Before the Zuma rape trial, I was much more hopeful about our fight against rape as a society, even confronted by the statistics. I believed most people when they said they opposed rape, even though I was very aware of South African hypocrisy when it comes to gender power. After the trial, having witnessed what happened outside, how far people were willing to go to terrorise a woman in defence of a powerful man, it is clear to me that something drastic needs to change before this culture consumes us whole. The One in Nine Campaign does not believe in violence, disavowing violence as a patriarchal weapon, and I have agreed to be bound by this kind of feminism. But there are times when I wonder what would happen if women fought back in defence of ourselves, in numbers and unapologetically. When I read Angela Makholwa’s superb novel Black Widow Society, the suspension of disbelief that works of fiction offer readers allowed me to entertain a different feminist position: one where women kill men who violate women, where women do so for themselves and in defence of one another. And there have been times when I have been convinced that the only reason the patriarchal siege continues unabated is because violent men know women will not rise up, take arms and collectively defend our own. It feels true sometimes. However, I also know that this does not make sense – everywhere in history there is evidence of people who defended themselves and broke regimes down yet globally white supremacy persists. Audre Lorde, whom a dear friend and sister prays to as “holy mother full of fire”, reminds us that “the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house”. Violence is the master’s tool.
We need new tools, not in place of, but in addition to the current anti-violent strategies we have. Holding rapists accountable is a start. I am not saying that the young men on whose narratives I started this chapter were representative of rapists. They need not be. And, I am convinced that they are not. But they open the door to understanding how rape is possible: because to treat women as though they do not matter is deeply engrained in our culture as South Africans.
I will admit to being despondent about the state of violence against women in South Africa today. As I drive to work in the final days of writing this manuscript, all the radio shows are abuzz with news of Paralympian Oscar Pistorius being released on house arrest after serving only ten months for killing his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp. I cannot tune out the news of the fact that the Stutterheim rapist, farmer William Knoetze, was sentenced to fifteen years for repeatedly raping three girls. And I am unable to erase from my mind’s eye the television news footage of a stone-faced former tennis superstar Bob Hewitt in court, nor his six-year sentence for raping a succession of girls. Perhaps he did not feel as nonchalant as he looked. With these and many other powerful, sometimes famous men in mind, I cannot accept the lie that poverty makes it more likely for men to rape. The image of poor, young Black men as the figures of the rapist is not the reality South African women live under. If that were so, then some groups of women would be safe when they lived lives that brought them into minimal contact with these men who are the face of the rapist in public discourse.
Rape is a crime of power, and in patriarchal societies, all men can access patriarchal power. Wealthy white men like Knoetze and Hewitt rape and those like Pistorius kill their partners, as do wealthy Black men. Quibbling over the class of rapist is a distraction. It misses the point. It also excuses those men who are poor and Black, pretending that those among them who choose to rape cannot help themselves, that they are victims of circumstance.
It is not true that ‘hurt people hurt people’.
Otherwise queer, working-class people of colour would be the most violent people on the planet.
It is condescending to poor people to suggest that these men cannot be held accountable for choosing to rape. It is also the most pernicious patriarchal lie that men – any men and all men — cannot help themselves when confronted by women’s bodies. It is rape culture. Rape culture renders rape acceptable.
Rape is never mild, never minor, never acceptable. It is not just sex. The cost to survivors who speak out is so significant that it does not make sense to fabricate rape except as an exercise in self-immolation because in patriarchal society, the dominant response to a human being ‘breaking the silence’ is disbelief. Therefore, those people who constantly say “but women sometimes lie” are part of the problem. Each time someone says, hears and believes that most women lie about rape – or that saying so is the legitimate response to someone telling you that s/he or they were raped – they make it more unlikely that someone else will speak of their own violation.
It is not immediately clear to me whether violence against women is on the increase or not. What does seem clear is the manner in which it seems to be more brazen, and I am not sure whether it is being reported more directly in the news and therefore more visible in its brazenness or whether there has been an upward turn. Given the fact that rape-reporting numbers are always much lower than incidents of rape, this is not a question we can confidently answer in the short term.
One thing is very clear to me about the numbers and statistics. In the immediate aftermath of April 1994, rape-charge statistics rose, not because rape increased in a new country, but because women felt more likely to be believed. We all believed that political power would make this possible, that freedom would mean that the police force and the criminal justice system would belong to us too. Many Black women would not have gone to a police station to report rape as readily under apartheid, whether their rapists were white or Black. Nothing about apartheid made Black women feel valued or taken seriously. Apartheid law treated women as minors who could not make any significant decisions in their own names, not even enter a contract for themselves. It punished those women who entered professional life for getting married, such as the fact that Black women teachers would lose their access to permanent employment as soon as they were married, exposing them to increasing vulnerability if the marriage did not work. Sindiwe Magona’s autobiographies To my children’s children/Kubantwana babantwana bam and Forced to grow are an incredible illustration of what could happen when a woman teacher plummets into poverty because she is married and her husband has abandoned her and their children. Magona’s autobiographies are worth reading for many more reasons, in addition to these.
At the same time, women activists’ autobiographies are rife with examples of how frequently sexual violence, rape and the threat of rape were used as a form of torture. How could women then trust police officers – some of whom had this approach to rape, and some of whom were proud rapists themselves – to do anything for them when they had been raped by non-policemen?
All of these problems 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