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While SA was marching on June 30, I was struck by a realisation — black men and women are not enemies.
It came to me through a photograph.
At the centre is a black woman wrapped in the South African flag.
She is smiling and seemingly comfortable in her place.
On either side of her are black men.
One carries a staff. Another wears traditional regalia and carries a shield.
Their presence is unmistakably masculine, but in that captured moment it does not appear to diminish the woman between them.
A photograph cannot tell us what the people in it believe, nor can it prove the nature of their relationships.
Yet photographs sometimes give form to emotions for which we have struggled to find language.
What moved me was not simply the image of men appearing to protect a woman.
It was the sight of a woman occupying the centre while masculine strength remained beside her rather than over her.
For some time, I have been troubled by how easily public discussion moves from condemning the harmful conduct of men to condemning men themselves.
Men are called dogs, monsters, useless and inherently dangerous.
In some spaces, such language is presented as courageous truth-telling.
I understand the anger from which it emerges.
SA women live with the devastating consequences of gender-based violence, sexual violence, abandonment and misogyny.
These realities must be named without hesitation.
But condemning misogyny is not the same as dehumanising men.
That distinction matters deeply to me because the men about whom we speak are not an abstract social category.
I have three brothers.
I also have three young boys whom I regard as my sons by virtue of being their rakgadi or dadobawo.
I have responsibilities towards these boys. Their futures matter to me.
I want them to grow into men who respect women, reject violence and understand that strength is not domination.
But I do not want them to be taught that being born male and black makes them inherently defective.
A boy cannot develop a healthy masculinity if the only language offered to him is suspicion, shame and anticipated guilt.
We must confront what men do without turning black manhood itself into a diagnosis.
Black men did not invent patriarchy.
Misogyny is not a uniquely African inheritance, nor is violence against women exclusive to black communities.
Yet public discourse frequently speaks as though black masculinity is the concentrated source of everything dangerous about men.
His capacity for care, grief, vulnerability, fatherhood and sacrifice disappears behind the social category of “the perpetrator”.
That is not accountability.
It is racialised reduction.
It also creates a false choice for black women.
We are made to feel that defending the humanity of black men amounts to betraying women, while defending women requires us to distance ourselves from black men as a group.
I reject that choice.
I can love my brothers and still challenge them.
I can defend my sons from dehumanisation while teaching them never to dehumanise women.
I can name patriarchy without accepting that black men are beyond redemption.
Culture has sometimes been interpreted and enforced in ways that silence women, normalise male authority and protect abusive conduct.
“Tradition” cannot become a hiding place for injustice.
But neither should we assume that every traditional understanding of gender necessarily reduces women to submission.
African families have also contained forms of shared responsibility, interdependence and female authority that cannot be adequately understood through a narrow opposition between male power and female power.
The photograph therefore represented something significant to me — the possibility of balance.
Of course, the political setting of the photograph complicates this interpretation.
The June 30 marches were organised around opposition to immigration.
Although many participants described their concerns in terms of unemployment, borders, crime and pressure on public services, the mobilisation generated fear among migrants and was accompanied in some areas by intimidation, violence and forced displacement.
That context cannot be ignored merely because the photograph moved me.
I can recognise dignity and gendered balance within an image while remaining deeply concerned about the politics surrounding it.
A politics that restores the humanity of one wounded group by stripping humanity from another has not delivered liberation. It has merely redirected humiliation.
This is perhaps the greater lesson of the photograph. Human dignity is not a limited resource.
Black women do not have to lose dignity for black men to recover theirs.
Black men do not have to be degraded for women to be safe.
South Africans do not have to dehumanise migrants to demand competent border management, functioning public services and economic justice.
We need a language strong enough to hold several truths at once.
Men must be held accountable for misogyny and violence. Black men must not be converted into a collective social pathology.
Women can honour cultural belonging without surrendering their agency.
Men can stand beside powerful women without controlling them.
And black men and women can struggle together without directing their pain towards people who are even more vulnerable.
The work before us is not to decide which of us deserves to be human.
It is to build forms of masculinity and femininity in which neither domination nor dehumanisation is required.
Perhaps that is what I saw in the photograph — not a completed reality, but a possibility.
- Busisiwe Madikizela-Theu, department of social development professions, faculty of health sciences, NMU
