SPOTS OF A LEOPARD- a journalist grows up
Aernout Zevenbergen
Published by LAUGHING LEOPARD PRODUCTIONS at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 Aernout Zevenbergen
Discover more about Aernout Zevenbergen at Smashwords.com
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Part 3 Never forlorn in Africa
‘You have to be able to love yourself’
No more longing for ouzo in Kisangani
Part 5 To procreate, provide and protect
A respectable throng on barren lands
Dedications
An audacious traveller
So, then, the double-edged sword of wounding. There are wounds that crush the soul, distort and misdirect the energy of life, and those that prompt us to grow up.
James Hollis – graduate of C.G. Jung Institute, Zürich
To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.
Marshall
Berman – professor of Political Science,
City University of New
York
This book was originally published as “Spots of a leopard – on being a man”
The origin of this book lies at a meeting, one day in 2001, in a slum in Nairobi. It was an ordinary event. Nothing big. No drama. No sweeping statements. Nothing extreme. Just a meeting between an aids activist, infected with the virus herself, and a group of men. Through games that visualised how hiv spreads, a lot of laughter, a few serious notes and a fake penis, the assembled spoke of the pandemic that has affected tens of millions of people all over the planet – approximately thirty million individuals in Africa alone.
No dying patients, no suffering. On the contrary. People joked and people laughed. And, of course, the sun beamed its light – a cruel sun: jua kali.
Yet the conversation that day put me on a journey that still continues today. What happened?
Let me take you to Kayole, almost eight years ago now.
NAIROBI – Her pair of glasses gives Hilda Ochieng (29) a stern look. Her smile though, disarms. The men opposite Ochieng know intuitively that although jokes are welcome, ridicule is not. Listen to Ochieng, and she’ll listen to you.
‘What do you want to know about sex?’ she asks, not restrained by any of the many taboos still doing the rounds in Kenya, in November 2001. ‘Everything,’ answers one of the men in Ochieng’s audience. ‘I’d like to know what hiv is, and how to prevent getting it,’ says another.
Around fifty men have gathered in the Mayaka International Club – a bar near the slum of Kayole in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. Most of them wear rags or overalls. They have put down their tools, which they work ‘under the cruel sun’, jua kali in Swahili. All make a living in the informal sector. Some are welders, others are spray painters, carpenters or plumbers. Most are ‘everything that helps make a living’.
The men have reached an age at which they want to start families. An abundance of love and sexuality awaits exploration.
‘Be open, Hilda,’ says one.
‘Name things as they are, otherwise what you say becomes too complicated,’ says a second man in the audience.
‘How dangerous is anal sex?’ a third wants to know. ‘That is as good as it gets, so how dangerous is it?’
A shy man dares ask if ‘romantic cuddling is risky too?’
Ochieng works for Woman Fighting Aids in Kenya (wofak), one of many aids organisations in the country. Her purpose today is to show the men the risks of untamed, unbridled lust.
‘Talking of abstinence so far hasn’t worked,’ Ochieng has learned. ‘Some men always need to have a go at it.’ For many men, monogamy is not a serious option. ‘The best I can hope for is to persuade them to use condoms.’
In the Kenya of 2001, Ochieng fights an uphill battle. All churches explicitly forbid their members to use the latex barrier. President Daniel arap Moi himself set alight a stack of condoms, only three years earlier. The born-again president did not feel comfortable about informing the population of the risks of aids.
Estimates of the prevalence of hiv amongst the largely unprotected and ill-informed sexually active population of Kenya reaches as high as 15 per cent. It is reported that seven hundred people die daily of aids–related diseases, with the City of Nairobi itself losing up to twenty experienced and educated staff per week. Confronted by these figures, and after pressure from civil society and international donors, Moi agrees to import three hundred million condoms that year to be distributed freely. But the myths around condoms have by then already grown roots. It is those myths that Ochieng has to fight.
‘My pastor tells me that the virus is smaller than the smallest of pores in the latex,’ objects one of the jua kali workers. ‘He also tells me that wearing a condom is therefore useless. He says I should have sex without one. What do you think of that, Hilda?’
Ochieng takes on the challenge, and names the facts as she knows them.
‘And what about the rumour that it’s the fluid that keeps the condoms moist that actually contains the virus?’ Ochieng laughs. ‘The condom protects you. It is the only kind of protection you can find.’
‘I was told my balls will explode if I always make love with a condom. Is that true?’ For the first time Ochieng is too stunned to speak. It is this question that opens the floor to a whole lot of other questions.
Ochieng needs to understand, some men say, that urges aren’t only supposed to lead to pleasure but also to procreation.
‘If we were to throw away our seed, how then do we make babies?’
And: ‘Aren’t we sinning against God’s word by wasting our seed?’
Or: ‘It is our duty as men, Hilda, to plant our seeds in as many flower pots as possible. Condoms prevent us from doing that.’
Ochieng replies, ‘Is it really God’s will for you to sleep around? If you are monogamous you don’t need condoms. But you have to ask yourself how many children you can raise on your income…’
In a short demonstration Ochieng shows how to use a condom; she rolls the latex off on a black penis, cut from wood.
‘What a tiny one, Hilda – come on, you have to be realistic.’ Raucous laughter.
At the end of the meeting Ochieng hands out condoms. She has brought boxes full of them. But most men politely refuse to accept, before they return to their tools and their sheds.
‘No wrapper around my sweetie – sorry, Hilda.’
*
This was not the first piece I wrote on aids, and many articles were still to follow. The elements of the story are hardly the stuff of headlines. Many, if not all journalists working in Africa, will have written similar things.
For some reason though, the questions and comments made at the meeting, that one morning in Kayole’s Mayaka International Club, are etched in my memory. The conversation raised a great deal of questions about how the participants saw themselves individually as ‘men’ – how they relate to themselves, to other men, to women, to their own sexuality, and to their roles as (potential) fathers, lovers and husbands.
‘It is our duty as men, Hilda, to plant our seeds in as many flowerpots as possible. Condoms prevent us from doing that.’
What did this remark say about manhood? About masculinity? About life? About the links between being a father, being a man, being a sexual creature, being human?
‘I was told my balls will explode if I always make love with a condom. Is that true?’
Where did this rumour come from? What did it say about the man who was honest and courageous enough to share it with a group? What did the statement say about the way forward, in the struggle against hiv/aids?
What did the comments indicate about the abyss between scientists far away, who think of mechanical solutions, and normal people whose main challenge of the day is how to make it to the next?
How did the questions fit into the clean, scientific approaches and the political agendas of organisations trying to tackle the pandemic?
*
Since I began to cover Africa as a journalist in August 1997, I have written many pieces on hiv/aids, on awareness campaigns, on the disaster that the epidemic has unleashed on individual lives. I have also written extensively about sexual and domestic violence, on rape in times of war, and fists in times of alcohol abuse.
The themes of hiv/aids and violence against women have made a lasting impact on me. For me, the two plagues point at a breakdown of the most intimate of relationships human beings can have with each other.
Of course, I spoke to those who had made careers of fighting these scourges. I listened to grand explanations about cultures, traditions, rites and rituals, and how – once Africa was ‘developed’ – all would work out for the best. This conservative, rightwing approach said, ‘If only they “modernised”, all would be well.’
On the other side of the ideological spectrum, I met those who stated in a wide variety of discourses that all of Africa’s present-day woes (aids and violence included) are rooted in colonialism, racism and the malfunctioning of the global economy. ‘If only society was transformed, all would be well.’
My problem with these explanations is that each portrays human beings as machines. Individual choice does not exist. Individual accountability appears to be a joke. Individual dissent seems impossible. Individual wisdom is denied. Individual fallibility and perfection – and the leeway between these two extremes – are negated.
The ‘theories’ unsettle me.
How come domestic violence in Kibera, Nairobi’s worst slum, is so much worse than in the rural areas in the north of Kenya, where life is much harsher, much poorer, much more devoid of ‘comfort’? How come aids is so much more widespread in relatively wealthy Botswana than in dirt-poor Burkina Faso (meaning: The Land of The Honourable Men)?
The ‘rightwing’ reference to cultures, traditions, rites and rituals that were seen as ‘primitive’, and therefore responsible for both hiv/aids and violence against women, seems too simplistic. Surely, on a continent where Homo sapiens sapiens have roamed, lived and loved for close to a hundred thousand years, people must have found ways of living and relating that are efficient. It can’t all be bad, can it?
Healthy cultures do not tend to self-destruct, and culture, whatever its form, is only one aspect of existence and therefore cannot in itself be the only source of the problems.
The ‘leftwing’ reference to the excesses of capitalism, to racism, and to poverty also seems insufficient. Not every poor man rapes, and rich men too can molest wives or children. Poverty is always part of a much larger context, and is hardly ever absolute. Poverty, whatever its form, is always relative and is only one aspect of existence, and therefore cannot in itself be the only source of the problems.
Some men in times of poverty grab a gun, kill, loot and rape. Other men, however, don’t. They work, share a beer with friends, and converse with relatives. Some men in times of hiv/aids grab, seduce or force a woman into unprotected sex. Other men don’t. They relate to loved ones as loving, caring relatives do.
Fuelling the flames
What makes a man think his balls will explode were he to use a condom? It can’t be based on fact, because balls don’t explode that easily. Could it be fear? If so, what then did he fear? The real-life explosion of testicles, or the explosion of a sense of manhood?
What makes it so crucial, if that were indeed the case, for some men to plant their seed ‘in as many flowerpots’ as they can? What is it with semen, that some men love to scatter it about – but only if it’s directed at a fertile womb? Why this urge to procreate with a seeming disregard for negative side effects?
I could not find answers to these questions. Not in libraries, not in the offices of non-governmental organisations, not on the Internet. I tried for over a year to find openings. I read some of the classics of feminism, but found in hundreds of pages only studies, quotes and opinions on the ‘how’ of patriarchy but never on the ‘why’.
Only one paragraph in Susan Faludi’s standard work Backlash (1991), for example, describes how men’s fears of no longer being the sole provider fed a harsh response to any policy that intended to free women from the yoke of patriarchy. But Faludi never explained why men have that fear.
Although she focused on the situation in the United States during the last decades of the previous century, her reasoning appears to be shared by most gender activists around the world. Gender studies, the field of social science that examines the relationship between men and women, does so mainly in terms of power dynamics.
I don’t think that approach suffices. Is the desire to be ‘the sole provider’, for no other reason than to be the ‘boss’, indeed all there is to manhood? Or is there something more substantial beneath the surface? What male need is satisfied by being in charge? What does he gain by exclusively holding the reigns? Is a man’s quest for power – if that is truly all a man’s life is about – a purpose in itself, or does that ‘power’ lead to something else? If so, what?
What is power, apart from a deep desire for control over the outside world, driven by fears of the unknown? Power satisfies a deep psychological need. Exactly what that need is seems to be irrelevant to most gender activists. And this is something I don’t understand.
Surely if a fire rages and one wants to stop it from further destroying individuals or even society as a whole, it is not enough merely to describe the flames. It is crucial to get to the heart of the fire and see what could be feeding it.
What fuels the man who feels this urge to plant his seed in as many flowerpots as possible? What motivates him? What drives him? What defines the choices he makes?
Answers to these questions do not lie exclusively in political science, which happens to be my own background. They do not lie in economics, sociology or anthropology. Those fields describe the landscape, the soil, the surroundings and the influences to which no person is invulnerable. But on their own they seem insufficient. It is not the economy per se that determines the choices a person makes, neither is it the society nor the political arena in which he or she exists.
The answers to the questions above lie in the hearts of men, in their minds and souls. The answers speak through hands that either caress or hit, through feet that either dance or kick, through mouths that either speak words of support or those of destruction.
A war
It is a September evening in a plebeian neighbourhood in Cape Town. The year is 2008. A grandfather and his grandson have an argument. The eighteen-year-old Mr. W. junior wants to fetch the clothes that he left at his grandfather’s house months earlier. The 79-year-old Mr. W. senior refuses to open the door. He wants nothing more to do with his grandchild.
Eight months earlier, Senior told Junior and his sisters to leave. They had been stealing his stuff: socks, clothes, food, money. They returned late at night or in the wee hours of the morning, breaking windows and damaging doors. Senior felt he could no longer cope with his grandchildren’s lifestyle: unemployed, broken, off-track, leaning to a life of drugs and crime.
Junior does not accept the closed door. He climbs a drain pipe and breaks in, grabs a broomstick and starts beating his grandfather on the head, demanding the old man’s retirement money – a mere two hundred rand.
Mr. W. senior retreats to his bedroom, where he sits down on his bed. Junior follows him.
The young man later confesses in a written guilty plea, ‘I […] turned him around onto his stomach. I opened my pants and put my penis in his mouth. I then took a broomstick and put it in his anus. When I was done I put my penis in his anus. After finishing I left the complainant there and fled the house.’
After the assault, the grandfather fled to a neighbour, dressed only in a t-shirt and underpants. ‘Full of blood, full of blood,’ Senior tells the court.
The prosecutor would like to know how he feels.
‘Very angry with him, yes.’
‘How is your heart?’ asks the prosecutor.
‘Very hurt.’
Senior wants his grandson punished, severely. ‘Something has to happen to him. I’ve been hurt badly. I will never forget, never forgive. Ever.’
*
Junior’s defence lawyer tells the court that the accused is one of five siblings. ‘My client also informs me that he has never really had a father figure.’ He lived with his grandfather until he was thrown out, and has a child himself, ‘a little boy who resides with his mother. [S]he is however unemployed, her family supports the child.’
Money ran out for schooling when Junior reached Grade Seven. Just like his brother, Junior has always been unemployed. ‘He previously had a drug problem, but […] he left that lifestyle four years ago.’
The defence continues: ‘My client is eighteen years old. He is young, very young, your Worship. He has his whole life ahead of him. […] [H]e is still a good candidate for rehabilitation.’
The judge is stern in his verdict: ‘He vented his rage in an inhumane and abhorrent way on his grandfather. He purposefully humiliated him. There is no trace of remorse whatsoever. […] Apart from the physical wounds, the events were very traumatic for the victim. He has been humiliated repeatedly through sexual acts […] committed by his own grandson.’
He continues, ‘The present levels of violence and serious crimes in South Africa are such that when sentencing, emphasis needs to be placed on the deterring effect of a sentence.’
Junior gets life.
*
Violence in South Africa is a serious problem. In the case of Senior versus Junior, a grandson beat up his grandfather and stole his money. The clash escalated into a power struggle through sexual violence for no other purpose than humiliation.
No one knows how many men rape other men in South Africa – victims don’t easily report the crimes inflicted on them. Even amongst inmates of the harshest of South Africa’s jails, where rape is instrumental in establishing the hierarchy, reports of sexual violence are rare. Victims fear retribution.
The same applies to ordinary girls and women who, after having been raped, often choose not to go to the police. Sexual violence in South Africa has taken on epic proportions. By some estimates, every twenty-six seconds a man in South Africa rapes a woman – and often, the women in question are infants or elderly. Every six hours a man kills his life partner.
‘The South African Police Service reports that 36 190 cases of rape and 6 763 cases of indecent assault were reported between April and December 2007,’ writes Kopano Ratele, a psychology professor at the University of South Africa. ‘While there has been a decline from numbers reported for April-December 2006, this is a country still in the middle of a war against its women and children. Add to these figures the 18 487 cases of murders, 18 795 cases of attempted murder, 210 104 cases of assault with the intent to inflict grievous bodily harm, and 198 049 cases of common assaults reported between 1 April 2007 and 31 March 2008, South Africa is a leader amongst the most unsafe countries in the world for its citizens and guests, most of whom are the very people in need of protection and care from the state, organisations, families and all of us.’
‘Macho attitude fuels alarming brutality of young males,’ is the headline of a news story in the South African newspaper The Times, on 5 October 2008. Ratele is quoted in the article: ‘Our men can’t walk away from a challenge. Parents need to teach their children it is okay to walk away from a conflict, instead of fighting with their fists.’
South Africa is not the only country in Africa faced with a problem of masculinity. During the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, rape was labelled ‘a weapon of war’ by both human rights and aid organisations. That ‘war’ did not end when the armed groups signed a peace agreement, and hasn’t let up since the country went to the polls in 2006. Rape in the drc is now no longer a ‘weapon of war’ – it is simply rape, on a massive scale, with thousands of victims annually.
Post-war sexual violence in Liberia is so widespread, it can only be termed an epidemic.
In Kibera, Africa’s biggest slum, located in the heart of Nairobi, uncles increasingly rape nieces, and grandfathers assault granddaughters.
‘Women in villages around Korhogo, northern Côte d’Ivoire, dare not walk to their fields alone for fear of rape,’ writes irin news on 30 March 2009.
*
It is extremely difficult to say with absolute certainty how bad ‘the war against [the] women and children’ is in the wide variety of African societies. As said earlier, many assaults go unreported.
South Africa is one of the few countries with the financial means to do independent scientific research. A report by the Medical Research Council, published in June 2009, sent shock waves through the country when it revealed that over a quarter of the 1 738 men asked about their experiences with non-consensual sex admitted having forced a girl or woman into intercourse.
According to the researchers, most important for the likelihood of a man being a rapist were psychological factors. ‘Rape was associated with significantly greater degrees of exposure to trauma in childhood.’ More specifically, those who rape were themselves made outcasts while growing up, or made others to feel cast out. Relationships while young were for most rapists based on power plays. And rape, at times, is part of a bonding ritual between teenage boys.
‘Teasing and harassment, or bullying, were reported by many of the men in their childhood. Over half of the men had experienced this themselves (54%) and somewhat fewer (40%) had teased and harassed others. Both experience of bullying and being bullied was much more common among men who raped.’
That power play does not just show up in the way rapists force girls and women into sex, but seems a dominating view of life. ‘Delinquent and criminal behaviour were more common among men who raped. Men who raped were much more likely to have been involved in theft and, with the exception of legal gun ownership, they were very much more likely to have been involved with weapons, gangs and to have been arrested and imprisoned.’
Justice Malala, columnist at The Times, responded to the findings on June 22. He wrote, ‘A conversation is needed among South African men. We need to start defining what we mean when we say that we are men. There is a problem with the way we perceive ourselves, and the way in which we present ourselves to the world: to our brothers, our sons, our sisters, our wives and our partners. We are not men; we are broken beings.’
Years before Malala wrote this, a young man in Soweto told me about this sense of befuddlement. ‘Men are confused, I think. We don’t know where we stand any more. We copy life as we see it on tv, in American soap operas. Sometimes I think that we are all a bunch of bad actors; we play roles and characters. But that is not who we really are, what our genetic make-up and history tell us to be, or what our social and natural surroundings demand of us. We are leopards who are trying to wipe away their spots.’
Honour and respect
A news article on the front page of the Cape Times tells of an amicable superintendent in the South African Police Service who suddenly blows a fuse. He empties his service pistol into his girlfriend, colleagues, two women and a toddler. His name is Chippa Mateane. He is eventually shot by his own mates who chase him and in doing so accidentally kill an innocent pedestrian.
Before Mateane went on his shooting spree, he wrote a farewell note to his girlfriend who had just left him:
I am not to blame. I am important – I deserve to be loved by you. I deserve to be treated with respect. And I will still love you forever.
The superintendent saw his girlfriend’s decision to leave as unacceptable, and interpreted it as a rigorous denial of his standing in society.
If Mateane had been a lone wolf, and the bloodbath he caused an exception, then his story would have been no more than a ripple on the surface of ordinary life. However, Mateane is not the only man going on a killing spree because of unrequited love – he is not even the only South African police officer to use violence as an outlet for his harsh confrontations with life. And Mateane’s girlfriend is not the only victim of bruised male pride.
What is this ‘respect’ Mateane wrote about in his farewell letter?
Respect is a stamp of approval, received from the outside – a sign that a person’s existence is considered worthwhile to others. Honour creates freedom of movement, ease of contact, peace of mind.
Respect is closely related to self-esteem, with one fundamental difference: respect comes from outside, whereas self-esteem has its origins within. A person with healthy self-esteem relies little on how others perceive him or her, whereas a person with poor self-esteem will do almost anything to gain a sense of honour through the eyes of others.
John Iliffe, professor of History at Cambridge University, was the first scholar to write a book about the meaning of ‘honour’ and ‘respect’ in Africa’s history. Iliffe sees both as keywords in understanding contemporary Africa. His book Honour in African History (2005) opens as follows: ‘[U]nderstanding African behaviour, in the past and present, must take account of changing notions of honour, which historians and others have neglected.’
How important then is honour? Iliffe writes, ‘Until the coming of world religions, honour was the chief ideological motivation of African behaviour. It remained a powerful motivation even for those who accepted world religions.’
Viewing contemporary Africa from this angle, Iliffe does not see aids in Africa as primarily a sign of poverty, a lack of responsibility or even as a lack of knowledge. For Iliffe the pandemic is essentially a matter of wounded masculine honour having turned against women, expressing an unconscious desire to kill and a flight from reality. Iliffe ends his book in a very outspoken way: ‘If the aids epidemic displayed heroic masculine honour at its most self-destructive, it also displayed female honour at its most heroic.’
The issue of ‘respect’ also lies at the root of domestic and sexual violence. These days, no reasonable person perceives rape as an attempt to find sexual pleasure. Sexual violence or the excesses of war and crime are phenomena in which perpetrators take what they are unable to get in any other way. ‘Respect’, however twisted or illusionary, is the ultimate goal – extorted or commanded.
Who’s on top?
Are the hiv/aids epidemic and the widespread violence against women really, as some dare suggest, the consequence of culture – of traditions, rites and rituals? Does a healthy culture allow for its daughters and women to be raped? Do healthy traditions demand of men to rape fellow citizens?
Or do (sexual) violence and the scale on which it happens indicate the opposite: societies that are crumbling, individuals who cannot deal with the stresses of life?
There is a saying that Africa survives on the strength of its women. They lug the water, cook the meals, till the land and send the children to school. Women give birth, they nurture, they show the way and they keep families together under the pressures of modern times.
Where are the men in all of this?
At the risk of generalising - and keeping in mind the existence of over four thousand different ethnic groups on the whole of the continent - traditional family life in Africa is a complex system of networks, fluid roles, rights and duties. But most of these diverse cultures assign identical core tasks to men: to procreate, provide and protect. In exchange for these services, a wife bears offspring that will honour her husband and continue his legacy after his death. Every day a meal awaits him, prepared by his wife or his daughters.
The nuclear family as the cornerstone of society is a Western concept. The strict boundaries of social life in the West seem unfathomable elsewhere. Outside Europe and North America, people tend to think in terms of extended families. The family as a social unit containing only a father, a mother and their offspring is quite untenable and practically unknown in Africa.
Until quite recently, the ideologies of materialism and individualism were unthinkable in Africa. For millennia, the individual survived here thanks to the benevolence and strength of the collective, and the collective survived due to the energy invested by each individual. Even today, in the last bastions of traditional life, an aunt can breast-feed a baby if the mother is away; any uncle will discipline youngsters if the biological father is out working; a neighbour can explain the ins and outs of life as a married man; a cousin can teach a younger relative the tricks of seduction.
And so it has been for a very long time. But things are changing.
Africans are now generally poorer than they were four decades ago. Globalisation has brought few advantages to the continent. It is hard, indeed often impossible, for Africa to compete in the global race. Serious industrialisation of the continent has yet to take off. The agricultural sector has not been able to compete with subsidised production from the United States or the European Union, nor can it comply with the strict bureaucratic import regulations of the economic superpowers.
These processes, combined with the introduction of both materialism and individualism, have had a profound effect on the relationship between the sexes, as well as on Africa’s rich and diverse customs, traditions and value systems.
Development organisations from abroad and African women’s groups have been working for decades to empower women. In their programmes men are, at best, seen as irrelevant; at worst they are adversaries.
There is an inherent problem with that approach. Most African societies are patriarchal in nature – nothing will really change unless men endorse the renewal that is being sought.
‘Aids is about who’s on top,’ says Gethwane Makhaye from the aids-ridden province of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. For years she had been informing women in her province about their rights, with unforseen consequences. Women whom she had informed of their right to demand a condom or to say ‘no’ to sex returned to her offices days later, with bruises and black eyes.
Makhaye: ‘A woman may insist on a condom, but that doesn’t mean that the man will want to use one. If we want to succeed in the fight against aids, we have to change men’s behaviour as well.’
Working with men, however, is far from common and appears to be an uphill battle that, apart from changing the politics between men and women, needs to include some serious soul-searching. Mbuyiselo Botha, active in Sonke Gender Justice, says, ‘It is all about choices. If we [men] want to save our souls, we have to face our demons. But it is difficult to take responsibility, because then we become accountable for our actions.’
A talent for indifference
Many men in Africa find themselves on pedestals. Some describe the role of the man as ‘the bull leading the herd.’ Many men give orders, beat women, shoot sperm and, occasionally, also a bullet. Nothing, or so is the assumption, will get them off that pedestal – no laws, no mores, no virus.
Sometimes these images cause a maddening itch deep inside me; sometimes they merely irritate me. At other times I feel a strange mixture bubbling beneath the surface, a combination of boiling anger, dark hopelessness and the urge to laugh out loud. And then doubts set in.
Why should I care if some of the most powerful politicians in Africa so often choose to look the other way?
Why should I care when a man with presidential ambitions thinks it’s perfectly okay to have unprotected sex with an hiv-positive friend of his family, less than half his age, supposedly for no other reason than that she wore a short skirt? Why should I care if his supporters, including numerous women, hold banners outside the court room where his rape case is being heard, shouting ‘Burn the bitch!’ – referring to the complainant?
Why should I care when women in Congo explain in detail the rape they had to undergo at the hands of self-proclaimed ‘rebel fighters’?
Or when a Rwandan man complains of his male compatriots’ drinking beer on the side of the road while their women carry forty kilogram loads of bananas or potatoes on their heads to markets to earn a buck?
Or when I read about mass rapes of girls in Liberia by neighbours, grandfathers and uncles?
What am I to do? Practise a talent for indifference; hiding behind my shield of ‘impartial journalism’?
Look the other way?
Snort and splutter about excesses of masculinity, and then get on with my own life?
Chained to a yoke
My umbilical cord was cut by a nurse in a hospital in Lusaka, but I was educated in schools and universities in the Netherlands. I am a child of Erasmus and Hugo Grotius, of Luther and Calvin, of the Enlightenment and the welfare state. Of Willem (a development worker) and Bertie (a primary school teacher).
As an adult I settled in Africa for its riddles and its smells – the smell of the air, the aromas of the savannah, the desert, the fynbos of the Western Cape, a rainforest and a shanty town. A melange, a dash of rotting garbage, a hint of flowers blossoming, smouldering fires, and tinges of days-old sweat. The flavour of the earth under a sweltering sky, and soil hungry for seeds and rain. I have only found this mixture in Africa. It’s the smell of my earliest youth, a vague reminiscence, a subconscious sense of nostalgia: This place smells safe.
On my travels as a correspondent in Africa, I’ve stumbled upon an increasing number of stories that, at first glance, seem unrelated to the major news events making headlines in Europe. They are not primarily on the price of copper or coffee on the global market, nor on bloody civil wars with repressed groups and ‘rebels’ fighting for ‘liberation.’ While rummaging through material for those headline articles, I came across stories from inside homes, with thin threads leading to bedrooms and to what happens once the curtains have been closed and the doors have been shut.
An illusive war – hardly noticed; a war that is barely reported in a coherent, sensible way. A war chalking up millions of casualties, year after year. It is the struggle between men and women. What are we as men to do with this battle? What am I to do with it?
I too am a man. And at times I resonate with the words of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in his poem Walking Around: ‘It so happens I am sick of being a man.’
Behind the impersonal statistics of hiv/aids or domestic violence, and beyond the gruesome stories of some of the latest armed conflicts, I have come across expressions of a type of masculinity gone horribly astray – it is a kind of masculinity I have no sympathy for whatsoever. A type of masculinity that, if looked at directly, raises questions about honour, self-esteem and perceptions of reality.
Those topics, in turn, highlight issues of love, friendship, loneliness, fatherhood, commitment, and the right to be imperfect versus the urge to succeed in everything. They point to a degrading definition of success, which is increasingly measured only by the ability to gather possessions, at whatever cost.
These issues started screaming for attention in my own life. A few months before I met the men in Mayaka International Club in Nairobi in 2001, my house of cards had collapsed. We were about to get married later that year and were planning a modest ceremony. Until I found the letter she’d written to him, her lover.
A relationship that had lasted for more than a decade had ended, and that ending threw me back into myself. What hit me hardest was the realisation that I would no longer become a father in the foreseeable future.
The avalanche of consequences of a love lost did not stop there. I started dating again, and found myself in circumstances stranger than fiction. Nothing seemed similar to the dating scene I remembered from more than ten years earlier. It was a different place, a different time, and I had grown into a different man.
An abyss of insecurity opened up. It seemed dating was stripped of everything I knew. There were no agreed rules, no agreed codes, no agreed guidelines – a jungle of lust, love, disappointment, fear, anger, desire, expectation and demands, popularly known as ‘baggage’. My return to dating felt like a slide into an obscene landscape, governed by futilities.
One woman would be insulted if I kept a door open, another would feel incensed if I didn’t. I myself couldn’t care less about the door or the veneer of either chivalry or misogyny it was supposed to represent.
If I ever wanted to feel comfortable in this bush of contemporary ‘romance’, I would have to first figure out what mattered to me, what I needed, and what I could very well do without. I could not afford to define my essence on codes or guidelines from outside which were extremely confusing at best. It became clear that only through a descent to the core of my own being could I make sense both of the world around me as well as my place in it.
I found myself surrounded by questions millions of other men worldwide are struggling with. Questions that have become urgent since women started liberating themselves from the yoke of patriarchy, and so paved the way for men to do the same.
Patriarchy doesn’t limit only women’s freedom. This system is seen to be a man’s best guarantee for staying on top of things, and for being placed on a pedestal in his own backyard. But at the core, patriarchy undermines the right of half the globe’s population to have emotions and express them. In its most extreme form, it denies men the right to be compassionate and to be of service to others.
The price a man has to pay for the privilege of remaining on his pedestal, is the amputation of large chunks of his own humanity. Is there a way out?
Steel chains lie on the ground, under a lean-to in a small courtyard of a mental asylum. The first link is anchored in concrete. Attached to it are rusty links, one after the other. The complete chain is probably two metres long and has a large ring at the other end to attach the prisoners to.
I cannot call them ‘patients’; patients are cared for. Here humans are fed and scrubbed clean once a month. That’s all. The mentally ill are merely kept alive.
I wander through the asylum of Freetown, Sierra Leone, from the courtyard where the insane are bound to chains, through a ward with more chains, towards the isolation cells. I open the latch of one of the steel doors. Startled eyes stare at me: wide open, beastly, inhuman and without a glimmer of expectation.
Behind him I read a few words scratched onto the brown wall. ‘To be a man is not easy.’ The man who scratched these words onto the wall of an isolation cell of the asylum in Freetown has a story unknown to me.
The simplicity of his words stays with me. It is devoid of drama, of heart-rending pain. A dry observation, like talking about the weather.
Wounding, healing and journeying
‘Men’s lives are violent, because their souls have been violated.’ James Hollis wrote these words in his book Under Saturn’s Shadow (1994). Hollis is an archetypal psychologist, who picked up the theme of masculinity during a period when men’s groups sprouted like mushrooms in the United States. It was a trend he did not particularly appreciate for he feared that the group processes would not allow individual men to take personal responsibility for healing their own individual wounds.
‘If men are to heal,’ Hollis wrote, ‘they must activate within what they did not receive from without. Unless men can emerge from darkness, we shall continue to wound women and each other, and the world can never be a safe or healthy place.’
Does this analysis – coming from an American psychologist trained in the tradition of Carl Jung, psychology’s European founding father – have any bearing on contemporary Africa? Or does it merely deserve to be dismissed as ‘alien’ and therefore ‘useless’?
What is the nature of the wound that turns an eighteen-year-old boy into his grandfather’s rapist? What is the nature of the wound that makes wife-beaters out of potentially compassionate men? What wounds cause a man to refuse responsibility for his own choices and behaviour? What causes so many men to hide behind mountains of arguments against either using condoms or sufficiently adjusting their sexual conduct in times of aids?
More importantly: What can be done about these wounds?
Hollis formulates an answer that rings true for me: ‘Our wounds are to the soul, and only that which reaches it can heal.’
To reach the soul requires a new journey. ‘The hero quest today is not through the physical world but through the badlands of the soul. The evil men must engage is not the barbarian at the gates but the darkness within, the fear from which only boldness may bring delivery.’
It slowly dawned on me that, if I were to make sense of reality around and inside me, I would have to journey into some of the darkest corners of my own soul. What are my shadows, what are my deepest fears, what are my greatest weaknesses and strengths?
Slowly, the first outlines of a new voyage became visible.
I would have to ask but one simple question to find clues that could help me rebuild the simplest of foundations, one that would enable me to construct my own path forward.
What does it mean to be a man, today?
Cape Town, July 2009
March 1996 – in the desert of Mali, between Bamako and Timbuktu
Tracks run in a northerly direction through the hills. Thorny bushes blossom here and there in the desert. It is empty, inhospitable. Hot. Dusty.
The emptiness of the desert has taken hold of me. In the void of the indescribable open plains, life revolves around trifling things and the art of observation – looking without knowing, being astounded without needing an answer.
In the distance I see a boy walking. He wears a coat, browned by sweat and grease, reaching just above his knees. I estimate him to be around thirteen years old.
He comes from the east and walks westward, assisted by a walking stick.
Along a path I cannot distinguish.
His gait is determined; a well-paced stride that could last for hours.
Who is he?
The sun shimmers above the Sahara. And the boy pushes along. With his head bowed down, he stares at the earth passing beneath him.
He crosses the tracks leading to Timbuktu; looks neither right nor left.
Where does he come from?
Bare feet. Hot sand.
At times he looks up, staring at the horizon. Most of the time though, he just plants his stick in front of him and simply walks.
The boy disappears in quivering, hot air.
Where is he heading?
Traditions are weird things.
Traditions are the answers to questions of purpose and direction. They are the habits, customs, rituals and legends that tell a person who he is, where his roots are and where he can go in life. Traditions, however, also safeguard the perks of the privileged.
Some speak of them as static and permanent – the everlasting and untouchable rules as laid down by ancestors. Traditions seem written in stone, but when one looks at them from a different angle they appear fluid and malleable, and the stone itself undergoes constant erosion. They change with time.
In traditional Africa, almost all objects have meaning. Belief in witches and the spirits of ancestors, in mysticism and the healing magic of crushed herbs and animal organs, is still alive.
From the oldest inhabitants of the continent, the Bushmen [1], to some of the last to arrive (the white Africans), each people has its own stories, myths, heroes and legends. The Afrikaner Boere constructed their holy shrine in Pretoria, to commemorate the Battle of Blood River in 1838. There, every year on 16 December, the sun shines on their Covenant with God. According to legend, Afrikaners killed over three thousand Zulus during this battle, and this was only possible, it is claimed, through a direct intervention of their God. Victory in this battle was proof, or so the Afrikaners chose to believe, of a divine calling to rule over the lands and the peoples of Southern Africa.
For the Bushmen, a people of hunters and gatherers, there was no difference between the world of the five senses and spiritual existence. Their shamans travelled easily from one realm of reality to another, and back. In the South African Drakensberg, over thousands of years, the Bushmen made 3 500 paintings in which they depicted their spiritual connection to nature, and especially to the eland. In those mountains, one doesn’t ridicule nature. Here, man is a guest, vulnerable and dependent on his environment. Live and let live. Hunt and honour. Gather and grace. Know the rules of the relationship between man and nature. Most of these rules have been laid down in the rock paintings of the Bushmen.
For many thousands of years these hunter-gatherers were able to withstand the pressures, limitations and dangers of the Drakensberg. Until, with the arrival of white settlers in the 19th century, they lost their prey. The settlers shot most of the game, and so eliminated the Bushmen’s primary means of existence in the area.
The last Bushman in the Drakensberg was seen in the 1880s. Fifty years later hikers found a few arrows and a bow, left behind on a ledge as if only moments ago their owner had disappeared. This same type of weapon was, for millennia, the most important means of survival for the Bushmen.
These days the last of the Bushmen survive mostly in the Kalahari desert, an area without rocks, and therefore devoid of places to paint. For many a Bushman, Spirits these days are found in spirits.
The art of rock paintings faded into oblivion halfway in the 19th century. When an older Bushman was asked to explain the meaning of some thousand-year-old paintings in the private game park Kaga Kamma, he shook his head.
‘It is a coded message from my ancestors,’ he said.
‘But we’ve lost the key to decipher it.’
Rejected by forefathers
Johannes Julius speaks in a gentle and composed way. His seat is a pot, turned upside down on the earth. Orange light from a huge lamppost shines on his face. He is twenty six years old, has short curly hair and a moustache. Smoke from a smouldering charcoal fire repeatedly forces Johannes to close his eyes.
Wanda (21) walks up and down, goes inside and comes out again. Three candles light up their shed, made of corrugated plates, all nailed to bent wooden sticks. Pieces of cardboard keep out the worst cold from corners where it is too hard to beat steel into shape. Inside, a wooden partition separates the living quarters from the ‘dining room’. It all measures three metres by five.
Wrapped around her head, Wanda wears a cloth to cover her hair. She listens intently when an older woman explains the basics of housekeeping. Her mentor shows her which pots to use for which meal, explains the purpose of cutlery and indicates how much fat to use when cooking.
An old man comes strolling along, greets his company, grabs a chair and makes himself comfortable. From one of his pockets he takes a pipe and some tobacco. He looks around, stands up, whispers something into Wanda’s ear, and sits down again.
Johannes has freshened up after a hard day’s work at the tannery, located somewhere between the provincial capital of Upington in the Northern Cape and the township, Louisvale. His task is to sprinkle salt on the skins of slaughtered sheep. It’s a ‘contract’ job, which means he only gets paid when the tanner has skins to work on. When there are none, he waits.
It is a life of slogging away, but Johannes has dreams. Big dreams. He wants to be deacon in his charismatic church, which he joined only a few weeks ago. He wants to earn enough money to offer his future wife, Wanda, and their daughter Tshepang a decent life. Gone are the days of booze, drugs, fights, girlfriends and ‘confrontations with the law’.
Johannes and Wanda are preparing for their wedding. Brothers from his church teach him how to be a responsible man; sisters teach her how to do her housekeeping.
A puppy walks through a hole in the fence. The wind picks up and gusts blow into Johannes’s face. The old man in his chair moves restlessly. He grabs the neighbour’s toddler and starts playing with the infant, on his knees.
Johannes speaks of the changes he and Wanda are going through. It started in the week before his birthday, in March. Johannes had ended up with broken facial bones when someone hit him with a stone. ‘I thought, I am heading for my death. One more thing and that will be it; one more fight and my time has come. This has to stop.’
One night, recently, Johannes had a dream. Wanda had caught two fish. Reverend Daniël Willems had told him good times were in the making. Fish are signs of good things to come. According to the Bible, and to Reverend Willems.
‘It burns inside me,’ Johannes told Wanda that night. ‘I want to change. Booze creates too many problems. If we both change our lives, we might get it together.’
While Johannes tells me his story, the old man stands up again and silently walks towards Wanda. The two of them no longer whisper – their tone now reveals rage. He wants something, and she is not willing to give it to him.
Johannes remains silent, observes what happens before him, and stares into the light of the lamppost. He plays with the laces of his shoes and repositions himself on his upturned pot. ‘Wanda is my inspiration. Of the two of us, she is the most determined to turn life around.’ Missing her baby Tshepang scorches her insides, more so than his.
The conversation between Wanda and the old man is spinning out of control. He yells while he grabs her. ‘This is all because of that damned baby of yours.’ She screams back, like a haunted woman.
The old man pulls his hat over his head, and stumbles away as only drunkards do. Wanda watches him go. Her eyes spew fire.
He wanted money. ‘My reputation has gone to smithereens because of that bloody baby of yours.’ He makes a fist and clasps his pipe.
Oupa Jan was one of the first suspects the police arrested for the rape of baby Tshepang. One of the other six suspects was Johannes.
Earlier on that Saturday morning in October 2001 Johannes was woken up by his brother. ‘Your baby has been raped!’ Johannes was recovering from a night of hard liquor and drugs.
Louisvale was outraged about Tshepang’s ordeal, about her bloodstained dress and her torn vagina and anus. The masses wanted revenge, and they wanted it fast. Oupa Jan and the other six men were suspected of a gang rape. They had to give blood to be compared with dna found in the sperm on Tshepang’s body. Tests showed none of the men had been involved in the assault.
Oupa Jan was awarded seventy-eight thousand rand in damages for his arrest. Most of the compensation is gone by now, left at the liquor store in small increments, one bottle at a time. With no more money left, Oupa Jan needs a new source.
Who else to approach but the mother of the ‘bloody baby’?
The rape of baby Tshepang unleashed a shockwave in South Africa. Newspapers started publishing stories about sexual violence against children and babies – a topic they had all but ignored before. Some spoke of the ‘moral bankruptcy’ of post-apartheid South Africa. Then deputy-president Jacob Zuma, responsible for a campaign for the Moral Regeneration, labelled his country ‘ill’.
The rape of children was neither a new phenomenon nor proof of the moral bankruptcy of the ‘new’ South Africa. What was new in the days after the rape of Tshepang, was the massive attention it received by the media, the police, the judiciary and even politicians. In the darkest days of apartheid (a heavily theocratic ideology), the rape of children went mostly unreported – any news of this kind would have tainted the ‘good name’ of the blissfully ignorant and god-fearing white minority.
The country faced a rough wake-up call when confronted with the unknown elements of its own reality. The first ‘experts’ to shine their light on baby and child rape referred to some old African tradition, which states that sex with a virgin would heal a man of all illnesses. In modern-day Africa that would also include the contemporary disease of hiv/aids.
But of all the cases brought to trial, none of the accused ever mentioned this myth in his defence. Child rape in South Africa had little, if not nothing, to do with alleged old African traditions.
Even in the trial against David Potse (23 in those days), not a word was uttered about a possibly healing ritual of sex with a virgin. Potse had finally been arrested in March 2002 in Cape Town, more than nine hundred kilometres from Louisvale, six months after the torn and bloodstained Tshepang was found. His wife Lya Booysen put him in the pillory.
A reconstruction of events, based on statements made in court, shows how Wanda left her baby in the care of her own mother on that fateful Friday evening. Wanda went shopping but did not return. Instead, she went out drinking with a friend – it was a Friday evening after all, and that is what one does in Louisvale on a Friday evening.
Wanda’s mother, worried about her daughter, set out to find her and left Tshepang on her own. When both returned home, they found the girl on the floor of their shed.
Following the rape, inhabitants of the township want to see blood. Confronted with this rage, the perpetrator flees Louisvale, fearing for his life.
The only witness to the crime is Lya Booysen. She saw her husband, Potse, rape the baby, but for months does not dare make a statement. She had felt his fists before, repeatedly. He is a violent man. Wanda too, Potse’s mistress, regularly felt his anger when things were not going to his liking, or whenever he had been drinking too much.
Johannes, Tshepang’s biological father, had just been released from jail. He spent three months behind bars for contempt of court, for not showing up at a trial where he was supposed to have been a witness. While he was in jail, his relationship with Wanda cooled off; Potse became her new lover.
Revenge was Potse’s motive. He suspected Wanda of having an affair and was enraged, seething with anger, livid. He felt he had to put Wanda in her place, and chose Tshepang as his means to do so.
In his verdict on 26 July 2002 Judge Hennie Lacock openly regrets the abolition of the death penalty, and condemns Potse to a life in jail. Tshepang by then is undergoing her seventh corrective operation on her genitals and anus.