Blame culture for shame

Molested as a child, again while she was teaching and nearly forced to marry a man of her parents’ choosing – all in the name of culture and heritage.

This is the story of Ameerah Nazier, now a 27-year-old woman with painful memories of culturally sanctioned silence and shame under the rule of male elders in the community.

Nazier was part of a small Muslim community in Uitenage, an industrial town outside Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape – and that’s where she was molested by a family member as a child.

Running to her parents didn’t help: they immediately shut her down.

The silence continued into her teens where, as a pupil at an Islamic school, she learnt of alleged sexual harassment by teachers and the headmaster against junior female teachers.

The year she turned 19, she became a teacher at the school and, because those teachers were never called to account, she says she became the next victim.

“I knew that I couldn’t be silent, but I was also scared. I had two choices, stay and keep quiet, or leave – so I left,” says Nazier.

At the age of 24, her family tried to force her to get married to a man of their choosing. Fighting for her freedom to choose a husband cost her her whole family: they have cut her off, refusing to communicate with her.

“I am in a better place now, I have a wonderful husband,” said. “But I still feel like I need to get this and other stories out there and break the silence in our communities, so that others won’t have to go through what I did.”

Deputy Minister of Women in the Presidency Professor Hlengiwe Mkhize says South Africa’s indigenous tribal heritage is also replete with troublesome messaging around women and children – a problem whose solution can also come from within tribal leadership settings.

“We have such a rich culture which teaches us to have self-respect and knowing our identity in terms of the things we can and cannot do according to our beliefs,” says Mkhize.

“But what has happened to us as South Africans has also led to us having violence of men against women.

“And there is not a single teaching in our various tribes that tells us to do that. Instead, we have teachings about respecting women and looking after our children,” Mkhize added.

“What we need to do until the next heritage month is to allow government decisions to be taken to communities, using these cultural spaces to look into the roots of the problem and to engage youth on the proper behavior and respect that should be shown to one another as human beings.

“It is not just policymakers but all proponents of our culture that need to be involved in speaking against violence against women and children.”

For organisations such as Sonke Gender Justice, anti-GBV messaging and campaigns in South Africa have been centered around tackling culturally accepted and defined standards of behaviour which prejudice women and girls.

But according to the non-governmental organisation’s (NGO) co-founder, Bafana Khumalo, despite the best efforts of advocates against this kind of thinking and behaviour, patriarchy still drives popular culture.

This is evidenced, he says, by advertising and entertainment, which still echoes the objectification of women, the overt sexualising of young girls and a casual attitude towards violence against women. –simnikiweh@citizen.co.za

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