament. It is the catcalling from the men on the back of a bakkie or from a gang of workmen on the street when women pass by.
The truth is, violence against women has long been part of the everyday culture of SA society. A march or a moment of silence achieves little.
What we need, I propose, is the same kind of legislative action that put Vicki Momberg in prison to be applied to men who behave badly in their everyday sexist behaviour. That will change things in a hurry.
This article was first published by Times Select
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