With more than 300km already walked and 500km to go, the Rev June Dolley-Major’s awareness campaign is gaining momentum and she has the blistered feet to prove it.
In recent years, Dolley-Major has become vocal about an incident in Makhanda almost 20 years ago and has named a minister as the man who allegedly raped her.
A month ago, she won a case against the alleged perpetrator in the Western Cape High Court after he sought to interdict her from talking about him publicly and in social media posts.
Dolley-Major, 52, has previously embarked on a six-day hunger strike and camped in a tent in front of an Anglican archbishop’s home in her bid to get justice.
More recently, she relayed her ordeal during a tribunal of the Anglican Church which took place under canon law.
The tribunal found the accused not guilty.
As part of her most recent campaign, Dolley-Major started her 900km walk from Sir Lowrey’s Pass to Makhanda — the place where the alleged incident took place.
The campaign is titled “Walk in my shoes, the shoes of a rape survivor”, and it aims to raise awareness of the injustices that rape and gender-based-violence survivors face in SA.
She is accompanied by a fellow activist and friend, Celesthea Pierang.
On Monday, the two woke up in Albertinia ready to start a 36km walk to Kleinberg.
Before they set off, Dolley-Major said she had received a threatening phone call from someone who warned her to watch out because “we are not done with you”.
She said the threats and vilification by others were exactly what rape survivors had to endure every day, hence very few people reported the incidents.
She vowed that she would not be deterred by anyone who tried to silence her.
“The only person I fear is God.”
The walk is set to conclude at the end of October.
The campaign is being used to raise funds to start an advice office for survivors of rape and to challenge certain laws.
Dolley-Major claims that she, the accused, and a family friend had driven to Makhanda in 2002 to look for a school for her son as she planned to study theology there the next year.
She claims she was raped that evening when the man entered her room and allegedly forced himself on her.
In 2016, she took to social media to post about the allegations.
Her reasons for speaking out came after attempts to seek justice through the criminal justice system and church processes failed and she was not believed.
The accused sought urgent protection from the courts in March 2021 on the basis that her posts were defamatory and had caused damage to his good name, reputation and standing in the community.
The court found he did not meet the requirements for a final interdict because the social media posts had been published and had been in the public domain since 2016.
HeraldLIVE