Ferial Haffajee A Second Look
A million men . huh. No more than 2 000 people pitched up at the Union Buildings last Saturday to show that “Real men don’t abuse women and children”, and half of them were women.
The organisers point out that about 3500 men started the march at Church Square, many with their children.
It’s small succour, and smacks of number crunching. I for one had hoped for a massive showing from the brothers in an insecure city and a dangerous country, where the fear of being raped accompanies you wherever you go.
Instead, many organisations are claiming easy victory by calling this pathetic march “historic”, saying they expected no more than 5 000 marchers to pitch anyway, and pointing out in lofty terms that it “put the issue on the agenda”.
It did no such thing.
There is no doubt that the march got lots of airtime on radio and television, and that the organisers did much with few resources.
But this country’s leaders should be doing some serious soul-searching about why an event endorsed and organised by a flood of government departments, trade unions and leading non-governmental organisations, and attended by President Nelson Mandela, drew such a piddly response.
The reasons are manifold. The obvious first: a march on the day that Chiefs play Pirates at the FNB stadium guarantees a foul-up.
Saturdays would have a low turnout in any case, because that’s when people do the things they don’t have time to do during the week, and transport costs to take the masses from Johannesburg to Pretoria are high.
The organisers’ decision not to provide buses – “if people can get to a soccer match, they can get to a march” – as they did in the struggle days was a mistake, particularly in a country where almost one in two adults does not have a job.
The old ways of the struggle have also been forgotten: there was little in the way of planning, no meetings, no pamphleting in communities to get the adrenalin flowing and the boys and their uncles and fathers aware that such a march would happen.
The prime-time television commercials and full-page advertising spreads only showed that the “mass media” in this country often do not reach the masses.
It is obvious, too, from the weak response to the most hyped event in recent times that the soft option – of men getting together to march, to talk about why they abuse, to “share” with each other – is destined to be a minority solution.
To grab the headlines and charge the imagination, organisations wanting to do something about endemic rape and battery must get creative.
What about protests at rape trials? Community sanctions against batterers, such as parading them publically? Vigils at rape hot-spots? Stake-outs and stake-ups? (The Yeoville women who tied a would-be rapist to a pole a few years ago still draw a grin and thumbs-up!)
What has become of the creativity and gumption of activists who almost brought down the red-meat industry, and had Wilsons-Rowntree eating their wrappers during strike campaigns in the Eighties?
Is there nobody out there who can organise a decent campaign?
Or does everybody have struggle fatigue?
A bit like yuppie flu, this affliction has descended upon those who spent their youth in the trenches, the bushes or up a pole plastering it with posters.
The regime fell, there’s a new and mostly democratic government in place and now it’s time for them to concentrate on their careers.
Nothing wrong with that, except that there is no new cadre of leadership in touch and in tune with what the youth are thinking.
One in four South Africans is going to be younger than 24 by the turn of the century. Many of them just missed the struggle and have no time for the old activist ways.
A recent survey of Soweto youth -often regarded as the barometer of youth in general – found unprecedented levels of apathy and an open lack of interest in politics.
Young people these days would rather be trawling the malls than spending weekends strategising in drafty church halls, as their older brothers and sisters did.
So struggle fatigue, coupled with the call of the mall, demands a new way of thinking about how to coax political participation.
There are many die-hard activists who would baulk at the thought of more populist organising.
But it’s either that or the spectre of rallies where there are more journalists and dignitaries than ordinary people around, even if President Mandela tops the bill.
And in the case of the march, more populist organising could have meant buses arranged to take marchers straight to the soccer at the FNB stadium (where fans, incidentally, observed a minute’s silence). It could have meant hosting a kwaito jol after the march, at which the message that rape and battery are not cool could have been relayed by the likes of Skeem, Da Meesta and Boom Shaka.
The survey of youth found that almost four in five young people are fans of kwaito artists; politicians organising campaigns for the 1999 election might think about that.
BLURB: This country’s leaders should be doing some serious soul-searching about why this event drew such a piddly response