TSHEGOFATSO PULE: A LAMENT By Asithandile Gxumisa

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 by many. Murder gallops thunderously through her as though it were one of the Horses of the Apocalypse, vermilion and ruthless, running over as many as 58 souls unto death every day in this sea-girt Republic. You cannot outpace this soulless Horse if you flee. If you hide within the walls of your house, there also shall your head the deadly hoofs find. All about us we watch on helplessly as rampant crime makes corpses of our neighbours, wondering morbidly when our own ghosts will retire our bodies maimed mortally by some brute out of the shadows.

Life is an emergency so said one of the wise once. South Africans know this dreadful reality all too well. Tshegofatso Pule, Naledi Pangindawo, and the nameless twin boys poisoned to death by a callous father knew somewhat of this emergency, even if for only a brief time. Violence in our DNA? No. That would be letting ourselves off too easily. All the precious souls I just invoked were casualties of the evil choices of other people - willfully and, at times, horrifically executed in the full knowledge of better paths that might have been trodden.

So, it is not our 'DNA of violence'. It is neither our history of violence, nor the vulgar patriarchy of a sensate century that are to blame for the flood of senseless murder and cruelty that threaten to sweep us all away into a wasteland of tenebrous misery. Evil is the lifelong tenant of the heart of every man, for "out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies." Ever will it remain thus so long as the world endures. The person who cold-bloodedly murdered Tshegofatso was not driven by the vestigial psychological elements of apartheid, nor were they compelled to such barbarity by the impersonal forces of the patriarchy.

In truth, a personal choice, to commit evil by murder, was made by this brute. Any other explanation - which will often come as an appeal to the mysterious workings of some 'system' or environmental context - will be no more than hollow sophistry. This age-old piece of sophistry, of which you will hear a good deal in the coming weeks, through which people attempt to write off their terrible choices as the consequences of someone else's doings or some force beyond their power, is actually a convenient way in which ordinary folk shy away from the manly work of genuine self-examination.

It works more mischief than good as, I can already imagine, Tshegofatso's murderer must have convinced him/herself of a zillion excuses for this senseless violence. We must vigorously affirm the now highly unpopular truth of personal responsibility, and valiantly proclaim to our neighbours, even in the face of alluring and flattering contrary doctrines, that "the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him."

Therein lies our hope of waking up our compatriots from the soothing delusion that somehow the choices we take personally are the function of our social surroundings or the workings of some mysterious 'system' out there. By so doing we would have come a little nearer to that tolerable world in which humans would shrink back with great horror at the very thought of choices such as were made by this murderous brute in the Durban Deep. Only after we have done this very demanding yet much-needed work shall the kingdom of a clear conscience, long bereft of its power, be established among Men once more.

Assuredly, when we affirm personal responsibility we are doing no more than affirming the dignity of the human person, created fearfully and wonderfully in the image of Our Holy God. We declare that man is not a beast, but a being endowed with infinite worth. To the killer of Tshegofatso, the murderer of the twin boys and the killer of Naledi these unlucky victims were no more than "the flies of the summer", and their lives, otherwise precious gifts from the Creator, were no better than a meaningless flight to some noisome swamp. Though made a little lower than the angels, our evil knows depths to which even the beasts of the Wild could never hope to descend.

It as if I was standing upon the threshold of the Door of Night, staring curiously through the shapeless cleft into the whirling Void that always was before the Sun ever rose. What do I see in this vision of lustreless emptiness? Why - it is a ghastly image of our souls gnarled out of all recognition by the murders, the adulteries, the fornications, the thefts and the blasphemies that cling so malodorously like gangrene onto them. The more of these beautiful faces we send gruesomely to the grave, I imagine, the less of the beauty of God we shall know. She was with child, into her eighth month. My hope is that Tshegofatso's little one, so sadly denied the light of life, will have the privilege that God gave all of us: to look upon her bright face and wonder joyously at the Glory it mirrored.