In the soul of artistic men

encounter and through mechanisms societies use to transmit and enforce cultures and norms, Ratele adds. He identifies the poor understanding of masculinities as ideologies as the underlying reason that genderbased violence continues without a coherent, decisive response from the state or society — or the artistic community.

The case of Wa Mamatu illustrates this and parallels that of Díaz. In 2014, after gender activists successfully campaigned to have a play by Wa Mamatu removed from the lineup of the Cape Town Fringe Festival, the now-defunct African Arts Institute (Afai) organised a panel discussion about the decision. It had been a year since the playwright had been fired by Wits. The title of the panel discussion was incendiary, some at the time said violent: Withdrawal of Play by “Sexual Harassment” Playwright from the Cape Town Fringe Festival: Justified Action or Continued Persecution?

Wa Mamatu was initially scheduled as a panellist but removed after gender activists lobbied Afai. They also excoriated the institution, saying it had focused the discussion on reintegrating an unapologetic perpetrator when no support of the kind had been offered to his victims, who were also members of the arts community. Tellingly, Wa Mamatu apologised for the first time publicly in a post on Facebook hours before the panel discussion was scheduled to start. “I apologise to everyone who was hurt and disappointed by my lack of judgment.” He apologised to the students, the university, his community, family and “every woman for failing them”.

Playwright Mike van Graan, Afai director at the time, said the intention was to convene a platform for a discussion that was happening in private and on social media. He says that the fact that some of the more vocal gender activists on the issue were white women, such as Melanie Judge and Michelle Solomon, seemed to be emboldening claims that Wa Mamatu was being targeted because he was black — hence the word “persecution” in the title of the topic.

At the discussion, a black woman in the audience argued such claims ignore that many of Wa Mamatu’s victims were black. Their needs and voices were neither being heard nor sought in the discussion, she said. She suggested that it was morally bankrupt to defend a perpetrator with arguments that he is a victim of white supremacy without recognising that his victims are also victims of the same systemic racism.

Van Graan says that, after the panel discussion, Afai produced a discussion document on whether or how to reintegrate people accused of serious offences back into the industry, and a code of conduct to guide institutions on dealing with serious offences.

“Conduct considered unacceptable or inappropriate includes violence and harassment of anyone on the basis of colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, national origin, disability, culture, language, ethnicity, age or any other prohibited ground of discrimination recognised in South African law,” the document reads.

Van Graan says it was published for public comment and distributed to playhouses and other arts institutions whose responsibility it was to decide whether they could or would include the recommendations in their policies and protocols.

In a similar vein, a group of Latinx (a gender-neutral term) scholars wrote an open letter in May accusing the media of mistreating Díaz after Zinzi Clemmons, author of What We Lose, publicly confronted him about the day he forcibly kissed her. Other women have come forward with similar accusations of sexual harassment and misogyny, including Díaz’s former partner, Shreerekha Subramanian. Writing in The New York Times, Linda Martín Alcoff, a signatory to the open letter and author of Rape and Resistance, argued that such conversations should focus on “a future in which repentant sexists might have a place”.

Alcoff also suggested that greater understanding should be extended to men like Díaz, who are not only themselves victims of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of men and other systemic violence but also make important contributions to anti-racist, and sometimes anti-sexist, liberatory movements.

“While individuals can never be absolved of responsibility by blaming structural conditions, those conditions do create opportunities, excuses, even training in the ways of domination, and these have to be radically transformed,” she wrote.

Alcoff did not acknowledge that Clemmons had not only rejected Díaz’s apology, issued through his publicist, as “a soup of unintelligibility” but also added that she knew of others to whom the Pulitzer prizewinner had done much worse.

Ratele finds the case of Díaz illuminating because it underlines the point that violent men can be and often are both perpetrator and victim. He says it also illustrates that societies such as South Africa that are founded on patriarchy produce masculinities that are toxic to all who live in it, including men. He cites the statistic that men in this country are overwhelmingly the victims of murder and interpersonal violence — at the hands of other men.

“The artist is a person in a body,” Ratele says.

When that body exists in a society that socialises male-bodied people into toxic masculinities, an act that itself is violent, the likely outcome is that the man that person becomes will perpetrate violence against others. In this way, artistic cisgender men are no different from other cisgender men in their society, he explains.

Mthetho Tshemese, a clinical psychologist whose alter-ego ‘cousin’ iNdlobongela is a musician, takes it further. He points the finger at himself and other men who espouse progressive gender politics as among the most dangerous to women, because of the apathy it can breed. “Being a 40-year-old black man in South Africa means a constant daily struggle and navigating my own masculinity. The kind of a man I aspire to be requires constantly checking my self because the norm is to be violent,” he says.

He agrees with Robert Morell, who has researched and written exclusively on masculinities. Both Tshemese and Morell say that South Africa’s ordering of race, class and sexuality refracts the social power of men of different racial classifications, socioeconomic standing and sexual orientation. They also exclude poor black men in particular from the mental healthcare that might help individuals to understand their place and role in upholding patriarchy and toxic masculinities. This is over and above the stigma that comes with therapy and the pervasive belief that “real” men don’t need therapy, Tshemese adds.

However, having conducted both individual and group psychotherapy, he is adamant that working on the individual is only one part of the equation. The other is to dismantle patriarchy as men are made to unlearn toxic masculinities and remain vigilant about sliding back into the violent norm.

Tshemese seems to echo Alcoff. But he refuses to see them as antagonistic or, as Alcoff put it, “easy binaries”. For Tshemese, the systemic and structural violence he faces as a black man is not a countervailing force that absolves himself and other men from acting on their personal agency to do the hard work, the constant daily struggle of not being what he describes colourfully as “violent fucks”.

Ratele is on the same page. He accuses the country of not having a national plan to end femicide and that recent responses by the likes of Police Minister Bheki Cele demonstrate a poor understanding of the underlying causes of gender-based violence. A co-host with Koketso Sachane of CapeTalk Dads, a show about fathers and fatherhood, Ratele thinks the arts could make a powerful contribution to the work needed to dismantle patriarchy and give rise to nontoxic masculinities. He credits Sachane for using the art of radio to convene a space in which men can talk about their experiences as parents and perhaps learn how to avoid passing legacies of violence on to their children.