Gender Apartheid is Thriving on South Africa’s Amnesia

To describe something as a ‘crisis’ is to deem it an urgent issue. Whilst a range of dictionaries provide various definitions, they all hinge on a notion of temporality and immediacy. Many allude to a ‘point,’ ‘time’ or a ‘flashpoint.’ Indeed, the word itself stems from the Greek word for turning point, ‘krisis.’ 

I don’t often consult a dictionary to decipher the headlines. However, when dealing with an issue so entangled with history and the narratives that accompany it, definitions matter.

South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, classified gender-based violence as a national crisis in November. Participants in the G20’s Women’s shutdown and women across the country celebrated this as a victory. Such a classification meant that the government’s National Disaster Management Centre (NDMC) would finally dedicate funding and resources to combat violence against women and femicide. 

However, it was acknowledged in terms of the problematic aforementioned definition. As a ‘crisis.’ 

Whilst I don’t dispute the immediacy and pertinence of the issue, I question it being framed as a novel or discrete phenomenon. The events of November 2025 could be understood as an awakening, a rupture in contemporary understandings of South Africa and its social stratification. However, the existence of gender-based violence and femicide precedes the open acknowledgment of it. This is not a post-apartheid problem, but something borne out of the very colonial foundations of the South African state. Focusing on the immediate threat felt by women today should not come at the expense of historical amnesia.

The violence that black women are disproportionately subject to can’t be described as a flashpoint, but as an entrenched historical disaster. What we are witnessing is the replication of endemic practices rather than the emergence of new ones, the practices of a society accustomed to institutionalised violence and disempowerment ordained by Apartheid thinking. The statistics of today, namely that 1 in 3 South African women have experienced physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetime, can’t be isolated from the network of racial, gendered and economic oppression constructed by Afrikaner nationalists in the mid 1900s. 

Residential segregation, initiated through policies such as the 1950 Group Areas Act, forced citizens into designated racial areas, confining black South Africans to ‘homelands,’ or Bantustans. In declaring Bantustans ‘independent’ states, the Apartheid government essentially ejected black communities, stripping them of their rights and rendering them separate yet entirely dependent on government subsidies for survival. Such institutionalised segregation fundamentally shaped attitudes and behaviours directed towards women. Economically deprived, physically dislocated and dehumanised, these communities experienced higher levels of crime and violence. Attempts to reclaim agency were expressed through the subordination of others. Apartheid structures were internalised and replicated by those who had fallen victim to it. Black women were primarily on the receiving end of this, fulfilling the role of the oppressed for the man to temporarily fulfil a semblance of power. 

Crucially, the selective policing of rape by white authorities served to further antagonise black men and dismiss black women. Crime in the Bantustans was dismissed as an unfortunate facet of township life and utilised to construct an image of black communities as hyperaggressive, sexual and subhuman. Rape was only reported in cases of a black man assaulting a white woman, which entrenched tropes of the black man as a savage threat to society. Women who did report rape were met with inadequate resources, incredulity, and shame. As such, rape was chronically underreported to the point of erasure. Women have claimed that rape simply did not exist during the Apartheid era, exhibiting either denial, unawareness, or a worrying acclimatisation to its presence. This compromised memory of rape and sexual violence has equally compromised efforts to address it. For years, it has existed as an amorphous issue lodged in the deepest and darkest recesses of the nation’s history. 

Violence against women, and the incredulity that accompanies it, straddles racial lines. During Apartheid, black and white women were subject to the same colonial ideals that dismissed the possibility of rape. South Africa’s legal framework was rooted in principles of English and Roman-Dutch law that insisted a husband could not be found criminally liable for raping his wife. A category of women ‘impossible to rape’ emerged; this could include married women, women deemed licentious or most often, black women deemed to be hypersexual and outside the jurisdiction of the Apartheid government. This categorisation of women unable to experience harm or fall victim to rape lives on today; when accused of rape in 2005, Jacob Zuma claimed ‘Khwezi’s’ ‘flirtatious behaviour’ was an invitation and was acquitted of all charges before being elected as President 3 years later. Cases of ‘corrective rape’ against lesbians persist, and sexual violence in domestic settings is considered beyond the purview of public concern.

Experiences of sexual violence can’t be universalised; intersectional forces of race, age, physical ability and income are always at play. However, perpetrators and bystanders remain beholden to the same toxic construction of masculinity that values violence and the subordination of others. The question of what it means to be a man or woman in South Africa is inextricably linked to a culture of militarisation, political violence and colonial hegemony. 

Afrikaner segregationists of the early 1900s, such as Jan Smuts, saw utility in the concept of masculinity, conflating an individual’s ability to exhibit it with their social status. Fundamentally, masculinity was a metonym for whiteness, homogeneity and power. To claim or assimilate these qualities was to become a man. The idea that blackness or femininity contradicts masculinity was established, and so too was the motivation to mimic the white man and subordinate women. To sexually assault a woman became a perverse demonstration of masculinity for both white and black men, and an opportunity for the latter to subvert their blackness.

Notions of nationhood and manhood have developed alongside prolonged periods of war, from the South African Border War to the ANC’s People’s War. The Apartheid government set a precedent for the militarisation of politics, using bodies such as the South African Defence Force (SADF) to enforce segregationist policies and suppress anti-apartheid activities. Politics was developed through a rhetoric of violence and has been felt on the streets as much as it has in the speeches of statesmen. Nelson Mandela acknowledged in 1964 that ‘non-violence… brought the African people nothing,’ admitting to the necessity for armed struggle in a climate of political brutality. In a society where gender and race are political, and the political is violent, to be a black and/or a woman is to be at risk. 

The story of South Africa’s women today is one of systemic misogyny, colonialism, and amnesia. It is a story of what happens when a society is founded on the oppression of another and governs through a framework of division. And it is a long story, one that extends beyond the temporality of a crisis. When citizens become acculturated to practices of violence and exploitation in the public sphere, the private sphere follows suit. This phenomenon can’t be contemporised, nor can it be understood without recovering years of buried memories. To truly accept the gravity of women’s demands today, the cries of their predecessors should be heard.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Cabinet Secretariat of Japan (original source)

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