Tag: gender violence

Men make women see black

“If you bring women together and you give them one goal, greatness will happen.” – Suné Luus

Telford Vice | Cape Town

WHILE Faf du Plessis was holed up in a Karachi hotel room on Saturday his compatriots were taking on Pakistan in an ODI at Kingsmead. Not that they were dressed like a South Africa team. They were all in black, as if they were a New Zealand white-ball side. But their names gave their nationality away: Laura Wolvaardt, Mignon du Preez, Marizanne Kapp, Shabnim Ismail, et al.

Why the change from the usual green gear? Because of the evil men do, and an effort to combat it. “Black Day” is a CSA initiative to raise the alarm about gender-based violence (GBV), an epidemic in South Africa. The World Health Organisation says femicide — the murder of women and girls because of their gender, and almost always committed by men — accounts for the deaths of 12.1 out of every 100,000 women in the country every year. That’s more than four-and-a-half times the global average of 2.6, and it’s only one of the shocking statistics on the apparent addiction South African men have to GBV. Another is that a woman is murdered every three hours in this country. Still another that someone is raped or sexually assaulted in what Interpol calls “the rape capital of the world” every 25 seconds.

“From a male perspective it’s really important that we create awareness on this,” Du Plessis told an online press conference. “It’s something I don’t take lightly. It’s not just a women’s problem in our country. It’s an ‘us’ problem in South Africa. Especially as males, we need to be better. If you look at the stats on gender-based violence in South Africa it is insanely ridiculous. It’s one of the most important things in our country that we as males need to do better; that our country becomes more aware of what’s actually going on and how bad that situation is. I’ve had lots of conversations on this specific topic. I want to learn as much as I can. The more you speak about it the more your jaw drops because of what’s going on in South Africa. This is something we as the men’s team can get involved in on a much higher scale.”

Suné Luus, who captained South Africa on Saturday in the absence of the injured Dané van Niekerk, told an online press conference last week: “This is such a big day for us, to help educate the people of South Africa and whoever is watching all over the world. That we as the Proteas and CSA stand against this is an important message. We’re trying to help wherever we can and make a difference. If you bring women together and you give them one goal, greatness will happen. That’s the vision for Black Day.”

Women’s Criczone, an online magazine, quoted Mignon du Preez as saying: “We have an opportunity to speak up against GBV and we want to really break the silence about violence and abuse. We know it’s family, friends … mothers, daughters [who go] through this. We really want to encourage men out there to also stand up, have a voice and be gutsy to speak up about it as a very sensitive topic. We need to take the lead and be role models and set good standards for our kids and encourage them to continue to live a life of respecting women.”

A CSA release quoted Mary Makgaba, the chief executive of People Opposing Women Abuse, a non-governmental organisation, as saying: “A nation which undermines the rule of law and does not protect women and children from acts of domestic violence, sexual violence, emotional violence, financial violence, physical violence and femicide is not a winning nation.”

That a high profile man should speak on the subject is at once right and part of the problem. Du Plessis is correct to say men are central to eradicating this tendency among South Africans. Misogyny, driven by cultural and religious prejudices, is rampant in all communities and at all socio-economic levels of the country’s deeply patriarchal society. South Africa’s constitution enshrines equality, but the document has little impact on the daily reality of the citizens whose lives it purports to govern. So it is sensible to enlist men in the fight against a scourge of their own making.

But some will wonder whether men will only take the issue seriously if a man demands their attention. They will point to the violence of another kind meted out to Candice Warner at St George’s Park during Australia’s tour in March 2018 — when spectators wore masks depicting a former lover’s face to try and bait her spouse, David Warner — as evidence of dangerous attitudes and behaviours in South African cricket. If those men could so brazenly abuse a woman they had never met, what would make them not beat up, rape and murder the women and girls in their lives?

Questions like that are a long way from being asked, nevermind answered. But at least Du Plessis has joined the conversation.  

First published by Cricbuzz.

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Bavuma cuts to the chase

“Let’s look after each other. As the Proteas we are diverse but united, and we’d like the same thing back home.” – Temba Bavuma talks about what matters, not cricket.

TELFORD VICE in London

ON a clear day at Dharamshala’s wedding cake of a cricket ground you can see the Dhauladhar mountains — part of the Himalayas — looming out of the Kangra Valley.

The scene is as close to being on another planet as Mzansians can find. But while you can take the South African out of South Africa …

“It’s been daunting,” Temba Bavuma said in the northern Indian city on Friday.

“We’re here trying to play for the people back home, but there are bigger issues affecting the nation. The whole issue with woman abuse, the xenophobic attacks — it’s scary.

“We also have wives. We’ve got women in our lives. The last thing we want is for women to get embroiled in all of that.

“We have friends who are foreigners, and the last thing you want to hear is that something has happened to them.

“So as a South African and as a Protea, on behalf of the guys we’d like to send a voice, a word of encouragement to the people back home.

“Let’s look after each other. As the Proteas we are diverse but united, and we’d like the same thing back home.”   

You can go to the ends of the earth but you can’t get away from reality, and it’s admirable that Bavuma didnt try to do so.

In journalistic terms, he’s the reporter who hears shooting and runs towards it, not away.

But Bavuma is likely have to concern himself with the less important business of playing cricket on Sunday, when he should become the 83rd player to make his debut for South Africa’s men’s T20 team against India.

Bavuma has already played 36 Tests and two one-day internationals, and earned a reputation as someone who values his wicket more than he does scoring runs.

And thereby hangs an incorrect opinion, according to Bavuma.

He admitted to surprise at his selection in the T20 squad, but said: “There’s a perception that I’m a red-ball player, but I knew at the back of my mind that white-ball cricket is something I wanted to play.

“Fortunately, with my good performances in the past season, this opportunity has come.

“It’s come earlier than I thought, but I’m here now and I’d like to do the most that I can.

“People are quite quick to label you as a certain type of player. That could be a good and a bad thing. Proving people wrong is always an extra motivation.

“You’re always going to have people who fight on your side and people who try to look to bring you down.

“The last thing you want is to take all of that to heart. I focus on what I want to achieve.

“Last year I made a conscious effort to improve my white-ball game. I tried to play as many T20s as I could. Those were goals that I set, not based on what other people were saying.

“As an international player, where pressure is coming from left, right and centre, you want to be listening to the voice between your ears and not to all the noise out there.”

Bavuma played 19 T20s in 2018-19 — significantly more than he has in any other campaign — in the Africa T20 Cup, the Mzansi Super League and the franchise T20 competition.

He scored 491 runs in 17 innings, among them a 63-ball 104 batting at No. 3 to help the Lions beat the Warriors in the franchise final.

So it will mean a lot to him if he is part of the XI on Sunday: “I’m 29 but I’m sure that when I make my debut I’m going to feel like I’m 21 again.”

But that won’t mean as much as the feeling that, as long as we have people like Temba Bavuma, whatever happens in South Africa, everything is going to be OK.

First published by TMG Digital.

Cricket’s ugly old man is a knight, and good men do nothing

“I don’t care a toss about her, love.” – Geoffrey Boycott doesn’t get why people are aghast that he has been honoured despite his conviction for beating up a woman.

TELFORD VICE in London

RAIN, cricket and England. That’s just how things are here in summer. So there was nothing unholy about the trinity gathering over Lord’s last month on what was billed as the first day of the second men’s Ashes Test.

It’s at times like these that commentators earn their money. Without field placings to fuss about, strokes to salivate over, bouncers to babble on, and the drama of dropped catches, what’s going on out of the pressbox window — not a lot besides the groundstaff’s hard work — won’t hold an audience for long.

If the rain keeps coming, broadcasters who aren’t resourced well enough admit defeat and resort to alternative programming.

That doesn’t include Test Match Special (TMS), which has brought cricket to the BBC’s listeners since 1957. Regardless of the weather TMS is on the air and in a class of its own, at least in English.

Nowhere else is cricket presented anywhere near as wonderfully. Television has yet to beam footage as captivating as the spoken word pictures painted by the TMS team.

They’re a touch fuddy-duddy — there’s a poshness about too many of them that doesn’t sit well with those of us who aren’t — it took them far too long to involve women, and they are too accepting of the banality of those who were exponentially better at playing cricket than they are at talking about it.

But TMS is unarguably the best in the business and a blessing the cricketminded among us should count at every opportunity.

As rain soaked Lord’s on August 14, TMS went above and beyond even all that.

Cancer ended, cruelly early, the lives of Ruth Strauss and Jane McGrath. Emma Agnew is also battling the disease, and winning. Strauss and McGrath left behind them four children and two husbands: Andrew Strauss and Glenn McGrath. Agnew’s husband, Jonathan Agnew, is the BBC’s cricket correspondent and the fulcrum around which TMS turns.

Instead of filling the empty airtime with wittering about long ago exploits on faraway fields, or nurdling this way and that through a debate about who should bat at No. 5, or wondering what’s for lunch — all staples of cricket conversation on TMS and elsewhere — the three husbands spoke about their wives. And about cancer.

They talked of bravery and commitment, of love given and received, of the best times of their lives. And the worst.    

They told their stories with openness and honesty, and with an uncommon softness that only added to the strength of what they said.

It’s rare to hear men express themselves with such care and goodness, more so on a prominent mainstream platform and even more so by such unvarnished examples of the species.

They were beautiful, and it rubbed off: unusually, it was uplifting to be a man listening to other men talk about women.

But the bubble has burst.

Geoffrey Boycott is an unpleasant old man. He is possessed of an ego monstrously bigger than anything he ever did as a player, which took him — willingly and profitably — to apartheid South Africa. He is a caricature of someone the world should have left behind by now; an unreconstructed bigot. He has somehow made a second career spouting clichés as profundities. He adds nothing to TMS except a rich Yorkshire accent.

None of which is news. Neither is it a secret that, in 1998, he was found guilty of the vicious assault of his then partner, Margaret Moore, in France. Moore testified that Boycott pinned her to a hotel room floor using his legs and unleashed 20 or more punches into her face, body and limbs. The photographic and medical evidence concurred. Boycott said she had injured herself in a fall.

The judge believed that evidence, as well as Moore and her blackened eyes and swollen face, and convicted Boycott — who appealled. And lost. He was given a suspended sentence of three months and fined £5 000.

It was also unsurprising that, in one of the last failures of her calamitous tenure as the United Kingdom’s prime minister, Theresa May decided to give Boycott a knighthood in her resignation honours list, which was announced on Tuesday.

Adina Claire, the co-acting chief executive of Women’s Aid, said: “Celebrating a man who was convicted for assaulting his partner sends a dangerous message that domestic abuse is not taken seriously as a crime.

“With increasing awareness of domestic abuse, and a domestic abuse bill ready to be taken forward by government, it is extremely disappointing that a knighthood has been recommended for Geoffrey Boycott, who is a convicted perpetrator of domestic abuse.”

Neither did it raise eyebrows that Boycott’s tone turned menacing when he was asked, elsewhere on the BBC, by Today’s Martha Kearney, whether the honour had taken so long to come his way because of his crime.

“I don’t care a toss about her [Claire], love. It was 25 years ago. You can take your political nature and do whatever you want with it. You want to talk to me about my knighthood. It’s very nice of you to have me, but I couldn’t give a toss.

“This is just recognition of my cricket. Very nice, very honoured, thankful to Theresa May, and I thank all the people that supported me and cared for me throughout my cricketing career.”

He claimed, wrongly, that in France “you’re guilty until you’re proved innocent” and listed that as “one of the reasons I [didn’t] vote to remain in Europe”.

So far, so Boycott. The only unanswered question in all that is why the BBC continue to employ him.

And this: what would the good men of TMS — who had at Lord’s used their platform to raise matters vastly more important than cricket — do about Boycott’s unrepentant, outrageous, disgusting answer to fair questions about his criminal past?

The question loomed when Boycott took his spot behind the microphone on the first day of the fifth Test at the Oval on Thursday. Would it be asked, nevermind answered?

That duty fell to Agnew, who greeted Boycott with: “Clanking in in his suit of armour, sword dangling by his side, visor down — I’ve called you ‘Sir Geoffrey’ for so many years, it’s ridiculous — but, Sir Geoffrey Boycott. Congratulations from all of us. Good man.”

Rain, cricket, England. And extreme disappointment.

First published by Times SELECT.

Leading Edge: Ashes lessons for SA

“England, as yet, have failed to work out Steve Smith. Bit like Boris Johnson can’t work out this Brexit.” – Graham Gooch

TELFORD VICE in London

SO, Faf, what are your thoughts on the xenophobia that’s slitting our society’s throat? Or the evil we visit on women for being women? Or that men just don’t get the damn straight truth that the problem starts and ends with them?

People of Faf du Plessis’ influence should be asked those questions. Alas, reality and sport don’t mix.

But it’s not all disappointing. Here’s David Gower on the BBC interviewing the current holder of his old job: “Most of the news is about politics, about Brexit, about the country in turmoil. Do you realise you are the antidote to all this?”

Joe Root rummaged through his head for his grown-up thought. It seems he failed to locate it. So he said: “It’s nice to see test cricket painted in such a light, isn’t it? Especially in England off the back of a fantastic summer, really.”

Then he waxed flaccidly about the “phenomenal” World Cup and the “fantastic” win at Headingley.

Gower was undeterred: “Going back to the original question, the comparison with ’81 has already been made many a time; when my long-serving friend and colleague Mr Botham made a name for himself. That was in the background of political turmoil and national unrest. That made history for all sorts of reasons. Are you aware of that social responsibility as well?”

Root could have referenced 1981’s Brixton Riots, which involved 5 000 angry people, or the deaths of 10 IRA hunger strikers in prison, or the ranks of the unemployed growing almost as fast as Margaret Thatcher’s unpopularity.

Instead he said: “Umm … I think sometimes you do forget about it slightly. But it’s just amazing how powerful sport can be sometimes, to see cricket being viewed in such a positive light.”

Then he wafted into flummery about Ben Stokes. The closest Root came to sounding like he knew of a world in which he didn’t play cricket for a living was when he described Jofra Archer’s languid, lethal bouncer as “almost like the bowler version of how you used to bat”.

Ah, cricket; lovely cricket. It was Gower’s turn to chuckle, almost in defeat, and say: “Very kind of you.”

Coverage of the Ashes juggernaut cannot be confined to the game. So the search for intelligence plumbs down far enough to disturb dingbats like Shane Warne, who said: “You’ve made the [Brexit] decision; it’s done. Get on with it.

“All this procrastinating about all this stuff. Just get on with it. Boris is good, everyone’s great. Get on with it. It’s a great country. Get on with it.”

Graham Gooch got on with it unbidden, hatching a metaphor as innovative as his baseball backlift: “England, as yet, have failed to work out Steve Smith. Bit like Boris Johnson can’t work out this Brexit. I’m not sure which is more difficult.”

Stokes was on 10 front pages the day after his sacredly profane innings at Headingley. And plenty of space remained for what really mattered.

There’s a lesson in that, Mzansi. Learn it.

First published by the Sunday Times.

Bring back the boycott

South Africa’s problems are all South Africans’ problems. Not one of us is innocent. All of us are guilty. We need to own that guilt.

TELFORD VICE in London

HANDS up if you remember the long summers and winters of empty ache while, far away across the world, seasons runneth over with international sport played by people who were not us.

The way white people spat the words “Peter” and then “Hain”, the shameless lying in the press and on air that the dross dished up on rebel tours was Test cricket and rugby, the Springboks shamefully allowed to keep touring and playing long after the extent of the evil was known, the denial writ large on the blank faces of the delusionists pretending all was normal …

I remember. I was there. I lived through it. South Africa’s forced exclusion from world sport was the white noise of my growing up. I could hear the black noise of anger on the street. At least, I could before it dissipated into the smell of fear as state oppression mounted.

The Olympics? Test rugby and cricket? International football? They were for other, supposedly better people. Not for us.

I knew that was as it should have been. That until all South Africans had the same chances in life — not only in sport — the least the rest of the world could do was not allow the apartheid government to, as we say these days, sportwash the murderous truth away.

Politics was sport. Sport was politics. Is, was, always will be. Anyone who believes differently is, at best, stupid, at worst, on the high road to fascism. That offends you? Noted.

I cheered like mad during the 1981 Bok tour to New Zealand — for the protestors. I grew taller with pride every time my father, someone I was irreparably distanced from in all sorts of ways, defiantly and in the face of vicious opposition loudly supported the man he always called “Clay”.

He did so not because Muhammad Ali was a wonderful boxer. He did so because Ali invariably said and did the Right Thing. That my father was an ardent student of the art and craft of smacking someone in the face for a living but knew that Ali’s political bravery was exponentially more important than anything he would do in the ring has shaped me in ways I’m still, at 53, trying to understand.

And here we are, all these years later, and not nearly enough has changed. We still don’t have democracy. What we have is a pretence of democracy for the five minutes it takes to put a cross on a ballot paper every five years.

That’s for those of us who still bother to vote. The rest of us know that’s a waste of time. Whether we vote or not, the government will run on corruption and stink of ineptitude. Just like it did when it was white — when none of the legally available alternatives were noticeably less corrupt and inept, just as they are now.

Too many of us believed the bullshit of the 1995 rugby World Cup. That wasn’t unity. That was marketing. Nelson Mandela was dangerously wrong: sport does not have the power to change the world. Not, at least, for any longer than it takes the cheesy fakery of a beer commercial to shamble across our television screens. That’s even less than the five minutes we fool ourselves, every five years, that we’re a democracy.

The Springbok is the swastika of sport, the symbol of what white supremacy used to do on Saturday afternoons. Yet there the filthy thing still is, leaping on the left sleeve of the jerseys of the team who will, so they have been sold to us, represent South Africa at the men’s World Cup.

Why has the Springbok survived? Because it is a valuable brand. Because it makes money. That it is also a significant part of the story of the depths human depravity has sunk to matters less, apparently. How does that make you feel? How does it make me feel? Sick.

I would feel better if international rugby’s suits, having been reminded this week of how abnormal South African society still is and will be for too many decades hence, threw the Boks out of the World Cup.

Or if India — important figures in South Africa’s expulsion and readmission to international cricket — uninvited the Proteas to their tour there later this month.

At least Zambia have had the balls to tell Bafana Bafana not to turn up in Lusaka for their friendly on Saturday. The South African Football Association’s response has not been to reflect on why that has happened and to empathise with the Zambians, but to try and find replacement opposition. How completely disgusting.

Worse, Banyana Banyana played Botswana in the CAF Olympic qualifiers on Wednesday. It is an outrage that the match went ahead — could the players and the crowd at Orlando Stadium smell the hate drifting in on the smoke from the fires set by the xenophobes they consider compatriots?

How do you talk sense into the heads of people swept up in the irrationality that those who have come from far worse realities than theirs to make lives no-one wants to live are stealing “their” jobs and “their” women? Black South Africans, you are a disgrace.

But you have a way to go to join white South Africans at the bottom of the barrel. There is no reconciling with people who, having done everything wrong for hundreds of years, think they have the right to be treated as equals despite retaining all of their privileges.

The latter calamity has, of course, led to the former. How could it not? And how did we think the main victims of centuries of systemic, institutional racial violence — black men, without whom colonialism and apartheid could not have existed — would manifest their dysfunction if not against women?   

All that’s more pathetic than women calling for the death penalty for perpetrators of gender-based violence is men seeking to distance themselves from those perpetrators by issuing confections of affront at their actions.

Some women seem to think you should go to jail if you kill a man and be executed if you kill a woman. But only if you’re a man. Nevermind that the death penalty doesn’t work, or that men are far more likely to be victims of male violence than women.

As for the shrieks of protest by men about other men, if you had lived their lives would you be that different? Or are you trying to say that being born black and male means being born bad?

Much of the noise made by these men and women rises from that swamp of affluence we call the middle class. How dare we lump these fine citizens with those other, dirtier, poorer South Africans? How could we possibly equate swinging a panga in anger with the lethal buzz of an electric fence securing ill-gotten gains?  

South Africa’s problems are all South Africans’ problems. Not one of us is innocent. All of us are guilty. We need to own that guilt if we are to have any hope of rehabilitating ourselves. 

It will take a lot more than sport to heal South Africa. But reviving the boycott would be a start. It is the least sport could do. Bring back the boycott now and bring it back properly, and to hell with how much money would be lost and whose careers would be cut short.

Hands up if you’re quietly aghast to be South African but will make noise in support of the Springboks at the World Cup?

Shame on you.

Dad? Thanks.

First published by Times SELECT.