At Least Eight Women Murdered in Ekurhuleni, and South Africa's Queer Organisations Are Saying the Same Thing Again

Elizabeth Moselakgomo went out for a run on 9 September and did not come home. She was 38, a mall manager, a committed runner, and the mother of an eight-year-old daughter — the daughter reported her missing. Her family has remembered her as the person who held them together.

She was the first of the women found murdered in Ekurhuleni to be publicly identified. Since then a second has been named by her family: Dineo Evelyn Motapane, also 38, whose body was found in KwaThema. At least eight women have been discovered dead across the Gauteng metro east of Johannesburg between July and September, many of them naked or partially clothed. Investigators believe they were strangled and may have been sexually assaulted, and the pattern has raised fears that a single perpetrator is responsible. A reward of R400,000 has been offered for information leading to an arrest.

What the organisations said

The Forum for the Empowerment of Women, a queer rights organisation that has worked with lesbian, bisexual and queer women in South Africa for more than twenty years, said it was “devastated and enraged.” Its statement, reported by MambaOnline, is worth reading for its refusal to treat this as a crime story.

“Every woman murdered is a life violently taken, a family devastated, and a community pushed further into fear,” FEW said. “These killings cannot be dismissed as isolated acts of crime. They take place within a society where violence against women, particularly Black lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer women, is deeply entrenched and too often met with silence, indifference and impunity.”

The organisation then described something that will be familiar to a great many readers: “We know the fear of constantly having to assess whether a place, a journey or a person is safe. We know what it means when women cannot walk, run, travel, work, love or simply exist in public spaces without calculating the possibility of violence.”

FEW was explicit about where responsibility sits. Not with women, and not with their choices about when to go out or which route to take. “The responsibility lies with those who perpetrate violence and with the institutions that repeatedly fail to prevent it, investigate it and deliver justice.” The statement closed: “We are not disposable. Our lives matter. Our freedom matters. Our safety matters.”

The Vaal-based Lebo Basadi Foundation made the same argument in different words: “This is not an isolated tragedy. This is femicide — rooted in patriarchy and the continued devaluation of womxn, queer, trans and gender-diverse bodies.”

The government’s response

Mmapaseka “Steve” Letsike, Deputy Minister in the Presidency for Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities, offered condolences and, notably, took up the same framing as the organisations rather than arguing with it.

“They deserve answers, justice and the full support of the state,” she said of the families. “This level of violence against women and other vulnerable people is an attack on our democracy.”

She went on: “Prevention must be at the heart of this work. The measure of our response cannot be how effectively we teach women to avoid danger; it must be how effectively the state and society remove that danger and make every community safe for everyone.”

That is the right principle, and the gap between it and the situation on the ground is the reason FEW’s statement reads the way it does. South Africa declared gender-based violence and femicide a national disaster in November 2025. The killings in Ekurhuleni began roughly eight months later.

Why a queer organisation is at the centre of this story

It is fair to ask why LGBTQ+ organisations are leading the response to the murders of women whose sexual orientation has not been reported and is, in most cases, nobody’s business.

The answer is that organisations like FEW have spent two decades building the only sustained documentation of this kind of violence in South African townships, because for a long time nobody else was doing it. They ran the case tracking, the court support and the memorials when Black lesbian women were attacked in what became widely known as “corrective rape” — assaults carried out with the stated intention of changing the victim’s sexuality.

Ekurhuleni is not an incidental location for that history. Eudy Simelane, a member of the Banyana Banyana national football squad and one of the few openly lesbian public figures in her community, was raped and murdered in KwaThema in 2008. Noxolo Nogwaza, a lesbian activist, was killed in KwaThema in 2011. Neither case produced the kind of institutional reckoning that was promised at the time. When a queer organisation in Gauteng says it knows how these investigations tend to go, it is speaking from its own files.

The gap the country cannot close

South Africa’s constitution was the first in the world to prohibit discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. The Constitutional Court’s 2005 ruling in Minister of Home Affairs v Fourie led to the Civil Union Act, making South Africa the fifth country in the world and the first in Africa to recognise same-sex marriage, in 2006. On paper, it remains the most protective legal framework for LGBTQ+ people on the continent by a considerable distance.

And South Africa has one of the highest rates of femicide recorded anywhere. A woman can marry her partner in Johannesburg and be unsafe walking home in the township where she grew up. Rights secured in courtrooms have not translated into safety on streets, and the distance between those two things is where this story actually sits — not in a failure of law, but in everything that law by itself cannot do: policing that works, investigations that close, prevention programmes that survive a budget cycle, and a society that stops treating the deaths of Black women as background noise.

What happens now

The immediate needs are investigative. Whether the cases are formally linked, whether the reward produces anything, whether the families are kept informed rather than reading about their relatives in the news — those are the measures of the next few weeks.

The organisations that issued statements this week will still be there afterwards, running the support lines and keeping the records, as they have through every previous cycle of outrage and silence. What they are asking for is not another statement. It is arrests, prosecutions, and a prevention strategy that outlasts the news.

Two of the women now have names in public. The others have families waiting for a phone call. That is the standard against which everything that follows should be measured.