There is something uncomfortable about celebrating a day dedicated to the ties that bind South Africans together while nine women in one municipality have become the focus of a national reckoning over whether those ties are strong enough to protect them.
The official theme for Heritage Day this year is “Celebrating Our Living Heritage: Strengthening the Ties That Bind Us”. Government says it is intended to promote social cohesion, Ubuntu and a shared sense of belonging.
But the nine women whose bodies have been found in Ekurhuleni since July have exposed a different reality: the extent to which fear, vigilance and violence have become part of the way women navigate their belonging to South African society.
The police have not established that the nine deaths are connected. Investigators are examining possible links through a specialised multidisciplinary team, while two women face charges in the murder of Jabulile Ntimba and another suspect is in custody in the earlier murder of Busisiwe Mahlangu.
The possibility that the cases may eventually prove unrelated does not make the collective reaction to them less significant.
It may, in fact, explain it.
A woman being murdered in South Africa is not unusual enough to guarantee sustained national attention. Nine women found dead across one municipality within two months is different. It has given a name, a face and a location to a crisis that usually arrives in the form of statistics, individual court cases and another family searching for a missing woman.
The nine women
These are the women who were found killed: Busisiwe Mahlangu – found in Kempton Park on July 15; Itumeleng Kekana – found in Kempton Park on August 3; Nomfesane Mjobo – found in Kempton Park on August 26; an unidentified woman – found floating in the Clayville River, Olifantsfontein, on September 7; Gracious Nkomo – found in Kempton Park on September 10; Elizabeth “Tsontso” Moselakgomo – found in Kempton Park on September 12; Name withheld but now believed to have been 28-year old Vutomi Mathebula – found in Olifantsfontein on September 14; Dineo Evelyn Motapane – found in Kwa-Thema on September 15; Jabulile Ntimba – found in Dawn Park on September 17
Their stories have made the scale of the crisis harder to distance from.
Kekana's family searched for her for 17 days before being called to identify her body. She left behind a 14-year-old daughter. She was from Mmakwane Village in Qwaqwa, where she was buried on August 22. Her devastated brother described her as loving mother and sister and an avid Orlando Pirates fan.
Moselakgomo left home for her usual run and did not return, with her eight-year-old daughter raising the alarm, prompting a search that became one of the most publicised of the cases. Her disappearance also brought the deaths of other women in the area to wider attention. She was buried on Sunday. She leaves behind her daughter.
Motapane, an entrepreneur who sold polony hampers with her cousins to help support the family, leaves behind a two-year-old daughter. The family of Nkomo, 28, searched for her for weeks, checking mortuaries, hospitals, police stations and areas around Kempton Park. Her photographs were also circulated in missing-person appeals on social media before her family identified her at Germiston Mortuary on September 17.
These details matter because they show what a statistic conceals: the ordinary lives that are interrupted by violence and the extraordinary amount of work families can be forced to do afterwards to find, identify and bury the people they love.
How women already calculate risk
The reaction to the Ekurhuleni killings has also exposed how familiar South African women already are with this calculation of risk.
Gorata Chengeta, a sexual violence researcher and PhD candidate at Wits University, told The National that women increasingly plan their lives around the possibility of violence – sharing live locations when they get into an Uber, running in groups and constantly checking their surroundings.
“The fact that women have to limit where they go and constantly watch their own and each other's backs takes an exhausting amount of work,” she said.
Jogini Packery, a counselling psychologist and campus head at the South African College of Applied Psychology, described the psychological cost of this constant vigilance.
“When women constantly feel unsafe, that sensed danger forces them to change their daily routes, avoid public spaces, and ultimately pulls them away from participating fully in public life,” she said.
That is more than a question of individual fear. It is a question of citizenship.
If a woman changes where she runs because she fears being attacked, stops walking after dark, shares her location whenever she travels or avoids particular public spaces, her access to public life is being shaped by the threat of violence.
The cost is rarely captured in the country's crime statistics.
The latest police figures record 9,201 reported rapes between April and June this year. Women and children accounted for 8,814 of those victims. A further 11,532 sexual offences were recorded during the quarter.
The figures tell us about reported crimes. They cannot tell us how many women changed their behaviour because of the possibility of violence, how many never reported what happened to them or how much of everyday life has been reorganised around avoiding risk.
That is the deeper significance of the Ekurhuleni killings.
They have brought together two things South Africa usually keeps separate: the individual tragedy of a murdered woman and the structural reality of violence against women.
The state has declared a disaster. What changed?
South Africa declared GBVF a national disaster in November last year, placing the national executive in charge of coordinating and managing the response.
The declaration was meant to unlock a more urgent response.
Since then, government has established or strengthened structures dealing with GBVF. The Department of Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities says work has continued around the National Strategic Plan, while government has pointed to additional policing resources and interventions.
In Gauteng, Premier Panyaza Lesufi has cited almost 16,000 new CCTV cameras, about 139 drones, two helicopters, thousands of wardens and 6,000 gender-based violence brigades as part of the province's response.
There is therefore no shortage of activity to point to.
The problem is whether activity is translating into a different experience for women.
What survivors actually experience
Anisa Moosa, national coordinator of the National Shelter Movement of South Africa, has acknowledged the policy and coordination milestones since GBVF was classified as a national disaster. But she says shelters and frontline organisations continue to face overwhelming demand, inconsistent funding, inadequate access to psychosocial support and problems within the criminal justice system, including delays in investigations and prosecutions.
“Survivors often still face barriers when seeking protection, accommodation, counselling and economic support,” Moosa said.
Her assessment provides a much harder measure of the disaster declaration than the number of new cameras or arrests.
If the state has declared GBVF a national disaster, the question is what a woman experiences when she needs the state.
Can she get a protection order?
Can she find a place in a shelter?
Can she obtain counselling?
Will her case be investigated properly?
Will the prosecution move?
Will she have economic support?
And, ultimately, does she feel safer?
Dr Zubeda Dangor, a clinical psychologist, founder of Nisaa Institute for Women's Development and a member of the National Council on GBVF, has argued that government departments and other structures need to work through a single coordinating mechanism to reduce duplication and make better use of limited resources.
She says progress should be measured by what survivors experience on the ground.
That is a significant shift in how success should be understood.
A national disaster cannot be judged simply by the machinery created in response to it. It has to be judged by whether the machinery works.
What are we passing on?
The response to the Ekurhuleni killings has also exposed another problem.
After the deaths emerged, police urged women to remain vigilant.
The National Shelter Movement and Lawyers for Human Rights pushed back, arguing that South African women were already highly vigilant and that responsibility for preventing violence could not continue to be shifted towards potential victims.
Women already modify their behaviour to manage a threat created by other people.
They check their surroundings. They share locations. They avoid isolated areas. They run in groups. They call friends when they arrive home. They arrange transport around safety rather than convenience.
Yet the fundamental question remains: why should women have to become increasingly skilled at avoiding violence rather than the country becoming better at preventing it?
That question goes directly to the idea of social cohesion.
Government's Heritage Day theme describes heritage as something that connects people and creates a shared sense of belonging.
But belonging has practical consequences.
A person who is afraid to use a public space does not experience that space in the same way as someone who feels entitled to move through it freely.
A woman who has to organise her life around avoiding violence is participating in society under different conditions from a man who does not have to make the same calculations.
The result is an invisible inequality: women occupy the same cities, streets, workplaces, parks and transport systems, but they do not necessarily experience them as equally available to them.
That is why the Ekurhuleni killings have resonated beyond the individual investigations.
The question is no longer only who killed these women.
It is also what kind of society produces a situation in which women have become accustomed to planning their lives around the possibility that someone might.
What are we passing on?
Heritage is usually presented as an inheritance – the languages, traditions, beliefs, music, food and customs passed from one generation to the next.
But societies also pass on behaviours, assumptions and inequalities.
South Africa has spent decades confronting the legacy of apartheid while trying to construct a democratic society founded on dignity, equality and human rights.
Yet violence against women remains sufficiently entrenched that the state has classified it as a national disaster.
That contradiction deserves attention on Heritage Day.
Because if heritage is also about what one generation passes to the next, then the question is not simply what South Africa wants to preserve.
It is what it wants to stop passing on.
The nine Ekurhuleni killings have made that question unusually visible.
They have not established a single perpetrator. They have not established a single motive. Police have not established that the cases are connected.
What they have established is something less dramatic but harder to dismiss: nine women can be killed in one municipality over two months and the country can recognise itself in the fear and anger that follows.
The danger is that the attention will eventually move on in the same way it has after other cases.
The investigation will continue. Courts will deal with accused people. Families will bury their dead. Another set of crime statistics will be released.
And women will continue making the calculations they have already learnt to make.
That is where the Heritage Day theme meets the GBVF crisis.
“The ties that bind us” cannot mean only the cultural traditions that are easy to celebrate.
They have to include the institutions, communities and social obligations that determine whether people can participate fully in the society they belong to.
A country cannot build social cohesion while a significant part of its population has to negotiate public life through fear.
The nine women of Ekurhuleni did not create that contradiction.
They have simply made it harder to ignore. - Vivian Warby, Gcwalisile Khanyile, Vuyile Madwantsi