Violence against women often a product of drugs
AS WE END August, the commemorative month of women in South Africa’s calendar, yet another tragic death of a woman was experienced thirteen days ago. This time in Thembisa, 27km from Pretoria – the name Thembisa means a promise, not only a promise, but one of hope and trust.
We had arrived from Mahikeng in the early hours of the morning on Saturday in 1987 in Lesotho with a very close family friend, Sekopi Tlatsana.
We had concluded our business in town during the day and Sekopi and I were back at my brother’s place to drive off back to Mahikeng where we both worked at the statistics office of Bophuthatswana.
My brother was uneasy seeing us arrive. He called me to the side – Sekopi Tlatsana’s eldest sister had passed on and he was to deliver the message. Parcel was the name she was fondly known by and she stayed with her family in Thembisa.
Our trip from Maseru back to Mahikeng was a long and sombre one. I came to know the Tlatsana family in Mahikeng when I led the 1985 Bophuthatswana Census.
It so happened that the two elderly brothers who were involved in the censuses of South Africa of the 1950s and 1960s had applied and got the census jobs as enumerators in the census of 1985.
The one brother who was a teacher became a supervisor. Old Serwalo Tlatsana was 70 years old and his two sons were also in the census employ.
Two other elderly contemporaries were involved – Mrs Lekgalatladi and Freddie Kgadiete. They were both teachers.
In early 1983 I attended a meeting at the Central Statistical Service (CSS) in Pretoria to discuss the upcoming 1985 Census in the broad SA-TBVC context.
We differed sharply with the rest as I drove an agenda for a comprehensive census and housing questionnaire for the census instead of a shorter one favoured by white South Africa, who bulldozed their way with this decision to the other TBVC states.
With that I ended the CSS and BopStats collaboration on the census and South Africa would not design systems for processing the Bophuthatswana Census.
I accepted the position and I knew I was on my own.
Getting back to Mmabatho I informed Motale Phirwa, (a township lad from Diepkloof and a fellow graduate of the National University of Lesotho), that we have to design systems for handling the data processing.
We did, and now had to train a team of elders and young stars who would experience an end-to-end process in survey operations. They were now poised for coding census questionnaires – a completely new experience.
Among the elders who were keen to go through this torture were Rre Serwalo Tlatsana and Freddie Kagdiete, whose enthusiasm really intrigued me.
They were exceedingly respectful and Rre Serwalo’s two sons were just exceptionally disciplined.
Attracted I was personally attracted to the family and the feeling was mutual and they took me in as their own.
For political reasons I could not visit Lesotho for a while.
In 2010 on my tenth anniversary as the Statistician-General of South Africa and head of Stats SA I invited Rre Serwalo Tlatsana to receive the Statistician-General ISIbalo Award in recognition for being one of the oldest and surviving census enumerators and data processors in the country.
He was then 95. As part of the family activities Rre Serwalo would invite us every Christmas to Lokaleng where he would slaughter a sheep and our families and children would be entertained.
His grandchildren by his daughter who died in 1987 would also be there visiting from Thembisa. Rre Serwalo Tlatsana departed from this world when he was 100 years old in February 2014.
In October 2013 when I visited him with Risenga Maluleke he insisted that we should come to bury him when his time comes.
I addressed the funeral from New York in March where I was attending the UN Statistics Commission and Risenga Maluleke was on the ground in Mahikeng to honour the call. Over the weekend we buried one of his grandchildren from Thembisa.
She was 40 when she met her untimely death a week ago, regrettably at the hands of her twin brother who hacked her head with a pick and finished her off with a shovel as she tried to mediate in a squabble.
She is survived by her husband and a son of about nine years.
I sat there in the tent with an empty gaze playing a recall of when these twins were just the age of the now orphan.
I watched how the nine year maternal orphan cried uncontrollably for a considerable part of the funeral service. He was cuddled by his father whose pain was just as palpable.
Towards the end – the young boy smiled – and joined the church choir and sang with them, and since then he looked content. But the scars should be running very deep and whether that moment of joining the choir in song healed the scars is to be seen.
We could not come to terms as we met as a family and kept asking ourselves as to what happened on that fateful day a week ago? Drugs are doing havoc to our nation. A month ago we had an animated discussion with Dr Bongani Ngqulunga, the spokesperson for the President, who is immersed in work with the nyaope addicts in Soshanguve.
Trance He gets possessed and goes in a trance when he talks about the youth in nyaope in Soweto, in Thembisa and in our townships – but does so with a sense of profound hope. He asked me to provide a statistical profile of the youth of our townships. As I sat at the funeral I could see this profile not in the statistics but in the human pain and havoc this creates.
The two Tlatsana brothers who were enumerators were at the funeral with their other siblings.
We took our cue from the harsh reality of the funeral and reminisced about the 1985 Census of Bophuthatswana and in particular about “Modimola and the suburbs.”
The elderly Tlatsana, who was a teacher, had contested census village assignments with his nephew, a matter I was not aware of, but remember distinctly of how the elder Tlatsana had narrated the argument for Modimola village and its suburbs.
This was a name we gave to him and behind his back we would say Modimola and the suburbs is here.
What is so important about this matter of census enumeration?
As we discussed, it was clear that there were major conceptual limitations in how we finally designed the enumeration geography then.
Whilst we were able to define the villages distinctly, we were not able to provide supervision areas by how the administrative systems are arranged. In that regard uncle and nephew found themselves at loggerheads in the census work. But beyond this, dissemination of census results for applications in planning would be at variance with the administrative boundaries along which planning subsists.
Whilst what prompted me to undertake the census of Bophuthatswana differently and in subsequent censuses for South Africa, and thereby to follow administrative geography, little did I realise how I missed this point 32 years ago.
Only to get a revelation in a terse discourse, as we reminisced years gone by when then we could hardly foresee that a tragedy of the nature we presided over at the weekend could happen.
We had then basked in the love and care of the deeply respectful elders of Mahikeng – Rre Serwalo Tlatsana, his brother who we then fondly behind his back called Modimola and the suburbs, Freddie Kgadiete and Lekgalatladi.
Violence against women is virulent and the weekend reminded me of this in a way so stark, far away from the numbers, but yet very much in the numbers.