It’s not GBV, this is a Crisis of Identity

Sometimes I knock off from work after midnight on production days. Normally these would be on Tuesdays and Wednesdays – or to put it more accurately, on Wednesdays and Thursdays.

When I arrive home, sometimes I find dirty dishes, cups and pots piled in the kitchen. My housemates would either be watching telly or sleeping! When I enquire why the dishes have not been washed, I would be told that “I was feeling very tired”!

The young man would be lying on the settee face towards the ceiling or eyes glued on the movie playing on telly, with little care to my demurs. Such is our life. The man will toil day and night only to arrive to an unwelcoming house.

It no longer feels like a home. The children don’t listen to the father. The mother doesn’t respect the father. In order to let off the steam, the man either resorts to visit his friends at the pubs, or at worst suffers in silence!

There is a serious problem that men are facing in this country. They have been stripped of the very essence that makes them men! If your children do not listen to you; neither does your wife, what other recourse do you have?

If you raise your voice to try to instil some semblance of order and discipline in the best way you understand, you are told that you’re being abusive! In-fact, they have a nice term for it, they call it gender based violence!

The man is seen as a monster that visits violence on his children and wife. He molests children, rapes girls, women and grannies! The man has forsaken his duty. He is no longer the provider; the defender; the husband; father; priest and comforter. No, he’s become a terror to his family!

This is the common narrative that defines our men-folk. And our sisters, mothers, wives, daughters and grannies have accepted it hook, line and sinker! I daresay even some of our men-folk believe it.

The sad part about it is that the more it is repeated the more society believes it and accepts it as gospel truth. Eventually, the men-folk become the aggressors that they are depicted as.

Meantime the perceived victims receive all the attention; all the help and all the support. It’s a vain attempt to balance what is perceived to be a historical injustice. We are told that our society is founded on paternalistic values.

It is a male-dominated society in which women and children are seen as lesser beings! How true this is, remains to me an academic exercise. Here is why I hold a tangent view.

I believe the problem we face today is not of GBV but rather of IDENTITY. The violence and crime that we see everyday are but symptoms of a much bigger problem. They are not the real problem. They will not be solved by enacting punitive laws.

That is an exercise in futility. In fact, punitive laws will only worsen the situation. What we need to do is to establish in all honesty who we are. I say this because we are NOT Batswana, neither are we Angles (Anglo-speaking Caucasians). If we were Batswana, we would have held on to our way of life (culture), which recognised the sanctity of the family unit; a culture in which children respected their parents (both father and mother); a culture in which men loved their wives; and wives respected their husbands! But no, we have since adopted a foreign culture with its borrowed laws, which tell us that there is NO head in the family! How daft! Even as politicians tell us this and go on to make such ridiculous laws they have the audacity to assign to themselves such titles as ‘Head of State’!

If the family as the basic unit of society does not have a head, why should the nation be headed by a President? Why do you tell us about a School Head, if really there is no head in a family?

It is being drummed in us that our extended family structures have collapsed - it is a deliberate ploy to divide and rule us! If you understand that extended family is made up of your nuclear family members and immediate relatives, then you will understand that it is an enduring structure that has no end!

It is precisely because they want you to despise your ways of life to cling to something that you don’t understand that they tell you these lies! If a child was naughty, wayward or big-headed, he/she would be taken before his/her uncles/aunties to be disciplined.

The mother and father would never give up on their child. They knew that if the uncles/aunties could not set the child upon the straight and narrow there was the next structure, which was the ward headman (Kgosana) and eventually Kgosi (King).

This is why in Setswana it was believed that a child belongs to the community and is raised by the village! But of-course the new culture which we don’t understand teaches us to be individualistic. It teaches us about rights without responsibilities.

The end result is that children dishonour their parents; students beat up teachers; women disrespect their men; men resort to violence! It’s a vicious circle! We must go back to the crossroads. All the nations that are successful managed that by holding on fast to their culture, their way of doing things. You cannot tell me that Setswana, my mother tongue on which I was breastfed, is barbaric, inferior, violent! I refuse to accept that.