Over the last decade, South Africa has seen

several public crises over the issue of rape.

In 1999, the South African Advertising

Standards Authority sparked a public row

when it banned a public service

announcement featuring South African-born

actress Charlize Theron. Censors believed

that Theron’s anti-rape ad unfairly implied

that all South African men were rapists, but

others perceived the ASA’s ban as denying

the reality of women’s experiences of rape.

In 2006, current state president Jacob Zuma stood trial for rape. Although he was acquitted, the

trial sparked vitriolic public protests at which anti-rape activists and Zuma’s supporters accused

each other of trying to subvert the country’s judiciary.

Clearly, the issue of rape provokes heated passions in the South African public sphere.

Women's activists decry the country's sky-high rates of sexual assault. More than one third of

critics, including former president Thabo Mbeki, have accused anti-rape campaigners of

maligning African culture and calling all African men potential rapists. These debates escalate

heated passions but do not point to a solution. I believe that my research on the history of

sexual violence in South Africa suggests a way to bring civility back to these heated public

debates.

A Historical Look Into South African Attitudes Toward Rape To begin, my dissertation provides some clues to how public discussions of rape became

politically charged. My research, which focuses on the Eastern Cape region, reveals that

the Xhosa communities who inhabited the area before European colonization thought about

sexual assault differently than the British and Afrikaner colonizers.

History helps find better ways to talk about rape in

South Africa by Elizabeth Thornberry on Monday, July 18, 2011 - 1:23am

In the precolonial period, archival sources indicate

that Xhosa communities generally assumed that

women who complained of rape were telling the

truth. The European colonial authorities who

arrived in the 1850s were, by contrast, extremely

skeptical of rape accusations. They also attached

more shame to sex outside of marriage than did

precolonial Xhosa culture. As a result, colonial

judges were likely to assume rape accusers had

engaged in consensual sex and had later

changed their minds and “cried rape.” The

development of a colonial legal system, staffed by

European judges, made it much more difficult for

Xhosa women to successfully bring charges of

rape against men who assaulted them.

In the late nineteenth century, accusations of

sexual violence became a tool for racial

segregationists. White women’s accusations of

rape by black men caught the attention of South

Africa's white public in a series of sensational

cases. Panics over the "black peril" played a

major role in the strengthening South Africa’s racial segregation policies. Segregationists

warned of the danger posed to white women by black men in order to garner support for

residential segregation, to pass laws against black men, and for a wide range of other

discriminatory legislation.

By the early twentieth century, the state responded to sexual assault in ways that were bad,

not only for black men, but also for black women. The state ignored rape accusations from

black women, and it used white women’s rape accusations as an excuse for racial

discrimination against black men.

Race, Politics, and Contemporary Anti-Rape Campaigns In this context, it is not surprising that many black South Africans in the early twentieth century

came to mistrust anti-rape campaigns. Members of the emerging black political elite worked to

counteract pervasive stereotypes of black men as sexual predators. As part of their strategy,

they not only contradicted accusations of black-on-white rape, they also avoided discussions

of black women’s experiences of rape within their own communities. The skepticism of the

white-dominated judicial system towards black women’s complaints of rape created a lingering

suspicion that anti-rape rhetoric was little more than a pretext for segregation.

As my research shows, we can look to the history of South Africa to find more productive ways

of talking about rape. The precolonial Xhosa cultures were supportive of women victims of

rape and did not condone or encourage sexual violence. By going back to these early

A Xhosa couple in the early 1800s.Source: H. Lichtenstein/Wikimedia Commons

conversations, we can find common ground between the women activists and the black South

Africans who want to eliminate the false stereotypes on their communities. I hope that my

research will make it easier for anti-rape activists to form alliances with some of their critics. It

should be possible for activists to frame some of their major goals, such as retraining police

officers to be more sympathetic towards rape victims, as in keeping with, rather than in conflict

with, the “traditional cultures” of South Africa.

Copyright 2010 Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Elizabeth Thornberry is a 2010-11 Clayman Institute Graduate

Dissertation Fellow. Elizabeth completed her PhD in History and is preparing for her new position as Assistant Professor, History, at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.