‘Do You Think I Can Kill You?’ Exploring Intimate Femicide in South Africa and Why Intimacy Hurts So Much

Abstract

This article draws on two South African books published recently dealing with violence against women, namely Nechama Brodie’s <i>Femicide in South Africa</i> (2020), and Kopano Ratele’s <i>Why Men Hurt Women and Other Reflections on Love, Violence and Masculinity</i> (2022). Both authors explore strategies for the prevention of violence against women and this article supplements their strategies with an idea put forth by Hannah Arendt in <i>The Life of the Mind</i> (1978). The article argues that intimate femicide persists in South Africa, to an extent as a result of the construction of a certain type of ‘hard’, ‘patriarchal’, ‘traditional’ masculinity that cannot admit its own frailty, dependence, impotence and powerlessness, and attempts to conceal its needs by becoming violent. Arendt argues that violence and power are opposites and that equating male violence with power is a lie that violence perpetuates about itself. Arendt proposes that the antidote to this false mastery and control is the activity of thinking, as distinguished from knowing. The article argues that the activity of thinking acts as a brake on the fantasy of masculine mastery and control and can perhaps minimise violence.