Crime Victims: S. Africa Blacks : Businessman Sees ‘Pattern of White Inhumanity’

What began as an ordinary weekend date for Ginny Goigzeone last Friday ended in a rape-murder so brutal that it shocked even the most calloused consciences here.

Ginny Goigzeone was black. The four men accused of her murder are white. The crime, in the words of a local clergyman, is “another of those terrible things that happen to black people at the hands of some white people in this country.”

The 24-four-year-old Goigzeone was sitting with her boyfriend, Jacob Wessie, 27, a professional soccer player, in his car near her home here Friday night when two white men, identifying themselves as police officers, got in and ordered the couple to drive down the highway while two more whites followed in another car.

Assault, Robbery

After 10 miles, Wessie was told to stop and was pulled from the car by three of the men. They allegedly beat him, hitting him repeatedly with a four-pound hammer, robbed him of about $30 and his watch and stripped him of his clothes. The other man dragged Goigzeone across the road into heavy brush and raped her.

Wessie, though badly hurt with a broken shoulder, escaped into the dense undergrowth and ran naked for nearly 15 miles for help. Eventually, with the aid of a passing motorist, he reached the police.

After raping Goigzeone several times, the four men locked her in the trunk of the car and set the auto on fire, according to police, who say they have confessions from two of the men.

Four men--two soldiers, a postal worker and an unemployed friend from the area--were quickly found by police through the license number of their car, and they are being charged with murder.

‘Revolting, Heartbreaking’

“Sickening,” said Andre Kotze, a businessman in Klerksdorp, 90 miles southwest of Johannesburg. “Crimes like this are both revolting and heartbreaking. We think we are making progress in this country and then something like this shows how little we have made. And what are the blacks to think? The trouble is that this crime is not isolated; I see almost a pattern of white inhumanity to blacks in such crimes.”

Among such crimes that have come to court in the past six months around South Africa:

--Maria Moepya, 15, was killed near Groblersdaal, 100 miles northeast of Johannesburg, when four drunken soldiers returning from leave assaulted her, threw her to the ground and drove their car over her twice, crushing her skull. The soldiers had assaulted other blacks along the road, the prosecutor said, and regarded it as “a sort of sports day.”

The judge sentenced the driver to 10 years in prison. Another soldier received five strokes with a light cane and a five-year suspended sentence. The other two were not charged.

--A gas station attendant, Godfrey Mbandhlwa, 32, was beaten to death by a 22-year-old supermarket manager, Theodore Harilaou, who was angered when the attendant accidentally splashed some gasoline on a friend’s trousers. Harilaou, who attacked the attendant with a baseball bat he carried in his car, said he felt “that boy should be taught a lesson so he would not do it (splash gasoline) again.”

Finding the facts not totally clear, the judge fined Marilaou the equivalent of $1,000 and gave him a one-year suspended prison sentence. “I must impose a sentence that will try to stop him from doing this sort of thing, especially where defenseless and less privileged people are involved,” Judge A. M. Vanniekerk said.

--A black woman, whose identity was never established, was stabbed to death on the street by a Johannesburg fireman, who said he did it for no reason and was too drunk to recall the incident. Because the murder was not premeditated, he was sentenced to only five years in prison.

--A Soweto man, Thami D. Moshoeshoe, 22, was killed south of that black Johannesburg township last Sunday, police said, after a white farmer and three friends beat him severely during a barbecue. Moshoeshoe had been taken by the white men from the home of a girlfriend on the farm after her family complained that he was molesting her. The whites tied his hands and feet and threw him into the back of a truck. Moshoeshoe was later discovered in a field, his forehead smashed, his nose ripped away, his body battered and a rope around his neck, police said. The farmer was arrested and the other whites are being sought on murder charges.

--Ronnie Van Der Merwe, out walking with his girl friend in Pretoria, bragged that he would kill a black to celebrate his 20th birthday. He beat to death the next black they met. He was sentenced to 1,200 hours in prison to be served on weekends over six months.

More than 30 such severe and largely unprovoked attacks by whites against blacks have gone through South Africa’s courts in the past six months or have been reported by police.

Many black assaults on whites are reported each week--”too many to count,” a police spokesman in Pretoria said.

The main difference between the two categories of crimes is that virtually all black attacks on whites occur in the course of other crimes, primarily robberies or burglaries, while most assaults by whites on blacks are solely crimes against the persons of the victims.

‘Fact of Life’

“In the eyes of some whites, black lives have no value,” said the Rev. Joshua Nkosi, who does social work in Jouberton, the black township outside Klerksdorp where Ginny Goigzeone lived. “We are here for them to use or abuse and we are supposed to accept that as a condition of life. You hear about the worst cases, the most heinous crimes, but for many, many blacks this is an every day fact of life.”

“For most whites, apartheid is simply a way of keeping the races separate and the blacks subservient,” a clinical psychologist in Johannesburg commented, asking not to be quoted by name for professional reasons. “But for a few disordered personalities it becomes a justification for killing. . . .

“Society seems to say to them, ‘Go ahead, it’s only a kaffir, a nigger, someone who is worth less than nothing.’ Unfortunately, we whites all have a little of this in us, but usually it only comes out in everyday rudeness to blacks. And, maybe for this reason, whites who commit crimes for which blacks here would be hanged get only five years in prison or even suspended sentences.”

The South African society of psychiatrists, at a convention this month, called attention to the “harmful psychological effects” on whites of racial discrimination.