are when talking about Black women who have been raped by Black men. Why would most white women raped by white men lay charges against them with police officers in a white supremacist patriarchal system that not only made white women minors themselves, but also constructed the cruel myth that white men could not rape? And what hope could Black women raped by white men have in an apartheid legal justice system?
Finally, given the constant active onslaught that apartheid was to Black life, policestations were not exactly a place we (as Black people) wanted to be anywhere near for any reason. In this context, many women felt that laying charges against Black men in such a system would render them complicit with the system. Here the choice was not a choice at all: handing over another Black person to a brutal racist state or placing your own vulnerability in the hands of a brutal racist state. This was not a state that invited confidence.
For vulnerable people who were not women, reporting rape also meant dealing with the kind of incomprehension and humiliation that comes with masculinist culture, such as the questioning of a man’s own masculinity in not being able to defend himself against another man’s violation. Rape is an exercise of patriarchal violent power against those who are safe to violate: mostly women, girls and boys but also adult men and trans-people deemed safe to violate. Queer desire and gender non-conformity were explicitly criminalised and policed in apartheid South Africa, thereby further dissuading gay men and transgender individuals from reporting rape.
Of course, many people fought all of these doubts and reported rape under apartheid, and their courage is remarkable. However, the hope that came with the end of apartheid and the ushering in of a new democracy that spoke directly about undoing not just racial oppression but also taking women seriously, and recognising the necessity of celebrating the full spectrum of gender and sexual rights, saw people’s confidence in the state soar. It is therefore not surprising that rape survivors expected that the post-1994 criminal justice system could offer them justice.
This dream and hope, however, was to be betrayed again and again from 1994. Rape survivors who have not already learnt this lesson will most likely do so if the current system remains unchanged. Many others also know that justice for most survivors of rape does not lie in the criminal justice system, and in fact, it may lie nowhere. Thus under-reporting to police will continue to be a feature. In South Africa, the Medical Research Council reported in 2005 that only one in nine women who are raped report it to the police. The other eight deal with their rape differently. Their mistrust of the criminal justice system is clear as they seek medical, counselling and other assistance to deal with their trauma, to find healing, resolution and sometimes justice. We will never know how many survivors remain silent foregoing assistance of any kind.
Many of us try to understand why rape is such a big part of South African contemporary life, and why it may be on the rise. Speaking as one of the panelists at the 2013 Thabo Mbeki Foundation’s International Women’s Day event, themed “OAU@50: Women at the Centre of Development: Celebrating women’s progress”, Thenjiwe Mtintso spoke about this relentless policing and violence as a crisis. The crisis, she argued, is the latest form of the backlash. In other words, it is a direct attempt to undo feminist work and gains. Yes, it is the ‘usual’ patriarchal violence in many senses. But it is also a patriarchy defending itself. It is not a coincidence that South African women, who, on paper are so empowered and have won so many freedoms, are living with the constant fear of violence when we cross the street, at work, everywhere. An effective backlash always does much more than neutralise gains, though; it reverses the gains we see everywhere and it reminds those who might benefit from such gains that they are not quite free. We can see the same thing in the US with a Black president and the constant violence by police and others on Black children and adults carried across the globe in news headlines. The sheer magnitude also makes us wonder about how much more violence goes unreported. It also creates a culture of instability and fear that reminds African Americans that they are not free and that they will pay for each gain. It is not new violence, and its targets are not just African Americans but Latinos, Latinas and Native Americans too, although the headlines do not always travel as far across the globe. The rape backlash that Mtintso speaks about proceeds along the same lines: it is not new, but it is more brazen. It is a critical time for feminists who already are so stretched and strained in this part of the world and continent.
In the midst of this backlash, public shaming and a criminal justice system that betrays them, women are repeatedly invited to break the silence. There is no silence. We know we live in the midst of a rape crisis.
It is time to apply pressure on men who rape, those who make excuses for rapists, those who make rape ‘jokes’, and to pressure our government to create a criminal justice system that works to bring the possibility of justice to rape survivors and all other survivors of violence. The silence we must now break is the silence around the identities of the rapists in our midst. It is no longer acceptable – or convincing – to pretend that men who rape women, children and other men are a small fringe minority of men we do not know. Most survivors know their rapists. It is simply not possible for a small minority of men to hold a country hostage in this way. And if it is, then we know who that minority is, so they need to be stopped.
It is also important for men who choose not to rape to stop being complicit and sometimes directly undermining attempts to end rape culture. Men who are not violent need to stop responding angrily to those who seek to end rape, accusing us of blaming all men, and requiring that we start by saying “not all men”. Men who do not rape have nothing to be ashamed of when rapists are held accountable. And they need to direct their anger at the men who make all of them ‘look bad’. They need to confront the men who rape and create rape culture, and stop sabotaging those who engage in a fight to end rape by insisting that any critique of endemic rape be prefaced with “not all men rape”.
For many survivors of violence, the only thing the criminal justice system offers is secondary victimisation. There are several examples in this book. There are millions upon millions more in the real world. It is crucial to focus on survivors and victims as we do in the work that tries to find healing and justice. It is also crucial to be honest about what we know, to render visible/audible what is obscured, but also to pay attention to the many meanings of silence, especially when they point to the limitations of litigation. There is no doubt that all of these feminist ways of thinking about violence have been invaluable.
But they also offer an opportunity to rethink our feminist work, especially when we think about the gains of such work. It is a success that feminist work has made it impossible for people to claim progressive politics without pledging commitment to anti-patriarchal ideas. Yet, we have not been able to move this beyond lip service in a society where men are routinely rewarded for being violent with better or unaffected career trajectories, loyalties and self-appointed armies coming to their defence. So, as in that much cited poem by Roshila Nair, a poem that I insert into Chapter 2 in this book, we need to break the cycles on hypocrisy. In South Africa, men acquire more kudos for speaking non-sexism and even feminism, but they still go home and act in misogynist ways with no real cost.
In recent years, there has been the establishment of a women’s Ministry, calling for President Zuma to fund an inquiry on gendered violence, to speak more strongly against rape. What does this call, this expectation, even creating this possibility, do? I understand that part of this is getting the president of the Republic to put money and resources in place so that anti-patriarchal work can happen further. What does it mean to ask this president to take anti-rape work seriously, after we lived through the brutalisation of Khwezi in more than one way? What does it mean for this to even be a call, and/or a reality, especially for those of us who believe Khwezi?
Jacob Zuma was acquitted of rape by a court of law, and those who call on him to make funds available, and to take a tougher stance against rape and other gendered violence point to this. However, whatever the court found, it did not absolve his refusal to limit the levels of brutality that happened in his name. When his followers terrorised Khwezi and her supporters, he did nothing to temper this even though they did it in his name. How do you
