By the time you read this, at least nine women’s bodies will have been identified by grieving families across Ekurhuleni — a city whose name, in isiTonga, means “place of peace.” Over the past two months, their bodies have been found in Kempton Park, Pomona, Clayville, Olifantsfontein, Rhodesfield, KwaThema and Dawn Park. Police are investigating whether the killings are connected. The country is still counting.
This week, South Africa marks Heritage Day. And a pattern left unaddressed does not stay a pattern. It hardens into a paradigm — because this is not the first September women have been found dead and dehumanised in this country; and without deliberate intervention, it will not be the last.
I write this as an outsider living inside South Africa, a behavioural science researcher invited to work in the City of Ekurhuleni on mental health — a city I have had the privilege of serving, having personally helped bring a private partner into a public-private partnership signed with former Mayor Mondli Gungubele. I do not write as a critic of this rainbow nation or its culture. I write as someone who has been humbled to sit in the bush and help support a young man through his rite of passage — a young man who, by the account of those around him, might not have survived the mountain had the process continued the way it was being conducted.
That experience sits uneasily alongside the news from Ekurhuleni last week, and I think it should.
Two crises, one root question
Is the government reactive rather than proactive? South Africa recorded 569 women killed and over a thousand survivors of attempted murder between April and June this year alone, according to the South African Human Rights Commission. Ekurhuleni’s nine deaths are not an aberration — they are a spike inside an already catastrophic baseline. Public warnings, task teams, and condolences tend to arrive after the bodies are found, not before.
Is the boy child being walked into a rite of passage without adequate respect for his body? Every initiation season, dozens of young men die — from dehydration, septic wounds, and neglect at unregistered schools charging desperate families for a ritual that is supposed to teach responsibility, not deliver a death sentence. This year’s winter season alone recorded dozens of initiation deaths across five provinces. A rite meant to shape boys into accountable men is, in its unregulated form, failing to protect the very bodies it claims to be honouring.
And quietly underneath both crises sits a third: households increasingly led by women, filling a gap that responsible, present manhood should occupy — not because women cannot lead them, but because too many women are having to be both mother and father, absorbing a load that was never meant to be carried alone.
These are not three separate stories. They are one story about what happens when a society under-invests in how it forms, protects, and holds men accountable — and pays the price in the safety of its women.
Heritage is not static
Culture is not a museum piece; it is a living practice, and living practices can be strengthened without being abandoned. Honouring Ukwaluko does not require tolerating unregistered schools that kill the very boys they claim to protect. Honouring heritage does not require accepting femicide as background noise to a public holiday.
This week does not need slogans. It needs a shift from reactive grief to proactive design.
Four calls to action
- Government: Fund prevention, not just response.
Move resources upstream — permanent, high-density patrolling in known danger zones, functioning streetlights, cleared open land, and a fully resourced National Council on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide — rather than task forces assembled only after bodies are found.
- Civil society: Make rites of passage a protected, monitored space, not a taboo one.
Traditional leaders, health NGOs and community elders should be resourced to enforce registration of initiation schools and embed basic medical oversight, so that culture and safety stop being framed as opposites.
- Private sector: Invest in the infrastructure of safety, not just the optics of awareness.
Fund streetlighting, transport safety, and community security in high-risk municipalities as seriously as CSR budgets fund Heritage Day campaigns. Safety infrastructure is a private-sector-solvable problem, and treating it that way saves lives.
- All three: Build accountable manhood programmes led by men, for men.
Government, civil society and business should jointly fund mentorship and rites-of-passage programmes that pair cultural continuity with modern child-and-mental-health safeguards — so boys are formed into the men households and communities actually need.
Ekurhuleni means place of peace. This Heritage Day, that meaning is a responsibility, not a decoration.
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Dr. Joshua Awesome is a Coaching Psychologist/Executive and Business Performance Coach who has supported over 100,000 professionals across Africa and the globe. He can be reached via: joshua@africainmind.org
