— Senior Counsel says these one-in-four men, they’re boasting…to him that’s perhaps the ugliest manifestation of the — she pauses for precision — the ‘commingling in South Africa of culture of impunity with one of masculine sexual entitlement’. That’s how it’s put. Conviction rate of those men who do go to trial is only around seven per cent.—
— What are the police doing about this masculine entitlement.—
— Police don’t have any real ability to prevent rape, do they — not the way they can catch thieves escaping with cash. Unless they come across flagrante delicto in cars, bushes…most rapes take place in private places. Homes: the men are friends of members of the family.—
— State of the nation. — His voice is as if speaking to someone else. — State of the nation address after he became President, Jacob Zuma, himself accused of rape, saying the most serious attention would now be given to crimes against women and children.—
She is the one, not he, who faces the victim in whose defence she is present at Chambers of the firm to which she is on loan. The victim isn’t a woman but half-woman-half-child. Fifteen years old. There has to be unlimited patience to draw her to tell. To be called upon at all is like being brought to the headmistress’s room and you wouldn’t be there if you hadn’t done something wrong.
It’s not drawing blood from a stone, it’s looking at the blood and semen that ran down the thighs; there is the medical report from the doctor on night duty at the hospital where a taxi driver, evidently the lover of one of the women in the house, took the girl ‘because the auntie (there was no mother) didn’t know what to do with her’.
The looks and manners of the lawyer woman who was asking the girl to speak about It — nothing like a headmistress, this beautiful lady out of TV, what an African woman’s supposed to look like, wearing the cloth wound high round the head and the smart jacket-and-pants suit you see in shop windows, white women wear. She’s what you would like to be; and she must have been a black kid, too, some time.
Yes I know the man, he comes to the house and brings things, a bottle for auntie, she likes brandy, and takeaway, chicken and stuff. That Friday the others were out, even the little brother her sister’s kid, she washed her school shirt for Monday and the man came up behind when she was ironing it, he said shame, they’s left you all alone, shame, I just laughed, and then he said come talk to me a little while I take you to get us curry rolls from the Indian’s then he took the iron away, his hands were big, he turned me around and he was…kissing, I began to hit him, kick, and then he pulled up my dashiki I had on for the weekend how can I say — I screamed but he didn’t care he knew there was nobody in the house lots of noise in our street — He got the zip and opened my jeans, I fought I tried to bite, he pushed me on the floor there’s a rubber mat there by the sink and then with the other hand he was doing something at his clothes—
Of course she began to weep a jumble of words and snot.
So she must have been intact — what’s known, with biblical reference, as a virgin. Or maybe did have a boyfriend who entered her secretly as it was long ago in Swaziland. But it was the brutality of this man that brought her blood and his semen running out of her.
To go to her, take her in your arms within a bonding of the common language — the girl is Ndebele but the language is through old tribal conquest close to isiZulu — that’s not in lawyer’s protocol of objectivity essential for extracting truth from clients’ emotions, but she takes the girl’s wet hands firmly in her own. Although the girl comes from what’s emerged as a background of poverty, a household of women managing an existence — where have the men disappeared to after insemination? — she’s not a bedraggled frail slum child. Something in the highways and byways of African DNA, a strain of strength and grace has sustained her. She doesn’t go to school in a dirty shirt on Monday. She is tall, for fifteen, with good long legs from what can be seen of the calves below the rolled-up jeans, a narrow waist above our jutting buttocks, and our African lips. Her story, evidence. She didn’t thank the unexpected kind of questioner but the dazed relief in her glance was an expression of this.
Fifteen.
She could be Sindiswa. Shades of brown deepening where the light catches the flesh. As Sindi would be. If Sindi had more share of me than share of her father.
Professional detachment by which you live now as you could not in the Struggle — misplaced as if it’s a document put down somewhere, can’t be found.
This is Sindi with the one man in four in our country.
The advocate on the same case met them cheerfully at reception and forbore to murmur aside to his attorney and expect an answer, how did it go. She left him with her tidy pad of notes. Many thanks, I’ll call you at the Centre, he patted the notes as he spoke, an assurance between the code of colleagues that he was confident in her special qualification for this case. These are worthy, not reprehensible situations when race does count.
She’s fifteen.
— The girl is fifteen years old. Same age as Sindiswa.—
He turns his head swiftly away and back again; does she have to be reminded this is not one of her cases to be told about with Sindiswa in the room, lately interested in her mother’s, a lawyer’s work; she and her schoolmates are being engaged seriously, at that school where there is a curriculum assumed responsibility with what pupils are going to do in life, for others, within the career they choose for themselves. What you going to be, as the schoolmates put it. Butcher-baker-candlestick-maker, oh no no no it’s nothing like the old jingle — television film-maker, advertising copywriter, sports coach, actress, five-star hotelier — teacher, doctor, lawyer, architect, engineer — these last are what the school hopefully advises while not encroaching on individual freedom of ambition.
He and she never had had the idea that you don’t bring your work preoccupation home with you, enough is enough as the phrase goes, one of those that have come into the country’s English from the colloquial of a long-mixed population, precolonial indigenous and immigrant usage. The university is about to send students and academics — himself — out on the winter vacation, with the poor mid-year exam results, solidarity with protest against inadequate bursaries, poor living conditions at hostels — the endemic of tertiary education — until these reassemble for the new term.
The month is ending with doctors again on strike. In a province that has the name Mpumalanga, ‘Rising Sun’, a town which still bears the name of a Boer War leader against the British, Piet Retief, two are killed as a mob round pyres of burning tyres, brandishing ‘traditional weapons’ clubs and pangas not out of date, protest against what’s dubbed ‘service delivery’, a non-existence for them, their needs, water, electricity, refuse removal ignored with promises for fifteen years. In frustration they rage indiscriminately destroying what they do have, what’s passed for a clinic, a library.
She speaks about the rape once more.
Gary Elias was at the Mkizes where Njabulo is allowed to call up Facebook on his father’s new computer and they enter themselves to be received by others they’re unlikely ever to meet within touch. Sindi has Mandoza playing so batteringly that the walls of her den and the walls of the living room seem to act as drums resounding. He got up and made to go to her. — Don’t — no, leave her.—