I received a message early 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 Tshegofatsu Pule, the 28-year-old eight-month pregnant woman who was murdered and hanged from a tree in Roodepoort. Her body was discovered on Monday after she went missing last Thursday. She had been stabbed in the chest.
My former colleague’s name was Sibongiseni Hilary Gabada and her end appeared to be even more brutal. She was 34 years old and her decomposed body was found on 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 by herself. 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. Over the past decade and a half, 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, had lived in Khayelitsha where she 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 Tshegofatso 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 is 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.
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. I would probably do the same even though I am opposed to violence and have never handled, and never want to handle a gun. The instinct of any parent is to protect your children and most of us would resort to violence if need be.
I thought about the last minutes of these young women – Tshego at 28 and Sibo 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.
Government has shown with its response to the coronavirus pandemic that they are able to resolve problems if they put their minds to it. They do not need resources; they only need the will. They need to put an end to gender violence sooner rather than later. We cannot afford to continue mourning 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 we are.
(First published as a Thinking Allowed column in the Weekend Argus on Saturday, 13 June 2020)
