THE PISTORIUS CASE AND THE VIOLENCE IN SOUTH AFRICA

This week, the news about the Pistorius case is on the headlines, our attention was drawn towards an article of opinion in the New York Times. It called our attention because of the interesting perspective it suggests about this topic. In this way our vision about the reality in South Africa has been amplified, and this allows us a better argument towards creating our own views on this matter.

Op-Ed Contributor

Cry, the Misogynistic Country

By EUSEBIUS McKAISER

Published: February 20, 2013

JOHANNESBURG

It is a tragic truism that South Africa is one of the world’s most violent countries outside of war zones. And for all of its international headlines, the Valentine’s Day shooting of the model Reeva Steenkamp by the prosthetic-legged Olympic hero Oscar Pistorius is ultimately a very South African story.

Mr. Pistorius’s charm, beauty, talent and refusal to live a marginal life as a disabled person made him a marketer’s dream. And for a fragile South Africa, he was a symbol of the country’s obsession with overcoming obstacles. Mr. Pistorius’s personal story reminded us of the country’s miraculous tale of deliverance from apartheid to freedom. But, as with South Africa, a lot of uncomfortable truths lay beneath Mr. Pistorius’s and Ms. Steenkamp’s seeming domestic bliss.

It is often assumed that widespread poverty, an official unemployment rate of over 25 percent and deep inequality are the drivers behind violence in South Africa. Many analysts claim that is why poorer countries in the region with lower levels of inequality have less gratuitous violent crime. South Africa’s uniquely unequal distribution of wealth, the argument goes, feeds the country’s violence.

But the Pistorius case shows that violent crime is not limited to the poor or committed only by impoverished blacks against wealthy whites. South Africa’s apartheid past normalized violence as a means of dealing with personal and nationwide problems and it has created a paranoid nation obsessed with the threat of crime, where those with the means arm themselves heavily and shut themselves into gated communities.

Initially, responses to news of Mr. Pistorius’s arrest seemed to fall along South Africa’s familiar racial fault lines. Comments from some whites on news Web sites indicated widespread acceptance of Mr. Pistorius’s claim that he mistook his girlfriend for an intruder and an easy identification with the fear that would lead to reflexively grabbing and firing a gun lest a black criminal be lurking behind the bathroom door. They blamed the black-led government’s inability to effectively address the country’s crime epidemic for the “tragedy.” The implication was clear: but for black leaders’ incompetence in assuring public safety, Ms. Steenkamp might still be alive.

Meanwhile, some black callers to my radio show were quick to pass judgment on Mr. Pistorius. They reminded me that the media talks liberally about accusations against black leaders, like the billionaire Tokyo Sexwale, who is alleged to have abused his wife. Their impulse to judge Mr. Pistorius hastily is driven in part by the desire to prove that a white man — seemingly nice and virtuous — is as capable of wrongdoing as a black one.

But as the narrative in court becomes more complex, and the possibility of a domestic violence story emerges, South Africans, black and white, are being forced to respond to Mr. Pistorius’s story with greater caution and less haste.

A long trial looms, but there are some accepted truths. Mr. Pistorius has admitted to killing Ms. Steenkamp but has stuck by his claim that he thought he was shooting a burglar. The defense team claims that crime is so rife that Mr. Pistorius had feared for his life several times and that he reasonably thought that the noises from the bathroom were those of a criminal. The government insists that this story is incompatible with forensic evidence at the scene and with witness reports of screaming and fighting before the killing.

It is possible that Mr. Pistorius’s defense will hold up in court, but the broad outline of the case is numbingly familiar to South Africans of all backgrounds. Mr. Pistorius, it has become clear, is obsessed with guns and deeply paranoid about crime, has a short temper and has fired a gun in public — at a restaurant, reportedly by accident. According to a spokeswoman for the South African Police Service, episodes of “a domestic nature” had previously been reported at his home.

Violence against women and girls is rampant here. Just two weeks before Ms. Steenkamp was shot, South Africa woke up to news of the death of 17-year-old Anene Booysen, a poor black girl who had been raped, disemboweled and left to die on a construction site in a small town on the country’s south coast. Experts say that a woman is raped every four minutes in South Africa. Many die at the hands of partners, siblings and friends. The gruesome rape and murder of the 17-year-old Ms. Booysen, a foster child, was framed by some, including the editor of a major newspaper, as a story of what happens when poverty and absent biological parents reduce one’s chances of living a flourishing life.

But the Pistorius case tells us that brutal violence against women is an equal-opportunity affliction in South Africa; it has no respect for whether its victims are rich or poor, black or white, suburban or rural. Our society is drenched in violence. A woman is safe in neither a shack nor a mansion.

Being disabled or athletically gifted seemingly did not preclude Mr. Pistorius from being like countless other South African men — aggressive and possessed of a sense of entitlement in his relationships with women.

And that is the real story. Mr. Pistorius, it would seem, is actually more typically South African than the exceptional story of his life might suggest.

Comments from Feminine Inspiration:

The racial conflict that underlies in this situation has called our attention. It is a problem that is still there, although the apartheid “disappeared” years ago. It is the real situation of a scandalous violence towards women, in a country where violence is united to the concept of poverty and “color”. This article reveals that the country’s elite has an important amount of violence themselves.

The statistics on violence against women is South Africa are shivering: every 4 minutes there is a rape; every six hours a woman is murdered, this supposes six times more the global average. We have as well information from de Medical Research Counsel (MRC), which revealed that 1 out of 4 men had raped someone in their recent past, many of them had attacked more than one woman, and one out of ten men had participated in “group raping”.

Violence against women in South Africa is higher than the medium average, and it cannot be attributed to only one cause, nevertheless Franz Fanon’s theory might be alluded: “A colonized country, brutalized, where the oppressed ones end up imitating the oppressors; the violent repression and family disintegration during the Apartheid might be a cause; that we live in a strongly patriarchal society that feels threatened; to the persistence of stereotypes which mark what is expected from a young boy and a young girl; to poor communities with high unemployment, drugs and alcohol.”

From Feminine Inspiration, the Pistorius case has lead us to think in something we have repeated in one way or another: Women always loose. And we say that because look at the disproportion of means: In the prosecutor’s office collaborated with his investigation detective Botha, who had, as evidence, the testimony of two witnesses who assured they had heard screams and a discussion in the house before the shooting. During this same week, it has been known that this same detective has been accused of seven attempted murders. Because of this background, his evidence doesn’t have the same validity, he has been discredited in the same way women’s opinion in conflicts are discredited so many times. How opportune it is that while the prosecution has the least appropriate detective, Mr. Pistorius has the advise of the best team of lawyers in South Africa! Sadly, this case is a mirror of the situation lived daily between men and women: She will always loose.

Another point we wanted to highlight is the huge social pressure towards this case, because Mr. Pistorius is a hero. Not only is he a national hero, but also a worldwide hero as a symbol of self-improvement. Let’s not forget he is a male, successful and white, so in a subconscious level his actions will be more justifiable. In this aspect he is connected with the controversial fiction character we have been speaking about recently: Mr. Grey, because he is successful, he is allowed to have “Shades or Shadows”. Or the ex director of the International Monetary Fund, Mr. Dominick Strauss-Kahn, who, even though he was guilty for some time, the woman who accused him of sexual assault was finally discredited.

As a way of culmination, we would like to stand out the coincidence that this event, which has had international impact, took place on the 14^th of February, the same day millions of men and women worldwide danced to stop the violence against women in the “One Billion Rising” project –on our blog last week-.

Facts and coincidences of this kind might leave us hopeless. But we have to be aware that we are before a change process that is slow and might take a thousand years or more. Not this event or any other should make us give up standing on our feet, keep dancing and making common projects. Nothing should stop us with our intentions, our proposals and realizations, towards a communion between men and women.