This is one of those columns I wish my mother – who has been reading this publication from the time it was delivered around Soweto as a knock-and-drop once a week – would not read.
Many years ago, when Nelson Mandela was still familiarising himself with being free to go wherever he fancied and dress as he wished, I had an encounter which to this day makes me wonder what if it had turned out differently.
I approached a friend I knew lived on the wrong side of the law to sell me a gun. I felt I needed it because someone of his own ilk had threatened to shorten my days.
Without getting into detail, the matter pertained to myself and the guy who threatened me holding different opinions about my feeling entitled to the affections of a certain young woman who happened to have been the guy’s previous flame.
My friend’s response was startling. “Why would you want to buy a gun? That is like buying grass like white people do on the sides of the road.”
His solution was simple. We must just disarm a police officer because they were easy targets, “especially those who work in the charge office” and therefore do not have enough street cred.
For the record, that was where that conversation ended. No police officer was disarmed and the relationship with the young lady petered away as young love tends to with time.
I recall this episode because of at least two stories making news in the last few days: the murder of Tshwane University of Technology student Ntokozo Xaba, allegedly by her former boyfriend Ngcebo Thusi.
The other is that of the coldblooded killing of music icon AKA outside a Durban restaurant in full view of patrons in a busy street.
So brazen was the attack, which happened late at night on Friday, that minister of transport (at the time of writing) and ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula described the assassination as having happened in “broad daylight”.
In the aftermath of AKA’s demise, we are once again confronted with the proliferation of guns in society.
As I implied, my conversation on acquiring a gun, happened in the early 1990s. By all indications, crime has escalated and there are a lot more guns now than at a time when buying a firearm was “like buying grass”.
I could have easily been Ngcebo Thusi. I too could have swallowed the toxic air of hypermasculinity and felt the need to be a tough guy for and in defence of “my” woman.
Who knows, I could have acquired a gun and, perhaps like Thusi, who is an engineering student, wanted to show that being bookish did not mean that I was less of “iauthi” – a guy as understood in terms of the rules of the streets.
SA has a cocktail of social ills which feed off one another.
Years and generations of black poverty, unemployment, under-education, economic exploitation and marginalisation has caused many to lose faith in ever acquiring a decent life by making an honest living.
Being a criminal is an ever available option in the choices before many who live in black SA.
Like my rival and I, far too many men believe that we own the women in our lives. We feel entitled to feel slighted and see our petty masculine pride injured by her making a choice we as men do not approve of.
Like I did in that moment, we feel we have a duty to defend “our” women and ourselves from those who seek to tamper with our divinely ordained right as men to lord it over the women who choose to share their lives with us.
Of course we must get rid of guns. As we do, let us remember that Ntokozo was stabbed and not shot.
Not being a detective I cannot say for sure why AKA was shot so brazenly but it would appear to me that this was not a guy who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
We must change the reasons why we are a hopeless society. Men must have a frank assessment of themselves and actively seek to change for the better.
Perhaps if we did that, nobody would even think of owning a gun.
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