Eudy Simelane: Is the LGBTQ community safer 14 years later?
The hate crime rape and murder of Eudy Simelane was a tragically defining moment for SA’s LGBTQIA+ community On 28 April 2008, 31-year-old Eudy Simelane was brutally raped, assaulted and murdered in what became one of the most high profile LGBTQIA+ hate crimes in the country. High profile, because Simelane was a member of Banyana Banyana, the national women’s soccer team, and was also well known in KwaThema, where she lived and had always been open about being a lesbian.
The annual Eudy Simelane Memorial Lecture has been held by the Ujamaa Centre at the University of KwaZulu-Natal since 2016, and aims to address the challenges faced by the queer community in South Africa and Africa.
Recalling the court case that followed Eudy’s murder and ultimately saw at least one perpetrator receive a life sentence for this horrific crime, 2021’s keynote speaker, Professor Zethu Matebeni, remembers the moment of recognition just before Eudy’s death. “We’ll talk a little bit about the moment of death, and that moment, for me, is so telling,” she says. “So, in this moment, Mphithi says – he’s one of the guys who murdered Eudy… Mphithi says, she looks at me and she says: ‘Hey, you know me, I know you.’ And he claims that at that moment of recognition, he panics, and he murders, he kills her… and you can unpack this in so many different ways – a moment of recognition, having a conversation with someone you know, and by looking into your eyes and acknowledging familiarity, and he decides to kill you.
You haven’t done anything.” Of course, Eudy Simelane wasn’t the first queer person in South Africa to be murdered because of her sexual orientation, nor was she the last.
