Activist gets a head-bashing

The sight of an active old man, Frans van der Merwe, who goes around Louis Trichardt removing illegal abortion adverts plastered on walls, road signs and trees, is not easy to ignore.

You will seldom find him by the roadside or at taxi ranks talking to people about his voluntary job, but he believes in his cause – removing all those adverts – and he has been doing this for many years now.

On June 3 this year, however, an incident left him reeling with shock. The incident was so imprinted in his mind that it still haunts him a few months later.

“At about 10 o’clock that night, I was removing the illegal abortion posters pasted on street signs in Louis Trichardt’s main street,” he said. “Suddenly I was smashed on the head with a fist-sized rock.”

Mr Van der Merwe didn’t expect this type of attack. He thought that as long as he was in his hometown, walking the streets he loved, he would always be safe. The attacker clearly did not share his sentiment. After the attack, Van der Merwe did not fall down to the ground. He had the energy to turn his face and look at his attacker.

“When I turned around, a young man who had just hit me with a rock was obviously surprised and also frightened when he saw the knife in my hand, which I used to remove the abortion posters,” he said. “He turned and ran, once again aiming his rock in my direction.”

Today, after nearly two months, Mr Van der Merwe said that he did not hate the young man for smashing his head with a rock. He stated that he pitied the situation that compelled the attacker to defend an “ill job”.

“I despise the people, the so-called doctors, who can keep on supplying those thousands of posters to defile and damage public property on a daily basis, without anybody in charge trying to stop it,” he said. “As a pensioner, I pay my entire monthly income to the municipality, so that this town can be clean all the time.”

He said that he had since supplied the municipality and police with the phone numbers of “the so-called doctors, who are now also guilty of attempted murder of an old man”.

The Makhado police cluster’s spokesperson, W/O Kedibone Mabatha, said that they were aware that Mr Van der Merwe had laid a charge of assault against an unknown man who had attacked him. “We condemn the spread of illegal abortion posters which are pasted in most areas of our town,” he said. “Those who are involved in the dissemination of those posters are acting unlawfully since they have no permit to do that kind of work. Even Mr Van der Merwe is not acting legally when he goes around removing the abortion posters, because there’s no law which has authorised him to do so.”

News - Date: 26 August 2016

Tshifhiwa Mukwevho

Tshifhiwa Given Mukwevho was born in 1984 in Madombidzha village, not far from Louis Trichardt in the Limpopo Province. After submitting articles for roughly a year for Limpopo Mirror's youth supplement, Makoya, he started writing for the main newspaper. He is a prolific writer who published his first book, titled A Traumatic Revenge in 2011. It focusses on life on the street and how to survive amidst poverty. His second book titled The Violent Gestures of Life was published in 2014.

Email: [email protected]