When campaigns against Gender-Based Violence (GBV) are often shrugged off as nothing more than high-heeled talk shops, there was something to be said of the ingenuity of turning to the good old fashioned “arts” at the kicking off of this year’s 16 Days of Activism for no Violence against Women and Children on 25th November. Call it hitting two birds with one stone. For one, it is sadly apparent that locally the arts have dwindled to being largely sneered at as nothing but a hobby for the utterly bored than a platform of creativity and a viable avenue towards making a living for oneself.
When last did you hear the word “theatre?”
Gone out to see a play?
For that matter, haven’t live musical performances dissipated into social unicorns?
Even in those dreary 80s before TVs were commonplace in African households, for 50cents one could go catch a VHS showing of Woza Albert – Barney Simon, Percy Mtwa and Mbongeni Ngema’s critically-acclaimed play – or a local production at the community hall. Choral performances were in vogue over the weekends. Even for bearded males, singing in a choir was de rigueur, nothing to be snickered at.
One recalls amateur Scathamiya acts kitted out in loose slacks and untucked shirts emulating the acapella sounds and dress of Ladysmith Black Mambazo to swooning crowds and proud mothers. Sadly, nowadays such activities appear tinkering on the verge of extinction, in their place is to “kick it” at the local shisanyama or tavern, regrettably, sometimes only further exacerbating the scourge of GBV.
A breath of fresh air then it was as four start-up actors from Umso High School and a local playwright – collectively known as the Kuyasa Cultural Group – got together to stage a locally-produced play. Like a nostalgic jaunt back to the dormant over-the-top sketches of yesteryear: breakneck, riveting performances with piercing screams and believable tears. Anguished faces, the closest some will ever get to the excruciating reality of what GBV looks like when it happens for real.
There it all was brutally thrust upon the audience that although it may sound like some trendy acronym but “GBV” in real life entails maimed bodies, broken families and psychological scars that seldom ever really heal. Sure we could relay the statistics to you but one is not sure if those are as stirring and will drive the point home as effectively as those four thespians so unequivocally did in their various character roles.
Penned by Mbulelo Kafi, directed by Yonela Nodidwa and proudly brought to you by the benevolent streetsoldiers from the NPO Second Chances, the play When Things Fall Apart captured the imaginations of the people who came out to see it. Through the outstanding acting, the deeper message against GBV, pedophilia, misogyny, sexism, discrimination against the LGBTQI+ community were dramatically brought to life.
Although government has been vocal against GBV, it has mostly been found wanting in effecting tangible deterring penalties on would-be offenders.
Moreover some of the laws that pertain particularly to the most marginalised women – sex workers, in the writer’s opinion – are not progressive enough to ensure that these stigmatised groups are adequately empowered.
Herewith an opinion piece – the unedited version – published by the writer on the City Press website, 19 August 2021, which still bears repeating now…
In this Women’s Month, let us remember the downtrodden sex worker by Phakamisa Mayaba
We’re all familiar with the drill; “Women’s Month” scream the posters; “fight gender-based violence” activists urge, and well-heeled politicians … well, they get on with the typical business of the season. Show up and lamely read aloud some hackneyed regurgitation to a generally yawning audience before disappearing from the Zoom screen, fated to do it all over again next year.
One wonders if we would not be spared bouts of boredom and the fiscus better served to simply have speeches from previous years playing on a loop all day if you consider that somewhere in SA a woman is being beaten, abused and murdered as the talking gets under way. In case you didn’t know, we’re still clocking femicide figures five times the global average. A stroll to the local spaza is to dice with death for our kids in some places.
Then there are scores of mostly unknown women who perish in the dead of night. Their pictures are not masted to trending hashtags nor do their pictures adorn the evening newsreels. They are sex workers, you see, often driven into obscene inner-city environs and, for their killers, there could be no easier targets. So as the Women’s Month narrative – foreswearing women abuse and contemplating castration as a deterrent – are rehashed ad nauseum do they trickle down to the grassroots? When a magistrate somewhere is making an example of an offender, a budding abuser will be getting his first taste of hitting his girlfriend.
We know this not because this political posturing is ineffective more than the culture of GBV pervades to the very sinew of the local anatomy. These campaigns, though they might bring attention to a known problem, fall woefully short of ushering tangible results.
A dance with death under normal circumstances, one dares not imagine how those in sex work are fairing especially under the grueling lockdown.
In a country where we are reeling from the trauma of a heavily-pregnant Tshegofatso Pule, stabbed and left hanging from a tree; Naledi Phangindawo attacked with an axe and Nompumelelo Tshaka’s dead body dumped in an open field, the talking, talking and more talking simply doesn’t cut it.
How many more women to be mutilated, hung or burnt before our “enough is enough” materialises into the sort of action that strikes fear into the hearts of would-be femicides?
What do we say to Anene Booysen the 17 year old who was raped and disemboweled in 2013 to honour her spirit? Or Uyinene Mrwetyana whose only sin was to run an errand at the local post office. If this is the fatal price to pay for being a woman, woe betide those who are in sex work.
As we visualise the looming “new normal,” their normal is a perpetual brutality. Despite insisting that they are sex workers, out on the pavement they remain the slutshamed “magosha.” Beaten. Preyed upon. Unprotected by cops. They are no strangers to dodging buckets of urine rained down on them from apartment tenants who find their presence a stain on the community.
Their bodies bear the social stigmata of a disdainful society and an overtly patriarchal government.
Following decades of sex worker activism the ruling ANC, at its Elective Conference in Nasrec back in 2017, seemed to cosy up to the idea of decriminalising sex work. But thanks in part to a report by the South African Law Reform Commission (SALRC) favouring to keep things as they are, that is, continued criminalisation or compromising on the so-called Nordic model, – criminalising only the buying of sex – the party could let the matter lie.
To the discerning citizen this seems that lazy SA default position where we knowingly sit on a ticking time bomb only to feign surprise when it blows up in our faces.
One need not think too hard of similar examples. Doctors had long forewarned the Gauteng Health Department before Life Esidimeni as we know it today, happened. Pit latrines were a mere report until children began falling into them and drowning to death.
So why when in March 2020 the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce (Sweat) warned that of the 118 sex workers who died between 2014 and 2017 more than half were murdered, this did not furnish reason to dust-off the two year old resolution?
Rather than revisit the plight of thousands of sex workers who ask for the emancipation of their line of work in general and their bodies in particular, our ears turn elsewhere. We ignore the activists and instead listen to a religious fringe whose selective reading of scripture often allows them to cast the first stone with no sense of hypocrisy. The irony of the glass house, if you’ve seen some of the things that happen inside the church, is hypocritically glaring.
But more of a let-down than the clergy are the legislators. That the decision to or not to criminalise rests with a leadership that is of a patriarchal bend is troublesome. All too often we have read the reports about “sex for jobs” or prevalent sexual harassment in the workplace as well as lewd requests for pictures of genitalia from female underlings in political organisations.
How dare we take the moral high ground when there is, at least in my book, little difference between “blesee” and “prostitution”? Between a “blesser” and a “John,” because both quite aptly fit the description of transactional sex. Yet the former has become so romanticised in our popular culture that it’s seemingly normal.
I recall Bloemfontein’s Charlotte Maxeke Street, infamously a sex worker strip, was as chaotic as a heavy metal concert during the ANC Mangaung conference in 2012. The women were running an unusually hectic trade. The female staff at the restaurant where I worked at the time were bagging eye-watering tips in exchange for after-work rendezvous with the “comrades.” Yet these are the same patriarchs in whose hands the fate of sex workers lie.
What is it about adult women who, whether by choice or circumstance, resolve to earn a living through selling their own bodies that has men saying: No, no, you cannot? In this, the world’s most unequal society, what is the logic of mimicking social models conceived in countries directly opposed to us on the socioeconomic spectrum? The Swiss and Norwegians don’t have enough experience with the triple threat of unemployment, poverty and inequality to be reliable role models. Considered a forward-thinking country as late as last year, Norway was ranked second in the Global Gender Gap Index Rating Report. The country sees its women.
To the layman’s gaze there is much in the SALRC report that leaves one perplexed when it perpetuates the objective of getting sex workers out. Out, to what? It is no secret that jobs are scarce out there. Perhaps we should be seeking practical rather than holier than thou solutions that are driven on idealistic prescripts like; “prostitution does not fit comfortably into the international definition of decent work.”
South Africa has the biggest education budget on the continent. The common claim that sex work is a by-product of lack of education does not sustain. Perhaps what holds truer, however, with unemployment at nearly 75% amongst our youth and even graduates queueing at the labour offices, it is likelier a matter of disopportunity than miseducation that pushes many women to the street.
And when government cannot give them or their children food, or pay school fees, what gives the state any right to determine how a woman satisfies the hunger pangs? It is not missed on this writer the countervailing argument about moral degeneration but one will contend that the shortest distance to that cesspit is guttural poverty. An empty stomach, the philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon will caution, knows no morality. It is thus my hope that the this Women’s Month will remember the most downtrodden woman in the country – the sex worker – for only when she is empowered can our sisters and daughters take one step closer to true gender equality.
That was my story then and it remains so even now.