Dresses deserve to be raped’
men get to have many women in the shebeens. We have a lot of sex, even in the toilets. I know. I’ve got experience of that.”
Back in the middle of the room, Lekekela is trying to calm the group. He wants the participants to take a break. But, during a lull in the cacophony, the words of a man in a black beanie echo: “Men raped my sister … Drunk men.”
There are tears in his eyes, but he tries to compose himself.
He turns to the man in the Uzzi shirt who said he would “personally rape” drunk women and snaps: “They were dogs. My sister was just walking home.”
His desperate eyes are fixed on the man when he asks: “Why did those dogs rape my sister? Did they think it was their right?”
The noise from the tightlypacked tin shacks had faded to a low hum that Sunday night. It was about halfpast ten. No streetlights shone; the moonlight was pale.
The only signs of life in Diepsloot’s Extension 1 were the ever-present stench of sewage, the lingering smoke from the fires used to braai earlier that April day in 2015, and the scavenging rats.
Nomvula Mbete* had just left the shebeen where she and some friends had been drinking since the early afternoon. The 21-year-old wanted to escape from her former boyfriend, José Macia*, who was partying in another corner with his friends.
Macia, 28, was a trader with a regular income. Mbete was jobless. The couple’s relationship had ended badly a week before.
Inside the tavern, Mbete had tired of Macia’s constant, drunken pestering. When he went to the toilet, she took the gap and fled. But Macia chased her down, armed with a broken brick.
Soon he was gripping her right arm and spitting in her face: “You are going to tell me who you have been sleeping with or I will smash your head in!”
Mbete could hardly breathe. Macia was wielding a brick, but she also knew that he never went anywhere without his firearm.
She remembers the whites of his eyes as he seethed: “You will not run away from me. You will do as I say.”
Then he dragged her behind him, to his zinc hut, one of four squashed together in the backyard of the landlord’s RDP house.
Macia was a big, strong man. He removed the padlock and chain with one hand and threw Mbete on to the threadbare couch, which had once been decorated with bright floral patterns.
He told her: “You are going to undress now. I will have sex with you, or else I will shoot you.”
Bit by bit, she removed her clothes. Then, hiding her nakedness with shivering arms and hands, she begged Macia to use a condom. She was surprised when he agreed. He mounted her.
Mbete recalls: “I pretended to be passed out, in the hope that it would put him off and stop him raping me. But when he realised I was like a dead body he pulled his penis out of me and removed the condom. Then he carried on raping me.”
A male neighbour, also drunk, knocked on the door, demanding to know what was happening inside the shack. Macia bellowed: “I am having sex with Nomvula! Do you also want to fuck her?”
Mbete began weeping, uncontrollably. Her previously limp body shuddered to life.
She remembers Macia glancing down at her, as if puzzled, for a few seconds. Then he shook his head and burst out laughing. “Stupid bitch!” he roared.
After Macia ejaculated, he jumped up, zipped his jeans and announced: “I’m going back to the shebeen to have more beer.”
In the Sonke Change trial, “problem drinkers” — people who used alcohol at such a high rate that it interfered with their daily lives — were more than twice as likely to rape a woman than those who did not drink heavily. Just over a third of the men in the study reported problem drinking.
Hatcher explains: “Areas with large numbers of alcohol-serving venues are associated with higher amounts of violence.
“But it might be that Diepsloot’s high rates of alcohol use are, at least partly, as a result of the ‘structural omissions’ of the neighbourhood. In other words, the fact that there are few recreational options for adults other than taverns.”
The Diepsloot study’s problemdrinking rates are about three-anda-half times that of South Africa’s already worrying national alcohol abuse rate of 11.4%, as recorded in the country’s latest Stress and Health Study.
As part of a social audit of the township, the Sonke researchers found that Diepsloot’s 13 extensions, the population of which is estimated at roughly 500 000 according to some organisations, have access to only one decent family park, just two community halls and one library.
There are no public swimming pools, or free-to-use, well-maintained sports fields, only a few dusty makeshift soccer pitches.
“When I ask people, ‘Why are you drinking so much?’ the answer is almost always, ‘because there’s nothing else to do’,” Lekekela says.
But the Sonke researchers also learnt that alcohol on its own does not lead to sexual violence. Alcohol is rather a “pathway” or “trigger” that gives already violent men the “liquid courage to act on their desires”, as some scientists have put it.
“Heavy alcohol use is a pattern that overlays with violence. So, the same men who are violent are often the same men who are abusing alcohol,” says Hatcher.
The Sonke study found that many violent men have gender-inequitable views, such as beliefs that women are unequal to men or that men should make the decisions in a relationship. They also have a strong sense of sexual entitlement.
More than half of the men in the study expected their partner to agree to sex when they wanted it, and a third believed a married woman “cannot refuse sex with her husband”.
Such men were more than double as likely to be violent towards women than men who did not hold such convictions.
When men have had too much to drink, explains a research paper by the United States government’s National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, they can much more easily focus on their “immediate sense of sexual gratification, sense of entitlement and anger”, rather than on their “internalised sense of appropriate behaviour, future regret and the victim’s suffering” or the possibility that they will be punished for their actions.
Alcohol is a “pathway” or “trigger” that gives violent men the “liquid courage to act on their desires”