Nine women murdered in Kempton Park in two months as runners take back the streets

Elizabeth Moselakgomo left her home in Kempton Park to go running on September 9. Her body was found three days later, along a driveway squeezed between a highway and a concrete wall behind a hotel, a short walk from the neighbourhood where she lived with her eight-year-old daughter. She was 38.

On Saturday morning several hundred runners answered a call from local running clubs and covered 13 kilometres through the district east of Johannesburg, past the place where she was found. A few extinguished candles and a bouquet of flowers still mark it. On the other side of the highway, the tail of a British Airways aircraft was visible above the concrete, a reminder of how close the spot sits to O.R. Tambo International Airport.

As IOL reported on September 20, Moselakgomo is one of nine women murdered in the district between July 15 and mid September. Some of the bodies were found partially naked. Investigators have established that some of the women were not killed where they were discovered. They have not committed to the theory that a single killer is at work, or that several are.

What the runners said

Hlompho Matji, a 47-year-old data analyst who lives in the same neighbourhood as Moselakgomo, ran on Saturday. She said she did not run at all the previous week.

“We shouldn’t be looking at our back. We should be protected at all times. We want to reclaim our streets,” she said. “The whole of last week I didn’t run. We are scared.”

Busisiwe Pakati, 53, a software engineer who described herself as a seasoned runner, put the cost plainly. “It has to stop because they are taking away our freedom, they are taking away our confidence now,” she said.

Mkhuleko Tshabalala, a 50-year-old financial adviser from Kempton Park, was among the men who joined. “I used to see her here, as a fellow runner,” he said. “So we went around, up to the spot where she passed. It was very, very emotional.”

Moselakgomo will be buried on Sunday in Phake, a small town in Mpumalanga.

The same week, 1 400 kilometres away

On Friday evening more than a thousand students held a vigil at the University of Cape Town. One placard read: “I want to live, not survive.”

Kitso Mojapelo, a student leader at the university, said the fear is not abstract. “Every day there’s a murder that happens,” she said. “And there’s always the thought that it could be my mother, it could be my sister, it could be one of my cousins, it could be one of my classmates, my tutors, my peers. And there’s a continued silence from the country, a continued list of failures from the government. And enough is enough.”

What the numbers mean here

The South African Police Service records a murder rate of more than 60 people a day on average. That figure is the one the country has lived with for years, and it is one of the highest in the world.

The number that sits behind the Kempton Park cases is narrower and harder. The United Nations has found that one in three women in South Africa experiences physical or sexual violence in her lifetime. The South African government has itself described the levels of gender-based violence in this country as a national disaster, which is the strongest language the state uses short of a formal emergency.

Nine killings in a single district in two months is not the national picture. It is a local cluster, and the police response to it is the thing to watch. No arrest has been announced in connection with the Kempton Park deaths on the record available at the time of publication.

What happens next

The Kempton Park running clubs have said they intend to keep running. Moselakgomo is buried on Sunday. The investigation into the nine deaths continues under the South African Police Service, and the question that the community has put to the police is a simple one: whether the cases are being treated as linked, and if so, by whom.

The Enquirer has asked Gauteng SAPS whether a task team has been established for the nine deaths, what its mandate is, and whether any arrests have been made. We will report the answer when it comes.

Source: IOL, ‘It has to stop’. Runners protest women’s murders in Kempton Park, 20 September 2026.