“I want to tell you a story. I'm going to ask you all to close your eyes while I tell you the story.
I want you to listen to me. I want you to listen to yourselves. Go ahead. Close your eyes, please. This is a story about a little girl walking home from the grocery store one sunny afternoon. I want you to picture this little girl. Suddenly a truck races up.
Two men jump out and grab her. They drag her into a nearby field, and they tie her up, and they rip her clothes from her body. Now they climb on.
First one, then the other, raping her, shattering everything innocent and pure with a vicious thrust in a fog of drunken breath and sweat. And when they're done, after they've killed her tiny womb, murdered any chance for her to have children, to have life beyond her own, they decide to use her for target practice.
They start throwing full beer cans at her. They throw them so hard that it tears the flesh all the way to her bones. Then they urinate on her. Now comes the hanging.
They have a rope. They tie a noose. Imagine the noose going tight around her neck, and with a sudden blinding jerk, she's pulled into the air, and her feet and legs go kicking. They don't find the ground. The hanging branch isn't strong enough. It snaps, and she falls back to the earth. So they pick her up, throw her in the back of the truck and drive out to Foggy Creek Bridge.
Pitch her over the edge. And she drops some thirty feet down to the creek bottom below. Can you see her? Her raped, beaten, broken body soaked in their urine, soaked in their semen, soaked in her blood, left to die. Can you see her? I want you to picture that little girl. Now imagine she's white.”
This is a quote from a John Grisham book, A Time To Kill.
Every time I see a picture of a missing white girl on TV or in a newspaper, I think of this quote. Our media has made it unthinkable that some races can be victims of crimes, and that's why when a white child is missing, it becomes news. It also becomes news when they die under tragic circumstances. Every death is tragic.
However, children who perish in shack settlement fires have no names. Why? They are not a priority in the media's pecking order.
No parent deserves to bury their child, and children shouldn't live at the mercy of child molesters, paedophiles and human traffickers.
Crime knows no colour, yet the media looks the other way when there are mass murders almost every month in the Cape Flats in the Western Cape, Inanda in KwaZulu-Natal or Westbury in Gauteng.
Why are certain communities prioritised by the media and others just expected to live with mass murders like nothing happened? In 2023, a man allegedly set a building on fire in Johannesburg, and 76 people were killed and 102 were seriously injured. Life went on like nothing happened. This is the reality we live with in South Africa, where some people just die and life goes on, like the death of a fly that was pressed by a closing window.
But for some deaths, even of people who are not prominent, there are commemorations well-documented by the media. This is one of the reasons why the Western world was shocked by the war in Ukraine: the victims were white. The world has made it normal that war should be reserved for societies in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
And most of these wars are engineered by the West's military-industrial complex that is always looking for new markets, ably aided by the plundering of mineral resources in Africa.
I urge every South African to read up on the meaning of Missing White Woman Syndrome (MWWS) and see how the media in South Africa keeps falling for this too, just from a different perspective. ZamaNtungwa Khumalo| KwaDukuza