Women remain targets, despite what Ramaphosa says

We sobbed just for a while when police constable Francis Rasuge was murdered, we shed a tear or two for Anene Booysen, we screamed outrage when Baby Tshepang was violated.

We made a song and dance when Reeva Steenkamp was shot dead in the upper-class section of suburbia.

Back in the corridors of poverty, lined with tin roofs and corrugated walls, women are butchered in the most inhumane of ways.

Will it ever cease?

The women of South Africa remain the very backbone of the family, the carriers of our crosses. Mothers are the epitome of the struggle of the black child.

These women sell wares on concrete, sometimes dusty pavements, of this very nation they sought to build – very literally working their fingers to the bone.

South Africa has been built by mothers, grandmothers, aunts and sisters, so one wonders why South Africa conducts itself as it does towards its women.

If the struggling economy does not bury women, their partners do.

The conversation we need to start having as a society is how, under the flagship of democracy, have we arrived at a point where women walk around with targets on their backs?

When did we normalise a situation where the girl child is taught to be afraid, wary and to trust no one in a sea full of men?

We have moved from being afraid of an oppressor that was of a different skin colour to an oppressor that resembles our brothers, fathers and husbands.

This is the South Africa in which women rolled up their sleeves and had to fill the shoes of the absent husbands and fathers in their households because they elected to show up for the greater good of the black nation.

Abuse of a public figure brings to light the struggle faced by the ordinary woman on a daily basis – a struggle that otherwise screams to deaf ears for assistance, bleeds to reluctant hands for aid and cries to emotionally blind eyes for recognition.

As a woman of this land, the president and his reassuring words give me no sense of comfort or security.

I remain a target.

Kekeletso Nakeli-Dhliwayo.

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