Sabine Hirschauer. Africa Insight. Volume 44, Issue 1. June 2014.
Introduction
At the advent of the twentieth anniversary of the end of apartheid, South Africa’s rape and sexual violence crisis has taken on a seemingly ever-expanding, fluid normative character. Its grim tales have morphed during the last two decades into ‘narratives of normalizations’, an ‘intimate terrorism’, and the ‘institutionalization of violence’. Nurses in local clinics have been quoted as suggesting that young teenage adults ‘receive contraceptive injections as soon as they began menstruating – given the extremely high likelihood that they would be repeatedly raped during their teenage years’. A new grammar of horror such as endemic baby, corrective lesbian and grandmother rapes has entered the nation’s vocabulary, stretching the normative parameters of rape ever further into disturbing terrain. In October 2013, one of the alleged gang-rapists of Anene Booysen, who was found disembowelled at a construction site and later died, stood trial for the first time. During the same month, five men appeared before the Pretoria Magistrate’s Court for the kidnapping, rape and murder of two toddlers in Diepsloot, causing a public outcry and violent protests. Some scholars posit that the rape crisis has become a critical test case for South Africa’s political viability, reflecting ‘anxieties about the moral fitness of the new democracy.’
This article concerns itself at its core with very basic, yet critical questions: What has created, supported and sustained this norm; what has consistently expanded its normative character; and has, and how has, the political narrative around rape been constructed, penetrated, aggravated and/or obscured the crisis? This article proposes a contested repositioning: the application of a political lens to the rape crisis. It posits that the emergence of a political narrative of rape in past and current South Africa – how ‘the story’ of rape within political discourses and spaces has and is being ‘told’ – has expanded the normative conceptualisation of rape in South Africa to turn rape into a ‘norm’.
A vast body of research (Armstrong, Eisenstein, Glaser & Delius, Jewkes, Moffett, Posel, Vetten, Wood etc.) accounts for years of investigating the apartheid and sexual violence interlock. It remains undisputed that the structural violences institutionalised during the white-minority government have left lasting scars on the South African psyche and deeply affected, for example, gender relationships and their sexuality intercept. The brutality and violent nature of many crimes in South Africa, in particular sexual violence and its many horrific deviations such as baby rape, have been traced in part to the country’s unique, oppressive political past. However, recent scholarship has increasingly attempted to dislodge itself from the ‘series of excuses’ positing the apartheid legacy argument (the emasculation of men and structural socio-economic deprivation, that is, poverty, a dissolved family structure and cultural oppression) as the causal qualification to fence in sexual violence. These issues, unequivocally, have exacerbated sexual violence as ‘do almost any social ill’. But to rely so narrowly and relentlessly on South Africa’s draconian past to explain the phenomenon of its rape crisis may be rooted, according to Helen Moffett, in the politically uncomfortable truth that gender equality in a democratic new South Africa ‘has by no means been achieved’.
This article’s political-narrative argument expands this notion. It provides an alternate reading of the normative conceptualisation of sexual violence. It suggests a looking beyond the apartheid legacy argument, but still engages with it. At its core, however, this article pushes a central position to the fore: how gender equality in the new South Africa has not only been ‘not achieved’, but has been only artificially pursued by the state within the context, for example, of sexual violence. As such, the political narrative – like Heidi Hudson’s reference to ‘essentialist inclusions’, ‘thin agency’ or ‘essentialised agentic inclusions’ – operates similar to Hudson’s suggested ‘technologies’ or ‘violence’ of othering, which structurally impedes peace building and reconciliation efforts within conflict and post-conflict settings.
This article will firstly define the political narrative and the rape and state intersection, and secondly the political narrative in both political spaces in South Africa – during and after apartheid – through the injection of race, legislative inaction or misdirected action. It will furthermore highlight some of the neo-conservative tendencies that have aggravated a gendered othering, and will in its final section ask the troubling question: Rape and the state: Where are the women? In the conclusion, the article will elaborate on the political attractiveness of gendered othering and its political benefits and rewards.
What is the ‘Political Narrative’?
The interrogation of the widely ignored intersection of rape and the state (the rape-and-politicalpower nexus) reveals rape as a crisis continuum, as the result of a gradual interplay within South African political spaces – during and post-apartheid – that produces and reproduces a specific political narrative of rape. Similar to the speech act, as employed for example by the Copenhagen School with its Securitisation Theory, the political narrative of sexual violence is a rhetorical performance (an active reiteration) of how a political elite or entity ‘speaks of’ sexual violence and as such produces new realities. Within this reiterated rhetorical ‘performance’, rape and sexual violence remain consistently silenced and pushed outside the parameters of state action as a purely social, private and domestic matter.
A rape culture; a culture of sexual violence; a tolerated normalisation of rape and sexual violence ‘not seen as harmful or criminal by the police, courts, perpetrators and by the society at large’ then emerge as a symptomatic outgrowth of this political narrative – with a gendered othering at its core. The specific ‘speaking’ of sexual violence and its reiterated (artificial) reality creates gendered othering by consistently positioning the historically and traditionally masculine political self against a feminine other. The gendered other is controlled through the political employment of specific social and cultural rhetoric – the political narrative. It constitutes what Hudson also refers to in her examination of current Rwanda as ‘a skewed politics of recognition […] that holds the seeds of latent conflict’.
For centuries, sexual violence and rape during conflict were seen as unavoidable by-products of war. Only the mass rapes during the Rwandan genocide and the Bosnian war in the 1990s altered these widely held misperceptions. The rape-as-a-weapon-of-war analogy often intrinsically linked the state to sexual violence through its frequently displayed systematic or strategic instrumentality. Yet, only very recently has the evolving rape-as-a-weapon-of-war analogy been contested and interrogated as being a too linear concept that potentially creates false realities. The political narrative argument of the South African sexual violence crisis – where a political lens is applied to the country’s rape crisis – is equally connecting sexual violence to the state, yet seeking answers beyond the convenient, narrow and linear narrative of apartheid’s legacy.
The surfacing of a political narrative – coupled with persistent gendered othering and political masculinisation by various actors and agencies within the state and during past and current political spaces – remains at the heart of the normative conceptualisation of rape. In the new South Africa’s democracy, these othering and narrative processes – rhetorical performance (active reiteration) – are being increasingly aggravated by salient neo-conservative political tendencies.
As such, it has consistently roiled beneath the political canvas of the Rainbow Nation of 1994, to surface most prominently since President Zuma’s election. Zuma has with extraordinary political finesse garnered political incentives and benefits from the othering continuum. Zuma’s emergence on the national political stage after the 2007 Polokwane revolt and then the 2009 election performed as a marker of ‘a mutiny against the spirit of the times, a yearning for a world with solid mooring points’. The political narrative of rape and its symptomatic, gendered othering have become integral parts of a ‘restorative project’, which not only suggests the reclaiming of a political legitimacy among an increasingly disillusioned ANC constituency, but also seeks to redress patriarchal hierarchies seemingly trimmed, or at least threatened, by the Rainbow Nation’s 1994 promises.
A gendered othering – fuelled by what Hudson in her article refers to as ‘interwoven gendered roles [including] the pervasiveness of gendered cultures of violence in the post-conflict period’ – then not only complements this quest for political rewards, but forms an integral part of an overarching ‘othering of the future’. A new othering will then contest what and who ‘constitutes a “true South African” – and on what terms they do so’. These newly evoked normative markers will then thrive on identity cleavages and what and who is an authentic African – an authentic and true South African. Such cleavages then will even further probe at the parameters of gender inequality and hector women’s rights and traditional gender biases, and punish ideological diversions as ‘un-South African’ or ‘un-African’. The ‘othering of the future’ only further precipitates the normative conceptualisation of rape.
What is ‘Rape and the State’?
The canonical definitions of ‘the state’ and ‘security’, steeped in realist orthodoxy, have in the past decade gained in complexity through an increasingly critical feminist lens. For centuries, the state has relentlessly imposed its hegemonic prerogatives on women – and the feminine – as its ‘other’ citizenry. As such, for women, the state’s inherent masculinity, displayed through its patriarchal power structures, has remained impermeable. The state-gender relationship, once complicated through the infusion of sexual violence, is therefore a peculiar one. For women and the feminine construct it is tainted with suspicion and doubt as the state continues to justify ‘its hegemony as protection, then violates the protected with relative impunity or permits their violation by those it empowers by ignoring them’.
The gendering of violent norms and its political incentives are universally applied and are not country- or elite-specific. Sexual violence against women and its widely accepted scale and scope ‘have been systematically tolerated by virtually every government in the world, despite cultural differences or similar formal equality guarantees’. In India in October 2013, four men were sentenced to death for the gruesome gang-rape of a 23-year-old medical student in New Delhi. In May 2014, Indian public outrage was compounded by the gang-rape and murder of two Dalit teenage girls, who were found hanged. This incident was again indicative of the silenced cultural chasms within Indian society in regard to sexual violence – and the pervasive state inaction. Up until now, an estimated 200 000 people have been raped in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) since 1998. The United States is currently combating an astounding rape epidemic in its military, silenced for decades by the state. Men rape because they can. And they can because the state lets them.
The ‘rape-and-the-state nexus’, the political narrative of rape and the ‘gendered othering’ then are exactly that: They locate their legitimacy in inaction or in action that is stalled, diverted, or initiated and then temporarily put on hold or protracted, or ineffectively or painfully prolonged – doing nothing or too little or ‘appearing to some not to be acting when it [the state] does nothing about this violation’. The constructed political narrative precipitates the legitimacy of a masculine political ‘self’, which dominates – as a matter of an ‘established’ historical default – the ‘gendered other’. The consistent ‘othering’ of women – politically lodged and maintained in social, traditional and cultural conventions – is consequential: it is politically rewarding – and for women and girls devastating.
Rape and the State: Gendered Security and Insecurity
Security is gendered because it is applied discriminately. Gendered security inequalities reveal themselves when sexual violence against women is defined as being primarily a non-lethal violent act and, therefore, there is an inferior (lesser) need for protection against it compared to lethal violence – disproportionately more experienced by men. Gendered secure and insecure spaces have most violently and systemically existed in the past in war settings, such as in the case of the mass rapes in Bosnia and Rwanda. However, these secure and insecure landscapes, as I will evince in this article, equally find themselves politically maintained during peace in post-conflict settings such as the latter-day South Africa. As ‘men violently dominating other men for control of states is called war; men violently dominating women within states is relegated to peace’. In the South African context, through the political narrative of rape the definition of security carries distinct markers of domestic politics, as security relies very heavily on ‘the construction and reconstruction of normal, domestic and peaceful politics’.
Security and insecurity then resemble a ‘political category’ and, regardless of context and scope, revolve intrinsically around domestic politics. The rape crisis and sexual violence then perform accordingly as extensions of structural violence, slipping effortlessly from war into peacetime settings, whether ‘symbolic or real’. Aligning politics with security and then sexual violence with insecurity during peacetime consequently produces the rape-politics nexus, unveiling the rape-and-state phenomenon. Feminist scholars have long recognised this intersectionality. Zillah Eisenstein calls rape ‘politics in yet another form’ and the rape epidemic in South Africa an ‘institutionalization of violence’. Helen Moffett suggests a definition of ‘unacknowledged gender civil war’ and Yvette Abrahms contextualises structural violence and politics, claiming the ‘violent sense of trauma underpins any possibility of viable politics today’.
Rape and the State: The ‘Old’ South Africa
During apartheid, rape, the political grammar of rape and gendered othering were equally evident, but only less visible. The effective silencing of rape was sanctioned through apartheid’s oppressive political structures. This lack of visibility, heavily interlaced with the state’s institutionalised racism, distorted the state functions of law enforcement and judicial accountability. And it did so because it advanced the white South African government’s meta-political narrative, designed to disrupt the political effectiveness of the country’s black majority. Apartheid’s police force was more invested in the ‘stifling of political dissents and [the] control of black communities at the expense of provision of conditions for safe communities’.
These distorted judicial and law-enforcement functions fostered impervious landscapes of lawless, self-regulated and entrenched gendered spaces, in particular in black communities. For generations, black women had little if any legal recourse to hold rapists accountable. Apartheid’s security apparatus, including municipal police, was understood to consist of system-coherently functioning agents of the repressive apartheid regime. The ‘loss of confidence in the forces of law and order’ created false alternative policing and judicial mechanisms – and vast distortions of reality. ‘Right up to the moratorium on the death penalty no white man had ever been executed for rape, whereas the majority of people who were hanged in this country were actually hanged for raping white women. If a rape victim was black, it wasn’t really seen as quite as serious as if she had been a white woman’, according to Heather Reganass, director of South Africa’s National Institute for Crime Prevention and Rehabilitation of Offenders in 1994.
These multiple silences have been replicated throughout history. Angela Davis in the 1980s in the United States was one of the first feminist scholars to articulate the distortions created by the long unacknowledged sexual violence and racism intersection, including within the anti-rape movement that emerged in the 1970s. During the US Civil Rights movement, ‘young activists often stated that nothing could protect black women from being raped by Birmingham police’. Rape morphed into an efficient tool of power – similar to flogging – to keep ‘black women and men alike in check’. The myth surrounding the black male as rapist and the ‘racist manipulation of the rape charge’ marred deeply – and structurally. From 1930 to 1967, in a then still racially segregated US, of 455 men convicted of rape 405 were black. The US-slavery-endorsed right to the black female body placed sexual violence in an institutionalised and political setting, which transcended the US Civil War into post-conflict times. The racial gaze toward sexual violence invited myriad distortions: the eternal, bestial male black rapist; the white privilege to ownership of the black body; the black woman’s sexual promiscuity, perpetuating the lack of political legitimacy to ‘black women’s cries of rape’.
In a South African context, this distorted concept of the ‘mythical rapist and the mythical whore’ equally proliferated. To counter vast lawlessness and eternal impunity within apartheid’s racist (therefore, for the vast majority of South Africans, absent) law enforcement and justice system, the country’s black majority created its own legal mechanisms. Townships instituted so-called ‘people’s courts’, addressing, for example, the widespread ‘jackrolling’ in Soweto, the rampant gang-rape of girls and young women so prevalent during the 1980s. Imposed punishments operating within such a quasi-justice realm included the payment of the rape survivor’s family, or physical punishment. Yet, these judicial sub-systems functioned only reflective of a displaced social order heavily lodged in gender biases. They perpetuated gendered and sexist stereotypes that had long been culturally and socially endorsed. Women suspected to be informers had ‘to walk through the streets naked’ – called ‘modelling’. During the 1980s consumer boycotts, ‘old women who bought from targeted stores were forced to drink the oil they had purchased, or walk naked down the street as punishment for their crimes’. The so-called comrades also hardly ever disciplined one of their own and were often known to intimidate the rape victim’s family.
During apartheid, statistics about sexual violence remained ambiguous; for one, because ‘homeland statistics….[were] recorded separately from those in the rest of the country’. Underreporting of rape (the lack of data and/or the lack of access to data, if it existed at all) was perpetuated by people’s ingrained distrust of the apartheid regime and the absence of judicial accountability. Within the black community, underreporting and the silence around the scourge of rape were reproduced through the political canvas of solidarity among Africans toward the common goal – the anti-apartheid struggle. ‘[N]o black woman would go to the police station. In those days, just to be seen near a police station might mean you were perceived as an informer, your home would be burnt down and you would be killed’.
South Africa’s apartheid effectively racialised the political narrative of rape, yet the silencing of rape as a purely private and domestic matter transcended racial lines. Political paranoia systemically suppressed sexuality and its public discourse. Sexuality was deemed a hidden co-conspirator of moral and political decay, facilitated by communism. In 1970, Director of Education A.L. Kotzee was convinced communism – through sexuality – would ‘undermine our young people’s moral values’. Apartheid’s judicial complacency about how to legally define sexual violence and prosecute it and lax rape and sexual violence legislation, including the ‘legitimization of rape in marriage, the lack of protection of children in incest court cases’, became the accidental outgrowth of these parochial socio-political sub-interests. For the white-minority government, sexual violence within the black community was a welcomed accomplice – as long as it complemented the political key objective: To disunite the black majority with self-imposed terror, including rape. ‘White-on-black violence [was] necessary as [a] kind of oil that kept apartheid hierarchies running smoothly’.
The disloyalty argument was not unique to South Africa. On various historical canvases of social movements, sexual violence against women has found itself consistently pegged against the ‘larger cause’. Calls for accountability by the rape survivor, such as during the South African struggle or the US Civil Rights movement, have been deemed disloyal and have been met by ‘a culturally imposed code of silence’. A cloak of silence descended on the black rape survivor in the name of social and political solidarity. Pushing against the social and political grain would be punished not only by exclusion, but also by the stripping of cultural and social identity.
In 1991, US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas employed the ‘myth of the black rapist’ and the ‘disloyalty argument’ by calling Anita Hill’s sexual harassment claims a ‘high-tech lynching’. Rhetorically, Thomas turned the black-male-rapist myth into a gendered mechanism through its historical association with ‘lynching’. Such an association articulated him as the victim and Hill as ‘an accomplice’ within the metaphorical act of a public lynching. ‘Thomas became an African American falsely accused of sexual aggression, while Hill, his accuser, came to be regarded by many blacks as a pawn of a white power elite’. The (disloyal) black female rape accuser was punished with the loss of authenticity and social belonging. The act of lynching was also portrayed as an exclusively male act (received or executed by men), excluding women through a selective, gendered memory from politically effective and powerful imageries such as lynching.
After 1994, the South African Truth and Reconcilliation Commission (TRC), employed to bring, for example, moral justice to millions of apartheid-disenfrenchised South Africans, became a misssed opportunity to rectify the narrative of sexual violence and rape during apartheid. As with many liberation movements, the struggle in South Africa deemed gender equality sacrificable on the altar of movement solidarity and loyality. It ‘was not terribly successful at uncovering the truth about women’s experiences, specifially of sexual violence, under apartheid’. Silence was the convenient mechanism of choice. Only 140 testimonies of more than 21.000 before the TRC included claims of rape.
Additionally, narratives of sexual violence and rape committed by the ANC members in exile were equally suppressed, partly because it would render the sexual violence accuser disloyal to the larger anti-apartheid cause. Black South African rape survivors in exile were painfully aware of the imperative not to ‘equate individual human rights violations by some ANC members with the systematic violations of apartheid’ in their testimonies or ‘[sell] out or [out] their comrades’. With the rape survivor and perpetrator often being public figures, women knew about the gendered power hierachies at play and ‘whose story was likely to be believed’ – about sexual violence suffered ‘at the hands of “allies”’. The narrative of rape and sexual violence then supressed by the TRC failed to highlight ‘the deeply political function of rape during wartime’ and may have contributed ‘to a climate of impunity’, a ‘conspiracy of silence’ and a ‘bizarre collusion’ surrounding sexual violence and rape.
Rape and the State – The ‘New’ South Africa
In the ‘new’ South Africa, it did not take long for sexual violence to enter the realm of politics. After South Africa was thrust in 1995 into the global sexual violence discourse and soon called the world’s rape capital, in 1999 President Mbeki ‘responded defensively by questioning its basis. Investigation suggested that the [rape] figure had possible just been made up’. A state moratorium on publishing any data on crime statistics followed in May 2000 with an embargo because of ‘concerns regarding the integrity and reliability of certain crime statistics’.
In 2004, Mbeki publically criticised sexual violence advocate Charlene Smith’s statements as being racially motivated, perpetuating stereotypical assertions about African men as ‘violent sexual predators’. Similar to Mbeki’s Aids denialist claims in 2000, when he portrayed Aids as a Western conspiracy instigated by the IMF against the African continent, rape, according to Mbeki, followed a colonial script, replicating prejudices that see ‘by virtue of our African-ness and skin colour, lazy liars, foul-smelling, diseased, corrupt, violent, amoral, sexually depraved, animalistic slaves – and rapists’. The injection of race into the public sexual violence discourse complicated an already irreconcilable predicament for women: For one, attacking ‘black men’ was deemed disloyal to the ANC and the liberation movement. Secondly, it spurred a retreat to traditional and conservative norms. The public dialogue about sexual violence and the infusion of race then recreated not only ‘anxieties about racism’, but also political anxieties. Racism was pitting the masculine political ‘self’ (Mbeki ‘politically owning’ the defence of black men against colonial/ racial representation) against the ‘feminine other’ (women such as Smith depicting black men as inhuman). The silencing of rape through the dominant representation of racism served as a cleansing mechanism. It reinstated patriarchal hierarchies.
This political reallocation of rape and its public narration is played out through women’s bodies and through women’s suffering – and has increasingly wedged open in South African society questions about the fundamental rights of women not only to bodily integrity, but also to sheer life. HIV infections, for example, exacerbated among women through the rape crisis, have morphed into a ‘human rights crisis to deal with which includes not just the right to freedom of security and safety, but the right to life itself’.
During the public Smith-Mbeki spout, Mbeki quoted official police data, an obvious indication of how the governing grammar of rape so easily functions to distort reality. Sexual violence data is heavily inundated with inaccuracies due to underreporting. According to the South African Police Service (SAPS), sexual offences from April to March 2003/2004 to 2008/009 annually increased from 66 079 to 71 500. The Medical Research Council estimated this number to be as much as nine times larger, i.e. 643 500, due to underreporting.
The problem of the lack and unreliability of data profoundly marks and mars the political subplot of the South African rape crisis. According to the 2009 report by the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, it is complicit in systemically undermining scientific rigour in analysing sexual violence. A circular mode of knowledge production ensues: the lack of data produces fewer comprehensive studies; fewer studies produce less knowledge – and less effective remedies. With the exception of the at least 13-year-old CIET Africa 2000 study, for the last twenty years the rape crisis in South Africa and its causes and consequences have been severely under-researched. Such structural inadequacies have for years significantly restrained a deeper understanding of the crisis – its context, scope and scale – and continue to leave experts with only ‘limited lenses’.
Already in 1995, Human Rights Watch criticised sexual violence statistics for being unreliable. It urged the new democratic South Africa to review existing statistics and gather more information in co-operation with non-governmental organisations to better understand the nature and extent of violence against women. However, today, nearly twenty years later, ‘the exact prevalence of sexual violence in South Africa is [still] unknown’. Blundering along with incomplete or limited knowledge implies a troubling complicity. It underscores rape as a norm, leaving the diversity of its root causes undetected, possible remedies unapplied and the tyranny of its vagueness intact.
This persistent tendency of underreporting is obviously not unique to South Africa. However, in a South African context underreporting is not only more pronounced due to the prevalence of rape; it is also distinct due to the country’s political complexity. Underreporting has propagated, in particular for black women, the silencing of rape. As such it has intrinsically tolerated and reinforced the political control of its normative parameters. It has instituted the system’s culture of impunity – embedded in ambiguous and sporadic law enforcement and judiciary structures – afforded by the state. Underreporting then serves, covertly or overtly so, a binary function: It has firstly morphed into a policing mechanism of the ‘gendered othering’ because it has turned rape into an ‘easy’ crime with hardly any legal ramifications. As such, secondly, it continues to produce and reproduce the political narrative of rape, effectively masking the true political and societal cost of this crisis.
A Southern African Law Reform Commission study of 2000 found that only five per cent of adult and nine per cent of child rape cases were reported; of those, many remained unprosecuted.80 Almost a decade later, in 2009, South Africa’s criminal justice system is still marred with ‘inefficiency, major backlogs, conservative attitudes, [and] issues which are born out of paucity of convictions for sexual offence crimes’. In the 20 years since the end of apartheid, South Africa has maintained and even further aggravated apartheid’s impunity culture. The normative conceptualisation of rape has almost seamlessly transcended from apartheid into the young democracy as a singular narrative. Its paradoxical continuum was permitted free rein in both political spaces – by the state.
The Manifestations of the Rape-and-the-State Nexus
The Ebb and Flow of Legislation
In 1991, already at the advent of a new, democratic South Africa, scholars saw violence against women as endemic and widely tolerated as a norm. In the initial aftermath of apartheid, however, structural violence in general and sexual violence specifically had to overcome almost immediately a politically critical binary character: ‘A failure to act reinforces public perceptions that government is weak, while overreaction – the characteristic [apartheid] fire force policing – leaves the impression that not much has changed’. However, twenty years after apartheid, in the ‘new’ South Africa, the legally ambiguous and narrow definition of rape severely constrained the prosecution of sexual offences and only added to the unreliability of rape statistics. The then archaic and outdated rape laws, for one, only defined rape as being between a man and a woman, involving only penetration via a penis and omitting forced penetration by other objects or, for example, forced oral sex.
It took more than a decade to legally redefine rape. The new Sexual Offences Act (SOA), signed into law by President Mbeki in 2007, expanded the definition of rape, including, for example, all non-consensual penetration. However, it admitted yet another defective rather than effective mechanism into the process of collecting sexual violence data. The SAPS’s ‘lumping’ of various forms of sex offences such as child pornography, incest and bestiality into one category is diluting specific data collection further and ‘allows for an even less nuanced understanding of the problem’. Legislatively and politically, another conundrum was created, and the new situation ‘means that we do not, by any means, have a complete picture of the nature or extent of sexual violence in South Africa’.
However, an erratic interplay of action, stalled action and inaction within the South African legislature consistently pauses the trajectory of critical sexual violence prevention and as such then only further underpins the so prevalent culture of impunity. In 1993, a pilot project was initiated to create special Sexual Offences Courts. The Wynberg Regional Court in Cape Town, the first of such courts, was in fact so successful, according to the National Prosecuting Authority, that six other courts, including in Bloemfontein and Soweto, followed in 1999. The courts, which were specially tailored to protect rape survivors, ‘performed extremely well’. They outperformed regional courts’ conviction rates for sexual offences by an average of 70 per cent. But in 2005, the Ministry of Justice and Constitutional Development put a moratorium on new sexual offences courts, deeming the courts too costly. The existing sexual offences courts started to take on regular cases and their effectiveness began to dwindle. Eight years later, in August of 2013, these special courts were reinstated.
This ebb and flow of prescriptive antidotes for combating the country’s rape crisis is negatively affected by South African politicians’ lackluster relationship with legislation. Political leadership most recently was glaringly absent during a critical sexual violence parliamentary debate on 26 February 2013, reported the Mail & Guardian. ‘[T]he growing rate of gender-based violence in our society was missing the Minister of Women, Children and People with Disabilities; Justice Minger; [the] Police Minister and [the] Social Development Minister’. Equally, the media heavily criticised President Zuma for letting five years elapse before he made ‘more than a passing reference to rape in a State of the Nation speech’, and then only largely because of the brutal gang-rape case of the 17-year-old Western Cape teenager Anene Booysen, which shocked not only South Africa, but also the international community. The case even forced the United Nations to issue a statement, publically pushing the South African government to ‘accelerate the implementation of relevant policies, laws and practices already in place to protect women and girls from violence and abuse’.
The Politics of Tradition
South Africa’s political rape narrative festers beneath the many layers of political patriarchy and male-dominated political spaces and discourses. President Zuma’s conservative views towards women are well known; his comment in the winter of 2013 during a televised interview that ‘women should embrace motherhood’ caused a minor public outcry. In 2011, critics slammed his choice of Mogoeng Mogoeng for the position of Chief Justice when his disturbing decisions on cases involving allegations of rape emerged shortly after he was suggested for the post. The public arena and its agencies, such as the South African media, equally display and perpetuate a patriarchally dominated culture of ignorance and sexual violence illiteracy. After the Anene Booysen rape and murder, the Mail & Guardian published an investigative multi-day rape series. Yet, in July 2013, a Mail & Guardian features editor and his colleague made ‘joking remarks’ about correctional rape on a blog update, commenting that ‘rape could be quite fun if executed in a romantic way’.
The continued framing of the political narrative of rape and the ‘gendered othering’ in the ‘new’ South Africa are starkly evident in a gradually emerging neo-conservative political script that is increasingly tainting state law and legislation. A glaring example is the most recent resurgence of the Traditional Courts Bill in 2012. During the initial debate about South Africa’s new constitution in the early 1990s, traditional leaders already then argued for the exclusion of customary law, culture and religion from the constitution’s ‘equality guarantee’. Women activists view the reinstatement of traditional leaders (who are usually all male) within the state’s judicial framework as yet another move to further mute gender equality. Traditional leaders would inject yet another layer of contestation into the rape crisis discourse – and further warp the political narrative of rape. Practices such as ‘male collective coercion’ or ukuthwala ’bride capture’ would only perpetuate the ‘entrenchment of patriarchy as well as discriminatory social and economic practices such as access to land, inheritance, and forced marriage’.
A neo-conservative political undercurrent, as evidenced in the Traditional Courts Bill, runs counter to the country’s progressive constitution of 1994, which manifested the politically imposed ambition for equality across various social and cultural fault lines. The creation at the end of apartheid of a pluralistic society, ideologically underwritten by constitutional rigour, was a historical, political and philosophical ‘must’ for a country so extraordinarily steeped in structural political violence, institutionalised racism and inequality. Today, at the advent of the ‘new’ South Africa’s twentieth anniversary, however, many view the constitution as a failure – a ‘paper constitution’ whose Bill of Rights, its normative commitment to gender equality, contains only ‘hollow rights’.
These rights have also been severely constrained by the state’s overt and/or covert inability to safeguard them, in part because they only marginally represent the values and norms of all South Africans. Against such a structurally complicated political and cultural backdrop, traditional leaders and traditional court systems, and, as such, the infusion of culture into the debate, cannot be excluded. While it would undoubtedly complicate the producing and remedying of sexual violence, a disenfranchising of tradition from the sexual violence discourse would equally only produce an incomplete social and cultural register of remedies. It would impede implementation processes, and as such then only again aggravate the weakness of the state’s role within the sexual violence political dialogue.
The failure in regard to women’s issues was already evident in the political processes which led up to the formation of the new constitution in the early 1990s. Women were not given the space to infuse ‘feminist’ perspectives regarding unfair discrimination on sex, gender, and sexual orientation into the debates about the ‘new’ South Africa. These concepts were ‘labelled as foreign and Western and therefore dismissed rather than engaged’. Sexual violence equally was barely mentioned, if not completely by-passed, in the 1994 Reconstruction and Development Programme. The discourse about gender rights, including the right to bodily integrity and freedom from all forms of violence, including sexual violence, was seen as ‘either divisive within the national liberation movement or as playing into the hands of racists’. The display of a ‘gendered othering’ – pitting the traditional masculine political ‘self’ (male ANC elite) against the feminine ‘other’ – was apparent.
The Programme was lauded as a transformation blueprint, but quickly became riddled with compromises and was soon deemed to be a product of an elite and not of the South African people. These assumptions of progressive and liberal elitism at work (and in charge) have aggravated the othering of women. In the 2000s, internal ANC political tussles would soon give way to the emergence of a new conservative elite that increasingly regarded the constitution as traditionally ‘unfaithful’, Eurocentric and in need of a review. This review, which still continues today, regards liberal rights such as gender equality, same-sex marriage and gay rights as inherently ‘unAfrican’.
The recasting of othering and its interplay within the locale of politics and tradition surfaced most prominently during the Zuma administration. As the ANC struggled to keep its promises of progressive change and saw itself drained of public trust, it opted to support Zuma. This shift displays an increasing masculinisation of policies and legislation, aggravating even further the phenomenon of gendered othering. Zuma’s rise to power and his 2009 electoral success is viewed by some scholars as a political repositioning, a retreat toward traditional and conservative norms – a political regression, tapping into ‘strong currents of disorientation and restiveness in and around the ANC’.
Even before his 2009 election, in his 2006 rape trial, Zuma found himself being thrust into a public maelstrom of gender, culture and politics. The trial, in which the daughter of a former ANC comrade-in-exile of Zuma’s accused him of rape, morphed into a public spectacle pitting sexual violence against tradition. It shrouded archaic sexist interpretations and long-festering masculine biases about sexual violence (‘she was asking for it’; ‘she enjoyed it’) in cultural and traditional norms – and by doing so, emphasised gendered othering. The alleged rape victim’s wearing of a kanga (a traditional skirt), according to Zuma, indicated her willingness to have sex. Zuma supporters, including women outside the courtroom, demonstrated their endorsement of this gendered otherness with banners such as ‘burn the Bitch’, ‘100% Zuluboy’, and ‘Zuma for President’.
A trial of this nature is usually ‘politically fatal’, but instead it only invigorated Zuma’s public image, unveiling the tension between South Africa’s abstract constitutional ambition and the dislodgement of tradition and culture. It implied a conservative backlash against the many progressive ‘un-South African wrongs’ put in place in 1994, and it located itself within ‘the known’ – the South African (male) ‘self’ and the ‘other’. The trial became a public display of the inflamed tensions between a post-modern and a ‘true’ South Africa; between women’s constitutional rights for equality and the traditional dismay at the 1994 equality guarantee. The Zuma rape trial exposed a rapidly widening cultural and political chasm and the pursuit of and new struggle for identity by a nation and its citizenry that would very readily again sacrifice gender equality for a ‘higher cause’ – for authenticity, culture and tradition.
In the new South Africa, women as ‘the other’ have been recast time and again. While President Mbeki was lauded by some for introducing one of the world’s most aggressive quota policies for female parliamentarians, others saw his ‘pro-women agenda’ as yet again masking patriarchal hierarchies. According to political analyst and journalist Hein Marais, Mbeki’s ‘plan [in 2009] though was to usher Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka in as South Africa’s first female president, while he would continue to wield decisive influence from behind the screen’.
The subtleness of a gendered othering continues to inflect the South Africa political landscape. In 2009, the government restructured women’s issues into the new Department of Women, Children and People with Disabilities. Non-profit and women’s organisations saw in the lumping of women, children and people with disabilities into one entity an indicator of the lack of governmental commitment toward women’s issues. It would divert attention – and funding – from women to other areas. Additionally, the department soon found itself embroiled in a corruption scandal, which severely crippled its ability as a fully functioning, productive and efficient government unit, expected to stand firmly in the frontlines of combatting the rape crisis.
Where are the Women?
In South Africa, gender equality, promised and so heavily pronounced throughout the country’s constitution, was deemed ‘sacrifice-able’ almost immediately after the end of apartheid. Time and again, women have been marginalised and consigned to the end of the long list of other, more important liberation agenda items. Gender equality, rape and sexual violence were not a priority of the new government. It was excluded (and deemed excludable); it was seen in contrast to other (more) pressing domestic issues such as poverty and education rather than in alignment with them. A tendency to ‘ditch equality rights when “more important” decisions about leadership are debated’ has dominated the South African political terrain, during and after apartheid. As Hudson points out in her article, the ‘post-conflict reconstruction [of] women’s agency’ fails, as it only adheres to long-festering stereotypes and reverts women almost immediately after conflict to their assigned, gendered roles in society.
South African women critically participated in the liberation movement – however, at a cost. The arguments for the involvement of women in the anti-apartheid movement often underwrote women’s political participation ‘on behalf of others – their husbands, brothers, children – but rarely accommodated the idea that women were political and sexual agents in their individual right’. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the ANC Women’s League often operated within the margins of the prevailing power hierarchies inside the ANC. These power inequities quickly rendered the League’s gender-equality agenda of secondary importance. It was understood that a discussion about gender needed to be postponed until after the liberation. Equally, issues such as sexual violence were initially ‘dismissed as a distraction from “real” issues of political liberation’. In the new democratic South Africa, however, the Commission on Gender Equality has been criticised for having ‘failed spectacularly to build an inclusive debate on equality’. The League and the Commission’s implicit silences remained ideologically underpinned by the political demands within the ANC apparatus revolving around ‘consent’. Consent and various party policy realignments since 1994 are rooted in ‘policies and practices within the symbolic world of national liberation and African nationalism’ – and do not allow for deviating voices.
As gender equality – during apartheid, but also after 1994 – has been persistently given lesser priority through the political narrative and the construction of ‘gendered othering’, rape and sexual violence have been equally made out to be lesser crimes. Gender equality remains ‘the stepchild of national liberation’, while rape and sexual violence equally are the stepchildren of the country’s gendered and gendering law enforcement and judicial structures.
In the first decade of democracy, the ANC Women’s League, ‘powered by strong female ministers, took on tough battles – and won’, Sonke Gender Justice chair Sisonke Msimang wrote in a 2011 column in Business Day. ‘It developed an excellent track record in advancing women’s rights at party and state level’. Yet, throughout the 1990s, many women found that the League’s voices and leadership role were diminishing. After the Zuma trial, the League’s silence and its subsequent endorsement of Zuma’s 2009 run for the presidency were interpreted to be an indication of the organisation’s struggle between its loyalty to the anti-apartheid movement and its assertion of its position as a twenty-first century women’s organisation.
Two decades into South Africa’s democracy, the country’s female politicians equally avoid constructive engagement with issues such as rape and justice for women. The lack of political will to tackle sexual violence transcends party lines. Democratic Alliance (DA) leader Helen Zille, who refused to budge after appointing an all-male cabinet in the Western Cape in 2011, was heavily criticised for failing to help a rape crisis organisation. ‘There is no politician who has shown a sustained and in-depth interest in the problem’, says sexual violence researcher Lisa Vetten. ‘You have strong women like Zille, Patricia de Lille and Lindiwe Mazibuko. But again they are not participating [in issues of gender] and they don’t show any great interest, really’.
Conclusion: The ‘Othering of the Future’
The intersection of rape and the state implies an intimate correlation between the state’s functionality as an effective political entity and its role as protector of its citizenry and sovereign borders; its positionality and viability as a democracy; and its role as a facilitator (overtly, covertly or complacently so) of ‘gendered othering’ – the perpetuation of an ‘othering’ that keeps gender equality at bay. As Hudson posits in her case study of Rwanda, the political narrative about sexual violence in South Africa equally highlights the tension between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ – true and effective – agency. In Rwanda, where its female parliamentarian majority has been heralded as a trailblazing feminist achievement, women are still excluded from key political positions and suffer from a multitude of gendered biases that are still in place.
Scholars have increasingly ventured to interrogate this correlation, viewing South Africa’s structural violence crisis, including its rape epidemic, as a test case for the viability of its new democracy. This article has argued that the emergence of a political narrative of rape in the past and current political spaces of South Africa and a continuous ‘gendered othering’ have constructed the normative conceptualisation of rape in the country. The implications are vast. The state may find it politically profitable (if not critical for its survival) to narrow its ideological and political framework to an ‘othering of the future’ – an ‘othering’ which emphasises traditional and neo-conservative values. It will find tendencies such as identity, nationalism, citizenship and authenticity politically vital.
South Africans’ growing disillusioned with a government that is embroiled in corruption and that fails to provide basic services and protection from structural violence may soon result in the government’s ‘othering of the future’ and a delineation of ‘who and what constitutes a “true South African” and on what terms they do so’. South Africa’s political elite may increasingly find the burgeoning terrains of ‘othering’ politically attractive and as such a necessity.
A rapidly globalising and hugely interdependent international network of trade and politics has governments and global actors flustered at the thought of borderless societies, and the loss of national identity and the concept of ‘the nation-state’ itself. South Africa’s rape crisis can then be viewed as being part of a domestic project in which South Africa’s political – mainly male – elite reasserts itself as it reconstructs patriarchal hierarchies. The political narrative of rape and gendered othering fit uncomfortably well into such a reconstructive framework.