Since 15 July, the bodies of nine women have been found across Ekurhuleni, in Kempton Park, Olifantsfontein, KwaThema and Dawn Park. On Sunday evening a tenth woman was found wrapped in a duvet in a dam in Moroka, Soweto. Iranti mourns Busisiwe Mahlangu, Itumeleng Kekana, Nomfesane Mjobo, Elizabeth Moselakgomo, Gracious Nkomo, Dineo Motapane and every woman whose name we don’t yet know. We hold their families close, and we think especially of Elizabeth’s eight year old daughter, who raised the alarm when her mother didn’t come home from her run.
We’ll call this what women in this country already know it to be. It is a war on women. Between January and March this year SAPS recorded 9,782 rapes, close to half of them in the home of the victim or the perpetrator. The South African Medical Research Council found that nearly seven women were killed every day in 2020/21, most by an intimate partner, at five times the global rate. Ekurhuleni has made the country look. The women killed quietly in their homes every day rarely make it that far.
This violence has a perpetrator, and nearly always he is a man. Patriarchy teaches men that a woman’s body, her time and her refusal are theirs to override, and our institutions keep confirming the lesson. So we were troubled to hear police advise women to take extra care when running or walking alone. Women have rearranged their whole lives around men’s violence for generations. We would really appreciate it if the advice were directed at the people doing the killing.
And every time, someone answers with “not all men”. We know. Nobody said all men. But it is almost always a man, and “not all men” is how the rest step away from the harder question of what they do when a brother, a friend, a colleague or a congregant shows them who he is. The President has asked men to play a greater part. That part starts in the taxi, the WhatsApp group, the shebeen and the family gathering, long before a body is found beside the R21.
Ten months ago, after more than a million people signed the Women For Change petition and women shut the country down during the G20, the National Disaster Management Centre classified gender-based violence and femicide a national disaster. The President called it a national crisis then, and he called Ekurhuleni a national crisis last week. These are the words of emergency. Yet the classification came with no emergency powers, no ring-fenced budget and no regulations, and in February the State of the Nation Address gave it a few sentences and no money. Shelters still run on inadequate and inconsistent funding. A disaster the state won’t spend on is a label.
Iranti also remembers that KwaThema, where one of these women was found, is where Noxolo Nogwaza, a member of the Ekurhuleni Pride Organising Committee, was raped and murdered in April 2011. Lesbian, bisexual and trans women live at the sharpest edge of this war, and our national figures still don’t tell us how many of them die in it.
We call on:
• The Presidency to publish, within 30 days, an account of what the national disaster classification has changed since 20 November 2025, in rands and in services.
• National Treasury to ring-fence funding for shelters, Thuthuzela Care Centres and forensic DNA capacity in the Medium Term Budget Policy Statement.
• SAPS to keep families informed before the media, to stop placing responsibility for women’s safety on women, and to record femicide data that shows the sexual orientation and gender identity of victims where known.
• Men, in every community, to stop saying “not all men” and start naming the men they know.
Iranti stands with the families, with Women For Change and with every organisation holding vigil this week. We’ll keep documenting until the state treats these deaths as the emergency it says they are.