Diepsloot: Where men think
Crime statistics released this week show reported rape cases dropped by 7.4% between 20082009 and 2014-2015. But experts say it’s not an indication that rape has decreased. Rather, fewer people are bothering to report rapes to the police. In Diepsloot, ra
The sun has just risen over the shacks of Extension 1 in Diepsloot, Johannesburg north. It is a calm Tuesday, just after 6am, in October 2013. Those with jobs are on their way to work; most people are hanging around doing nothing, whispering about death.
A crowd of people are banging on the door of Sisanda and Thokozani Mali’s one-room tin shack. “You need to come to the toilets! Quickly!” a voice shouts on the other side of the door.
The young mothers race to the public toilets, about 500m away, still in their pyjamas.
“It’s the one on the left; the one that’s broken!” someone yells. “They were found in there.”
The Mali sisters push through a heaving crowd of bodies to get to the toilet. Their hearts are hammering. They can hardly breathe.
At the toilet’s tin door, someone announces: “People have found the bodies of two toddlers. They may be yours.”
Four days earlier, two of the Mali sisters’ children had disappeared a few metres from the family’s doorstep. They shared the shack with their mothers, grandmother, great-grandmother, aunt and five-year-old cousin.
Just after lunchtime, Sisanda had gone to buy sugar from a nearby shop. Her three-year-old daughter, Zandile, and Thokazani’s two-yearold, Yonelisa, were playing in front of the family’s shack. When Sisanda returned, the girls were gone.
“No one saw anyone talking to the children,” Sisanda remembers. “But there were some people who told us something that made us worried. They said: ‘We saw them walking behind a man wearing a yellow T-shirt.’ ”
After they had reported the disappearance, the police, Mali family and community members combed thousands of shacks and alleys. They scoured the rubbish dumps and riverbanks.
But on that Tuesday morning the search stopped.
Two tiny, mutilated bodies had been found — they were stuffed head-first into a blocked public toilet. The four little feet and legs that stuck out were tied together with plastic, and bodily fluids poured from the corpses, which had started to decompose.
There, amid the stench of faeces and urine, someone turned the small, half-naked bodies around so that the Mali sisters could see their faces.
“It was our daughters,” recalls Sisanda.
A year later, Ntokozo Hadebe, who was 29 at the time, was found guilty on six rape and three murder charges — in addition to the rape and murder of Zandile and Yonelisa, DNA results also linked him to the disappearance of another girl, a five-year-old, whose body had been found on a rubbish dump in the area. Post-mortem results revealed he had raped each girl twice — vaginally and anally — and then strangled them.
Hadebe’s shack was about 20m from the toilets where the girls were found.
When the judge passed sentence — 240 years of imprisonment — in the high court in Pretoria, Hadebe showed no remorse. “Fuck you!” he repeatedly shouted before being led down to the cells.
The Mali family has since moved to Extension 9 in Diepsloot, where they’re renting two small rooms at R1 000 a month each. There’s a huge fence, with a locked gate, around the property. “We can’t really afford it, but we need a safe place for the children,” Sisanda explains, adding that Thokozani has since had another child.
Sisanda’s sitting on a couch next to her mother in one of the rooms. There’s a picture of Zandile in a light blue dress next to the pots on the kitchen unit. “We don’t understand why the guy took the kids and killed them like this. He never said in the court why he did it,” says Sisanda softly, weeping. “We never spoke with the killer. He’s not a human being to us.”
On the corner of William Nicol Drive and Diepsloot Road, just after you pass Afri Tombstones, there’s a spanking-new two-storey brick building. Its gloss makes it incongruent with the township. The Diepsloot police station, most of it built five years ago at a cost of R52-million, remains largely unstaffed.
Inside, there’s a spacious charge office, an investigators’ bureau, interrogation rooms and holding cells.
Police officer Lwandile Skosana* thought he would be working here. But instead, he and his colleagues are “squatting” at the nearby cramped offices they are forced to share with the metro police.
There’s no official explanation about why the new police station is largely empty, other than vague utterances from the South African Police Service about “problems with the contractors”.
Skosana says his dream of prevent- ing crime has come to nothing. “Who am I helping here in Diepsloot?” he asks, his voice desperate. “All I do is to drive from crime scene to crime scene, fill out reports and pick up dead bodies. Sometimes I feel like I’m wasting my life here.”
Skosana is navigating his way through one of Extension 1’s narrow gravel roads. The morning’s rain has turned the soil into dark, wet mud. Urine and excrement have collected in the puddles surrounding the policeman. “When I was new in Diepsloot, I used to feel something. But I just feel nothing now,” he says. “Child rape is something that I see almost every day.”
The shacks are built almost literaly on top of one another. People are screaming and shouting, and children are running around directionlessly through the incessant, chaotic noise of the hooting of taxis.
Skosana explains: “It’s easy to rape in a place of chaos, easy to drag kids and women into a shack and rape them and hide them away in the mess of Diepsloot. It’s easy for criminals to disappear in this congestion.”
There are no recent statistics for Diepsloot’s official population. South Africa’s 2011 census found the township’s 13 extensions had a total of