h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Elektra wrote an entry about violence against women, and mentioned the absurd rape levels in South Africa. Just to give you an idea: polls in South Africa suggest that more than a third of all women have been raped; a poll of MEN revealed that between a quarter and a third of them ADMITTED to having raped a woman. Clearly there is something very wrong here.

I am struggling with trying to figure out what is going wrong. I cannot imagine what kind of man would rape a woman. But things here are even worse than the above statistics tell you. Because they don’t tell you the awful details. For instance that many of those raped are raped when they are mere children … not just that, but in this country we have the phenomenon of baby-rape. A part of the reason is the belief that sex with a virgin will cure AIDS. So men are seeking out girls likely to be virgins … young girls … but as more and more young girls are raped there are less and less virgins to go round and so even younger girls get targeted and you end up with the logical end point: baby girls being raped. With the belief that this will cure AIDS. So – raped by someone with AIDS and in the process perhaps getting AIDS as well as getting raped.

The statistics also don’t tell you of the violence attending these rapes. We get here the situation of women being gang-raped to death. We have here the situation of ‘corrective rape’ of lesbians or women perceived as being lesbian. Some of them are beaten/raped to death as if death is an acceptable cure for lesbianism.

But … this is something not often spoken about … we ALSO have in this country a very large number of men getting raped. Prison rape is an accepted part of prison life. If you are arrested – even if you are not guilty of anything – you might end up in a cell with a bunch of men who will proceed to rape you … even some of those men doing it have had it done to THEM when they had been arrested, but they do it to you anyway because that’s how things are done. Prison rape feature in our soap operas. How many of YOUR soap operas in Britain and America feature a favourite male character being arrested or unjustly imprisoned and then being made the sexual plaything of a prison thug and having no choice but to just suffer it?

Men get raped outside prison too of course … men and boys. In my stay in a psychiatric hospital one of my roommates was a boy of 18 who had been raped by a homeless person.

Rapes … now I try and view things holistically and I see rape in this country as part of a pattern of extreme, insane violence. Like I said I cannot really understand how people can do such things to each other, but I have to try and make sense of all this somehow. And all that makes sense to me is that we have internalized violence and brutalisation in this country. Apartheid as well as the struggle against it involved every kind of violence and also every kind of justification for violence. Now it’s long after Apartheid but we’re still stuck with internalized violence. And the problem is the politicians make use of this. They still blame Apartheid and they still keep the mindset of the Struggle going. They like people being angry, frustrated and scared – this makes them easier to manipulate. They exploit people’s fears and insecurities. They don’t go so far as to openly condone or advocate violence … er, actually sometimes they do. But manage to explain it away all the same.

But at ‘ground level’, what is happening? People remain poor and powerless. They remain frustrated. The ‘good life’ they had been promised is not arriving. Some people blame the whites … in reality we have lost pretty much all our power but there are factions who think we are still in power and blocking non-whites from achieving prosperity. There are political leaders who advocate that true liberation has not yet been achieved and will only happen when everything has been taken from the whites: farms, mines, factories, everything remaining. There is … although its motivation is difficult to prove … a seeming campaign of extermination directed at white people living on farms. Often elderly couples living alone without much protection are targeted. They are killed and often brutally tortured beforehand. Only a few trivial items are stolen in most cases, but this is enough for authorities to state that the motives of these tortures and murders is nothing more than robbery.

But discounting these farm murders we have a staggering overall murder rate. Perhaps as many people here are killed each year as in America, despite the fact that we have only about a seventh of the population of America. In response to this, the authorities have decided to no longer make accurate murder statistics available for the public’s scrutiny.

Rape. Murder. Torture. Interpersonal violence … there is a lot of violence in households here. Violence is still seen as an acceptable educational tool. So how could some people propose that we use education to fight violence when we still have that mindset? Beating children to make them grow up ‘good’ … that teaches them that the law is of the strong against the weak. And the weak, being constantly beaten up by those who are stronger, will in turn seek out someone weaker that THEY can beat up. That is the way of things. How do you change that?

What about psychological violence? I cannot even think where and how I can begin to speak of this. But the bottom line is that people are being threatened, deceived, twisted psychologically … every step of the social hierarchy does it to those on the step beneath it. The attitude is that people are to be used, their minds are there for us to use for our ends, no matter how much damage THEY might suffer as a result. No matter how much damage SOCIETY eventually suffers as a result of being full of people with broken minds, drenched in lies and deceit to the point where no-one can know what is really going on any more.
And as things are nothing will get done about this, because this is the system and it suits those in power. A populace torn apart by violence, by fear, by hatred … this is great, this means we can make even more promises, this means people are desperate and will flock to us when we say we shall help them, this means with a tiny little lie we can turn the masses against our enemies! Or against each other, and we can sit back and watch them waste their energies destroying each other while we continue to rob them.

Maybe I’m cynical but this does seem to be the way. There might be good leaders, good politicians, but they are not much in evidence. There is no prominent politician visibly standing up against the incredible wrongs I mention here. There is actually so much more that I am not even mentioning because most of you don’t have the context to understand it. Suffice to say that we are a society of absolutely insane levels of violence.

It is a miracle that we are still here and still doing relatively well in spite of all of this … but we are in denial about something absolutely awful, and I don’t know how much longer we can keep getting away with it.

People overseas don’t seem to really care about us. On the one hand we are presented as a country that is a great example to others of how intolerance can be overcome. Our leaders are anxious to present this image to the outside world. So, they will not like speaking about rape, torture, murder happening here. At the same time as I said they are also not eager to actually do anything about the actual rape, torture and murder happening here. When people complain, it is made out to be the whites complaining because they resent the loss of their power and now they want to make the new government look bad, they want to make it seem as if things are going badly in this country, and this won’t do. To talk about crime, violence, whatever, is racist. People should focus on the GOOD that is being achieved. Denial is a good political strategy.

Those swayed by the government therefore keep quiet, keep up the denial. Those who do speak out therefore tend to be those opposing the government, and this of course makes it seem they have ulterior political motives. Many see it as indeed ‘the whites’ complaining, complaining, complaining about every little thing. Some people see it that the whites should shut the heck up and even if they get violence, they deserve it for what they had done during Apartheid. I sometimes feel that people in countries like Britain, America, Australia and many others are projecting their own guilty consciences for the historical misdeeds of their own people against other peoples on the South African whites … if they can show how much they are against us, that would atone for the genocides and oppressions of their own pasts. But we South African whites are, I maintain, not more evil than other white people – or other people irrespective of skin colour. It is past Apartheid now and almost all of us recognize that we did wrong in the past and most of us who are in a position to do so are now trying to make amends, to help those we oppressed before, to raise our children without biases and to combat the remnants of prejudice still in our own minds.

And violence is violence. It will not keep itself tidily confined to one compartment. It’s not just white people getting killed (and can you really say it is all right for people to be raped, tortured and murdered just because they are white?) but immense numbers of non-whites are being hurt and killed as well. And when white people are targeted or only feel as if they are targeted, they will lash back. There are small-scale right wing conspiracies; so far nothing much has come of all that but who knows about the future, and the mindset in itself is bad.

As I’ve said elsewhere a big tool for getting a ‘people’ out of a dysfunctional mindset is having contact with the outside world. But the more a people gets isolated and wrapped up in itself, the more distorted it gets. We in South Africa NEED the outside world; we need good and stable friends so to speak, to show us a better way. But … in the first place we seem to be paying less and less attention to what others are doing and saying, and in the second place the others out there seem to be having problems of their own. It is not for nothing that I believe that human civilisation as a whole is suffering a crisis right now. I’m worried that not just South Africa but the whole continent of Africa seems to be thrown to the wolves right now. If we don’t get outside help, I do think we will eventually manage to get up and help ourselves … but perhaps only after a long period of immense suffering. The problems we face are just that big. If we have help, it would just go easier and with less trauma. And … if we are helped, if we are OK, then we in turn can help others. Isn’t that how things should be? We humans all need help right now … and also, all of us can help each other out in various ways. We here in South Africa do have things we can contribute that will enrich the whole world and I don’t mean our diamonds, gold and minerals.

What can we or anyone do? This is only my view, but the only way to combat violence is to do so deliberately, actively and fully. The answer is to be loving, kind, gentle, compassionate, considerate, responsible. You can’t force this on people. You can’t order people to be like this. You can only encourage them, and set an example by being so yourself. And being so fully and without exceptions. I am trying to do this … but as a single, socially isolated, mentally ill person, my influence doesn’t go far.

Gosh Willem, SA is not the only country with those horrible gang-rapes, the entire subcontinent of India has a dreadful problem as well. In SA the history is more like an ugly civil war that went on with the gov't on one side and the everyone else on the other. Lawlessness is always a by-product of one of these situations and everyone has to work through them cooperatively before the situation improves.

Also with all strongly patriarchies, there are problems associated with women and CONTROL over reproductive issues. The rise of feminism is perceived to be a BIG threat to the STATUS QUO. The more repressive and conservative a society is the more threatened men feel and violence results. That has been true of Christianity as well (especially Calvinism) even in the gospel everyone was shocked when Jesus spoke to women as though they had rights. (Don't talk to me about Paul---he had a lot to answer for his as well.) All the cultures that have these 'honour' killings where fathers and brothers kill daughters and sisters are prey to this. The UN and a lot of other NGOs have found out that improving women's earning capacities go a LOT further in helping countries develop economically than those huge construction projects the IMF used to specialize in. Microloans and Heifer International do a lot for communities.

Hi Elektra! Well, over here there is a strong initiatives at eliminating inequalities between men and women. I'm not sure how sincere they are, though, or how much effect they have in practice. When we speak of empowerment, I think we need to focus most on the power of love. Nothing wrong with addressing economical inequalities, but that too has to happen from a spirit of love - as I see it.

To true, Willem. No argument there. I am sure Jesus would be disgusted with his 'so-called' followers.