If becoming a feminist ally is a process, then South African novelist Thando Mgqolozana was its genuine expression. A consistent feminist man who committed his art to aiding the argument that says African men must reckon with their problematic assumptions about masculinity or continue to inhabit an environment that denies them their humanity. He’s not the man we should be reminding of the realities of being a woman in a country that records more than 100 cases of sexual offenses daily. Or explaining the principle of believing the victim. But here we are.
Relying on exposure from his proximity to popular Southern African feminist voices such as Pumla Dineo-Qola and Lebo Mashile—Mashile once described Mgqolozana as “the best male feminist writer writing right now,”—Mgqolozana fronted (not to be confused with pioneering) an idea of an insurgent African masculinity that rejects patriarchal socialization in unambiguous ways. To this cause, Mgqolozana offered himself and his art as an example of the possibilities of his social experiment. He encouraged men to commit social suicide and appeared to adhere to this idea to the letter. Even as he stood accused of abuse, Mgqolozana boasted of crying; but feminists would be quick to point out that there’s nothing newsworthy about a man accused of abuse crying. Whenever a cis-heterosexual male celebrity expressing a genuine human emotion makes the news is part of the problem. We are a society that essentially rewards fish for swimming.
But how we react to black male vulnerability is also a reflection of just how little the needle has moved in South Africa in spite of years of feminist agitation and efforts by popular figures like Mgqolozana to flip the cultural script. Just as adherents of neoliberal capitalism continue to find ways to make it relevant and inevitable in the South African socioeconomic context; those who continue to benefit from patriarchy as a system continue to find new ways to entrench it in the South African sociocultural context. Religious institutions and cultural practices like initiation (ulwaluko), which Mgqolozana has contributed to reckoning with how it shapes African masculinities, have been the most effective tools for ensuring that patriarchy endures as a guiding social principle in South African communities. We owe our shock to men expressing emotion to the effectiveness of these institutions. But social media conversation about patriarchy and how it finds expression at both an interpersonal and communal level can fool one into thinking that there’s a reckoning in South Africa; that we are finally doing what writer Mmatshilo Motsei calls “our work” and dealing with patriarchal violence as a lived reality of South African women and not a feminist witch-hunt (as male chauvinists insist). But numbers tell a different story.
If there were gains made by years of community activism and feminist agitation those gains now appear meager, if not nonexistent. South Africa now records numbers consistent with that of a country at war. In the first quarter of 2023, the country recorded 6,289 murders; more than 1,000 of those murdered were women and children. Civil society organizations have called it losing the war, but feminists are often at pains to state that official statistics alone don’t tell the whole story. The incompetence of South Africa’s criminal justice system, which Minister of Police Bheki Cele regularly acknowledges, discourages victims and their families from reporting their ordeals, meaning that a lot more women are abused and murdered, and their cases are not recorded.
The shocking rise in violent crimes, especially when directed toward women, has not inspired the state to coherently communicate and speedily implement its policies to combat femicide; part of that incoherence has to do with addressing issues in isolation. Experts and feminists have long argued that femicide and gender-based violence cannot be addressed in isolation from South Africa’s other social ills, inequality being the most urgent of those since it anchors almost every social problem in the country. As a factor that fuels femicide, inequality finds expression in economic vulnerability, limited employment opportunities, and disparities in wages. Although class lines can be blurry when reckoning with the phenomenon of femicide, a careful reading of the statistics will show that a higher number of the victims are poor and working-class women. “Economic vulnerability is a huge factor in gender-based violence and femicide. The failure to address access to education and employment opportunities is contradictory to state policies meant to combat gender-based violence and femicide” says Dr. Nadine Lake, the Director of the Gender Studies Program in the Centre for Gender and African Studies at the University of the Free State.
It is against rising femicide statistics, a state that is struggling to address the crisis of femicide and a cultural context that perpetuates patriarchy that a figure of Mgqolozana’s stature was a welcome sight. He embodied the possibilities of feminism in a country at war with its women, queer communities, and children. Mgqolozana’s circle reflected just how successful his insurgency against patriarchal expressions of African masculinities was. Through his Abantu Book Festival and the publication of A Man Who Is Not A Man (2009), arguably the most important post-apartheid novel, he courted some of the continent’s most prominent feminist voices from Egyptian writer Mona Eltahawy to Nigeria’s Chimamanda Ngozi-Adichie. But one gets a sense that Mgqolozana felt a tinge of betrayal at how quickly some of those feminist voices condemned his alleged abuse and distanced themselves from him.“He is despondent, feeling betrayed. He is distraught that I could put his name in the same sentence as GBV.” Siphiwo Mahala, then Mgqolozana’s friend, wrote in a statement.
In August 2021 Mgqolozana’s then-wife (name redacted for obvious reasons) in a series of tweets accused the novelist of abuse. The reaction was swift and global, nearly every platform that had previously hosted or promoted Mgqolozana was quick to condemn him, Mahala described it as “a literary landscape in turmoil.” But it was not necessarily accusations of abuse that sank him, though that should have been enough; it was more his reaction to the accusations that was telling. He seemed bewildered that anyone would believe accusations of abuse about him, yet he strangely encouraged everyone to believe his wife. Mgqolozana’s reaction was a reminder that men often engage with feminism for the promise of its end goal—and not the ongoing messy process of undoing a system they are complicit in. Or what feminists liken to a war in the South African context. We demand absolution from feminism but not rigor; we want feminism to quietly wash us off our patriarchal sins without stepping on what comes off the wash. This is why we see believing the victim as a witch hunt and not a feminist tactic that responds to a criminal justice system that too often re-victimizes women.
We adjust our politics and analytic tools as our material conditions demand. We may begin convinced that class or economic vulnerability is a primary contradiction of South African society, but come to appreciate race as the ground on which that economic vulnerability plays out. Mgqolozana began his cause as a feminist, feminism helped him see the malice of patriarchy and how violently South African men express it. But as he sits cast out by the same feminist circles and gospel he swore by, one is bound to ask how much of his politics have been affected by public reaction to his personal troubles? Does he see the limits of feminism as an analytical tool? Because preaching feminism and upending patriarchy is one thing, staying the course when your life begins to resemble that same patriarchal incoherence is another. When accusations of abuse first surfaced Mgqolozana reiterated his commitment to fighting gender-based violence: “I will not waiver” he said in a statement. When I contacted Mgqolozana I was curious about how much of what has happened has affected how he sees the world now.
“I don’t see the point in participating in a process that seeks to critique me and possibly lie about me,” Mgqolozana says in response to some of my questions, and later warms to a discussion about the country’s literary scene. Particularly, the impact on his beloved Abantu Book Festival, which faced calls for a boycott from many of the people who once saw it as a progressive safe space after accusations of abuse against his wife surfaced.
But if it’s grace Mgqolozana was hoping for then he doesn’t understand the basic tenet of what he’s been championing all these years. He is what happens when a theory is embraced without committing to its radical demands. The women who upheld Mgqolozana as a beacon of feminist possibilities are in a war, in which they are socially, culturally, and economically outnumbered. Of course, they would be the first to throw him to the wind on the news of an alleged abuse. Any genuine feminist ally would appreciate this.
Mgqolozana isn’t the first South African cis-heterosexual male celebrity figure to claim feminism as a guiding principle and yet fail to honor its very basic tenets. In the 2000s, the rapper Tumi Molekane (Stogie-T) was…
