Rape. Pumla Dineo Gqola
addition to the current strategies of marches and protests, we need to find new ways to make violent men unsafe and to end the impunity with which they enact violence. Many aspects of our public gender talk need revisiting. Many forms of violence happen in plain sight and sometimes with the active complicity of spectators. What are we saying to survivors of sexual assault when we ask them to break the silence even though we avert our gaze when other forms of violence and humiliation of people happen in our presence?
How can we shift our perspectives and behaviour in ways that make it harder for violence to happen in our presence? How can we render violators unsafe? Why is it that most of us look away even when the violators are in the minority and audiences in the majority?
Recently, in a conversation where we spoke about rape as endemic, and where we spoke about the routine abuse of school children by paedophiles in positions of power, one of my friends asked a question that caused us all to pause.
She asked, “What do we mean? What are you saying when you say it happened all the time in school?”
Think about that question for a minute before reading on. It is not as simple as it seems.
How we speak about and respond to violence matters. “It happens all the time” points to the crisis, debunking the myth that it is shocking and expressed in isolated incidents. That phrasing also suggests that it is commonplace, normal: “All the time”. It happens. The truth is that it does not just ‘happen’. Individuals choose to rape and they make this choice because it is an available one, and one that is mostly without consequence to themselves.
But there is a cost – a huge, devastating cost that comes with rape – an invisible wound that remains long after the physical scars (where these exist) have healed. And what a cost to us to have so many of our people walking wounded.
As a society, we can do so much better.
CHAPTER 1
A recurring nightmare
Rape is not a South African invention. Nor is it distasteful sex. It is sexualised violence, a global phenomenon that exists across vast periods in human history. Rape has survived as long as it has because it works to keep patriarchy intact. It communicates clearly who matters and who is disposable. Those who matter are not afraid of being raped because they have not been taught to fear sexual assault. They have been taught safety. Rape is the communication of patriarchal power, reigning in, enforcing submission and punishing defiance. It is an extreme act of aggression and of power, always gendered and enacted against the feminine. The feminine may not always be embodied in a woman’s body; it may be enacted against a child of any gender, a man who is considered inappropriately masculine and any gender non-conforming people. Rape has also been central to the spread of white supremacy, and to the way race and racism have organised the world over the last four hundred years.
Rape is something we have come to expect from areas of conflict, a threat we are adept at deciphering and a nightmare regularly reported on in our media. It appears everywhere: in a political speech about decolonisation as the legitimate response against the rape of the continent/land, repeatedly as something that happens to women who are out of control but need to be checked, as constitutive of swaartgevaar, as one of the constitutive elements of societies structured on slavery (slavocratic societies), as something that can be easily denied, as conspiracy, on the placard of an orange overall-clad Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (POPCRU) leader and South African Prisoners Organisation for Human Rights (SAPOHR) president Golden Miles Bhudu declaring the accused in a rape case as ‘raped’, in a Zapiro cartoon where ‘lady justice’ lies prone as the tri-partite alliance get ready to rape her, and as one of the reasons why a Minister with a record of gender progressive activism storms out of an exhibition by ten Black women artists.
This book is called Rape: a South African nightmare because although rape is part of our contemporary gender talk, our constant preoccupation with it plays itself out as a series of miscommunications and missed opportunities. In other words, although we talk about it all the time, read about, and fight against it, we cannot make it go away. It is an enigma in post-apartheid South Africa since very few admit to being rapists, yet millions are raped each year. As our newspapers cover more and more instances of rape, we respond to them as individual acts of brutality, as we must in order to be empathetic to the violated, but, having done that, we then stop short of reading rape as more than a moment, a singular event. Every time we read a rape as an isolated, enigmatic event, we move further away from curbing the alarming statistics, interrupting the patterns and transforming gender power. And so the nightmare recurs with largely similar responses replayed.
By looking at different aspects of rape and rape talk in South Africa, across epochs, I make the assertion that rape is not a moment but a language, and in the pages that follow I untangle and decipher the knots and codes of this language, to surface its structure, underline its histories, understand its rules, pore over its syntax, page through its dictionaries, vocabularies and what it communicates. I am indebted to a substantial body of writing on rape as I do so, revisiting some of these arguments made about rape, asking questions about why rape often works in ways that seem counterintuitive. I am not interested in writing a bible on rape, nor in merely distilling here what the patterns are in rape research. I limit the public discussions I analyse to South African ones, not because I think there is nothing to be learnt from elsewhere, or because South Africa is exceptional, but to probe specific relationships to rape, specific histories of rape, surface our blindspots and to better reflect on possible ways out of the quagmire.
This is a political project. I am invested in trying to figure out how we can change collective approaches to rape from different spaces and how to broaden transformative praxis beyond the small radical healing and generative spaces of organisations opposed to gendered violence. The personal and political motivation for this book comes from the same place as the sense of unfairness my friends and I felt when we were young and when girls were humiliated, sexually harassed, slut-shamed and molested, the same place that motivated my training and volunteer work as a Rape Crisis counsellor two decades ago, and the same place that prompted my membership of the One in Nine Campaign, an organisation that takes a multi-layered approach to feminist anti-rape work.
When I did the bulk of my work at Rape Crisis Observatory and Khayelitsha, I was also writing a Master’s thesis on the first five years of Staffrider magazine. I had been ill-prepared for the space that raped fictional Black women characters occupied in those short stories, and had I known I may have chosen an entirely different research project. I’ve written in that thesis and elsewhere about how to make sense of the fact that almost a third of the stories published 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