Time flowed like clay. My torn T-shirt clung to my sweat. Ma’s scolding struck my ears. Don’t get me wrong, Ma’s voice was clear, crisp and sweet, but it may as well have been a vuvuzela at 4am when she barked orders at me on how to weed the maize garden.

“Cha! Cha! Cha! (No! No! No!) Not like that!” the angry sun searing.

“Yebo Ma,” I responded, a fake smile stuck to my face while wishing a giant bulldog clip would shut her mouth. I craved to be with my peers on the brown, powdery footpath that wraps itself like a gift-wrap string over the green rolling hills of Nkabini Village (KwaZulu-Natal), pursuing the wild bramble bushes with their branches stretched like arms freely giving to boy and beast its succulent blackberry fruit. Instead, my nine-year-old self was destined for the lonesome, tedious task of plucking weeds.

Mom continued, “Hold the hoe as you would hold a broom to sweep … cha, cha, cha, pull one weed at a time, otherwise you break its stem. Make sure the roots are out!”

As I write this, I miss Mom; 2020 was the first Christmas without her. I join many families in our land whose loved ones plunged like seeds to soil because of the breath-crushing Covid-19 pandemic. Lives lost. Life changed forever. 

Yet perhaps my pain pales in comparison to the many South African families who lost loved ones not because of an invisible sickness, but at the hands of someone who claimed to love them. Covid-19, like most diseases, might one day be a distant memory, but I wonder if GBV will meet the same fate. While many are losing their hair on the freedoms lost because of the lockdown, spare a thought for the abused women of Mzansi who are perpetually looking over their shoulders, unable to walk freely on our streets or rest behind closed doors.

According to Women for Women International, GBV is violence directed at an individual based on his or her biological sex or gender identity. It includes physical, sexual, verbal, emotional and psychological abuse, among others, occurring in public or private life.

GBV in South Africa is born from the weeds of toxic patriarchy and masculinity, fertilised by the neglectful state of fatherlessness (the highest in sub-Saharan Africa).  

In the village, we had to weed the garden while the seedlings were still young because to wait for harvest would end with the weeds competing aggressively for water, sunlight and nutrients, leaving our crops starving.

On the contrary, it seems that, as a nation, instead of uprooting the weedlings of GBV, we wait for the night to harvest the violence.

“Aagha-maan, arrest the rapist! Increase jail time! Bring back the death penalty!” we cry in protest as we harvest the horror of Tshegofatso Pule’s pregnant, stabbed corpse hanging from a tree.

It would seem we are obsessed with the optics of being seen to fight GBV, but very few are interested in the less glamorous, continuous, uprooting of GBV.

Much like weeds that spread like rumours and thrive on neglect, GBV that is not routinely uprooted suffocates women and children.

In truth, the fight against GBV can, to us men, sometimes feel like Mom’s vuvuzela in our ears – and while we smile on the outside, deep down we wish we were wearing earplugs.

I am reminded of a story in the Bible in which Abimelech violently murdered almost 70 of his brothers in his pursuit of becoming king of Israel. Jotham, a surviving brother who hid himself during the slaughter, said this to Abimelech and the people who appointed him king before fleeing: “Once the trees went forth to anoint a king over them and they said to the olive tree, ‘Reign over us.’ But the olive tree said, ‘Should I give up my fatness by which God and men are honoured, and go wave over the trees?’”

The story goes that the trees then approached the fig tree and the vine and were given similar responses. When the bramble was approached, it said, “If in truth you are anointing me king over you, then come and take refuge in my shade, but if not, let fire come out from the bramble and devour the cedars of Lebanon.” In the story, the bramble did catch on fire, causing immense destruction (Judges 9).

I wonder if GBV is not a bramble that rules over us all, but which gives its fruit only to beasts. But when it catches fire, it destroys us all. Why? Because in many ways, we men may think that the toxicity serves us – that when women are silenced by toxic patriarchy and masculinity, which deprives them of education and economic independence, it is for our benefit. So we think.

And yes, while in South Africa there are men who are victims of GBV, there is a significant number who are battering women and many others, sitting back enjoying the shade of the bramble, allowing weeds to thrive. According to the World Health Organisation, South Africa’s female interpersonal violent death rate is 4.8 times the global average.

Our use of language as a tool to fight GBV leaves a lot to be desired as it is often, consciously or unconsciously, engineered to slide down the slippery slope of toxicity. Instead of saying, “Men are battering women”, we slide to:

“Women are being battered by men.”

“Women are being battered.”

“They are battered women.”

The woman’s very identity is being battered by our language while the perpetrator has long left the discussion. Soon the survivor’s voice is choked by toxic questions like: What was she wearing? What was she doing in that area at that time? Why was she with that guy in the first place? On and on, the lens of our indignation zooms in on the survivor as opposed to the perpetrator.

Let’s speak up for survivors of GBV by using precise language to name the abuser and the action of the abused. Let’s not allow the internet and the streets to love our boys more than we do; let’s all do our part in loving and mentoring our boys. After all, every GBV offender is born into a community.

We claim to love and respect women while treating them as a collection of body parts for sexual amusement or is’stoko.

We are “all” angry and aggrieved at GBV but, if we truly are, shouldn’t we be prepared to walk the talk? Are we prepared to uproot the social norms and language that feed it? Are we willing to address the objectification of women? Or are we only interested in watching porn and dancing to the tune of Mapara A Jazz’s John Vuli Gate?

John Vuli Gate is a hit that made it into the top 10 best songs for 2020 on Ukhozi FM, the biggest radio station in Mzansi, loved by both men and women. If we are honest, we have to admit it is as toxic as hell.

GBV at its core is driven by the desire for pleasure at any cost – even death. The song is classical gender stereotyping, where women are presented as inferior to men or are trivialised and marginalised. The song calls women stock no more valuable than a stockpile of groceries on a shelf from which men pick while women shake their butts in approval.

The widespread acceptance of the song shows that ours is a toxic culture – a culture that says one thing and does another, gaslighting the nation through song and dance with the promise of happiness, gyrating and thrusting the youth towards vanity and lust instead of self-improvement, gender equity and true love. I have even seen “cute” videos being shared on social media of little girls singing lines from this song.

I agree with Professor Tamara Shefer, a gender studies expert from the University of the Western Cape, who says that even as Covid-19 has worsened GBV, “rape culture is a pandemic in itself and one that we have known about for a very long time in SA”. When we do not take “stock” of the language we use in our everyday lives, we may as well be lunatics trying to weed a garden using a Weed Eater. Our pursuit of pleasure and fun times cannot be at the cost of the whole garden. 

GBV thrives on the plains of neglectful parenting and upbringing. “The Revolving Door”, a study published in the Southern African Journal of Criminology, found that adverse childhood developmental events and experiences which included premature exposure and habituation to lewd sexual acts were among the key factors that contributed to the reoffending of incarcerated sex offenders. According to Global Kids Online, 51% of South African children under the age of 17 were exposed to sexual content, 34% to hate speech and 33% to violent content online.

Statistics from the international porn website Pornhub have revealed that South Africans are in the top 25 countries in the world for porn consumption, even though I imagine it would be hard to quantify the saturation of pirated porn brazenly sold on street corners – a casual walk down our streets suggests massive saturation. How is it that despite the overwhelming peer-reviewed research on the dangers of pornography, we turn a blind eye to it?

If porn does not need our attention in the fight against GBV, then we might as well ignore the drug problem in fighting crime and gang violence in Gugulethu.

It is generally accepted that many people have relied on porn for sex education. However, porn is glamourised misogyny and sexual violence, more specifically GBV. A study by Bridges et al on what constitutes bestselling pornography found that it is littered with aggressive, abusive and corrosive acts that fit like a glove to the definition of GBV. Almost all acts were male gratifying, the most used words being “bitch” and “slut”.

Almost always, those exposed to this aggression in videos have been women who, in all cases, responded positively or neutrally or even groaned and asked for more — unlike what you would expect in the real world. If a man slaps, pulls hair or verbally abuses a woman, we are incensed – but not in porn.

Studies have consistently shown that there is a strong link between consumption, and acting out sexual aggression and assault. Furthermore, neuroscientists say porn hijacks the reward pathway in the brain and can become a compulsive behaviour with drug-like addictive qualities. No wonder women are in trouble.

Sadly, it would seem porn is the biggest societal influencer on how we think about gender, sexuality, relationships, intimacy, sexual violence and gender equality.

Like alcohol abuse, we need to acknowledge that porn delivers a heavy blow, not only to consumers but to SA society at large.

Let’s speak up for survivors of GBV by using precise language to name the abuser and the action of the abused. Let’s not allow the internet and the streets to love our boys more than we do; let’s all do our part in loving and mentoring our boys. After all, every GBV offender is born into a community.

Let’s start educating everyone, starting with our sons and daughters, about the words we use and about sex as if our future depended on it – because it does.

As a father, I need to gear up and talk to my three daughters about these issues no matter how uncomfortable – even if they wish a bulldog clip would clamp my mouth shut. Their future depends on it. DM