There has been a justified outpouring of national anger and fury over the past few weeks in response to the ongoing war on the bodies of girls and women. Yet we have been here before. Every now and then the rape and death of aparticularvictim galvanises us.
Those two cases also highlighted some other realities about rape and femicide in South Africa: the war on the bodies of girls and women is both class-blind and colour-blind. Ours, as has correctly been said time and again, is no country for women. She is a continued target of predatory men who have no regard for her intrinsic dignity and rights to bodily and psychological integrity. Which is why each South African woman has asked this week: “Am I next?”
The history of slavery is instructive. An important ingredient in the psychology of white supremacists is the display of attitudes towards black people that reduce them to things. Black people who were owned by slave owners, to take the most extreme instantiation of white supremacy, were spoken of in terms that put them on a continuum with other things in the house that lacked intrinsic value.
We do not see girls and women truly. We see them as part of our dominion. A university acquaintance of mine, who is a well-read lawyer, recently participated in what he regarded as Facebook banter by asking his male Facebook friends how they feel when a guy compliments “[their] women”. The discussion that followed was exemplary of the kind of possessiveness that is taught boys and men in relation to girls and women.
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