On Might 25, Olorato Mongale, a 30-year-old girl from South Africa, went on a date with a person she had just lately met.
Lower than two hours later, she was useless.
Her half-naked physique was discovered by the roadside in Lombardy West, a suburb north of Johannesburg. It confirmed indicators of extreme trauma and bruising. Investigators concluded that she had been murdered elsewhere and dumped on the scene.
Her brutal and mindless killing led to a wave of grief and outrage on social media. Days later, a household spokesperson revealed that Mongale – a grasp’s scholar on the College of the Witwatersrand – had as soon as labored as a journalist. She left the career seven years in the past because of the emotional toll of reporting on gender-based violence and femicide (GBVF).
Her household stated Mongale had grown more and more anxious about her personal vulnerability to male violence. Specifically, the 2017 homicide of 22-year-old Karabo Mokoena haunted her. Mokoena was stabbed to dying by her ex-boyfriend, Sandile Mantsoe, who then burned her physique past recognition and buried the stays in open grassland in Lyndhurst – a suburb simply kilometres from the place Mongale’s physique was discovered.
Regardless of her acutely aware efforts to keep away from Mokoena’s destiny, Mongale finally turned what she had feared most: one other identify added to the lengthy and rising listing of South African ladies murdered by males.
At her funeral on June 1, her mom, Keabetswe Mongale, stated her daughter had tried desperately to struggle off her attacker.
“After I noticed her on the authorities mortuary, I may see that my daughter fought. She fought till her nails broke,” she stated.
Her devastating dying serves as a stark reminder that girls and ladies throughout South Africa proceed to face an existential menace from gender-based violence, regardless of years of presidency guarantees and reforms.
On Might 24, 2024, President Cyril Ramaphosa signed into legislation a invoice establishing the Nationwide Council on Gender-Primarily based Violence and Femicide. The physique is remitted to offer management and coordination within the struggle in opposition to GBVF. Whereas it seemed to be a step ahead, it didn’t signify a transformative coverage shift.
This isn’t the primary such initiative. In 2012, then-Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe launched the Nationwide Council In opposition to Gender-Primarily based Violence, with an analogous mandate to coordinate nationwide anti-GBV efforts.
Greater than a decade later, with yet one more council in place, GBVF crimes proceed.
In November 2023, the Human Sciences Analysis Council (HSRC) of South Africa launched the nation’s first nationwide research on GBVF. It discovered that the persistence of gender-based violence is rooted in “deeply ingrained societal norms and constructions that perpetuate male dominance and reinforce gender hierarchies … resulting in feminine subordination, systemic inequalities, and violence in opposition to ladies”.
The harmful impact of entrenched patriarchy is simple. In South Africa, a girl is murdered each three hours. That’s roughly 8 ladies a day. One research estimates that round 7.8 million ladies within the nation have skilled bodily or sexual violence.
Whereas ladies of all races and backgrounds are affected, Black ladies face larger charges of GBVF – an everlasting legacy of apartheid and its structural inequalities.
This disaster will not be distinctive to South Africa. The phobia confronted by ladies and ladies is a continent-wide phenomenon.
In November 2024, the United Nations printed its report Femicides in 2023: World Estimates of Intimate Companion/Household Member Femicides, revealing that Africa had the world’s highest fee of partner-related femicide that yr.
Kenya stands out for its staggering figures.
Between September 2023 and December 2024, the nation recorded greater than 7,100 instances of sexual and gender-based violence. These included the murders of a minimum of 100 ladies by male acquaintances, relations, or intimate companions in simply 4 months.
Among the many victims was Rebecca Cheptegei, a Ugandan Olympian and mom of two, who competed within the marathon on the 2024 Paris Video games. On September 5, 2024, she died in Eldoret, Kenya, from extreme burns after her former companion doused her in petrol and set her alight throughout a home dispute. He himself later died in a hospital from his accidents.
The Kenyan authorities later recognised GBVF as essentially the most urgent safety problem going through the nation — a belated however essential transfer.
On Might 26, Kenya’s Nationwide Gender and Equality Fee famous that the surge in GBVF crimes was pushed by “a fancy interaction of cultural, social, financial, and authorized elements”. Patriarchal traditions proceed to gasoline inequality and legitimise violence, whereas dangerous practices comparable to pressured marriage, feminine genital mutilation (FGM), and dowry-related violence additional endanger ladies’s lives. Financial hardship and ladies’s monetary dependence solely deepen their vulnerability.
Throughout the continent, we’re witnessing a harmful resurgence of archaic patriarchal norms.
The COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 additional uncovered the size of the disaster. Since then, numerous behavioural change campaigns have been launched, however they’ve largely failed.
That is no shock.
In response to Afrobarometer information from November 2023, almost 48 % of all Africans imagine home violence is a personal matter, not a legal offence.
The uncomfortable reality is that many African males, no matter training or financial standing, don’t prioritise the protection or rights of ladies and ladies.
On Worldwide Girls’s Day final yr, South African rugby captain Siya Kolisi stated it plainly: “Males should not doing sufficient.”
Certainly, many proceed to uphold dangerous customs comparable to baby marriage and stay disengaged from efforts to guard ladies. Years of empty rhetoric have led to a rising physique rely.
It’s time for African males to take full possession of this disaster and decide to radical change.
They have to reject cultural practices and beliefs of manhood that dehumanise ladies. African cultures should not unchangeable, and patriarchy will not be future. A brand new, egalitarian mannequin of African masculinity have to be nurtured — one primarily based on dignity, equality, and nonviolence.
This cultural reorientation should start in households and be sustained by way of colleges, non secular and conventional boards, and neighborhood life.
It should occur for Olarato Mongale. For Rebecca Cheptegei. For the hundreds of others whose lives had been stolen.
And most urgently, it should occur for the ladies and ladies throughout Africa who stay every day figuring out that their best menace might come from the lads closest to them.
There will be no simply African future except African manhood is reworked.
