South African government branding masks a failure to protect women
By Maya Ellison · Reporting from Detroit ·
# The Performance of Safety
I know what it looks like when officials promise fixes while tap water runs brown. In Flint, Michigan, leaders insisted they were working on it while my neighbors broke out in rashes. When the state weaponizes the language of urgency to mask a systemic collapse, it stages a performance.
Right now, the South African government orchestrates a masterclass in that theater.
In the Ekurhuleni region east of Johannesburg, a predator hunts women. The BBC reported that the state has recovered nine women dead in similar, brutal circumstances since July. These are not statistics; a killer shredded their lives. Elizabeth Moselakgomo, a 38-year-old mother and runner, lay half-naked, her face beaten beyond recognition. Dineo Motapane, also 38, suffered battering and partial burns. Itumeleng Kekana, a 32-year-old shopkeeper, ended up dumped on a bridge, badly bruised.
The South African Police Service (SAPS) now scrambles. Operation Shanela floods Kempton Park with visibility while an Investigative Psychology Unit determines if a serial killer operates in the area. President Cyril Ramaphosa promises that no stone will be left unturned.
But the women living there turn the stones themselves, finding bodies instead of answers. Shari Maluluke, a 26-year-old runner, warned NPR that her whole country feels like a prison because the killer strikes while women jog, visit the post office, or stay inside their own homes. When the police respond to a massacre by telling women to be vigilant and avoid walking alone, they do not provide security—they order the victims to shrink their lives until they disappear.
Where Predators Find a Permissive Environment
This is not a series of unfortunate crimes; it is a climate of terror. We saw this mechanism during the Yorkshire Ripper murders in the UK, where Peter William Sutcliffe seized a specific geographic area to create a pervasive, paralyzing fear, signaling to every woman in the vicinity that she was prey.
The shared mechanism is not just violence—it is the way a serial predator exploits a state's refusal to protect its most vulnerable. When police lag in connecting dots or abandon streets, the predator finds a permissive environment. In Ekurhuleni, the state maintains this safety zone for killers by treating the bodies of Black women as disposable.
Lebogang Ramofoko argues that this matches the long record of South Africa. The violence of colonization and apartheid did not vanish with a ballot; it migrated into homes and the national psyche, where aggression served as the primary language of power. Because the state refuses to dismantle those foundational traumas, the cycle repeats, and Black women become the landing strip for that inherited rage.
When a Crisis Becomes a Press Release
The government uses the national disaster declaration as a shield. In 2025, officials officially declared gender-based violence and femicide a national disaster. On paper, the move looks bold. In practice, it functions as a platitude.
The state claims it has signaled the gravity of the situation through this declaration, deploying every available resource from R400,000 police rewards to specialized psychology units. Officials argue that systemic societal change takes decades, and they must perform the hard work of standard policing in the interim.
That argument is a lie. You cannot police your way out of a culture that views women as disposable. If the government were serious, it would stop treating femicide as a subset of general murder. Shenilla Mohamed, Amnesty International's South Africa Director, insists that the law must recognize femicide as a separate, gender-motivated crime.
Currently, 33 countries, including Gabon and Morocco, have done this. South Africa has not. Recognizing femicide as a specific crime strips the state of its anonymity, forcing the government to track the carnage and admit its specific failure to protect women. As Mohamed puts it, you cannot fix what you are not tracking. By lumping femicide in with thousands of homicides recorded between April and June, as noted by Evrim Ağacı, the state buries the targeted slaughter of women inside a larger, more manageable statistic of general violence.
The national disaster label is mere branding; a separate criminal statute demands accountability. One is a press release; the other is a tool for justice.
The state is not simply failing to catch a killer; it refuses to acknowledge that the perpetrator thrives within a legal system that declines to name the crime. Until the South African government stops reciting empty rhetoric and passes legislation that criminalizes femicide as a distinct act of gender-based hate, leaders are not fighting the fire—they are just describing the smoke while the house burns down.