Don't Touch Me On My 'Culture'

You can say what you want about our president, but the man certainly is virile.

With the wife-count sitting at three, he has no less than two fiancées. And on top of all that his extra-marital philandering is public knowledge.

God only knows how many kids he has, and I think the official count is somewhere around 22.

Zuma has excused his actions, saying, “That’s my culture!” and also mentioned that many western, monogamous politicians have mistresses.

The thing is, if you’re defending polygamy and attacking extra-marital affairs, how do you explain your own cheating ways? The reason we always see Zuma with that fat grin on his mug is because he somehow manages to have his cake and eat it.

Maybe it’s because his current wives really only care about the money and status that they don’t mind. Maybe being a woman within a polygamous culture makes you a bit more thick-skinned when it comes to your man sticking his dick into anything with a heartbeat. Maybe JZ actually is so damn charming that he manages to talk himself out of accountability for his indiscretions.

But playing the culture card is something I have a bit of a problem with.

Middle Eastern cultures allow family honour killings. Acts like virginity testing and female circumcision are excused as ‘part of our culture’.

In Mali, if a man leaves town and is worried his wife’s going to fool around, it is culturally acceptable for him to sew her vagina closed.

And why are all these ‘cultural’ beliefs patriarchal? Why isn’t it a case of ‘what’s good for the gander is good for the goose’? In this age of equality, why can’t a woman be let off the hook for infidelity as easily as a man is?

Am I being racist or ethnocentric for believing that it’s wrong for a man to be able to have as many sexual partners as he likes, while women must make do with just the one useless lump? It’s not the act of polygamy that I have such a beef with, it’s the unfairness of the whole set-up.

When you think about it, saying that men are allowed to do certain things but women aren’t is as bad as saying that whites are allowed to do certain things but blacks aren’t.

It’s as bad as excusing racism and intolerance as just part of our South African culture.

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