Aug-Sept 2014 K.indd

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AUG/SEPT 2014 • www.cosatu.org.za

Something Inside Gave Way

By Bongani Kona

O ne afternoon, in April this year, I had a breakdown at work. I started sobbing in the of fi ce during a Skype conversation with my editor. I knew I was in bad shape – I had spent the night before drifting in and out of sleep – nevertheless, the breakdown took me by surprise. Prozac Nation, there is a scene in which the protagonist says, “Ernest Hemingway had his classic moment in The Sun Also Rises when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is ‘gradually, then suddenly.’ That’s how depression hits.” It’s true. Gradually, I felt myself sliding down a black hole, then suddenly I was at the bottom. In the movie adaptation of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s memoir, How did I get there? I work as a freelance writer and in January this year I started working with Sonke Gender Justice, a Cape Town-based non-pro fi t organisation that seeks to promote gender equality.

For the fi rst time in my life I saw from up-close the human carnage wrought by gender-based violence. Something inside gave way.

I was assigned to document some of the work the organisation is doing in communities around South Africa to stem the tide of gender-based

In March, one of the stories I was assigned to write involved the rape of a nine-year-old girl named Queen in Delft, a sprawling township approximately 35 kilometres east of Cape Town. She had disappeared just after sunset on the 18th of January when she left her grandmother’s place. She was on her way home, a few streets away, and she wanted to get there before dark. She never made it. Hours later, she was found by a passerby lying in a desolate open fi eld next to the R300 highway. She had been raped and burnt. The man who attacked her had doused her body in petrol and set

“Ernest Hemingway had his classic moment in The Sun Also Rises when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is ‘gradually, then suddenly.’ That’s how depression hits.”

it alight before he vanished into the night. She was still alive when help arrived and she managed to name a 27-year-old man who lived in the same

violence, and develop positive norms around masculinity and gender. The fi rst few weeks went by smoothly but along the way something happened.

Gender Agenda