Multi-millionaire, Kenny Kunene, celebrated his 40th birthday party in style when he hired five models to wear lingerie, cover themselves in body paint, and one model, to lay half-naked with sushi strategically placed over her markedly unpainted body.
What might have only been just another “gig” for these models marked a bourgeois show of wealth and abandon for Kunene. And the media have eaten it up.
Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi has criticised Kunene for “spitting in the face of the poor” by spending R700,000 on this lavish spread. But aside from “spitting in the face of the poor,” what about spitting in the face of women? Or, in this case, possibly drooling on their thighs and stomach?
Vavi stated: “It’s the sight of these parties where the elite display their wealth, often secured by questionable methods, that turns my stomach.” Vavi never once cited women’s rights or gender equality in this outpouring of disgust.
Kunene responded to Vavi, stating apartheid and race as arguments for his actions: “You say that my so-called R700,000 party is a “corruption of morality” and that I’m “spitting in the face of the poor”…You remind me of what it felt like to live under apartheid: you are telling me, a black man, what I can and cannot do with my life,” he said. “You are narrow-minded and still think that it’s a sin for black people to drive sports cars or be millionaires at a young age. You make my stomach turn.”
In all of this, it seems that socio-economic and racial issues are more important that the ever-consistent oppression of women. I would even argue that the “struggle” that Vavi nobly fights excludes women. While Kunene might feel he is staking a claim on his rights, these women are merely decorations and serving platters in the world he has created to prove his arrival to the international elite.
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