in this literary magazine contained a Black woman character raped by a white man character. I tried to understand the relationship between, on the one hand, the fact that rape was clearly violence that these women characters could not escape in the hands of brutal white men characters, and the fact that it was only those Black women characters who defied their societies’ prescriptions on appropriate feminine behaviour that were raped in these stories, on the other hand. It was clear that rape was being written as punishment for bad behaviour, and it was also clear that the rape of Black women by white men was a constant preoccupation for these writers. For two years, I pored over, and tried to make sense of this preoccupation with rape in the magazine. It was intellectual work but it was also emotionally distressing reading and analysis. I wrote mostly in the early mornings and late at night. During the day I went to my paid and volunteer work: in the morning I mostly went to my part-time tutoring jobs in the English Department and Academic Development Programme at UCT as well as Academic Development Unit in what was then Cape Technikon, all work that brought me enormous joy. For a few hours a week, I counselled rape survivor clients at Rape Crisis. Very difficult work, I nonetheless found counselling enormously rewarding and healing because sometimes a girl or woman moved through trauma to hope, and also because many of the women who were similarly volunteering were the most remarkable people I have ever met. Their courage, dedication and support was another affirmation of feminist community, not my first, but one that changed me nonetheless.
At the same time, there was not much I was able to do when a friend of mine was abducted and gang raped, when she reported the crime, refused any kind of counselling, and had the successfully collected evidence of her rapists used against her in court. We were starting to be very aware of HIV, and when she realised they were going to rape her, she had pleaded with them to use a condom. In the end, although her body bore the kind of evidence of physical and sexual attack that our society expects to see in typical rape cases, she led the police officers to the site of her rape where the condoms were collected in evidence, and she had provided enough information to get the rapists arrested, various legal justice officials pointed out to her that the fact that the men had used condoms on her prompting meant she had consented. Her boyfriend begged me every day to convince her to go for counselling, and my then boyfriend tried hard to understand what I meant when I said it was not right to pressure her into anything. I recognised their frustration, but knew that she needed to feel strong, not weak; I believed her when she said to me that she did not need help. In Teaching my mother how to give birth, Kenyan-born Somali poet Warsan Shire reminds us that “sometimes the wound is by the healer” even with the best of intentions, and the Rape Crisis training had affirmed a principle I had learnt quite early on in my feminism: that each woman’s process is different and forcing solutions is not empowering.
It was at about this time, as I wrote about rape for my thesis, counselled my clients and battled with how to support my most recent rape survivor friend, that I was discovering and falling in love with Miriam Tlali. I thought I was drawn to her because she was a Black feminist who had written consistently throughout the 1980s: a column, essays, interviews with other women writers trying to make sense of the relationships between Black women and writing, novels and short stories. I loved that when she wrote about rape she did so differently from her peers, with gentleness and empathy for her women characters, told from their perspectives. As a reader, I was delighted by the dialogue she wrote into her characters’ mouths.
In the story “Devil at a dead end” from her 1989 collection of short stories, Footprints in the Quag, Miriam Tlali’s unnamed girl narrator escapes rape by outsmarting the lecherous white clerk who sneaks into her carriage when she is alone and asleep, by telling him she is “afflicted with a venereal sickness”, using the word “makoala”. Tlali’s narrator notices:
The impact of that word was quick, merciless, shocking and immediately disarming. Like when in a dark alley you suddenly grope into a dead end. She stood still listening to the sound of receding breath. She reached below the bunk above and lowered the dim switch. She watched the recoiling devilish figure and drew a sigh of relief.
Unable to physically resist her assailant, this young woman outsmarts him by doing with her mind what her body has failed to do. In another story that appears earlier in the collection, “Fud-u-u-a!”, women unsuccessfully try to escape groping and rape in congested train conditions, and build a community as one of the ways to defend themselves.
Unlike the stories I was writing about in my thesis, Tlali’s girls and women understand, analyse and develop ways to deal with the threats, fear and experience of rape, collectively and individually; they believe, help and protect one another. They are not just bodies and metaphors, not just faces and vaginas, their bodies are not battlegrounds. Instead, she repeatedly made different choices for her characters whether they feared, escaped or survived rape. They were never deviant outsiders written as though they deserved what had happened to them because of their foolishness or transgressions. They belong to a community of women who protect and fight alongside one another.
Each reading of Tlali offers the possibility that something might be illuminated differently, a reminder that some solutions require taking the imagination seriously. Writing and imagining is doing – it is action and politically consequential, not retreat. Tanzanian literary scholar Susan Andrade insists that we should think about African feminist work in terms of what is generated by rioting women and writing women, not as oppositional but complementary. For Andrade, rioting/writing women are political, practical, imaginative, and both are the birthplaces of intellectual abstraction. Following Andrade, I like to think that sometimes writing women are rioting women.
A few years ago, when I first encountered this essay, it aptly captured the substantial thinking, strategising and analysis that I had encountered in activist spaces and significantly challenged the dominant academic frames that pretended that abstraction happened among those located in institutional spaces designated intellectual, whereas activist spaces exhibited only practice. I think many of us who came to feminism before we entered university research careers know this: that some of the most transformative, thought-provoking abstraction is taught in activist communities not in classrooms. In the One in Nine Campaign, for example, the textures of thinking, reflection, debate and discussion that go into every campaign of direct action remind me of this constantly.
This is the context of writing this book for me. From this context, I want to ask questions about the society I am part of and its relationships to rape. Writing is also thinking and rethinking some of these questions. It exists alongside conversations with other feminists in community and individually.
If South Africans generally are opposed to rape, then why does it continue to be such a huge part of everyday life, with so few interventions? Why is rape so often met with disbelief, second-guessing and invitations to keep it under wraps? Why are some rapes perceived as more shocking and devastating than others? What does it mean to invite survivors to break the silence, report and lay charges against rapists when successful prosecution rates are so low?
After one of my op-eds on the Jacob Zuma rape trial had been published by a national paper in 2006, an old friend called me to express concern that I might be read as “not just as feminist but also a rape survivor”. For my friend, although the former was perfectly acceptable since it was a deliberate political stance, the latter was worrisome because, as he argued, it might delegitimise and stigmatise me. As I pointed out to him, there is something wrong with a society that stigmatises survivors, and dissuades others from supporting them publicly and privately rather than shaming the perpetrators. It was equally perverse that survivors could be dissuaded from speaking in support of one another, and against rape culture. I did not understand then what it meant to be a feminist who bit her tongue on rape. I still do not.
The question that has replayed on a loop since I received that phone call, however, is: how could being a survivor disqualify a person from speaking against rape?
This suggestion seemed as counterintuitive to me as my friend’s stated concern. This friend was the kind
