In a narrow street in Johannesburg’s Organic Market informal settlement, Kgomotso Mathekga, 30, admits something plainly to a circle of men gathered to talk about violence against women: “I once had an argument with my girlfriend, and I grabbed and slapped her.” He pauses. “Now I feel pain. We broke up and I no longer see my child. I feel like I’ve contributed to the problems in South Africa, instead of being the gentleman that I know I am.”
The gathering is run by Father A Nation, a non-profit that works with men and boys to promote what it calls positive masculinity, and it is meeting at a moment when South Africa is confronting renewed anger over a string of femicide cases in Ekurhuleni, near Johannesburg, where the bodies of 12 women have been discovered over three months. President Cyril Ramaphosa has acknowledged his government has not done enough and announced new measures, including better street lighting and a review of unsolved cases — steps local organisers say arrive too late for the families already grieving.
The scale behind that anger is in the numbers. Between April and June this year, 5,427 people were murdered in South Africa; of those, 569 were women, an average of six a day, with 1,052 more surviving attempted murder, according to the South African Human Rights Commission. A 2022 Human Sciences Research Council study found more than 35% of South African women have experienced physical or sexual violence, often from intimate partners.
Father A Nation’s approach starts from a different premise than most awareness campaigns: that reducing violence requires working directly with the men most likely to commit it, not just supporting the women who survive it. “We get men to talk, to process their feelings,” founder Craig Wilkinson explains. “And as they do, this healing takes place. And the second phase is teaching and training positive masculinity. We ultimately hope that this will eliminate the scourge of gender-based violence.” The organisation says it has reached more than 400,000 men and boys through programmes in schools, universities, communities and workplaces since 2010, and Wilkinson addressed delegates at the National Dialogue on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide in Pretoria last November, where the Special Investigating Unit launched its first GBVF Responder Programme. His argument to that room, echoed at the Johannesburg meeting: “No boy is born an abuser. But an unmentored, unfathered, unhealed man becomes dangerous in all the wrong ways.”
Local organiser Itumeleng Stephen Tamaga, known as Bra Steve, runs the Johannesburg sessions with a bluntness that matches the neighbourhood’s mood. “We are a lost generation,” he tells the group. “We must restore dignity to the men around here.” Fellow coordinator Zizipho Mtwesi is less patient with the pace of government action: “When I think about all of these recent murders in Johannesburg, I get angry. Why do we have to wait for this to happen for us to act? We are trying to reach men before things like these murders happen again.”
For the women living alongside these meetings, the reassurance lands unevenly against daily fear. “We are not safe when we are outside our place,” says a resident named Linkie, washing clothes outside her shack. “We are afraid when we see a car behind us when we walk. What if this guy’s going to kidnap me or do something to me?” At a nearby hair salon, Providence Maseko is more direct about the limits of trust: “Maybe you are the serial killer. How do I know who to trust?” She now takes a taxi everywhere she goes, hoping it’s safer than walking.
Police have not ruled out links between some of the Ekurhuleni deaths but have stopped short of confirming a serial killer is responsible; suspects in some of the cases have appeared in court. Mathekga, for his part, says the meetings have given him something he says he never had growing up. “I would love them to keep on practising what we have learned, because we no longer have role models,” he says. “Our fathers and our uncles, they are there in prison. We must now become role models and help make this country better.”
