Kelly Khumalo encourages abused women to speak out

By Zinhle Khumalo

While addressing a media briefing in Rosebank on Tuesday, to talk about her career after the murder of her boyfriend, slain Bafana Bafana captain Senzo Meyiwa, Khumalo encouraged women to stand up against abuse.

“You are the person to say I will not do this, I will not be treated like this. So the only person that has the power to change your environment and how people perceive you, how society sees you, how men see you, is yourself.”

She explained women should teach men how to treat them. That way they will not be abused, since men will see that women stand up for themselves.

Khumalo became an advocate against domestic violence in 2012 after speaking out on her abusive relationship with singer Jub Jub Morohanyane with whom she has a child.

Asked on whether she has plans of writing a book on everything that has happened following Meyiwa’s death, Khumalo said she was no “opportunist”. “If there’s anything that I’m not in life, it is an opportunist. I allow God to give me an opportunity to do certain things.”

Khumalo added that even the idea of her first book The Kelly Khumalo Story by Melinda Ferguson, was not her own, but that of Ferguson.

“For now I don’t think I will write a book. But when the time comes, I’d probably do, even now I feel like my first book came out too early,” she said.