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.