Hlaudi trading women as livestock

The silence of women advocacy groups and human rights lobbyists in the matter involving a Venda chief "giving" SABC boss Hlaudi Motsoeneng a young woman, a cow and a calf is deafening.

How can they keep quiet when a woman's status in life is reduced to that of a slave given to a "master" as a gift for personal pleasures?

The cow and calf we understand, because it is livestock.

Are we back to the times when women had no status in society, and were seen as the property of men - to use as they pleased?

We cannot hide behind tradition as an excuse to selectively undo what has been achieved.

"When men are oppressed, it's a tragedy. When women are oppressed, it's tradition," US social justice activist Letty Cottin Pogrebin wrote inDeborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America.

What are we teaching our daughters when we trade them off as livestock? Is it not human trafficking in the name of tradition?

"Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And. it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name," US scholar Jaroslav Pelikan said.

Motsoeneng should have politely declined and explained that he would not accept a person as a gift.

But even more worrying is the dead silence across the country.