Ledgers of femicide: Why SA men think they’re the exception

Every man on the radio station’s phone-in line had grown up without a father and turned out fine. The country, meanwhile, buries seven women a day. Somebody’s maths is wrong.

The first caller was from Tembisa. He had grown up without a father, he said, and look at him now. The second was from Soweto: also fatherless, also fine. By the third, the presenter had stopped taking names. I was on POWER 98.7 on Tuesday afternoon, talking about the nine women whose bodies have been found across Ekurhuleni since July, and the lines had filled with men who wanted it on record that they, personally, were not the problem.

I believed every one of them. That was the difficulty.

I have spent a working life in rooms where people are asked to score themselves. If you have ever run a performance review, you know the pattern. The company’s own results say it is a four out of ten. Ask each employee to rate their contribution, and the average comes back a six, sometimes a seven. Nobody is lying. Everyone is describing themselves accurately, as they see it. And yet the fours have to be somewhere, because the numbers on the audited statements did not rate themselves.

It is not only employees. Ask drivers to rate their own skill, and most will put themselves above average. The mathematics cannot accommodate all of us. The problem on the road is always everybody else.

The trouble is that a country can run on the same logic, and ours does.

The audited statements say otherwise. South Africa’s murder rate is roughly six to seven times the global average.

Seven women killed a day

The most recent national femicide study found that seven women were killed every day, nearly 60% of them by an intimate partner. Nine in ten murder victims are men. Those are not opinions about men. They are the audited statements. And yet you will struggle to find a man who recognises himself in any of them. Ask around, and the nation rates itself a six. The country is a four. Where are the fours coming from?

I watched the reflex at work all week. When two women were charged in connection with one of the nine Ekurhuleni deaths, the exception was immediately recruited to acquit the rule: you see, women kill too. One docket, and the national femicide study was being asked to stand down.

When a businessman was filmed in a Sandton restaurant, in a video where he is heard telling women who had refused him their phone numbers that he could put a bullet in one of them and walk, he was arrested within days, and he apologised.

He should, he said, have removed himself from the situation. Read that apology again. It is the account of a good man interrupted by a bad evening. The man in the video did not describe himself as bad. Almost nobody does.

The fault always lies elsewhere

The reflex is older and wider than men. Listen to the parties contesting the November elections, and you will hear it again. The Auditor-General’s reports on the municipalities they govern tell a considerably less flattering story, and have for years: only 39 of 257 municipalities earned a clean audit last year.

The fault is always the previous administration, the coalition partner, the national government, the residents who do not pay. I have sat in enough municipal offices to know the sentence by heart: we are doing our best under difficult circumstances. It is the institutional version of the man from Tembisa. It may even be true. It changes nothing on the statements.

Why do we do it? Partly because it is human. Partly because it is comfortable. As the Ekurhuleni bodies were being counted, one explanation quickly took hold: perhaps there was a serial killer. I understood the appeal. One monster is a relief. One monster leaves the rest of us innocent.

The harder possibility is that there is no single monster to find – that women die at the hands of ordinary men in ordinary homes, men who would describe themselves as decent, perhaps even phone a radio station to say they turned out fine. That possibility asks something of all of us.

I should confess my own six. Some years ago I was shot twice in a hijacking on the road out of the airport and survived by less than I like to think about.

Afterwards, I was fine. I said so to everyone, including the psychologist I eventually agreed to see. She asked how I was feeling. Good, I said. “Good is not an emotion,” she told me. I was, she said, fluent in words and illiterate in feelings, and I had been reaching for a bottle to cover the gap. I had rated myself a six because I had mistaken functioning for health. I was not lying about myself. I simply had no instrument for measuring what I could not see.

We cannot build a nation on its exceptions

Fine is not a measurement. That is what the callers lacked too, and it is the only useful thing an accountant can add to this argument. An audit does not ask how you feel about your performance. It asks for the evidence, and it does not accept the fact that you turned out fine as evidence of anything except your own story.

The men on Tuesday were real men whose fathers were absent. Their survival is a credit to them, and often to a mother or grandmother who did two jobs. But their survival proves no more about fatherlessness than the country’s violence proves against it. Those are different ledgers. We cannot build a nation on its exceptions, and an exception, however loudly it phones in, does not nullify the rule.

So, to the man who is sure he is a six: do not argue with the statement. Audit it. How many nights this week were you in the room where your children sleep? When your friend reduced a woman to a collection of body parts, did you laugh, object, or say nothing? When a woman told you she was afraid of a man you know, did you believe her or explain him? When your son lost his temper, did you teach him what to do with anger, or only tell him to stop? None of those questions will tell you whether you are a good man. They will tell you whether the country’s fours have anything to do with you, which is the question the callers were answering before it was asked.

Everybody is a six. The country is a four. One of them is wrong, and it is never the one with the receipts. DM