The New South Africa

"Somehow, somewhere there must be a tipping point where society is so convulsed by a collective anger over rape that we begin to turn the tide against this terrible scourge.
"Each of us needs to ask what we can do to stop this awful trend. And then we must act accordingly. You can help."
"Stand up. Speak out. Help us turn this evil around once and for all."
Makhuda Sefara, South Africa Citizen

Sexual violence, brutal rape against women and children is so common in South Africa that when the present head of the African National Congress, and then-presidential candidate, Jacob Zuma was accused of having raped a woman who regarded him as an uncle, an old family friend, he was elected to the post of the country's president, regardless. This is a man so ignorant that he claimed he protected himself against AIDS by showering after raping the HIV-positive young woman.

One in four women in the country is raped. And it is not only mature women who are viciously violated. Babies of several months of age, as well as 94-year-old grandmothers meet similar atrocities. Studies of the phenomenon substantiate these events; they are not claims or allegations meant to embarrass the country or portray it in a condemnatory light. These are actual cases, and this is what afflicts its society.

The Talk Radio 702 station reminds its listeners of this part of their culture every four minutes to inform them that statistically another and another and yet another child or woman in their country is being raped. The station has undertaken its own campaign, hoping to deliver a message that should shock the country into a response. That a popular movement would emerge to condemn and begin an assault on the noxious crime.

India's mass revulsion over the dreadful gang rape and subsequent death of a 26-year-old woman on a bus, drew attention to that country's horrible statistics on the prevalence of sexual abuse of Indian women. India, with its population of 1.2 billion people reported 24,206 rapes in 2011. Needless to say that figure hardly represents the true number of women molested and raped in that country, but it is an institutional yardstick.

In contrast, and without doubt equally under-reported, South Africa with its far lesser population of 50-million people officially reported two and a half times that number of rapes occurring in the last year of report statistics.  Lindiwe Mazibuki, an opposition politician in South Africa spoke of "a silent war against the children and women of this country ... We live in a deeply patriarchal and injured society where the rights of women are not respected."

What this unspeakable cultural practise represents is a crime against humanity. And the ultimate hypocrisy: President Jacob Zuma stated his personal  opinion and official position: "that government would never rest until the perpetrators and all those who rape and abuse women and children are meted with the maximum justice that the law allows."

That can be taken as a guarantee that never again will an atrocity as horrible as the one that saw a gang rape of a teenager mutilated with her body carved open from her stomach to her genitals, left for dead, occur. That 17-year-old girl's mutilation was so dreadful that the doctors who tried to save her life and the nurses in the operating theatre are undergoing trauma counselling.