Johannesburg - South Africa is going through a moral crisis.
It is a crisis fuelled by high unemployment, poor enforcement of the laws and poor municipal governance.
Last week, following the Krugersdorp rape ordeal, political organisations and enraged residents in West Village (approximately 500m from the scene of the rape) took to the streets to voice their frustration with the lack of crime prevention.
Eight women were gang-raped allegedly by illegal miners who pounced on them while they shot a music video, last week.
In local news coverage, residents criticised Mogale City Mayor Tyrone Gray over his broken promises to improve community safety.
When explaining how the unrest unfolded, Gray said that what was originally meant to be a peaceful protest, morphed into retaliation toward the illegal miners (also known as zama zamas) following the gang-rape incident.
“The community are understandably frustrated and fed up over the illegal occupation by zama zamas, which was fuelled by what happened in West Village. They realised that they didn’t want a similar incident to happen here and they took matters into their own hands,” Gray said.
West Village’s community-based activist Nicolene Trom, said that the poor standard of protection and safety in the area had increased paranoia and anxiety for residents, whether inside their homes or out on the street.
“Since the zama zamas have been around, we have become a community that lives with fear, prisoners in our own homes. We are constantly on guard,” she said.
Trom explained that the illegal miners behaved violently towards residents through intimidation, theft, and harassment.
She said when she moved with her husband to West Village in 2019, the house they bought was on a property where the previous homeowners had leased the land to illegal miners.
She said that because they moved in during the hard lockdown when the national disaster regulations prohibited evictions, and restricted much movement and relocation, they could not evict them from the property, and this was when her personal experience with them began.
“Because we didn’t know them, we gave them a three-month notice to also stop the illegal activity happening in our yard and move out. There was a time where I saw one miner throw something into our yard. When I tried to stop him, he took out his gun and threatened to shoot me where I stood. That is how merciless they are,” she said.
“When I immediately went to report it at the police station with my husband, we learned upon our return that some of the zama zamas knew that we were opening a case against one of them,” she said.
Trom said that when she returned home, some of the abiding miners warned her to not go to police, as they had already been tipped off.
To further add to her experience, Trom said that when she saw police monitoring the area, she thought they were patrolling the street due to her case.
“It was only after the war broke out between zama zama gangs, wherein many of them died, that those in my yard left with their belongings. We never saw them again,” she said.
Trom thought their moving was due to the internal conflict being handled by police along with their street patrolling, but it wasn’t.
The police were not patrolling her street but rather they were allegedly intimidating the community activist. “It wasn’t patrolling but collection. We learned that there were police officers arresting them and releasing them on the outskirts of the area, not taking them to the police station,” she said.
Trom said that the police were a critical aspect of the community’s safety being threatened.
While she acknowledged officers who had tried to enforce law and protect residents, it was disappointing to her to see them only acting to chase out illegal miners after the protests and the rape of eight women.
Trom berated Police Minister Bheki Cele on July 29 for the police’s reaction when he visited the crime scene at the disused mine. She told Cele that women and children were under siege in the area and that the past incident only displayed the dangerous realities that residents face because illegal miners live within the community.
"This is a norm to us. We know of 20 men who raped one woman,” she said to the minister.