Earlier this year, on February 2, Anene Booysen was taken from David’s Sports Bar and Grill in Bredasdorp South Africa to a nearby housing development. To a sandy passage between two small RDP (Reconstruction and Development Programme) houses, and alongside a deep culvert.
There, the 17-year-old girl, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister and a friend of some and known to many, was gang-raped and murdered. Inbetween those two events, she was disembowelled. Not just her body but Anene herself… because she died much later, after she was found by a security guard, her blood sinking into the sand.
A week later, with South Africa seemingly rising up in protest over the grotesque invasion and mutilation of Anene’s body and life, I went to join the demonstration outside the Bredasdorp Magistrate’s Court, where three young men appeared in connection with the crime. I also went to the spot where Anene’s dignity and life were taken from her…
… and found these flowers. And a wooden cross. And I found the horror. I found it on people’s faces. I felt it in the heat of a midsummer’s day. Between two unoccupied houses.
The horror had its own home between two tiny, empty houses built on sand. And I felt it snaking through my body.
I went back on Saturday. May 25, 2013. Exactly 16 weeks later.
I returned to the home of horror…
At first, I stood back. To absorb what I saw. What I felt. To feel. To feel what had changed.
Nothing had changed for me. The horror lived on.
I immediately noticed that the flowers and the cross had been removed. I had expected that.
I saw that front doors had been installed in the houses. And I noticed that people had moved into their new RDP houses…
into every house but the two that flanked the place where a child of their community had been raped and torn apart.
I breathed deeply and moved closer…
Grasses and plants (gardeners would call them weeds) had grown where the flowers once lay dying…
… and a lamb was eating them.
A lamb. It peered at me through barbed wire. I moved closer to photograph it. It bleated at me.
I don’t do bleating very well. So I did the tongue-click thing I do near animals whose voices I cannot mimic.
And the lamb stayed, munching happily on the greenery growing on what, to me, feels like the grave of Anene Booysen…
Her grave. Upon which dogs now shit.
Shit.
A small girl appeared. On the other side of the culvert. A girl growing up like Anene once did.
She was joined by a friend in the culvert… and posed for the camera…
Tinka and Mikala. Putting out a gangsta vibe. For my camera.
Wanting money for their show. Of hopelessness.
On the exact spot where Anene was raped and murdered.
I asked the two little gangsta-girls if they knew Anene. Knew of Anene.
They didn’t.
The flower was gone. Gone, gone, gone…
…
but I found something, a symbol of hope, to lift me up…
Next to the house where nobody wants to live… little yellow flowers… for Anene…
… to help lift her up… and lift her up…
… again… into the consciousness of those of us…
… who seem not to care.
RIP Anene Booysen.
Child of the Nation.
…
* According to last week’s Mail & Guardian, all charges against “Accused One” (Jonathan Davids) in the case of the rape and murder of Anene Booysen have been dropped – due to lack of evidence.
You can read more about the trial here.
Fred Hatman (AKA Howard Donaldson) knew he wanted to be newspaper journalist at age 13. He has worked as a reporter and sub-editor for the Daily News and Cape Times, both based in South Africa and Wimbledon News, Today, London Daily News, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mirror, all based in London .
