A world of respect – a tribute to Nanzala Siyambango and those women & children who die at the hands of violent men
(Windhoek, Namibia, 15 November)
delivered by Charlene Smith, Key Note speaker at invitation of Namibian government and Namibian Legal Resources Clinic

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, mothers, fathers, the many who are my sisters and those who I am proud to call my brothers – those who honour peace, and respect not just those around them, but truly, deeply and honestly love themselves and put themselves first.

I hope there are many of you.

But sadly I suspect not.

Our parents told us a lot about respecting others, but not enough about respecting ourselves.

Respect is not something you can tell a person to do; it is something you have to show by example. When my daughter, my first child was a tiny baby I wheeled her to the park in her pram, she began crying so I stood there rocking her pram. An old woman came up to me and said, “You’re spoiling that child.”

I said to her, “you can’t spoil a child with love.”

I was right and that old woman was wrong, my daughter is now in her 20s and a most remarkable young woman. I never hit my children, if I get angry or irritable I quickly apologise to them for my bad behaviour, ever since they were tiny little people I have shown my children respect and now get great love and respect in return from them.

Violence begins with us. We can sit here tonight and say what a bad person, Steven Luhibesi, the man who shot dead Nanzala Siyambango was, but that’s too easy. It is too easy to point fingers, it is too easy to blame, it is too easy to think we as women would not make the mistake Nanzala did in loving someone who was dangerous. Until we start looking at the ways we as individuals and communities contribute toward violence in our societies we will never end it.

And we have to end it. Home is the most dangerous place in the world for a woman or child. In every country of the world a woman or child is more likely to be beaten, raped or murdered by someone they know, love and trust than anyone else. In every country of the world women are more likely to be killed by a lover or husband than by a stranger.

In 2004 the Ministry of Health and Social Services in Namibia interviewed 1 500 women and found that one in 3 women had experienced abuse or rape in relationships with men and 1 in 5 was still experiencing violence. Despite this Namibia does not have enough shelters for battered women.

Indeed in Namibia the sentence for stealing a cow is higher than that for raping a woman. For the first offence both rape and theft of a cow carries a 10 year sentence but for second offenders rape carries a 15 years sentence while a person who steals a cow will got to jail for 30 years.

In 2005, Prime Minister Nahas Angula said violence against women and children in Namibia had reached a ‘crisis point’ and spoke of an incident in 2002 in Swakopmund in which a woman, Monika Florin was murdered by her husband who later cooked her remains.

In South Africa a woman is murdered by her intimate partner every six hours. Until we as women stand up and say yes, it happened to me and yes, it has to stop – it will never end.

I was first beaten by my father, then by two husbands and then raped and stabbed by a stranger. It doesn’t matter how rich or how poor you are, violence can happen to any of us and we won’t end it until we say, sissie, it happened to me too, come let me put my arms around you, let me help you.

I want every woman who has been beaten by a man to please briefly stand to help us understand how pervasive this problem is. I am already standing. Thank you.

I now want every person who was ever hit or beaten by a mother to raise his or her hands. Just hold them up a while.

Sisters, how do we get men to stop beating us, if we beat them as children? There are other ways to teach children. If we teach them that violence is the way to solve a problem, how can we expect them to respond differently when they grow up?

If a son hears his father speak disrespectfully to his mother or if his dad is someone who does not contribute to his children’s upbringing – how will that son learn that to be a man is to be a person of honour?

And why do we not do more to pressure politicians to tighten gun ownership?

A Makarov, like the one that killed Nanzala, is a semi-automatic weapon that is banned in some countries. An explanation of how it works notes that:

To fire, the action of squeezing the trigger for the first shot cocks the hammer, an action requiring a long, strong squeeze of the trigger. This re-cocks the hammer for subsequent shooting; fired single action with a short, light trigger squeeze.

The Makarov holds anything from 8 to 12 rounds. The bullets are powerful enough to pierce armour. The ammunition is cheap. The weapon is designed in such a way that it cannot be accidentally triggered.

We know that Nanzala was shot twice in one arm and once in the shoulder, the impact of such powerful bullets must have almost torn her arm off. But it also tells us that she was probably reaching for the gun when Steven fired. She tired to stop him.

It also tells us that he would have had to press the trigger down hard for that first shot. The makers of Makarov tell us it would have required “a long, strong squeeze of the trigger.” He then shot himself in the chest and head. And with just five shots, less than half of what those guns hold in their magazines, two 24-year-old people were dead.

Nanzala was someone who could have risen to be a judge or president of this country.

When she died she was studying for her Masters in Law and Justice Training. She was a part time tutor in the faculty of law. Her brilliance as a law student saw her invited to Washington and London to take part in internationally prestigious events.

After her trip to London she wrote: “I called this the trip of my life as I was exposed to many things and many different people. I know that I did not come back to Namibia the same person. I encourage anyone who is given this opportunity to grab it with both hands, as I would gladly do it again.” Sadly a man who saw her as a possession and who did not respect her right to choose or her right to end the relationship, denied us the gift of having a woman like Nanzala in our world.

And although her younger brother Bull tells us “she would lock herself in the study room and pursue 90% and 100% for all her academic endeavours” – she still found the time to excel in basketball, netball, discus, shot-put and canoeing. She was remarkable.

So how could someone so clever choose to love someone so dangerous?

Because the simple truth is that the most dangerous people we allow into our lives never look it. Banks will tell you that those who defraud them of millions is the star worker, the person everyone likes, the man or woman who works late and rarely takes a holiday, he or she can’t they are too busy stealing and covering their tracks. They have to appear above suspicion.

The person who first stalked me, then raped and stabbed me was good looking, he dressed for the rape – he was clean, his clothes were smart. He left a wife and child at home when he came to rape me.

Those who rape children are most often fathers or grandfathers or they are the kind priest, the caring teacher … it is not dirty strangers we must fear, it is the smiling person we think we know.

The classic profile for a man who beats a woman – and I’m not going to use the word domestic violence or sexual violence because I think those are male terms to hide the sordidness of rape and wife beating, I’m going to use the right terms for these violent crimes. The classic profile of a man who beats his partner is one who is charming, often quiet-spoken. In public he appears a loving attentive husband or boyfriend. He needs to create a myth of being a good man, so when she first tells people that it was him who broke her nose, it was him who kicked in the door, it was him who kicked her in the belly while she was pregnant (and pregnancy is when more than a third of wife beating begins) – he needs to have created such a strong myth about what a good man he is, that no one believes her.

Because if no one believes her, no one helps her, then he is able to retain control over her.

Some years ago I met Professor Kathleen Jones, a professor of women’s studies at San Diego University, she was profoundly traumatised by the death of one of her students, 27 year old Andrea O Donnell whose decomposing body was found in her boyfriend’s flat. She – like Nanzala - had left him shortly beforehand, he persuaded her to come and talk to him and strangled her to death.

This is important, because we can criticise women for not leaving these men, but all of them are terrified he will kill her if she leaves and some of them are right. The most dangerous time for a beaten woman is when she leaves the abuser, it is then that he is most likely to find her and kill her. And that is why a woman who leaves a man who beats her needs huge amounts of support and protection from us and the police.

By all standard definitions, Kathleen told me, Andrea was not a “victim, she was self-assured, strong-willed, a feminist.” In other words, she was a lot like Nanzala – someone too clever for this to happen to her.

Let me tell you something now. None of us are too clever to be raped, beaten or murdered, indeed in my experience, those of us who think we are the most clever are the most at risk, we take more chances because we simply don’t believe it will happen to us. And then it does.

Kathleen later wrote a book called Living Between Danger and Love and she wrote: “We become fascinated with the victim, curious about how she could let something bad happen to her… we want to know why something happened to her, what went wrong with her life, so that we can create a safe distance between ourselves and the victim who made bad choices. We say, well, maybe she or he would do that, but I would be different, I would know how to make the right choice, the good choice.”

I experienced the same after I was raped and stabbed in my home. Afterward women did not want to touch me, it was almost as if they feared they would catch the rape virus. They would ask me incredibly stupid questions – and all the rape survivors in this room who have spoken out about being raped know the stupid questions we are asked and how we despise those who ask them. The word we hate most is WHY. Women who are raped are asked why did you not lock the door? Why did you speak to him? Why did you wear that dress? Every time someone asks WHY, they are saying it is OKAY for someone to rape, to beat us, of for someone to sexually harass us.

You never ask someone who was hijacked – why did you drive a car?

You don’t say to someone who is in a bank when it was robbed – why did you go to the bank?

You don’t say to someone whose house is burgled – why do you own a house?

They are questions that say it is okay to be a criminal but it is not okay to live your life. WHY is the most common word a woman who is raped, beaten, or sexually harassed will hear – and finally, and most damagingly she will ask it of herself. She will take the blame for the sins of a criminal. Never, ever use the word WHY to anyone who has experienced trauma.

There are some common characteristics of abusive men, they are often charming, women love them. They often buy lots of presents, phone you often. A woman who says, ‘my man loves me so much he doesn’t want me to go out at night’ or ‘he fetches me from events so that I am safe’ – her words make me nervous. Yes, he may be a good man, but too often he is a controlling man. It starts with little things until slowly you realise you no longer see your friends or family because he doesn’t like them. You start battling with your confidence because slowly he criticises, he might say, ‘don’t wear that dress babe it’s too tight’ or he might criticise the way you talk, your ideas or the way you look.

It takes a while before the hitting starts and when it does it will happen in a way that you can’t understand why and so you keep thinking that if you just change, if you stop doing the things that annoy him – but the trouble is there are so many things that seem to annoy him that you become confused and frightened but the point is he never changes.

Many of us are also brought up in religious homes, we are told that it is important to forgive – and so we forgive, over and over and put ourselves in greater danger.

There are some things that cannot be forgiven and a person who hits or harms or abuses should never be forgiven unless he or she shows dramatic change, not just for one day, nor a year, but forever.

Kathleen asked a friend of Andrea’s if Andrea was frightened of her boyfriend and the friend said: “Not physically, only emotionally. She was a role model, she was afraid that if other women knew about her problems at home, they wouldn’t respect or look up to her anymore.”

And so we who are clever and successful, make it hard for other clever and successful women to ask for help – because we simply think we are too clever for it to happen to us. None of us are too clever to experience pain.

A friend of mine is one of South Africa’s most beautiful and gifted television stars, some years ago she was in a relationship with a good looking, talented man who beat her on a few occasions but would then apologise, send her big bouquets of flowers or take her away for weekends. Then one night he beat her very badly, he threw her through a glass coffee table, he got into her BMW and rammed it repeatedly into the walls of her house. She took him to court.

I led a demonstration outside the court on the day of sentence, we got pictures from the police of women and children who had died at the hands of their partners. Some of the pictures were so shocking that we didn’t use them. We made cardboard t-shirts that we hung as if washing lines with the pictures in between them. On those tshirts we wrote the name of women killed by abusive men. What made it terrifying were the pathetic reasons for which these women died. I will give you some examples:

· Joan Retief, 34, beaten to death with a baseball bat because dinner was not ready on time.

· Sibongile Dlamini, stabbed to death because she did not have R10 in her handbag to give to her husband because he wanted to go drinking.

What on earth is wrong with these inadequate men that they resort to such extreme violence?

I think in part is because they get away with it. A South African legal advocacy group last year published a poster that said:

Fact: More than 9 out of 10 court judges are men.

Fact: Only one out of 10 accused of domestic violence are convicted.

Fact: Only one out of 20 accused of rape are convicted.

Fact: The maximum sentence for femicide is only half the maximum sentence for fraud.

Fact: The legal system abuses women.

Many of you here tonight are in politics and the law, you have the power to change the situation.

What I want to know is, why do women have so little value in the world?

And why do women value themselves so little that they allow this situation to continue?

Tonight, right now, you have to make a commitment to change your life, to put yourself first.

This minute you have to promise to be the sort of man or a woman that those harmed feel safe to come and talk to. They need to know that you won’t judge them, that you will listen more than you speak, and you will act immediately and with love to help them.

Some years ago I gave a talk and Vusi Pikoli, the man who heads our National Prosecuting Agency followed, he made me so proud. He said:

“We must reclaim our streets. We are all potential victims of rape, men and women alike. We need to commit ourselves to the complete eradication of this scourge. We can set up an administrative and legal framework but as long as we don’t address power relations in society, we will not be on top of the situation.”

Now listen, this is what for me, makes Vusi Pikoli one of my heroes, he said: “As young boys, we took it for granted that even if a girlfriend did not want sex we had a right to take her, even against her will. We feared that if we did not others would laugh and say, ‘you’re not a real man.’ This has become the norm, this is our culture. We says its OK for boys to harass girls – unless its my daughter. Perhaps we need to talk about the regeneration of moral values, we cannot allow our society to degenerate as it is doing.”

What made Pikoli’s speech so important was he revealed what he too had done wrong. Because until we, as men and women, stop pointing fingers and look at what we are doing to contribute to violence, until we remedy our personal failures and then strengthened by that, move on to destroy everything that contributes to the harm of others --- until we take those personal steps, we will never end this problem. We will just talk into the wind and more lives will be needlessly lost.

But never let us forget, as Martin Luther King reminds us, that “morality can never be legislated but behaviour can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.”

Violence ends with me. It ends with you. If I don’t have self respect, then how can others respect me?

If I don’t behave in ways that honour my partner or if I beat my children – then how on earth can I teach them that violence is wrong?

We need a revolution in our world. A non-violent revolution. I hope it begins now, today, here, with you.

Nanzala my sister, thank you for bringing us together, thank you for touching our hearts tonight for making us think and for inspiring us to act.

I thank you.