#THETOTALSHUTDOWN

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South African women are organising against the scourge of Gender Based Violence and femicide in our country. Since inception of the #TotalShutdown action in July 2018, over 70 000 women have pledged to shut the country down on August 1 2018, the beginning of Women's Month, to say ENOUGH IS ENOUGH, and to demand action from all levels of our government to put an end to the terror that all women in our society are constantly living under.

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Gender Based Violence has been recognised as one of the most destructive ills that plague South African society. Every week, news of murdered women and children shock our society. The statistics are grim, and as more and more people speak up, society continues to become aware of the nightmare that South Africans are living. Mandisa Khanyile, one of the organisers of #TheTotalShutdown, gives us more insight into the movement and how they aim to change things for the better.

Q. Who are the founders of #TheTotalShutdown, and why did you decide to start this campaign?

Mandisa Khanyile

Mandisa Khanyile: A group of women from all walks of life who subscribe to feminist ideals got together and said they don't want to sit back and not do anything anymore. Too many women and gender non-conforming people are dying, and there is no decisive action being taken.

Q: How do you plan to shut down the country?

MK: Women are 52% of the population in this country, so any action taken collectively could bring this country to a standstill. Women on the day will down tools for a set period of time. All of us will observe thirty minutes of silence between 13:00 -13:30. Women from all walks of life will be marching to Parliament, the Judiciary, the Executive, as well as provincial legislatures to hand over demands and propose action plans to help end the scourge of genderbased violence.

Q: What does it mean to be an intersectional movement?

MK:We recognise the different types of oppression individuals can suffer based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and class, and we are an all-encompassing movement, that is home to all women and GNC people who are survivors of gender-based violence. It also means we are inclusive of the LGBTQIA+ community, because they too have been heavily affected by the violence.

Q: What does it mean to be an intersectional movement?

MK: We recognise the different types of oppression individuals can suffer based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and class, and we are an all-encompassing movement that will be home to all women and GNC people who are survivors of gender-based violence. It also means we are inclusive of the LGBTQIA+ community because they too have been heavily affected by the violence visited upon their bodies via GBV.

Q: We see marches against gender-based violence all the time. What is different about this march?

MK: The difference is that we are an action march. We are not here to create awareness or run a campaign. We are here for solutions, and we will give the state deliverables and a timeline to meet our demands. If they fail to come to the party, we will be taking action.

Q: What are you demanding from Parliament, the Judiciary and the Executive?

MK: We have different demands for the three legs of state, and those details will be in the memorandums that we will be handing over. We will be addressing precedent with regards to sentencing in GBV cases to the Supreme Court of Appeals, plus gender sensitive magistrates and judges at lower courts. We will be proposing policy documents to Parliament and we will be giving the Ministries of Women , Correctional Services, Police, Social Services and the Presidency demands at the Union building relating to rollout and implementation of programmes that can prevent and combat gender based violence.

#THETOTALSHUTDOWN #IWILLMARCH

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Reverend June Major, an ordained priest in the Anglican Church has decided to join #TheTotalShutdown movement against genderbased-violence. Major says her experience as a woman in the church has been horrific and her position as priest did nothing to protect her.

Rev. June Major

I'm an ordained priest in the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, in the Cape Town Diocese. A few years ago I was raped by another priest, and I was told to remain silent to protect the name of the church. In 2014, I eventually grew weary of keeping quiet and approached my Bishop, requesting to move to another diocese. He gave me his blessing, but it was short lived because it all turned out to be lies. I laid a charge against the priest who raped me, but the court refused to take the matter further, and never furnished me with the reasons why my case was not pursued.

The police told me that it was attempted rape because he did not ejaculate inside of me. I believed them, for all those years, but have come to realise that it was indeed rape because he penetrated me. My Bishop indicated that I have nothing against the Anglican Church as it has a lot of money, a strong legal team and contacts high up. I was later offered a job abroad, and I needed referral documents from the Bishop. He refused to give me the papers and the job offer was declined. I ran out of money and ended up on the streets at times and dependent on others. I sent letters to the Archbishop begging for my documents but never received any. I went on a hunger strike in 2014 outside the Diocesan offices. On my 7th day the Archbishop came to see me and promised to deal with the priest who raped me and assist me with getting a chaplaincy post with the SADF, I was again given promises that never materialised.

At a meeting with the Bishop and our legal teams, I appealed to the human heart within him and told him I am single, without a job, and homeless, again begging for my documents, he looked at me and said no. That is when I decided to institute a law suit against the church for loss of income and suffering. I cannot speak much about the court proceedings because a court date is yet to be set however a summons has been issued.

The police told me that it was attempted rape because he did not ejaculate inside of me.

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Indescribable Horror

I remember that day like it was yesterday. I had heard a lot of stories about boyfriends killing their partners, but I never thought it would happen to someone I knew. Thembi* was a free spirit. She had survived being shot by her boyfriend several times. The impact was so severe she lapsed into a coma. At the time of the shooting, she had started a new job in Rustenburg, as a qualified teacher. She was my cousin, my sister. When she woke up from the coma, our whole family was shocked. It was a miracle.

In 2014, she broke up with her boyfriend and moved to Rustenburg permanently. She was determined to start a new life. She was doing better than before and I knew she was okay. Not long after that, we received a call from my father. His voice was trembling, I knew things were bad. He told us that Thembi had been killed.

Thembi’s neighbour had called her mum after hearing noises in her room. She could hear that there was a fight and was afraid something bad would happen. Police were called to the scene, they had to breakdown the door as it was locked from the inside. People in the area remembered seeing her ex-boyfriend coming over to see her.

My aunt was asked by the police not to go inside the room, and she decided to call my father and uncle. Police found my cousin’s body and that of her ex-boyfriend hanging from the bulks. This was the same man who had shot my cousin several times.

She had a cut from her throat to one of her breasts, her mouth had been filled with what looked like baked beans and tinned fish, the room was a mess showing evidence of a struggle. What horrified us even more, was the writing on the laptop, “I did it all for love”.

His mother later confirmed he left their home saying he was going to kill my cousin then take his own life. They didn’t believe him. I cannot describe the hurt, nor can I describe what kind of love men in our society express. How someone can brutally murder someone like that without a conscience is baffling to me. We have been left with so many questions. Why did he have to torture her like that? What was the point of feeding her dead body?

This is why #IWillMarch on the 1st of August.

Thembi* is not the victim's real name, and the author has chosen to remain anonymous. .

MY BODY - NOT YOUR CRIME SCENE.

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Transgender LivesMatter, Too.

Radical feminist Ntsiki Skosana is a radical feminist is the Vice Chairperson of the Social, Health, and Empowerment

(S.H.E.) Feminist Collective of Transgender Women of Africa based in East London. She is also one of the organisers of #TheTotalShutdown, a movement against Gender-Based Violence (GBV), which plans to shut down the country on the 1st of August.

Gender based-violence (GBV) is a broad term, yet society’s Ntsiki Skosana understanding of it is limited. The conversation around the impact of GBV mostly focuses on how it affects cisgender women (women whose sense of personal identity and gender corresponds with their birth sex), and fails to explore how transgender women and gender nonconforming (GNC) people are also victims of GBV.

GNC is a term used for people who may have been assigned male or female at birth (AMAB or AFAB) and don’t either identify as such but could Identify as both or neither. A transgender person, is a person who was assigned female or male at birth, but identifies as the perceived opposite of what they were assigned at birth.

I joined #TheTotalShutdown to effect change, because our society does not care about the realities of transgender people, until we perform our pain for it to be recognised. I have been thrown out of bathrooms because of people’s transmisogynoir and this is part of what inspired my activism, which mainly focuses on issues affecting black trans women and GNC folk. GBV and femicide affects us as much as it affects the cisgender community. For a trans woman and a GNC person, existing in predominantly cisgender and hyper masculine spaces can prove deadly: if we aren't Queer bashed, we're attacked verbally - especially if you don't meet society's ideas around beauty.

In our community, GBV is layered. It’s not just intimate partners that abuse and kill us: our colleagues, family members and our neighbours are also implicated. In many cases, we are easy targets, because the police completely ignore our plight.

In 2017, a trans girl from Duncan Village in East London was stabbed in the chest by a man. Sihle was walking back home from the store with a friend when it happened, she died a few moments later. We still don’t know what happened to the murder case. On a daily basis, trans women are mis-gendered, dead named, over looked and forgotten after being killed. Dead naming a trans women is when you use a name that a transgender person may have gone by earlier on in life, as opposed to their new chosen name. This contributes heavily to our subjugation, and the statistics not reflecting the number of trans women who are killed in this country.

The most common experience for trans women is being dismissed by police officers when we report a crime. We are ridiculed when seeking security and justice, “But isn’t this what you wanted? You changed yourself into a woman to experience what women experience you should be grateful”, they often say. It gets worse, as police officers also assault trans women. If we cannot trust the police, where are we safe? This is why it’s important that #TheTotalShutdown on the 1st of August is intersectional, because our experience with GBV is also valid. Year after year, conversations around this issue focus on cisgender women and our existence is ignored. It’s not enough that there are NGO’s in the country that work to change trans people’s lives but we need the government to humanise us and for the greater society to respect our agency and existence.

#THETOTALSHUTDOWN #IWILLMARCH