Asithandile Gxumisa's Public Diary

Ours is a time of troubles. The West is in turmoil as a whole generation of men and women, rootless and thankless, rises up to lay waste to anything that smacks of their past: monuments are desecrated, statues toppled and ancient institutions set alight. In the East dormant disputes and old resentments threaten to sweep away the stability and peace of an entire region as two great powers, China and India, face off in the Galway Valley. Nearer home, in the Republic of South Africa, trouble has emerged in the shape of a Plague and a Scourge: a deadly Flu and a concatenation of cruelties perpetrated against women. In parts of the Middle East religious fanatics have yet to find a language better than bombs and rifles in which to converse. Perhaps worse than all these general calamities are the multiplying troubles of the souls of all of us - souls hopelessly adrift like ghostly cadavers in a raging sea of confusion, error and apoplexy. For are not the afflictions of republics, kin...

If ever there was a face that stood most accurately for the beauty of South Africa at her best then it was the splendid face of Tshegofatso Pule. Alas, those closest to her, her family and friends, shall never again behold that bright face, now hidden forever behind the impenetrable veil of death. For she was murdered viciously, allegedly knifed many times and left hanging upon a tree in the woodlands of the Durban Deep. She was with child, now into her eighth month. With her departure for the realm beyond the grave passed something of the remaining beauty of South Africa - without any hope of recovering it. In many ways the last hour of this 28-year-old lady tells a tale about the Republic she left behind: South Africa becomes grotesque by the day, she becomes less innocent by the hour and her soul loses its lustre of life slowly, as her last hope of redemption dangles perilously by the proverbial gallows. Violence is in the DNA of South Africa, or so we are often told ...