Legalbrief | your legal news hub Tuesday 21 November 2023

Rape: A South African Nightmare

Rape: A South African Nightmare

By Pumla Dineo Gqola Jacana. R189

Most South Africans likely learn about rape, or the threat of rape when they are very young – even if that’s not what
they might term it. The prevalence of rape is one of the most alarming elements of South African society: a
'nightmare', as Gqola terms it in her new book’s title. The notion that rape in South Africa is a specifically
post-apartheid problem is deftly dismantled by Gqola. It is natural that rape charge statistics would rise after 1994,
she writes, because black women felt more likely to be believed: previously, police stations had been deeply
unfriendly places. She points to the rape and forced impregnation of slave women in Cape society; the fact that
rape was a core feature of colonial rule; and that British soldiers at war with the Xhosa are recorded as having
committed rape. Under apartheid, no white men were hanged for rape. The only black men who were hanged for
rape were convicted of raping white women. Gqola understandably cannot reach any definitive conclusions about
the origins or current causes of South Africa’s rape crisis, but she compellingly details the social conditions which
normalise and excuse it. Her book is written with enviable clarity. Academics addressing a wider audience than
normal often tend to carry ponderous academic style and jargon along with them; not so in Gqola’s case. 'I wish
that I did not have to think about rape, that it was not so close to home, that I did not have to think about the many
times I have felt the combination of rage and tenderness as I sat across from someone as they talked about how
someone had raped them,' Gqola writes in conclusion. But the South African public is better off for her having done
so.