Quote Of The Day

"The problem with South Africa is that we get outraged by the things that don’t matter. When issues arise that really matter, we are subdued and quiet. Probably the most earth-shattering piece of news [last month] was the release of a report by the Medical Research Council, on a study in Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, that showed that one in four men had committed rape. Released [last month], it was hardly news in the media the next day. There are reasons to quibble with the study: the people questioned were from devastated, extremely poor provinces, the logic of the extrapolation of the results to all of South Africa is not convincing, and the sample might not have been wide enough. But, in a country where up to 52,000 women are raped every year, it is impossible to hold up a sustained argument against these figures. They go to the core of our country. They might not all be true but certainly they are largely true. To quibble is to indulge in the semantics that led this country to debate whether HIV causes Aids while people died....Anywhere else in the world, survey results like these would lead to the declaration of a state of emergency. If one in four men has indeed raped, then surely there can be one, and only one, conclusion: we are engaged in the systematic murder of our fellow citizens. But the silence is deafening. As deafening as when the statistics and evidence mounted that HIV and Aids were killing people in the millions. The silence is as deafening as when we keep quiet when we hear that a woman wearing a short skirt is 'asking for it'.....A conversation is needed among South African men. We need to start defining what we mean when we say that we are men. There is a problem with the way we perceive ourselves, and the way in which we present ourselves to the world: to our brothers, our sons, our sisters, our wives and our partners. We are not men; we are broken beings. The statistics show that we murder our wives and partners as if there were no tomorrow. We fight, we shoot, we rape. The cycle needs to stop. It cannot go on. We urgently need to talk. We need to start somewhere." — Justice Malala, South African center-right columnist