Balancing gender scales mustn’t blind us from plight of young men, boys

LAST week, a relative called me to see if I could help a younger relative, a teenage girl, find a mentor for her “Take a girl child to work day”.

In the same week, Cape Town gangster George “Geweld” Thomas was convicted of 53 charges including murder, racketeering and theft, some of the offences including the murders, having been committed while he was already in prison awaiting trial.

Around the same time, two of the four young men accused of killing Mozambican national Emmanuel Josias (also known as Sithole) were denied bail.

At face value the three incidents were unrelated, yet they are part of the same narrative.

I have written before that it pains me that South Africa ignores the plight of its young black males. We hope they will sort themselves out, which is why we have a day dedicated to showing young girls that a different world exists, but hardly anything of the same magnitude for their brothers.

Many of the boys who we assume have the future figured out, for no other reason than that they are boys, grow up to be Geweld (meaning “violence”) or the Alex youngsters. Let me hasten to say that I do support the principle of exposing girls to possibilities that exist.

Patriarchy is too entrenched in South Africa to not recognise that many young women have been raised to think, and still believe, their role in life is to be subservient to men.

I just believe they ignore the reality that in South Africa, historical marginalisation by class and race is as real as keeping some on the peripheries on account of their sex.

Geweld and those Alexandra youngsters have more in common than even they probably appreciate.

They were all raised in poor communities where violence is the norm and where the majority of victims of this violence looked like them. They are part of an unending cyclewhere the few positive male role model figures are judged by the consumables their cash can buy them.

The pictures of Geweld and his gang published in the media showed the group as enjoying their moment in the sun, with some making the “8” sign to emphasise their membership of the 28s gang that operates both inside and outside prison.

Their lives epitomise the tragedy of being black, male and poor in a country where being all of these means life’s dance is pitted against you. I get the impression we avoid peeping into the world which created them because we fear we might be accused of trying to justify their dastardly acts.

Unfortunately, to minimise the emergence of another Geweld, we have to understand the streets that made them.

We have to understand what it is about a community that makes young men merrily stab another in full view of others, regardless of whether it was a robbery or a xenophobic attack.

I am afraid we will continue to produce figures like Geweld and Sithole’s killers because we have accepted the plight of our young men as ordained from up high, and poverty and hopelessness as standard. It seems to be the popular view that if we no longer had communities such as the one where Geweld and the Alex boys grew up, we would no longer have “authenticity”.

Whoever said “keep it real” had no love for those whose reality is the violence and easy death witnessed by residents of Bishop Lavis and Alex for generations.

Many feminists will argue that being a woman under the same situations is far worse. I beg to differ.

The majority, if not all of Geweld’s victims, were young black males.

One of the reasons the likes of Geweld continue to exist is that we have normalised poverty and lack of opportunities for the majority of our youth. Many of us say with displaced pride that we grew up in rough neighbourhoods.

One does not need to go to a museum or to see a statue to be reminded of the extent of apartheid’s impact on its victims. You only need to take a walk around any township.

We can jail as many like Geweld as we want. He was convicted along with 17 members of his gang. But that has not solved the problem of gangs and crime on the Cape Flats.

Mothers will continue to hope and pray their sons are not seduced by the world of violence and youthful corpses. The same applies to Sithole’s killers.

We can jail and condemn the Alex boys as much as we like. But unless we are honest with how the gender-race-class nexus in this country creates individuals like Geweld and Sithole’s killers, we will continue treating the symptoms and calling the jailing of such figures “justice”, when it is mere retribution.

Come next Thursday, South Africa celebrates the 13th Take A Girl Child To Work Day. We should warn them to be on the lookout for those like Geweld and the Alexandra boys with unresolved social issues waiting to prey on them and on all of us.

Whoever said ‘keep it real’ had no love for those whose reality is violence and death