There is a poignant scene in Khaled Hosseini’s bestselling novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, where Nana, the mother of the novel’s protagonist, Miriam, says to her daughter: “Learn this now and learn it well. Like a compass facing north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that Mariam!”
These lines have been playing themselves in my mind since I watched rapper Kiernan “AKA” Forbes’s sit-down interview with Thembekile Mrototo on Bar Leader TV.
Like many South Africans, I have been following the aftermath of Anele “Nellie” Tembe’s death with great interest. In my recently published book, Corridors of Death: The Struggle to Exist in Historically White Institutions, I tackle the subject of mental health among black students in historically white universities, tracing it to some of the institutional and systematic constructs that are embedded in the DNA of a SA battling to deal with remnants of our colonial and apartheid past.
Mental health, therefore, is a subject close to my heart. And so, when news surfaced that Nellie had battled with suicidal ideation before her untimely death, I was drawn to the story.
And like many South Africans, my heart went out to AKA, Nellie’s fiancé, who had paid lobola for the young woman just weeks before her death. To lose someone you love under such circumstances is unimaginable.
But then troubling videos started coming out, showing instances of violent conduct by AKA towards Nellie. One video, where the young woman can be heard screaming: “You guys don’t know what he has been doing to me!” while crying hysterically inside their apartment, is etched in my memory. It is gut-wrenching – as is the one where AKA can be seen breaking down a bedroom door to get to a visibly shaken Nellie during a fight that allegedly took place just weeks before her death.
This past weekend, AKA sat down for an interview to give his version of events leading up to Nellie’s death and to say I was shaken would be putting it mildly. Throughout the interview, AKA repeatedly paints a narrative of Nellie as the aggressor and himself as the victim of her rage. She threw her engagement ring at him, she was the one with mental health problems and therefore the aggression in their tumultuous relationship was primarily her fault.
Listening to AKA, one would think that Nellie was a deranged person who subjected AKA to violence and abuse, while he, whom we saw violently break doors as she sat on the floor visibly shaken and terrified, was an innocent victim.
And, of course, Nellie is not here to defend herself, to tell her side of the story. What we are left with are the words of a man who her friends allege physically abused her, a man we saw exhibit violence, and a man who by his own admission is a drug user.
And today, this man wants to present himself as a victim while cleverly casting aspersions on the character of his deceased fiancée. Worse than this, he is using her history of mental illness to do this – legitimising the narrative that it is women who are “crazy”, and also that mental illness and abuse are mutually exclusive, that one can’t be mentally ill and still be abused.
AKA refuses to take responsibility for his actions. He does not at any point turn the mirror on himself to reflect on his share of responsibility in the state of their relationship. At every turn, the mentally ill Nellie is to blame. Like the compass facing north, a man’s accusing finger points to a woman whether she is dead or alive.
Welcome to Patriarchy 101, folks!
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