We won’t stop the rapes till we stop the murders in South Africa

Last night CNN flighted the story of the gang-rape of a young South African woman. http://edition.cnn.com/2012/04/18/world/africa/south-africa-rape-video/index.html. It made me feel sick, shamed and nauseous to be a South African man. Angry too.

The story ran several times during different programmes. I am informed that other global news networks also ran with the story. Two of the guests on CCN were the Lulu Xingwana, minister of women, children and people with disabilities and Nomboniso Gasa, former chair of the commission for gender equality. I thought their comments were ok, but nothing new.  They spoke about the enduring legacy of apartheid. They spoke about how unacceptable the levels of violence against women are. Ms Gasa challenged some of the views put forward, and though she was overly gentle, I was glad she didn't let it go without comment.

Then, after recomposing myself, I once again felt that the reportage and comment on rape in South Africa does more than just shame and anger us. It conceals the true picture of what we are facing. It is remiss for news reports and commentators on violence in South Africa not to point out for the country and world that being raped is very bad indeed, but so is being murdered. The rates of death from interpersonal violence for young black men go as high as approximately 500/100 000. That’s a mindboggling number. In comparison, female homicides rates are around 24/100 000 - very high relative to  worldwide figures, but nowhere near the prospects faced by young black males in Nyanga, Thembisa and other low-income urban areas.

Rape is ugly, beastly and can shatter a woman's life, and at rates of approximately 132 per 100 000 for total sexual offences as reported by the SAPS for last year, it might well be true that a young South African woman has more chances of being raped than learn how to read (as CNN said). I doubt it though, and would appreciate it if anyone who knows lets me know where do they get these likelihoods? I don't think it helps us understand any better the violence South Africa is facing to say things like a young black man is more likely to die violently than get a job. That is vulgarly sensationalist. It is enough to state that we are in deep trouble as a society.  

In addressing rape and violence against women, we are where we are still because we refuse to see violence in its different forms in South Africa as affecting women, girls, men, boys. Our response remains piecemeal and our advances against violence slow because the sexual and gender violence against women is inextricably connected to physical violence against and between men. We won’t stop the rapes till we stop the murders. We won’t stop murdering each other with such abandon till we put a stop to the sexual violence.  

Some people say the young will revolt one day. I am afraid the revolution went viral a while back. Offline it's been here for over a decade. Don't just look at the numbers of service delivery protests. Look also at the numbers of rape and homicide; look at the figures for attempted murder, assault GBH and common assault. Look at the suicides and transport-related deaths. Look at the slow death from – where do I start. Hunger, alcoholism, drugs, fat, bad education, hopelessness, they also kill, slowly. Look at AIDS-related deaths. Because we in the middle classes, black and white, do not get the brunt of it, we ignore the direct violence until it gets on CNN, BBC, and Aljazeera. Ignore it till one is directly affected, raped, killed, burgled. The revolt of the young is to shame us, for they long ago ran out of shame.

This is a leaderless revolution because from Mandela to Zuma, without exception, from Khoza to Motsepe and every political and business leader in between, the leaders either are out of ideas how to turn things around, restore meaning to the lives of these young men and women, or they couldn't give a toss for the young black women and men. Forget apartheid, this democracy is a bitch.

The revolution is not for new rights for the old rights and freedom are just not working for them. They don't care about hurting others because they are hurting. They don’t' care because no one cares about them until they get on telly. Maybe young black men may still get to eat the rich in the future, but for now they are starting with their peers and the poor. Welcome to young black male hell.

Anger management: Mandela or Biko?

I've been having conversations about anger a fair amount recently. Anger gets a bad rap you know. Sometimes rightly so. However, if we take our affective states seriously and assume that our emotional responses sometimes are better indications of our relationship to the world and our responses to it than our thinking is, then all anger cannot be bad. Acting on anger without reflection is not so good. Being driven solely by anger is not so good. But so is ignoring anger.

There are different ideas about anger: anger being fear turned inside out; anger being a pathological response or a primitive response. Cultivating anger is to not follow the laudable Ghandi; not be a Nelson Mandela - the later version, the post-prison version. To be angry is to undermine the demonstrations of the natives' capacities for tolerance and to fail at the civilising mission.

If one thinks Mandela's and Ghandi's movements through the anger of a denied justice to the people they both served, with continuing poverty as an indicator of success or failure (depending on what you think blacks and Indian's deserve), then, well, the question is exactly what is so persuasive about what they did? Even Archbishop Tutu has been roused to glorious anger (by Mandela's movement's legacy).

Both these legendary icons, Mandela and Ghandi, transcended the idea of the native: vile, primitive, angry, destroyer and disrespecter of white civilization, misunderstander of the marvelous education at the hands of the refined whites who are genteel, and tolerant and loving. White racism is especially loving when they whip you for your edification. Or infantilise you to remind you of their advanced sensibilities and thus assert the injunction to learn at their soft unlaboring hands. Or when they ever so delicately shudder to think that the shitty hovels the majority of blacks live in is not good enough for their cousins/sisters/random white-faced person. Yet the civilised well-meaning white will declare with certitude that blacks could better themselves or, worse, that they are used to and like those living conditions. Or, well, my favorite evidence of loving, kind whiteliness are those presumptions that the mansions their struggling white selves are living in has nothing to do with the corrugated-frequently-burnt-down-scraps-of-nothing the majority of 'citizens' in this country live in; nothing to do with being maintained by normalised traditions of black hands and sweat at such great cost to the baas and madam; nothing to do with the fact that it would be impossible to have such a life without the cheap black labour. That's why comrade Malema's joke about white maids so tickles us. Now some of us living this fantastic whitely life bequeathed to us by Mandela, we know that our lives are maintained by the self-same cheap black maids, nannies and gardeners whom we pay just enough to move back and forth betwen their hovels and our magnificent residences. 

Why, we - and yes it is we blacks, hell yea - we especially really need the reflection of genteelness and steel to correct that unlove we learnt at the white breast the Mandelas and Ghandis bring to our natural tendency to be caterwauling carnival clowns jumping around maniacally popped up on our primitive rages while tsotsing for basic dignity. Aren't Mandela and Ghandi just so comforting for whites and the new black madams and masters, mostly in their ability to be better than the context that produced them expected, to become the modern-day secular Jesus with cheeks just waiting to be slapped by the non-angry crazy white people who created the conditions in the first place?

Even our new black governement hates that the enraged are not being Mandelaesque and are continuing traditions of protest that allowed him to be Mandela. And really why should they dare to do that, seeing as how the tolerant freedoms didn't turn their families into royalty with treauries to boot or forget that: the genteel un-angry negotiations of freedom didn't even turn them into citizens, except for election years, that is, and that should be enough, a nice cross like all literate people do is a wonderful gift.

Suppressing anger willy nilly without allowing its productive capacities to engender new possibilities to rouse oneself to those moments when your boundaries are transgressed, is to live without a meter of your self-worth. This anger isn't indiscriminate. I met an angry young man in December, one I haven't been able to shake. His anger was ugly. It was unreflective, as if he had forgotten the most basic premise for living, that wherever events occur in his life, he is part of the event, not outside of it. I recall that all he saw was the offence, his abused rights, his trampled dignity. Not once did he pause to accord that same right to dignity to the people room. Not once did his anger and so-called humiliations open the potentials of empathy to ask of his others: "what can I learn from you, even if it is to destroy an ugliness about me that you dare to say"? The funny thing is, he had more than he could ever experience, but his anger had blinded him to the reality of his privilege. He was more powerful than he could imagine, yet his anger rendered him powerless. He was beautiful to look at and compelling to hear if not for what his charisma was directed at. And what his anger produced was an epistemic kind of violence that built progressively and contaminated the room. So that is not the kind of anger I mean: unchanneled, misdirected and self-serving.

Biko seemed angry to me: it was a productive anger. It might have gotten him dead anger, but then he would rather have been dead and proud and klapping policemen back so that oppression would not be an easy task for the oppressor. We don't know how the years might have softened his anger or swelled it, we just don't. But he did get to leave us a legacy of dead and proud.

Anger wasn't about fear for Biko. Nor was it about the threat of humiliation.

Anger was about right and expectation and the certainty that to be human meant not accepting the klap and turning the cheek. About the fact that to be human meant to understand the right to dignity, the right to recognition and mostly and, so reductively, that anger was about marvellous, wondrous and a deep, deep self-love, self-respect and an affirming kindness to the self.

For Biko anger was, and for me anger is about giving kindness where it was, is, due; anger is about making alliances across boundaries of injustice to practice self-love and love for an other that too has been trained in traditions of self-hate and disparagement. Anger is in service of love without forsaking the fury and rage in the places it belongs: with those who are hateful, with those who are unwilling to love and care based on dermal evidence, with those who need to make a superior/inferior self through hateful Apartheid ideologies.

It seems an awful choice for us mere humans, if our anger only enables us to be martyrs or secular prophets. No, I think we need to learn that middle-ground. We need to learn to both value and control our anger so as to marshal its productive capacities. There really is more than enough room for raging against the machine. Why aren't more of us angry? I love Mandela still, but I can't understand how he brought us here.

The shadow of the president's father and his collective handling by different mothers

Firstly I think it is basically my background, how I grew up. I come from a large family. I lost my father when I was very young. I don’t even know him properly. I just know the shadow of him. I therefore grew up in a kind of a collective handling by elderly people. Also because my mother had to go and be a domestic worker and could not stay with me all the time, I was handled by different mothers. All this and more made me appreciate Ubuntu, a culture of respect, which I was taught very strongly. Up to today you would never hear me losing respect, even when there is political debate, I don’t. And I believe even when you disagree with a person you still have to give that person respect, whether old or young people. I think this, to me, was a critical element that moulded me into what I am.

The speaker is Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma, president of South Africa. He is being interviewed by Elias Mnyadu and Adriaan Groenewald. (The full interview can found here: http://www.iol.co.za/business/business-news/q-a-with-zuma-1.1137856). The question put to him was, "what do you consider to have best prepared you to fulfil the task (of CEO of South Africa)"?

With my interest in question of boys and men, how we raise boys and how we father,  I was naturally struck by his answer. The first thing that got hold of my attention is how he starts with his family circumstances, in particular the loss of his father when he was very young, as well as being raised by different mothers and elderly people. Not his experience as a worker, trade unionist and leader in the liberation movement in South Africa. He mentions these other shaping influences, but he appears to give primacy to his family circumstances.

The second is his choice of words. He talks about being handled - "collective handling by elderly people" and "handled by different mothers". Perhaps this is a metaphorical rendering of the Zulu word, "ukuphathwa", and nothing more should be made of it. 

However, I want to think that Zuma, a master of the Zulu language, could have chosen other words. He could have spoken about being raised - ukukhuliswa - or gone on and used 'grow' that he mentions at the beginning.

I suspect that he used "handle" because wanted to communicate something more, in his own subtle way. That something more is being fathered and having your mother home every night. It is about presence. About a steadfast and intimate support that all children should take for granted. Zuma wanted to tell about the difficulties of a black boy growing up in a disrupted family life during apartheid. Not in so many words, he says, being without a father and my mother being away at the kitchens, I had to be strong, although I still got to learn about admirable stuff connectedness to others and respect.

The young Jacob must have been 6 when the apartheid governent came to power. Like many a black family in the 1940s, his must have felt the full effects of an enthusiatic white patrirachal supremacist government. Without a father, and with a mother trying to make ends meet, he couldn't have had adequate warmth and intimacy of present and close family.

As all the presidents of democratic South Africa have to differing degrees shown, one can reach as high as possible in one's career without having grown up with stable family environment. Mandela, Mbeki and Zuma, are examples of what men can do against the greatest of odds, when an oppressor denies a people's very humanity. It's called resilience.

However this growing up without constant and warm support of one's parents is not an ideal situation. Resilience is fine, but the warmth of a parent's bosom is irreplaceable. There is no doubt in my mind that it is better for a child's well-being to have a fully present father and mother, not just grandparents, aunts and uncles, if that child is to know what love and happiness means. This in no way privileges nuclear family or biological parents. Quite the contrary, it says the more family connection there is, starting from mother and father, whether adoptive or biological, the less harsh life is and the better outcomes for one's life.

One can't but wonder then what kind of man President Zuma would have become if his father had been more than just a shadow and his mother had been a professional woman. What great society will we be able to create if we manage to put black family life together. If we have been able to achieve so much with so little, to have a president who never went beyond primary school because he didn't enjoy the kind of family support and receive the education many others took for granted, how amazing will we be if we can fix black families and increase the love.