• Raliphi Master Push Xolelizwe from Ward 36 writes:

When I was growing up, Kagiso was safe. We would walk late at night without any fear of being harmed.

Back then our sisters, daughters, aunts and cousins would travel long distances alone at night to sleep over and would return home alone in the wee hours before our parents noticed they had slept out.

I never heard that someone was attacked or raped on their way to or from the boyfriend’s place. But, today, we cannot say the same thing.

Kagiso is no longer the safe haven we grew up in. It is now infested with drugs, high levels of crime, and young boys who kill each other like flies.

Hillary Gardee, the daughter of an attorney, who is a former national secretary of the EFF, was found dead in a forest in Mbombela two weeks after being reported missing. She was abducted and killed by men who were well off. They own properties in Nelspruit and some of them have political credentials. They’re not nyaope addicts.

We need to pause and ask ourselves questions: What is wrong with South African men? What drives the apparently compulsive, appalling propensity in men to murder our mothers, our sisters, our daughters, our aunts, our cousins and our grannies? What is wrong? Are we driven by jealousy? By hate? By greed?

The days of treating women like chattels and common land, without fences and borders, are over.

There is a global awakening in all spheres as notions of treating them as jejune tools for procreation are thrown out of the door of oppression.

The irreducible worth of every women and child needs to be recognised as we insist on the sanctity of human life. What a life it must be for many a women in a relationship. Imagine having murderous and jealous husbands or partners floating around like a playful wind, and you don’t know which way they are blowing.

The sad thing is that we know who these abusers are. They are our friends and our neighbours. We mourn the loss of women. We mourn the abuse but we as men, do precious little to stop this hateful, misogynist, patriarchal behaviour.

In order to address this crisis our focus should be on men because men are the perpetrators. We must address men before they contemplate the crime, when they do it and after they have done it. Our messaging must be a deterrent that alienates this behaviour, while modelling and promoting the behaviour we want to see. This is an important counter-narrative because everyday conversations already create a societal narrative that sustains this kind of behaviour.

All other kinds of messages should be secondary because what will actually stop gender-based violence is when men stop being violent.

We do even less when we refuse to believe what women are saying or experiencing. We look everywhere but at ourselves.