S6: E4 - Nechama Brodie: Music, motherhood and Domestic Terror

Nechama Brodie is no stranger to the Living While Feminist podcast. We spoke in 2021 for Season 4, so if you haven’t listened to that episode please do go back and find it now.

 

Nechama Brodie is an absolute polymath – multi-media journalist, author, senior lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand’s School of Journalism and Media Studies, musician, singer, martial artist. She has turned her attention to so many important topics, and most recently to the topics of farm killings and domestic violence.

 

Today we’ll be focussing on her latest book, Domestic Terror, which examines the fact that – as the back of the book says – quote, “every day, more than three women in South Africa, on average, are murdered by their male intimate partners, the person who often sleeps next to them, who shares a bed, a house, a life, children”. This book looks at the stories of some of these women and unpacks decades of coercive control and centuries of state failure to protect women. It manages to examine this extremely important and difficult topic with insight and information, it busts myths in a fantastic way, and it is an extremely important read.

 

In an early chapter, Nechama writes: 

“In my earlier works on femicide I have written how when a woman asks for help, we should listen to her. I want to add to this: when a man says he is going to hurt a woman, we should believe him.”

 

Later on in the book she asks: 

“How do we tackle this? How do we teach women, their families, and their communities to change – because it is clear that while we are very good at marches and hashtags when it comes time to back and believe individual women who need our support before they are killed, we are not succeeding.”

 

So today I’ll be talking with Nechama about Domestic Terror, her work as a fact checker and myth buster, and her writing world.