HMN 2025: how apartheid-era sexual violence has been ‘collectively unremembered’ by South African society

A technology of girls in South Africa have collectively pushed from their reminiscences apartheid-era sexual violence in a cultural strategy of “unremembering.”

New analysis has discovered that historic crimes dedicated in opposition to girls in Black communities have been forgotten or suppressed by cultural forces, together with prevailing attitudes that such assaults are both a contemporary crime or had been solely perpetrated by brokers of the apartheid state.

“(Un)Remembering Sexual Violence in South African History” is printed within the journal Past & Present.

Remarkably, some girls maintain these views regardless that they had been the sufferer of sexual violence throughout the period, or knew a member of the family who was.

The analysis by the University of Exeter is the primary to discover girls’s understandings and experiences from the apartheid period, compiling a collection of oral histories from these dwelling in two townships on the coronary heart of violence and unrest within the run-up to the nation’s 1994 election.

Published within the journal Past & Present, the analysis has, the authors say, implications for the present give attention to sexual violence in up to date South Africa.

“South Africa has develop into infamous for its excessive charges of home violence, rape and femicide,” says Dr. Emily Bridger, of Exeter’s Department of Archaeology and History.

“We know from past analysis that these points aren’t new to the post-apartheid period however have deep roots stretching into the nation’s colonial and apartheid past. Yet when requested to replicate on historic sexual violence in oral historical past interviews, Black girls repeatedly informed us that life in apartheid South Africa was devoid of rape—even when such statements contradicted their private expertise.”

The study has been made potential by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship awarded to Dr. Bridger in 2020. Over a interval of 4 years, she and Kefuoe Makena, a Black South African analysis affiliate, performed greater than 70 interviews with girls dwelling in Thokoza and Katlehong.

These are each townships positioned southeast of Johannesburg and had been topic to intense political violence from 1990 to 1994 within the lead-up to South Africa’s first democratic elections.

Most of the ladies interviewed had been members of the Khulumani Support Group, a civil society group based in 1995 to assist victims of apartheid-era human rights abuses. All had been born throughout the interval spanning the Forties to the Nineteen Seventies, with two-thirds of them shifting to the townships from rural areas, both for work or to dwell with husbands.

The interviews had been sensitively designed to discover what place, if any, sexual violence occupied inside the girls’s broader reminiscences of apartheid and its aftermath, slightly than to retrieve any untold tales of beforehand hidden trauma.

The girls had been requested about their experiences of childhood, relationships, marriage, home life, crime and political violence, earlier than turning to their basic understanding of sexual violence, how prevalent it was, and who was perpetrating it?

More than half of the interviewees stated there was no or very minimal rape throughout apartheid, or that rape solely got here to their communities within the Nineteen Nineties. Yet roughly a 3rd of them spoke brazenly about their very own or their instant relations’ private experiences of intimate associate violence, coerced intercourse or rape. And in some circumstances, the identical individual held this contradictory view and expertise.

Dr. Bridger stated 4 cultural components had formed this strategy of “unremembering” bygone days, with the primary regarding the suppression and silencing of rape by households, communities and the police throughout apartheid. This resulted in incidents being handled privately between households or saved secret as a consequence of societal disgrace.

The second purpose issues the that means of the time period ‘rape’ because it was utilized throughout the apartheid period, when it referred to against the law involving a extra particular set of circumstances. Sexual violence—together with what a up to date viewers would perceive as rape—was usually expressed within the media and different types of communication in neutralized phrases comparable to ‘pressured love.”

Dr. Bridger stated, “The hurt performed by this refusal to call was summarized by a 60-year-old interviewee from Soweto who, in distinction to different girls, acknowledged the existence of past sexual violence. As she defined, ‘In the olden days, this gender-based violence was there. But it had no identify, as a result of nobody cared about it.'”

The third purpose, say the authors, is that the historical past of sexual violence has been obscured by the dominant historic narrative of South Africa’s emergence from the oppression of apartheid. Sexual violence dedicated throughout the period was politicized because of this and led to claims that it was solely perpetrated by these linked to the apartheid state.

The fourth and ultimate rationalization for this amnesia is that the present give attention to rape in up to date South Africa has not solely resulted in an erasure of past historic sexual violence however has produced a nostalgia for that past.

“Despite important proof of the widespread perpetration of rape throughout South Africa’s racial and sophistication divides throughout apartheid, older Black girls dwelling in Thokoza and Katlehong predominantly characterised the apartheid past as a interval with out or earlier than ‘rape,'” concludes Dr. Bridger.

“This strategy of collective unremembering is just not distinctive to those girls; we see it at work in South Africa extra broadly and different nations where sexual violence has been used as a political weapon.”