Nokubonga Qampi became known as the “Lion Mama” in South Africa after she killed one of three men raping her daughter and wounded the others. She was charged with murder – but after a public outcry the prosecution was halted, and she was able to focus her efforts on her daughter’s recovery.

It was the middle of the night when the telephone call came, waking Nokubonga from her sleep.

The girl at the other end of the line was just 500m away – and she said Nokubonga’s daughter, Siphokazi, was being raped by three men they all knew well.

Nokubonga’s first response was to call the police, but there was no answer. She knew, anyway, that it would take them time to reach her village, in the rolling green and brown hills of South Africa’s Eastern Cape province.

She was the only person that could help.

“I was scared, but then I was forced to go because it was my daughter,” she said.

“I was thinking that when I get there, she might be dead… Because she knew the perpetrators, and because they knew her and knew she knows them, they might think they had to kill her so she couldn’t report them.”

Siphokazi had been visiting friends in a group of four small houses in the same village but had been left alone, asleep, when her friends went out at 01:30. Then three men who had been drinking in one of the other houses attacked her.

“I took it for me, for walking the distance between here and where the incident was taking place, because it is not safe,” she says. “It was dark and I had to use the torch on my phone to light the way.”

She heard her daughter’s screams as she approached the house. On entering the bedroom, the light from her phone enabled her to make out the awful sight of her daughter being raped.

“I was scared… I just stood by the door and asked what they were doing. When they saw it was me, they came charging towards me, that’s when I thought that I needed to defend myself, it was an automatic reaction,” Nokubonga says.

Nokubonga refuses to go into detail about what happened next.

The judge in the court case against the attackers said Nokubonga’s testimony showed she had “become very emotional” as she saw one of the men raping her daughter, while the other two stood nearby with their trousers round their ankles, waiting to take their turn again.

Judge Mbulelo Jolwana went on to say, “I understood her to mean that she was overcome with anger.” But in recounting the story now, all Nokubonga will admit to was fear – for herself and her daughter – and her face betrays only sadness and pain.

It’s clear, though, that when the men charged at Nokubonga she fought back with her knife – and that as she stabbed them they tried to flee, with one even jumping out of a window. Two were seriously injured, and the other died.