Resolute action against femicide needed

I RECEIVED a message on Thursday morning that a young woman I used to work with had been found murdered near her home in Khayelitsha.

I received this news as my family were watching live on television the funeral of Tshegofatso Pule, 28, the eight-month pregnant woman who was murdered and hanged from a tree in Roodepoort. Her body was found on Monday after she went missing last Thursday. She had been stabbed in the chest.

My former colleague’s name was Sibungiseni Hilary Gabada and her end appeared to be more brutal.

She was 34 years old. Her decomposed body was found in a field in H-Section, Khayelitsha, near her home at the end of last month. It is not known how long she had been missing because she lived alone. It appeared her body had been chopped up and placed in a small sports bag.

Sibu had worked with us at the Cape Town Festival for three years as youth festival manager in the early 2000s. The Cape Town Festival was born out of the One City, Many Cultures project which I initiated while I was editor of the Cape Times.

She was a poet, a performing artist and a writer. She had dabbled in theatre production and event management and, at some point, she worked with the artist known as Zola 7 in Johannesburg. She was also part of the And the World was Women ensemble of women performance poets, a project started by the poet Malika Ndlovu.

I can’t remember the last time I saw Sibu, but it was probably years ago at one of the Monday night poetry jam sessions started by the late Sandile Dikeni at Off Moroka Café Africaine in the Cape Town CBD. More recently, Sibu, who was known to her family as Nomfazi, was involved in the Khayelitsha Development Forum.

According to a community newspaper, Sibu’s cousin Buyiselwa called for her murderer to be sentenced to life for the pain he had caused the family.

Watching Pule’s funeral on television while trying to process the news of Sibu’s death was not easy. Even though we had not seen each other for years, many of us who worked at the Cape Town Festival had become like family and would keep in touch.

But Sibu was also as old as the eldest of my three daughters and I could not help thinking about what must be going through the thoughts of the parents of young women who are so brutally taken away from us.

Even though I’m opposed to violence, as a parent, I identified completely with Tshego’s mother when she said at the funeral that she would shoot the man who killed her daughter. The instinct of a parent is to protect your children.

I thought about these women – Tshego at 28 and Sibu at 34 – and wondered what kind of society we have become where we allow these kinds of things to happen to women. It is not only about men not having respect for women or for their lives. It is also about the murderers knowing that they will get away with their crimes, because violence against women does not appear to be a priority for our police.

The government has shown with its response to Covid-19 that it is able to resolve problems if it puts its mind to it. It does not need resources; it only needs the will. It needs to put an end to gender violence. We cannot afford to mourn young women who lose their lives in such a brutal manner.

Men have a responsibility to speak out against gender-based violence and violence against children, because, inevitably, men are the perpetrators. It does not help when men complain about slogans such as #menaretrash, because clearly men are.

RYLAND FISHER