AMONG the thousands toeing the start line at Sunday’s Sanlam Cape Town Marathon, all free and psyched up for the 42.195km ahead of them, will be a man knackered, severely sunburnt, and physically and mentally bruised.
Tumelo Mokobane will start the popular race on extremely tired legs, having just completed a 1 400km trek from Johannesburg to the Mother City to raise awareness and funds for a non-profit organisation called Abafaziphambili that assists women and children who are victims of gender-based violence.
The 38-year-old looked the worse for wear when he arrived at Greenpoint Stadium on Friday, his lips badly chapped from sunburn, his legs jelly from the high mileage he’d covered, and his mind tortured after he was robbed of his mobile phone by thugs just as he was approaching Cape Town on Wednesday.
But he still wore a smile as he readied himself for media interviews on Saturday.
“He has done it,” a member of his support team said as they recorded Tumelo completing the final metres of his 1 400km journey.
It was a crazy undertaking, and one that could only be done with tons and tons of motivation. Throughout his journey, during the media interviews he gave, Tumelo explained that he had been touched by a story he had read in a local paper about Abafaziphambili and what they did to help abused women.
Having previously completed epic runs for such causes as protecting animals and raising money to buy school shoes and sanitary pads for kids in Tembisa, Mokobane decided to run to Cape Town in a bid to raise R300 000 for Abafaziphambili. By yesterday, he had raised a modest R21 000 via BackaBuddy.
He’d said during the run that it was no longer about money, but rather raising awareness of the scourge that is GBV.
“But what really is the drive behind the run, Tumelo?” I ask him during our telephonic interview this week. “What is it that makes you take this GBV issue so seriously?”
“My brother, I am from a family where something like this was happening. My father was someone who used to always make noise and beat up my mother when he was drunk.
“And I was still a young boy in primary school, but it was painful to see my mom going through that. The beating eventually stopped, but he continued to shout at her, and sometimes even at us.”
It was only in adulthood that Tumelo began to understand how the situation he had grown up in had affected him.
“I am now divorced, and when I look back on my marriage I realise that I was like my father. I was very short-tempered with my wife, and because she was an activist she didn’t allow it to get too far. So we decided to separate in 2017.
“And when that happened, I found myself looking back and asking myself: ‘Why did my mother stay on?’ But the biggest realisation I had was that I actually had anger issues from my childhood.
“And the anger was towards my mom for having kept us in that abusive situation to endure the pain that came from seeing her being abused. I was also angry at my father for being the abusive man he was.”
Blessed with a daughter, he decided to break the chain of abuse so that his little Dikeledi Blessing did not end up being married to an abusive man.
However, he looks back on his life and says that, when as a child he saw his father abusing his mother, he had no plans to make a change when he was older.
“I never said that one day I would tackle this problem. But reading that article planted a seed in me, and here I am now doing this.”
He has actually done it, and on Sunday, as he attempts to complete the marathon in a sub-four hours time, both fellow runners and spectators would do well to give him a cheer or a high five and some encouragement.