Tragedy amid neglect our mothers have to endure

To say the case of Zinhle Maditla — the mother who murdered her four children by feeding them rat poison — has shocked South Africans would be an understatement. At the age of 24, she killed her kids — the eldest being eight and the youngest 11 months — after she found the father of her two youngest in bed with another woman. Two weeks ago, she was handed four life sentences.

Reactions ranged from anger to sympathy: how could a mother kill her babies? Surely the circumstances must have been unbearable to drive her to commit such an atrocious act?

While there is the possibility that her act wasn’t driven purely by revenge and she might have been a victim of her circumstances, what she did is unforgivable and inexcusable, and the punishment is fitting.

The sympathy shown towards Maditla is driven by her gender — we have been socialised to believe women are nurturers by nature; that mothers are caring, kind and loving towards their children.

But for various reasons, not all mothers are safe spaces. Having been a teenage mother, it’s possible Maditla also held feelings of resentment towards her children.

To explore the broader picture, three children are murdered every day in SA. Not all of these murders are committed by their parents or guardians, but in cases where they are, it’s “easier” to focus on the children and the ways they’ve been killed, because to dig any deeper would mean the kind of analysis that requires introspection. And introspection is an uncomfortable act. On paper, SA protects and cares for its children: the Children’s Act of 2005 demands that parents ensure their children are financially supported, for instance. That is, of course, one of the basic roles of a parent, but the problem is that ours isn’t a country that encourages poor parents to be self-sufficient, and in turn to effectively take care of their offspring.

With such a high rate of unemployable people and the economy in the gutter, how are parents meant to financially support their children when they can’t even support themselves?

We know the social grant is as good as dust, and there is little to no empirical evidence to support the widespread, elitist idea that impoverished women intentionally fall pregnant for — as of October — R430 a month. And it doesn’t matter if your wife’s best friend’s second cousin did that — a handful of hearsays don’t count as research.

Stats SA’s monthly publication Mbalo Brief last year shared some frightening numbers about hunger, saying that among pregnant women aged 12–50 (there’s no such thing as a 12year-old “woman” — and having pregnant 12-year-olds is indicative of a bigger problem), 16.3% lived in households where children or adults suffered from hunger because there was not enough food, and 35% were in households that ran out of money to buy food for five or more days a month.

Lack of resources, lack of effective policing and a lack of social workers (while thousands of social work graduates are unemployed) means single mothers are left to fend for themselves in untenable situations that are not of their own making.

This is the part where some will roll their eyes and sneer: “Well, they shouldn’t have fallen pregnant in the first place,” because we love to control women’s bodies — especially if they are impoverished.

That control over women’s bodies extends to their reproductive health, and while in theory family planning is easily accessible to anyone who needs it, the truth is that girls and young women are often slut-shamed by the health professionals who are meant to be helping them.

Try being a girl or woman who wants to get an abortion — a legal right — at a state-owned health-care facility: you’ll understand why back-street abortions are so common, and why babies are left to die or simply abandoned.

We can tell SA’s poor to lift themselves up by their bootstraps all we want, but they don’t even have said bootstraps in the first place.

And there is a bleakness to poverty that makes it difficult for people to keep working towards or even hoping for something better.

Research shows a link between poverty and mental health, with the hopelessness of socioeconomic circumstances exacerbating — and sometimes causing — illnesses such as depression.

A 2015 study titled “Motherhood and the ‘Madness of Hunger’ ” from Stellenbosch University’s department of psychology found that mothers who struggled to feed their children showed signs associated with major depressive disorder, and exhibited feelings ranging from sadness, guilt and shame to anger, frustration and resentment.

That is the South Africa we live in: a country that fails to protect its citizens, but especially doesn’t care for its poor, instead often treating them with disdain and resentment. And that’s only when we even acknowledge their existence.