For 20 years, I’ve known about and seen femicide. Will it take another two decades before it all ends – or even just decreases.

It was exactly seven days after my ninth birthday when I first encountered femicide as a reality, and it would be another decade before I even learnt what the word means. On 20 October 1999, a male family member (who was a police officer) murdered his wife and then turned the gun on himself. I witnessed the shock and shame as the news spread throughout the family. I knew what had happened was big - horrifying in fact. Why would this man, who I was told was my uncle, shoot his wife? Did she do something wrong? Was he mentally well?

Five years later, when I was almost 14 years old, I encountered femicide in the media. It was the case of Constable Francis Rasuge who had gone missing in 2004, and nobody really knew her whereabouts. I read about it in the weekly newspapers and magazines my parents would religiously buy, I heard about her in the news bulletins on Motsweding FM every morning as I got ready for school, and I also watched the Setswana news every night with my parents. The photo of the then-27-year-old police officer has been etched in my memory since then. Her boyfriend was convicted of her murder, although her remains were only discovered eight years later — in 2012 — as construction work was being done on his house.

Almost simultaneously, the news cycle was also inundated with reports about the kidnapping and then later the murder of Johannesburg student Leigh Matthews.

Although, I didn’t quite understand what was going on when both Rasuge and Matthews were reported to have disappeared, the worry and commentary from parents and other grown-ups reminded me of the tension that I saw when my uncle killed his wife and himself. For the first time, it became very clear to me that this world, our country, my community, is not a safe place for women.

It is these moments that also informed my mother’s insistence on a curfew for my older sister and I, which my older brothers and male cousins who lived with us didn’t have — despite them being my sister’s peers. It was the reason I wasn’t allowed to join our village’s traditional dance group because "boys and men can be inappropriate", my mother said as she forbade me from ever going again.

These moments - or, according to my teenage brain, my mother’s interpretation of them - ruined everything. They took the fun and freedom out of being a young girl. The older I became, the wider my hips stretched, these moments started to hit home: gender-based violence and femicide don’t just happen. A man doesn’t turn into blind rage that ends with a murder. It’s meshed into the very existence of our society.

We’re not tirelessly stuck in this loop of violence against women by chance. These are the fruits of patriarchy’s labour. It’s centuries of women and girls being considered less than their male counterparts, the homophobia and transphobia we condone and allow to exist in our presence, it’s telling little girls that boys tease or hit them because they like them. It’s in this everyday normalisation that sacrifices the freedom and humanity of girls and women for the pleasure – and at the hands – of boys and men. It’s never-ending, yet most of us are only up in arms when a horrific case makes it into the news cycle. And for weeks, and even months later, we will hear and read about almost all the gruesome cases of gender-based violence until it dies down again.

Perpetual shock and anger

Right now, it’s Tshegofatso Pule, Altecia and Raynecia Kortjie, Sibongiseni Gabada, Sibongile Nono Mancotywa, Tebogo Matsane-Mabunda, Naledi Phangindawo and many others. It was Uyinene Mrwetyana in September last year. In 2017, it was Karabo Mokwena, Mavis Mabala, Iyapha Yamile, Meisie Molefe and many others. Then there was Susan Rohde in 2016, Jayde Panayiotou in 2015. Then there was Reeva Steenkamp and - before her in the same year - Anene Booysen. Almost a decade earlier, in 2004, it was Leigh Matthews and Constable Francis Rasuge. And when I was nine years old, it was my own family.

How many of us women will have to die first? Will it ever end? Is this our future? Perpetual shock and anger? Living in constant fear and hoping that this doesn’t happen to us or someone we know.  

On Wednesday, President Cyril Ramaphosa addressed the nation and said South Africa is suffering from two pandemics: Covid-19 and femicide. It’s been about a hundred days since the novel coronavirus hit the South African shores and government has done everything it could to prevent the exacerbation of the spread of the virus and also put in place plans to deal with cases. On the other hand, it’s been decades since this femicide pandemic has engulfed the country, but can political and government leaders honestly say they’ve done all they could to stop the killing of men and women?

As I crawled out of my femicide fatigue to write this, I felt despondent yet again. The president said all the right things and condemned what we all know to be wrong. But he wasn’t convincing, said my friend and journalist Tebogo Tshwane. What’s next? What will be done really about this? As the president of the country, Ramaphosa should be able to provide a more crystalised account of what the government has done or is doing to end gender-based violence and femicide. He should be able to tell us the progress on the Department of Social Development’s rollout of the Emergency Response Plan that took place between October and March and how and why these plans were interrupted by Covid-19.

As mentioned in a social development parliamentary portfolio committee in early June, the disbursement of funds to shelters and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) hasn’t been completed. Only 169 NGOs have been identified and are yet to receive these emergency funds – months later and even during the lockdown where gender-based violence increased – with women feeling the brunt of it.  

I don’t have the answers or the solutions, but I’d like another nine-year-old girl not to know that her life and the lives of those who look like her are disposable.

- Pontsho Pilane is media practioner, lecturer and trainer with an interest on health, race and gender and how they intersect.