The annual campaign to highlight gender-based violence has just started. It comes amid dramatic data that show that a human of female gender is murdered every three hours in South Africa, while a child is murdered every five hours.
I wish to offer two ideas that we must urgently embrace as one of many practices to reverse this national disaster.
The first is a call to men to collectively reject patriarchy and male dominance and to embrace the practice of humility.
Men fail to understand how dominant they are in both the South African apartheid and liberation narratives.
It’s why the data also show that men kill each other every 30 minutes. Men fight these internal demons instigated by patriarchy by also killing other men who challenge them.
To change the narrative, men must reject patriarchal power. I cannot put it any other way.
Society must stop giving men special cultural, religious and social significance.
As men, we must embrace the narratives of women and children as equal to our own stories. In some sense, I believe even that acting, in and of itself, is not enough.
For men to demonstrate to society their rejection of patriarchal privilege, they must take a lesser role to allow the equitable narrative to grow and take root, and this may well take several years to achieve.
For example, I have over the last year insisted that people only introduce me by my first and last names whenever I am asked to address an audience.
I have taken a stand to reject the elaborate titles by which most men insist they must be introduced.
We have had centuries of such testosterone-filled male glorification, and yet it is under those elaborate CVs and titles that women and children continue to die.
It is time we see a new man who is content and confident in this humble role. When we embrace humility, we show our children that a better world is possible.
Humility is a sobering detoxification of the brain. We are yet to see such leadership from our political classes.
The second idea that I consider part of the new narrative is the issue of helping South Africans at all levels to embrace the concept of complex justice.
Our seven Chapter 9 institutions offer South Africans a multidimensional justice architecture.
What we struggle with as an emerging democracy are the competing justice demands conferred on us by our Constitution.
Social justice, which includes access to decent housing, education, health and food security, and economic growth, labour rights and political stability, all intersect in a fragile public square. Managing the intersectionality of these rights is where our leaders are failing the country.
We often see our politicians and social leaders take a one-dimensional, soapbox approach to the rights conversation in South Africa, spewing forth populist rhetoric instead of managing the fragile public square where these rights intersect.
We need a generation of new leaders, who can manage complex justice in the public square as opposed to fuelling populist ideologies that are ultimately bound to fail us all.
Complex justice is supposed to make us feel both safe and awkward: safe in that we know the rule of law is sacrosanct, and awkward in that it challenges our privilege, our patriarchy and our power.
The failure of our leaders is that their narratives sound like they are advancing complex justice, but their practices show us that they are too weak to challenge the entrenched cultures of privilege, patriarchy and power - both those established under apartheid and those born and perpetuated in the democratic era.
Democracy will flounder under such leadership.
The dominant patriarchal narrative of power is a blight on our great country.
Let us stop that narrative now. The data show us that it is almost too late.
* Lorenzo A Davids is chief executive of the Community Chest.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.