Eight women were raped while trying to make a living through their art near Johannesburg on July 28. Police minister Bheki Cele termed it a gang rape, and the survivors have revealed that the men who attacked them were armed and are believed to be foreign nationals who are illegal miners in the area.

Typical of South African political culture, we reacted to the news of this incident with outrage and anger. Last month we had a similar reaction to the 21 teenagers who died in a tavern in the Eastern Cape. Last year we repeatedly protested against women and children being killed and raped – to the extent that our 2020/21 crime statistics showed that 9,500 women and children get raped every three months in this country. And this is just referring to official reported crimes. The bulk of crimes committed every day in private homes go unreported.

Clearly, SA is a violent society with deep-seated hatred towards women, children and the effeminate, yet it has the weakest law enforcement infrastructure to handle the extent of this crisis. Our rates of reporting violent crimes to the police are too low and the rates of arrests and prosecutions are even far lower.

Hence, communities and women particularly do not trust our courts and government to rescue them from this kind of violence. Men who are supposed to be in jail are freely walking around society – and the Krugersdorp rape incident has added further complexity to our crisis of violence.

There are two things that must be made clear.

Firstly, the men who raped those eight women are part of the overall problem of male violence that we are facing all over the world. They supplemented their masculine violence with armed power to dehumanise the young women who were trying to make an honest living.

Secondly, the Krugersdorp community has seized on this moment to finally revolt against foreign nationals who use their proximity to abandoned mines to take advantage of the vulnerable, including the weak laws of the country, to violate women in the area.

In a number of media interviews, protesting community members emphasised that these crimes have been committed by men for many years yet no action has been taken by police when reported.

The community knows that these illegal miners are an organised group that reside in a specific area and hold a market where they sell their wares. The community also knows that these miners come from outside SA and recruit each other into this market, they speak a particular language and target a particular group of vulnerable women in specific locations to commit rape.

These are criminals the community cannot tolerate anymore. They have given up on the police to do this on their behalf. Correctly, they have taken the fight into their own hands by organising protests and leading the charge to have every possible suspect arrested and punished according to their own terms.

Another problem that is beginning to be clear is that our government must not take the problem of immigration and foreign nationals too lightly. Our approach to this conversation is too academic for the extent of the problem we face as a country. No sane country engages with this question in as weak a way as we do.

The truth is that this country is in a unique geographic location in Africa and it is facing a high rate of foreign nationals immigrating at a time when the world is overwhelmed by international commercial crimes. These crimes target human beings – especially children and women – for the purpose of human trafficking in search of profit.

In this context, SA cannot afford to take the question of its border management systems for granted in a global environment full of sophisticated criminals. This is not a xenophobic reaction. It is about crime, a subject that has the potential to put every citizen at risk. If we are not careful, it could downgrade our country into a zone without state control where underworld syndicates engage in illicit crimes and terrorism – just like Mexico, Nigeria, Somalia and Mozambique next door.

Moving forward, we as the people need to take our country back from this pathetic state and defend it ourselves. We must end rape. We must end male violence on women and children. We must end the infiltration of our country by foreign syndicates. We must meet every enemy of our democratic project head on, including the current leadership that enables its destruction.