Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - Sunday 24 March 2002

At places like the small tavern in Hanepoot Lane, drunks jostle youths playing video games.

It was at the modest home of Gertruida Rens, 47, next door to this tavern, that one of the most infamous atrocities of recent SA history was revealed.

A bloody hole was found to have been torn into the tiny body of a nine-month-old girl, now known to the world by the alias Baby Tshepang. Her rapist has yet to be punished.

The child and her 16-year-old mother lived in a two-bedroom, cinderblock house with a heart-shaped garden. The crime that broke the heart of a nation was committed in the early hours of Saturday October 27 2001.

Louisvale Road still demands justice. The High Court has yet to decide what happened before Tshepang's 35-year-old grandmother, who lives in another house, found the child untended at 1am and tracked down her daughter, the baby's mother, allegedly drunk at the tavern. The grandmother took her daughter and her grandchild to Rens's house.

And it was here that the mother and grandmother saw the horror that will never be erased from their minds. Rens told me tearfully of "a dark hole in her body - it's all I can remember". Her mind blanked out the rest. Four-and-a-half months later, she is still on medication for the shock and often wakes up in terror.

Louisvale Road is a compact settlement of 6 000 people, a mixture of the Griqua, Bushman, Baster, Nama and Tswana peoples. Despite the amalgam of ethnic groups, the devout and the profane, the drunkards and the teetotallers, the 60% employed and the rest who scrape by, the more than 20% with HIV and those more fortunate, Louisvale Road is close-knit.

The arrest of six locals for the presumed gang rape of the baby provoked unmitigated outrage.

Those held were John Radebe, 25, an abattoir worker who lived with his wife and children in the house where the rape took place; Joffie Freeman, 32, a self-employed mason who lived next door; Frans Mosterd, 28, a family friend who did odd jobs at the local golf course; Piet van Rooi, 39, an unemployed man out on parole for theft of Telkom copper cable; Jan Mienies jnr, 45, a farm worker who lives across the road; and Jan van Wyk, 66, another farm worker.

Media stories on the case prejudged their guilt, and the word "alleged" was often missing from reports. The six were presumed to have gang-raped the baby.

Then came the embarrassing admission in court on January 17 this year: the arrests were a mistake. DNA tests could find no link between the six and the crime, and pointed rather to a sole rapist.

"We saw those long knives [of angry vigilantes] on the TV," Van Rooi recalled this week with a shudder, sitting on a paint tin and pointing at his groin. "They said they would cut it off and make us women."

The charges against the six were withdrawn, and they were freed. But the jubilation of their families was clouded by enduring suspicions.

"When the six were arrested, most thought one of them must have done it," Rens said. "It couldn't have been all six - the baby wouldn't have lived."

On March 7, police arrested David "Pana" Potse, 23, who had dated Baby Tshepang's mother for a month last year, despite having a common-law wife and a baby of his own. He will apply for bail tomorrow.

The conviction rate for child rape in South Africa is only 3%.

Today, two months after the release of the six, tempers are still running high. During my interview with Rens, Freeman got into a scrap with his neighbours at the tavern next door.

"You protected that rapist!" he screamed at two young women. The police arrived and separated the parties.

The scenes outside the court on Monday, when a frightened Potse appeared briefly, were calmer than before.

Still, detectives took his wife away from the seething crowd afterwards for her protection. And outside, Baby Tshepang's grandmother stamped her feet and swore to "stab him [Potse] dead in the court myself".

Pastor Johannes Stuurman, of the United Congregational Church, said the community, which has managed despite its poverty to send several youngsters to university, felt "slapped in the face" by a world that looked at it "as if we're all rapists".

"I asked the Lord why he allowed it to happen to Tshepang. I have no answer. I wish I was there to stop it . . . It's hard times. I get pushed towards unbelief," he sighed.

Provincial Safety and Liaison MEC Connie Seoposengwe shut down several shebeens in Louisvale Road after the rape. But the township has to ask itself hard questions: how was it possible for the baby to be raped by an outsider when there were six adults living in the tiny house; and who allowed the underage mother to allegedly abandon the child and get drunk that night?

Not one of the former accused I interviewed volunteered much sympathy for the child. (Van Wyk said: "I feel bad for her [Baby Tshepang] but I sat for three months in jail for this sh** that I raped her.")

Instead, they all spoke about the way their livelihoods and reputations had been destroyed by the case, even though they are now free. They all claimed to have been beaten by the police and all have lost their jobs.

The most tragic character is Radebe, who lost his R220-a-week abattoir job and now earns R130 a week as a farmworker. After his arrest, his son, Ricardo, five, and baby daughter, Memory, were placed in foster care by the authorities. But an ill Memory died shortly afterwards.

"I lost my job and I lost my child and I don't know who raped that child," Radebe said.

Social Development is investigating and the future of Radebe's son will be determined next month.

Albert van Zyl, the attorney for the six men, said they were suing the authorities for hundreds of thousands of rands each, for the tarnishing of their good names.

But the biggest question is how Baby Tshepang, now a year and three months old, will be reunited with Louisvale Road.

Her grandmother said she feared the child would be taken away from the family by the state. There is a possibility that the Child Court will order that she be put into foster care. But the most likely option is that she and her mother will be cared for by the Afrikaanse Christelike Vrouevereniging in Upington and gradually reintroduced to her family and later the community under a "family unification programme".

Meanwhile, the child at the centre of it all, having undergone her fifth and hopefully last bout of reconstructive surgery at the Red Cross Children's Hospital in Cape Town, is likely to be discharged soon. Paediatric surgery head Professor Heinz Rode said Baby Tshepang had "bounced back" from her ordeal. The most positive sign is the character of the child herself. Rode described her as "a bright little spark".

Stuurman suggested that when she grew up, Tshepang might use her experiences to teach others, spreading light in Louisvale Road's darkness. He hoped the media attention would "one day show to Tshepang that enough people spoke up for her when she couldn't speak for herself".

But Baby Tshepang's situation is unique. Because of her age at the time of the rape, it is possible that if she is left to grow up in peace with her mother, away from Louisvale Road, she will forget the trauma of that night.

If she is reintroduced into the community that still languishes in the conditions that produced her rape, she may never be allowed to forget an experience that should be obliterated from her memory.
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