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This man gets my kudos for fighting these sick-minded louts

SOME louts, animals in the words of President Jacob Zuma, found it in their sick minds to visit untold misery on two female paramedics called out to attend to a burn victim in Durban Deep, west of Johannesburg.

SOME louts, animals in the words of President Jacob Zuma, found it in their sick minds to visit untold misery on two female paramedics called out to attend to a burn victim in Durban Deep, west of Johannesburg.

It is when the dastardly acts of such sickos are reported that most sane men feel their masculinity like an albatross around their necks.

The sweat hasn't dried from the bodies of the Cape Town marchers from various anti-homophobia groups who were in the Khayelitsha regional court to protest over the February 2006 murder by stoning of 19-year-old Zoliswa Nkonyana.

Her only crime was that she was openly lesbian.

Others like Eudy Simelane, Sizakele Sigasa and Salome Moosa have died for the same reasons.

The nine local men charged with Nkonyana's murder are an oddity, a blot on the collective psyche of men.

The same as those who killed Simelane, cutting short her promising soccer career when she was found dumped in a field in KwaThema. For good mysoginistic measure, she had been gang-raped and died tragically from multiple stab wounds.

Like Moses Sithole and Andrei Chikatilo - and Jack the Ripper before them - these township heretics did not act on behalf of the brotherhood of men.

Men - only those worthy of this noun - concern themselves with other worldly pursuits.

They play games, work and buy chocolates for their women. Should the inclination to flex their muscle get too overwhelming, they buy taxis and insist on plying routes they have no permits to be on in the first place.

Just as the miscreants and the human vermin who maim and kill women are not doing it in my name, there's a man who gets a shower of kudos from me: Mbuyiselo Botha.

He does not wear a Breitling watch nor sip the best in fermented grapes that money can buy, but he just seems to get my vote - all the time.

He's taken Julius Malema to the Equality Court twice and the latest instalment culminated in a victory that saw the cantankerous ANC Youth League president ordered to pay a R50000 fine and issue a public apology.

If he can get his peers to bare their bums for him, Malema surely is a man who wields a lot of influence. If he can say all the regrettable things that were found to constitute hate speech and harassment by the court, imagine how they would be received by those whose pastime it is to treat women scornfully?

Julius Malema said so...

While it is never easy to whip Malema back into line, as the senior party leadership have shown in their laxity, it is comforting to know that civil society has men like Botha, a doting father, I'm told.

It is just a pity that only retribution can heal the sick minds of those who killed the likes of Simelane, Sigasa and Nkonyana.

But perhaps if Botha, in his quiet demeanour, had got to them first, they would have turned out differently.

In the meantime, Botha's tireless travail is to moderate the exuberance of those who think they can abuse public platforms to mouth off gender-insensitive rancour.

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