Elizabeth “Tsontso” Moselakgomo went for a run. It was something she did often; a regular afternoon habit after a long day at work, unremarkable, the kind of thing that doesn’t require an explanation or a plan. She did not come home. She was 38. She is one of nine women whose lifeless bodies have been found in different parts of Ekurhuleni over the past two months.
Police have said there are similarities between several of the cases serious enough to warrant a public warning, and investigators are weighing whether more than one person may be responsible. Nothing about a serial killer has been confirmed.
But whether this is one man or several, the fear moving through the country right now isn’t really about a manhunt. It’s about what it now means to be a woman doing an ordinary thing on an ordinary day. Running is exercise. It’s routine. It is supposed to be safe. If a woman can disappear while jogging in daylight in an area she knew or while going to the post office and yet she does not return, the last illusion collapses with her: that some category of ordinary life exists where a woman doesn’t have to calculate her risk of being murdered.
I keep returning to a list. It isn’t one I invented. It’s the list every woman I know carries in some form or shape, without ever having been taught it twice.
Don’t go there. Don’t walk alone. Don’t run alone. Don’t travel at night. Don’t take a lift from someone you don’t know. Don’t trust too easily. Be careful at work, in public, in your relationship, online. Be careful, always, with everyone.
That list never actually protects anyone completely. It only grows. After this tragic week, women across the country were told, again, not to run alone and not to walk alone at night. That’s sound advice in the narrow sense that any precaution against a known danger is sound. But I want to ask a harder question, one men in this country have avoided for too long.
What else, precisely, is a woman supposed to do?
If she can be killed while running, attacked at work, at a post office, while out on a date, hurt by a partner in her own home, or harmed on her way to do something as unremarkable as buying bread, then the list of precautions was never a solution. It’s an admission of defeat, dressed as advice. It asks women to keep shrinking the space they’re allowed to occupy, while the actual source of the danger, a man who has decided to hurt her, goes largely unexamined. At some point the question has to turn. Not “what should she have done differently,” but “what produced him.”
What are we teaching men in this country, formally and informally, that lets some of them believe a woman’s body is theirs to take? Why do some men experience rejection of a message, an advance, a relationship, as an offence requiring punishment, rather than a decision they simply have to accept? Why is access to a woman’s time or attention so often confused with ownership? Why do communities so often know, in advance, that a particular man is dangerous or controlling, and say nothing until it’s too late?
These are uncomfortable questions to put to men, and I’m aware I’m asking them of myself too. Most our countrymen are not rapists or murderers. That’s true, and worth saying plainly, because collective accusation is neither accurate nor useful. But the innocence of the majority can’t shield the minority who choose violence. And it can’t excuse the silence of good men who let misogyny pass unchallenged because confronting it feels awkward, or none of their business.
It is our business. When a man laughs at a joke that reduces a woman to something to be used and disposed of, and another man says nothing, something is being taught. When a man boasts about controlling where his partner goes or what she wears, and the men around him treat it as a private matter rather than a warning sign, something is being learned. We spend a great deal of energy teaching women how to recognise a dangerous man. We spend almost none teaching men how not to become one.
It’s worth being precise about the limits of safety advice. Sensible precautions can sometimes reduce risk in a given moment. It is a different and false claim that women are responsible for preventing men from choosing violence against them. A woman cannot, through any amount of caution, control whether another person decides to rape, assault or kill her. That decision belongs to him. No woman’s route, clothing, or choice of hour causes a man to commit a crime. The man who commits it does that.
It’s also worth being careful with the word femicide itself. It names something specific: the killing of women because they are women, rooted in unequal power or the belief that a woman’s body or life is subject to a man’s control. The South African Medical Research Council has found that more than half of women killed in our country in a recent survey were killed by an intimate partner, roughly three women a day. That isn’t incidental violence. It’s a pattern, repeated across hundreds of thousands of households, sitting quietly behind the more visible horror of a case like Ekurhuleni’s.
I won’t walk through every figure here. Our femicide rate sits at several multiples of the global average, and the most recent quarterly crime statistics put both murders and reported rapes of women in the thousands, with researchers cautioning that the true number is almost certainly higher. Gender based violence and femicide were declared a national disaster by President Ramaphosa in November 2025. Nearly a year on, we still don’t have a reliable national system to track the crisis we officially named.
However, a crisis like this can’t be solved by government alone, and it would be lazy to end this piece by simply demanding it to “do something.” Government does carry real responsibilities here: functioning policing, competent prosecution, services that work, consequences that are enforced. Where those have failed, that failure deserves scrutiny.
But the crisis runs through more than the state. It runs through families that teach sons anger is strength and daughters to make themselves smaller. It runs through workplaces that tolerate harassment because the man responsible is useful or well liked. It runs through schools that don’t know how to talk to boys about consent or rejection. It runs through religious communities that sometimes counsel a woman to endure abuse in the name of forgiveness, while offering the man doing the harm little more than silence. The pulpit’s silence has too often stood in for the courage to name gender based violence directly, and it has to end.
None of this is an argument against precaution, and none of it should read as blame towards women who take care. Locking a door, telling a friend where you’re going, avoiding an isolated route after dark. These are ordinary, sensible things to do in an unsafe world, and no one should be shamed for doing them. But precaution was never meant to carry the entire weight of a woman’s safety. That weight belongs, first and always, to the person who decides whether to commit violence.
So I return to where I started. Elizabeth Moselakgomo went for a run. She had already done everything the list asks of a woman. She knew her route, she ran in daylight, she was careful. She still didn’t come home.
The question left standing isn’t for her, or for any woman reading this. It’s for us. What are we, as men, actually going to do? Not in a statement, not in a moment of grief that fades in a fortnight, but in the ordinary rooms where we work, worship, drink, and raise our sons. Are we willing to name the friend who frightens the women around him, rather than protect him with our silence? Are we willing to raise boys who understand that no is a complete sentence, and that a woman’s body was never theirs to claim?
Safety should never have required women to make their lives smaller. It is long past time that the burden of building a safer country was carried by the people who are, overwhelmingly, the ones making it unsafe.
Written by Lehlogonolo Mokgathi
Sources
South African Medical Research Council, Fourth National Femicide Study — https://www.samrc.ac.za/press-releases/south-africas-femicide-crisis-persists-new-report-highlights-increase-intimate
SAMRC, Femicide Research Brief (2024) — https://www.samrc.ac.za/sites/default/files/attachments/2024-10/FemicideBrief2024_0.pdf
Africa Check, “How does South Africa’s femicide rate compare?” (UNODC global comparison) — https://africacheck.org/infofinder/explore-facts/how-does-south-africas-femicide-rate-compare
Daily Maverick, “Gender-based violence and femicide declared national disaster, but with caveats” — https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2025-11-21-genderbased-violence-and-femicide-declared-national-disaster-but-with-caveats/
IndustriALL, “South Africa declares gender-based violence and femicide a national disaster” — https://www.industriall-union.org/south-africa-declares-gender-based-violence-and-femicide-a-national-disaster
Democratic Alliance, “DA demands urgent release of delayed Q1 Crime Statistics” — https://www.da.org.za/2025/09/da-demands-urgent-release-of-delayed-q1-crime-statistics
Institute for Security Studies, “Crime statistics belong to the public, not the police” — https://issafrica.org/iss-today/crime-statistics-belong-to-the-public-not-the-police
Associated Press, via Local10, “A ninth woman’s body found in South Africa deepens fears of a possible serial killer” — https://www.local10.com/news/world/2026/09/17/a-ninth-womans-body-found-in-south-africa-deepens-fears-of-a-possible-serial/
Mail & Guardian, “Nine lives snuffed as fears escalate” — https://mg.co.za/news/south-africa/2026-09-17-nine-lives-snuffed-as-fears-escalate/