In December 1994, Alison Botha arrived home in Port Elizabeth after an ordinary evening. Before she could get safely inside, a man confronted her at knifepoint and forced his way into her car. A second man joined him.
They drove Alison to an isolated area outside the city. There she was raped and attacked with extreme violence. She was stabbed repeatedly in the abdomen and her throat was cut. Her attackers left her in the bushes believing she would die.
She did not.
Alison later described moments of deliberate choice during the ordeal. She concentrated on staying alive. Despite catastrophic injuries, she managed to move towards the road. A passing motorist found her and help was called. Doctors regarded the fact that she survived as extraordinary.
Survival, however, was only the beginning.
There were operations, physical recovery, the criminal case and the much longer task of living after something had happened that could never be undone. Alison has spoken openly about the emotional impact, including a period of depression after the court case. She had to reclaim ordinary parts of life that fear had made difficult.
What became central to her later message was not the idea that she had controlled what happened to her. She had not. The distinction she made was between the actions of other people and the choices that still belonged to her afterwards.
She developed what she describes as her ABC: Attitude, Belief and Choice. She went on to speak internationally, wrote I Have Life with Marianne Thamm, and became known not only because she had survived an attack but because of what she chose to build after it.
The Ambassador’s Reflection
There are events in life that we would never choose and could never justify. What happened to Alison was one of them. Choice does not mean pretending that such things are acceptable, nor does it mean that pain disappears because we decide to move.
What strikes me is the line Alison drew between what was done to her and who she would become afterwards. The attack was part of her story, but she refused to give the men who attacked her ownership of the rest of it.
That matters. People can become trapped inside labels: victim, failure, divorced, unemployed, depressed, rejected, damaged. A label may describe something that happened or a period we went through. It does not have to become the final description of the person.
Moving forward can be painful. It may happen in stages. It may involve help from other people. But somewhere inside that movement there is still a choice: will what happened to me be the end of my direction, or will I stand up again and keep walking?
