Everybody needs someone to look out for them, but the social fabric around young white men doesn't need as much repairing

Earlier this month I was asked during a public conversation why white young men do not die at the rates of black young men. Who is protecting them? Or is that what's protecting them?

I am experiencing some kind of Groundhog Day. I feel as if I said this yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. If you have heard, don't stop reading.

As you may know, levels of violent death are never uniformly distributed across the sexes. That's a well-established finding from research. Males die from violence at much higher rates than females. You may also be aware that age is a significant predictor of dying from violence.  

But here are other variables that put an individual at risk of dying from violence: how much money you have, where you live, and race among others. There are studies from the United States and from Europe, and a few from Africa, in support of this. In South Africa you are more likely to die violently, on average, when you are male, in your late teens or early adulthood years, when you are black or coloured as opposed to white and Indian, live in a poor and low-income neighbourhood, live in a metro than in the more rural municipalities, live in Cape Town in comparison to Tshwane. Those are only some of the variables.

However, the question I was asked though is why: why are young white men at a decreased risk from dying prematurely? One of the major reasons is because men who do not achieve socially respected masculinity are likely live in or get into violent situations. Say that again? They are likely to live in or get into violent situations. That is to say, an attempt to achieve culturally valued manhood is interwoven with other reasons. Some of these are structural and others personal.

Studies show that, for instance, Khayelitsha has higher levels of homicide than Constantia. Why is this so? Because young men who live in Constantia are better protected against assaults or murder. It’s not only because of the alarms, spikes, and barbed wires. It’s because of conditions in the two areas. It’s because of their life circumstances, which in the end reduces the choices available to them to make something of themselves, that young men in Khayelitsha, most of whom are unemployed, will put themselves at greater risk of victimisation while trying to get recognition and success as men.

It's a damning situation. You can die slowly and on your feet from poverty, hunger, and distress. Or you can go out, in a world that says risk is good, take your chances and be shot to death.

Of course the risk a stock market trader takes is different from the risk a would-be bank robber takes. They are all trying to get money. But the risks for the latter can be deadly. The one with his qualifications has a lawful space to take risks with other people's monies; the other, whose education has left him standing at the corner with few prospects, has very few opportunities this side of the law and so steps outside of it. 

This is not to condone criminality. It is to explain the difference between young white men and young black men. The difference, which looks like one of race, like it is essentially racial in nature, is actually about historical economic advantages and the legacies of inequality. Social and economic advantages mean life advantages. It contributes towards a longer, safer, and happier life. Historical socio-economic discrimination imply that young black men today will find it harder to enjoy a happy, protected and long life.

But they were born after apartheid, I have heard it said. Their parents were not. Those parents raised them, for better or worse. Those parents may not have jobs today. If they have, those parents are not able to support them to go to university or with connections to get an internship into a good company. And most of those young men who die still live with the abjection that their parents experienced under apartheid.    

In societies that are racially and economically highly unequal the odds to get respect are stacked against young poor black men then. Whereas young middle-class and rich white men live in conditions that offer them protection, young poor black men have decreased safety nets. The conditions that make some young men better protected include things like a having a room of one's own instead of living in a small crowded house. Being able to spend time surfing the net as opposed to standing at the corner also helps. Surfing the net will keep you off the street. Having a job as opposed to standing at the corner will keep you out of trouble for a chunk of the day. Having a car instead of walking past a group of young men standing at the corner will get you past the corner. If that corner is next to a place where people drink, that adds to the risk. If you like to get drunk, it does not help: alcohol tends to make some people more likely to get into fights. If you are a teenager or young adult and your own father and mother are drinkers or even just disengaged from you, that removes a layer of social protection. All these factors multiply the risk as they interact. 

There are other factors that put some and not other young black men at increased risk of premature death. These are psychosocial.  They are gendered. Because of their psychosocial vulnerabilities and feelings of not being valued by society, young men may lash out at those nearest to them. The historical gender system denied their fathers their manhood which the sons are trying to regain, the traditionalist cultural system of gender has miseducated them, the education system has warped their sense of social equality, and the economic system excludes them. Men’s violence, then, often enough functions towards deflecting their internal states of vulnerability of being a surplus group. They get violent with women or engage in fights with other men to deal with feelings of hopelessness, anxiety, abandonment or insecurity. Some of this violence will go unremarked or have any visible consequence. Yet this violence is what puts a man at risk of dying violently. In a situation where another man is unwilling to walk away or talk things over, the ensuing argument is likely to result in injury or death of one of the protagonists. As the South African police have said, over 50% of what they call “social fabric-related murders and attempted murders result from arguments which subsequently deteriorate into fights”.

White young men don't die at the same rates as black young men because they have much better protection. They have far more opportunities to achieve culturally successful manhood without resorting to physical violence. And unlike young black men, the socio-economic fabric around young white males does not need as much repairing.       

Connecting can save your life and make you happier, man

Like some men, it took me a long while to fully realise that durable relationships and reciprocal connections were pretty much all there is. Make that the majority of men. Many of us, and nearly all young men, act as if sex is completely and incontrovertibly central to their lives. Not relationship, coitus. At least they talk that way.

Without regular copulation, I have heard some men state, they would die. If there is no sex, more than a few have even said, there is no relationship. That's what we are led to believe by other men, some women, pornography, quite a number of tv shows, women's mags, men's mags, and, if we didn't think so before we saw Mapona Volume 1, what we make others believe. But if you believe this partial rendering of your own being at 25, you better come right because it doesn't hold at 52. Soon you are going to have to start accepting that you got it terribly mixed-up. You got sex confused with connection, with acceptance, with what it means to be young and oh so cool. Even old presidents and world economic leaders confuse and are confused about this stuff.

What I think many of us are mistakenly looking for in beautiful young bodies is precisely this hard to describe enjoyment we confuse with sexual fun. Actually, the majority of women got and were socialised into it early on in their lives - while hanging out with their mothers and grandmothers - far more than you as a man got. Not in so many words, but girls more than boys learn without direct teaching that quality connection makes us more secure and happier. It turns out that connectedness to others also makes us healthier and live longer.

You didn't get the lessons in relationships as a boy because, in South Africa at least, the father and grandfather and older men who can give you the education about boy-stuff to match the education girls get have themselves disconnected, absconded, checked out from the families, even while they may be in the house or neighbourhood. In a research paper released in April 2011, the South African Institute of Race Relations said that the proportion of South African children with absent but living fathers in 2009 was nearly 1 in 2. At 30% black children had the lowest proportion of present fathers and Indians at 85% had the highest. 

It isn't sex that is central to our lives as men (and women) then. But don't get me wrong, sex is good. And good sex can be really awesome. It reconnects you to your body, and in some cases, your heart and mind. The question is, what makes sex good? Is it because the person you copulated with is so hot, so supple, so wild, so rich or so kinky you feel as if you just came into the world? Is it because you did it in the backseat of the car, the church graveyard, and the public toilets? Is it because you just did to her or him what you have always fantasised your tribe doing to the other tribe? I think not. 

What all of these factors indicate is that sex holds inexhaustible potential. There are myriad factors that go into making sex fantastic, from with whom you do it, where you have it, why, with what, and when in your life. Sometimes what kills the sexual mood can be as unrelated as worries about bills, something that your boss said to you last Friday, someone cutting in front of you in traffic, or not finding your favourite bread at the store. But the elusive nature of pleasure and innumerable factors that make it mind-blowing when it is good, also indicates that these spaces, fantasies, and sexual objects (in the Freudian sense), do not exhaust the potential of sex.

What makes sex an axis of what is good, and so damn confusing at times, in the world is more than the physical. The difference between sex that makes you feel good and good sex that leaves a bad taste in your mouth is reciprocity and recognition. I know, sometimes friends dispute this and argue that it's because one has never been fellated by a sexy foreigner who will never be seen again, otherwise I would not be going on about all this mutuality and sharing. Maybe not. Until such time, and following such unbelievable lasting happiness that I change my mind, I will stick with connection, communication, and intimacy. What keeps a man up between the rounds, I think, is being looked at in a certain way by a lover or spouse. That feeling of incompleteness even after coming hard is because, though you may not know it, you want to be touched, spoken to, told you are good - even if you are not so great. You might not know it at the moment, but you feel disppointed even though she or he is hot because what you are really missing is for her or him to wear your shirt, smile at you, tell you something interesting, listen to cds with you. 

It took me to be in another country, free to do as I please, to figure this out. And I am a psychologist for goodness sake. Also, I come from a people who almost on a daily basis use words like botho, motho, setho: that's not botho, that's what setho means, you gotta do that if you are motho, and all that cultural jazz. Botho is nothing if not connectedness. Setho is about being-fully-present-in-relationship, and thus motho is one of who cares about the other, and by extension the world.  

Since I mentioned communication, and at times talking on a phone or smsing that seems the only worthy kind of connection nowadays, of course being connected means far more than choosing a Vodacom, MTN, Cell-C, 8ta or any other cell-phone services provider. Connectedness of course goes far beyond getting sexually connected, we have said that enough times now. Being connected to others - and, in this case, the more quality partners the better - could mean literally the difference between a long healthy life and dying young if you are a young man. It could mean the difference between happiness and suicide. Being securely attached to your son, father, grandparents, mother, sister, daughter, teacher, student, peers, colleagues, dog, whatever makes you feel recognised and valued - it makes a difference.  

'Makgaiso Adelise Mapeshoane with her daughter, grandson, and great-grandson, at a traditional ceremony introducing the great-grandson to his people, Vosloorus, Gauteng Province, April 2011

But the connectedness of young black men or lack thereof could make a differnce to your life too, whoever you are: woman, old, white, rich, or poor. Since the deadly male-male violence spills out of the group, working to undo the social disconnect many young black men experience demands far more attention that it is receiving.

This post was, I need to say now, was inspired by among others Jean Redpath's article on the disconnectedness or otherwise of young black men in Busines Day of 22 August 2011. What I liked about the article is Redpath's stress on the importance of connection. After reflecting on the disproportionate homicidal victimisation of young black men in South Africa and Brazil, Redpath states that from her research on victimisation in Galeshewe township in Kimberly, Northern Province of South Africa, the most important protective factors against becoming a victim of violent crime is associated to the connectedness of men. Actually, we know from some very good studies on schooling and organisation, connectedness is of uncontested significance to many other things and not just victimisation. I'd say it's time we reverse the serious and mind-boggling neglect of the concept in present-day South Africa, especially as it has do with young black male lives. It's time to restart reconnecting because being connected to others is a predictor of things like staying and finishing school, performance, health, and happiness, not just staying alive. Ok, let me say that again: in South Africa, connectednes is important because it can save lives, specifically of young black men. But surely it is important for each of us and the cohesiveness and conviviality of society . 

Fashioning Masculinity Retrospective 1 - Making Visible Uncelebrated Black Manhoods

Fashioning Masculinity, the event we anticipated and prepared for over the last seven months has come and gone. We are hoping the event starts a tradition of thinking about men as men with nuanced and careful deliberation.

In the first of a series of posts, I want to tell you some about the making of the event, and let you into some of the unseen activities that went into this new tradition we are trying to start. Now granted, we borrowed, like most traditions do from elsewhere. Masculinities and the thinking around it and its contestations has a history and we are inheritors and borrowers and also we would like to think innovators in this conversation about the makings of men.

The history of masculinity, as a concept that is good to think with, is tied to feminism of course and the recognition that gender is an organizing feature of society. Feminism, in turn, moves to resist patriarchy and overturn the oppression of women. Thus, the genesis of masculinity studies is aimed at understanding men as men. Feminist masculinity scholars  and activists are connected by the desire to uncover how and why men as a gender receive patriarchal dividends from the subjugation of females, de Beauvoir's second sex. Progressive black masculinity studies are provoked by black men's condition as oppressed, suffering from an unformed, deformed or denied masculinity, escaping into alcohol, drugs, rape, unsafe sex and beating black women. (This reality of black women bearing the brunt of black men's anger of course occurs in the world despite the mostly unfounded fears and discourse of white women as the object of black men's insatiable lusts). Right there we can see the ties to Black Studies. And then of course there is Critical Race and Subaltern Studies which make sense of black man's violence through the concepts of alienation and hypermasculinity driven by deprivation and inequality.

Kopano Ratele's innovation in this tradition is to consider black men not merely from their pains and psychic wounds but from their transcendence of their wounds. For every one black man who does not abuse a woman, there are at least three who live in the world with kindness, gentleness, community of spirit and care; this despite suffering the pangs of hunger, want in a world that maligns and wounds them in ways too large to comprehend and so small  we barely think it significant. How have these men been fashioned? Which traditions of care and self-love are they drawing upon? And how can we reproduce these traditions to create a kinder, gentler and enabling world for everyone? The stories of the good and nurturing black father, lover, son, brother, friend, colleague and comrade, the ones we can learn from, are largely unwritten, untold and unexplored. Some of these stories are as inspiring as they are common like that of Tyrese Bani and Vuyani Mnyamana, young men who grew up hard but have learned that disciplining the body can be a vehicle to changing oneself on the route to elsewhere. The statuesque Tyrese Bani from Port Elizabeth is a model and budding photographer doing his Bachelor of Arts degree. The articulate science student, body-builder Vuyani Mnyamana, has a low centre of gravity and a cool demeanour. Both are completing their studies at the University of the Western Cape. When they start to talk about working on their bodies at the gym, getting up at 5am before they go to their classes, something else you can't miss is how men are made, not born.  You also see and hear what is there, and made possible by other black men, but very much ignored in favour of the tsotsi, skelm and swagerring dominant image of young black men. 

 

Model Tyrese Bani and body-builder Vuyani Mnyamana, both students at UWC, in conversation with masculinity scholar Kopano Ratele and Kharnita Mohamed (not in picture) of the Institute for Social and Health Science's Programme on Traditions and Transformation, at the Fashioning Masculinity event on 16 August 2011



This starting premise, of masculinity of care, is what founded the Fashioning Masculinity event, and the series of events to follow: a critical exploration of black manhood that is not mired in despair. We desire to start a conversation about a black man many of us recognise in our everyday dealings with the men who sit around our boardroom tables, in our offices, at our dinner tables and who share our beds, our homes, our blood. When we stop to think about them, these good black men, we blindly count ourselves lucky and treat them as exceptions and not as a seventy-five percent majority, so as to comfortably hold onto the stereotypes of that other black man raging in a township, a suburb, or a mansion somewhere.

Are we trying to excuse and ignore the pain and suffering caused by the angry black man so wounded he is cannibalising himself and those around him? No! We are trying to make visible the unacknowledged, uncelebrated, everyday and kind black manhoods that already exist. We are trying to surface the kind of masculinities that already exist not in our academic perches but in the same township, suburb or mansion in the tired and yet persevering voice of a man trying to advise another on a better way to live with himself and those who love and/or would love him. These are the masculinities that men like Stephen Mentor, men's programme coordinator at CASE, is also trying to bring to the surface. Working out of Hanover Park on the Cape flats, a place riven by endemic structural, direct, and psychical violence Mentor and his male and female colleagues are trying to heal and change men's relationshisp with other men and women in their lives so as to change the place.



Stephen Mentor, men's programme coordinator at CASE, speaking about presenting the organisation's work in Hanover Park at the Fashioning Masculinity event


In allowing ourselves to rethink traditions of masculinity, we hope to provide space for positive traditions that exist to thrive. One thing that I was reminded of by Nadia Sanger and Melanie Judge at the event is that masculinity is not just tied to having a penis. Disconnecting masculinity from penises brings us to the optimistic realisation that traditions can be transformed to make all of us, men and women, girls and boys, flourish.
  




Feminists Nadia Sanger and Melanie Judge at Fashioning Masculinity event, MRC, 16 August 2011

 

Address by Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe during the National Women’s Conference, Boksburg, Gauteng, 03 August 2011

Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe addressing the National Women's Conference, Boksburg, Gauteng, 3 August 2011:

"Changing patriarchal attitudes and practices goes to the centre of democracy and the spirit of the South African Constitution. 

The opportunity is that there is recognition that patriarchy and economic exclusion are the root of discrimination against women and a lot of attempts are being made through policies and legislation at government level, and research and training at civil society level, to change these attitudes.

Policy and legislation are critical in changing practices based on patriarchal attitudes and behaviour but it is difficult to legislate the attitudes away.  For this purpose, there needs to be work that is focusing on attitudinal change.

The global strategy to transform gender relations should also include continuous education and the creation of spaces to debate issues relating to patriarchy, women’s empowerment and gender equality."

http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/pebble.asp?relid=4583

Update on Fashioning Masculinity event

Fashioning Masculinity, which  we spoke of a few weeks ago, is ready to roll in. The event will take place on Tuesday 16 August 2011, 8h30 to 17h00, at the Medical Research Council in Parow, Cape Town. An interdisciplinary event hosted by UNISA's Institute for Social and Health Sciences  in collaboration with the MRC-UNISA Safety and Peace Promoion Research Unit,  the event is meant to be a stage to kindle some new and less despairing thinking about masculinities and the way in which manhood is fashioned, created, styled, imagined, challenged, enlarged, reworked - you name it. Another set of thoughts I hope will come through is on traditions: what are the traditions of thinking about and fashioning masculinities. After all, this event is part of the Changing Traditions Project. Regardless, the programme so far is highly promising. Proposed topics include 'what defines men'; 'female masculinities'; 'metrosexuality'; 'Zimbabwean masculinities in exile'; 'black rage and Baldwin, Biko, Malcolm, Mbeki, and Malema'; 'masculinities in the police'; 'masculinities in the army', 'rugby'; 'blindess', 'male-biased architecture'. I'm looking forward to some ideas about men and traditions of masculine self-fashioning, representation and stylization coming through. I think there is still space. If you are around Cape Town, then, make contact either with Kharnita Mohamed kmohamed@mrc.ac.za 021 938-0398 or Candice Rule crule@mrc.ac.za 021-938-0535.

Fantasies about the unsettled past at the Apartheid Archives Conference

It turns out that nostalgia is a heck of messy thing. I guess memory itself is always less than entirely reliable, indeed wily. That much was clear at the 3^rd Apartheid Archives Conference that happened this past week, 25 to 29 July 2011, at Wits University, under the theme ‘narratives, nostalgia and nationhoods’. I know that I am part of the Apartheid Archives Project (AAP) network, but this baby was a mind-blowing event.

Nostalgia, since it reflects and restores, certainly isn’t simple sentimental reminiscence. In fact, being often a treacherous fantasy, it can betray memory, fictionalise reality. A painful yearning for home that is no longer there, it is also not just bittersweet memory for the past, pining for lost time. Instead nostalgia, a symbolic return, often coloured by trauma, stages an encounter between history and memory while trying to act as guide for the future that often is coloured by unspoken shame and guilt in the present. To reflect on nostalgia is to encounter the good old bad days, what Professor Leswin Laubscher, member of AAP, referred to as ‘ache for an absent other, or an irretrievable self’.



Leswin Laubscher at 3AAC. The poet and scholar Gabeba Baderoon
is in the background (photo: Ratele).

But you probably knew that from Jacob Dlamini’s book. Or maybe not. Or like Eric Miyeni and others dislike the book. Dlamini, a homeboy of mine whom I met for the first time at 3AAC, where he was one of 8 keynote speakers, has been getting a lot of grief from Miyeni, Andile Mngxitama, and others for his book Native Nostalgia for remembering black life in apartheid-era Katlehong the way he does. Mngxitama says it reproduces a white perspective; refers to the book as giving an Oprahesque view of township existence. In Miyeni’s words, Dlamini’s book’s premise is “so sickening I decided never to read it”. How does that work: getting sick from imagining what a book contains? Come on Mr Miyeni, you do your name an injustice. The chutzpah of writing in a column about a book you have not read is admirable; but I think it gives a crutch to the pervasive anti-book reading culture that I want to think a book-writing man like you in a more calmer moment would not support. Read the book, only then you can trash it. Actually, in my reading of Native Nostalgia, which featured so much at the 3AAC, it does not say “we had fun under apartheid”. It illustrates that black people actually had a life even then, despite the inhumanity of the regime. In my book, the book is an uncomfortably fine read (except for the earlier parts when it keeps on promising what it will do later), at once touching and maddening and provocative. I recommend it, precisely because of how he interprets subjects who would say “Things were better under apartheid”. Gutsy, smart writing.  

Jacob Dlamini at 3AAC (photo: Ratele)



Although all this black-on-black skirmish is about what the apartheid past looked like, did to us, what we did and were back then, and how to think about the unsetlled past, I am getting a bit sidetracked aren't I. Back to the AAC. Things were never what they seemed under apartheid, needless to say. In trying to engineer a future white utopia, apartheid turned out to be a pornographic fantasy gone awry, and not just for many ordinary black people. But it didn’t just end there. The regime did not only soil the future for black people (and white people), it would make the past a shameful place for any ethical white person. Anyhow, that’s what I got at 3AAC.



You might not be familiar with the AAP, so here is what it is all about. A loose formation of international group of actors from different fields of enquiry and practice, it’s led by Professors Norman Duncan (in picture below) and Garth Stevens. The main goal is to make sense of South Africans’ stories (but not only South African stories) of racism under the old regime. It is interested in the persisting consequences of the past racist order on personal and collective functioning in today’s society. Yes, indeed, the past is dead, long live the past! The Project “is fundamentally premised on the understanding that traumatic experiences from the past will constantly attempt to re-inscribe themselves (often in masked form) in the present, if they are not acknowledged, interrogated and addressed.” It argues that “it is important for South African society [and doubtless any society which has pasts characterised by racist division, legislated or otherwise] to review, so as to acknowledge and deal with its past, in order to better manage its present and future.”



Norman Duncan, leader of the AAP (photo: Ratele)

Zimitri Erasmus and Garth Stevens, co-leader of the AAP (photo: Ratele)



With nostalgia and nationhoods added to the foundational theme of narrative then, 3AAC was set to offer a stage “to explore various deployments of nostalgia in personal narratives of the past, emphasising its critical and creative possibilities.” And what possibilities! As a few people said, at the end you were not sure what nostalgia is and what the past wasn’t. Along the way, we lost nationhoods, but that is ok; we had our hands and ears full of memories of the unsettled pasts, nevermind the future. As the organisers had promised, the conference brought “into conversation a diversity of scholars critically engaged with nostalgia as a means to expand social memory, reclaim and reconfigure subjugated knowledge(s) and experience(s), to produce new knowledge(s) and new subjectivities; surface ways in which nostalgia is employed not only as a means of reconstructing historical knowledge and subjectivities but also as ‘a set of resources for the future’”. It did all of that. And how it did it. Then it did some: how did they manage to have Nadine Gordimer, William Kentridge, Chris van Wyk, Hugh Masekela, Zoe Wicomb all there, I ask? Impressive.

I am not sure why I experienced a pleasant feeling seeing the trumpet master Bra Hugh helping the 1991 Literture Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer take off her coat (see a not very clear image below). I enjoyed the work that Kentridge presented. Chris van Wyk talked about township dogs, and he was tears-down-the-cheeks-fall-off-the-chair hilarious. Wicomb, who was generous with her time to the conference, having given one of the keynote addresses and sitting through all of the conference talks, read a new story in progress. She is intriguing, even from her look, Wicomb is. The five artists were brought together for the event moderated by another fine South African, Mark Gevisser, the biographer of Thabo Mbeki. It was unbelievable stuff; perhaps historical. You had to be there to experience it. Make a date to be at the next AAC in 2013 when it is likely to be next staged. 

Hugh Masekela helping Nadine Gordimer take off her coat (photo: Ratele).

Traditions of service

So, off we went to Zambia to present at the 6th African Regional Safe Communities Conference. It was a good conference. A lot of people who are invested in doing the painstaking work of attempting to create a safer, more peaceful, kinder and gentler world for all.

Anyway whilst in Livingstone, I went to the ATM to do my bit for the Zambian economy and of course to buy some commodified tradition to make my Zambian experience authentic. As you get to know me, you will learn I get attached to particular machines in foreign countries. My first meeting with that particular ATM had been spectacularly successful the day before. The next day however though this machine greeted me cordially, it could not assist me. So, off I went to the next machine feeling a little rejected and disappointed (well actually a lot disappointed and rejected). A long queue informed me that it was not merely me that the other machine had refused service to. This cheered me up,  no-one after all, likes to be the sole rejectee of their favorite machine.

One of my fellow rejectees however, was rejected again at the new machine and what was more had just been robbed by the new machine. It had taken his money out of his account without giving him any Zambian Kwachas in return. Aw, I commisserated even though I really didn't care about his plight and was convinced that the new machine would never do to special special me what it had done to him.

Well, I'm sure you know ... do I have to say it? Really, I mean, really? So, the new machine took my money out of my account and did not give me Kwachas to buy more things I don't really need but am convinced I do.

I went inside to the bank. The bank incidentally was inside a Shoprite (a South African supermarket chain). I spoke to the woman behind the counter cordially and told her about the new machine. Was I shocked when she said well, there is nothing she can do. I should take my ATM slip and go back to South Africa and have my bank resolve it. Nothing, she wanted to do nothing. She wanted me to meekly go away and not bother her with the theft of my money by her bank's machine.

Can you tell I kicked up a ruckus and refused to enter the bank to take the scene I was creating out of the public eye. No, their bank had robbed me, I said loudly, and they would not do anything and so forth. Give me some proof to take home, I insisted. No, she said she couldn't do anything. Not check the thieving ATM which was sending in a queue of people behind me to complain about the theft of their money. Eventually one of her male colleagues slipped her a form to give to me about twenty minutes, a lot of loud insistence and a good deal of lost faith in the Zambian banking system later. I filled it in, they stamped it, I asked why they could not have just given me the form in the first place. It was only for Zambian customers, foreigners had to go home and fill in their own countries forms or something responsibility-shirking like that.

I don't know how it works in Zambia but in South Africa when you interact with an institution, you have to follow the tradition of providing a paper trail. I went to my bank, exhausted and saddened, my memory of Zambia now clouded by the machines who would not care for me and the bankers who would refuse to right the wrongs of their machines. I took my bank my little form and told my sad story. My bank official was horrified, that I, a citizen of this wondrous land could be so misused in that foreign place. She cared for me. She called the other banking people and made them care about my sad little story and the twenty minutes she spent with me felt like she was making Herculean banking efforts for me.

And there it was, a tradition of service. I didn't care if I got my money back. I cared that I was cared for by an impersonal institution. Institutions who set down policies, dry, standardised boring to read policies about customer service set traditions of caring or uncaring as the case may be. Although I am with my bank for financial reasons, on the day their traditions and policies of care enfolded me, they now have my loyalty. I did get my money back, in two weeks. Not because my bank is caring but because I had insisted on following authorising traditions by demanding a piece of paper as witness to back up my claim. I broke the tradition of silent consumer who has been cheated in Zambia.

So, what do we get out of that. I do not trust the Zambian banking system, their policies are uncaring of me. South Africa is much much better. And all the machines are my friend.