A passerby found a black newborn baby being dragged by two dogs in Zondi, Soweto, on Sunday, Gauteng police said.
The passerby notified the police who found that the baby’s head had already been eaten by the dogs, Warrant Officer May Makhubela said.
The baby’s mother was unknown.
An inquest into the incident was opened and the baby’s body taken to a mortuary.
The partly burnt body of an eight-year-old boy has been found in a field in the Ramaphosa informal settlement on the East Rand, police said on Tuesday.
“The boy was found dead with socks stuffed in his mouth and a used condom was found next to his body,” said Captain Tsekiso Mofokeng.
The eight-year-old was reported missing on Monday at the Reiger Park police station.
He was last seen on Sunday evening playing with friends in the area.
His body was found on Monday afternoon by a man walking past the field in Ramaphosa. He alerted the police.
“The body matched the description of the boy who was reported missing earlier on Monday,” Mofokeng said.
A case of rape and murder had been opened. No arrests had been made.
The police appealed for any information that could help them find the perpetrator. – Sapa
“I told (the court) that as a family we were prepared to forgive them. It will help give us closure,” said Anchen Jooste about the two men who had been sentenced for the brutal murder of her gay brother, Barney van Heerden.
Van Heerden was found strangled in his home in September 2011, his head wrapped in tape and his body beaten. This was after he had invited into his home three black men who were later accused of robbing and murdering him.
Van Heerden’s murder was the first case identified by The Star in what police believe is a series of killings of gay men in Gauteng and the Western Cape.
In November last year, police told the media about their theory that the killings were perpetrated by a gang targeting gay men.
But after a year of investigations, police have been unable to forensically link the trio to any of the other crimes.
Earlier this month, one of the men responsible for the crime, Maxwell Nyathi, turned State witness. He told the Johannesburg High Court sitting in Palm Ridge how he, Mthokozisi Ndlovu and Bheki Maseko had wangled their way into Van Heerden’s home before robbing him. They allegedly left him bound with duct tape around his face and head, causing his death.
Last week, Jooste, who had attended the entire trial, saw Ndlovu and Maseko each sentenced to 20 years for the murder and another 10 years – to be served concurrently – for the robbery. She said it was a cathartic experience, but that she would fight if the pair tried to apply for parole.
“They deserve at least 20 years for what they did,” she said.
Jooste said she approached the men after the sentencing, specifically to speak to Maseko, who had told the court that he had known Van Heerden for some time before the murder.
She asked him about how he had met her brother and what their relationship had been like. Apparently, Van Heerden had wanted to help Maseko to pay for his university tuition.
“His facial expression showed he had cared for Barney,” said Jooste, who said the emotion after this confrontation was overwhelming.
Judge George Maluleke’s judgment had upset Jooste.
The judge had said that an almost middle-aged man associating sexually with 22-year-olds was playing “a dangerous game”.
He also suggested the three men were prostitutes being solicited by Van Heerden, which Jooste said was unlikely.
But the grieving sister said she wanted the senseless murder to have meaning. She wants to donate one of Van Heerden’s properties to a gay rights organisation for use as a safe house for teenagers kicked out of their homes after coming out of the closet. – IOL
by Claire Smith
I went on my first protest march yesterday – another item checked on the ‘things everyone should do before they die’ list. I attended the Red October march. According to the media reports on the march I must have turned into a right wing, fascist, Nazi, apartheid supporting crazy since I moved here. That’s not true. I was brought up in London, one of the most diverse cities on the face of the planet and I marvel at the fantastic range of cultures that this earth plays host to. Anyone who knows me knows that I don’t give a flying monkeys whether you are white, black or green with sky blue polka dots – AND THAT HAS NOT CHANGED.
I also don’t recognise the caricature of the protest that was presented by the media – maybe I’m mistaken and I turned up at a different protest….
I have to say, I was hesitant at turning up yesterday. I was worried that this event would be hijacked by racist groups looking for a publicity opportunity. I was worried that the message of Red October would be kidnapped.
I was pleasantly surprised by what I experienced; the protesters in Pretoria were respectful but wanted to get their point heard. I, personally, heard no bigoted racism, no derogatory name calling or incitement to violence. I saw people who were sick and tired of the fear that crime causes in this country – people who were saying enough is enough. I identified with the Red October cause after reading the content of the letter sent to the Presidency setting out the reasons for the protest:
Nothing racist in that lot – no calls for return to apartheid, no we’re better than you, no bigoted name calling, no incitement to violence, no mention that this should be limited to white people in any way, shape or form!
But when the protest was reported in the media it was characterised as a bunch of Afrikaners demanding special treatment over anyone else, making outlandish, untrue statements and generally being a bit racist. It was an eye opening experience of selective reporting and has taught me the lesson that the ‘news’ is actually about 99% opinion and spin and the remaining space left to fact is filled by cherry-picked information to back up the preconceptions of the person and/or agency presenting the story.
So, let’s answer the criticisms leveled at Red October.
In 2009 white people represented 1.8% of murder victims, but make up 8% of the population.
By this statement E news is trying to indicate that white people, especially Afrikaners, are not victimized and are, in fact, nice and safe and complaining about nothing. Anyone fearing ‘white genocide’ is clearly a delusional fantasist.
Up until this point, any figures quoted by groups worried about the degree of violence focused on white populations were discredited as the South African Police Service does not routinely collect data on the ethnicity of victims and perpetrators of murder. Obviously that doesn’t make nice convincing TV news, so E has gone through the archives until they found a 4 year old statistic gathering dust in a corner. Want to disprove groups who spend an awful lot of effort trying to document murder rates through the devotion of their time to collating anecdotal reporting? Then where is your carefully researched analysis of murder over the past 19 years? Where is your statistical analysis of last year’s crime statistics that were released last month? Where is your evidence of the reliability of your single snapshot statistic from 2009?
So, let’s leave statistics aside – as Benjamin Disraeli reportedly said: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
What is verifiable is the horrific brutality and savagery of farm murders in South Africa; if you have a strong stomach, Google it. Torture, rape, murder and mutilation are a legitimate and reasonable part of robbery or a wage dispute? I didn’t think so.
This march is ridiculous as it only focusses on crime against white people
I refer you back to the motivation for the protest above. This was against all crime, all murder, all rape, all violent attacks. No one in this country should have to live in fear. Yes, the focus shifted towards white victims of brutal farm attacks, but these were the people who could be bothered to get off their backsides and make a stand.
If all those who criticised the march on that basis stood up and arranged a protest against the complete lack of control that the ANC government has over crime in this country, then we’d attend that one too. But you haven’t, so we can’t.
The additional demand to scrap racial quotas such as Affirmative Action, Black Economic Empowerment, etc, etc, proves that Red October is a front for racists who wish to return to apartheid.
It has escaped reporting, but organisers and speakers took great pains to point out that this is by no means a call to return to apartheid and that the system was fundamentally wrong.
All forms of discrimination are fundamentally wrong. None of them are positive. The ANC, however, insist on applying racial quotas and conditions on all areas of commerce and employment. How will it ever be fair that someone has to hand over large percentages of the business that they have worked hard to establish and make successful, just due to their skin colour?
The motivation for this protest also highlights the issue of education, asking for quality education for ALL children in this country. The ANC has had 19 years to focus on education, ensuring that every person can compete for jobs based on their abilities and qualifications rather than the melanin content of their skin. They have failed spectacularly – the government can’t even get textbooks into schools for the start of the school year! In order to cover for their incompetence and lack of motivation in this area, they impose employment quotas to give a thin veneer of success.
In the face of a difficult and hostile job market, many white families have had to rely on their entrepreneurial abilities to make a living. If you can’t get a job, you have to work for yourself in order to survive. The new focus of the government has now been to attack white ownership of business, to demand that anyone who has worked hard to establish a successful, profitable company now hands over a percentage of what they built up to black ownership.
There is one group determined to keep race a flashpoint in South Africa and that is the ANC. The ANC are just as obsessed with race as apartheid was, possibly more so.
As the title of this piece indicated, this experience has been a real eye opener. Caricatures mindlessly spouted by the media are being used unfairly to silence people’s concerns. I guess there are none so blind as those that refuse to see, and deaf as those that refuse to hear.
From a Brit living in South Africa – Claire Smith
by Dan Roodt
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My first question upon reading this sorry little ego trip from a Daily Maverick columnist who obviously thinks she deserves the Nobel prize for literature in a few days, is: Why don’t you go back to the UK where you spent 14 halcyon years? Why return to this backward country where English is mostly a second language to everyone – even to people like you who are hardly on the English peerage list – and therefore in various states of creolisation, pidginisation, etc.?
Many sub-editors and journalists at English-language newspapers in this country are actually Afrikaners. Maybe you should go on a campaign and get them fired and replaced by born-and-bred Englishmen?
Recently the Coloured champion of English and anglicisation in South Africa, Jonathan Jansen, claimed that “English will unite us”, where Afrikaans divided us, or some such lunatic fallacy. The truth is that English, like any language, unites as well as divides. In the UK, the British class system has created almost two worlds, an upper class gossiped about in the tabloid press and an anomic, drug-ridden white underclass whose children pass out in public places as reported here.
In the USA, which until recently used to be an English-speaking country, there is the Mason-Dixon line which no longer exists politically, but which still defines two cultures. The New York Times regards Southern identity with the same suspicion as a Soviet commissar would look upon stirrings of nationalism in any satellite state. We Afrikaners have a lot in common with Southern Americans, having lost an important war in the nineteenth century but also being puritans and Calvinists. The other day I read a comment by the Austrian intellectual Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn describing American folk music, especially country, as Calvinist and I must admit, he is right! The contemptuous American-liberal view of “red-state fascism” corresponds very much to the Johannesburg leftist’s supercilious “interest in the oddities of post-Apartheid whiteness”, as Nicky Falkof puts it.
To me English is also a foreign language, like French. But I really love reading books in French and even sometimes, more rarely, in English. When a black taxi knocked me over on my bicycle in DF Malan Drive a few years ago, I lost a lot of what Falkof would call my white skin, and spent a week immobile on my side. To ease the pain and discomfort, I read three Jean Echenoz novels and I think his quirky, ironic prose anaesthetised me a little and took my mind away from my immediate inability to even get up and go to the toilet without help.
I have never come across a Frenchman or -woman who held me in contempt because I was not a mother-tongue writer of French. Yet, Nicky Falkof, this is what you seem to be doing: you despise people who do not happen to be “to the manner born”, to quote J.P. Donleavy. I gather you were raised in some deep corner of Houghton where anglophilia was part of your noble upbringing.
By implication you are also saying that Afrikaners like Sunette Bridges and others are foreigners because they do not speak or write British English properly. The theme of alienation, becoming-foreign in the land of one’s birth – my forebears only came here in 1701 so I have not been properly naturalised as a “South African” – is one that really interests me. We named most of the country’s towns and cities, yet we are now seen as strangers. Farm murders are also an expression of xenophobia because, at least since the revolution, Afrikaners are considered foreigners or settlers, as Thabo Mbeki, Ruth First and many others have assured us.
That said, and being a foreigner/stranger, an “étranger” – if you know the famous novella by Albert Camus bearing that title, you will understand the existential alienation concomitant with being “not of this place”, the RSA, which is now oh so English – I cannot say that I know too much about your exalted language.
Yet the one thing I do know about South African English is that it is really horrible, lacking in aesthetic sense and coherence. Even mother-tongue speakers – although that might be a contradiction in terms – make lots of mistakes all the time and of course spelling and grammar have fallen by the wayside since the revolution and Kader Asmal importing something called “outcomes-based education”. Have you heard how blacks speak English? Have you seen how some of them write it, even ones with university degrees? Because it is not their own language, but also because since 1994 they have had sub-Bantu education. Maybe you should apply some of your heart-felt linguistic snobbery there?
Or is it not politically correct to put blacks down on account of their English style, but in relation to those local whites who object to being killed, tortured and raped, it is almost de rigueur?
Your other concern, that these hapless non-English are not amenable to being manhandled and executed by Foucauldian freedom fighters, and are actually usurping the register of genteel leftist diction, might be more problematic than you think. You describe it as “a ham-fisted attempt at adopting progressive discourse”.
First of all, I regard as ham-fisted the attempts by English people such as yourself to adopt some kind of local identity. Why does Woolworths sell boerewors and koeksisters? Why are you not proud to say that you are English, hoist the Union Jack or preferably the St. George’s Cross, and leave us in our benighted enjoyment of sosaties and pap, dubious Afrikaans poetry and popular songs, including Steve Hofmeyr, much like British peers on a visit to Africa would gaze from a distance at the dancing natives in colonial times?
At its simplest level: why do you want to correct our grammar? Lately, you or your underlings have even taken to correcting Afrikaans grammar, something about which you know absolutely nothing.
At a more theoretical level – and this might be another primitive display of non-English mores, as we are straying from “common sense” now – what you call “progressive discourse” probably means some variation of Marxism. To the extent that Karl Marx used Hegel and German indealism to construct his little dogma of the class struggle, we “naive people of the veld” could level exactly the same accusation at you “progressives”: Why did you pollute Hegel with your quasi-religious social eschatology? Progressivism in itself stands revealed as a perverted – more precisely perverse, even in a sexual sense – form of idealism.
By the way, the expression “naive people of the veld” is derived from a statement made by Gillian Slovo, the daughter of South African Communist Party leader Joe Slovo who characterised all of Afrikaans culture, everything from Eugène Marais to Mimi Coertse or Arnold van Wyk, I suppose, as “the naive culture of the veld”. Gillian Slovo is English enough to remain in London and I sometimes wonder when all you “progressives” will follow her example.
Being “naive people of the veld”, we find some things difficult to understand. The cognitive limitations of the proverbial “dumb Dutchman”… One is the depths of sadism that the freedom fighters stoop to in their orgies of killing in rural areas, but sometimes in the cities too. The mutilation of the victim’s body is supposed to be a sign of clinical sadism, so we are not being semantically naive in referring to it as sadism.
The second conundrum is the depths of “progressive” contempt for our “naive culture of the veld”, our language, music, architecture, cuisine, art, literature, place names, and so on. How do we explain that contempt, even apart from the “progressive” penchant for everything British and colonial?
Is there some innate or structural connection between the sadism of the “natural born killers” stalking the countryside and the “progressive” need for humiliating, putting down and ultimately affirming a cultural and perhaps even racial superiority on the part of the cultural-Marxist nobility that rules the roost in South Africa, particularly in the media and the universities?
A phenomenon of which, needless to say, Nicky Falkof has just given us an exemplary demonstration.
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by Dan Roodt
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In a recent article in the Sunday Independent, Gillian Schutte mistakenly blames so-called “white conservative narratives” for the appalling sexual violence that is sweeping South Africa at present. As rape is notoriously underreported, most estimates put the number of such crimes at more than a million per year or approximately three thousand per day.
The macabre forms of dehumanising torture during farm murders provide another clue to the societal breakdown that is occurring in our country. Even calling it “our country” might be a malapropism in that Afrikaners like myself are no longer considered full citizens in an Afro-Saxon state that is slouching towards some incarnation of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe or, better still, Charles Taylor’s Liberia. This week, Taylor’s conviction as a war criminal was confirmed by an international court, the first head of state to be jailed for such crimes committed in Sierra Leone while he was in office.
South Africa has become a sadists’ apocalypse. No amount of “reframing”, circumlocution or leftist pseudo-intellectualism can disguise it any longer. Nor can the seemingly desperate massaging of the crime statistics. In the age of social media, people communicate their horror and despair at being captives in this, our “paradise of cruelty”. Policing our language as in the cowardly attack upon Louise Mabille is a poor substitute for the lack of policing elsewhere.
As the twentieth century has shown, utopias are always dangerous, be they fascist or communist. Every utopia has turned into its mirror image, a dystopia replete with genocide. South Africa’s pursuit of a racial biopolitics known as “transformation”, as well as extreme forms of cultural relativism, have unleashed hitherto unknown social consequences. In the domain of sexual violence at least, the country has earned the dubious title of “rape capital of the world” and it regularly tops international murder tables too.
Understanding the causes of this immense violence, unknown in peacetime, represents a rare analytical challenge. None of the usual explanations actually fit. The same people denouncing “colonialism” are the most accomplished colonialists in their slavish subordination to US or British racial discourse and political correctness.
However, neither Britain nor America has absorbed any significant African cultural influence so it is of no use applying the sociology of New York or London to an outbreak of sadistic violence in Limpopo province. It is risible to see ostensibly educated people constantly blaming either “apartheid” or “poverty” for the horrors and cruelties afflicting this society.
The retreat of Afrikaner power in South Africa has been coterminous with the resurgence of African belief systems, including witchcraft and ritual murders. In the early nineties South Africa experienced hundreds of killings associated with witchcraft and occult beliefs, leading to the Commission of Inquiry into Witchcraft Violence and Ritual Murders. We still do not understand the role that occult beliefs played during the revolution, especially in establishing hegemonic black politics and racial nationalism. The necklace, that symbol of revolution, is pregnant with ethnographic and cultural meaning. There is also evidence that young “comrades” intimidated traditional healers to extract money from clients and that the accusation of being a witch was used to eliminate political opponents.
Mrs. Winnie Madikizala-Mandela, that international heroine and former wife of Nelson Mandela, subscribed to the Maoist doctrine – ‘kill one, scare a thousand’ – that support is gained through terror and horror. She notoriously stated in 1986:
…with our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country.
Child and even baby rape is another ghastly phenomenon indicating that South Africa has navigated to a new, alien moral code. Stating that white men sometimes do it in some other country too, hardly mitigates the particular horror that it has assumed here.
The British Guardian ran an article on 12 March 2009 entitled, “Raped and killed for being a lesbian: South Africa ignores ‘corrective’ attacks“. The Guardian’s website contains an accompanying video interview with lesbian rape victims, as well as young black men who are outspoken in their support of “corrective rape”. One of them says:
Me, I have no time to rape them, but if there are some of the other guys who want to teach them the way, they must rape them, they must rock them.
But perhaps white conservatives are a bigger problem: they might go to church or caution their children against drugs and sexual promiscuity, which would undermine the libertine morals that so many have advocated for so long in South Africa. In Hillbrow, as recounted to me by a former policeman, young white female drug addicts are employed as prostitutes by Nigerian gangsters. When they are no longer useful to their pimps, they simply get injected with heroine and pushed off highrise buildings in what gets officially recorded by the police as “suicides”. In South Africa, the crime reality show is so much better than the fiction.
The country’s academics are all but ignoring the scourge of rape, including infant rape, judging from the paucity of published articles in the field. To some extent they have acculturated to the witch-hunting culture in persecuting dissidents in their own ranks. Otherwise they engage in repetitive denunciations of “patriarchy” as if there were still a father left somewhere that has not been killed.
South Africa’s “transformed” universities have been turned into the “armed brothels” Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn spoke about when he said:
Rousseau is the grandfather of the concentration camps and also of those armed brothels that we continue to call universities. We have with us on one hand the Old Left, a finished product of L’éducation sentimentale, with its bent for social engineering and its tendency to identify its own plans and policies with the volonté générale; on the other the New Left which has taken up the slogan Retournons à la nature! exemplified in the rabble of unwashed, unkempt, debauched, unbridled ignoble savages who look to the Third World of the underdeveloped for inspiration. Its heroes are Chairman Mao with his Little Red Book, Ché Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Holden Roberto, the Harlem criminals and the pistol-packing priests.*
That is why leftist university intellectuals find any form of criticism of traditional African culture to be inherently “racist” and eschew references to practices such as ukuthwala (the kidnapping and forced marriage of young maidens). Recent legislation has placed about 18 million black South Africans under so-called customary law in which such practices are legal.
Everybody in South Africa, whether white or black, fears a witch-hunt in some or other form. Especially the kind of witch-hunt whereby you are called a “racist”, lose your tenured university job and spend the rest of your life in ignominy. Therefore white academics are completely silent on ukuthwala or the so-called “virgin cleansing myth” if the professors do not actually deny in writing that such phenomena exist!
Here and there information filters through the iron curtain of political correctness. The only academic article worth reading on the “virgin cleansing myth” is that by Suzanne Leclerc-Madlala which appeared in The African Journal of AIDS Research in 2002 under the title, “On The Virgin Cleansing Myth: Gendered Bodies, AIDS and Ethnomedicine“. It provides a fascinating glimpse into the psycho-sexual paradigm in which, as she puts it, “virgin cleansing is believed to have both a therapeutic and a prophylactic effect” (against HIV-AIDS). Raping a child or a disabled person is therefore seen as a form of AIDS prevention or cure.
But even the virgin cleansing myth obliquely alluded to by Dr. Mabille in her critique of insipid Western feminism does not go far enough in explaining South Africa’s journey upriver into the heart of darkness. We really lack the concepts to understand the enormity of what we are faced with.
Much of what passes for analysis of sex and culture in South Africa consists of rehashed hippie or New Left thinking from 1960s America. Get liberated, man, is more or less the gist of it. Call it Marcuse on Durban Poison. Repression or any form of “holding back” is invariably seen as “bad”. But sometimes repression might be desirable, even imperative. Freud was old-fashioned enough to advocate a balance between the pleasure principle and the reality principle.
The old Afrikaner government, while encouraging African ethnic identities, saw fit to suppress witchcraft and ritual murder by making it a criminal offence. Prior to becoming the first president of a united South African republic, Charles Robberts Swart introduced the Suppression of Witchcraft Act 3 of 1957. To the principled cultural relativist, the act – which is still on the statute books – is an affront and he would probably agree with the Marquis de Sade that “morality is just geography misapplied”, meaning that a crime in one culture is a harmless pastime in another.
One could even argue that the very structure of the South African political system is tending towards sado-masochism. Last Sunday the new CEO of the liberal Institute of Race Relations, Dr Frans Cronjé, argued in Rapport that whites should assume a far more submissive role in South Africa, lest they expose themselves to some form of collective revenge during a Second Revolution. According to Cronjé, such a revolution will be
…a violent, racist and destructive transition from a reconciling democratic state to a hostile, black nationalist state… After the Second Revolution, white South Africans will lose their homes, their jobs and their businesses.
Apart from exhortations to submissiveness, white guilt and even “vows of silence” à la Samantha Vice of Rhodes University, South Africa’s academic sycophants contribute little to our grasp of contemporary violence. In this respect, French literature is more instructive. Sade’s amoral theory of nature, of course. But also his notion of the sovereignty of sexual instincts that should not be tamed by any man-made law or religious scruple.
The Marquis de Sade had a disciple in the surrealist author Georges Bataille who espoused a theory of “transgression”. He took an interest in violence, punishment and eroticism. Bataille also collected photographs of Chinese executions which included horrific torture.
South Africa’s army of sadists regularly commit acts that shock a weaker Eurocentric sensibility. At the same time they are creating a world without limits, revelling in a new-found innocence that to them must represent the perfect freedom, the sovereignty of Sade’s libertine who pursues excess in celebration of pristine nature, a nature that punishes the weak and rewards the strong. To impose one’s will on a woman is also a gift of nature to all men. As Sade writes in Philosophy in the Bedroom:
If then it becomes incontestable that we have received from Nature the right indiscriminately to express our wishes to all women, it likewise becomes incontestable that we have the right to compel their submission, not exclusively, for I should then be contradicting myself, but temporarily. It cannot be denied that we have the right to decree laws that compel woman to yield to the flames of him who would have her; violence itself being one of that right’s effects, we can employ it lawfully. Indeed! has Nature not proven that we have that right, by bestowing upon us the strength to bend women to our will?**
Human rights or even a puritanical code such as feminism is not incompatible with sadism. As Bataille would argue, morality is needed for transgression to take place.
Sylvia Plath wrote in her poem “Daddy” that “Every woman adores a Fascist”. She was wrong. Every woman adores a sadist. Especially if she happens to be a feminist.
* Erik van Kuehnelt-Leddihn. “The Western Dilemma: Calvin or Rousseau?” in Modern Age, Winter 1971, p. 55.
** The Marquis de Sade. The complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and other writings, transl. RIchard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse. New York: Grove Press, 1965, p. 319.
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Seventeen men have been jailed for various sexual offences in the Eastern Cape, police said on Thursday.
The sentences were all handed down last week, spokesman Thulani Mbambala said in a statement.
One of the culprits, 88-year-old Ntakopo Desi from Lusikisiki, was given a 10-year prison term for the rape of a 72-year-old woman.
The suspects were aged between 17 and 88. In another case 48-year-old Mbulelo Ntapo from Butterworth was given a 10-year jail sentence for the rape of a 13-year-old girl.
Lungile Ndululo, 37, from Grahamstown was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment for raping a 42-year-old woman. – Sapa
A black man who raped and tortured to death elderly Kei Mouth resident Anne Roebert was yesterday sentenced to two life terms in jail plus a further 28 years, reports the Daily Dispatch.
Siyabonga Ntshabalala, 26, stood stony-faced as his lawyer Ntombenani Mtini read to the court his plea statement, which was replete with gruesome detail of his crimes.
In his plea, Ntshabalala describes how he and his co-accused Zukisani Tulani – who has pleaded not guilty to the rape and murder – broke into the home of the popular 75-year-old in Donax Street, Kei Mouth, because they knew she had a safe.
They tied her up with an electrical extension cord and demanded the keys to the safe. Roebert told them she thought the keys might be in her bag, says Ntshabala in his statement.
But none of the keys in this bunch fit the safe. She then referred them to another set of keys in a bag downstairs. These, too, did not open the safe. They decided to rape her to make her “speak the truth”.
After both men had raped her, she told them the keys were somewhere in the house. He said he had then fetched an iron from downstairs and plugged it in and had begun burning her with it on her stomach. He said Tulani had repeatedly strangled her with the cord.
“I burnt her until she said she does not have the energy to talk anymore.”
She had then fallen from the bed and died. They ransacked the house.
They split their booty and returned to their separate homes where they were later arrested by police
Complete disregard for the right to life, dignity, privacy, security and property
After Ntshabalala pleaded guilty and Tulani not guilty to the charges, Judge Nomathamsanqa Beshe separated their trials. Tulani’s trial begins today.
In sentencing Ntshabalala, Beshe said his callous crimes showed a complete disregard for the right to life, dignity, privacy, security and property.
She said it was clear Roebert had suffered a great deal at his hands and that they had used rape as a means of torturing her before burning her with a hot electrical iron. They did not have to use violence to the degree that they did or at all. “What resistance would a 75-year-old woman offer to two young men in their twenties?”
She sentenced Ntshabalala to life for both the rape and the murder. He was sentenced to a further 10 years for housebreaking with intent to rob, rape and murder and 18 years for robbery with aggravating circumstances.
The sentences will run concurrently.
Senior state advocate Nico Henning yesterday told the court he had been prosecuting for many years and had never come across such a degree of torture.
Mtini acknowledged there was little she could say for her client in mitigation. “[Mrs Roebert] was an elderly woman who should have been allowed to enjoy the peace of her home.”
Roebert’s family and friends sat in the public gallery.
Bev Roebert said her mother-in-law had been a remarkable woman and was much loved in Kei Mouth. She had edited the local newspaper and was deeply involved at the golf club.
“She was the life and soul of Kei Mouth. This is a peace-loving community with many pensioners and widows. They are so traumatised by this.”
Ntshabalala – who has a long rap-sheet spanning a decade, was out on parole for housebreaking when he raped and murdered Roebert. – dailydispatch.co.za
By definition, excess stands outside reason. (Georges Bataille)
South Africa is known as the rape and murder capital of the world. But that sounds almost anodyne, telling us nothing about the millions of psychos let loose by this crazy government and its many foreign backers.
Just this morning I learned about the macabre murder of a woman of Italian extraction, Vivien Ponté. She was tied up, presumably raped, then slaughtered (there were blood stains all over) and finally set alight upon her own double bed. The Johannesburg Beeld published a picture of her charred bed.
The mainstream media in South Africa have long ceased to keep us informed of all the murders in the country, especially black-on-white murders. The 200 foreign correspondents from the world’s major news media based in Johannesburg generally eschew reporting on anything that would disturb their carefully constructed myth of South Africa as a liberal democracy with a “model constitution”. According to them, our pristine utopia is only occasionally marred by the presence of “die-hard white racists” and people who commit speech crimes like using the “k-word” or even just insinuating that all is not well in Mandelatopia.
Murder, rape, burning women on their beds? What’s that? These incidents almost never make it into print in international English and if they do, they are carefully sanitised so as to remove the grisly, unspeakable, dehumanising details. Currently there is almost a pandemic of child rapes. Even toddlers and babies are regularly subjected to sexual violence. In one case, the maniac of Thokoza, a 42-year old black man called Sifiso Makhubo, raped 34 underage girls and two adult women before he was finally arrested. Makhubo believed that raping girls as young as ten could cure him of HIV-Aids. Of course, in the process he infected many of them. The fact that he conveniently committed suicide on the eve of his trial, did nothing to expiate his crimes.
I must confess: I am ashamed to bear the South African nationality. I cringe whenever someone pronounces the phrase “We South Africans…” To me, everything about South Africa is tainted by the wave of sadistic violence, corruption and mediocrity that have swept the country since 1994. The flag, the anthem, the constitution, our very identity, have all been blighted by our “transformation” – that politically correct cliché – into a criminal, deviant society.
One cannot be proud of anything in South Africa, except perhaps the Drakensberg mountains and the Kruger National Park. Appropriately, the ANC government wants to rename the Kruger and inside its animals, such as rhinos, are being poached. So even there, decay has already set in. Maybe they will rename the Drakensberg too, after some terrorist like Magoo’s Bar bomber Robert McBride or Abu Bakr Ismail, the “commander” – so-called – of the Church Street bomb.
South Africa is a social and political Chernobyl. The disaster predates the leftist coup of 1994 and may be traced to the very foundation of the current state in 1910. Britain, too, committed war crimes and atrocities on our soil during the Anglo-Boer war, but those were swept under the carpet for the sake of “reconciliation between the two white races, English and Afrikaners” as it was put at the time. Boer women and children were harassed, raped and made to starve in the British concentration camps. Many of the atrocities were committed by so-called “armed blacks” that the English employed to terrorise Boer civilians.
So South Africa was more or less conceived in the British camps. It is the fruit of a forced union, then as now. The rape and rapine that Britain and its black helpers visited upon us in 1900 would become the sediment of the slimy and shameful compromises and forgetfulness of politicians. Alas, during the twentieth century we had few leaders of integrity. Verwoerd was a rare exception and without him we would not have been a republic now. For that he was vilified and finally assassinated.
Remarkably, South Africa has largely escaped war on its own soil for more than a century, even though we participated in both world wars on the Allied side. “Never a good deed shall go unpunished,” as the saying goes, and for our loyalty to Britain and the US we have been crucified, calumnied and finally incarcerated in this putative “New South Africa”. Except it is not new. It is old, very old, primitive, even primaeval. It wears the grimace of ancient rituals, killings, human sacrifices. If 1994 were a “liberation” at all, it was the liberation of Freud’s two primal drives: Eros and Thanatos, the latter being the death drive. When the two of them combine, as they have in South Africa, you encounter the set of impulses that still bear the name of an eighteenth-century French writer, the Marquis de Sade.
Every South African is a sadist. The utter perversity and complete lack of any moral compass in our society testify to the almost pristine state of amoral utopia that we have reached: a paradise of cruelty. Everything is permitted; everyone may be bought or bought off and everyone will look the other way, either because they are in on the deal or out of fear.
People often ask me: “If you are so ashamed and disgusted by South Africa, why don’t you leave?” I think the short answer is that, given the decades of slander directed at Afrikaners, most other countries would rather welcome a Rwandan war criminal than an Afrikaans writer, so no other state would have me. But then, I ask myself, if our women could “walk barefoot over the Drakensberg” as Susanna Smit famously put it, why should we simply abandon our land to these squads of sadists? The more complex answer is that a place as sick as South Africa needs a few psychiatrists, a few sane people to at least write up the manic convulsions of the patient.
It feels as if I have only broached the subject. There is so much more to say and to explain, of how we got to be inmates in this, our sadists’ castle.
This could well turn into a series, on the shame of being South African.
by Joseph Secrève
If one were to take a bird’s eye view of the changes that took place in Western nations over the past sixty years, one could only muse at the rapid shifts that have occurred in this short time. The dust of war had hardly settled and an invisible war on the Western soul has taken its place. In small increments, we have been fed slivers of violence, less dialogue and more action through the national media and entertainment industry. A sense of higher purpose has been clouded and narcissism has taken over. Remember the Cold War spy dramas where pistol-wielding protagonists held lengthy dialogues with their enemies at gunpoint? Especially in the case of Ian Fleming’s immortal superspy, a clear shift could be seen if one compares Connery with Craig. More often the use of violence has been promoted as a means of solving disputes and debasement has become acceptable under the guise of an ‘alternative lifestyle’.
In stark contrast to today, Truman Capote’s famous non-fiction novel In Cold Blood caused a national stir when it was first released in 1966. The book recounts the killing spree of two rogues who killed a Kansas farmer and his family after it was rumoured that they had a substantial amount of cash in their home. The killers got away with only a modicum of dollars, but the carnage they left behind traumatised a large section of rural America. To quote Capote: “Of what were they frightened? It could happen again.”
The intensity of Capote’s research in today’s terms would seem slightly out of place. Such levels of violence and cruelty have become an almost everyday occurrence, and in rural South Africa there are even multiple cases of torture, often leading to murder, with on average one murder per week. This carnage has spread like an inkblot over South Africa, fuelled by the “Kill a Boer, Kill a Farmer” slogan, and there appears to be no end in sight. Every subsequent president under the ANC is less reserved in either chanting or defending this bloodcurdling invective. In Capote’s interview with the accused Perry Edward Smith, the latter revealed that he had felt a deep sense of shame as he slit the throat of Mr. Clutter. Nowadays the mutilation of people and deliberate desecration of corpses unveils a motive of a different kind: sheer hatred! The intentional destruction of human life has become a goal in itself, especially when one considers that these savages…uhm…I mean “robbers” seldom steal anything valuable. Usually no more than a cell phone gets stolen to prevent the victims from calling someone or their car gets taken as a getaway vehicle, only to be abandoned a few kilometres down the road.
Our Marxist-inspired intellectuals and ideologues are eager to help defend these offensive acts, often rationalising the chaos away with their usual outmoded Freudian frustration-aggression or deprivation theories. This is their version of ‘supporting the oppressed’. Strangely enough, many people still buy it. The more savagery the murderers cause, the more warranted their grievances are held to be, especially from people who have no knowledge or experience of these communities. Filling their knowledge gaps with presuppositions then becomes a reality.
Fortunately our understanding of human psychology could help us show the way. In many respects the Arendtian concept of the ‘banality of evil’ clears matters up a bit. The everyday nature of these acts of cruelty makes them appear normal. Hannah Arendt however faltered in believing that people were entirely nonchalant when it comes to the killing of others. Research has shown that there is always an element of ideology present in these levels of appalling behaviour. Psychologist Philip Zimbardo demonstrated this in his Stanford Prison Experiment, which was later to be elevated to the ranks of classic psychology experiments. In this experiment a makeshift prison was erected on the university premises and student participants were randomly assigned to the role of prisoner or warden. It was the intention to run this experiment for a fortnight, but after six days the severe levels of abuse from the warden participants on the prisoner participants compelled Zimbardo to pull the plug prematurely. In fact, Zimbardo himself was moderately blinded by this experiment, and only started seeing the trees from the forest when a new participant entered the experiment and pointed out how badly abusive the wardens had become.
This convinced Zimbardo how easily a fabricated reality could alter the perception and behaviour of people, regardless of their deeper understanding that this ‘reality’ is only play-acting and not for real. What was more astonishing was the level of docility of the prisoner participants. Having to go to the bathroom with a bag over their heads and their ankles in chains; or having to do push-ups with one hand behind their backs were humiliations they fairly readily accepted.
In this sense, South Africa – like many communist-run countries – is a collection of all the evil psychology experiments raked together from times past. Farmers and other whites are considered to be fundamentally to blame for all social ills that have visited South Africa. The stoic acceptance of the fate of whites is further exacerbated by calls from intellectuals, with the likes of leftist author André P. Brink who mentioned that his people deserved to disappear. The reason why is not really important. The daily reality is clouded with the notion that they are unwanted to the extent of being outlaws. One doesn’t need to control human behaviour directly, as this would likely meet up with resistance. The better option would be to control the mental climate, ie. cast a stage where the actors are told to live this reality, and then slowly turn up the heat. By letting this severe debauchery creep in slowly has the additional benefit to cause confusion and paralyse the victim even more. Had the approximately 4 000 South African farmers lost their lives in, say a week or a month instead of twenty years, this would have been a sure-fire cause for war.
Unfortunately our powerful leaders, our presses and public intellectuals have the habit of denying certain aspects of daily life such as the abominable state of cruelty we have fallen into. Harvard psychologist Stephen Pinker claims that we are living in a higher state of peace in the West than ever before. The impending genocide on white South Africans is primarily expounded by a small group of bloggers who are constantly facing a wall of denial or ridicule. Especially regarding South Africa, they are having a tough time in dealing with this frustrating Cassandra Complex.
As for communism, there were always the frontrunners who were obsessed with their brave new world ideology and who were capable of turning a blind eye to all the evils they personally witnessed. The Romanian communist leader Ana Pauker is a prime example, as she saw to the deportation of her own husband who later died in the gulags under Stalin’s orders, but did not shed a tear. Not to mention how cannibalism was justified and even rewarded with top jobs under chairman Mao’s command in certain Chinese provinces. Yet, all the while, the promised utopia did not materialise. The only real change that took place was to turn the situation awfully grim and harden people’s attitudes further, effectively closing themselves off from truly seeing each other.
If we want to understand this process in full, we would be misguided in believing that this sadism is due to some form of repression and is now undergoing a cathartic release. The reinforcement to do evil comes from outside and acts on the devil inside.
To return to the example of Capote: How many murderers in South Africa and elsewhere feel a sense of shame for their barbaric deeds? Probably not many, especially within the climate dictated by the media that such murders are not crimes but belated reactions to “suffering” from decades ago.
If Capote been alive and in South Africa, I’m sure he would have quoted instead: ”Of what were they frightened? It will happen again”.
Joseph Secrève was born in South Africa but lives in the Netherlands. He is a psychologist by training.
by Dan Roodt
I ended off my last column with a reference to “the dark eye of Africa”, a term used by Laurens van der Post in his eponymous lecture in 1954. Following in the footsteps of Van der Post, how are we supposed to make sense of the sadistic violence, murders and rapes taking place in South Africa every day?
Just yesterday on this website I read of a case where a 38-year old black man raped and murdered his own 92-year old grandmother. Over the last two weeks we have had at least three very high-profile murders, on 13-year old Alyssa Botha, 50-year old André Jordaan and only a few days ago, on the world-famous boxer Corrie Sanders.
According to at least one expert who has analysed our crime statistics released last week, every white person in this country will be exposed to a so-called “contact crime” – an armed robbery or violent attack on his person – over the next three and a half years. More than fifty people are murdered every day, as many as are murdered in some European countries in a whole year!
The worst is, much of the “xenophobic killings” of foreign Africans do not even get reported by the police. Some of them are in the country illegally and the local black policemen turn a blind eye when they are murdered, except where it gets video-ed. Then you might get an account published in the New York Times as happened last year when Barry Bearak described such a murder in Watching the Murder of an Innocent Man.
Many people still pretend that South Africa is a normal society, even a liberal democracy. But they are simply dishonest or blind to the reality that we have become a kind of Barbary Coast, albeit inland, where the rules of pirates prevail. Also the events and controversies surrounding Julius Malema are to be seen in this light, as manifestations of pirates quarrelling over stolen loot.
Malema is rumoured to have ties with organised gangs and black mercenaries from Zimbabwe. Against the backdrop of a sadistic society with atrocities being committed almost as part of a daily ritual like shaving or brushing one’s teeth, the internecine power struggle between Malema and the establishment ANC portend still more conflict ahead.
Both the American Stephen Ellis and the French journalist Stephen Smith characterised the civil war or anarchy in Liberia as a defining moment in Africa after the Cold War. The “paradise of cruelty” created by Charles Taylor in Liberia and Sierra Leone with child soldiers committing atrocities, resonates profoundly with present-day South Africa.
Ironically, South Africa has attained barbarism at the very moment when many international observers – let’s call them naïve do-gooders – saw the country elevating itself to Wesern-style democracy. Even the mayor of Ekurhuleni, the sprawling conglomeration of municipalities cobbled together by the ANC on the East Rand, described the murderers of Corrie Sanders as “barbarians”. And he is both black and an ANC politician, therefore an incumbent of “democracy”; which makes his use of the word so much more significant, even poignant.
Those same “angels of virtue”, the international do-gooders – but who naturally have their own interests at heart too – are fond of explaining our problems by way of institutional failure, socio-economic conditions, “inequality”, or even the ubiquitous scapegoat, “apartheid”. Yet the barbarian urge at the heart of the New South Africa goes far deeper than that. It is more a problem of consciousness. A society can only sustain so much violence. After that it becomes self-perpetuating, a conditioned reflex, a way of life.
Zuma’s little war chant, “Bring me my machine gun”, acquires a whole new meaning, as the motto not only of ANC rule, but of a whole epoch.
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The mine workers at Marikana seem to have opted for violence and intimidation as a far better way of negotiating with mine owners than our byzantine labour laws and regulations. Given the success of their strategy so far, they appear to have been vindicated.
South Africa has become so phantasmagorical, so far removed from any semblance of normality that one has to look to fiction, especially science fiction or a futuristic horror world to gain any understanding of what is going on here. Mad Max comes to mind. But at least Max was driven by rage at the killing of his wife, baby and best friend. Our killers are actuated by pure sadism, by the mystical pleasure of killing, raping and hurting.
South Africa seems to be doomed to a kind of reverse narcissism. The more it stares into the mirror, especially that mirror held up to it by the mass media, the more it sees an image that is the opposite of itself. During the previous dispensation, which was mostly orderly and without the gratuitous viciousness of the present order, many people saw us as a profoundly evil society. Nowadays, with things falling apart completely and anarchy upon us, those same people and newspaper pundits discern in this utterly sick society a pristine exemplar of liberal democracy and human rights.
Malema is already the Big Man of South African politics. He just needs a militia to take us, as they say, to the next level.
