A few days ago, The Expresso Morning Show host, Katlego Maboe, who is more famously known for his OUTsurance advertisements, found himself trending on social media after a video in which he is being confronted by his partner for cheating was leaked.
The clearly distraught woman, who is also the mother of his young child, alleged during the confrontation that Maboe, due to his philandering ways, had infected her with a sexually transmitted illness that has left her potentially infertile. It was a gut-wrenching video to watch.
Subsequent to this, the family of his partner revealed that he had also been physically abusive towards her, adding that she had opened a case of domestic violence against him. The Western Cape SA Police Service could not say whether such a case had been opened, but confirmed that a contravention of a protection order had been reported to Sea Point police and that the case docket has been referred to the senior state prosecutor.
So what we have here is a man alleged to have a domestic violence case against him pending, who has admittedly cheated on his partner, the mother of his child, and allegedly infected her with a sexually transmitted illness that has had devastating implications for her very life as she might be unable to bear more children.
Despite this, the dominant conversation in society has been that she was wrong to expose this publicly, and that she destroyed his reputation and career since he was subsequently suspended by The Expresso Morning Show and his adverts pulled by OUTsurance. To paraphrase Khaled Hosseini, indeed, like a compass needle that points north, the accusing finger of society always finds a woman.
If you have battled to understand why SA has such high levels of violence against women, higher even than some war-torn countries where rape is used as a weapon of war, then this is a practical demonstration of the reasons.
We are a country that has normalised the abuse of women, and where we are more committed to protecting perpetrators than we are to providing a safe space for women. We are a country that is obsessed with performance, so we view everything in optics. We are a country that protects men at all cost – even at the cost of the lives of women.
We are a country that has no regard for the family unit, that's why we don't see how this man has torn apart his family through his actions. And more than this, we are a country that likes to focus on how the oppressed react more than on the structures that exist which birth that kind of reaction.
We did it with #FeesMustFall, where we made the conversation about the "hooliganism" of students rather than about the violent system that animalised them by denying them access to higher education or trapping them in debt.
We did it with the EFF, where we made the conversation about its protests to Clicks stores rather than about the deeply entrenched racist white normative practices that define our reality. We are doing it again with this issue. We are focusing on a video of an abuser being made viral rather than on the substance of his abuse. This needs to stop, because it makes it impossible for women to find a safe space to open up about abuse.
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