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Rape: A South African Nightmare by Pumla Dineo Gqola
MF Books (Jacana Media)
192 pages
R200 on takealot.com
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Rape remains a vexing, often worsening, reality in the kumbaya narrative of the rainbow nation. Some true and some not-so-true myths have found their way into public discourse, often exacerbating the “female fear factory”.
At the launch of Rape: A South African Nightmare, author, feminist, professor and scholar Pumla Dineo Gqola explained that we are (rightly) obsessed with rape – with talking about it, and expressing shock, anger and dismay with each new case.
However, the manner in which we discuss rape has become more ritualistic instead of becoming a way to understand, and ultimately dismantle and end the violent patriarchal threat to women, children and men who are rendered rapeable.
Gqola’s work brings to the national conversation clarity and thoroughness, and a tireless weaving and connecting of what is largely normative or unpunished behaviour (from catcalling and public harassment to the terror of rape).
In the first chapter, Gqola quickly deals with the myth that rape is a post-1994 phenomenon. She makes the clear link between rape and race, and how that plays itself out in a slavocratic and heteropatriarchal society, and how rape (after nearly 400 years of colonialism) continues to be the tool of the hegemonically powerful.
The rape and forced impregnation of slave women was part of Cape society, and rape was a weapon of war between the Xhosa and the British. Under apartheid, no white men were hanged for rape, and the only black men who were hanged were convicted of raping white women.
It is this opening chapter that sets the book up, providing a well-articulated context in which to understand the nightmare. Although tackling sometimes complex and academic concepts, Gqola’s text is easy to understand as she unpacks rape culture.
Chapter 4 is perhaps the most mind-blowing in the book. In it, Gqola tackles the female fear factory and how much of our discourse actually serves to create/recreate more fear of rape, often through what is seen to be “logic” or “practicality” to prevent women from getting raped, rather than fear of being caught raping or partaking in rape culture. It exposes the rut in which South Africa finds itself in the face of sexual violence.
Equally incisive are insights on Jacob Zuma’s rape case, which Gqola says represented an end of innocence for many South Africans who watched it play out. She tackles powerful men and how positions of power make rape possible.
When dealing with the rape of boys, lesbian women and children, Gqola is careful to not cast them as extraordinary – as our public reactions often do – but to understand them as specific instances of pervasive patriarchal power (which is what all rape is).
Rape: A South Africa Nightmare is a must-read and the kind of book that needs to be discussed everywhere by everyone.
Gqola says she wrote the book hoping that any rape survivor reading it did not “feel thrown under the bus”. She achieved this
