Rape. Pumla Dineo Gqola
end airplay was given to men who targeted out Black lesbians, gender non-confirming people, and women they suspected of being lesbian.
Because there is so much talk of rape and ‘corrective’/‘curative’ rape in South African media, I have not been able to find the footage I am recalling. I only remember how long ago and how far apart the screenings were because of where I lived when I watched them. But perhaps that allows me to work with why these two programmes made such an impression on me that they retain a grip on my imagination so many years later. In both, the rapists were unrepentant and laughing uncomfortably; and in the first programme they were sharing anecdotes. The interviewers grew visibly more flustered at the absence of remorse. Some of the men reported that they were no longer serial rapists, but most admitted that they would probably rape again.
In these instances, those who had retired from raping had done so due to something that had nothing to do with rape. They had generally stopped committing crime of various sorts, or had stopped the drug-taking that they partly attributed the rapes to, or some other lifestyle shift. The ones who did not speak of rape as something they did in the past admitted that they saw nothing wrong with raping. All of them insisted that it was a type of sex that they were entitled to. None of them wanted to admit that it was violence that had far-reaching effects, that they could ruin women’s lives, and that rape traumatises. They all insisted that while it was obviously unpleasant to be forced to do anything, the effects of rape were not long-term wounding. They also reported not suffering any real consequences themselves from a life of serially raping women. By real consequences, I refer to the fact that there had been no social cost to raping women directly. None of their relationships had suffered. They had not been ostracised or stigmatised. Even when coming out of jail for rape convictions, the argument that they had served their time and therefore required a second chance mediated societal responses to them, even if prior convictions and imprisonment does not always curtail subsequent decisions to rape.
Then something interesting happened in the first interview. The journalist asked how they would feel if a woman they loved was raped: a sister or a niece, specifically, rather than a mother or a partner. All of them were disturbed by this question, with one man swearing he would kill a man who dared hurt his sister.
The interviewer’s point had been made: one about the connections between his hypocrisy and brutality. If they genuinely did not find their behaviour harmful, then the consistency with which they wanted to keep the women and girls they loved safe from rape did not make sense. Clearly, these men were not ignorant of the effects of their actions. They raped because they could, and in this decision was the implicit statement that some women did not matter. Therefore, violating them is permissible.
The second programme was stranger still because the conversation with the rapists sat so oddly at the end of what had been a very sympathetic and sensitive series of conversations with young lesbians who had either been raped themselves or supported loved ones who had been raped. These men spoke unequivocally of their entitlement to teach these women a lesson that men would have access to their bodies regardless of what they wanted. Rape, here, was explicitly a weapon. There was no doublespeak, no excuses.
I am working from memory, and memory is unreliable, so there are aspects of the programmes that I may have edited out. I start with this recollection because these shows offered rare public access to the mind of a rapist. In most public talk, people distance themselves from rape and express incomprehension about how rape continues to have such a firm grip on our society. These men were not animals or monsters. They looked like anybody’s brother, boyfriend or son. There is no way to tell who can choose to rape, even though women and girls are often told that they can protect themselves by staying away from certain places and kinds of men. Rapists can be anywhere and everywhere; rape culture and the manufacture of female fear (which I also call the female fear factory) are part of how we collectively get socialised to accept the ever-presence of rape most often by being invited to be vigilant. The female fear factory is a subject I dedicate Chapter 4 to.
To start with this anecdote does not mean that these men verbalised something we might want to think of as ‘typical’ of rapist behaviour. This clearly is not the case. We do not have brazen admissions of having raped women by all the men who have in fact done so. Rather, what is important about these two programmes is the notion that women’s pain is negotiable, that while rapists know (because how can they not) that they inflict harm, they proceed to do so in any event. And they do so often, knowing that many will line up alongside them to defend them against such accusation, requiring evidence and the legal reporting. They also know of the high likelihood that they will be acquitted in legal courts and the court of public opinion.
It is a myth that rapists come from a certain background, race, class location or religion. At the same time, there are very specific reasons why so many people continue to believe that some groups of men are more likely to be rapists than others. In the long 2004 public argument with Charlene Smith, former South African president Thabo Mbeki was not entirely off the mark when he insisted that we need to interrogate the automatic links made between Black men and rape. At the same time, Charlene Smith was correct to point out the prevalence of rape and its unacceptability. The stereotype of the Black male rapist of white women has been central to the rise of racism, and it has also been used as justification for lynching and killing tens of thousands of Black men across the globe – in the Americas, on the African continent and in South Asia. I am using capitalised Black here to refer to black and brown people, in other words, the collective people of African and South Asian descent. This is not a small matter, and constructions of ‘black peril’, or what was termed ‘swaartgevaar’ in colonial and apartheid South Africa, depended heavily on this idea of the sexually and otherwise violent Black man. So, we do need to constantly guard against reliance on stereotype to explain rape and to fight for its end. At the same time, guarding against stereotype cannot be justification to silence activism against rape. To say a stereotype exists does not mean that Black men never rape women of any race. Most rape survivors in South Africa are Black because most people in South Africa are Black; that seems quite straightforward. However, there is a much more insidious reason for the large numbers of rape than numbers. The same white supremacy that constructed the stereotype of Black man as rapist, created the stereotype of Black women as hypersexual and therefore impossible to rape. Making Black women impossible to rape does not mean making them safe against rape. It means quite the opposite: that Black women are safe to rape, that raping them does not count as harm and is therefore permissible. It also means that it is not an accident that when Black women say they have been raped, they are almost never taken seriously and in many instances are expected to just get over it.
In Chapter 2, I briefly trace how this came to be so. I do not expect you to just take my word for it, and, if this chapter piques your curiosity, there is a wealth of scholarship that demonstrates how this is true in relation to East African, American and South Asian contexts too. It is not an accident that the explosions and brazen instances of rape in South Africa and India have been so remarkably similar in recent years. Part of this history of who becomes safe to rape, and safe to construct as unrapable is directly linked to this history. Here, and throughout this book, I use unrapable and impossible to rape to mean the same thing: the creation of the racist myth that this is so also makes it possible for those coded as unrapable to be habitually raped as a matter of course.
In Chapter 2, I also trace the long history of rape in South Africa, unpack the pornography of empire, and demonstrate how it is that although all women are in danger of rape, Black women are the most likely to be raped. It is not for the reasons that would seem ‘logical’ or obvious. It has little to do with numbers, and much to do with how rape and race have historically intersected in mutually reinforcing ways. In this chapter, I show that these examples are different racist regimes.
Chapter 1 is linked to this project because it is also about thinking through the contexts that help us make sense of rape. In this first chapter I am also interested in why so many in our society are able to believe some rape survivors so easily and refuse to believe others. Some of this has to do with the myth that ‘real’ rape looks a certain way or that all survivors behave in the same kinds of ways. But, as the chapter shows, there is also a lot more to what makes rape stories believable. Ending the rape epidemic in South Africa is going to require that many more people think critically