Anika Smit.

Today Anika Smit, 17, was buried in Pretoria. Last week, 11 March, 2010, she was killed and raped in her own room. Her arms were cut off from the elbow and taken by the perpetrators. No one has been charged with her murder.

I was so horrified by this story that I sent it to all and sundry. No mention could be found in British press. I wrote to the Guardian and the Daily Mail. With the Soccer world cup looming, there is simply no interest in frightening visitors to South Africa.

Correspondence with South African friends revealed a consistent trend 'This is not news. It happens every day.'

One correspondent told me that racially motivated murder in South Africa since the end of Apartheid exceeds 300,000. More than 45-1 higher than racially motivated deaths during apartheid.

Crime in South Africa is a real and present issue. But the crime in Anika Smits case goes beyond anything that we, outside of South African experience, can relate to. This behaviour is a uniquely South African variant of tribalism enabling sexual incontinence that effectively normalises rape. Maintaining manifestly unhealthy arrangements in the name of tradition is a recipe for disaster which should be a matter for Governmental review, but in light of a Polygamous President with a history of defending rape charges, is not.

Considering these uniquely perverse crimes - raping and hacking body parts off people who are still alive, the better to make muti with - the issue of Apartheid is often presented as a contributory cause. I grew up in Apartheid South Africa and remember well the British approach of 'No normal sport in an abnormal society.' One I wholeheartedly agreed with then as I do now.

This is not a time for the world to be normalising South Africa's collapse into tribal barbarism and lawlessness by enjoying games of football in Stadiums whose cost cannot possibly be reconciled with the decayed lifestyles of South Africa's dispossessed majority even as their falsely elected new class of cuntocrats swan around in the accoutrements of obscene wealth.

No normal sport in an abnormal society. Why did that make sense in 1976 and not now? How many South Africans consider theirs to be a normal society?

Playing games of soccer in the shadow of 17 year old girls being raped and mutilated, whose killer might be the person sitting next to you at the games, smiling and cheering Bafana Bafana, is not the way the issue of barbarous decline in South Africa is best addressed. It maintains the delusional precept of a 'rainbow nation' thriving on 'the miracle of Mandela.'

I imagine all media coverage of South Africa today will be about football games and ticket sales and travel opportunities for visitors, leaving little interest ina story about Anika Smits father, as he buries those body parts of his butchered daughter that the rapists left behind. 

I certainly will find it difficult watching Dave Beckham swish around the England camp promoting football and talking up our chances against Germany knowing how far apart the world his values represent is from the reality of South Africa. This is not a normal society. Leaders like Zuma and Malema are not credible and one can but wonder how the legacy of Mandela arrived here in 16 short years.

Continuing unchecked at this rate, in another 16 years time there will be no opportunity for this subject to be raised again. 

For me these football games will be remembered as The Anika Smit Games. 
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