Domestic Terror: Intimate partner violence in South Africa

By Nechama Brodie

Every day more than three women in South Africa, on average, are murdered by their male intimate partners. This book looks at the stories of South African women who were subjected to unimaginable periods of fear and terror, who endured sustained physical, emotional and psychological attacks, all at the hands of men. 

Dr Nechama Brodie explores decades of brutal domestic violence and coercive control and she examines women’s changing rights and current legal protections. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kwela
• Release date: Aug 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9780795710865

Nechama Brodie

DR NECHAMA BRODIE is a journalist, author and academic. She has worked as an editor, publisher of magazines, a radio talk show host, a TV writer, director, and has written for many newspapers. She is a lecturer at Wits Centre for Journalism and is acting coordinator of Wits Justice Project. She is the author of nine books and lives in Johannesburg.

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KWELA BOOKS

This has always happened.

1911

WIFE’S TERRIBLE DEATH

HUSBAND CHARGED WITH WILFUL MURDER

Bulawayo, Friday.

The death occurred at the Bulawayo Memorial Hospital yesterday of Cecilia Barry, wife of John Barry, a plasterer.

She was removed to the hospital on Saturday night last by the police, suffering from shocking injuries, alleged to have been inflicted by her husband, who at the same time was arrested and charged with assault with intent. It is alleged that the woman was brutally ill-used, and that, although she was pregnant, he beat her horribly and systematically. There were marks of bruises on the stomach, caused by kicking or jumping. Barry will now bes charged with wilful murder.

The parties came from Perth, Australia, and for some time resided at Fordsburg. They only came to Bulawayo a few months ago.

A girl aged eight and a boy aged five are now being cared for in the Convent.

– Rand Daily Mail, 21 January 1911

1913

ONE WAY WITH A WIFE

BRUTAL HUSBAND SENTENCED

Krugersdorp, Friday.

A Cape boy named John Booysens was brought up before Mr. E.J. le Roux for sentence today, having been found guilty of behaving in a brutal manner towards his wife. The first count alleged that on May 11 last, at the Municipal Location, he struck his wife on the head with a piece of iron; the second count stated that on August 28 he thrashed her with a stick about the legs and arms; and the third count stated that on September 1 he tied her arms and legs together with a piece of fuse, placed her on a trolley, and caused her to fall off when the wagon was in motion, rendering her unconscious.

The accused pleaded that he suspected his wife of infidelity and felt quite justified in punishing her.

– Rand Daily Mail, 6 September 1913

1917

SEQUEL TO A WOMAN’S DEATH

HUSBAND CHARGED WITH ASSAULT

Thomas Bilton was before Mr. Juta yesterday on a charge of assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm. The case is a sequel to an inquiry, heard by Mr. A. Cramer some weeks ago, into the circumstances surrounding the death of Mrs. Bilton, who lived with her husband in Braamfontein. Death occurred on November 10 from cerebral haemorrhage. The body was a mass of bruises. Bilton’s story was that his wife had bruised herself through falling on some coals.

[. . .] Bilton used frequently to strike his wife. On November 3 accused said that Mrs Bilton had fallen on the coals, and that he had brought her back into the house. He admitted having slapped her on the face with his hand. His reason for doing so was that Mrs. Bilton was lying drunk with her clothes disarranged.

– Rand Daily Mail, 19 December 1917

1923

TRAGEDY AT VREDEDORP

NATIVE WOMAN BATTERED TO DEATH

A BLOOD-STAINED TABLE LEG

HUSBAND CHARGED WITH MURDER

A native woman named Lizzie was found lying dead on a bed in a room in 22nd Street, Vrededorp, on Monday afternoon. The few rags that covered her were bespattered with blood, and her face and body were covered with terrible bruises.

Neighbours allege that the woman was killed by her husband, a Basuto named Daniel. It is said that at about 10 a.m. on Monday a quarrel arose between husband and wife over some food. Towards midday (the neighbours say) the woman ran into the house opposite, but she was dragged back and severely chastised by her husband.

Shortly after midday a party of coloured people visited the deceased’s room. Lying on a couch, and apparently feigning sleep, lay Daniel. On the bed Lizzie lay motionless, practically unclothed, save for a few rags across her legs.

The woman was quite dead and when the police were called to the scene they discovered in the room the leg of a table covered with blood. The circumstances suggested that this might have been the weapon used in the terrible ill-usage which the unfortunate woman had obviously received.

Daniel was arrested on a charge of murder and will appear before the magistrate today.

– Rand Daily Mail, 10 January 1923 

Harder than you think

The first time I got paid for a piece of writing was in 1988. I was 12 years old and I was sent a cheque from The Star made out for the amount of R5, first prize in a creative writing competition, for a poem that was about the Tragedy of Child Abuse. I remember the event very clearly, mostly because my English teacher edited a single line of the poem, rearranging a couplet so that the words would rhyme better, and to this day I dislike the revision: A battered child becomes a beater / A wooden stick’s no way to treat her. It was too neat.

Child abuse was probably top of the list of the worst things I could imagine at that time. For one thing it was something I had personally experienced, and it had come with a deep sense of shame and puzzlement, and an immediate but still immature understanding of the complex hypocrisy of the family and community and society in which I lived – where I was believed, and swift action was taken to prevent any further abuse, but nothing much was done against the perpetrator. Looking back, now, from my current point of view as a researcher, I can retrofit information to work out that, in the 1980s, there was something of a ‘moral panic’ around childhood sexual abuse in particular: that it was thought to be a very worrisome thing, but also that there was a lot of concern that children would somehow falsely accuse adults of molesting them. Molesting. That is an interesting word. An absolutely deficient term to describe what took place. Like the continued practice in some countries of describing rape as defilement, as if being ruined is the real problem.

The reason I mention this is because it was quite fundamental in shaping my ideas and understanding of how violence happened, and also how I started to understand narratives of violence. I could understand violence against children because I was a child. It was through this same lens that I started slowly understanding the edges of the violence of apartheid, learning about the murder of Hector Pieterson, who had been killed in the year I was born, and whose death I first read about (and saw in a photograph) also sometime in the late 1980s, in a history book published by Ravan Press. I remember quite clearly the dawning horror of it: what kind of a state murders children?

Narratives of violence are, in many ways, as important as the reality of it. They shape our understanding of the world we live in, where we do and don’t feel safe, where we do and don’t feel afraid. Outside of my parents’ occasional shouting matches, I had little understanding of the violence that happened between adults. I did not know anyone whose father regularly beat their mother (in retrospect there most certainly would have been instances of this in our school, and our suburb, but wherever it was, it was kept very quiet). If I read about women being abused it would have been primarily through the lens of cases that involved child abuse. Perhaps I also didn’t understand it clearly at the time because my earliest introduction to men who committed violence were men who were not interested in grown women.

As I grew older, I learned about violence against women from television; also Hollywood movies, and from novels. I cannot recall that I read or noticed very much about violence against women in the news – at least, not violence that was committed by the women’s partners. Strange men, strangers, were quite strongly put forward as the candidates for all evils, despite me already knowing better in this regard. My earliest understanding of abusive marriages or romantic partnerships was (and I admit this freely, in the interest of transparency and frankness) a movie that Julia Roberts starred in, in 1991, called Sleeping with the Enemy, where she played a woman who had to fake her own death in order to escape an abusive and controlling husband. Having learned substantially more about domestic violence, I recognise that the plot is perhaps less far-fetched than I might have imagined at the time. Several years later I got my first journalism job as an editorial assistant at Marie Claire magazine, which is where, in the stories we published, in the interviews I conducted, in the pages I wrote and read, I gained more insight into the violence women experienced at the hands of men. (As a side note, I don’t think we often enough acknowledge the important role that women’s magazines played in writing about and drawing attention to the issue during the 1980s and 1990s; this was mostly done in a serious and thorough manner, despite women’s mags frequently being brushed off as lightweight.)

The older I got the more distant child abuse became (this would change when I became a parent and had my own children to worry about), and the more relevant other kinds of problems became. I had a boyfriend who, after I broke up with him, would drive past my house in the middle of the night, and who once smashed my phone and damaged my car. I didn’t think of this as abusive; it was just jealousy and a bad temper. I knew a couple more women who’d had similarly ‘jealous’ boyfriends at one point or another. We would joke about it, be openly relieved that we had left, and that they had gone from our lives (except for when they reappeared out of the blue). But we only really spoke about it after it was over. Sometimes we would hear about cases far worse than our own, but mostly they were removed by enough degrees to keep us feeling secure in our bubble of lucky-escape/it-wasn’t-that-bad-really. The normalisation of so much of this was what I think surprised some people during the recent waves of the #MeToo protests – that it was so common, so everyday, almost to the point of being unremarkable except when we paused for a moment to think about how absurd it really was. It amazed me how little most men knew of these kinds of things, and how much almost every woman knew.

In writing this book, I realised that there was some part of me that somehow imagined at least some part of this ‘forever’ story of violence against women had changed over time, that at the very least its invisibility, its social acceptability, its inevitability had been slowly left behind, together with other vestigial violence like apartheid and the old South African flag. Statistically I knew this wasn’t the case (because I had been writing about femicide since at least 2013), but narratively there was a part of me that said: surely this must be a little different now? We have all these remarkable laws in place, and we actually have words for the things that happen; we can describe gender-based violence. We don’t let men behave this way any more. We believe women now.

Don’t we?

I was sitting having breakfast with Glynnis Breytenbach, a former state prosecutor who is now a member of Parliament (I had the great fortune to work with her on her book, Rule of Law), when our conversation turned to a court matter involving a woman who had allegedly killed her abusive partner and who was facing a charge of murder. (This is not one of the cases in this book, and was still being prepared for court at the time.) We talked about domestic abuse and intimate partner killings in general, and Glynnis shared a phrase from South African law reports that I had never heard before, but which captured my attention: it was the notion of ‘murder by instalment’. In a legal context it represented a specific set of ideas about the rights of abused women to defend themselves even when they were not literally being attacked at that moment – i.e. that expecting an abused woman to wait for a deadly assault before she could legally defend herself was tantamount to sentencing her to murder in instalments. The concept had an unpleasant resonance with a slightly different case I had been contacted about a year or two before, where a woman had been killed by a partner who everybody knew was abusive, and who had been beating her for years, and where the woman was last seen alive by friends while her partner was beating her and nobody had intervened. She had died from this kind of murder, these thousand blows delivered over time, the final one being the killing blow – but really it could have been one of so many blows before then. I also knew what these ‘instalments’ looked like on the bodies of women, because colleagues of mine at the forensic medicine and pathology department of the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) had written about a case of deadly domestic violence, analysing what felt like an entire library of cruelty etched onto a dead woman’s bones. These latter two cases are included in this book.

When I started to research the topic in more detail, I went back to the important work that was done in the early 2000s under the Justice for Women project (spearheaded by the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation), and the major court cases that followed on from the project’s work (S v Ferreira and S v Engelbrecht), and which changed/set new legal precedents for women who killed their abusers. I also went back through news archives, to see what I could discover about previous cases that had similar features – where women had killed violent partners (several of these are discussed in this book). While I was searching past and present court reports and news reports, it appeared that there had been a positive shift in the judiciary when it came to dealing with and understanding the causes, effects and outcomes of violence against women, in line with the changes made to South African laws after 1994. Although this also may have been more extensive on paper than in the real world. As one legal expert (who shall remain anonymous) sarcastically commented to me about the appeal hearing of murderer Oscar Pistorius: ‘I’ve never seen so many judges who love abused women and murdered women. In the judiciary, nobody ever voted for the National Party and nobody has ever been sexist.’

What also became clear through this search and exploration – and this was the part that challenged my imagined narrative – was that while the courts had perhaps become more progressive and more considerate (overall, not that there aren’t exceptions) of women who killed their abusers, there seemed to be absolutely no similar interruption to the continued killing of women by these same types of men. Worse, from my point of view, was that when I started to document some more recent intimate partner killings, it became apparent that a large number of them continued to involve substantial and sustained abuse (physical, emotional, financial) prior to the women’s murders, and that in many cases the women had been killed by their partners while there was a (domestic violence) protection order in place. Why were women still being murdered ‘in instalments’?

Based on our current crime figures more than three women, on average, are murdered by their intimate partners every single day in South Africa. This figure is completely dwarfed by the number of men who are killed – but these deaths are not usually caused by the person sleeping next to them, sharing a bed, a house, a life, children. In domestic violence, the fatal act is also usually not the first time that violence has been used against a partner; it is just the last. And what that speaks to is an unimaginable period of time before then when the violence builds, accumulates. When the perpetrator deliberately creates fear and terror in his victim.

This is what this book explores – not necessarily to offer easy answers or solutions, but to demonstrate, in quite disturbing terms, what domestic terror looks like in South Africa, then and now, and to show that it is still very much a part of now, despite supposedly living in a progressive, democratic society where women have equal rights.

It is, I should say, an unpleasant book. Halfway through writing, I nearly decided that I could not finish it. The content was too depressing, the terror far too real and too close to home, literally. Often the nexus of my own distress would, again, be linked to the children who were caught up in these cases: how must Vicki Terblanche’s son feel, knowing that his mother died on his bed and that her body was rolled up in his own duvet? I imagined the cold fear that would have crept into the chest and limbs of Nazreen Fakier’s child when they saw their mother covered in blood and had to go and ask a neighbour for help, saying that they thought their mother was not feeling well. I read case after case where women, and children, had asked for help, and had not received it.

Violence against women is often referred to as a disease. In part this is because it is a massive public health problem – it causes uncountable loss of life, injury, and a loss of productivity, it consumes vast quantities of health and other social support resources. People like to think of violence as a pathogen, even though it doesn’t technically behave like one. We want to think of it as a problem that can be treated or prevented in the same way as boiling water sterilises dirty things, or vaccines teach our body how to manufacture immunity without literally being in a state of mortal peril. But this creates the mistaken belief that violence is something that comes from outside us, which is foreign. And we need to start acknowledging that this violence is in our own homes.

2022

Nazreen Fakier Cajee

7 December 2022

The funeral of:

Marhooma Nazreen Fakier

D/O Late Rugshana & Igshaan Fakier & DIL Of Yusuf Cajee & Tasneem & M/O A–, A– & Y– & S/O Noeraan & Raighaan

WILL LEAVE FROM [redacted]

PROCEEDING TO: Newclare Cemetery

JANAZAH SALAAH WILL BE PERFORMED AT: Newclare Cemetery

(This is a short story.)

On Tuesday 6 December 2022, one of Nazreen Fakier’s three children went to ask for help at a neighbour’s house. The child said that they thought their mother was not well, and that she was covered in blood.

The neighbour rushed to the home Nazreen shared with her children and her husband, Shaheed Cajee, and, finding the front door locked from the inside, had to force his way in where he found Cajee seated in the lounge. The neighbour asked