A few months shy of her 11th birthday, Vuyelwa bore in miniature all the noble traits of her race and gender. Stately and voluminous as a chubby-cheeked Zeppelin coated with Vaseline, she sailed through clear skies of her own making, deaf to the howls and grunts of the boy-children who crouched on all fours at her feet, snapping at each other as they fought over scraps of bone and splinters of action figurine. One spiteful nip on the ankle or snot-encrusted snipe too many, and she would purse her lips into an expression of infinitely patient martyrdom and walk away, her generous posterior giving a faintly dismissive swish from side to side, as if she was sweeping away the barely human detritus behind her with some sort of rear-mounted broom. At 10 and a bit, Vuyelwa was a bonsai African woman: neat, self-contained, and learning to live in a world terminally infested with boys.
I imagine that when one is a girl and almost 11, there are a great many things that are important, many of them quite logically arranged and fairly defensible. But when one is a boy and almost 11, one’s priorities are far clearer, and almost entirely dominated by ballistics. Whether involving wet tennis balls thrown at point-blank range at best friends’ genitalia, or green acorns thrown over vast distances at little girls’ buttocks, the essence of prepubescent male happiness is hurling hard things at soft things.
All of which came to a head one summer afternoon in the 1980s when a once-dear friend of mine, known to possess a cannon of a right arm, landed some spiteful organic missile somewhere on Vuyelwa’s person. It was an accident, he protested, as tears welled in her placid eyes and she began to swish towards him from where she’d been hanging upside down in a tree.
What was less accidental was the manner in which she grasped him, knocked his feet out from under him, sat on him, and sank her pretty teeth deep into the flesh on his forearm. He screamed as little boys do when genuinely afraid and shocked, a high-pitched squeal that startled dozing pigeons into flight. He screamed, we decided later, like a girl.
But, of course, most of the time it’s girls who scream like girls, which is why we have set aside a whole 16 days to ponder (in that overly earnest way that always presages a complete abdication of responsibility) the next campaign in the endlessly repeated, overwhelmingly one-sided battle of the sexes.
Vuyelwa’s tormentor was lucky to be enrolled at a humanist, distinctly hippy private primary school; and what would have got him thrashed in the real world no doubt earned him a sorrowful lecture about how he was killing Vuyelwa’s buzz, and behaving in a way that was not only ungroovy, but that was making the flower-fairies cry. It was gentle and affirming, but at least it was about his action, and not about Vuyelwa’s victimhood.
Which is why the laboriously named 16 Days of Activism against the Abuse of Women and Children seems so desperately misdirected; indeed, why all the nation’s efforts to curb corrupt behaviour are intrinsically irrelevant. The fetish of inclusivity and the new sanctity of self-esteem have provided a superficial dignity and fleeting justice to the victims of abuse, but they have simultaneously drawn our claws when it comes to vilifying perpetrators.
Indeed, if we are handing out clunky titles for half-arsed mood-swings masquerading as paint-by-numbers activism, why not serve the cause better by removing the victim from the spotlight, and turning the full glare of our disgust on the perpetrator? Perhaps something along the lines of a ‘If You Torture or Degrade Women You Are A Gutless Bastard Who Should Have A Fibreglass Splinter Shoved Up Your Urethra” week.
But somehow the modern liberal continues to balk at pointing an accusing finger at the throwers of green acorns, preferring to pour out its energies on the victim. Abuse, it seems, just happens, and we bystanders can only be useful by picking up the pieces. Even HIV/Aids has become a disease of victims, a national catastrophe to which the officially sanctioned reaction is sombre resolve — helplessness, in other words. She had no choice, we say. A tragedy, we say, as if her violation was written in the stars. And to a certain extent it was, but only because the rutting male, human in nothing but physiology, is always removed from the equation and freed to go on his merry way.
Women’s rights activists are fond of telling us that if you strike a woman, you strike a rock. Only a woman could have thought this up, because from a man’s perspective that’s not a rallying cry: that’s carte blanche. Rocks don’t go anywhere, like to police stations, and they don’t talk. Rocks stay loyal, and they stay at home, no matter how hard you hammer them.
We know that if you strike a woman, you stand naked: a wretched, frightened little monkey gagging on a man’s role you are too stupid, arrogant and damaged to understand. So why aren’t we — saying so?