Last Thursday, South Africans awoke to yet another gender-based violence and femicide (GBVF) horror story. Ntokozo Xaba, a 21-year-old student enrolled in the national diploma in integrated communications programme at the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT), was brutally murdered inside her Ekhaya Junction residence in Pretoria Gardens.
According to the police, Xaba had spent the previous night doing the most banal thing – hanging out with her friends in her residence. It is reported that one of these was her ex-boyfriend, whom she was subsequently left alone with later at night when the friends returned to their own residences.
Xaba was found with multiple stab wounds in her residence the following morning – her young life cut short in the most gruesome of ways.
On Monday, 23-year-old Ngcebo Thusi, Xaba’s ex-boyfriend, appeared in the Pretoria magistrate's court charged with murder. The image of Thusi standing in the dock is haunting. The young man, clad in a grey hoodie and blue jeans, stood with his hands folded, looking straight at the judge.
Behind him, scores of TUT students and members of the community packed the courtroom gallery, with others standing just outside the door. Their eyes were fixated on him, anger written on their faces. But there was another emotion in those eyes – shock.
I attribute the shock not only to the horrific crime with which Thusi is charged, but with just how ordinary he is. He looked like any young student – casually dressed, fashionably uncombed hair, physically fit and handsome.
Thusi is studying towards a chemical engineering degree. He is a great rugby player, a promising scrumhalf who played for the university's first team. It is also reported that he had played a match for the Blue Bulls Rugby Union's country district side and stood a chance to be scouted into professional ranks.
Thusi had a promising future ahead of him and looked poised to become a productive member of society. None of this matters anymore because for the rest of his life, he is going to be remembered as the coldblooded killer of a young woman whose life was brutally taken on that fateful February night.
I have often heard people refer to men like Thusi as “monsters”, with other men making statements like “Real men don’t rape or kill women”. On the surface, such descriptions and statements sound progressive. But in reality, they are rooted in the denialism of the structural nature of patriarchal violence. Thusi is not a monster even as his alleged actions are monstrous.
He is a man – an ordinary young man who was created by a heteronormative society in which women’s lives have no value. He is as real a man as any other. It is precisely the fact that he is a real man that he could kill Xaba so viciously – because the very definition of a “real man” in a heteronormative patriarchal society is one who has power over women.
Society does not seem to understand the fact that we still have a gender pay-gap, that the economy and labour market are gendered, that women are disproportionately affected by poverty and other related injustices, is directly linked to GBVF and is a reflection of how normalised men having power over women is.
And so, men like Thusi are not “monsters” or some anomaly, they are exactly the kind of men our society deems “real” in practice. And so, when we discuss Thusi during the course of his trial, we must call him by his proper name – a man.
We must not separate him from the society that created him because in so doing, we minimise the extent to which patriarchy is embedded in our country and how every man, whether they kill or not, is a beneficiary of a system that makes it possible for women like Xaba to die so young, so violently and so unnecessarily.
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