When elders aren’t better

And so the preachers have hit the streets, and the school marm is ringing the bell and clicking her heels. It’s time to get in line.

The clarion call sounds across the length and breadth of the land: the youth must be saved. Saved from drink, saved from disease, saved from one another — Hell, saved from themselves.

Admittedly, it’s hard not to be swept up in the infectious crusader-like fervour gripping the land. After somebody’s got to do it — all this saving of the lost generation.

One supposes it is high time the nation’s youngsters stopped partying and failing matric and started acquainting themselves with the core values of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

And yet, in all their doubtless well-intended zeal, the bearded gentlemen (and one or two ladies thrown in for good measure) of our National Religious Leaders’ Forum (NRLF) seem to have left out that crucial adage we all learned at mother’s knee: that the wee innocents, the children, learn by what they live.

Way before they even set sight on, let alone are able to read, a Constitution, their first sources of emulation are the grown-ups around them. And from what better source to be schooled in the virtues of non-­discrimination, religious tolerance and equality of the sexes?

Or at least so one hopes, maybe in vain. For there is reason to believe it isn’t the youth of this country who need all the prayers, pledges and saving, but the grown-ups.

Like a group of grown-ups at a Johannesburg taxi rank, who this week displayed what they deemed justifiably grown-up behaviour: stripping naked and sexually assaulting another grown-up who dared to walk past in a miniskirt.

In a bizarre version of the old Mother Goose nursery rhyme they showed that they, little boys, were indeed made of ‘frogs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails” — as they humiliated Nwabisa Ngcukana by pawing at her underwear and violating her with their hands.

However, little boys probably wouldn’t have behaved so badly. Unless, of course, they had been getting in some early lessons from papa or umalume on how to deal firmly with a wanton woman.

She, the woman, in her tight attire, was made of ‘all things nice” — and they wanted some. And those who didn’t had a duty to show her she had no business flaunting her ‘sugar and spice” in front of them.

Little boys indeed — for how else could one make sense of a scene straight out of antiquity, where a woman’s right to walk the streets clothed as she pleases is subject to approval or sanction by a male mob. Sad times, if this is how the men of South Africa believe a woman is to be treated. Who, then, could blame male youth watching it all for believing such behaviour acceptable?

It doesn’t help matters when, instead of immediately calling in the cops to deal with the perpetrators of a clearly criminal act, the task of ‘dealing with it” is left to semi-toothless bodies such as the South African Human Rights Commission and the Commission on Gender Equality. The latter is particularly short on teeth, as its record of dealing (or the lack thereof) with gender-related discrimination has proved: there tends to be much tough talk, but little use of its ­Parliament-bestowed powers of investigation and censure.

Were I a grizzly, sjambok-wielding taxi driver at the Noord Street rank who was part of the mob that jeered at and roughed up Ngcukana, I don’t think I’d be losing sleep at the thought of a stockings-and-patent-shoe-clad gender commissioner coming to track me down any time soon. Nor would the prospect of the NRLF’s august personages handing out pamphlets at the rank do the trick.

All of which raises the question: of what use are fancy rights if they cannot be enforced? And what message is sent when the violation of the rights of others is not met with the might of the law?

As mother said: kiddies learn by what they live. With the government’s crusade to save the youth on the march, one hopes they don’t take their eye off the adults, starting with those at Noord Street taxi rank.

If criticism could be levelled at the education department’s so-called Bill of Responsibilities, it’s that it is vaguely worded and smacks of academese. It is good and well to get the youth to chant that they will ‘not discriminate unfairly against anyone on the basis of race, gender, blah blah blah”.

But as those die-hard advocates who are against sparing the rod will remind us, it might be helpful to carry that big stick, too, amid all the soft speaking. A gentle reminder, as it were. So repeat nicely after the schoolmarm, children: ‘To violate someone else’s rights spells trouble — with a capital ‘T’.”