ABSTRACT
In February 2006 19-year-old Zoliswa Nkonyana was brutally murdered in Khayelitsha,1 Cape Town. Nkonyana was stoned and stabbed to death by a group of approximately twenty men between the ages of seventeen and twenty, who “chased Nkonyana, pelted her with bricks and fi nally beat her with a golf club a few meters from her home.”2 According to the weekly newspaper Mail & Guardian Nkonyana and a friend of hers had initially been harassed by a group of heterosexual girls who encountered them on the street and ‘accused’ the two friends of being lesbians.3 While Nkonyana’s friend managed to escape, Nkonyana was not so lucky. The woman who fl ed the attack had to hide at an undisclosed house of safety, fearing for her life.4 It was weeks later before the incident became a media item. When this occurred the South African weekly newspaper Sunday Times published a photograph of Nkonyana with three of her friends, including the seventeen-year-old woman who had witnessed the murder.5 In the image the friends are posing in front of the camera, one is hugging another one from behind; all four look tomboyish. The subtitle of the image identifi es Nkonyana and her friends as part of the Wini Soccer Club, a lesbian soccer club in Khayelitsha. This, combined with the position of the image in relation to the story of Nkonyana’s murder, clearly situates these women as being lesbian. By positioning the women in this way the newspaper put them at further risk of anti-lesbian violence.
