Decolonisation after Democracy

Rethinking the Research and Teaching of Political Science in South Africa

Laurence Piper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429788543
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Decolonisation after Democracy addresses the provocative idea that we need to rid higher education of lingering forms of colonial knowledge. This matters because in the colonial era much knowledge was put to the service of subjugating indigenous peoples, and the assumptions from this era may linger into the present. Examples of deep-rooted and 'foundational' forms of knowledge that carry colonial traits are normative binaries such as 'civilised and backward', 'modern and traditional' and 'rational and superstitious'. In addition, some accounts of positive values like freedom, equality, justice and democracy may hide the assumption that the western experience is the norm, from which other kinds are rendered imitations, deviations or pathologies.

In this collection, some of South Africa's leading political scientists and academics engage with the challenge of decolonising knowledge in the research and teaching of politics. It includes new insights about the state, international relations, clientelism, statesociety relations and land reform; and introduces new ways to engage the colonial library, curriculum reform, and the marginality of historically black institutions. Finally, the contributors deal with the decolonial challenge posed by the #FeesMustFall student movements, reflecting on issues of revolutionary politics and gender and sexual violence.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Politikon.

#EndRapeCulture Campaign in South Africa: Resisting Sexua Violence Through Protest and the Politics of Experience

Amanda Gouws

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the #EndRapeCulture campaign in South Africa, where women students took to the streetsin 2016 to protest against the pervasive normalisation of sexual violence on university campuses. In many cases, some participated topless and brandished sjamboks (whips) to show their resentment and anger at the prevailing conditions of sexual violence. The article looks at the role of digital media in circulating slogans around the campaign and asks the question whether these protests can be compared with SlutWalks or FEMEN. Another way of understanding the #EndRapeCulture campaign is to think through the implications of using experience as a form of identity politics.

Introduction

In 2015 university campuses all over South Africa erupted in hashtag campaigns(#Rhodes-MustFall, #Feesmustfall, #OpenStellenbosch, #EndPatriarchy and in 2016 #EndRapeCulture), linking demands for decolonisation to the removal of the larger-than-life statue of Cecil John Rhodes on the UCT campus, a zero per cent fee increase for 2016, changes to the instruction medium of Afrikaans at the Stellenbosch University and at the end of 2016 a demand for free tertiary education, as well as an end to attitudes, behaviour and practices that normalised sexual violence on campuses.

My concern here is with the #EndRapeCulture campaign that saw young women mobilise against sexual violence in South Africa. When the campaign started out most of the organisers were black African women, taking protests to the streets, often bare breasted or in underwear to say that ‘enough is enough – we are tired of this violence!’. What is remarkable is the fact that they embrace a feminist identity, something that was less common with an older generation women who were suspicious of a type of feminism that draws on essentialised identities that masked white women’s experiences as the norm, even though they embraced feminist notions of gender equality. They were not afraid to speak in a feminist register, from the vantage point of intersectional, radical African feminism.

Their feminism is motivated from a place of black African identity in a post-colonial/ post-apartheid society, rooting feminism in black consciousness philosophy and black pain (‘the personal is political’). These young women are articulate and appear to be fearless. Apart from racism that oppressed them they see patriarchy as one of the main obstacles to end the pervasive rape culture (attitudes, perceptions and stereotypes that normalise sexual violence) insociety at large and universities in particular, not only for heterosexual women but also for members of the LGBTIQA and transgender communities, that took a central place in the #EndRapeCulture campaign.

For the students involved in the hashtag campaigns South Africa has never really been decolonised and even 21 years after the transition to democracy the remnants of colonialism remain. The statue of Cecil John Rhodes was a stark reminder of how he,a colonist of note, brutalised the indigenous populations of Africa and South Africa in particular (see, e.g. Nyamnjoh 2016).

The aims of this article are to analyse (1) young women’s struggles to end sexual violence through the #EndRapeCulture campaign, (2) to show the importance of digital space for protesting sexual violence, (3) to do a comparison of their ‘topless marches’ with ‘SlutWalks’, because of the way in which certain ideas which circulated through digital spaces were adopted, and (4) to take a closer look at identity politics based on the experience of black pain, as is suggestive of the feminist notion of ‘the personal is political’.

The colonial discourse of African sexuality

On 22 April 2016, South Africa woke up to the ‘RU Reference List’. This was a list of names of 11 alleged rapists who were students at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, released online. Women students claimed that these men were well-known for their sexual violation of women students, but that no action was taken against them. They sat in their classes, walked the streets with them and kept on harassing them. This was the culmination of repeated complaints by students at Rhodes University about sexual violence,where between January and December 2016, 21 students have been raped, but no action was taken by the management against the perpetrators. Due to this neglect of justice for survivors #Chapter 212 was founded with the strategy to use anecdotes to accuse management of a failure to act. They accused the university of trivialising rape by pointing out that it has stronger punishments for plagiarism than rape. The women students demanded a revision of Rhodes University policies on gender-based violence, the appointment of a task team to investigate sexual violence, and for the named students on the list to vacate leadership positions (https://www.thedailyvox.co.za/rhodes-university-rapeproblem-rureferencelist/, accessed 4 December 2017).

The university’s management indicated that they will only act when the alleged perpetrators were found guilty in a court of law and until that happened they remained students. Women students accused the management of victimising them, walking out of talks about gender-based violence and portraying them as ‘hooligans’. On 12 December 2017, two women students who acted against some of the alleged perpetrators by dragging them out of their rooms, spitting on them and assaulting them with empty water bottles were found guilty of kidnapping, assault, defamation and insubordination in the High Court and banned from completing their studies and any further studies for life at Rhodes University,¹ leading to a huge outcry from activists working with gender-based violence. It once again shows the asymmetrical punishments that are handed down to perpetrators of sexual violence versus their victims in court (https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2016-06-01-we-will-not-be-silenced-rapeculture-rureferencelist-and-the-university-currently-known-asrhodes/#.WNJDSU1daUk, accessed 20 March 2017).

For women students at Rhodes University, this was the last straw. They organised topless marches with sjamboks (whips – a symbol of fighting back). Solidarity among women’s students through topless marches spread across campuses in South Africa with lightning speed, rage and anger following in its wake. And while women were in solidarity with men during all the previous #campaigns they felt let down by the men who showed little solidarity with the #EndRapeCulture campaign (some actually insulted the women for being so unashamed about their bodies, acting ‘un-African’, and others for objectifying themselves – something that a ‘real’ feminist would never do²). Here I am referring to a narrative between black African women and black African men, since the majority of women students who participated in the #EndRapeCulture were black African (at the University of Cape Town, the University of the Witwatersrand, Rhodes University and Stellenbosch University). The #campaigns were spearheaded by black African students, who used a narrative based on notions of decolonisation as informed by theories e.g. of Frantz Fanon (see Nyamnjoh 2016). White students struggled to relate to this discourse.

We need to locate these topless marches in the context of a post-colonial society, with extraordinary high levels of rape.³ The actions of women students in the #EndRapeCulture campaign, on a symbolic level, articulate how the intersectionality of race, gender and sexuality positions black African women as sexual subjects in relation to black African men but also in relation to white women and white men – something that an intersectional African feminist identity expresses.

In the context of a discourse on decolonisation as expressed by the #RhodesMustFall campaign as well as the other campaigns, women students’ understanding of sexual violation is deeply implicated in a long history of sexual violation under colonial conditions and its apartheid continuities, where slave women were raped and where African women were (are) viewed as hypersexual and their sexual violation trivialised. Violence in this context is made possible through the co-constitution of race, gender and sexuality.

Arnfred (2004, 7) articulates colonial understandings of sexuality in Africa in her edited volume Re-Thinking Sexualities in Africa as follows:

[We need to think] beyond the conceptual structures of colonial or even postcolonial European imaginations, which have oscillated between the notions of the exotic, the noble and the depraved savage, consistently however constructing Africans and African sexuality as something ‘other’. This ‘other’ thing is constructed to be not only different from European/ Western sexualities, and self, but also functions to co-construct that which is European/ Western, as modern, rational and civilized.

This othering and colonial gaze of African people’s sexuality has far-reaching consequences for how women in post-apartheid South Africa experience and live their sexuality and sexual identities. Blackness in itself and blackness as sexual is the double outcome of the processes of othering – of disavowal and projection (Arnfred 2004, 18).

Under the colonial gaze, black men and women are viewed as quintessentially sexual – black women are tantalising objects for white men’s sexual fantasies while black men are viewed as a threat in case white women would desire them. This is often connected to the myth of black men’s sexual prowess and powers (Arnfred 2004, 19).

Underlying the views of black people’s sexuality under colonialism and apartheid was a fear of miscegenation and the desire on the part of white settlers to keep the white race pure. Colonial and apartheid governmentalities were aimed at preventing miscegenation through the inferiorisation of African peoples and locating black men and women differently from white men and women in relations of power and sexual intercourse.

Gqola (2015, 37–38) argues that race and the language of race were made through slavery, colonialisation and kept in place through sexual violence. As she puts it ‘[R]ace was made through rape in very direct, deliberate and indirect ways…’ (38). As property of slave owners, women slaves had no control over their bodies and reproductive labour (Gqola 2015, 40). Gqola (2015, 44) puts it:

Because race was made through rape and sexual difference, there was a constant preoccupation in slave-ordered society with ‘race mixing’. While the rape of slave women was profitable, it also threatened ideas of racial hierarchy and produced anxieties about race-mixing. The institutionalized rape of slave women revealed a frightening possibility…of the unspeakable sexual intercourse between white women and slave men. This anxiety was about the loss of control over the bodies of white women, as much as it was about the view of white women becoming unpure.

In denying that the actions of slave owners were rape white men were not viewed as rapists. This determined a certain colonial sexual hierarchy – white women were ‘rapable’ but black women not, white men were not viewed as rapists, but black men’s intercourse with white women was considered rape – therefore the view of black men as rapists was determined through a colonial ordering of subjects. Through sexual violation of slave women, shame became part of sexual identity. In the power relation between slaves and masters slaves are unable to control their own sexuality. Slaves become reduced to dehumanised objects in relationships in which their own sexuality is deeply complicit without their consent. This is the cause of great shame(Gqola2015,40).

From the point of view of the slave women, shame was induced through rape,while the European masters created the stereotype of the hypersexual African woman, that could not be raped be cause she was excessively sexual and impossible to satiate. The stereotype of hypersexuality on the part of African women institutionalised the rape of slaves as a normal aspect of society, which meant that freed slaves could also be raped. These ravenous sexual appetites of African women were constructed as a big danger to white women (Gqola 2015, 43). Already under colonial conditions black and white women were differently located in relation to sexual violence.

The conquest of colonialism was replaced by the rule of the apartheid state that institutionalised racethrough the policing of sexuality and a continuing fear of miscegenation. Apartheid legislation, especially the Population Registration Act (Act 30 of 1950), the Immorality Act (Act 5 of 1927 (pre-apartheid)) and the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (Act 55 of 1949) produced governmentalities of race in an attempt to keep the white race pure. Disciplinary power combined with nationalism created a normalising discourse of white women’s roles as reproducers of the nation that ensured white male control over white and non-white women (Gunkel 2010, 59). Sexuality was the regulatory force of South Africa’s history of slavery, colonialism and apartheid that inscribed the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. #EndRapeCulture Campaign in South Africa: Resisting Sexual Violence Through Protest and the Politics of Experience
• 2. Decolonising International Relations and Its Theory: A Critical Conceptual Meditation
• 3. Thinking the State from Africa: Political Theory, Eurocentrism and Concrete Politics
• 4. Confronting the Colonial Library: Teaching Political Studies Amidst Calls for a Decolonised Curriculum
• 5. What Would the Decolonisation of a Political Science Curriculum Entail? Lessons to be Learnt From the East African Experience at the Federal University of East Africa
• 6. The Need for a New Language? How Historically Disadvantaged Institutions Grapple with the Effects of Labelling in Higher Education: The Case of the University of the Western Cape
• 7. Decolonising Clientelism: 'Re-centring' Analyses of Local State-Society Relations in South Africa
• 8. On Decolonisation and Revolution: A Kristevan Reading on the Hashtags Student Movements and Fallism
• 9. Land Redistribution in South Africa:Towards Decolonisation or Recolonisation?
• Index