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Calls mount for Durban 'sick' teacher to pay back the money
Jun 3, 2018 | IOL
By Lungani Zungu
https://www.iol.co.za/sunday-tribune/news/calls-mount-for-durban-sick-teacher-to-pay-back-the-money-15287630 -
Toxic masculinities: The demon in the soul of artistic men
Jun 1, 2018 | Mail & Guardian
By T.O. Molefe
https://mg.co.za/article/2018-06-01-00-toxic-masculinities-the-demon-in-the-soul-of-artistic-men -
The other side of #MeToo
Jun 1, 2018 | Mail & Guardian
By T.O.Molefe
https://mg.co.za/article/2018-06-01-00-the-other-side-of-metoo
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Calls mount for Durban 'sick' teacher to pay back the money
Jun 3, 2018 | IOL
By Lungani Zungu
“Pay back the money!” say opposition parties in KwaZulu-Natal to the former Hopeville Primary School (Phoenix) teacher who pocketed R519 420 during her 1 522 days’ unlawful sick leave.
Despite being found guilty on falsifying a doctor’s note, Theresa Naicker was redeployed to the human resources division where she also reported for duty for only two days before going on “permanent sick leave”.
Also read: Teacher sick for 1522 days, still lands plum promotion
This was contained in Education MEC Mthandeni Dlungwane’s reply to a DA question in the provincial legislature about Naicker’s case.
The DA’s Dr Rishigen Viranna said: “On principle, she must pay back the money. But we are doing our investigation to ascertain when she started the unlawful sick leave so that she could pay back the money she earned starting from that point.”
He said they were still consulting with legal advisers on whether they should press fraud charges against Naicker.
The DA also wanted the two officials who recommended her medical boarding, which was rejected by Thandile Risk Management, consultants to the department, to face the music.
Thembeni KaMadlopha-Mthethwa, the IFP’s KZN education spokesperson, said: “If the department found that she falsified her sick note, then it must recoup the money the teacher earned while on sick leave during that period.”
KaMadlopha-Mthethwa said Naicker should be axed from her new position at the department’s human resources division, saying: “It’s clear that processes were flouted everywhere when she was redeployed. We cannot allow it to happen that when people are found guilty of wrongdoing in one department, they are then reshuffled to another department.”
The Sunday Tribune has learnt through sources in the department that one of the two officials who is believed to have had a hand in Naicker’s redeployment saga was suspended over a fraud case, not related to Naicker’s one.
Equal Education, a movement of pupils, parents, teachers and community members working for quality and equality in South African education, said it was weighing its options whether or not to press charges against the teacher.
Those who knew Naicker, who is said to be from Phoenix, described her as a person with very strong political connections in the province.
“That’s why, instead of being sacked, she was sent to another division within the department. She has very strong people on her side,” said one source who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Her former colleague, also on condition of anonymity, said: “I know her from the late ‘90s. She was one of the teachers who were untouchable at Hopeville Primary. She would brag about how connected she was with politicians in the province.”
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Toxic masculinities: The demon in the soul of artistic men
Jun 1, 2018 | Mail & Guardian
By T.O. Molefe
Men in the arts are no less capable than other men of violence, their tendency to be highly sensitive people notwithstanding. Why are we surprised when they are accused?
Filmmaker Khalo Matabane, creator of the television series When We Were Black and Mandela: The Myth and Me, and Dominican-American author Junot Díaz grew in notoriety in recent weeks. They joined the public list of men in the arts the world has accused, some tried and convicted, of sexual and other violence, mostly against women.
The addition of Matabane and Díaz to this fast-growing list cuts against the popular notion that artists are introspective, highly sensitive beings. Artists, psychologists such as Scott Barry Kaufman have argued, are more open to feeling and responding to the world around them, the beautiful and grotesque alike. In his co-authored book, Wired to Create: Unravelling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind, Kaufman argues that this is true even of those who might, as part of their artistry, project an image of being hard, brash and outlandish.
Matabane and Díaz in their bodies of work do indeed demonstrate progressive politics and sensitivity — fragility, even. Their demeanour is also not “macho”, wrongly thought to be the sole indicator of a predilection to violence.
Consequently, revelations of their atrocious acts against women have come as a shock to many.
But, according to Kopano Ratele, professor, researcher on violence and author of Liberating Masculinities, sensitivity and a heightened capacity for introspection are not enough to cause any man to face the violence they inflict on others, nor what they’ve likely experienced personally but repress.
“Only a different kind of introspection about the kind of man you are, the kind of man you have been made to be, the kind of man you want to be — not about art that you do — can bring men to face this violence,” Ratele says.
He says that people, perhaps creative-minded people more so, have an incredible capacity to build walls in their minds around otherwise incongruent ideas and actions. This allows them to function with no apparent cognitive dissonance. This is how men like Matabane and Díaz could present a progressive public image yet be violent in their private lives, he suggests.
Matabane and Díaz have joined the list of men alleged to be violent in the arts which includes kwaito star and West Ink Records founder Mandla “Mampintsha” Maphumulo and Mark Coetzee, who resigned as chief curator of Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art. City Press reported that Coetzee resigned during a meeting of the museum’s trustees after being confronted with evidence staff had gathered of his sexually inappropriate and abusive behaviour.
Maphumulo, for his part, stands accused of domestic violence against Bongekile Simelane, who is signed to West Ink as musician and performer Babes Wodumo, the “Queen of Gqom”. In a controversial interview with Simelane on Metro FM, Maphumulo is said to have broken the performer’s leg during one of the assaults. He posted a statement and a rambling video on Facebook the day after the interview, in which he said he was no saint and conceded the veracity of some of the claims — made by host Masechaba Ndlovu, who seemed to have ambushed Simelane with the accusations live on air.
In an interview with Ndlovu last Tuesday, Maphumulo was evasive and seemed to retract his concessions. Alarmingly, he seemed to lay claim to Simelane, as if she were property.
Also on the list are painter and photographer Zwelethu Mthethwa, serving an 18-year sentence for murdering Nokuphila Kumalo. There’s also fugitive Roman Polanski, who pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, and Bill Cosby, convicted of three counts of aggravated indecent assault. Both were expelled by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which continues to nominate and award Oscars to Woody Allen, accused of sexually abusing his adopted daughter Dylan.
Film producer Harvey Weinstein is also on the list. It was the accusations against him that triggered Hollywood actors to adopt the #MeToo movement, started by activist Tarana Burke. The movement has spread to countries such as France, Sweden, India and South Africa — and women have come forward to say they, too, were subjected to violence, sexual and otherwise, at the hands of a man, a specific man. In most instances, multiple women have come forward, suggesting that the behaviour could be part of these men’s way of being.
There is also kwaito artist Sipho “Brickz” Ndlovu, a convicted rapist who still lands gigs after his release on bail pending the outcome of his appeal. And playwright and former drama lecturer Tsepo wa Mamatu was dismissed by a disciplinary committee at the University of Witwatersrand on sexual harassment charges. Similarly, filmmaker Sipho Mpongo was charged and found guilty by the University of Cape Town of “sexual harassment, sexual assault and interfering with the complainant”.
There’s a bevy of others who’ve been accused but denied the claims, including Swedish photographer Jean-Claude Arnault, Hollywood executive Adam Venit, rapper Nas (Nasir Bin Olu Dara Jones), former Ruth First fellow and arts journalist Lwandile Fikeni, musician R Kelly, Kenyan columnist Tony Mochama and kwaito producer Arthur Mafokate.
In his upcoming book Born to Kwaito, writer Sihle Mthembu is scathing of Mafokate, whom he describes as “kwaito’s most hideous man”. Mthembu argues that the hit-maker, currently on trial for assaulting Cici Twala, his former girlfriend, is undeserving of the title “King of Kwaito”.
“Not simply because he is not the genre’s foremost innovator (that title could go to an Mdu or Spikiri), but because he represents a toxic masculinity and a co-opting of the very notion of artistic autonomy, placing him at odds with the aspirations of black excellence and joy that are at the core of the music’s roots,” Mthembu writes.
He also expresses distress that Mafokate still has a place in our culture.
Despite being the accused in an ongoing domestic violence trial, Mafokate was among the local celebrities allowed on to the pitch to meet players as Mamelodi Sundowns squared off in the Mandela Centenary Cup against Spanish football club FC Barcelona. He has not been asked to step down nor been suspended, pending the outcome of his criminal trial, as a board member of the South African Music Rights Association.
Based on Ratele’s framing, it is the toxic masculinities Mthembu says Mafokate represents that allow the music producer the support and freedoms he continues to enjoy.
“Masculinity, at a minimum, operates at two levels. It operates as something that is corporeal. It is incorporated on to the body, in the choice of clothing, the way you sit, the way you carry yourself,” Ratele says.
These choices communicate and are understood by society as masculine and defining of the person who embodies them as a man, he says. This is the more dominant understanding of masculinities, he adds.
The other interconnected but, according to Ratele, poorly understood level at which masculinities operate are as ideologies. He says they organise our lives and how we relate and engage with each other.
“Masculinities are both, on the one hand, performance to societal expectations and, on the other, ideologies — bundled sets of beliefs created over time and taught to everyone from one generation to the next,” he says.
These are taught and reinforced not just by children’s primary caregivers, who in South Africa are mostly women, but also by everyone they encounter and through mechanisms societies use to transmit and enforce cultures and norms, Ratele adds. He identifies the poor understanding of masculinities as ideologies as the underlying reason that gender-based violence continues without a coherent, decisive response from the state or society — or the artistic community.
The case of Wa Mamatu illustrates this and parallels that of Díaz.
In 2014, after gender activists successfully campaigned to have a play by Wa Mamatu removed from the lineup of the Cape Town Fringe Festival, the now-defunct African Arts Institute (Afai) organised a panel discussion about the decision. It had been a year since the playwright had been fired by Wits. The title of the panel discussion was incendiary, some at the time said violent: Withdrawal of Play by “Sexual Harassment” Playwright from the Cape Town Fringe Festival: Justified Action or Continued Persecution?
Wa Mamatu was initially scheduled as a panellist but removed after gender activists lobbied Afai. They also excoriated the institution, saying it had focused the discussion on reintegrating an unapologetic perpetrator when no support of the kind had been offered to his victims, who were also members of the arts community. Tellingly, Wa Mamatu apologised for the first time publicly in a post on Facebook hours before the panel discussion was scheduled to start. “I apologise to everyone who was hurt and disappointed by my lack of judgment.” He apologised to the students, the university, his community, family and “every woman for failing them”.
Playwright Mike van Graan, Afai director at the time, said the intention was to convene a platform for a discussion that was happening in private and on social media. He says that the fact that some of the more vocal gender activists on the issue were white women, such as Melanie Judge and Michelle Solomon, seemed to be emboldening claims that Wa Mamatu was being targeted because he was black — hence the word “persecution” in the title of the topic.
At the discussion, a black woman in the audience argued such claims ignore that many of Wa Mamatu’s victims were black. Their needs and voices were neither being heard nor sought in the discussion, she said. She suggested that it was morally bankrupt to defend a perpetrator with arguments that he is a victim of white supremacy without recognising that his victims are also victims of the same systemic racism.
Van Graan says that, after the panel discussion, Afai produced a discussion document on whether or how to reintegrate people accused of serious offences back into the industry, and a code of conduct to guide institutions on dealing with serious offences.
“Conduct considered unacceptable or inappropriate includes violence and harassment of anyone on the basis of colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, national origin, disability, culture, language, ethnicity, age or any other prohibited ground of discrimination recognised in South African law,” the document reads.
Van Graan says it was published for public comment and distributed to playhouses and other arts institutions whose responsibility it was to decide whether they could or would include the recommendations in their policies and protocols.
In a similar vein, a group of Latinx (a gender-neutral term) scholars wrote an open letter in May accusing the media of mistreating Díaz after Zinzi Clemmons, author of What We Lose, publicly confronted him about the day he forcibly kissed her. Other women have come forward with similar accusations of sexual harassment and misogyny, including Díaz’s former partner, Shreerekha Subramanian. Writing in The New York Times, Linda Martín Alcoff, a signatory to the open letter and author of Rape and Resistance, argued that such conversations should focus on “a future in which repentant sexists might have a place”.
Alcoff also suggested that greater understanding should be extended to men like Díaz, who are not only themselves victims of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of men and other systemic violence but also make important contributions to anti-racist, and sometimes anti-sexist, liberatory movements.
“While individuals can never be absolved of responsibility by blaming structural conditions, those conditions do create opportunities, excuses, even training in the ways of domination, and these have to be radically transformed,” she wrote.
Alcoff did not acknowledge that Clemmons had not only rejected Díaz’s apology, issued through his publicist, as “a soup of unintelligibility” but also added that she knew of others to whom the Pulitzer prize-winner had done much worse.
Ratele finds the case of Díaz illuminating because it underlines the point that violent men can be and often are both perpetrator and victim. He says it also illustrates that societies such as South Africa that are founded on patriarchy produce masculinities that are toxic to all who live in it, including men. He cites the statistic that men in this country are overwhelmingly the victims of murder and interpersonal violence — at the hands of other men.
“The artist is a person in a body,” Ratele says.
When that body exists in a society that socialises male-bodied people into toxic masculinities, an act that itself is violent, the likely outcome is that the man that person becomes will perpetrate violence against others. In this way, artistic cisgender men are no different from other cisgender men in their society, he explains.
Mthetho Tshemese, a clinical psychologist whose alter-ego ‘cousin’ iNdlobongela is a musician, takes it further. He points the finger at himself and other men who espouse progressive gender politics as among the most dangerous to women, because of the apathy it can breed. “Being a 40-year-old black man in South Africa means a constant daily struggle and navigating my own masculinity. The kind of a man I aspire to be requires constantly checking my self because the norm is to be violent,” he says.
He agrees with Robert Morell, who has researched and written exclusively on masculinities. Both Tshemese and Morell say that South Africa’s ordering of race, class and sexuality refracts the social power of men of different racial classifications, socioeconomic standing and sexual orientation. They also exclude poor black men in particular from the mental healthcare that might help individuals to understand their place and role in upholding patriarchy and toxic masculinities. This is over and above the stigma that comes with therapy and the pervasive belief that “real” men don’t need therapy, Tshemese adds.
However, having conducted both individual and group psychotherapy, he is adamant that working on the individual is only one part of the equation. The other is to dismantle patriarchy as men are made to unlearn toxic masculinities and remain vigilant about sliding back into the violent norm.
Tshemese seems to echo Alcoff. But he refuses to see them as antagonistic or, as Alcoff put it, “easy binaries”. For Tshemese, the systemic and structural violence he faces as a black man is not a countervailing force that absolves himself and other men from acting on their personal agency to do the hard work, the constant daily struggle of not being what he describes colourfully as “violent fucks”.
Ratele is on the same page. He accuses the country of not having a national plan to end femicide and that recent responses by the likes of Police Minister Bheki Cele demonstrate a poor understanding of the underlying causes of gender-based violence. A co-host with Koketso Sachane of CapeTalk Dads, a show about fathers and fatherhood, Ratele thinks the arts could make a powerful contribution to the work needed to dismantle patriarchy and give rise to nontoxic masculinities. He credits Sachane for using the art of radio to convene a space in which men can talk about their experiences as parents and perhaps learn how to avoid passing legacies of violence on to their children.
I sought only cisgender men as interviewees for this article. We are generally silent on, or defensive about, toxic masculinities. This has left womxn, trans and nonbinary people largely on their own to do the tiring intellectual and emotional labour of responding to and ending the violence of men.
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Jun 1, 2018 | Mail & Guardian
By T.O.Molefe
I am naked and in his bed. He is, too.
I’ve no intention of having penetrative sex. I told him as much earlier. Over and over again. As we made out on the couch, as he stripped me of my clothes, as he clambered atop of me, I told him.
Still, he tries again to force me.
I protest. I squirm. I wriggle out of his arms but crawl right back. Except for his repeated attempts to ram himself into me, it otherwise feels quite nice there, in his arms, my lips on his.
Years later, I rewind and play it back.
Was I being a tease? Should I have left at the first sign of danger? Was it reasonable, or even fair, to draw the line where I did? Was I explicit and clear enough when I said yes to all but that one sexual act. Should I have sketched diagrams on how consent works? Prepared a PowerPoint?
Should I have reached for the non-existent walkie-talkie on the nightstand and said:
“Joseph? Come in, Joseph. You need a yes to everything we do together tonight, as do I from you. I’ve said yes to all but the one act you seem to want most. In fact, I said no. Trying to force me as you are now is attempted sexual assault. Do you copy? Over.”
I wonder if that would have stopped him.
The scene that follows seconds later is so absurd even in the moment I can only make sense of it as an observer.
Two men are in bed, wrestling. One is 1.68 metres and 60 kilos sopping wet. The other is of similar height but has a 20 kilo weight advantage, mostly muscle. The bigger man is erect and trying at every opportunity to insert himself into the smaller man, who resists. Only groans from sheer physical exertion are heard from either during the five or so minutes that elapse as they fight.
They fall from the bed to the floor, where the bigger man pauses to catch his breath.
The smaller man uses the moment to wrench himself free. He eyes the stairs next to him that lead down to the living area, where inside his jeans on the floor are keys to his car parked outside.
“OK,” the bigger man says. He puts his hands up. “Let’s just sleep.”
Despite his better judgement, the smaller man agrees. It’s 2am. They crawl into bed and cuddle. At dawn, the smaller man leaves, taking with him the suspicion that the bigger man had done that before. That he would again, to someone else. Like he did after being repeatedly sexually abused from age 12 by his dentist, the smaller man tells no one of what happened.
He and the bigger man work for the same company. The bigger man is senior, a director in a separate division. They never speak nor see each other again.
My psychologist tells me of the limbic system—that part often called the ‘reptilian brain’ in our neural wiring that tells us, when confronted by danger, whether to fight or flee. I was in danger, but my reptilian brain was indecisive. My fight-or-flight response was bewildered by my sexual desire and the reasoning of my prefrontal cortex, which said Joseph ought to respect my choices about my body.
He did not, but I stayed. Was I revisiting the scene of the original crime, my childhood abuse? A satisfactory answer I have yet to find. I also carry with me guilt that I told no one—neither what my dentist did nor what Joseph tried. The former especially. The man was a serial child abuser who’d violated many boys before me and more after, until two braver than I laid charges that led to a conviction.
Joseph was not the last man to sexually assault me, or at least try.
Another for whom I found the words to stage a confrontation was shocked, as I’m sure Joseph will be to read these words. The shock was genuine. To this other man, what happened was one of the most beautiful experiences of his life. In my mind, the facts are that he dismissed my repeated no’s and sexually assaulted me.
The stark differences in our understanding of events make me take stock of my own history. Are there sexual encounters that I have blocked out or rationalised away where I violated the consent and bodily integrity of my partners?
Possibly. Maybe even probably.
While in no way deterministic nor an excuse, men like me are more likely to become perpetrators of violence. Men who were sexually abused, witnessed or were subjected to other forms of violence as children, and lacked healthy avenues to express their feelings. That is the vast majority of men. That is how men are presently made.
In this patriarchal world, becoming a man is to be subjected to violence from birth and told to take it. Not just by parents but by society.
This makes men victims. And it also makes us perpetrators, actual and potential—a point many progressive scholars on masculinities and anti-sexism activists make strongly. They speak of masculinities, the plural, and recognise that other systems, such as white supremacy and capitalism, enhance or diminish a man’s social power.
Some have argued that this calls for a more “nuanced” response from the press when reporting on acts of sexual and other violence of men. They suggest blame is heaped solely on the individual, and too little examination is conducted of the other violent systems and structures in which men operate, Black men in particular.
This perpetrator-focused argument rings hollow, as a victim aware of my own capacity for violence. I gained this self-awareness through the work of African feminist scholars, activists and women who raised me. They decry patriarchy as they recognise colonialism, for example, exploited African men and masculinities for its own ends. They gifted me and others the words to understand ourselves, and speak to our realities and each other—not only as men, but as Black men.
Why do we refuse this gift?
Why do we undermine their labour as “Western feminist” in origin, as though African women at any point ever lacked the capacity or words to theorise and examine their own realities?
Why resort to denials and tap into patriarchal power structures to discredit victims?
My hope is that if, or when, my turn comes around, that I’d find within me the humanity to own up. That I’d listen, re-examine my actions, raise my hand and say #MeToo. I, too, was sexually abusive or violent. And attempt in any way I can to be accountable. It’s a possibility that every person raised to be a man should contemplate, with honesty and humility.
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