Dear Rashieda,

In her magnificent garden, Ronelda S. Kamfer begins her letter to her old friend Rashieda — a letter in which the threat of gender-based violence is as inescapable as the shadows between the leaves. What starts as a reflection on nature and mycelial connectedness unfolds into an examination of the parallel system of risk, memory, and collective vigilance that women inhabit. Ronelda weaves personal story and political reality into a testimony that reads as a warning, and an exploration of the invisible networks that bind women to each other.

Dear Rashieda,

Through no effort of my own, we have quite a magnificent garden. Tended, as it were, by nature’s own hands. I sit there sometimes and mime tranquility. I shouldn’t even call it a garden really, it’s more like a small contained forest. From my porch, with this wilderness as my view, I write to you while drinking hibiscus tea, because a friend said it’s supposed to calm the mind. I don’t think the tea is helping, but this forest-like garden is doing something to me. In spring the purple jakaranda flowers will fall and our yard will look like an Indian wedding venue. But for now, its main characteristic is the foreboding shadows between the leaves. I feel the silence of the trees communicating with the silence in me, and it really is deafening. Or maybe it’s because we’ve had the Gender-Based Violence shutdown this week that I see shadows everywhere.

Forests communicate through a vast, fungal mycelium – an intelligent, life-sustaining system where nutrients, warnings, and collective memory are exchanged. This underground intelligence of the trees and the quiet knowledge of the root structure, offers a metaphor for our own existence. For women, the network often transmits not life, but the ever-present shadow of harm. We stand, often in isolation, yet beneath the surface. Our fear, our vigilance and our occasional, profound exhaustion are in constant, silent circulation – a network of anxious thoughts and panicked screams.

This underground intelligence of the trees and the quiet knowledge of the root structure, offers a metaphor for our own existence.

Fifteen women are murdered every day in South Africa. It means that when I write this sentence, and later when you pause to absorb it, a life is being extinguished. It means that the supposedly safe commute you completed this morning, the harmless act of moving through a public space, was shadowed by the recent and irrevocable end of another woman's existence. This violence is mathematical, mechanical.

The most crucial failure of our social imagination is insisting on presenting this particular violence as a series of isolated, tragic events, rather than grasping it as a systemic, predictable, and profoundly structural phenomenon. We are conditioned to look outward, toward the dark alley, the lone stranger, the sensational headline. This is the myth of the external threat, which brings comfort only to those who would wish to offload any responsibility that might require action or change.

I remember a recent television debate where a woman made a simple, yet fundamentally truthful demand: ‘We need to change how we see murderers. The men who are killing us are not always strangers.’ The immediate response from a panelist, a reflexively self-preservationist, was telling: ‘But we can't see murderers everywhere. This is impossible.’

It is not about painting every man as an imminent threat; it is about recognizing that the place of danger has been systematically misdiagnosed. It is an acknowledgment that the institution of intimacy, the very sanctuary of the home, is, for far too many, the primary danger zone. The men who kill are often the fathers, the husbands, the partners, the sons. To deny this is to cling to a fiction of safety that costs lives.

This forces a reevaluation of the concept of the private sphere. In political theory, the private sphere constitutes the domain of personal liberty, free from state intrusion. For us, it has become, on the contrary, the domain where the most lethal forms of power imbalance are enacted. The home becomes an execution chamber; the family unit is the primary witness.

Every second is a quiet calculation of risk. Even the smallest disagreement elicits an internal debate over tone, a vigilant reading of one’s own face, a preemptive yielding in conflict. Not to keep the peace, but to ensure nothing more than one’s physical survival.

The institution of intimacy, the very sanctuary of the home, is, for far too many, the primary danger zone.

In The Unwomanly Face of War (1983), Svetlana Alexievich records the testimonies of Soviet women whose experiences in World War II were eclipsed by the grand, masculine myth of the ‘Great Patriotic War’. Their stories often circle back to the discrepancy between the official, heroic narrative of war and the granular, often disregarded experience of women in combat. One woman recalls how her husband insisted she recount the war only in his words, ‘without tears and women’s trifles’, while censors openly rejected women’s testimonies as ‘primitive naturalism’, demanding instead ‘the big history … the history of the Victory’. These women speak not only of the enemy on the front lines but of the struggle to be seen and validated in a narrative that sought to diminish their suffering.

This resonates with the experience of domestic violence and femicide. Just as Alexievich’s narrators speak from within a history that sought to erase their wounds, so too do victims of gendered violence suffer within a society that refuses to recognize their deaths as the losses of a war. Our casualties are not honoured by the state but met with platitudes, euphemisms and hurried, often victim-blaming, commentary. If a woman is lucky enough to survive a sexual assault or an attempt on her life she isn’t called a ‘victim’, but a ‘survivor’.

I grew up, as many of us did, watching this reality unfold on the nightly news. The televised story of a woman killed by her partner became a grim routine, a predictable segment of the broadcast, as regular as the weather report. Each case was different, a unique tragedy, but taken together they comprised a single terrifying pattern; a drumbeat of death. A rhythm of life, that we learned to move to. These victims felt far away, yet they were foundational in shaping a certain kind of female consciousness: a quiet, steady state of watchfulness.

Last year, Rashieda, when I saw you in Amsterdam, you said that you felt so much safer now. You told me it took years, but at some point you began to accept a new normal. You slowly started accepting that it’s okay for a woman to walk alone at night there. You were almost evangelical in the way you praised Europe for being so much safer than South Africa. Beneath the surface however, it felt like our roots were having a different conversation entirely. In that same wordless way we learned to communicate when we were both still kids on the Cape Flats. And right before I left to go back home to South Africa, you broke down in tears. Through the tears you insisted on the safety of European streets. And that the man who hurt you was someone you knew. You’d convinced yourself that you were just unlucky. I remember you saying that maybe it was your own fault, for forgetting where you’re from and buying into this illusion of safety.

The televised story of a woman killed by her partner became a grim routine, a predictable segment of the broadcast, as regular as the weather report.

When I was fourteen I saw a news report that broke through the protective lens of intellectual distance and statistics. It described the suffering of a girl, hospitalized and fighting for her life after a beating so bad she needed surgery. A beating not doled out by a stranger, but by her father. And speaking to you reminded me of this story again. This was the sudden, unbearable crystallization of the pattern onto an individual, vulnerable face. For weeks, the image of her – struggling for consciousness in a sterile, indifferent hospital room – became a fixed point in my mind. I was overwhelmed, morbidly and urgently, by a single anxious question: Did she survive? The news never said. My preoccupation with the girl wasn’t necessarily empathetic curiosity; it was an obsessive internal inquiry for evidence of resilience, a desperate attempt to locate the rupture in the cycle.

You and I know the vigilance that cannot be articulated, the self-censorship that precedes any conversation, the meticulous planning of exit strategies that are never, hopefully, executed. This foundational insecurity contours everything. It's why we listen differently. It’s why the sound of a door closing or a raised voice can set off muscle memory. It’s why, even years later, even in a different geography, the shadow of violence dictates the terms of your engagement with the world.

The ability to analyse violence dispassionately and transform raw experience into insight is the mark of a survivor. I don’t share these thoughts for sympathy. It is a data point.

I still find refuge and sustenance in the underground network shared between women. And I still heed the warnings of danger. I’m strengthened by the connectedness as quiet and as certain as that of the trees right in front of me. Only our roots run deeper and reach so much further. Even across this vast expanse of earth and ocean between us I can say I can feel what you feel. And I’m certain you know I feel the same.

Your old friend,

Ronelda