Category: South Africa

SA Social Structures make gender based violence possible

We are weeks away from the first anniversary of the horrific murders of University of the Western Cape student Jesse Hess, and University of Cape Town student Uyinene Mrwetyana. Leading up to the first anniversary of their deaths, we have been overwhelmed with news of the brutal murder of Naledi Phangindawo by a man wielding a knife and an ax. 

While digesting this news we were confronted by the news that Tshegofatso Pule was murdered by her partner who stabbed her and hung her from a tree. She was 8 months pregnant. There was then another report of a women who was stabbed and dumped in an open field in the Eastern Cape. Her boyfriend was arrested for the murder by the Mthatha detectives. 

In KwaZulu Natal, Zamadeyi Goodness Ngaleka, was shot dead by her husband, and then he turned the gun on himself. We are hearing about these horrific stories while we are under a Covid-19 induced lockdown, where there were reports that the police received a record number of calls reporting Gender Based Violenceduring the lockdown. The stomach churns as we read, as we hear, as we bear witness to the violence and the murder of women by men in South Africa. 

Reading about these murders, seeing hashtags demanding justice on social media, and knowing that this is a repeat of a cycle one has witnessed before sits heavy on the heart. Being alive right now and absorbing the news of all this violence is traumatic. 

In August last year, with the murders of Jesse Hess and Uyinene Mrwetyana, words seemed so banal. In the current moment as well, words seem so trite, so vacuous. It feels like everything has all already been said, and that words may not be enough. In all the despair, what do we do? 

I find courage in the words of the late Toni Morrison, speaking about dark times, dark times like the ones we find ourselves in this country. Morrison writes: “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.” So through the hurt, through the powerlessness, we do language. We speak, and we speak truth to power – we speak truth to patriarchal power. 

My high school going cousin recently gave birth to a baby girl. She herself is really still a child. Truth be told she doesn’t have the means to take care of the baby. My aunt, the grandmother is helping. Like usual, the women are the caregivers. In 2017, it was reported that 62% of birth certificates issued in South Africa had “no information on the father”. This is the social landscape of South Africa. 

While I am relieved the baby is healthy, all I have been thinking about since the child’s birth is her trajectory in this country. To be born poor, to a teenage mother, in a country with what seems like a careless government. To be born a girl in a country with war-time-like rape statics. I ask myself what are her chances in this society? 

All conversations of Gender Based Violence need to take into account the social structures that make violence possible. Indeed, inevitable. With Gender Based Violence we need to start at the beginning. To echo Kagiso Molope, in order for us to really end Gender Based Violence, the sexual assaults on women, and the general brutality on women’s bodies, we need to raise boys differently.

The men who become rapists were once boys who were taught to think very little of women. Boys are born and raised into a social language of violence, where the humanness of women is less than that of men. As a society we need to rethink, and redo, the way we raise boys. 

I can’t help but invoke bell hooks here, “The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.”  

From the beginning boys are taught a very limited palette of emotions, which often don’t include empathy, vulnerability, healthy demonstrations of sadness, tears, and solution of problems that don’t include violence. In homosocial settings, pressured by other men, men are forced to outperform each other at manhood. Often, the demonstrations of manhood are wrapped up in a valorised culture and language of violence where women become collateral damage. 

Gender inequality, like racial inequality, is difficult to change because it is structural, and so we need to stop individualizing the gender problem. The gender problem is a systemic problem. For example, there is a horrible tendency in South Africa to walk on eggshells when it comes to religion. Religion is almost beyond reproach in this country. Yet some forms of religion clandestinely endorse Gender Based Violence. 

Take the scriptures; I Timothy 2:12 “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.” There’s also, Mark 10:12 “And if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.” Who can forget Ephesians 5:22-24 “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Saviour. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.” 

I use these scriptures to make obvious the larger system that has built and upholds gender inequality. While I use Christianity as an example here, this pertains to other religions as well. We can’t have honest conversations about Gender Based Violence without engaging the structures that make violence possible. 

“Culture” is also similarly constructed as beyond reproach in this country. By culture I mean the practices that people engage in that are attached to their language groups and/or ethnic identities. Like, Xhosa culture, Venda culture, Afrikaans culture. The violence committed in the name of culture on women in South Africa is danced around by many. 

The horror of the way that culture is wielded in the subjugation of women in South Africa is exemplified by the Jacob Zuma rape trial, where Fezekile Kuzwayo was demonized. We dance around practices such as Ukuthwala. Often, the “protection” of culture from imperialism is invoked as we count the mutilated bodies of women and girls in South Africa. 

Often, we speak of imperialism, colonialism, and apartheid as if colonialism and apartheid didn’t affect women in this country. When hard evidence shows us that women were adversely affected by colonialism and apartheid. Residue of which is the gendered power structures that remains with us. 

As demonstrated by Kopano Ratele in his book Liberating Masculinities, there is a particularity to black men’s experiences and their inhabiting of masculinity and manhood. Here, in talking about black men I am including coloured and Indian men and other “men of colour.” I take my cue from the words of Koleka Putuma’s Collective Amnesia, particularly the poem on Black Solidarity, where she writes, “Black solidarity at the expense of a black womxn’s anything is a farce, a rip off.” 

Putuma’s words remind us of the Rhodes Must Fall and the Fees Must Fall student movements where gender issues, queer issues were purposely undermined by the men in the student movements as unimportant and divisive. Imagine, women and gender non-conforming people asking for their humanity to be recognized, to be taken into account, was read as divisive in student movements that were calling for “decolonization” of the university. 

This warrants us to question the place of gender, of non-normative genders, and of sexuality in the “decolonial” moment? Can we talk about “decolonizing” without talking about Gender Based Violence? 

No. We can’t. 

Unless decolonization takes seriously gender inequality, the ideas on decolonization are half baked. 

While we were reeling from the news of Gender Based Violence and murders over the past couples of weeks, there were reports of the violent murder of Kirvan Fortuin, a gender non-conforming queer person from Cape Town. Fortuin was allegedly murdered by a 14-year-old girl in a homophobic attack. 14 years old. Kirvan Fortuin’s death, a person who challenged society’s understanding of gender, particularly manhood, in the midst of the murders of other women, necessitates that we recognize the connections, make the links, to understand the operations of systemic violence brought to different kinds of women, gender non-conforming peoples, and girls, in South African society.

Gender inequality is a systemic problem, therefore solutions to gender inequality need to address the system. All of us are implicated in finding solutions to Gender Based Violence, to sexual violence, and the ongoing mutilation of women’s bodies. When I say we are all implicated, I mean that ALL men are implicated. 

It was striking in the media reports of the murders of Naledi Phangindawo and Tshegofatso Pule how there were “witnesses” and/or “bystanders”. There are so many questions about these witnesses and how they are implicated in these heinous crimes. While I am not sure what “witnesses” means in these reports, it does point to the many ways people are complicit and therefore implicated in the murder of women. 

South African institutions are implicated in the ways they perpetuate gender inequality in hiring decisions, undermining women’s positions, and participating in mansplaining. In the university environment, the fact that gender as an area of academic inquiry is marginalized speaks volumes on the seriousness the academy itself takes Gender Based Violence. Gender is not only the business of the women’s studies department, it is the business of the university, it is the business of commerce, it is the business of architecture, it is the business of law, it is the business of the health science. 

Similarly, with government, gender politics and policy are not solely the mandate of the Department of Women, Youth and Persons with Disability, but the business of all sectors of government. Government response to Gender Based Violence is to invoke a distancing language of “we condemn violence”, as if it is not part of their duty to be hands on in the fight for gender justice. President Ramaphosa speaks as if the “enemy” is elsewhere, when the state is complicit in the sloppy handling on gender-based crimes and murders. 

Until it is recognised that gender justice is the responsibility of all of us, and leadership in corporate, government, universities, and other institutions takes the appropriate-yet-radical steps, we are not going to solve the gender inequality in South Africa. 

The fight for gender justice is a fight for freedom. It is a fight to achieve freedom for women, and those who are strangled by the patriarchal gender order. As South Africans who are living in post-apartheid South Africa, we need to continuously make the links between freedom and gender justice. In many ways, in post-apartheid South Africa, we tend to have narrow ideas of freedom. The fall of apartheid was not just for cisgender men to be free; it was so that ALL South Africans can be free. 

In thinking about freedom for all people, including women, it is useful to invoke Martha Nussbaum’s idea about capabilities as fundamental entitlements. The idea of capabilities differs from the narrow libertarian idea of freedom from state interferences. Capabilities is about freedom to be able to live, a freedom to pursue your dreams and flourish. I find Martha Nussbaum’s articulations on “Life” and “Bodily Integrity” being essential in enabling not just Human Rights, but Human Capabilities useful. According to Nussbaum: 

“Life. Being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length; not dying prematurely, or before one’s life is so reduced as to be not worth living.” 

“Bodily Integrity. Being able to move freely from place to place; to be secure against violent assault, including sexual assault and domestic violence; having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and for choice in matters of reproduction.”

In post-apartheid South Africa men experience women’s liberation – the push for gender justice, as their disempowerment. Men need to ask themselves, what am I without misogyny? What am I without power to dominate women? To end, I would like to invoke Toni Morrison again, “If you can only be tall because someone’s on their knees, then you have a serious problem.” And South Africa, we have a serious problem on our hands. A problem that demands all men’s hands on deck, as we overhaul dominant and violent tropes of manhood and masculinity.

Notes Towards a New World: 100 Ways to a Better South Africa

While under lockdown due to Covid-19, we have all been forced to reckon, perhaps more than usual, with the glaring inequality and injustice we live with in South Africa. Crippled by the sense of my powerlessness to change things, I have been preoccupied with the idea of a new world. The following 100 points are my way of imagining a different South Africa. In many ways, the points I am making here are obvious, and that is the point—that while they might be obvious, they are not our reality. I write these in the hope that they can galvanise us, particularly young people, to push for a more just, more equal, and more empathetic society. The kind of South Africa we deserve, one grounded in social solidarity.

  1. We need to develop a kind of civic education class/module where the South African Constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights, becomes part of the school curriculum. This would mean that by the time a South African matriculates, they should hopefully know the constitution very well. Imagine a South Africa where 18-year-olds are able to assert their constitutional rights!
  2. We need a concerted effort to build solid healthcare and education sectors in post-apartheid South Africa. These two sectors, in many ways, are the foundations of a great nation. The idea is that with a healthy and educated populace, we can build a strong nation. 
  3. South Africa should invest in public libraries. Public libraries should be made technologically savvy and systematised with efficient processes, in an effort to make them accessible to all South Africans. In time we can move to building state of the art libraries in at least four corners of the country, with different themes and designs. Imagine the pride in our sanctuaries of knowledge.
  4. We should create pathways whereby South Africans can fund and gift book donations to South African libraries. Libraries could have accessible lists of books they need, and ordinary people could assist libraries in obtaining them. We can develop a unique system called the ’South African Library System’.
  5. The South African state needs to invest in making books affordable and easily accessible. This could mean local printing, perhaps buying books from countries with cheaper publishing press, but something has got to be done to fix the inaccessibility of books.
  6. The South African government should invest in Lovedale Press and make it a functioning National Heritage. We should all do everything we can to save Lovedale Press. 
  7. Our government should really take the learning conditions of pupils seriously and invest in the infrastructure of schools all over the country. By infrastructure I mean roofed buildings, working ablutions, electricity, and safe playgrounds. 
  8. To ensure we have a great education system, teachers must undergo continuous training, where their skills are “updated” or “upgraded” to suit the changing needs of incoming pupils. 
  9. The training curriculum of teachers, over and above their subject areas, needs to include intersectional issues of race, class, gender, disability, and sexuality. 
  10. Teachers need to be remunerated adequately for their work, which in itself would be a recognition of the importance of the work teachers do. Investing in teaching will mean that the profession becomes desirable, which will be great for morale in the profession. 
  11. On a national level, teachers need to be honoured for their work in educating the nation through boards that recognise excellence in teaching. 
  12. Schools in South Africa need comprehensive sex education. Considering the high rates of teenage pregnancy, sex education must start as early as possible. 
  13. South African schools need to build better relationships with parents, where parents are involved in the operation of the schools. The facilitation of parent-teacher meetings should be done in ways that accommodate parents’ schedules. 
  14. The history of the feminist and women’s movements and the history of the sexuality movement need to be part of the history curriculum in South Africa. 
  15. We need to make sure that indigenous languages are taught in South African schools, making it compulsory for pupils to study South African languages other than English and Afrikaans. This should begin at grade one.  Furthermore, knowledge of indigenous languages should be linked to admission to university, while granting scholarships and hiring for jobs could factor in knowledge of indigenous languages.  
  16. More investment through funding is needed for institutions of higher education. Particular attention should be paid to historically black institutions to ensure their survival and thriving into the future. The desire to learn should always be fulfilled. Investing in higher education is a way for South Africa to invest in itself. 
  17. Resuscitate and fund technical colleges to ensure diverse skillsets and training for the South African workforce. People’s strengths and passions are differently distributed in society, and providing different kinds of institutions of higher education shall capture this distribution.
  18. We need to encourage and invest in the transfer of skills in our country. The fact of the matter is that because of apartheid policies there is unequal distribution of skills development amongst South Africans. In the transition from apartheid to post-apartheid South Africa, there hasn’t been a concrete plan for skills transfer, and this has been to our detriment.
  19. Education is not just a means to an end; we should develop and cultivate a culture of education as an end in itself, with the goal of cultivating critical thinking, broadening our minds, and possibly contributing new ways to organise our society. 
  20. The SABC should institute another channel that is singularly geared towards educational programmes. The programmes can include South African and world history documentaries, current political debates, book discussions, contemporary South African life documentaries, creative arts seminars, and entrepreneurship seminars, elections around the world, wildlife and science documentaries, how-to-get-into-university seminars, and South African Constitution 101 seminars. 
  21. The state needs to invest in public WIFI in public institutions like libraries and other strategic places all over the country to enable access to the internet and the many resources it avails. This would enable citizens to look for work, improve their qualifications through many free online learning, and access the plethora of DIY resources online. 
  22. Investment in healthcare infrastructure is crucial to ensuring optimal care to all citizens. By infrastructure I mean efficient administrative processes, the necessary equipment, ambulances, and rigorously trained first responders and personnel. 
  23. The South African government needs to create, diversify, and fund pathways to medical schools and general healthcare work. 
  24. The South African Police Service and the South African Defence Force require an overhaul, where apartheid-style policing is done away with and a new citizen-centred policing approach is instituted. 
  25. The training of the South African police force and army should include a comprehensive understanding of Constitutional Law, particularly the Bill of Rights, and Criminal Law. 
  26. The police services need to be made more efficient, and digitisation might help increase efficiency. The police services need secretary-style frontline workers with impeccable listening and administrative skills to ensure the smooth running of police services, all designed to aid citizens in distress. 
  27. Many South Africans have pointed out how law enforcement is energised to work in certain “breaking of the law cases” but not in others. A case in point is that law enforcement is slow, sloppy, and inconsistent in investigating and prosecuting gender-based violence, but has been eager to break down protests, and during the Codiv-19 lockdown has had a “heavy handedness” (as President Ramaphosa put it) and even murdered citizens for “breaking” lockdown curfews. This kind of excitement and heavy handedness of law enforcement is nowhere to be found in almost all the corruption accusations of politicians. Law enforcement needs to treat every case of wrongdoing with seriousness, if it is to be trusted by citizens. 
  28. There is a culture of violence in South Africa. It is a culture that partly stems from our violent history. It is the responsibility of everyone to end this culture of violence and cultivate a different way of solving disputes. 
  29. All parents must cease to beat their children. It is, after all, against the law. Beating children as part of child rearing contributes to the culture of violence. Consider what kind of lessons you are imparting to your children by solving issues using violence on another human (because your child is another human). As a parent, and an adult, devise new ways of discipline. Consider the lesson you are imparting on girls and boys when you beat them, and then tell them that you love them; how conflating violence with love plays out in adult behaviour. 
  30. As a society we need to raise boys differently. The boys in our society become men who are violent towards women. The gender hierarchy that boys and girls are socialised into from a very young age creates gender inequality in our society. 
  31. The values of accountability, empathy, vulnerability, care, and consideration are some of the ways we need to consider in the constitution of new manliness and masculinity. It is unfortunate, but men in South Africa experience the empowerment of women in post-apartheid South Africa as their disempowerment that leads to a demonstration of toxic masculinity traits.
  32. In 2017, 62% of births in South Africa had “no information on the father”. That means that 62% of the children born in 2017 had no father. The culture of men not taking responsibility for their children needs to be challenged, and processes need to be put in place to ensure that accountability takes place. 
  33. All babies born in public hospitals in South Africa should receive a pre-packed “starter kit” that includes all the essentials needed by an infant in the first few months of life. 
  34. Rape is a terrible violent crime perpetrated by men in South Africa. We need to fight it with everything we’ve got. And it all starts with undoing – no – demolishing the gender hierarchy. 
  35. The gang wars in the Cape Flats are a South African problem. The interventions to end gang violence in the Cape Flats require serious community involvement; they require economic upliftment, an engineering of a different society. 
  36. We need to have honest debates about the problematic aspects of our traditional cultures. Some of the traditional practices in South Africa’s cultures do not serve the wellbeing of our communities and need to be reconsidered. The rationalisation of “we’ve always done it this way” is not good enough to sustain hurtful practices. I am speaking of practices such as Ukuthwala.
  37. Embracing our cultures, and/or rejecting certain aspects of them, shouldn’t be dependent on who is watching. We need to consider whether practices are harmful to members of our communities, and how to justly deal with such practices. 
  38. A feminist and women-led political party would be a good addition to the South African political landscape, where it could push for policy agendas that prioritise women and disrupt the current political landscape. 
  39. We should encourage young people to be active in politics in order to foster new ways of thinking about South Africa. Many young people don’t vote, because they don’t believe their voices are heard or make any difference. Perhaps there is a space for a youth political movement/party.  
  40. The payments of social grants and senior pensions should all be done electronically by now. The system of making senior citizens queue for their monthly payments is archaic and lacks dignity. The state should lead this process and encourage safe and efficient ways to access state grants.
  41. The South African government is there to serve South Africans. People who work for the state, and state parastatals, work for the people. While those who work for the state deserve our respect as citizens, they are not above citizens in their role of service. 
  42. Party politics will be the end of our country. As citizens, as young people, as people who desire a different future, we need to vote differently. Firstly, we need to vote against power, and vote to decrease the power of the of parties who are currently ruling. As citizens we need to engineer a situation where different political parties are in charge of different provinces. The ANC majority in parliament brought us the devastating years of the Zuma presidency, which we will literally be paying for  for years to come. It really is upon us to lessen the power of political parties; in so doing, we also lessen their power to harm our society. Imagine a South Africa with a DA-led Western Cape, a UDM-led Eastern Cape, an EFF-led Limpopo, an IFP-Led KwaZulu Natal, a Good-led Northern Cape, an ANC-led Gauteng, an ACDP-led North West, an NFP-led Mpumalanga, and a COPE-led Free State. What would our politics look like? 
  43. Serious social solidarity demands that we vote against “our favourites” in order to achieve a better state of things. The demand is not that members of political parties necessarily leave their “political party home”, the ask is that you don’t vote along party lines, rather, if necessary, you betray party solidarity in solidarity with South Africans, and the future of our country. 
  44. All politicians involved in the mismanagement of parastatals funds and corruption deals must account for their involvement in court and face jail time. They must furthermore be liable to pay back the mismanaged funds. 
  45. The office of the Presidency, Members of Parliament, and Members of the Executive should all take part in mandatory, comprehensive training grounded in intersectional politics of race, class, gender, disability, and sexuality. It cannot be taken for granted that people occupying these positions fully grasp these concepts as lived realities and as they play out in contemporary South Africa. 
  46. The Life Healthcare Esidimeni Tragedy in 2015 was indicative not only of the South African government’s approach to people with disability, but of that of the majority of South Africans. As a country we are in desperate need of Critical Disability Theory – especially for those who work for the Department of Women, Youth, and Persons with Disability. 
  47. The biggest disappointment in the current ANC-led government is the lack of prioritising the poor in South African society. While there are things I can look away from, it’s impossible to ignore this. The continued suffering of black people with a black government in power heartbreakingly demonstrates Frantz Fanon’s “the pitfalls of national consciousness.” 
  48. At times it feels like South Africa is at war with the poor and the homeless. The City of Cape Town deserves a special mention here; the city governance becomes even more heartless when one considers the history of District Six staring us in the face as it continuously treats homeless people with contempt and violence. 
  49. The “Social Welfare Services” should be better equipped to deal with homelessness, mental illness, and people who find themselves destitute in the streets of South Africa. One would imagine that with a history of forced removals, labour migrations, and people’s precarious work life, we would be more empathetic to the hardships of people on the streets. 
  50. Since the election of President Ramaphosa there has been talk of the “fourth industrial revolution”. The fourth industrial revolution is the technological revolution where most, if not all, aspects of life are run by advanced technologies that replace each other. There has been talk about tablets for all students. This is of course difficult to take seriously, because the majority of schools in South Africa lack the most basic infrastructure, and it seems that tablets should come after proper classroom lights, electric sockets, and ablutions. 
  51. The aim of the state should be to create social solidarity over and above extreme individualism that is prized by the capitalist system. This is of course difficult to achieve when there is a lack of trust in the state by citizens, like we find in South Africa as a result of unbridled corruption. 
  52. Growing up, I remember the “buy South African products” campaigns, which were filled with a sense of pride in South African products. As a nation, we really need to cultivate and foster the idea of supporting home grown products  and sustain local businesses. This is social solidarity. 
  53. The trust between citizens and the government is broken and rebuilding this trust will be a long but necessary a step. The trust is so broken, that when the German Consul General pledged money to help buy testing kits for Covid-19, South Africans responded by asking that the German man buy the tests and give them to us because the money would otherwise be misspent by the state through corruption. Reading that Twitter thread is all kinds of embarrassing. 
  54. Information about corporate money that supports and sponsors party politics needs to be readily available. This would be one element of radical transparency in South African politics. 
  55. South Africa is a relatively middle-income country. Everyone, absolutely everyone, should have access to clean water and sanitation. 
  56. We should be building decent RDP houses for people. By this I mean that new RDP houses shouldn’t be leaking, should be of a decent size, and should give people a small yard space where they can have a garden or build a nice red stoep. 
  57. Mismanagement of funds and corruption deals through government parastatals with foreign sovereignties and multinational corporations should be considered treason. Such corruption is looting taxpayers’ money and handing it over to foreign land, crippling the South African state. 
  58. The years of Jacob Zuma’s presidency have ensured the collapse of government parastatals, to a point where these parastatals are ineffective. We need to rebuild the government parastatals for them to properly serve South African citizens. 
  59. Both in the ANC-led national government and in the DA-led provincial government, citizens are often treated like children, nannied when it comes to policy decisions. This is insulting to many citizens who take their role in democracy seriously and desire to participate in the country’s democracy. 
  60. We need radical transparency in order to rebuild citizens’ trust in the government and to rebuild our society. The lack of transparency in the ANC-led government has created distrust among South African citizens.
  61. Through our wandering in the dark because of power cuts, cutely called “load shedding”, it has seemed that those in charge do not understand the gravity of their effects. Those blackouts have seriously affected people’s daily lives, functioning and productivity, ruined aspects of small businesses, and affected the ability to teach. The blackouts have become so bad and so frequent, that South Africans have begun organising for “life without electricity.” This is unacceptable. Not to mention that these blackouts affect those who do not have the means to “keep the lights on” without electricity through gas and petrol generators. This should be fixed with urgent priority.
  62. We all want nice things. Nice things shouldn’t only be reserved for historically whites-only suburbs, they should be availed to everyone. By nice things I mean regular refuse collection, regular painting of roads, trees, streetlights and signs, and access to the councillors who supposedly represent us. 
  63. More thought and consideration need to go into the appointment of judges in South African courts. Our judges are not diverse enough in terms of gender, f values, and a myriad of other factors, which adversely affects people who are “too different”, because the current judges do not “get” or are biased against them. Not to mention the gender bias in gender-based violations affecting women. 
  64. South Africa should decriminalise sex-work. 
  65. In the selection of people for government positions, we need to consider educational skills and professional experience. The position of Minister of Health, no doubt, requires impeccable knowledge of the healthcare sector either as a practitioner or in another capacity. Similarly, with a portfolio like that of the Minister of Arts and Culture, I imagine a veteran in the Arts and Culture sector would be most suitable for the job. 
  66. As South Africans we need to be able to make connections between the mismanagement of state funds and corruption, and the lack of funds for services and other necessities for citizens. Take the example of South African Airways, where billions of rands have been spent to financially rescue the company; imagine what else those billions of rands could have been used for. 
  67. South African Airways (SAA) needs to be shut down. The idea of a national carrier is archaic, and the majority of South Africans do not use SAA. Keeping SAA afloat is a waste of taxpayers’ money that could be better spent elsewhere. 
  68. I have often thought of the Post Office as one of the most important state-run enterprises. South Africa should resuscitate the Post Office and ensure its efficient management and administration. The Post Office shouldn’t necessarily be making a profit, but rather rendering services to citizens at minimum cost. Considering that we are moving towards a culture of e-commerce, the Post Office, with its built-in infrastructure, would be a crucial service right now. In South Africa one hesitates to use the Post Office, as the goods may arrive a year later or not at all. I have goods posted to me two, even three years ago that are yet to arrive. 
  69. We should have a Pen Pal programme for young South Africans to connect and share their lives with one another through writing. This could of course be done through email, but it would be a disadvantage for those who don’t have internet access; it’s also much more interesting through the post. This is another reason the Post Office needs to function at an optimum level.  
  70. South Africa should invest in local and national public transport infrastructure in order to facilitate efficient ease of movement. Enabling people to travel will help in South Africans learn more about the country, so people would be able to see how others in the country live. There are many ways to create connections between citizens; often, the infrastructure is already there.
  71. White parents and white communities should raise their children with comprehensive conversations about colonialism, apartheid, and white privilege. Without this knowledge, white parents are setting up their children to NOT be responsible members of South African society poised to make socially conscious contributions. The failure of white parenting was on full display during the fallout over the Miss SA hopeful Bianca. 
  72. White South Africans need to learn humility. At times it seems almost as if white South Africans enjoy the prospect of a failed South Africa just so they can say “we told you so.” This attitude ensures that white South Africans are only tentatively invested in the success of our new democracy. 
  73. In response to white people’s antics, black South Africans pay too much attention to whiteness. Whiteness is a distraction. The irony is that Steve Biko is always quoted for his philosophy on the psychological effects of whiteness, yet black South Africans do not seem to heed his call. Bianca, “Karen”, and Penny Sparrow are all distractions. 
  74. We should create a programme where South African families adopt each other and share life experiences across racial lines and across different kinds of families. Imagine the kinds of solidarities that could emerge through a process of sharing ourselves with one another. 
  75. While race continues to play a role in how our lives are shaped, we must also imagine ways to surpass our current understandings of race. It’s a difficult task, but we should all be on board if we are to overcome our divided racial past. 
  76. South African schools and other institutions should facilitate exchange programmes with countries in the Global South, with an emphasis on countries on the African continent, in order to foster better South-to-South relations, and for South Africans to be able to situate themselves within the world and its history.
  77. We need to create more humane prison environments. Environments where education and rehabilitation are not only possible but the goal. Currently, prisons are spaces where people are hardened and become more dangerous to society because of prison life. 
  78. We need to ask ourselves what environment produces the people who are in prison. Perhaps an honest conversation about the conditions that produce criminality will aid us in creating a crime-free South Africa. 
  79. The South African state does a very bad job, perhaps intentionally, at regulating the unbridled cowboy capitalism that has rendered South Africa the most unequal country in the world. When South Africans are not being screwed over by the state itself, they are being abused by corporations, particularly financial institutions. The way corporations abuse poor working people has the same tenets as colonial extraction with little to no reward.   
  80. South Africa is the most unequal country in the world. We need to do everything in our power to solve the inequality in South Africa. To do this, we have to be bold and creative. Under consideration should be a wealth tax and an inheritance tax.   
  81. We owe it to ourselves to test out what South Africa would be like under a different leadership than the one we currently have and have had over the past 25 years. Maybe the ANC-led government has done all it can, and we owe it to ourselves to try a different kind of leadership. 
  82. A conversation and a move towards the redistribution of land are not only just but would hopefully bring peace to many South Africans. We need to have many, many transparent conversations about the redistribution of land, and come up with creative ways of implementing this in ways that will benefit those who were seriously injured by forced removals, whose pain and suffering are visible in their destitution today. 
  83. Africans from other countries on the African continent are not our enemies. They have never been our enemies, in fact quite the contrary—they were there for us in our time of need. Afrophobia is a deflection from the real source of South African misery, which is caused by an alliance between the ANC-led black government and white-owned and operated corporations.
  84. No one ever flees their home because they want to, and certainly not to a country where one is hated. People leave home in search of liveable lives. Their lives are usually unliveable because of war, joblessness that leads to hunger, persecution, and many other reasons. We need to cultivate a Pan-African social solidarity. 
  85. The contribution made by artists and the arts to South African culture is undervalued. This is demonstrated in the lack of adequate funding for artists and the arts, and the lack of proper regulation of how different aspects of the arts industry function. The under-appreciation of the arts in South Africa is proven by the appointment of Nathi Mthethwa as the Minister of Arts and Culture. In one word – insulting. 
  86. We need to duly honour South Africa’s artists. Street names, boulevards, types of flowers, university buildings, state structures, you name it.
  87. Miriam Makeba’s oeuvre should officially become a National Treasure. 
  88. We need to rethink Christian holidays as part of the secular calendar. We need to rethink this either by incorporating other minority religions into the official calendar, or by doing away with special religious holidays altogether. 
  89. We need a consortium of experts in different fields—like scientists, philosophers, lawyers, economists, and environmentalist, as well as lay people and young people, to come up with a plan for the next 30 years. What do we want South Africa to look like in 2050? 
  90. The South African state underutilises experts and specialists in many fields. What is the point of having world renowned specialists if they can’t use their skills to better South African society? This is a sad reality.
  91. Considering the degradation of the environment, we should seriously ban all single use plastics, and then move slowly to banning other things that are choking the planet. Industries can be given timeframes to get their act together. Growing up we used to buy milk and cooldrinks in deposit bottles. Let’s go back to that.
  92. I was in Port Elizabeth, now called Nelson Mandela Bay, and it was hard to stay in my lane while driving, because the roads have not been painted, there are potholes, and there has not been basic maintenance done in what looks like years. The white lines on the roads are invisible on a major highway—Settler’s Way (a name that should probably be changed), between Deal Party and South End. This is a safety issue. The maintenance of roads—road signs, electricity, water pipes, water dams, streetlights, drainage systems—is necessary. South Africans deserve to have working things. 
  93. The critique of the state by citizens is necessary for a healthy democracy. In South Africa, particularly those who support the ruling party, both nationally and provincially, act as if it’s treasonous to critique the state and what the state does. The critique of the state is our role as engaged citizens. 
  94. And NO – critique of the ANC-led national government does not mean one endorses the DA-led provincial government. And vice versa. It’s revealing, perhaps even painful, to actually have to say this. 
  95. We have a strong constitution. We have so many great policies. We have a strong and progressive judiciary. It is not more laws that we need. We need to teach citizens to embrace and follow the laws we have. A case in point is that we have come so far with sexual liberation in the law that same-sex marriage is legal, yet violence remains an ongoing feature of queer people’s lives, particularly gender non-conforming people. 
  96. The silence over human rights violations by other African states South Africa has a “relationship” with is a demonstration of complicity. As a country overcoming the difficult past of apartheid, we need to do better with speaking up against injustice in other parts of the world, particularly on the African continent. 
  97. The legalisation of cannabis for personal consumption was a progressive move. Used effectively and in moderate quantities, the plant has many positive effects. There are people, particularly women, who have been ahead on the cannabis cultivation front in the rural Eastern Cape, and no doubt in other rural communities in the country. Those people should really have first dibs in the obviously budding cannabis industry in South Africa. It is revealing, and against the spirit of entrepreneurship of “vukuzenzele”, to hunt down and burn cannabis fields in rural areas, when many in white coats and white-collar industries are poised to make a killing from cannabis. Ensuring a stake for these communities in this budding industry would be a creative way of the redistribution of wealth. 
  98. Take down the pictures of the president and other public officials in entrances of public buildings. There is something ill-fitting and somewhat cheap about the smiles of public officials in public buildings, particularly on walls with peeling paint and spider webs. 
  99. Public officials should be forced to use public facilities; public transport, public hospitals, even public toilets. Perhaps then they could understand how those public services need to be funded, improved upon, and maintained.  
  100. Engender a philosophy of freedom that is expansive and accommodative. Engender a freedom that enables liveable lives. A freedom that enables each and every South African to pursue their dreams and fulfil their human potential, whatever that potential may be. 

Many of the points I have raised here cannot single-handedly fix South Africa, but must be seen with reference to other points. For example, point number 1 cannot really be fulfilled if points 7 and 8 are not met. We need to somehow imagine and work ourselves out of the dark place we find ourselves. And sometimes the most obvious route is the most ellusive.

Inxeba (The wound) – The trouble with making men

 

Directed by John Trengrove. Written by John Trengrove, Thando Mgqolozana, and Malusi Bengu

 

Inxeba (the wound) is a groundbreaking movie. It is a combination of artistry, emotional depth, and a serious engagement with a difficult subject, often taboo subject, that makes Inxeba probably the best South African movie in 2017. Nakhane Touré who plays Xolani, Bongani Mantsai who plays Vij, and Niza Jay who plays Kwanda are amazing in their individual portrays of the characters, but are explosive as a trio. In this movie you are confronted by the violence inherent in the construction of Xhosa manhood through circumcision. You are confronted with the pain of Xhosa men who are unable to claim and live out their sexualities. After watching this movie I am even more convinced that the subject formation of Xhosa men is a violent process. Also, the process of man making is lonely.

Inxeba is a movie about the experiences of queer Xhosa men when they go to initiation school. It is a movie about the intersection of sexuality, manhood, tradition, and desire. The movie exposes the ways in which manhood, particularly Xhosa manhood, in this case, is rigidly policed by other men. You are confronted with the consequences of a homophobic culture and society where men are unable to claim and live out their sexual desires for each other.

I went to go watch the movie with my queer friends. While we were watching the movie, we laughed out loud at certain moments in the movie, we gasped, we looked at each other knowingly, we made faces to each other. We were seeing ourselves in the movie. When we spoke after the movie, we all agreed that watching the movie was like seeing our younger selves on the screen. Stories that centralise the experiences of black queers matters because there is very little of our reflections in South African stories. These stories also matter because they enable us to publicly engage in conversations about culture, manhood, and sexuality. These stories create platforms that enable us to have a conversation about what it means to be a man in post-apartheid South Africa. What is the role of culture in 21 century South Africa? Stories like these enable us to ask questions about the process of “constructing a man.”

For me, this movie has resurfaced questions I have often debated with my and myself and my friends, like, how do you make a man? What makes a man a man? Who can be a man? Who says who can be a man? As a queer person, I have had to engage these questions all my life because my manhood was always under scrutiny. And many men have noted my “failure” at performing manhood.  In one of the scenes in the movie, the initiates are circumcised and the person who does the circumcision asks the recently cut boys to shout “I am a man.” There is something powerful about this pronouncement. Uttering these words just after you have been circumcised cement Xhosa culture belief that you are only a man once the foreskin is gone. It is also bizarre that the foreskin is what separates “boys” from “men.” But of course, I am being simple, for I know that it is not foreskin per se that is at the heart of this practice but the pain you endure as you recover from circumcision.

At one point in the movie, the father of the queer initiate addresses the caregiver, giving him instructions to be “firm” with the queer kid. The father complains that his son is “too soft” and then he goes on to blame the mother for the boy’s softness. It is ironic how the supposed “failure” of the son to be “manly” is blamed on the mother, not the father. Which of course, begs the question, had the son succeeded at being “manly”, whatever the fuck that is, who would get the kudos? I’ll go on a limb here and say that the father would praise himself for having raised a “man.”

The father distances himself from his son, which is very revealing of the relationships many queer boys, particularly effeminate queer boys, have with their fathers. In this then manhood is associated with not being “soft”, not being a “mama’s boy”, and if you are soft, you need to be toughened up. In Xhosa culture, a man is made through pain. The ability to withstand immense pain is intricately tied to Xhosa masculinity. This is not unique to Xhosa culture, of course, it is part of patriarchy in many parts of the world. When I think of manhood construction through pain, when I think of this movie, I am reminded of bell hooks when she wrote:

“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.” – bell hooks

The accuracy of bell hooks in describing the violence of patriarchy on men is chilling. bell hooks speak to the detrimental effects of patriarchy on men. She speaks to the value of feminism for men. She speaks to the need for men to fight patriarchy because it damages men. This quote speaks to the destructive ways in which the characters portrayed in Inxeba conduct themselves, towards themselves and then to each other.

I was incredibly moved by the scene where the men are asked to verbalise and claim manhood after they are circumcised. The “I am a man” scene is interesting to me on many accounts. The queer initiate Kwanda, played by Niza Jay is the last initiate to be circumcised. He is then also asked to announce the statement “I am a man.” In his effeminate voice, Kwanda repeats the phrase. It is the first time we hear Kwanda speak, and the voice is a “giveaway” that he is queer. Even my friends and I looked at each other in the theatre when Kwanda spoke.  After Kwanda says the phrase “I am a man”, the man who performed the circumcision asks him to repeat the phrase, and Kwanda does. Kwanda is the only initiate who is asked to repeat the statement as if he was not heard before but most likely because he was not believable the first time around.

The “I am a man” scene reminded me of myself in many ways. When I went to initiation school, none of the boys who were initiates with me knew who I was. I was thrust into a “man’s world”, a world I had never really been part of in the ways the other boys were. In many ways, I am still not part of that world. I was acutely aware of violent homophobia when you are queer in the company of other men. Men often perform homophobic violence in the presence of other men, in conversation with other men. When I arrived on the mountain I knew that my survival depended on being a wallflower. The problem, of course, is that my personality does not lend itself to be a wallflower. I had decided that I will say as little as possible, keep to myself, and avoid any contact or conversation that would “out” me. It was only on the second day that I realised my plan not to be “out” had failed when another initiate mocked me by mimicking the way I had said the “I am a man” phrase after circumcision. My effeminate voice had betrayed me. Now my girly intonation was being used to mock me. The violence and shame I felt in that moment still makes me well up. And it’s been over a decade now.

The relationship between Xolani and Vij is complicated. They are both in the closet, and they annually meet during “circumcision season” on the mountains.  Vij has a wife and children. Xolani lives a lonely life. Xolani’s loneliness is haunting. What Nakhane Touré does with this character is nothing short of brilliant. Xolani really only goes to the mountain to be with Vij. Considering the homophobic context they live in, and their own policing of their desires, it’s an impossible situation. The homophobia is not only coming from their society and culture, it is also internalised by the men. The two men share intimate moments with each other, but there’s also violence in their intimate moments. It’s as if their desires for each other has to be mitigated by violence.

There are two moments in the movie where we see the complex intimate yet violent interaction between Xolani and Vij play out. When Xolani tries to kiss Vij, he pushes him away, also when he tries to give him oral sex he pushes him away. In both moments Xolani is violently rejected. These are heartbreaking moments. They are moments that make obvious the intricate relationship between shame and desire, and the sometimes consequent violence. Xolani loves Vij, and I think Vij also loves Xolani, in his own way. But it is a love that cannot speak itself. It is a love that cannot be lived or expressed. It is a love that must quietly exist for a couple of weeks in a year, and even then, it must be hush about its existence. Xolani desires more than what Vij can give, and Vij is not willing to give more than he already has, which is not much to begin with.  In this way, Inxeba borrows much from the queer archive of stories of love and double lives, of impossible arrangements where one is sustained for a year by a patchy intimacy of six weeks, and most of all the self-annihilation in the denial of one’s desires.

The irony about the circumcission tradition in Xhosa culture is that it is homoerotic. There are two examples I want to highlight of a homoerotic nature in the movie. Firstly, it is when the initiates are starting to heal, and they decide to show each other their penises. They play a version of “show me yours, I will show you mine” and it is hilarious. The queer initiate is excluded from this conversation. It is not uncommon for men in groups to play show-and-tell, and it is excused as “boys being boys.” The sexual tension that might accompany these show-and-tell moments is often underplayed or nullified. Secondly, when the boys are about to head home, when they are fully healed, the older men comment on the beauty of the circumcised penis. The talk of the penis as a beautiful organ in the movie is strikingly similar to the way my queer friends talk about penises when we are having “kitchen” talk.

Inxeba succeeds because of the richness of the characters of Xolani, Vij and Kwanda. It succeeds because it paints these characters as people with fluid and complex desires navigating rigid systems of identity and culture. These characters are real, they are people I know, I have seen them. This movie succeeds because it sidesteps the traps of portraying black characters on television and movies, particularly queer characters, as one dimensional. It challenges head on the overly simplistic notion that homosexuality is “unAfrican.” Homosexual desires exist wherever there are people. Our homosexual desires are formed in ways we sometimes cannot explain, but there they are. This movie opens up space where we can have a conversation about our desires, space where our desires matter.  As a nation, we should all applaud John Trengrove and the team for an amazing job at story telling. Inxeba is an immense contribution to the queer archive in South Africa.

 

 

“No land for married same-sex couples”

“Rendered here is an array of interpretations of what it means to be fully human, queer and African – three categories of identity often misconstrued as mutually exclusive. The stories collected in this volume give a kaleidoscopic peek into the many ways in which Africans inhabit ‘queerness’, giving fine grained texture to the lives and experiences of those whose humanity is routinely denied.”

– Barbara Boswell, in the Introduction of Queer Africa 2

Queer Africa 2 (2017)

The vignette above is taken from the introductory chapter of the recently published Queer Africa 2 book. The book is a compilation of queer centred stories predominantly from different parts of the African continent. Boswell’s introduction highlights that queer people in South Africa and in other parts of the African continent are often denied full humanity. The book, Queer Africa, claims space for queer Africans, boldly asserting queerness where it is habitually denied.

Books like Queer Africa are necessary because they celebrate queer life, but they are also necessary because queer lives are still oppressed in many parts of South Africa. Just a week or so ago rural queers were under attack from the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa (Contralesa). The Eastern Cape Chairman of Contralesa, Chief Mwelo Nonkonyana, while attending the funeral of the Xhosa senior royal member Chief Mthetho Ngubesizwe Sigcawu, said that there will be no land allocation for same-sex couples in rural communities. Reported in the Daily Dispatch, Chief Nonkonyana said, “In our rural areas we will never demarcate residential land for any man who is married to another man, not because we punish them, but because sites are according to our practices and are demarcated for a married man who has a wife.” Furthermore, Chief Nonkonyana shared that “According to God’s law, man should marry a woman. Same-sex union is not only anti-God but also un-African.”

Of course, we have come to expect statements like these from Contralesa leaders. Who can forget their display of contempt for same-sex couples during the debates about same-sex marriage in 2006? Also unforgettable is their audacious proposal that the anti-discrimination clause against sexual orientation be removed from the Constitution. Contralesa has a consistent anti-same-sex relationship record. So when these reports about no allocation of land for married same-sex couples in rural communities, it did not come as much of a surprise. But although it is not surprising, it is still unjust.

The notion that same-sex love is “un-African” is a deeply held belief that doesn’t seem to diminish even with overwhelming historical evidence proving the existence of homosexuality on the continent.

My own research on the lives of married same-sex couples is evidence of the continued existence of same-sex couples. There are countless publications about the lives of African queer people, but the leaders of Contralesa want to negate African queer existence.

Chief Nonkonyana uses the notion of “God’s law” as a basis for discriminating against married same-sex couples in the allocation of land in rural areas. The last I checked in South Africa the Constitution is the law and the Rights of LGBTI citizens are protected under the Constitution.

The statements made by Chief Nonkonyana unveil the “contradictions” that emanate from our progressive constitution, where the Rights of LGBTI people are presented as clashing with customary law.

There is a “clash” only because there is a bias and limited reading of “African” culture. It is my view that Chief Nonkonyana has a limited view of “African” when he says same-sex love is “un-African.” It is a construction of same-sex love as outside Africa while we are living evidence that we are inside Africa and African-ness.

With all of that said, I am also wondering if there is an inherent contradiction between “ethnic” and/or “tribal” identity and citizenship. Can one be fully invested in being a good citizen of a country like South Africa, but still be heavily invested in “ethnic” and/or “tribal” identity? Wasn’t the problem with the pre-1994 political dispensation exactly this, a dogmatic investment in white tribalism?

Chief Nonkonyana presents Xhosa culture as something that has never changed as if it’s been static over centuries. While we know that Xhosa culture, like most cultures, is dynamic and ever changing, and how it is interpreted depends on the politics of the day.

Also, what belongs under “Xhosa culture” is practised differently in many parts of the Eastern Cape and parts of the Western Cape and in Xhosa communities that live in Johannesburg. Chief Nonkonyana assumes that we live the same, we love the same, and that the values held by him and Contralesa are the only Xhosa “African” values there are.

Chief Nonkonyana says that by not allocating same-sex couples land he is not “punishing them” but “land is for a married man who has a wife.” If a same-sex couple is denied land in their rural community, of course, they will experience this as punishment. No land allocation has deep consequences for the quality of life for same-sex couples in rural communities, it affects their belonging needs, and it affects the inheritance of their children or other loved ones. The homophobia inherent in the statements by Chief Nonkonyana has material consequences for same-sex couples.

The threat that there will be no allocation of land for same-sex couples is an abuse of power by Contralesa Chiefs. The statements by Chief Nonkonyana unveil a bigger problem of Chief’s running amok in what was previously Bantustans. Chiefs who have appointed themselves sole trustees of communal land oppress people living in rural communities as demonstrated in the documentary This Land.

In This Land we learn that King Goodwill Zwelithini is the sole trustee of land that belongs to the people in Makhaseneni and sold mining rights on the land to Jindal Africa mining company. Soon after the mining began, the land and the water became contaminated and crops started dying. These are people who depend on their land. This has become an all too familiar story in South Africa’s rural communities.

Thiyane Duda, from the Land and Accountability Research Centre in the Department of Public Law at the University of Cape Town, has also written about the problems experienced by local communities in rural areas where chiefs act like they are sole heirs to communal land. The ANC government is complicit, as they do nothing about the dispossession of people in rural areas.

The struggles experienced by same-sex couples in rural communities and the struggles of rural people under corrupt chiefs is linked to the lack of government leadership in the country. The current South African government has failed rural communities over and over again. The statements made by Chief Nonkonyana are in line with the hostility that the South African government treats the poor. What is important for me here is that we recognise that the problem here is not same-sex couples or poor people from rural communities, the problem is corrupt chiefs who are able to oppress people in rural communities because they have support from a corrupt ANC government.

So how do we move on from here? Well, we must fight for the rights of those living in rural communities, and one way of fighting is through participating in the construction of laws that govern rural communities. As South Africans we have a bad record at participating in our own democracy, this needs to change if we are to hold leaders accountable. The Minister for Rural Development and Land Reform has published the Communal Land Tenure Bill and the Explanatory Memorandum for public comment. As members of the public, we are invited to comment on this bill. The bill is open for public comment until 7 September 2017. We must take this opportunity to push for the protection of communal land rights, and also the rights of other marginalised people with respect to land in rural South Africa. The bill can be viewed for comment on the government website http://www.gov.za/documents/communal-land-tenure-bill-draft-7-jul-2017-0000

Pretoria High School for Girls: Black hair politics and the battle for dignity

It was just last week that my friend with a daughter in Model C high school in the northern suburbs of Cape Town was telling me about having to send an e-mail to the Mathematics teacher because the teacher made comments about the daughters hair. The daughter’s hair is in a natural mini Afro.

So when I was reading about the protests by black girls at Pretoria High for Girls this weekend, I immediately thought about my friend’s daughter. The administration at Pretoria High School for Girls, like many white South Africans, does not take seriously the dignity of black people.

Maybe it is good a good time to insert here that the South African Constitution, in the Bill of Rights, guarantees for everyone – including black girls – a right to human dignity. It reads, “Everyone has inherent dignity and the right to have their dignity respected and protected.” The administrators at Pretoria High School for Girls and other Model C schools in South Africa seem to ignore this important right while formulating “general appearance” guidelines.

In South Africa, lip service is paid to the idea of human dignity but there is a lack of respecting this right in practice. In other instances we speak of human dignity, but we have caveats, we say human dignity for all but not for the sex-worker, not for the homosexual, not for the gender non-conforming bodies, not for the black foreigner, not for the poor, and not for women.

Instinctually I want to say, how crazy is it that South Africa has a population that is more or less 80% black, but it is that black 80% that needs to modify to fit into European beauty ideals. I stop myself because although it is “crazy” because it is unjust – because it should not be so – it not crazy in that there is a history that leads us here. It is 350 plus years of colonization and then apartheid that brought us here. It is years of missionary education that was premised on racism. South Africa has a long history of denying black people their dignity, hence the specific inclusion of human dignity in the Constitution.

In South Africa we don’t always acknowledge the full impact of colonialism on present day society. In South Africa we are discouraged from engaging the history of colonialism. The history of colonialism is often neglected in discussions about race and racism and the creation of a democratic South Africa. Statements such as “we need to move on” are often used when colonialism is brought into a conversation.

What have those years done to our collective historical psyche?

What we need to interrogate and ask is why do we not engage more with colonialism and the effects of colonialism? We have a museum for apartheid, we have one for District Six, we have the Voortrekker Monument, but as my Boyfriend once asked, where is the museum or memorial for colonialism? Are we to pretend that the 300 years preceding 1948 never happened?

I suspect the answer to the colonialism museum question has to do with who has the power, – monetarily, socially, and otherwise – to realise such a museum. Building a colonialism museum would imply that there will be a place where we can go and engage with colonialism and its legacy. And yes, it would be a museum of horrors. It would be a museum where the violence of whiteness is on proper display, where it is obvious.

Instead of thinking hard about colonialism and then apartheid and their legacies, in South Africa we are encouraged to “move on” and “leave the past in the past.” This is a futile exercise of course because the past is not in the past; the past is here with us and the protests by black girls at Pretoria High School for Girls is evidence of this.

You might ask what does colonialism and then apartheid have to do with the protests at Pretoria High School for Girls?

Everything.

We are often blind to the ways that we are all affected by colonialism. The fantasies that white South Africans still have about black people are palpable. You see part of what colonialism has bequeathed on us is the investment in an authoritarian Christian nationalist ethos. The bizarre notion that imposing rules on how you look will instill “discipline” and make students excellent – as if you think with your hair. South African schools really need to rethink the dressing codes, the school prayers, the school songs, and school traditions that were part and parcel of the colonial and then apartheid regimes. The problem at Pretoria High School for Girls is real and its 3 centuries in the making.

The rules and regulation of grooming practices for black girls at Pretoria High School for Girls has everything to do with our colonial past and then apartheid. These grooming practices were established during colonial and then apartheid years. The idea that black people’s grooming practices must be monitored is as old as 1562. The ways that black girls are treated at Pretoria High School for Girls, and other Model C schools is rooted in the ways colonialists and then the apartheid regulated the “neatness” of black bodies.

The language of “neatness” is still part of the guidelines of Model C schools. It is used to discipline black girl’s bodies in order for their bodies to closely reflect the dominant European ideal. It is when the black girl’s hair does not reflect the European ideal that it’s “neatness” is called into question. Talk about a need for decolonising the South African schooling system.

The black girls who get into trouble with Model C school administrators are not black girls with “properly” combed European looking weaves, it is not black girls who do their hair in the “ordinary” way – an ordinary that pleases the white administrator. It is the black girl with an Afro. It is the black girl with dreadlocks. It is the black girl whose hair pronounces I am black and I know it and I love it.

Many white South Africans, including white teachers at Model C schools, have not caught up with a post-apartheid South Africa that is supposed to be rid of racism. How is it ok for a white schoolteacher to think that it is acceptable to call a black girls hair a “bird next”?

Some white South Africans might have missed it, but whiteness just isn’t what it used to be. But you see blackness is also not what it used to be. As demonstrated by #RhodesMustFall, #FeesMustFall, and now #StopRacismAtPretoriaGirlsHigh with regards to whiteness and previously whites only institutions, it is not business as usual anymore.

The black girls at Pretoria High School for Girls are a clear demonstration that blackness is not going to be lived in ways that pleases white administrators at Model C schools. Black girls at Pretoria High School for Girls are fighting back. They are fighting for their dignity. They are fighting to exist in a South Africa where their being is not measured against European standards of beauty disguised in discourses of “proper grooming.” Black girls shouldn’t be policed like this. In fact there’s already too much policing that girls experience what with the patriarchal culture that we live under, teachers cannot and shouldn’t be part of the policing. They should be helping high school girls forming positive body image.

What is taking place at Pretoria High School for Girls is shocking because black girls in high school shouldn’t have to protest for their dignity and their identity to be valued and respected. However, what is happening there it is not surprising. Model C schools have been mistreating black pupils all throughout the post-apartheid period. We have had reports of schools not allowing black languages to be spoken in class. We have seen schools with very questionable admissions policies.

Who can forget Simphiwe Dana deciding to move from Cape Town to Johannesburg so that her children can have access to good schools that offer black languages? So, no, this is not surprising. The black students I have met at university who went to Model C schools speak of the racism experienced at these schools. They speak of the pressure to assimilate to whiteness. Students are denied the Right to speak their mother tongues in Model C schools, and in addition they pick up a distinct “Model C English” accent. For most of us high school was tough, but there is a particular self-loathing that is produced by Model C schools.

The reaction from the school authorities towards the protests by black girls at Pretoria High School for Girls is disgusting. It is apartheid style tactics of making the school a victim with teachers speaking of being “threatened and scared”. This is a typical whiteness response when white people and white institutions are called into order about their racism.

White South Africans are so used to treating black people and black people’s bodies with disregard that when black girls demand to be treated with dignity, white teachers speak of feeling “threatened and scared.” Of course the irony is that the white teachers are blindly unaware of the “threat” they pose to black girls identities and self-worth. They are blindly unaware how “scared” the black girls must be to have to put themselves in the line of fire with the school administration. Also, what about the fear that the teachers place on black girls who have to extensively calculate the “appropriateness” of their hair with every new hair do.

It’s impossible to miss the gendered nature of hair “guidelines” or “general appearance” guides for schools as they are often designed for girls and much less is said about boys. Since Pretoria High School for Girls is a girl’s school, I imagine the policing must be doubly intense. We are already aware of the many ways that black women’s bodies are surveilled in society. Places like Pretoria High School for Girls institutionalize the policing of black girls bodies under “dress codes.”

In the policing of black girls bodies at this school, how do they deal with the diverse ways that gender is experienced and lived. I shudder to think how pupils at places like Pretoria High School for Girls who have gender non-conforming identities, or who are forming gender non-conforming identities. The violence that must be visited upon such pupils at a school that has dress and hair policies that are admittedly “conservative.”

The “rules must be followed” and “all schools have rules” response to the protests by the black girls at Pretoria High School for Girls is telling. Although it is a typical response from many South Africans who value authority and rules for their own sake, it is problematic. That “rules” must be followed even if the rules are unjustified, colonial, and affect the dignity of black girls is unacceptable.

This type of discourse is of course not unlinked to the “children must be seen and not heard” nonsense that allows for the silencing of children, where children learn to be silent even when they are being hurt. Rules do not exist in isolation. People create rules. Rules are created by appointed structures, by society with a particular agenda. Rules are set to encourage a particular way of being, of dressing, of styling. Rules are ideological, they embody the world view and assumptions of the economically and socially dominant group who govern institutions. They are underpinned by a certain way of seeing the world – what the world ought to be like. Rules are not objective. So rules that are anti-Afro are rules that are anti-black. Rules that are anti-dreadlocks are rules that are anti-black.

The problem with the white administrators at Pretoria High School for Girls and other Model C schools is symptomatic of the problem of white South Africa. White South Africans are not invested in, and they show no commitment in fostering a nonracial South Africa. It has been lamented time and time again that the people involved in the post-apartheid rebuilding of South Africa is black people.

White South Africans are more interested in living in gated communities with electrical fences and security guards than engaging with black people. In post apartheid South Africa white people still have not taken the time to learn more about the black cultures around them. The poverty porn in Cape Town and Johannesburg galleries and the occasional Sunday braai at a place like Mzoli’s doesn’t count.

White South Africans are still living with strangers, an ideologically far away people. There is very little effort from white South Africans engaging meaningfully with black people and black cultures, and that is why in 2016 schoolteachers can say racist things about black girls hair. That is why administrators are poorly handling the protests at Pretoria High School for Girls. That is why when black girls are screaming to be treated with dignity; they are met with “rules must be followed” responses.

There is a total disregard of the black girls personhood. In this climate, in this culture of ignoring the dignity of black girls, Maliaka Eyoh’s words, a grade 12 pupil at Pretoria High School for Girls, become that much more prophetic when she states, “When we stand together, our message is stronger. We understand that we cannot trust two old white men who work for other old white men to stand up and combat the injustice and incite the change we need.” Maliaka Eyoh understands that she has to fight for her dignity and the dignity of other black girls. She understands the poverty of white South African’s will to meaningfully engage with blackness.

Many South Africans are proud of the black girls of Pretoria High School for Girls. We are excited for the world these black girls envision for themselves. A South Africa that is not anti-black. A part of me, a big part of me wishes that these black girls didn’t have to do what they did. And as I wish this, I am reminded of one of my mother’s favourite 16-century English proverbs, “if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” A luta continua.

Striving for Frantz Fanon’s Universal Human Emancipation

The relevance of Peter Hudis’s Frantz Fanon: philosopher of the barricades on Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary ideas to achieving universal human emancipation cannot be overstated. Hudis has been instrumental in helping me make sense of the current student politics, amongst other things, in South Africa because he writes Fanon for our times. Hudis sees it as a matter of extreme importance that Fanon is read in context. Fanon mostly writes in the 1950’s and 1960’s. During this time the Algerian revolution is underway, African countries are “receiving” independence from Europe. The word “receive” independence is deceiving and therefore problematic. Firstly it’s as if Africa’s independence was Europe’s to give, and secondly wars were fought for independence, it was not given. Nonetheless … In 1960 alone 17 countries gained independence from Europe, most of which were French colonies in West Africa. The African national movements were instrumental to ensuring independence. A very specific time in history, with very particular politics, and all of that has to be considered when discussing Fanon’s thoughts and how they are applicable to the South African context in 2016.

This is not a book review. I am pulling out three sections from Peter Hudis’s book that are helpful in making sense of the current student protests in South African universities. Of course the philosophies of Frantz Fanon are applicable to life in South Africa beyond the academy. The three sections I take from the book, for me, speak to the complexity of the current political moment, but also how we can think through this moment. The sections I have decided to highlight and write about in thinking through our current political climate are: the lack of ontology of blackness, the necessity to engage colonialism as a genesis of where we are, and lastly Fanon’s ideal of achieving universal human emancipation. The selected sections from the book, I write about them insofar as they are relevant for us in South Africa.

The philosophies of Frantz Fanon have been part of the current student movements in South African universities. Lines like “we can’t breath” have become part of the vocabulary of the movements. This was a statement screamed out by Eric Garner in NYC when he was being strangled by white police officers. Before Garner popularised this powerful line, it was a much-quoted Fanonism: “When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.” Fanon has been heavily invoked in the student movements in university campuses all over South Africa. The current political climate at university campuses across the country necessitates a close, contextual reading of Fanon. It necessitates an engagement that asks, what does Fanon mean for us in the current South African political climate (which universities are part of), because surely what it taking place at the university is linked to wider social issues.

Peter Hudis’s book is invaluable in helping us think through the current political moment using Fanon’s philosophy as a guiding light. Fanon’s philosophies are powerful, and they contain within them the roadmap to liberation, but they require immense intellectual labour. We need a meaningful engagement with Fanon’s theories if they are to aid us in grappling with the current political moment. It is this considered engagement that will potentially aid us in formulating an appropriate response to the moment. This is why I think philosopher of the barricades is a necessary read for ALL of us interested in the current political moment. Firstly, this book helps us understand Fanon’s preoccupation with the lack of ontology (existence) of “blackness” – which I see at a point of departure in our engagement with the South African political moment. Hudis writes:

“Unlike the Jew, who (as Sartre discusses in ‘Anti-Semite and the Jew’) is over-determined by the view of themselves that they have interiorized from gentile society, blacks, Fanon contends, are ‘over-determined from the outside’ – that is, they are ‘slaves to their appearance.’ Colonial domination, a rather arbitrary social construction, creates over time a certain way of ‘seeing’, in which skin colour is presumed to have determinative importance. The individual becomes fixated on the supposed ‘fact’ of the person’s blackness. This defines not only the colonisers view of the colonized, but also the colonized view of themselves; they are ‘fixed’ and defined by the ‘gaze’ of the Other. Their ‘being’ is defined by the other – not by themselves. The black comes to see themselves as ‘black’ because of the distorted gaze of the white – who is unaware of the peculiar nature of colonial and racial domination. And since white society tends to associate ‘blackness’ with every negative trait imaginable – again, as a result of its need to justify its domination over them – blacks come to view themselves as inferior to whites. For this reason Fanon writes, ‘the black man (people) has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man (people).’ Ontology refers to the nature of being – it is the study of what constitutes the real. Fanon contends that there is no ontology of blackness, since ‘blackness’ is not a ‘natural’ reality – it is not a form of being that just ‘is.’ Blackness is instead a construct of specific social relations. It is produced, fabricated, not simply given. The black ‘exists’, as black, only in relation to the white: there is no pre-existing black essence that a black person can fall back upon. In other words, blacks ‘exists’ and are defined in negative self-relation to what they are NOT.” … Understanding this is a crucial starting point to understanding and genuinely engaging what’s going on around us.

Linked to the first point about the lack of ontology for “blackness”, a major problem with our analysis and discussions of the current political moment is the lack of historical context. Discussions about why we are where we are are often without any historical considerations. Racism as we have come to know it developed under very specific economic conditions of domination and exploitation such as slavery and colonialism. In South Africa colonisation is something we seem to skip over when we talk about our current political milieu, but it is the genesis of the struggle against white racism. It is the current student movements that have brought the issue of colonialism to the fore by demanding a decolonisation of higher education institutions. When the black students at campuses around the country are talking about economic hardships, having no access to residences, bringing a shack to campus to demonstrate the lack of housing not only on campus but in their communities, they are highlighting (intentionally or not) that the inferiority that plagues the black psyche has it’s origins in economic subjugation, but obviously thereafter “takes on a life of it’s own that surpass that of the economic.” So the socio-economic problem is not divorced from the psychological problem. In South Africa the phrase “human dignity” is often loosely thrown around without any real considerations on what it means for everyday life of black South Africans. This is something the ruling party is very guilty of doing. There is no dignity in poverty. There is no dignity in not having proper sanitation. Poverty is often wrongly framed as a personal failing, ignoring all the colonial history that created the social structure that enables poverty and sustains it. As Hudis demonstrates racism can only be overhauled by dealing with it on both the socio-economic and the psychological level. Hudis notes:

“Fanon adopts a socio-genetic approach to a study of the psyche because that is what is adequate for the object of his analysis. For Fanon, it is the relationship between the socio-economic and psychological that is of crucial import. He makes it clear, insofar as the subject matter of his concerned, that the socio-economic is first of all responsible for the affective disorders: ‘First, economic. Then, internalization or rather epidermalization of this inferiority.” Fanon never misses an opportunity to remind us that racism owes its origin to specific economic relations of domination – such as slavery, colonialism, and the effort to co-opt sections of the working class into serving the needs of capital. It is hard to mistake the Marxist influence here. It does not follow, however, that what comes first in the order of time has conceptual or strategic priority. The inferiority complex is originally born from economic subjugation, but it takes on a life of it’s own and express itself in terms that surpass the economic. Both sides of the problem – the socio-economic and the psychological must be combatted in tandem: ‘The black man (people) must wage the struggle on two levels; whereas historically these levels are mutually dependent, any unilateral liberation is flawed, and the worst mistake would be to believe their mutual dependence automatic.’”

“On these grounds he (Fanon) argues that the problem of racism cannot be solved on a psychological level. It is not an ‘individual’ problem; it is a social one. But neither can it be solved on a social level that ignores the psychological. It is small wonder that although his name never appears in the book (black skin, white masks), Fanon was enamoured of the work of Wilhelm Reich. This important Freudian-Marxist would no doubt feel affinity with Fanon’s comment, ‘Genuine desalienation will have been achieved only when things, in the most material sense, have resumed their rightful place.’” … In South Africa things are far from resuming their “rightful place” – The uprisings on campuses across the country are indicative of this. They are also symptomatic of a larger socio-economic and psychological national problem.

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Lastly, Fanon’s ultimate goal was to create a roadmap to achieving universal human emancipation. Although he endorsed nationalism in Algeria and in other African states, Fanon understood that nationalism had limitations. In South Africa and in other Africa states we are very aware of the shortcomings (mostly downright failure) of national movements post-independence. The big question then becomes how do you achieve universal human emancipation, while endorsing nationalism? It is clear that Fanon’s wants us as black people, as Africans, to move us towards what he called New Humanity. Not the European kind of “humanity”. According to Hudis “Fanon’s central philosophy message is that instead of trying to copy or catch up with Europe, it is time to leave it behind – not because all of the values and ideas that arose from it were necessarily wrong, but because they remained unrealised by a Europe which speaks of “man” (humanity) while slaughtering man en masse. Europe has failed humanity; but humanity is not a failure. Its renewal IS possible.” So how do we achieve the New Humanity set out by Fanon while straddling nationalism and full emancipation? Hudis through Fanon seems to think that the seeming contradiction is a necessary one, a contradiction that we need to think through. This contradiction did not come about because of Fanon. “Rather, the contradiction is endemic to the revolutionary process itself.” Hudis states:

“‘Fanon’s commitments revealed a contradiction in his position that he, in effect, never fully resolved, between the wholehearted endorsement of nationalism, and his hope that it would nevertheless produce a nation prepared to transcend its limitations of nationalism.’ This is questionable, since in the Rome speech Fanon does not issue a ‘wholehearted endorsement of nationalism.’ He wholehearted endorses the struggle for national culture and national liberation, which is not reducible (at least in his eyes) to nationalism. Nor does it appear that in the Rome speech he ‘remains divided between the genuine commitment he had to the Algerian movement on the one hand, and the continuing concern he felt for the predicament of black men and black society.’ Fanon plunged into the Algerian movement not because he moved away from concern for ‘the predicament of black men and black society’ but because he viewed the Algerian struggle as the vanguard force in weakening French colonialism and leading to the liberation of black Africa. He did not embrace Algeria’s fight because he became won over to Arab nationalism, but rather because he saw it as a catalyst to the liberation of Africa as a whole. From the start of his career he understood that ‘blackness’ is a creation of colonialism and that embracing any ontology of ‘blackness’ buys into the very logic of racism. [It is crucial then, as we talk about blackness in the current student movements in South Africa, that we don’t get trapped in the very logic of racism we are fighting against] To transcend the fixation associated with racism it is necessary to posit, as an absolute, a particularity that is not fixed or essential but which is the conduit to a new humanism. By the late 1950’s Fanon had wagered that he found that in the national liberation movement.”

“Still, is there not a contradiction between supporting a national struggle, which clearly has a nationalistic component, and seeking to achieve universal human emancipation, which transcends any form of nationalism? There certainly is a ‘contradiction’ here but it is not one that is a mere product of Fanon’s making. Nor is it a matter of him being ‘ambivalent’ about his commitments. Rather, the contradiction is endemic of the revolutionary process itself. Any effort to achieve emancipation entails a development through contradiction – a development from posing particular demands and perspectives to reaching for universal human emancipation. As Marx once put it, ‘the transcendence of self-estrangement follows the same course as self-estrangement.’ There is a tenuous, contradictory relationship between means and ends, and there is no guarantee that it will be successfully navigated – whether we are speaking in terms of struggles over race, class, or gender. An automatic, predetermined teleology is out of the question here. It is not possible to reach the goal except by certain means, but there is no guarantee that the means will be universally recognised as but a step to something else. It is always possible to fall prey to fixation, even in the struggle to liberate oneself from it. This problematic defines the very project of emancipation. One can wish the contradiction away, but it will not disappear. One can seek to deny it by skipping over the particular in order to leap to the universal, or one can ignore the universal in favour of the particular. But in either way case the contradiction is unresolved and remains to haunt us.”

It is my hope that as we strive to achieve a universal human emancipation that we do it in the Fanonian way. Because as Hudis so beautiful put it: “A movement is ‘Fanonian’ not because it consists of peasants, lumpenproletarians, or shackdwellers, any more than it is ‘Fanonian’ because it consists of the working class, students, women, gays and lesbians or blacks and other national minorities. A movement is ‘Fanonian’ insofar, and only insofar, as it ‘re-examines the question of humanity’, rejuvenates it, and actualises it.”

The inclusion of Sexuality, Gender, Transgendered issues in the #RhodesMustFall movement

I first went to Azania House (formerly known as Bremner Building) at the University of Cape Town (UCT), on the Saturday after the first night of the occupation. The energy was amazing, the discussions were vibrant, and at the time I wasn’t sure if the Rhodes statue would ultimately fall or not. I was just excited to be in the presence of black students who are fighting for transformation at the university. I was excited to see students demanding to see themselves represented at this African university.

On my next visit to Bremner I witnessed a heated discussion on the issue of Gender Neutral bathrooms on the first floor because there are transgendered students in the #RhodesMustFall movement. One of the transgendered persons in the room suggested that the female and male bathrooms on the first floor should be made Gender Neutral. Others met this request with resistance for a number of reasons. The cis gender woman mentioned reasons of safety that they do not want to go into a bathroom where males can also go. One of the guys sheepishly voiced not wanting transgendered women entering the male bathroom.

The cis gender woman tried to explain that firstly she respects the transgendered person, but she really doesn’t understand transgendered issues and why the bathrooms have to be Gender Neutral. The concerns of the cis gender woman about safety issues in the bathrooms are valid in the climate of sexual violence on women in South Africa. But transgendered persons and other gender non-conforming bodies also face physical and sexual violence in this country.

The transgendered person in the conversation tried to explain that they also feel uncomfortable going into male or female bathrooms. Male bathrooms are often hostile and you are treated like someone who is there as a voyeur on male penises. The trans person also voiced that female bathrooms are also filled with cold stares and judgements and sometimes-verbal abuse.

While listening to this conversation I couldn’t help but think of how Simon Nkoli conscientised some of his comrades about homosexuality while they were arrested in the Delmas Treason Trial in the 1980’s. Simon Nkoli’s fellow comrades in the treason trial often spoke about Simon Nkoli with affection and how they learned about gay and lesbian rights from him. The transgendered person in the conversation at Azania House was conscientising fellow comrades on transgendered issues and I was moved by this interaction. It was a real and honest moment and although these students had different opinions and feelings about Gender Neutral bathrooms, it was an open discussion; it was on the table and the students were grappling.

In the end the students decided to stick paper signs designating the first floor male and female bathrooms Gender Neutral? and Gender Neutral. What I saw was the first of many discussion that I would witness about transgendered issues in Azania House and in the #RhodesMustFall movements as a whole. In the following weeks during the occupation of the Archie Mafeje room the politics of gender, sexuality, and transgendered also became central as intersectionality as a framework took shape within the movement.

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The #RhodesMustFall movement has adopted Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness as the foundation for the movement. The Black Consciousness movement has in the past been critiqued for not incorporating gender struggles within the movement. The #RhodesMustFall movement made it a point to incorporate gender, sexuality, and transgendered politics as they fall part of the emancipatory project of post-apartheid South Africa.

The inclusion of gender, sexuality, and transgendered issues within a predominantly black student movement is no small victory. My sense is that continuously invoking gender, sexuality, and transgendered issues in the race conversation is what is going to deliver us. The battle for gender, sexuality, and transgendered rights has always been ghettoized and only fought by people directly affected by these issues. Our strength actually lies in our ability to see that the race issue is connected to the gender issue and the sexuality issue and the transgender issue and the class issue. In the piece How Black Women Claimed Their Place Mbali Matandela articulates the significance of having black women’s voices in the movement to amplify the specificity of the pain of black women in this country.

The psychological, emotional, and sexual violence that black women, gender non-conforming people, transgendered people are subjected to is from predominantly black men. And this needs to be addressed. The violence these groups of people are subjected to is because of the systemic patriarchal order in this country that black men are part of and need to be part of its undoing. And so it is critical then that a movement created for the dismantling of white supremacist patriarchy embodied by the Cecil John Rhodes statue must include the dismantling of black patriarchy.

Addressing the issue of black patriarchy remains an issue as some black males within the #RhodesMustFall movement remain stubborn about their conservative views about gender, sexuality, and transgendered issues. There is hope because many are willing to learn and strong black feminists and gender non-conforming LGBTI people challenge these black men.

The adoption of intersectional politics in the #RhodesMustFall movement was a genius move because intersectionality is immensely beneficial in understanding the multi-layered South African context where race, class, gender, disability, and sexual identity intersect with complex results. The very lives of black students at UCT are an example of the complexity of intersectional identities in South Africa because black students come from different class backgrounds, have different sexualities, and have different gender identities and all of these must be navigated in this often hostile white environment.

For me the #RhodesMustFall movement represents the hope for the future. A future where black students see themselves in the architecture of the universities they study in. Perhaps this is a sign of how future South Africa movements will look like, that they will recognize how struggles are connected. It is in the recognising the different ways that we as black people, as poor people, as LGBTI people, as women, as disabled people, are all chained by systems of oppression. This recognition then becomes the impetus for us to come together and dismantle the systems that oppress us.

Lwando Scott 

The politics of Pride – Cape Town

“Gender is about race is about class is about sexuality is about age is about nationality is about an entire range of social relations.” – Kath Weston

In this quote Weston captures the intersection of social and identity struggles and how these struggles pull and push on each other. The intersection of struggles is no more evident than in the South African LGBTIQ community, where race, class, gender and sexuality intersect and produce a complex set of relations between people.

During Cape Town Pride this year, 2015, there were two schedules that were put out. There was the official Pride that was organised by the Cape Town Pride organisation. There was also an Alternative Pride schedule that was organised by members of LGBTIQ community in Cape Town who felt unrepresented and ignored by the official Pride organisers. Leading up to Pride there were numerous meetings that were held with the organisers of Cape Town Pride but these meeting never yielded any agreements about the events on the Pride schedule. Cape Town based LGBTIQ activists, NGO organisations and other individuals requested an inclusive Pride, where all within the LGBTIQ community can be represented in Pride events. The efforts to create a more inclusive Pride fell on deaf ears. The Alternative Pride schedule was created because of a lack of diversity and a lack of consideration for marginalised LGBTIQ people within the Cape Town LGBTIQ community.

I attended one of the official Cape Town Pride meetings after they had sent out an e-mail requesting volunteers. The meeting was help at 6 Spin Street in the Cape Town city centre. The organisers of Cape Town Pride chaired the meeting and they solicited ideas about pride events, but rejected most of the ideas because of “budgets” constraints. We were then asked to sign up for volunteer hours to help with Pride but then never heard from the organisers again. During the meeting, it sounded like the Pride was already fixed and that there was no real input needed, even volunteers weren’t seriously wanted. It felt like a smoke and mirrors exercise, not really geared at engaging the people, and I didn’t appreciate the waste of my time.

Looking at the 2015 Cape Town Pride schedule, the schedule had 9 days of events and out of these 9 events only 2 were free. The rest of them you had to pay a fee in order to access the events. If I decided that I wanted to go to all of the events on the Cape Town Pride schedule, it would cost me R850. Now the important question becomes, who can pay to get into these events? Who are these events geared towards? Are these Cape Town Pride events representative of the L-G-B-T-I-Q communities in Cape Town? What is missing in these events? What is a Millionaire Gala that costs R450 per head? I think the answers to these questions will reveal much about the politics of the organisers of Cape Town Pride.

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As mentioned there was an Alternative Pride schedule, which was a direct response to the lack of representation of the diversity of the LGBTIQ community by Cape Town Pride. Some of the events organised under the Alternative Pride schedule were free, and when they did charge it was not ridiculously expensive, so many could attend the events. I attended a number of the events and found that they spoke to the experiences of many LGBTIQ South Africans. The Alternative Cape Town Pride schedule included events that were located outside of the Cape Town city centre, like Gugulethu. The Alternative Cape Town Pride events were organised in a really short space of time, but they were a huge success. While attending some of the events I couldn’t help but imagine how impactful and inclusive they would make Cape Town Pride.

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The Pride Parade is usually one of the last events on the pride calendar and this year was no exception. The LGBTIQ activists, NGO’s, and individuals who were opposed to the way that Cape Town Pride is organised planned a protest. The details of the pride protest were ironed out at the “Talk Pride To The People” event that was part of the Alternative Pride Schedule. In this meeting activists spoke of the non-accommodating and non-inclusive stance taken by Cape Town Pride organisers. The activists also spoke about how there shouldn’t be just a “stay away” from Pride, that it must be protested, people must show up, and reject the bullying tendencies of the Pride organisers.

The protest took take place during the Pride parade. The protesters consisted of people from different NGO’s in Cape Town, individuals, and LGBTIQ activists. There was so much solidarity during the protest amongst protesters from different LGBTIQ communities fighting for inclusion. The Pride protest was filled with songs, the beating of African drums, and chanting, calling for the recognition of black, of poor, of disabled, of transgendered, and of sex worker LGBTIQ struggles. Cape Town Pride organisers seem to lack an understanding of the way struggles are connected. There’s a refusal to comprehend that organising Pride in a socially and economically divided city like Cape Town, you have to consider how the events accommodate people who are not middle class, who are not men, who are not white, and who don’t live in the Cape Town city centre.

“Pride is a celebration” is one of the arguments used by Pride organisers for the lack of politics in South African Pride parades. How Pride events situated in South Africa can be devoid of politics is mind-boggling. Many LGBTIQ South Africans are still fighting for the right to exist. Many black gender non-conforming LGBTIQ are targets of violent assaults and murder. Transgendered individuals are fighting for access to social services, access to health services, and the creation of laws that allow people to live their lives in their preferred sex and gender identities. Not to mention the everyday bullying, and taunts, and the indignities that LGBTIQ people struggle against because of institutionalised homophobia in this country. Under these conditions how do we embrace Pride parades that are devoid of politics? Under these circumstances how can LGBTIQ communities be asked to only “celebrate” Pride?

It is clear that the Pride protests in South Africa target the depoliticization and subsequent commercialisation of Pride, and the resulting exclusion of certain groups of people. This is not unique to Cape Town; Johannesburg has had its fair share of Pride protests. Both Cape Town and Johannesburg Pride events have been mired in complex politics of representation. Although there had been a number of protests during Johannesburg Pride in the past, it was the disruption of Pride by the One in Nine Campaign protesters in October 2012 that really placed a spotlight on the problems with Pride in Johannesburg. The disruption of Joburg Pride in 2012 started a conversation within the LGBTI community about the politics of pride and the meaning of pride in the context of South Africa. This is an on going conversation and it remains a touchy subject because the issues that caused division have not been solved, chief amongst them the representation of “black” struggles within Pride.

When the One in Nine protesters disrupted Johannesburg Pride they were asking for a minute of silence from the organizers of Pride to honour members of the LGBTI community, particularly gender non-conforming black women who have been murdered because of their disruption of normative gender expectations. They were demanding Johannesburg Pride and its organizers to focus more on LGBTIQ politics in the country and less on the commercialised aspects that had become a priority for Johannesburg Pride. Johannesburg Pride organisers and the pride goers responded to the call for silence from One in Nine with hostility and assault.

You might be wondering what exactly are LGBTIQ NGO’s, activists and individuals demanding from Cape Town Pride? What would an inclusive Pride look like? If Cape Town Pride is going to be inclusive it will have to consider the following points very seriously:

  • Cape Town Pride does not seem to care about poor LGBTIQ people in Cape Town and so does not make attempts to include such people in the Cape Town Pride schedule.
    • The events surrounding Pride and the after Pride enclosed festivities are expensive and this excludes people who can’t afford.
    • Cape Town Pride does not exist in a vacuum, it can’t just ignore LGBTIQ people who are poor by just saying “if you can’t afford, don’t come.”
    • Because of the history of colonialism and then apartheid economic classes are racialized in South Africa, which means that the majority of people who can’t afford to access the paid sections of Cape Town Pride are predominantly black. This means that black people are mostly excluded from Cape Town Pride events.
  • Cape Town Pride does not organise events that include LGBTIQ people who have children. The schedule does not attempt to have family friendly events.
  • Cape Town Pride does not engage with feminist politics and lesbian feminist politics, in fact Cape Town Pride does not engage in any kind of politics. It’s just a “celebration.”
    • The struggles of black gender non-conforming peoples within the LGBTIQ community needs to be taken up and seriously engaged with. There is something seriously wrong with the politics of Cape Town Pride when we have people in LGBTIQ communities assaulted and murdered and the response during Pride is silence and “celebration.”
  • Cape Town Pride does not engage transgendered issues, and this needs to change. The T in LGBTIQ seems to be decorative only. There’s a negation of transgendered people’s experiences and their needs.
  • Cape Town Pride shouldn’t place financial gains before political struggles.
  • Cape Town Pride needs to include LGBTIQ communities in organising Pride. It’s understood that Pride programming will never fully satisfy everyone, but there has to be an open process that tries to be as inclusive as possible.

The creation of a better South Africa, of a more democratic South Africa, of an inclusive South Africa is the responsibility of all of us. Cape Town Pride is not exempt from this. Cape Town Pride needs to consider the different communities in the alphabet soup – LGBTIQ – when designing the Pride schedule. The 2015 Cape Town Pride schedule caters to the needs of middle class white gay men. If Cape Town Pride is for middle class gay white men, then it should be termed as such, and rebrand, and not give the illusion that it caters to the whole LGBTIQ community. Cape Town Pride should also remember that Pride has its roots in protest. But most crucially Cape Town Pride must remember that the situation of the African queer necessitates that Pride be political.

Jesus is destructive for black people

There are two times in my life that I started to think critically about Jesus and all that he represents. The first moment was when I was in school and my friend NomaA said to me that she thinks Jesus is horrible and hates black people. NomaA said that God hates black people because he gave black women ugly hair and they have to go to so much trouble to get their hair as silky as white women’s hair. NomaA said that if God loved black people he would have given black women straight, beautiful, flowing hair and not the type of hair that needs to much labour to make it beautiful. I remember this conversation because it was the first time someone had spoken so openly to me about dissatisfaction with God.

The second time my young mind had to critically think about Jesus (I use God and Jesus interchangeably, they are after all the same person) was when I read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. You will remember Pecola in the book and the sadness of her yearning for blue eyes. Pecola, a black girl who prays to God to give her blue eyes so that she could also be beautiful. I remember reading the following passages and weeping:

“Each night without fail, she prayed for blue eyes. Fervently, for a year she had prayed. Although somewhat discouraged, she was not without hope. To have something as wonderful as that would take a long, long time.”

After praying very hard for a whole year for blue eyes, Pecola does not get her blue eyes. She then goes to see a Psychic Reader and who said:

“Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty… a little black girl who wanted to rise out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes. For the first time he (Psychic Reader) honestly wished he could work miracles.”

As you can imagine I’ve had other experiences that have made me question the concept of Jesus, but these two stand out because I was so young and both of these encounters have stayed with me. What also made these encounters special is that when I read about Pecola in The Bluest Eye, I immediately thought of NomaA and how she must have felt about black women’s hair.

Now I am a little older and I have sat through many Sociology classes that have enabled me unpack these events in retrospect. There is much to unpack from the statements made by my friend NomaA and by Pecola about the intersection of race, religion, gender, and beauty. In this piece I want to concentrate on religion, on God, on Jesus and why it is destructive for black people to believe in this construct.

The statement made by NomaA back in school about her black hair and Jesus not giving black people flowing white people hair was problematic because it relies on white supremacist concepts of beauty. What NomaA believed about Jesus on the other hand was correct to a large extent, because it is clear that if there was such a thing as a Jesus, then he really doesn’t like black people, women, disabled people, and LGBTI people. The important question then becomes why would black people want to worship a God that doesn’t seem to like them? Back in school both NomaA and I didn’t have the analytical tools to help us understand the way South African society was shaped and how race, God, and white supremacy are linked. Even though we didn’t have well developed analytical skills NomaA already felt that there was something wrong with the Jesus picture.

The character of Pecola was instrumental in helping me see the violence of Christianity on the black psyche. The way Pecola prays to white Jesus for blue eyes made me weep. I couldn’t (still can’t) get over the destructiveness of how she prayed for a whole year for pretty blue eyes, blue eyes she will never attain. Here is a black girl praying for blue eyes from a white God – it is the essence of white supremacy – black people asking to be saved by a white God by making them white. To think that black people continue praying to Jesus so that “they can be more like (white) Jesus.” You have to appreciate the wackiness of it all, that although black people have been “emancipated” from colonialism and in South Africa also from apartheid, they continue to be enslaved to a Jesus that was an instrument in their colonisation.

The question of Jesus is a pressing matter for black people’s liberation because the construct of white Jesus is one of the strongest ways black people are held in captivity. I have already written about the dangers of the concept of “The New Jerusalem” and “storing your wealth in heaven” while others, predominantly white others are enjoying wealth right here on earth. The concept of Jesus is the biggest scam on the African continent and the only people who do not seem to see this is black people. It is a scam because the very people who brought Jesus here do not give two shits about him. It is people who used to worship ancestors before the arrival of Europeans who are willing to die and sometimes kill for Jesus.

A friend of mine recently sent me a video from Stan The White Guy who has some interesting things to say about black people and about Jesus. Stan says a number of things that are true including:

“We use white supremacy and religion to mind fuck brown people.”

“If you believe in a God of your enemy, you are an idiot.”

“We gave you this God because we knew by worshiping a white God you will be worshipping us (white people).”

“You will never fight against us because subconsciously you will be fighting God.”

 Watch the video here.

The relationship between Jesus and white supremacy is destructive for us not to pay attention. The relationship black people have with Jesus is psychologically damaging for us not to critique it. We need to question the concept of Jesus and the things black people do in the name of God. The construct of white Jesus is part and parcel of  the systematic structure of white supremacy and it needs to be challenged and even if God is not willing, it needs to be overhauled. I would rather black people worship dead grandmothers and dead grandfathers a.k.a ancestors than to worship a white, blue eyed Jewish guy who was born from a virgin.

Written by Lwando Scott 

Reflections: Memoirs of a Born Free

                                               Malaika

Author: Malaika Wa Azania

Written by: Lwando Scott 

When I saw this book, I knew I had to read it. I have a thing for clever book tittles and I love smart book covers. There’s even a book covers archive that I visit more often than I should. Memoirs of a Born Free touches on subjects that almost every black South African will have experienced. Reading this book I could see myself and I could remember the experiences I’ve had navigating South African society. I could see the lives of thousands other young black people who have travelled a similar road as Maliaka Wa Azania.

Firstly I love how Setswana is peppered throughout the book. The use of the African language in this book is reminiscent of the way we speak; it is the way black people converse in everyday life. The code switching between English and multiple vernacular languages that is present in my everyday conversation with other black people is very much present in this book. Malaika Wa Azania succeeds in translating everyday reality, the everydayness of her life into paper and it is such a pleasure to read. She also tries to convert certain vernacular phrases like “njengamathe no lwimi” into English “inseparable as a tongue and saliva” and obviously it doesn’t sound as punchy in English as it does in the vernacular, but the message is sent.

Malaika Wa Azania’s battles with navigating white spaces and white culture is a recurring theme in the book. She addresses her dealings with white supremacists culture when she talks about how when she attended Melpark Primary School, which is a former Model-C school with predominantly white students and white teachers, and felt like part of her was left in the township of Meadowlands Zone 8. That part of her was not welcomed in this white establishment.

What connects me to this book is also what frustrates. On the one hand I am glad that I have someone who understands what it means to be young and black in South Africa, but it also means that there’s something horribly wrong with social structure of South Africa that young black people are experiencing similar racial and class problems. Black people navigating predominantly white spaces are constantly complaining about the need to assimilate in order to be taken seriously, or seen as part of institutions in South Africa. The irony of-course is that assimilation often results in just as much alienation and humiliation as non-assimilation.

Reading this section of the book reminded me of three studies that have been conducted at the University of Cape Town about black students struggling to navigate the former whites only university. These are the studies:

  1. “Like that statue at Jammie stairs”: Some student perceptions and experiences of institutional culture at the university of Cape Town. By Melissa Steyn and Mikki van Zyle (1999).
  2. Not naming Race: some medical students’ perceptions and experiences of ‘race’ and racism at the Health Sciences faculty of the University of Cape Town. By Zimitri Erasmus and Jacques de Wet (2003).
  3. “Coming to UCT: Black students, transformation and the politics of race.” HUMA Seminar presented by Dr. Shose Kessi (2014).

All of these studies point to the alienating and humiliating nature of former whites only institutions that are refusing to transform and culturally embrace the post 1994 student body. What Malaika Wa Azania’s experiences growing up as a “Born Free” is indicative of the experiences that black students on different schools and campuses around the country.

The alienation depicted in this book is worsened by the humiliation of poverty. Although Malaika Wa Azania writes about “drawing strength from poverty”, it is painful to be reminded about one’s poverty on a daily basis at predominantly white schools by whites and sometimes black kids from middle class homes.

While reading the book I had a laugh out loud moment when Maliaka was insensitive to a school teacher who was crying in front of her class over her dog that had recently died by laughing at the woman’s tears. Malaika couldn’t understand why someone would cry over the death of a dog, so different the worlds that Malaika and her teachers and fellow students lived in. The relationships white people have with their pets was humorous to a township kid who grew up with stray dogs. In the township even yard dogs never reduced their owners to tears when they died.

I personally identified with the struggle for education in Malaika Wa Azania’s memoir. She passionately discusses the impossible task of trying to get a decent education in this country if you are poor or from a working class background. The odds are against you in every possible way, and reading this book, I couldn’t help but think of my own quest for education which has not been easy, particularly when I was finishing matric and about to starting university. Just like Malaika Wa Azania, my mother lost her Pick n’ Pay job in my matric year, and the future was so uncertain at that time. I was anxious about a future that could possibly never be because all my hope was in getting a decent education in order to escape poverty. And in this country, a decent education requires a decent income.

Not having money to register at her first choice high school, Malaika ends up going to another school, and she was grateful that the school had proper facilities unlike the townships schools. The poor education and poor infrastructure that is common in townships schools inhibits the success of black pupils. In the past 20 years township schools have only deteriorated and some have shut down. Where I grew up in Kwazakhele, Port Elizabeth, about three schools close to my house have closed. The ones in operation, including the one I went to as a kid, are falling apart with toilets not properly working and sometimes with no running water.

Malaika’s mom valued education and she does whatever is necessary to ensure that her kids go to school, to the point where she worked herself into a psychiatric hospital. Whoever said hard work doesn’t kill, has never met black South African single mothers. It would seem that Malaika’s mother, just like my mother, took Nelson Mandela’s words to heart that “education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” These words have propelled me to aggressively pursue my education even in the hardest of times.

The one aspect in the book that left me feeling a little ambivalent was when Malaika Wa Azania was talking about being taught about apartheid by her family. I imagine that white young people are also getting a version of apartheid from their parents, and I am interested in how the white telling of apartheid would be similar or different from the black telling of apartheid. Although I think that apartheid history is important to teach and to be talked about, I am concerned about one-sided stories about the past from families. I wonder what this “family education” does because we need to be mindful of transforming South African society, and not create another generation of people who think along apartheid lines.

Malaika Wa Azania says that “merely by being born black in this country you had problems.” Malaika speaks to the ways in which our society is structured; that your blackness ensures that you are positioned at a disadvantage is South African society. Transforming this country is harder than people anticipated it would be in 1994. Memoirs of a Born Free is a book I want all my friends, my cousins, and my professors to read. This book is a reflection of our country told by a young black woman who is trying to find her place in the world and South Africans have so much to learn from it. Malaika Wa Azania chronicles the everyday struggles of young black people in the “new” South Africa. Malaika is the embodiment of Nina Simone’s “to be young, gifted, and black” and I am super excited that I live in a South Africa where young people like Malaika are taking their place.