Why I actually moved to the UK

Yesterday, Rhodes University held its Graduation ceremonies. Loads of my friends and classmates attended it,and I would have too, had I stayed in South Africa. On her way to this ceremony, a Rhodes student was raped and then stabbed to death, around 6pm.

I scrolled down my Facebook news feed with my heart in my mouth, looking for the woman's name. I thought of all the girls I know who could have been coming from the same city she was travelling from. I thought of the horror her parents must be in. I thought of how dressed up my mom got when she came to my first graduation.




I didn't know the student. You'd think that would make me feel relieved, but hardly. There are others out there who knew her, loved her, taught her, were about to congratulate her.

I am so sick of these deaths. Death is hardly ever welcomed, but at least, when someone has lived a full life, for decades and decades and decades, and they have set down their roots, and watched them grow, then, maybe, death is more easily accepted. I do not accept, I cannot overlook, a death like this one.

I know every country has rapists, murderers, thieves, serial killers and paedophiles. I know, believe me. Bristolians protest regularly in the city centre, but really, that's an episode of First World Problems that I'll have to tell you about another time. People leave their cars parked on the street here, UNLOCKED, with bags inside. Then they complain on the rare occasion that one of these cars is broken into. So yes, there is crime in the UK too.

The problem is that back home in South Africa, we have a ridiculously huge collection of these motherfuckers.  And yes, again, I know why. I know that it's because the education system has failed millions, because family units have broken down, because AIDS has put responsibility into the hands of children,  because alcohol has taken responsibility out of the hands of adults, because of poverty and desperation, because of the injustices of the past, because of the indifference of the present, because of the hopelessness of the future, but I cannot embrace this. I cannot live like this.

I cannot consider renting a flat in Cape Town because it's "less rapey" than Durban. I cannot consider teaching at a Grahamstown school because there's less kids with knives there. That's not fucking good enough, that is not peace of mind. I want to be stressed about whether I can pay the rent, not whether I can pay for my hospitalisation if I get shot.

I cannot even begin to think about having children in a country like this. Imagine I have a daughter. Imagine I try to be positive, and let her go out to a dodgy place. Imagine she gets raped. Imagine if, like so many before her, her entrails break through her skin and hit the tarmac because the sex was never about the pleasure, it was about the power, and so, it does not stop at rape, it logically carries on to being beaten up, stabbed, shot, choked, run over, pissed on, mutilated.

They made a play about Tshepang but it does not atone for the fact that she was raped and left to die on the street when she was only an infant.

Some things I can laugh at, like Eskom, Cell C's customer service, or Checkers' soup (don't try it unless you like projectile vomiting).

But this invasion. Call me paranoid, but the statistics, the stories, my fucking Facebook news feed, prove to me that I am far from delusional. I cannot laugh about this. And I cannot see myself settling down amidst such anarchy.