Transcription
[Music] Hello, hello. Welcome back to It Happened Here, or I Double H, as my sister from another mister Meegan called it the other day. This episode is—well, it’s late. I wrote this during June, and I interviewed my guest at the end of June, but I really struggled this week to find the time and the confidence, frankly, to do this particular case. So it is now July. It is no longer Pride Month, but here is your Pride episode nonetheless.
I discussed it with some friends because I wanted to check that impulse—that I wasn’t being opportunistic by jumping on the LGBTQIA+ theme. I didn’t want to fall into the trap of rainbow washing. I do identify as a member of the community, and I feel strongly that hate crimes and violence targeted at that community, as horrific as they are, must be talked about. But being part of that community doesn’t mean that I face the struggles that others do. I am white, with all the privilege that that brings. I’m also cisgendered, and I was married to a cis-het white guy for far too long. And these things allow me to move around the world with little impediment, even if it means that people are making assumptions about me.
I bring this all up because the people I speak about today did not enjoy those privileges, and their hardships were compounded by poverty, myth, misconception, tribalism, and racism. Today, I’m talking about hate crimes and homophobia in South Africa. This is Episode Four: Hate and Homicide—The Murder of Nothando Ngcobo.
Today, we are traveling to KwaThema, a township in Springs. The closest town is Springs, but if you aren’t from South Africa and are looking for a major landmark to orientate yourself, KwaThema is southeast, but mostly east, of Johannesburg. Residents here are predominantly Black and poor, partly because this was established during apartheid in 1951 as a Black area. When the apartheid government decided to force people out of Payneville and into this township because—and I kid you not—Payneville was too close to Springs, which was designated as a white town. On this flimsy pretext, people were dispossessed of their land and homes and moved—moved further away from jobs and work opportunity. In fact, as I understand it, KwaThema was one of the first townships established under the Group Areas Act, which was the legal framework that designated areas by race in the first place during apartheid. In an earlier episode, I spoke about spatial apartheid as a legacy of apartheid, and this is a good example because, almost 30 years after apartheid was dismantled and we transitioned to democracy, the population of KwaThema is still 99.7% Black and marked by poverty. The census data on Wazimap will give you a good sense of the place. For example, some of the stats that I pulled out: 20% of the houses in this ward are classified as shacks; 90% of households have access to a cell phone (and that’s probably gone up in recent years), but only 22% of households have a computer; only 80% of households have access to a toilet (and that includes chemical toilets), and 3% have no access to a toilet of any kind. The gap between those numbers will be using pit or bucket latrines. Less than half of the population have jobs.
If you go to KwaThema today, you’ll find a mix of these little cookie-cutter government-built houses in chalky shades of orange, red, and toothpaste green, as well as shacks built from whatever people can get their hands on, but often corrugated iron sheets. Fruit sellers and other enterprising individuals hawk stuff on the side of the road. There are few trees, so people set up makeshift stalls with a few poles and shade cloths. The main roads are tarred, but stray even a little off them and you’ll find yourself on gravel or dirt. And even where there are proper roads and nicer homes with trees and yards, those roads are also streaked with the same red-brown mud that flows off the pavements and verges and pools in the dips on the tar when it rains. The municipal buildings are low, in face brick, with coils of barbed wire on their walls. This “Kylo General Dealer” is just a one-room shop with a handwritten sign outside promising sugar, eggs, noodles, and beans. There is electricity in KwaThema, but there are also lots of people who gave up waiting on their homes to be connected and have made a plan with illegal connections. There are often plumes of smoke rising above the houses as people cook or warm themselves on open fires, and there are these huge, towering spotlight-style streetlights. They’re lifted that high off the ground to provide a measure of light and security, but there are always bits the light doesn’t reach. And it was in a patch of deep shadow in an alley between buildings that a woman called Nothando Ngcobo was killed in April 2011.
“Nothando” means peace in Zulu. She was just 24. She was a mum to two small kids and she lived with her gran. We’re told that she loved soccer and, quite her music, and she just happened to be gay—openly so; her family and friends knew. Although her aunt and granny told the media after her death that they never talked about her sexuality directly, she just was who she was. She identified as a lesbian and was an activist and an advocate of gay rights, as well as a member of the local Pride organizing committee. But being openly gay in KwaThema means living in daily danger. I wish that I could say that that is an overstatement, that I’m exaggerating for the sake of drama or podcast. I’m not. This is an area with a distinct pattern of violence directed at gay and trans people. In 2008, Yudi Similani, who played on the national women’s football team, was raped and murdered in KwaThema in what has been called an instance of—“gigantic quotation marks here”—corrective rape. I’m going to get into why that term is so, so wrong a bit later, but that’s what the attack was called in the media and that’s how it was reported. She had been attacked for being gay. Another lesbian, Gugu Dlamini, was killed in 2009, and Golani Glomor was a gay man who was murdered in 2004. That’s just three of the prominent cases that we know about. We really don’t have a good measure on the number of hate crimes in the area because the police do not keep specific records on a victim’s sexual orientation. All the stories you will read about this case say things like, “at least 10 in the last year” or “30 in the last decade.” All of these numbers are arguably a thumb suck; they’re sourced from people on the ground—friends and family and local activists—but none of these numbers are what you would call official. Nonetheless, there is a trend of prejudice and hate-based crime in KwaThema—a legacy of violence that hangs over the heads of gay people just trying to live their lives in the area.
Despite the fear and risk, Nothando was out; she didn’t hide who she was. As a result, she faced a lot of abuse from others, especially young men in the area. The night she was killed, in fact, she had been out with a woman. This woman is generally described as a friend in the news, but this may be the same way that tabloids like to say that Kristen Stewart and her “gal pal” were out on the street. Anyway, they don’t specify. Nothando and her friend were out for a drink in a local bar when a group of guys hit on this friend. We’re told that this led to a verbal altercation between Nothando and the men. There were no punches, but some ugly words. Nothando and her friend left the bar and went their separate ways.
In the next section, I’m going to talk about what specifically happened to Nothando because I think it is important and revealing of the level of hate at play here, but—all the trigger warnings—it is extremely violent and distressing, and you can feel free to skip. Seriously. The short and factual version is that she was raped, beaten, and stabbed to death. That’s the gist of what you need to know. If that is enough to horrify you, go ahead and skip the next minute to 90 seconds.
Okay, for the brave souls who are still listening to this section, I won’t belabor the points, but this is what we know from various accounts of those who found her body and what was leaked from the police: she was raped—seemingly gang-raped; she was also very likely vaginally penetrated with objects, including a beer bottle; she was stoned—pelted with actual stones and with bricks; and she was stabbed repeatedly with something sharp and jagged, like a broken beer bottle. Bottles, as well as used condoms and rocks, were found on and near her body. She suffered innumerable wounds, losing teeth and an incredible amount of blood. Her face was smashed beyond recognition, and a cement cinder block had been dropped on her head, splitting her skull. And it was this that probably ended her life and her suffering. I’ve read and listened to a metric fuckton of true crime; I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of a crime as violent and destructive. And this is why—for those of you who suffered through that description and those that skipped ahead and have rejoined us—this is why I actually think cataloging her injuries explicitly is part of the story and not gratuitous for gore’s sake. These attackers attempted to obliterate her, to destroy her. This is how the hate and fear show themselves. Her shattered body was found the next morning, around 9 a.m., Sunday, April 24th, 2011. It was just 40 or so meters—50 yards—from houses. People told the police that they had heard screams late at night, but they didn’t go to aid or call the police. And that will tell you, too, the power of fear and the extent of the mistrust of the police in this area. There were no apparent witnesses, and the man she fought with in the bar had never been formally linked to the crime. Her friends in the Pride group, as well as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, all classified this as a hate crime, but the local police declined to do so. There are a few quotes in the news from police spokespeople saying, rather snottily, I think, “They don’t worry about sexuality and therefore cannot confirm if it was a factor in this instance.” A memorial was organized for Nothando the following week—a prayer gathering outside her house—and the activists in attendance reported hearing threats and homophobic slurs—denigrating comments about lesbians and so on—being made by young men who had the gall to mingle in the crowd as her family gathered to mourn her. [Music]
Despite the wealth of forensic evidence, no arrests are ever made. Nothando is survived by her children, Lindiwe and Sipo, and her grandmother, Fujielwa. The Pride organizers in the area continue to do incredible, brave work to tackle the layered and complicated issues that gay and trans people in the region face. For example, the slogan of the 2018 Pride was “Fighting HIV/STIs, TB, and gender-based violence,” and attendees were encouraged to wear their traditional cultural outfits to drive home the point that they are African, to counter the suggestion or belief that homosexuality is somehow un-African.
I’ve just a few more points to raise, starting with this idea of policing what is and isn’t African. South Africa was the fifth country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage. Our constitution outlaws discrimination based on race, gender, and sexual orientation. It is, in my opinion and the opinion of people who are much smarter about the law than me, one of the most liberal and sometimes beautiful constitutions. But there remains a gaping chasm between these rights on paper and the lived experiences of people.
I want to read a short extract from an interview with Bondile Carlo, a lesbian and activist in KwaThema. I found this on the Amnesty International website (this and all my sources are linked in the show notes). Bondile says, quote: “If you are a Black lesbian, gay, or transgender person living in the township, it’s still not safe. You still kind of brace yourself because Black people still have a lot of misconception. Men, in particular, still have a lot of hate and anger about LGBTI issues. For lesbians, my personal feeling is that a lot of men feel emasculated. I don’t think they agree with the notion that women were in relationships with each other and were so vocal about these relationships.” She continues, “I think in the early ’70s, organizations like GLOL—which stands for Gay and Lesbian Organization of the Witwatersrand—were headed by gay men. I don’t think people had a problem with gay men because they were so out there and so flamboyant. It was all just fun and games for people, and they felt comfortable with that. When lesbian women started to come out more and more, I guess men didn’t feel comfortable with that—not in the way that they just ignored gay men or took it as a joke or whatever.” End quote.
This interview really highlights for me a lot of important elements of patriarchy and misogyny and homophobia, including the idea that men are somehow entitled to women and sex with women, and therefore lesbians aren’t just depriving men of themselves but competing with men for access to other women. And it is this skewed thinking that also comes into the term “corrective rape,” which is still widely used, it seems, despite the obvious problems with it.
Firstly, two apologies here: to my academic friends, my dissertation supervisors, if you were ever to listen to this, I am desperately sorry for how shallow the following analysis is going to be. I want to do more of this in episodes to come, but it’s not for now. And then, secondly, apologies to the non-media, non-academic types who just want a damn true crime podcast without homework and theory. The use of the word “corrective” in this term suggests that there is an error or mistake or problem that needs to be set right. So, just in the term itself, it sets homosexuality up as a problem to be solved. Not only are we dealing with the violence of the act itself, but what Judith Butler calls “structural violence of discourse.” Look, Megan, I managed to get narrative theory and discourse into my true crime podcast, but that’s it. That’s your homework. Moving on. The New York Times did a photo essay on this in 2013, and they called it “The Brutality of Corrective Rape.” If you can look past the use of that term, it is a powerful piece of journalism detailing several stories from survivors of this practice and showing how embedded this thinking is in some families, in some churches, and so on.
I promised earlier that I had an interview for you, and I do. I reached out to an expert to talk this through with me. Sean Green is a registered clinical psychologist, now in private practice. She worked in criminal psych and in the corrections system for a number of years. She is also—full disclosure—my cousin. It’s handy to have smart people in the family to turn to. This is an extract of our conversation. It was pouring with rain—I’m talking biblical-level rain here—so the sound is what it is. Apologies.
If we unpack it even further, how I see it—what are we dealing with here? It is group dynamics, and I think group dynamics is a highly underrated and, you know, not really spoken of as a powerful thing to human beings. Being functioning groups—we function in groups; we’re social creatures—gluconeogenesis so complex. And I think that this is really a call here as well of hate crimes, if that makes sense.
That is interesting because a lot of these crimes—hate crimes—a lot of them were gang rapes and violence and destruction of the body on such an extreme level, and I did kind of wonder if—if that like obliteration that’s going on is because people are—I don’t know—that you would act like that if you weren’t part of a group.
Yes, and now if we—if we’re evoking groups, you fall away as an individual. The individual falls away, and you actually can’t have a discussion or some logical flow or some connection or empathy or anything like that because all you hear is groups. So the content is lost. The in-group is strengthened, and then, after a minority group, for instance, you know, with a sexual orientation—LGBTQIA+—we know that this is a minority group, so culturally in South Africa or, you know, across the world, but here if we look—we bring it specifically to South Africa—this is a minority group. And if we’ve got in-groups with our group, you might even find that some of that in-group doesn’t necessarily hold as strong bias or prejudice against, you know, the LGBTQIA+ community or whatever—you know, their prejudice is—it’s—but the dynamics around group is that they lose their identity and they become group. The individual falls away, so—and in-group is so strong because it’s the majority group that then you can’t actually have these kinds of discussions, and then it becomes this violence—which talk of extreme violence and gang rapes and um—these these things are just—it’s about shedding the out-group because it’s a threat. Minority group then becomes a threat to the—to—to this group mentality, um, you know, that’s at play here.
I don’t want to fall in the trap of saying that, you know, of—I’ll say making definitive statements about a culture, but it does seem that South Africa has a kind of issue with masculinity in the same way that you would say like Mexico has an issue with machismo, um, and I wonder how that plays into people who see queer people as betraying their gender in some way.
Yes, yeah, I think there is a sense of evoking a toxic masculinity. It’s this idea of this traditional sense of masculinity, and we do see it, and it’s of course, like you said, it’s not across the board, and of course these differences, but in some of our cultures in South Africa we do see—we do see the toxic masculinity playing out and this high level of um traditional understandings of relationships and cultural views of marriage. There’s strong traditional beliefs in throughout South African culture, um, and it goes from patriarchy to our traditional setups of marriage to, you know, this idea of corrective rape. You know, we have this like unbelievably forward or liberal constitution, and it seems to be very disconnected from like what people are actually living—what—what the experience of justice and policing and social dynamics are. And I don’t even know how to begin unpacking that, to be honest. You know that New York Times article you referred to earlier that describes it nicely—that we have laws in place, but these are actually aspirations; it’s not a reality. And it’s not a reality in South Africa that we actually have these, you know, open ways of functioning and we’re so accepting of everybody. I—I think it’s an aspiration that the laws kind of hope to achieve, but I don’t see it saying now. I worked in correctional services for some time, um, I worked with adult male offenders—15-year sentences and up—so that is sexual violence and sexual and violent crimes, so it’s your 15-year sentences and up, um, losses and that kind of thing. So an excessive amount of offenders incarcerated for rape, but there is a shame around incarceration for sexual crime and offenders that are incarcerated for that—really—there’s shame within the prison structure as well of um—of being imprisoned for sexual crime—that’s seen a bit lower down the line as, you know, murder would be higher than rape.
And in terms of—no, I think you are—I mean it wasn’t a very specific question; I’m—I’m not even sure how to turn it. I guess I’m just kind of still trying to wrap my head around, you know, living in a country with the crime—the rape stats that we have, um, the number of people who um are raped—people who will admit to rape once you take the word “rape” out of the discussion, um—and then that it would carry such a stigma in our prisons. The seems—
Yeah, I think what you say though is very important. You—you say, you know, when it’s described and not seemed raped, more—more people will admit to this, and I think that’s also really, really important because, you know, if you ask people that are sentenced to rape, you know, in—in this country, majority are going to say they’re innocent, and I think that also comes down to, you know, feeling that they’ve been framed or they were entitled or that the woman or the girl wanted it in some way or a sense of, you know, coming to this masculinity and toxic masculinity as well as a feeling of entitled um she sex with a woman, and that—that is definitely—as we discussed in it—that definitely plays out and my experience has played out. Yeah, um beliefs of entitlement and—and right being minimized and misunderstood, and consent, especially around that entitlement, is definitely something I kind of wanted to get to. I think the entitlement comes back to those group dynamics we’re talking about where your individuality is lost a bit; you’re now, you know, doing it for the group, and there is an entitlement now—we corrective and a strong belief—I mean, as I think corrective rape for me, I’m like, okay, this just does not logically, emotionally, or any—there’s no sound reasoning whatsoever, but if you’re in it and that’s your belief, then I think it’s strong; it holds stronger, and that’s where the entitlement comes—that you’re doing this in order to reduce shame on the family, to reduce shame on the group, and the—even in me saying it, I’m like, yeah, I struggled to say it because my views are so—vastly different.
Finally, while researching this case, I came across a song that uses Nothando’s name in the title, and I went to go listen to this. It was really moving. I reached out to the writer of that song; his name is Matt Riggan. He’s an American—or actually, I don’t know that for certain, but he’s in America—and he wrote two tracks inspired by the life and death of Nothando. The first piece is called “Ditch Side Monument” and is about where she was found. The second is called “An Afterlife for Nothando.” He performed and recorded these with the Liberation Music Collective. Matt very, very kindly gave me permission to play you an extract of his music, which I’m going to use now to play out. I’ve linked this in the show notes; it’s also on Spotify, so please go listen and support. [Music] [Music] [Music] Huh [Music]
Zodwa, thanks Matt and the Liberation Music Collective. Please go and listen to their music. It Happened Here is a Ready Freddy [Music] production. You