13 such knowledge if he could have acquired it by exercising reasonable care.’ The knowledge which is required is the minimum necessary to enable a creditor to institute action: Nedcor Bank Bpk v Regering van die Republiek van Suid-Afrika 2001 (1) SA 987 (SCA) at para 13. The ascribing of blame to a particular defendant is a necessary element of any claim in delict. [19] Prescription penalizes unreasonable inaction not inability to act. Where, therefore, the statute speaks of prescription beginning to run when a wrong is ‘first brought to the knowledge of the creditor’, it presupposes a creditor who is capable of appreciating that a wrong has been done to him or her by another: cf Wulfes v Commercial Union Assurance Co of SA Ltd 1969 (2) SA 31 (N) at 37A and SA Mutual Fire and General Insurance Co Ltd v Mapipa 1973 (3) SA 603 (E) at 608F609D. The existence of s 7 (which suspends prescription in five specific instances) does not detract from this conclusion. In the first place suspension can only take place if the running of prescription has commenced. Perhaps more important is the fact that there exists a category of creditor (the person abused as a child who has reached adulthood before commencing the action) who does not necessarily fall into any of the categories of suspension and who should be accommodated within the legislative framework if that can be achieved without doing violence to the language. Such a person is not non compos mentis. Nor is he or she incapable of rational thought. What the evidence shows is that the process of reasoning and the development of insight have been distorted in the child’s psyche when it comes to an appreciation of where responsibility lies. (I assume in this regard that the legislature used the expression