Rape in South Africa

South Africa has a high rate of rape. This article from the BBC is a good explanation of one of the reasons why.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8115219.stm
25 June 2009

South African rapist: 'Forgive me'

Dumisani Rebombo says peer pressure led him to rape

Dumisani Rebombo and his friend raped a young girl in their village in South Africa when they were teenagers.

Years later, he returned to the same village to find the woman he attacked and begged for her forgiveness.

Mr Rebombo, 49, is one of thousands of men in South Africa who admit to having carried out a sexual assault - one in four, according to a recent survey.

He told BBC News why he feels so many young men in his homeland engage in the ill-treatment of women.

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When I was 15 years old, I took part in a gang rape.

Before the incident, I was constantly jeered for not being man enough.

At the time I was not ready to have a girlfriend when all my friends did.

I did not tend the cattle or sheep, nor did I attend the initiation school [where South African teenagers are circumcised in traditional rites of passage].

This fuelled my daily jeers.

My friends sang and clapped as if we had done something right Dumisani Rebombo South African rape survey shock

A friend and my cousin pressured me to prove that I was man enough, by taking part in the rape of a teenage girl in the village.

This was termed "straightening her up", since she did not want to go out with any of the local boys.

I succumbed to this daily pressure and on the day of the incident, when they saw me trembling with fear, they ordered me to take marijuana and beer to defeat my fears.

I did just that and the two of us [my friend and I] proceeded to rape the girl.

Guilty and scared

Afterwards, I was terrified.

I felt guilty but also scared that the news could reach my mother who had a high standing in the community.

The following day, when we went for our soccer practice, this incident was reported to all the other football players.

Dumisani Rebombo said he was prepared to face jail

On hearing the news, they sang and clapped as if we had done something right.

This helped to stop the jeering somewhat and I was allowed to associate with the other boys.

I still felt guilty, at least partially so, especially when I saw the girl in the village. Sometimes I tried to avoid meeting her.

But slowly, over time, I began to think less and less about the incident.

I left my village in Limpopo Province and went to live in the city and joined a religious group from which I learned a lot about love and respect for all.

Strangely, I did not think much of the incident - I just went on with my life.

I started work with an NGO (non-governmental organisation) where I mostly worked with unemployed mothers.

Every Monday morning, the women reported incidents of abuse in different forms.

Every time I heard of a negative act by a man, I was forced to go back to my own incident Dumisani Rebombo

As they did this, I could not help it but give way to introspection.

It was as if every time I heard of a negative act by a man, I was forced to go back to my own incident.

I then asked my employers to train us in a methodology which would target boys and men.

They did this and very soon, I felt challenged, self-consciously, to set an example to the men I was teaching.

Seeking forgiveness

I took a decision to go back to find the woman I raped.

I realised that the woman needed justice.

But also, I wanted to ask for forgiveness, now that I understood the effects and consequences for someone who has been raped.

South Africa's government has been urged to solve the rape epidemic

I went to my pastor about this. His response was: "You are saved now, you were once in the mud, but now you know the truth and you are therefore OK."

He also asked me if I was ready to go to jail. He said: "What if the woman went to the authorities?"

My answer was: "If I go to jail, that would be justice for that woman."

I therefore took the journey to the north.

I wanted her to know that I felt bad about what I had done to her, that I was a changed man and I was working with other men to prevent rape.

When we met, she showed a wry smile on her face.

Since we were at a public clinic, she thought I was a doctor or someone from the Ministry of Health.

I related my story to her. She looked at me and revealed that she had since been raped on two other occasions.

She told me how she often cringes when her husband touches her Dumisani Rebombo

She started crying. She told me how she often cringes when her husband touches her.

She told me that her life was never the same emotionally following these incidents.

Worse still, she was not ready to tell her husband of what had happened.

Finally, she said that she forgave me, and thought that I had meant well with all that I had said.

I left that room with a new burden - to do something about rape in my community and my country.

Machismo feelings

If you asked me: "What motivates so many men in South Africa to engage in un-consensual sex?" I would say that it is the machismo feelings and beliefs, coupled with patriarchal processes and tendencies.

I think that we raise boys in the wrong way, but later on in their lives we want to see them as different men who care and love.

My advice to young men who feel under pressure to rape, is to surround yourselves with good friends.

Learn to talk to someone about what is going on inside.

For with this, one can teach the young men to have other means of solving conflict.

And above all, to grow up respecting girls.

Dumisani Rebombo is a community development worker and public speaker, working for the Olive Leaf Foundation, in Johannesburg.

Sea Swells and Big Guns

There is a storm in Cape Town at the moment. It arrived on Monday with downpours, near-gale winds, and big sea swells. We live on the top floor of our apartment building and there isn't any insulation or space between us and the corrugated metal roof so it is quite loud when raining hard and it woke me up this morning with the pounding and blowing. Also, since our building isn't sealed so well, the wind comes in through the cracks and around the windows so the curtains sway back and forth.

A benefit of a storm are the big waves in Table Bay. The swells smash up against the Sea Point Promenade and launch up into the air 20 feet or so. Today Jared and I were walking to Sea Point and stopped at the intersection by Standard Bank to look towards the sea a block away and the big waves there. After watching for a minute or so we crossed the street and as we were walking past the bank I saw the guy in blue crouched by the bank wall holding a very big gun. The biggest barrel I've ever seen very close, I don't know guns at all but it looked like some kind of automatic thing. On the other side of the sidewalk was another guy in blue with his hand on the handle of his gun, which was tucked into his bullet proof vest, his eyes darting around. Both guys were very nervous, understandably so since there are a lot of attacks on armored vehicles when they pick up money from banks and stores. That was these guys' jobs. I've never seen anyone so nervous with a gun before, although I don't hang out with guys and guns and haven't encountered them much.

It was a bit of a shock, from looking at the ocean to looking at the barrel of a big gun and then the nervous guy holding it. I saw a lot of security people today. South Africa has a high crime rate and security personnel are everywhere, but today I really noticed them.

The storm is expected to continue through tomorrow and then the sun should come out again.

It's Not Always Good to Know the Details

A relationship with an apartment can be similar to a romantic relationship with a person. At first it's all goo-goo ga-ga, it's perfect, so lovely and beautiful, the view is amazing, its great to have a table to eat on, several chairs to choose from in which to sit, nothing is wrong with it. You may even feel that you aren't good enough for the place, that somehow you don't deserve it. It's a honeymoon, but soon the smell of sewage, the breeze that flows through even when all the windows and doors are shut, the puddle that forms under the bed when it rains hard, the car that was stolen from the parking lot, the police that came one night when a boyfriend of a tenant was accused of stealing cellphones, the guy down the street in jail for steeling carparts, and now the woman that was murdered next door this week, the one-sided perception ends and you are left with the stark reality that it isn't all positive, there are negatives too. That just like a person in a romantic relationship (any relationship really) there is two sides to this apartment and where it stands.

Becoming chatty with the manager of the building has drawbacks too. We love gossip, but sometimes knowing the gossip doesn't actually have any benefits. We would have found out about the murder anyway since it's in the paper, but not all the other little tidbits that come with managing a building for 11 years.

Like, how several years ago there was a group of Nigerians living in a flat running a drug scheme, or the 11 year old girl that hung out with them until a social worker came for her, or the group of 5 Asian girls living in a flat meant for 2. Or, that over the weekend when the gate wasn't working someone's car was stolen over night. Most buildings in South African cities have gates or walls around them. Our building has gates and a partial wall that allows people to hop over it. Jared and I have often wondered about this and make sure to keep the door locked all the time. The building is old and so is the gate so when it stopped working last week, it was left open over night by someone who couldn't be bothered to manually close it after they drove through. Sucks for the person who woke up to find their locked car gone.

And the murder. The building next to us is a holiday lodge/backpackers. We look down onto their backyard of sorts from our balcony. It's not usually very busy, though in the summer more people came through. Apparently there has been a women working there with her boyfriend for the past 10 months and on Monday it looks like he strangled her during a fight. He claimed she hung herself with a scarf in the bathroom, but when the police arrived she was on the bed and so far he looks pretty guilty so he's been arrested. We don't remember seeing her as our spying was into the back part of the place and the reception is in the front, but it's really sad. She was in her 30s and has, I guess, had, a child. The owner of the lodge is worried about the bad press since people don't generally want to stay somewhere a murder occurred. So bad press for the lodge, a family one member short, and a guy in jail. The paper said her parents drove 20 hours to Cape Town not knowing if it was in fact their daughter that was dead until they identified the body. Horrible.

South Africa unfortunately has a high murder rate...even though several years ago apparently the then president Thabo Mbeki said that South Africa doesn't have a problem with crime, but a perception problem of crime. One of the incredibly dumb things he said.

As of now, we still like our apartment and it's location but definitely have a more balanced view of it after 5 months of living in it.

The Good Food and Wine Show

The Good Food and Wine Show was at the convention center in Cape Town this weekend. At first, I hadn't wanted to go since I'm vegan and currently gluten-free. Gourmet food tends to be meat and dairy centered, with vegetables as either an after-thought or an enhancer, not the centerpiece. But food is a high value for both Jared and I. We eat well and very healthy and spend a fair amount of time in the preparation of food. So we really like food... It's a bit more than that actually, if we aren't preparing food, eating, or cleaning up from cooking, then we are thinking about food.

We decided to go to the show. The show was a cross between cooking demos like the Food Network channel (I always think of my friend Ae-young with cooking demos, the Food Network used to be her favorite TV channel), booths demonstrating nifty cooking tools like at the USA Oregon State Fair, samples, and wine. This being wine country around Cape Town, about 30% of the fair was different vineyards offering wine tastings of their wine. And it was free tastings! I didn't come anywhere near close to sampling them all, knowing when I reached my limit after the fortified wine booth... that red muscadel was so good, followed by the white muscadel, then the port and then the sherry. There is something so smooth about good fortified wine.

I was also delighted to find one organic vineyard that also had a low sulfite content. Apparently, all wines have a certain amount of naturally occurring sulfites that are a result of the fermentation process, but many conventional winemakers add sulfur dioxide as a preservative. According to Organic Wine Company (http://ecowine.com/sulfites) sulfur dioxide has been added to wines for 200 years. This website says many people have a low tolerance for sulfites, Jared is one of these people, so its great to find wine that doesn't have a lot of sulfites.

Cape Town has a big Muslim population so one corner of the fair was dedicated to Halaal booths. We had some veggie curry from one of them, they put the curry into this little metal-looking container and then popped it into the microwave. Jared got really nervous expecting sparks or the micro to blow up, but apparently they are special micro containers, so there was no fireworks. I was reminded of freshman year in college when the guys would put CDs into the microwaves until they cracked and the microwave turned black inside and the room smelt bad. Can't remember why this was supposed to be cool.

We finally left the show once we had been there for 6 hours and they were closing the place down. Yeah food!