Green Shoots: Imagining safe spaces and ways of being - IOL

My job gives me opportunities to travel and to have really interesting experiences in places outside of Johannesburg. This week’s reflection is being written in London where we’ve been having cracking conversations with international non-governmental and faith-based organisations working in Europe and globally.

We grappled with difficult questions about how to advance social justice in a world where powerful governments and rich men seem dead against anything that will create more stability, security, and livelihoods for more people. Instead, wars and genocide continue, making insecurity a constant reality for too many of the world’s population. 

I’ve been struck by how much my colleagues from home, particularly the first-time visitors, were enjoying the city. There is always the after-work pint at a local pub, and then some dinner with colleagues who you only get to see occasionally in person. We’d go our different ways at the end of the workday, and meander back to the hotel late at night.

Notably, the women in our group would navigate their way through nighttime London alone, using trains and buses and walking the streets without fearing for their lives. Their experiences of discovery and sightseeing are shared with an exhilaration at being able to walk the streets after dark, and to not be terrified at being out alone. It is quite a novel experience for many of us who live in South Africa.

As I write this, the television headlines and the newsfeed on my phone tell me that a ninth woman has been killed in the Ekurhuleni municipality in the east of Johannesburg. I know from my limited engagement from this far that at least one of them was a runner.  I’m a runner, and the beauty of the sport is that anyone can do it anywhere and at anytime. Clearly this does not apply to my home city.

I’m ashamed that I can enjoy the sport free of the fear that must be filling the hearts of women who share my love for it. I also have read that women are being urged to not walk or run alone to avoid being attacked. We should never find it acceptable to put the responsibility on the potential victim to not get killed.  

These new developments are the sharp public edge of the war us men are waging on women in South Africa. Femicide is real, and these news stories bring that reality into sharp relief. 

The spaces we occupy and navigate as residents of cities should be safe spaces for everyone. London, I’m sure, is not squeaky clean and has its problems, but this is not the first time I have witnessed how free women are to navigate it. I wish Joburg didn’t need shopping malls and gated communities to make people feel safe to enjoy the basic right to walk the streets of their neighbourhoods. 

The conversations we need to have in South Africa must focus on ourselves and our own agency to change how we are and how we live. What can we do to change attitudes of those we know and interact with regularly who hold sexist and misogynistic views?

We need to start imagining a new way of living together that enhances our lives rather than places them at risk. We need to give ourselves the permission and space to dream and conceive what a living space could look like that allows us to walk without fear of crime and violence. If we can’t conceive a different way of being and co-existing, we run the risk of reinforcing this system of violence, poverty and deprivation that dehumanises us and enables the brutalisation of women.

If we can imagine something different and better, maybe we can energise the struggle to stop men from killing women.