ROSE THAMAE is proud of the old-style black bicycles, each with a rudimentary metal carrier above the front wheel, propped up in the back room of the dimly lit tin shack. “Those are our new ambulances. We use them to take sufferers to the clinic,” she explains.

Few normal ambulances venture into Orange Farm, the sprawling township of 200,000 people 20 miles south of Johannesburg, particularly at night. It is a place where routine rape contributes to South Africa having some of the highest Aids infection rates in the world.

Ms Thamae, who is HIV-positive after suffering two gang rapes, set up Let Us Grow, a grassroots organisation dedicated to fighting the rapists and helping their victims, seven years ago.

Some members sleep with torches under their pillows so that they can search for survivors as soon as they hear the tell-tale sounds.

Ms Thamae added: “Rape is a terrible thing to have to deal with. Some of the girls who come here just keep crying. If you go to the court, you end up being like a monkey at the zoo. The police keep saying there is not ‘full’ evidence. What do they mean by ‘full’. We know who these people are.”

With public hospitals and social services unable to cope with the number of Aids sufferers, her group concentrates on home-based care, often taking patients to the clinic only at the very end.

Ms Thamae’s work includes counselling, lobbying to obtain anti-retroviral drugs and fighting against rape and sexual violence, a campaign that has put her on the front line of the most controversial issues in modern South Africa. She rarely has a day without confronting death.

On the day that The Times visited her two-room shack, she was comforting a shy young girl who had recently discovered that she was HIV-positive after a gang attack a few weeks before.

“She is coming to terms with it, but it is hard. I get so angry when I talk to the boys, too. Sometimes they say they know they are HIV-positive and just don’t want to die alone,” she said.

The Government is desperate to shed South Africa’s image as one of the world’s most violent countries and show that it is winning the war on crime. Amid great fanfare two weeks ago, the South African Police Service unveiled crime statistics showing that most violent crime was declining, an assertion met with enormous public scepticism, shared by diplomats and analysts.

More controversially, the police service reported a 5.7 per cent decrease in rape and claimed that the figure was the lowest since the first non- apartheid government took office in 1994. The figures infuriated anti-rape activists, who accused the Government of downplaying the true extent of the problem, particularly the link between the soaring HIV rates and rape. Gang rape accounts for 75 per cent of all cases.

Charlene Smith, one of the country’s leading white anti-rape activists, who survived a rape and stabbing, wrote about the country having the highest rates of rape in the world, but said that many women were forced to lie about the attacks and withdraw cases.

“The South Africa Law Commission estimates there are 1.69 million rapes per year, but on average only 54,000 rape survivors lay charges each year. Why? It’s because rape survivors are treated so badly by so many,” she wrote. She said that better treatment of survivors by medical, police, and court personnel would result in far more women coming forward to report cases.

The extent of the problem is horrifying. The National Institute for Crime Prevention and Rehabilitation estimates that only one in some twenty rapes is reported to the police. It concludes that a rape occurs every 83 seconds.

Whatever the exact figure, sexual violence pervades society. One in four girls faces the prospect of being raped before the age of 16. There are astonishingly high figures of domestic violence and child abuse.

Delphine Serumaga, of the lobby group People Opposed to Women Abuse, said: “We would argue that police figures are faulty. At various levels in police stations, reporting is not done accurately.

“This is a legacy of the past. Before 1994, these issues were not covered. Rape, torture, beatings were all part of the brutality that was going on.”

Ms Serumaga said that the Government had introduced measures to combat the problem, but the stigma attached to reporting rape remained.

“Report rates are now increasing, but there is still a belief in many parts of society that a woman can’t just get raped. She must have contributed to it in some way,” she said.

Ms Smith’s article infuriated President Mbeki, who labelled her arguments racist and said that they were typical of whites who did not want to accept progress in the new South Africa. “This ‘internationally recognised expert’ was saying that our cultures, traditions and religions as Africans inherently make every African man a potential rapist,” he said.

Tony Leon, leader of the opposition Democratic Alliance, said that Mr Mbeki had scored yet another “own goal in the fight against rape, HIV/Aids, crime in South Africa” by trying to drown out all criticism by his constant use of the race card. “The only person for whom this is a race issue is Thabo Mbeki,” he said.

Ms Smith, a former underground operative for the African National Congress, added: “I have written time and again that is nothing to do with race or malehood. Mbeki just has a problem with issues around sexuality.”

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