On 2 February 2022, Phethelo Fakude logged onto his Twitter profile (@JagIsOffline) and shared that he’d undergone a vasectomy. Within minutes, the tweet had gone viral. Now, while there’s nothing shocking about a young man choosing to take responsibility for his sexual health, especially in a country where almost 60%* of South African children have absent fathers, the reaction to his post revealed something much deeper.
“I didn’t anticipate a strong reaction to the tweet. I tweeted about the procedure as a way to update my friends that I’d gone through with the procedure, as I’d made them aware that I’d booked it,” explains Fakude, who is an admitted attorney. “So, I thought only a handful of people in my circles would react to it. What I got, instead, was far more than I could have imagined.”
The tweet, which garnered over 3 million impressions, 5 000 retweets and 1 020 replies, also received a lot of responses that
