CHRIS ROPER: The Chris Brown controversy

“Michael Jackson was accused of paedophilia — but where would pop music be without his contribution?” Now that’s not a sentence you read every day. It’s from a column by Fred Khumalo in City Press headlined “Why the anti-Chris Brown brigade is wrong”.

In it, he attempts to convince readers that we shouldn’t be mean to fans of Chris Brown, just because he has been convicted of domestic violence. To remind you, in 2009 Brown pleaded guilty to assault and was sentenced to five years’ probation, community service and domestic violence counselling. And a former girlfriend, Karrueche Tran, also had a five-year restraining order granted against Brown in 2017, alleging that he made violent threats to her over text, punched her in the stomach and pushed her down the stairs, according to People magazine. 

Apparently we shouldn’t be nasty about Bill Cosby either. Sure, more than 60 women have accused him of rape, drug-facilitated sexual assault, sexual battery, child sexual abuse and sexual harassment (the list is from Wikipedia). And sure, Cosby himself has admitted to drugging women with Quaaludes. But we should remember, writes Khumalo, that Cosby “had done many good deeds, and did not go out to announce them so he could bask in the praise”. Well, that’s OK then. Humility cancels out human rights abuses. 

Khumalo also mentions Eric Clapton’s racism, Hugo Boss’s stint designing uniforms for the Nazis and Hitler’s funding of the design of the Volkswagen. “Let us elicit the good from the bad. And, quite frankly, we can always separate the artist from his art. Embrace the art, and rebuke the artist, if need be. To put it bluntly, the art can transcend the artist. Let us be open-minded enough to allow for that.” 

You can, perhaps, see that there’s an argument to be made there for artistic artefacts, such as recordings or literature (though Hitler’s watercolours probably wouldn’t make the cut). But it’s a little different when you’re talking about a live performance. Or rather, live performances, in the case of Brown. As a BBC article, headlined “Chris Brown concert shines spotlight on violence against women in South Africa”, points out: “In less than two hours, the Grammy winner managed to sell out tickets to the FNB Stadium in Joburg — the largest stadium in Africa with over 94,000 seats. Demand was so high that a second December date was added.” 

And if you want a snapshot of how South Africa is seen by the BBC, the news site’s list of “More South Africa stories” under the Brown story is revealing: “Zuma’s daughter marrying polygamous king ‘for love’”; “Tyla’s racial identity: South African singer sparks culture war”; and “Beauty contest sparks row over who counts as South African”. Yep, that’s us. 

As you can imagine, organisations involved in fighting the scourge of gender-based violence (GBV) in South Africa see our readiness to embrace Brown as detrimental to that cause. Women for Change, for example, started an online petition to have the concerts cancelled, and called on concert organiser Big Concerts, promoters and the South African government to reconsider the decision to allow Brown to perform. They pointed out that “his concert is scheduled just days after the global commemoration of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, making this event a direct insult to the millions of women and girls affected by violence in South Africa and worldwide”.

If we can allow someone like Brown to still make money out of doing his job, would that apply to one of the DA’s recent hires?

It’s perhaps Khumalo’s most insulting moment when he writes: “The wokeists, who are leading the charge, are the same people who are always preaching tolerance and a diversity of opinion —and yet they are the epitome of intolerance.” You should always disregard the opinions of those who conjure up the clichéd demon of “woke” when they’re trying to argue against someone else’s call for a more equitable society. It’s just a sign of lazy thinking, and rote rhetoric. But calling the hurt felt by anti-GBV activists a sign of intolerance takes it into a whole other realm. 

Brown has 31.1-million followers on X, and he has this as his X bio: “Hate me tomorrow but love me tonight”. I guess you couldn’t ask for a more succinct description of hypocrisy than that. In other words, take an evening off from fighting GBV to enjoy the musical artistry of a sometime abuser, and then tomorrow we can get back to the battle. 

It’s precisely the standpoint of one of Brown’s more locally famous fans, described in Khumalo’s column as “the social media-crazy Prof”, former University of Cape Town vice-chancellor Mamokgethi Phakeng. On X, Phakeng posted: “Chris Brown tickets secured. Hall of fame seats here we come!”, accompanied by dancing women emojis. As you can imagine, some backlash ensued.

Phakeng’s response (I’m using Bona magazine’s transcription) to those who said that by attending the performance she was setting back the struggle against GBV, was this: “I am totally against GBV and condemn it. I believe that those who perpetrate GBV should face the full might of the law without exceptions or leniency. But let me be clear, just in case the message didn’t sit well: I am going to attend Brown’s concert if he comes. These two are mutually exclusive. To suggest that enjoying a concert aligns with every past action of the artist is, at best, simplistic and, at worst, intellectually dishonest … If you hold a different view, then big ups to you, but please do not impose your narrow beliefs on me or anyone else for that matter.” 

News24’s Qama Qukula had a very different take on the issue to Phakeng and Khumalo. “Amid all the ‘discoursing’, I’m still a bit taken aback. Not by the record-breaking ticket sales or Brown’s legion of diehard idolisers. No. What truly astounds me is the amount of people, many of them women, who gladly rage-attack platforms and organisations like Women for Change simply because they have asked South Africans to read the room. Even when presented with details of his violence-peppered timeline, South Africa’s unrelenting crisis of femicide and GBV, or critical perspectives on social justice, Chris Brown’s crusaders remain adamant that the concert is harmless fun.”

Khumalo defended Phakeng, saying: “To insult and abuse those who are exercising their democratic right to embrace a malevolent artist’s work is downright stupid and even inhuman.” Is that a democratic right, though? It gets murky. Is it John Steenhuisen’s democratic right to hire someone who has said racist things in the past? If we can allow someone like Brown to still make money out of doing his job, and indeed encourage it, would that apply to one of the DA’s recent hires? Especially as they fit the Brown parameters, to wit: their offences are in the past, they’ve supposedly repented, and society benefits in some way from their work.

Context matters, of course. Choosing, as an individual, to listen to Brown’s recorded music is one thing. But in a country which — I’ll quote the BBC’s figure here — “has one of the highest rates of femicide and gender-based violence in the world” and where “a rape is reported … roughly every 12 minutes and it is assumed that many more go unrecorded”, a show of huge public support for an abuser is sending a terrible message.

Again, context is everything. I don’t think many people would be against the rehabilitation of racists, but I do think that many of them would be affronted at the idea that a political party would hire them, thereby insulting a large part of their potential supporters. To use Qukula’s formulation, you have to read the room. 

“Michael Jackson was accused of paedophilia — but where would pop music be without his contribution?” I can’t help getting stuck on that sentence from Khumalo’s column. As a defence of Jackson’s work, it can almost sound like an apologia for paedophilia. This is not what Khumalo is doing, I hasten to add. But it is a perhaps inevitable endpoint of that sort of equivocation. The word “but” is the problem here. For people such as Women for Change, and the survivors of sexual assault in our country, one imagines that there is no “but” in GBV.