Kopano Ratele

Violence and injuries in South Africa: prioritising an agenda for prevention

Violence and injuries are the second leading cause of death and lost disability-adjusted life years in South Africa. The overall injury death rate of 157.8 per 100,000 population is nearly twice the global average, and the rate of homicide of women by intimate partners is six times the global average. With a focus on homicide, and violence against women and children, we review the magnitude, contexts of occurrence, and patterns of violence, and refer to traffic-related and other unintentional injuries. The social dynamics that support violence are widespread poverty, unemployment, and income inequality; patriarchal notions of masculinity that valourise toughness, risk-taking, and defence of honour; exposure to abuse in childhood and weak parenting; access to firearms; widespread alcohol misuse; and weaknesses in the mechanisms of law enforcement. Although there have been advances in development of services for victims of violence, innovation from non-governmental organisations, and evidence from research, there has been a conspicuous absence of government stewardship and leadership. Successful prevention of violence and injury is contingent on identification by the government of violence as a strategic priority and development of an intersectoral plan based on empirically driven programmes and policies.

Who needs a father? South African men reflect on being fathered

The legacy of apartheid and continued social and economic change have meant that many South African men and women have grown up in families from which biological fathers are missing. In both popular and professional knowledge and practice this has been posed as inherently a problem particularly for boys who are assumed to lack a positive male role model. In drawing on qualitative interviews with a group of South African men in which they speak about their understandings of being fathered as boys, this paper makes two key arguments. The first is that contemporary South African discourses tend to pathologize the absence of the biological father while simultaneously undermining the role of social fathers. Yet, this study shows that in the absence of biological fathers other men such as maternal or paternal uncles, grandfathers, neighbours, and teachers often serve as social fathers. Most of the men who participated in this study are able to identify men who – as social rather than biological fathers – played significant roles in their lives. Secondly, we suggest that while dominant discourses around social fatherhood foreground authoritarian and controlling behaviours, there are moments when alternative more nurturing and consultative versions of being a father and/or being fathered are evident in the experiences of this group of men.

Currents against gender transformation of South African men: relocating marginality to the centre of research and theory of masculinities

South African research on men, boys and masculinities appears to be underachieving. The article presents a number of research-related and socio-political discursive cross-currents tied to this unconvincing performance. These are currents within and against which masculinities are produced and masculinities research conducted. They are seen as opposed to changing gender power relations and the transformation of boys, men and masculinities in post-apartheid society. The inventory of these currents is intended to be taken as signposts of the ongoing struggle for dominance among the forces pressing against the project of changing gender power relations and mens transformation. The article suggests that while there are obvious hegemonic ideas about masculinity in the country, these ideas are complicated by the marginality of (South) African society in juxtaposition to powerful multinational capitalist ideologies. It is contended that what we might be in need of are culturally-intelligent studies and activism on men in their locatedness in their marginal worlds. A door into gaining better access into masculinities located in this zone of marginality and representing pro-feminist work with men and boys as pro-African is the critical re-deployment of the notion of ‘(the) tradition/al’ as constitutive of masculinity.

Working through resistance in engaging boys and men towards gender equality and progressive masculinities

Over the last two decades, a focus on challenging and transforming dominant forms of masculinity and engaging boys and men towards gender equality and healthy masculinities has permeated South African social and health sciences and the humanities. This focus on men and boys has also been evident in intervention and activist work. However, the turn to boys, men and masculinities has not gone without resistance, contestation and contradictions. A range of localised and global realities has frustrated much of the enthusiasm for rapid, sweeping and concrete changes regarding gender justice and the making of progressive masculinities. Among the discursive and material forces that oppose work that engages boys and men are those to do with income-related issues, race and racism, cultural traditions and gender itself. Because of this, it is contended that engagement with boys and men needs to consider not only gender but also economic inequality, poverty and unemployment, divisions created by race, and struggles around tradition. This paper discusses these forces that undermine and counteract work with boys and men and how we might work through resistance in engaging with men and boys.

Sexuality as Constitutive of Whiteness in South Africa

Over the course of the life of the policy of apartheid, the South African State undertook an exercise of classifying the population into different racial categories. These racial classifications were accepted by most but also disputed by many individuals who appealed to be reclassified into other categories or were forcefully reclassified. Interwoven with the processes of racial classification and objections against classification were the laws against inter-racial coupling. The police arrested and the courts prosecuted thousands of individuals for unlawful sex with persons regarded as of other races. This article employs four illustrative cases to show how a certain idea of whiteness was constituted, elaborated, and rooted. The analysis undertaken in this article is grounded on the reports carried in the annual Survey of Race Relations in South Africa about the population of South Africa in the 1960s, a period that has been referred to as the hey-day of apartheid. The article underlines the role of sexuality in the making of whiteness, linking the intention of the immorality laws with the creation of whiteness generally and dominant white masculinity specifically. The State is shown to have been a principal actor in the rendition of sexuality as constitutive of whiteness. The article concludes that over the years the idea of sexuality and sexual immorality as conveyed by the apartheid legal Acts ended up distending the conception of being white, reshaping the development of personal and social relations of whites to each other and to members of groupings.

‘We Do Not Cook, We Only Assist Them’: Constructions of Hegemonic Masculinity Through Gendered Activity

This article discusses how the gendering of activity by boys coincides with, contests or recreates constructions of hegemonic masculinity in the context of South Africa. The study used a qualitative methodology including a series of three focus groups with 14–16 year-old boys across six different schools in the Western Cape, South Africa. A discursive analysis in which particular attention was paid to how participants construct their masculinity in relation to what they may or may not do as boys/men was conducted. The findings foreground how articulations of masculinity by boys are characterised by efforts to gender activity in the process of, amongst other things, counter blushing—meaning not to be regarded as girl-like or a moffie, or other derogatory notions that do not fit with hegemonic masculinity in a particular context. However, resistances and alternative views on what boys/men can and cannot do also emerged, highlighting the contested nature of current constructions of masculinity among young people in South Africa.

Proper sex, bodies, culture and objectification

abstract There are two main goals to this article: First, to illustrate the difficulty in resisting the persuasion of powerful cultural actors, in particular scientists and the media, in respect of what and how to feel about our own bodies, desires and pleasures; second, to sow misunderstanding and show disrespect to certain ‘African’ views on how to look at women and mens bodies, practices and desires. Underlying these aims is the argument that for anyone to succeed in evading or opposing the power of culture she or he would need to stage a mutiny against culture itself, and therefore the self. The article thus moves for the suspension of the old cultural contract on the sexual, the bodily, and African identity. The long purpose here then is that it is important to be aware that science and culture are always useful to each, just as the cultural and sexual are never disentwined—such awareness hopefully serving the further aim of seeking to unlearn our desires, images and pleasure from ruling ideologies. The failure to do so is that one is bound to always fail in relating to others and oneself, without sexual or racial objectification.

Hegemonic African Masculinities and Men's Heterosexual Lives: Some Uses for Homophobia

Abstract: Based on two relatively well-reported cases of homophobia in Malawi and South Africa, this article aims to show some of the ways in which hegemonic African men and masculinities are unsettled by, but also find ideological use for, the existence of homosexuality and nonheteronormative sexualities. Deploying the notion of psychopolitics, the article traces the interpenetrating psychosocial and sociopolitical aspects of homophobia. The argument is that analyses of issues of lesbian, gay, and “othered” sexualities are vital for a fuller understanding of the production of hegemonic forms of gender and masculinity in Africa. The article suggests that the threat posed by homosexuality is used as a distraction for some of the socioeconomic development-related failures of Africa’s ruling men but also, more significantly, for the impossibility of hegemonic African masculinity itself. Résumé: En s’appuyant sur deux cas relativement bien médiatisés d’homophobie au Malawi et en Afrique du Sud, cet article vise à montrer quelques-unes des façons dont les hommes hégémoniques et les masculinités africains sont bouleversés, mais aussi à trouver une utilisation idéologique pour l’existence de l’homosexualité et des sexualités non hétéro-normatives. En exposant la notion de psycho-politique, l’article retrace les aspects psychosociaux et sociopolitiques entrelacés de l’homophobie. Une hypothèse de l’exposé est que les analyses des problèmes des lesbiennes, gays, et des sexualités de l’ “altérité” sont essentiels pour une compréhension plus complète de la production des formes hégémoniques de genre et de la masculinité en Afrique. L’article suggère que la menace posée par l’homosexualité est utilisée par dirigeants africains comme une distraction de leurs propres échecs socio-économiques liés au développement et aussi, de façon plus significative, de l’impossibilité même de la masculinité hégémonique africaine.

Towards the Development of a Responsive, Social Science-informed, Critical Public Health Framework on Male Interpersonal Violence

Emerging out of a larger study whose main focus was to identify the risk and protective factors in male interpersonal violence, and based on analysis of local and global empirical and theoretical literature, the main aim of this article is to develop a conceptual foundation for understanding and preventing male interpersonal violence in South Africa within the context of responsive local manifestation and dynamics of male violence. The conceptual foundation developed has been informed by both public health and social science perspectives. The impetus for the development of a conceptual foundation is not only the scale of the problem of violence in the country but, more importantly, the urgent need for a theoretically sound, locally-grounded and better-integrated understanding of male interpersonal violence and violence generally. The article describes violence in a global context before turning to violence in South Africa. Then it briefly looks at different theoretical approaches on violence before focusing on the public health approach to violence generally, and male interpersonal violence more specifically. Next it describes the ecological framework, given that this perspective tends to accompany the public health studies in violence. A critical appraisal of this approach is then offered. Finally, the article attempts to bring together these disparate perspectives in the process of developing a locally responsive, social science-informed critical public health conceptual framework on male interpersonal violence, drawing on and including a focus on the political, economic and social history of South Africa.

Make Indigenes Unconscious of Whiteness: A Response to Green, Sonn, and Matsebula

Green, Sonn, and Matsebula (2007) present a useful review of studies that theorise, research, and suggest possibilities of looking at race and racism through the lens of whiteness. In the process, however, they elide some intriguing specifics of the history of race in South Africa, such as that in the entire history of the race classification board there were no instances of any African turning white or of any white person changing into the category of African. By placing the focus on white rather than black subjectivity, whiteness studies runs the risk of drawing attention away, not only from the suffering, but also from the resilience, beauty, and love, that arises, for indigenous people, out of a history of oppression and solidarity.