The early years

The Nkomazi district of Mpumalanga province forms a small triangle of rural South Africa that lies wedged between the Kruger National Park in the north, Mozambique in the east and the Swaziland border in the south. It is typical of the country’s former homelands: resettlement villages made of mud-and-tin shanties; high levels of unemployment; congestion and an extreme shortage of land.

During the civil war that afflicted Mozambique in the 1980s, the region provided a refuge for thousands of people who fled the terror in that country. Most of them crossed an electrified fence that ran across the Lubombo Mountains between the two countries and were given plots to settle in the villages of the Nkomazi.

They came with stories of unspeakable atrocities committed by Renamo, right-wing insurgents who massacred villagers and captured women and children to serve as sex chattels and slaves in the bases from which they ran their war against the leftist Frelimo government. Masisukumeni – an isiSwati word meaning Let Us Stand Up – has its origins in the plight of these desperate people.

An organisation called the Hlanganani Refugee Relief Centre was started in the mid-1980s by concerned individuals, amongst them Rachel Nsimbini Nkosi and Sally McKibben to provide assistance to refugees who often arrived only with hessian sacks on their backs and harrowing stories about how they had survived mass rape at the hands of Renamo soldiers. The organisation set up a network of individuals and organisation in the villages who provided the Mozambicans with support and food from various relief agencies.

Towards the end of that decade a clinical psychologist, Tina Sideris, arrived in the area to do research for a PhD thesis on how best to treat the collective trauma of people who had been subjected to rape as a weapon of war.

“I was working with the Hlanganani Refugee Relief Centre. Tina came to me and was looking for someone to help her with her work and research on refugees from Mozambique,” remembers Rachel Nsimbini.

“We went to my house and started interviewing and counselling women refugees. Then we started discussing how we could form a centre and help women being abused. She was interested to start a women’s centre. After doing interviews she asked a question: ‘This rape happening to the refugees, is it happening in this area?’ ‘Yes’, I said. ‘But we are quiet’. ‘Is there anything we can do?’ ‘Yes we can’. ‘Let’s do it’.”

1994

In 1994, amidst the euphoria of South Africa’s first democratic elections, Masisukumeni was launched. Its aims, according to the organisation’s first annual report, were to:

• Assess the feasibility of setting up a permanent crisis center.
• Train local field workers in crisis counselling.
• Develop community based intervention programmes to address the issue of sexual violence.
• Document the experiences of women living in the Nkomazi District, including local South African and Mozambican women who have been the victims of sexual violence and abuse.
• Establish links with organizations and institutions doing similar work.

Early research soon established that political freedom faced a major challenge. “Evidence suggests that the Nkomazi district is not much different to other parts of South Africa in its high levels of sexual violence,” says the report. “It contains all the necessary ingredients that make up the recipe for domestic violence, rape and sexual assault – poverty, high levels of unemployment, poor living conditions, patriarchal gender relations and practices. Rape and domestic abuse are not acceptable to the people who live in the rural villages that make up the Nkomazi, yet the experience of sexual violence has become pandemic.”

Late that year the fledgling organization conducted a survey among 300 women who attended clinics in seven of the region’s villages. It provided a simple but stark set of statistics that set the agenda for Masisukumeni: 65% of the women interviewed had been raped, 63% by someone they knew and 37% by a stranger. Six out of every 10 women had been beaten by their partners. And 68% endorsed the need for a women’s centre in the Nkomazi.

Says Rachel: “I was surprised with the results. I did think it was happening often but it was more than I thought. With the local cases (of sexual violence) … there was silence. Matters were dealt with in people’s houses and confidentially. But really there was a silence and it was all kept inside the families or in the chief’s kraal.”

Strategies for breaking the silence

The organization confronted the problem with a four-prong strategy.

• Firstly, Tina Sideris began training of a group of lay counsellors, what could be called a corps of village counsellors, to help women cope with the effects of sexual violence or abuse.
• Secondly, the organization consulted with and encouraged sisters working in the local clinics to deal with the effects of sexual violence by referring them to Masisukumeni for counselling and encouraging them to lay charges.
• Thirdly, the Masisukumeni staff began talking to the police and local chiefs about ways to stop the pandemic.
• And, fourthly, they began running educational programmes with teachers, youth groups and in the schools so “youngsters would learn to respect each others’ bodies”.

The response was nothing short of staggering, stretching the resources and stress levels of the women who ran the centre to their limits.

One of the earliest cases dealt with was that of an old lady from a village called Block A. It set the tone for the type of work the organization would face on a day-to-day basis. “She was raped and her vagina was all cut up and bleeding,” remembers Rachel. “She died in hospital. That was our first case. And we had to learn a lot from it.

“Rape cases and abused people that is what we saw all the time. The sisters in the clinics were happy. We were helping them. With the chiefs and indunas it was more to inform them that the work would be done. Some were a bit unhappy … they used to fine offenders and were worried that what we were doing would take away their power and their money.”

Creative extension

Masisukumeni faced a major problem in that the Nkomazi was made up of some 25 far-flung villages and transport was, according to an early report, “both poor and costly”. Rachel and Tina responded with characteristic creativity. They mobilized a network of support in the villages so that they could take the service to people.

By the end of 1998, the organization had a staff of nine and was working with a network of clinic sisters and lay counsellors. Anna Nyambi started working with Masisukumeni in that year, working as a counselor in the village of Boschfontein.

“I cannot say it is a good work. I can tell you the direct truth. In 1998 I was not confident to be working for Masisukumeni. But by the training I have received from my management I have become confident. I had questions and I doubted myself. My self-confidence was lacking. But I have it now,” says Anna.

“We just take this as our work. But I often ask myself why is this happening to our people … it is traumatizing for us but at least we know it is getting better than before. Sometimes I wake up when I’m sleeping thinking about the cases … is that person safe, is the kid okay? Even when I go home, I can say to myself ‘now that work is over I can go home’ … But someone will come that night for help.”

“My dream for Masisukumeni is that we must not give up serving our community. All along our community has been keeping quiet. Now they are speaking up, knowing their rights. Masisukumeni must never give up. Me as an individual must not give up and say enough. We must go on because the gap is still big.”

Challenges breed confidence

In the early years, the counsellors encountered a range of problems. Many local policemen were reluctant to charge offenders. Often women victims of rape and abuse were humiliated by being questioned rudely and in public. Some school teachers were reluctant to support the work of Masisukumeni, perhaps because they came from the same background that made men feel entitled to the way they treated women.

Another problem related to the fact that some perpetrators were boys under the age of 16 and were not being charged, resulting in anger and disillusionment among the victims. And there was disturbing evidence that officials in the criminal justice system took bribes from the families of abusers. Charges were dropped, dockets went missing, witnesses failed to arrive. And, frequently, abused women agreed to drop charges because of a common conundrum: to put their husbands in jail would be to condemn their children to even further poverty. So they took the beating instead.

Says Masisukumeni’s 1998 report: “The clinic sisters and Masisukumeni staff have become aware of a very disturbing dynamic. We have come across cases in which the relatives of survivors are accepting monetary bribes from perpetrators in exchange for not reporting them to the police. This seems to be happening especially in cases of child rape and abuse and occurs even where the perpetrator is a stranger and, therefore, cannot be explained as the relatives wanting to protect their family members in cases of incest. These practices give the perpetrators immense power.”

But the counsellors reflected a growth in confidence and fortitude from confronting these challenges. These are extracts from some of the confidential self-evaluation reports compiled by the counselors on an annual basis:

“Masisukumeni is not weak … It is only those who are undermining our work and the community are blaming us about the number of abusers who get bail and the under-agers who are not being charged.”

“There was a problem of a child who was raped and was having vaginal discharges and the parents did not know the cause of those discharges ... the parents refused to believe she was raped and said she slept with a ghost. But by doing the follow up investigation, we found that it is not the ghost but the brother of the child who raped her.”

“My main problem is that there are so many abuses that happen in this community that some people do come for counselling and although we see people at the clinics we are not covering the whole community. We must also get more men to come to community meetings because we only get a little number of men and they are the main abusers.”

“I think my work as a village counsellor has helped women a lot in the Nkomazi to empower themselves because women in the past they used to hide their problems when they were being abused… I think my weakness as a counsellor is when the problem that I try to solve is not being solved because of all the problems in the system.”