(Un)Remembering Sexual Violence in South African History^*

Abstract

Frequently labelled one of the world’s ‘rape capitals’, South Africa today struggles with notoriously high rates of domestic violence, rape and femicide. These issues have long histories and deep roots stretching far beyond the country’s democratic era. Over centuries, colonialism, slavery, racial segregation and state-sanctioned violence entrenched sexual violence by perpetuating harmful racial and gender stereotypes and endorsing the use of force in both private and public spheres.¹ Sexual violence may occupy a more prominent place in public discourse now than it did in the past, but it is not a problem new or distinct to the post-apartheid era.

Yet when asked to reflect on historic sexual violence, oral history interviewees — Black South African women in their sixties, seventies and eighties — largely characterized apartheid as a period without or before ‘rape’. As one woman born in rural Natal in 1961 stated, ‘The thing is, when we grew up, the thing of rape was not there’. She later explained more concretely that, ‘there was no such thing as rape’ during apartheid, and that rape is a new problem that only emerged ‘now, in your days’.² Other interviewees similarly expressed that ‘rape was not there back in our days’, ‘no one was raped back then’, ‘we didn’t know that in our time’, and ‘there was no rape’ during apartheid.³

Such statements contradict other historical evidence. Previous research into sexual violence during apartheid argues that rape had reached ‘crisis proportions’ by the 1950s; that ‘young township women . . . were subjected to astonishing levels of sexual violence’; and that ‘rape was extraordinarily common’ by the mid twentieth century.⁴ In 1981, the South African author Miriam Tlali wrote of how ‘virtually all black women, from small children to grandmothers and great grandmothers, live in perpetual fear and are haunted by the lurking shadow of personal defilement’.⁵ Moreover, when narrating their own life histories, some of the same interviewees who denied rape’s past existence testified to their own harrowing experiences of coerced sex and rape as girls and women.

How then should we understand their statements that there ‘was no rape’ during apartheid? This article explores the multifaceted and at times contradictory meanings of such declarations and asks what it means for these women to unremember sexual violence in South African history. I use ‘unremember’ to indicate the passive and active occlusion of certain historical events, trends and narratives from collective memory. In doing so, I draw on Ann Stoler’s concept of aphasia, and the questions she asks about how certain histories ‘become muffled’ or are ‘displaced’ and ‘occluded from view’.⁶ Like Stoler, I emphasise that there is an important difference between silence or forgetting and unremembering: it is not that women were silent or reticent about sexual violence (many spoke about the topic openly), nor that they have forgotten individual incidents of past violence, but that they collectively denied its past existence or located its advent in the dismantling of apartheid, even when such statements contradicted their own experiences.

This article explores four central conditions that have rendered much of the sexual violence perpetrated during apartheid as unrememberable in the present. First, for many women, ‘rape’ as an identified social problem did not exist in the past because of its active silencing by families, communities and the police. Second, much sexual violence during apartheid was not labelled as ‘rape’ but instead as ‘force’ in a way that neutralized and normalized rape, particularly against Black women. Third, dominant historical and politicized narratives about the apartheid past have subordinated histories of intra-communal sexual violence and gender oppression to histories of racial oppression and the fight against it. And last, the current framing of sexual violence as a contemporary ‘crisis’ in South Africa has encouraged historical amnesia about the problem and nostalgia for a past seen to be without rape.

In response to South Africa’s escalating post-apartheid rape rates, scholars have stressed the importance of addressing the gap in historical research on sexual violence. As Pumla Gqola argues, ‘if we are at all serious about making sense of rape’s hold on our society, we need to interrogate the histories of rape in South Africa’.⁷ In heeding this call, research has turned to the country’s long histories of broader forms of violence and oppression — racism, colonialism, militarism and patriarchy — to explain today’s high rates of gender-based violence.⁸ Yet much work stops short of exploring the longer histories of sexual violence itself. Historical research explicitly focused on sexual violence has, on the other hand, mostly focused on the colonial period, demonstrating how perceptions of rape perpetrators and victims, and rape’s harms, have long been shaped by dominant ideas of race, gender and class.⁹ Existing knowledge about sexual violence during apartheid largely stems from social histories of youth, violence and masculinity. This work highlights the ubiquity of sexual violence in many mid-century townships, and how apartheid conditions encouraged gender identities predicated on access to and control over women’s bodies.¹⁰ Yet in its focus on masculinity, this literature says little about how girls and women experienced or understood such violence, a topic surprisingly left untouched by most research into women’s histories across South Africa’s twentieth century too.

While addressing the lack of historical research on rape during apartheid, this article also contributes to a small, interdisciplinary literature on the politics of rape and questions of memory in South Africa, including Deborah Posel’s research exploring how rape emerged as a public and political issue in post-apartheid South Africa; Gqola’s investigation of the historical, social and cultural roots of South Africa’s rape problem; and Lucy Graham’s study of how rape is portrayed and narrated in South African literature.¹¹ Together, this research demonstrates that what has changed about rape in post-apartheid South Africa is not necessarily its frequency, but how it is conceptualized and discussed. Developing this work further, I turn to oral history to explore how sexual violence during apartheid is collectively remembered and narrated in the present. In doing so, I speak to broader work on the remembering and forgetting of violence. While this article is a South African case study, drawn from a very specific set of oral history interviews, the phenomenon of unremembering that it highlights is not unique but can be seen in other contexts where narratives of violence have been politicized, or where present anxieties or disappointments facilitate unremembering of past sexual violence.¹²

This article primarily draws on oral history interviews conducted with women living in Thokoza and Katlehong, townships located southeast of Johannesburg which were subject to intense political violence from 1990 to 1994 in the lead-up to South Africa’s first democratic elections.¹³ These consist of fifty-nine interviews with members of the Khulumani Support Group — a membership-based civil society organization founded in 1995 to support victims of apartheid-era human rights abuses — and a further twelve interviews with residents of the same area who are not Khulumani members. Interviews were conducted in Zulu, Xhosa or Sesotho. The first eleven of the Khulumani interviews were conducted by the author, a white UK-based historian, in 2019, while all other interviews were led by Kefuoe Makena, a Black South African research associate who grew up in Thokoza, between 2021 and 2023. While our different positionalities led to some divergences in women’s narratives, the unremembering of past sexual violence was shared across our interviews.¹⁴

Interviewing women about sexual violence poses numerous methodological and ethical difficulties. Using life history methodology, these interviews were designed to explore what place, if any, sexual violence occupied within women’s broader memories of apartheid and its aftermath. The aim was not to retrieve untold stories of previously hidden trauma but rather to explore women’s collective understandings and memories of rape. Beginning with their childhoods, we allowed participants to speak about what was most important to them. We circled around sexual violence by asking questions about relationships, marriage, domestic life, crime and political violence, without asking women directly if they had ever experienced abuse. Towards the end of interviews, we also asked about women’s general understandings of sexual violence: how prevalent was it? Who was perpetrating it? Was it something they thought about or feared?

The sensitive nature of these interviews required a careful recruitment strategy. To access interviewees who may be victims/survivors of violence, working with organizations from which people have already sought support is considered best practice.¹⁵ Yet restricting interviews to women who had reported and sought counselling for sexual violence would have narrowed the study and undermined its intention to explore more generally if and how sexual violence features in women’s life histories. Partnering with Khulumani’s East Rand branch offered a course through this conundrum. Translating to speak out, Khulumani encourages its members to share their past experiences of apartheid-era violence and oppression as a means of personal and political healing.¹⁶ Their primary focus is on addressing the ‘unfinished’ business of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and demanding reparations for the various human rights abuses its members suffered during apartheid. Yet they have also sought to tackle gender issues such as HIV/AIDS and sexual violence. In 2018, when pitched the idea of conducting life history interviews with their female members to better understand the longer histories of gender-based violence, they enthusiastically agreed to recruit interviewees and provide or signpost them to support services if required. Khulumani’s national organizer also sat in on interviews, providing translation and contextual information when necessary. Yet women’s Khulumani membership and pursuit of reparations shaped, albeit to varying degrees, the narratives they disclosed about sexual violence. We were able to address this in part by pursuing questions unrelated to the organization’s political goals, about interviewees’ childhoods, teenage years and romantic pasts. But this also led us to conduct further interviews with women from the same area who were not affiliated with Khulumani, recruiting through Makena’s personal networks and using a snowballing strategy from there.

Interviewees were born between the 1940s and 1970s. Roughly two-thirds were raised in rural areas and migrated to urban townships between the 1960s and early 1990s for work or to live with their husbands, while the other third were urban-born. They come from a range of ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, though all were classified as ‘native’ or ‘black’ under apartheid’s racial legislation. Their educational levels vary; many of the older or rural women only briefly attended school and are illiterate, whereas most of the slightly younger or urban-born women stayed in school into their teen years, though very few completed their secondary education. The majority are unemployed or retired, living off meagre government grants for pensioners that must often support multiple generations of dependants. For most, their daily lives are marked by struggles with poverty, poor health or disability, and rising problems of alcohol and drug addiction amongst their children and grandchildren.

In narrating their life histories, women followed a similar trajectory: they spoke about the hardships of growing up under apartheid and the difficult circumstances their families faced; their adolescence as girls and young women; and their relationships, marriages and journeys through motherhood. Most then turned to their experiences of the political violence that rocked Thokoza and Katlehong in the early 1990s, and the harms inflicted on them and their families. The majority concluded their narratives by sharing their disappointments with post-apartheid South Africa, and lamenting the scourges of drug addiction, joblessness and sexual violence that stifle their communities. More than half of interviewees, both those from Khulumani and not, stated that there was no or very minimal rape during apartheid, or that rape only came to their communities in the 1990s. Yet approximately a third of interviewees spoke openly about their own, or their immediate relatives’, personal experiences of intimate partner violence, coerced sex or rape during apartheid. These two groups were not mutually exclusive; some women testified to their own historic experiences of violence whilst framing rape as a post-apartheid problem. This article next explores four explanations for such contradictions: how rape was historically subject to silencing and secrecy; the language used to refer to violence in the past and the non-naming of ‘rape’; how memories of rape are shaped by dominant historical or political narratives of apartheid; and how present realities and nostalgia for a time before South Africa’s current ‘rape crisis’ distort memories of past violence.

I the historical silencing of rape

There is significant evidence of apartheid-era sexual violence. Police statistics, media reporting and court cases, although flawed in their capacity to precisely measure past violence, all point to the widespread use of rape across South Africa’s racial and class divides. Black-readership newspapers reported extensively on township cases of sexual violence across the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.¹⁷ By 1980, multiple Black communities were declared to be in a state of ‘rape crisis’.¹⁸ Writing specifically about Thokoza — the township where some of our interviewees live — one newspaper wrote in 1982 that ‘a week never passes . . . without people being mugged, raped and killed’.¹⁹ However, as Posel’s research demonstrates, rape was concealed socially and marginalized politically prior to the late 1990s; sexual violence that did not cross racial lines was largely ignored by the state and silenced within families and communities. It was only after apartheid that rape became a prominent public and political issue seen as a fundamental threat to society.²⁰ Posel’s work helps us to understand interviewees’ statements that there ‘was no rape’ during apartheid. Many interviewees made a distinction between rape as a physical act and as an identified social problem; while the former may have existed in the past, the latter did not. Several qualified that they did not hear about rape: ‘when we were growing up, we never heard about rape’; or ‘I didn’t hear about rape a lot back then, I only started hearing about it nowadays’.²¹ One woman clearly separated rape and public talk about it: ‘Rape was there but people didn’t speak up about it . . . Rape is not a new thing . . . It has been there, it was just hidden well’.²² With rape subject to such silence and secrecy, ‘rape’ as a public discourse may have not existed in the earlier social worlds of interviewees.

Rape is commonly subject to secrecy across cultures and historical contexts due to the shame and stigma attached to it and the widespread disbelief and mistreatment of its victims. In South Africa, the historical dynamics of colonialism and apartheid furthered this silencing in multiple ways. First, social changes brought by colonialism, Christianity and the migrant labour system encouraged intergenerational silence about sex. Meanwhile, these same social and economic changes seem to have led to an upsurge in sexual violence, with notions of masculinity increasingly tied to men’s ability to control women and secure multiple sexual conquests.²³ Second, under colonial and later apartheid rule, African women were legally classified as minors relegated to the guardianship of their husbands or fathers, leaving them dependent on men for housing and income and thus vulnerable to violence and pressure to keep quiet about it. Within many African families, marriage contracts solidified by lobola — the payment of cattle, goods or money from the husband’s family to the bride’s — impelled women’s silence about intimate partner violence, with families keen to keep lobola contracts in place likely to pressure women to keep quiet about violence.²⁴ Third, in much of precolonial South Africa, rape cases were largely dealt with between families, with perpetrators punished through compensatory payments of cattle to the victim’s family.²⁵ The colonial state, however, saw rape as a criminal offence to be adjudicated in courts and punished with imprisonment or corporal punishment. Yet during apartheid there was little incentive for Black women to formally report rape. The apartheid police were deeply mistrusted by Black South Africans because of their role in maintaining white supremacy and enforcing racial legislation, and women even seen near police stations could be taken as political sell-outs and subjected to retributive violence.²⁶

Such historical change had contradictory effects on how rape was spoken about and responded to over the apartheid period. For many interviewees, it was still seen as a matter to be resolved between families, not involving the state. As one woman explained, ‘you could not go to the police station and report rape, it had to be something that was spoken about within the family’. Yet she also recounted how talking to parents about sex was seen as shameful; ‘it is disgraceful’, she explained. Rape was thus ‘not known’, she stated, because ‘our mothers and older sisters did not speak about these things’.²⁷ Many interviewees shared this notion that rape could not be discussed with family members. Their testimonies demonstrate how the silencing of rape was often implicit, with sexual violence censored by pre-existing rules governing what could be said and by whom.²⁸ One woman who acknowledged the prevalence of rape in the past explained, ‘Old people were raping young girls at that time. But kids were secretive with that or unable to say that to their parents’.²⁹ As girls, they knew that discussing rape at home would only earn parental disdain or bring shame to their families. ‘Women kept quiet because some were worried that their family will start looking at them in a different way’, a Khulumani interviewee explained.³⁰ Another woman said that if she had been raped, she would not have told her mother, knowing she would have laid the blame with her for ‘tempting’ men.³¹

But this censorship was often explicit too. Commonly, rape cases were initially disclosed to someone — be it a family member or police officer — but the survivor was then pressured to retreat into silence. Girls were encouraged by mothers or grandmothers to keep quiet to protect the family’s reputation. As one woman explained, ‘If people find out that I have been raped, what would they say? Even at home, you would be told to keep quiet because your mother is thinking about her status and dignity; not thinking about you and what you are going through’.³² This was particularly the case when sexual violence was perpetrated by family members. When asked about the prevalence of rape during apartheid, one woman responded, ‘It was there. It mostly happened in families. It was there and it was hidden. If your cousin raped you, the elders would close it from others, and it would not be spoken of’.³³

The police also aided the censorship of rape. Throughout apartheid, police stationed in townships publicly discredited Black women’s testimonies, routinely claiming that women were lying about being raped. In 1977, a Soweto-based Colonel told the press that 80 per cent of reported rapes in the township were false claims made by women caught cheating on their husbands.³⁴ Across the 1970s and 1980s, police routinely peddled this line, often in defence of their ruthless and humiliating questioning of rape survivors which they claimed was necessary to ‘ascertain the truth’.³⁵ ‘It is no use proceeding with a case’, argued Soweto’s Brigadier Viktor, ‘if you find out that a woman who slept out with her boyfriend wants to claim to her parents she was raped’.³⁶ Investigating why women were reluctant to report rape, the Soweto News concluded that victims were silenced by fears of family stigma and callous police reactions. One woman interviewed by journalists said she did not report her experience out of fear of being ‘identified as a person who had been raped’. ‘Just imagine what my friends and neighbours would think of me’, she said. ‘The best thing for me to do was just to keep quiet and forget about the whole thing’.³⁷

When trying to understand what women mean when they say there was no rape during apartheid, this historical silencing provides the simplest answer; while the physical act of rape existed, the space to publicly talk about it often did not. This was exemplified in the responses of one interviewee, who when asked about rape in the past said that while she was shocked by the prevalence of rape today, she knew nothing of it in the past; ‘I was not even thinking about it because it was not happening a lot and people never talked about it much’, she explained. Yet she then conjectured that perhaps older women deliberately hid such topics from her and her peers, stating, ‘You know, our grandmothers used to keep secrets . . . Maybe it was there, but it was hidden’.³⁸

II language and the non-naming of rape

A second way to understand women’s statements that there was no rape during apartheid is to examine ‘rape’ as a term — a specific word used in the past to refer to a particular form of violence and violation. Shani D’Cruze warns historians against viewing past sexual violence through contemporary definitions because its meanings and the language used to legally or socially signify it shift over time and place.³⁹ As Estelle Freedman argues, ‘the meaning of rape is thus fluid, rather than transhistorical or static’.⁴⁰ In apartheid South Africa, the term ‘rape’ was publicly used by men, women, the government and media, but it was largely reserved for cases of sexual violence that occurred between strangers, often in spaces marked as dangerous such as alleys or dark fields; were perpetrated across a clear social barrier, be it racial, class or generational; involved physical violence or its threat, often with a knife or gun; and fitted legal definitions of rape at the time, so were perpetrated by a man against a woman (not his wife) through forced vaginal penetration. Despite the secrecy and silencing that rape was subjected to, it was not absent from apartheid-era public discourse. Against all odds, Black women did report rape to the police in significant numbers; the resulting court cases filled the pages of tabloid newspapers with headlines such as ‘Rapist caught half naked in closet’; ‘Mini-skirted doll chased, raped’; and ‘Bag snatcher raped victim who chased him’.⁴¹

Yet public discourse was also suffused with talk of a broader spectrum of violence beyond that readily labelled ‘rape’. What we would now call sexual violence was widely apparent but rarely named as such, and not necessarily socially condemned. This is exemplified in writing aimed at Black audiences across the apartheid period. The popular magazine DRUM routinely discussed the ‘violent advances’ young men had to ‘resort to’ to get women to ‘love them’. In one 1957 cover story, the magazine discussed ‘thugs’ who ‘make love by force . . . intimidate women, twist their arms and abduct them from home’. The article wrote that being ‘forced into love’ ‘at the point of a gun or knife’ was now the norm for young township women as boys had ‘thrown overboard all the art and all the finesse in love-making’. The article never labels such behaviour ‘rape’. The closest it comes is referring to it as ‘indelicate human intercourse’.⁴² Such disarming discourse was used by others too. In her 1959 anthropological study of African women living in Johannesburg, Laura Longmore wrote how men would force women ‘to love-making against their will, as they [the women] know the tsotsis [gangsters] will assault them if they don’t agree to their suggestions’, clearly not conceptualizing such ‘forced love’ as ‘assault’.⁴³ Many commentators tended to portray ‘force’ or violence as inevitable in young people’s relationships, not something worth addressing. As Can Themba, the famous Sophiatown author, nonchalantly wrote in 1964, ‘all township love-making is rough’.⁴⁴

It is difficult to know how women in the past who experienced such violence themselves conceptualized it. To do so, we must first explore what were considered ‘acceptable’ heterosexual relations.⁴⁵ Previous research on South Africa demonstrates that there has long been (and often still is) a spectrum of coerced sex that is often not understood as rape, by men and many women too. A certain degree of ‘force’ has historically been seen as acceptable when establishing intimate relationships. Observing people in Pondoland in the 1930s, the anthropologist Monica Hunter wrote of how ‘boys twist girls’ necks to make them love them’.⁴⁶ Studies of township love in the 1950s and 1960s demonstrate the ubiquitous use of intimidation in courtship, with urban masculinities predicated on violence and control promoting the ‘endless and often violent harassment of women by men’.⁴⁷ Recent anthropological research highlights the resilience of beliefs that certain degrees of force and resistance are required when a young man courts a young woman, and how much forced sex within relationships is not conceptualized as ‘rape’.⁴⁸ This is not to argue that violence or coercion is an inherent element of a static South African ‘culture’; on the contrary, social histories demonstrate how such behaviours largely emerged in response to changes wrought by Christianity, colonialism, the migrant labour system and the resulting disintegration of social systems and cultural codes previously relied upon to regulate sex and relationships.⁴⁹

Interviewees’ own understandings of sexual violence were probably shaped by both this social tolerance of coercion and apartheid-era public discourse which neutralized rape. When discussing the past, many avoided using the term ‘rape’ or colloquial terms in their own languages derived from it, such as raipile, raipiwa, and ratsilwe. Instead, most preferred the same language of ‘force’ employed in the sources discussed above to speak about various forms of coerced dating, marriage and sex, using the isiZulu phrase nge nkani [by force].⁵⁰ Asked how boys used to treat girls, one Khulumani interviewee responded, ‘They used to beat us. They would date us by force’.⁵¹ Similarly, another woman recalled that she ‘didn’t hear about rape a lot’ during apartheid and saw it largely as a contemporary problem. Yet when asked how boys used to treat girls she said, ‘at that time boys mistreated us and wanted to date us by force’.⁵² Another interviewee reflected on the language used to describe such behaviour. When asked if rape was prevalent when she was growing up in Thokoza she initially said, ‘No, it wasn’t, and if you heard about rape, it was rare and it was shocking’ — using a vernacular version of the English word ‘rape’. But she then added, ‘But you might find that it was a lot more than we thought, because boys would force you to date them, which means it [rape] was there at that time’.⁵³

In speaking about their own historical victimization, most women avoided the term ‘rape’, euphemizing their experiences instead. One Khulumani woman spoke of how, at only fourteen years old when migrating to Johannesburg from the Eastern Cape, men ‘were using me’, ‘slept with me’ and ‘forced me to be a woman as a child’. Later in her interview, Makena asked her if she understood what rape was at that time. She responded, ‘no, I wouldn’t say I knew that I was being raped or abused, because I was working for a plate of food . . . You see, now that I hear about what rape is, it takes me back to what used to happen back then and say, oh, so that was rape!’⁵⁴ When coerced sex occurred between people who knew each other, it was even less likely to be identified by women as ‘rape’. Another interviewee disclosed how, as a young teenager, her boyfriend ‘dragged me and beat me up and took me to his house . . . and he locked the doors. And he said to me “we are sleeping together now” ’. Again, Makena asked her if she understood what was happening when the boy ‘took you by force [nge nkani]’, to which she only responded, ‘I was not aware that I could get pregnant’.⁵⁵ Only one interviewee used ‘rape’ (and its colloquial form raipiwa) in reference to her own historic violation, discussing the rapes she experienced first by a stranger when 13 years old and again by her sister’s boyfriend a couple years later. But she did not perceive the second incident, perpetrated by someone known to her, as rape at the time. ‘That was a second rape for me, I just didn’t realize’, she explained. ‘Back then men were taking advantage of women and women were not allowed to say no’.⁵⁶

As might be expected, most women who spoke of non-consensual sex within their own marriages labelled this as ‘force’ rather than ‘rape’, describing how their husbands would ‘sleep’ with them ‘by force’ or when they ‘didn’t want to’. Marital rape was not criminalized in South Africa until 1993, and still today many in the country have difficulty perceiving forced sex within marriage as rape.⁵⁷ In one of her first interviews, Makena asked an isiZulu-speaking interviewee how rife ‘rape’ was when she was growing up. The woman responded that she hadn’t heard a lot about ‘rape’. Our interlocutor at Khulumani then rephrased the question, asking if girls were forced into marriages. An exchange about ‘force’ followed, in which the woman explained how when a young man liked a young woman, he would often sleep with her by force. But this was not ‘rape’, she insisted, so long as he paid lobola and married her. She strictly differentiated this from sexual violence today, explaining, ‘It was not like today where boys kidnap, rape and kill girls’.⁵⁸ A similar account was provided by a woman interviewed by the feminist academic Diana Russell in the late 1980s who, in explaining the Eastern Cape practice of ukuthwala, described how young women would be kidnapped for marriage and forced to have sex with their new husbands, often with their own family’s consent. But ‘we don’t call it rape’, she insisted, so long as lobola has been paid.⁵⁹

Interviewees largely reserved the English word ‘rape’ or their colloquial adaptations of it to discuss sexual violence perpetrated during the political violence of the 1990s or in the years since. This suggests that for many of these older women, ‘rape’ is a term that refers specifically to contemporary acts of non-consensual sex, despite their longer histories. In her work on Northern Uganda, Holly Porter similarly found that interviewees talked about ‘rape’ as a new problem that did not exist in the past, but in doing so they were speaking specifically about new conceptualizations of rape brought to the area by war, NGOs and media discourse about gender-based violence. Both groups of women thus had experiences of the physical act of rape but not necessarily the language to label it; ‘they were forced to have sex but “rape” was not there’.⁶⁰ We can understand this in part by examining how conceptualizations of rape have changed since apartheid in South Africa, as this article does in its final section.

What is important to analyse here is how women’s understandings of rape were influenced by historical discourse that normalized rape as quotidian and worked against its explicit naming as violence. During apartheid, sexual violence was often only labelled as ‘rape’ when the act breached a clear social barrier: most often race, but also generation or class. Forced sex perpetrated within Black township communities, between peers, was often not identified as ‘rape’. Gqola highlights how colonial constructions of race and gender fostered stereotypes of Black women as ‘impossible to rape’ which she explains ‘does not mean making them safe against rape. It means quite the opposite: that Black women are safe to rape, that raping them does not count as harm and is therefore permissible’.⁶¹ The fact that so much violence against Black women during apartheid was never labelled as rape demonstrates how, across the twentieth century, these stereotypes continued to dictate what was counted as ‘rape’ and who was injured by it. Such violence was then neutralized into a discourse of ‘force’, shared by men and women alike.⁶² The harm done through this refusal to name was summarized by a 60-year-old interviewee from Soweto who, in contrast to other women, recognized the existence of past sexual violence. As she explained, ‘In the olden days, this gender-based violence was there. But it had no name, because no one cared about it’.⁶³

III sexual violence and dominant historical narratives

Oral histories of sexual violence are also shaped by dominant narratives of the past. As Alistair Thomson argues, ‘The apparently private process of composing safe memories is in fact very public. Our memories are risky and painful if they do not conform with the public norms or versions of the past’.⁶⁴ In remembering (or unremembering) sexual violence, interviewees’ life histories were influenced by three intersecting dominant narratives: master narratives of South Africa’s recent history which privilege apartheid over other forms of oppression; local narratives of the political violence that devastated Thokoza and Katlehong in the early 1990s which posit the state or ‘third force’ as the primary aggressor and township residents as victims; and, for women belonging to Khulumani, political narratives used to pursue claims for reparations for apartheid-era human rights abuses. Together, these narratives work to obscure historic sexual violence that does not easily fit within them, contributing to views that there ‘was no rape’ during apartheid.

In South Africa, creating a new, shared history has been essential to post-apartheid nation-building. Yet the dominant narrative that has emerged in this process is not neutral but legitimizes the ongoing hegemony of the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC). This narrative sees the struggle against apartheid as the predominant event in recent history, with ANC activists as clear protagonists and the apartheid state as adversaries. The problem with this narrative is not that it is false, but that it is too simple, blinding us to historical complexities and ambiguities.⁶⁵ Within it, sexual violence is predominantly spoken about as something perpetrated by apartheid agents — police, prison guards and interrogators — against female anti-apartheid activists. On the other hand, the ANC has largely maintained a culture of silence around its members’ own involvement in such violence.⁶⁶ Within the master narrative, struggle activists cannot be viewed as the enemy and thus not as rapists either.⁶⁷

The influence of this master narrative was particularly clear in interviews with women from Khulumani who, due to the nature of Khulumani’s work, are invested in unveiling stories of apartheid’s oppression. For them, the apartheid state was the dominant, and sometimes only, oppressive force in Black women’s lives. When it came to sexual violence, this meant that there was often little room for them to acknowledge historic victimization beyond that perpetrated by the apartheid state. This is not a new issue; during apartheid, Black women could not easily speak out about violence perpetrated against them by Black men without being seen as divisive and undermining to the liberation movement.⁶⁸ Khulumani interviewees seemed to believe that talking about suffering beyond that directly inflicted by apartheid would distract or detract from the primary stories they wanted to tell. Some who argued that there ‘was no rape’ during apartheid established a binary in their narratives: there was no sexual violence because there was apartheid. Their oppression by the apartheid state was so paramount that it precluded oppression by men from within their communities. As one woman said of apartheid-era sexual violence, ‘It was not a normal thing, it was just oppression of Black people. Black men at that time were not abusing women, we were being abused by white men’.⁶⁹ Similarly, another woman insisted, ‘there were not criminals that raped people and killed them then . . . The only abuse we faced was the oppression’.⁷⁰

We can see the influence of dominant histories particularly clearly if we explore local narratives of political violence in Thokoza and Katlehong from 1990 to 1994, and political narratives about this violence used in the pursuit of reparations by Khulumani. This period prior to the country’s first democratic elections was the most violent in apartheid history, as multiple groups vied for power. In East Rand townships, the conflict was complex. While the primary dividing line saw Zulu hostel dwellers aligned to the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) pitted against ANC supporters and township residents, much of the violence was also perpetrated or exacerbated by the overt and covert involvement of multiple apartheid security forces and capitalized on by local gangs and criminals. The National Party, ANC and IFP all jostled for power and used violence to enhance their position. However, a dominant, ANC-sponsored narrative of the war emerged at the time and has maintained primacy since, which casts the ANC and township residents as victims and the IFP and state security forces as perpetrators.⁷¹ All of our interviewees lived in East Rand townships during this conflict and were deeply affected by it. They endured attacks on their homes by various enemy groups, were forced to flee, lost children, husbands or siblings, or were themselves shot, beaten or raped. There is evidence that sexual violence was used by all sides: local Self-Defence Units (SDUs) affiliated to the ANC; IFP-aligned hostel dwellers; soldiers sent in by the state to quell the violence; and local gangs.⁷² In comparison with their denial of rape in earlier historical periods, women identified the conflict as a period suffuse with sexual violence, unequivocally labelling forced sex within this context as ‘rape’.

Yet within dominant narratives of this violence, and particularly within Khulumani’s reparations pursuits, a collective memory of sexual violence has emerged which casts ‘soldiers’ or ‘Afrikaners’ as the sole perpetrators of rape. Responding to questions about who rapists were, interviewees spoke exclusively of these two groups. This was the case across all Khulumani interviewees, regardless of their ethnicity, political allegiances at the time, or whether they lived in the township or in hostels during the violence. When talking about rapists as ‘soldiers’, interviewees spoke predominantly of the 32 Battalion — a unit mostly made up of Angolan soldiers who had previously fought in South Africa’s Border War, who were deployed by the state as a counter-insurgency team in the East Rand townships. During a violent raid in April 1992 on Phola Park, a squatter camp in Thokoza, members of the battalion assaulted and raped multiple women, thereafter gaining a reputation for their brutality.⁷³ When discussing ‘Afrikaners’, women rarely specified who they were talking about, instead speaking vaguely of white police or soldiers deployed in the township as a cohesive, predatory group. ‘Women were raped. We were raped by these Afrikaners’, one woman recalled.⁷⁴ While there is substantial evidence of white men in positions of power perpetrating sexual violence against Black women across the apartheid period, there are limited records of this during the political violence in Thokoza and Katlehong.⁷⁵ Yet when asked who the primary perpetrators of sexual violence were, many women explained ‘it was mostly Afrikaners’. Even the 32 Battalion were seen as committing rape on behalf of the ‘Afrikaners’. Demonstrating how white men have been collectively mythologized as rapists in the conflict, one interviewee stated, ‘We were afraid that the Afrikaners will rape us’, referring to the 1990s violence. When asked why she was afraid of this, she continued, ‘We always heard people saying, “Run away, the Afrikaners are coming and they will rape you!” but I never saw it’.⁷⁶

The other dominant narrative about rape told by Khulumani interviewees was that rape began, or was first introduced to their communities, during the conflict. As one woman plainly put it, ‘rape started during the conflict’.⁷⁷ Another woman described rape as ‘the thing that came with these white people’, casting it as a foreign import anti-ethical to township communities that was only learned and adopted by locals after the war. When asked if rape is still a problem now, she reiterated, ‘No, there’s no longer any white people coming here, the only rape we hear about is perpetrated by a few evil people but it’s better than what the white people did, because when we were growing up we never heard about rape’.⁷⁸ Likewise, another woman stated that sexual violence did not locally exist before the 1990s conflict — indeed, she had never heard of it — until the ‘short soldiers’ [32 Battalion] were sent in by the government and started raping women.⁷⁹

Such memories contradict the more private and individual disclosures made by many women. Khulumani interviewees disclosed thirteen personal experiences of rape or attempted rape (according to present legal definitions), plus an additional six rapes perpetrated against their immediate family members. Of these nineteen incidents, two were perpetrated by 32 Battalion soldiers and none by ‘Afrikaners’. Three further rapes occurred within the political violence of the 1990s: one by a known gang; another by an unidentified group of young men; and the last by hostel dwellers. The rest occurred before the war, perpetrated by strangers, gangs, partners, teachers and family members. Yet when speaking generally about the past, ‘rapists’ were almost exclusively cast as either ‘soldiers’ or ‘Afrikaners’. In elucidating this, the aim is not to contest the realities of rape during the violence of the 1990s, but instead to explore the political narratives that have shaped collective memories of sexual violence.⁸⁰

These collective narratives about rape, which silence prior sexual violence or that not perpetrated by government agents, have emerged and endured amongst these women for numerous reasons. First, they locate sexual violence within existing, dominant histories, both ANC-sponsored accounts of transition-era violence and the wider master narrative of South African history, by portraying the apartheid state as the sole perpetrators or orchestrators of such violence while minimizing that perpetrated by others. These accounts of rape support rather than detract from stories of apartheid’s brutality. Furthermore, they fit within existing knowledge about wartime rape, both in South Africa and globally. The ANC drew attention to the 32 Battalion’s attacks on women during the war as a means of exposing and critiquing the state’s involvement in the violence.⁸¹ South Africa’s transition era also occurred simultaneously with conflicts in Rwanda and former Yugoslavia that witnessed high rates of sexual violence and led to new, internationally-shared understandings of rape as a weapon of war. This means that when women speak of wartime rape cases, they are testifying to something nationally and globally recognized and condemned. However, the global recognition of wartime rape has led to a universalizing that makes speaking about sexual violence beyond the clear categories of soldier/perpetrator and civilian/victim difficult, facilitating an unremembering of rape that does not meet such specifications.⁸²

Second, these narratives of sexual violence fit within and bolster Khulumani’s political narrative developed in their decades-long quest for apartheid reparations. Today, Khulumani sees the work of South Africa’s TRC as ‘unfinished’, and continues to call on the government to pay further reparations to all those who suffered human rights violations during apartheid, not just those who formally participated as ‘victims’ at the Commission. In defining ‘gross human rights violations’, the TRC did not include a special category for rape or sexual violence; instead, such violence was subsumed under the category ‘severe ill treatment’. For rape to be considered under the TRC’s mandate, it had to be perpetrated with a clear political motive. Yet both the Amnesty and Human Rights Violations Committees struggled to perceive rape’s political intent, seeing it largely as a personal issue.⁸³ Over the past three decades, Khulumani has sought to help South Africans share their experiences of apartheid-era human rights violations, including rape. It has then used these testimonies to lobby the state to reopen the TRC’s reparations claims and provide payments to a wider cohort of victims. In the process, narratives of apartheid victimization, including rape by apartheid agents, have become a political currency. This is not to argue that women’s narratives are in any way false, but rather that accounts of sexual violence as a clearly political crime have more expediency to the group and have thus become more readily inscribed into collective memory than those from other contexts or perpetrated by community members.

Khulumani members interviewed for this project were engaged with the organization to varying degrees; some are regular participants in its latest protests while others appeared to be only peripherally involved.⁸⁴ Yet the influence of Khulumani’s reparations pursuit was clearly imprinted on most women’s narratives. In testifying to rape as something only perpetrated by ‘soldiers’ or ‘Afrikaners’, and as something that only historically took place within the 1990s conflict, they are identifying rape as an explicitly politically motivated human rights abuse, and thus something worthy of reparations. There is evidence to suggest that Khulumani encourages its female members to tell such rape narratives in interviews. Whilst discussing the war, Makena asked one interviewee, ‘did women get raped at that time?’ ‘No’, she responded, ‘women were not raped’. Then Khulumani’s national organizer interjected: ‘Those soldiers, what did they do to people? . . . I mean to those women that were raped?’ ‘Oh!’ the interviewee added, ‘that’s when women were attacked in their houses and raped’.⁸⁵ It appears that women in the group thus face what James Mark calls an ‘obligation to narrate’ sexual violence in pursuit of the organization’s political goals.⁸⁶

Last, these collective histories of sexual violence render intra-community sexual violence invisible and create a myth of community cohesion during apartheid — another key facet of the South African master narrative.⁸⁷ Interviewees clearly cast rapists as outsiders — either foreign, 32 Battalion soldiers or white Afrikaners. The foreignness of the 32 Battalion was often emphasised in their accounts, which described them as the ‘short dark guys’ with ‘very dark skin’ who ‘couldn’t speak Zulu properly’ or respond when greeted with sanibonani [hello] in the street.⁸⁸ ‘Afrikaners’, on the other hand, were often described as white men who had ‘their faces painted black’ or ‘covered in black polish’ to disguise themselves as locals. This is a common trope applied to other aspects of the 1990s political violence, most notably a massacre in the township of Boipatong in 1992.⁸⁹ While such accounts are thus not exclusive to Khulumani members, the linking of white men in disguise to sexual violence, rather than general political violence, is, to my knowledge, particular to this group of interviewees. When asked why she thought such men were the primary perpetrators of rape, one woman responded, ‘South African men won’t rape you and put bottles in your private parts, so we knew that was the white Afrikaners that did that to us’.⁹⁰ Jelke Boesten argues that while seeing rape as a weapon of war can be beneficial in uncovering the political dimensions of sexual violence and highlighting women’s victimization, it can also obscure rape perpetrated by neighbours or family members rather than soldiers from an opposing camp.⁹¹ Interviewees’ characterizations of rapists as outsiders draws a clear moral line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in what was, in reality, an ethically murky war. By insisting that alleged Black perpetrators were actually white men in disguise, women proactively refute any suggestions that men from their communities also perpetrated sexual violence, protecting the reputations of their communities as a whole. They also avoid being accused of sowing divisions within their communities for revealing rape perpetrated by Black men, as Black women who speak out against intra-communal rape often are.⁹²

IV the past and the present

Just as dominant narratives about the past shape women’s memories of sexual violence, so too do popular ideas about rape in the present. Sexual violence in South Africa today occupies a very different place in public discourse and in the country’s political hierarchy of issues than it did during apartheid. ‘Rape’, both the physical act and English term for it, has become more readily sayable than in the past. This is not to say that individual acts of violence are easy to disclose, but rather that sexual violence holds a more prominent place in public discourse and debate and is more readily labelled as ‘rape’. It is something regularly discussed by the country’s media, politicians and public, and something for which South Africa has become globally notorious. Posel traces how rape was reconstituted as an issue of social and political concern in the late 1990s and early 2000s, following its silencing and marginalization during apartheid. No longer subordinated to the liberation struggle, sexual violence rose ‘to the epicentre of a political furore’ which has largely persisted to the present, albeit in waves of public indignation and apathy.⁹³ Public concern was further spurred by rising panic about South Africa’s HIV/AIDS epidemic, and a global shift in understandings of rape from a personal and largely private problem to a human rights abuse and key matter of international security.

The sudden emergence of rape as a publicly acknowledged problem in South Africa was both reflected in and precipitated by official statistics, which demonstrated an unprecedented surge in reported rape cases across the 1990s: 20,281 cases in 1990; 36,888 in 1995; and 49,280 by 1998.⁹⁴ However, as Gqola and Graham highlight, these numbers likely arose from an upsurge in the reporting of rape driven by the country’s new political dispensation post-1994 and increased public attention to sexual violence, rather than from a marked increase in violence itself.⁹⁵ They also reflect broadened understandings about what counts as rape and who can be labelled a rapist, driven by legal and social change.⁹⁶

The East Rand townships of Thokoza and Katlehong, incorporated after apartheid into the new metropolitan municipality of Ekurhuleni, witnessed these shifts at a local level. In her study of the area, Vanessa Barolsky argues that while domestic and sexual violence were always present in the community, they were ‘masked and minimised’ during the transition era before being ‘radically re-framed’ as a new and pressing problem post-apartheid. Local concerns about rape in the 1990s and 2000s were furthered by fears that the trauma and disruption of political violence had exacerbated sexual violence, and by Ekurhuleni’s worrying HIV prevalence rate of over 30 per cent by the 2000s.⁹⁷ These shifts have led to a widespread understanding of rape, at least on the scale witnessed today, as a post-apartheid problem, something ‘radically disjointed from the past’.⁹⁸ With rape framed as a contemporary ‘crisis’, its longer histories have been subject to historical amnesia, contributing to interviewees’ beliefs that there ‘was no rape’ during apartheid. As one Khulumani interviewee summarized, ‘I am only hearing about sexual abuse nowadays, where I hear that a man raped some woman. We didn’t go through that, we used to walk around with no panties on and playing with boys. But we were not raped’.⁹⁹ Similarly, speaking about her high school years in the 1960s, another woman recalled, ‘It was really nice and we used to play everywhere and there was no rape . . . Our problem started in 1994 when this democracy came . . . Children are being raped, elderly women are being raped. We are always in our houses locked because we are living in fear’.¹⁰⁰

Within this ‘crisis’ framework, rape in South Africa today is incessantly represented as getting worse: more profuse, violent and brazen. This led many women across both groups of interviewees to see sexual violence in the present as distinct from that in the past. Even those who recognised its historic forms described these as ‘not like today’, identifying certain types of rape (against children; against old women; rape-femicide) as new. As one Khulumani interviewee said of apartheid, ‘people were raped if they went to the bushes alone . . . but they were not killed. But with you guys [speaking to Makena], it’s worse because your boyfriend can rape you and then strangle you and put you in a fridge or a suitcase’.¹⁰¹ Within this linear narrative of ever-worsening violence, the past is presumed to have been better than the present, encouraging interviewees’ beliefs that ‘there was no such thing as rape’ during apartheid.

However, this view is not unique to the post-apartheid period, nor to these interviewees; it is a belief that has been repeatedly expressed by commentators across the later twentieth century. When interviewed in the 1980s about growing up in Soweto, Susan Shabangu, a post-apartheid cabinet minister, spoke about how she was routinely chased and harassed by boys as a teenager in the 1970s, but then reflected,

But when you look at and compare our situation to today’s situation, it’s worse because at least in our situation, even if they might have got hold of you, sometimes you manage to survive and you can cry and old people would come to your rescue. But today it’s no longer the same. Young girls are being kidnapped and all terrible things are happening to them.¹⁰²

Speaking to Diana Russell in the 1990s, Mary Mabaso — the organizer of Soweto’s first anti-rape march — likewise recollected, ‘In the olden days if the man or the boy loved a girl he had to talk to her. And if the girl didn’t love him, he could not risk raping her. But nowadays, if a boy proposes to the girl and she doesn’t agree to the proposal, he often rapes her’.¹⁰³

In the post-apartheid period, this understanding of rape as ever-worsening has been accompanied by what Posel identifies as a broadening in how rapists are collectively conceptualized, from exclusively predatory strangers to include fathers and other family members.¹⁰⁴ The influence of this on interviewees was clear. As one woman summarized, ‘Back then you wouldn’t hear stories about an uncle raping a niece, it was these guys that like standing by the corners [on streets] that raped people . . . It’s worse now because you don’t even trust to leave your uncle with your own child’.¹⁰⁵ As another interviewee stated, ‘There was not a lot of rape before. Many things you see today were not there, like fathers raping children’.¹⁰⁶

The historical erasure of sexual violence was often twinned with significant nostalgia for the past, as interviewees longed for an idyllic time before South Africa’s current rape ‘crisis’. One story, told so frequently it appeared to be a cultural or generational script, was that, in ‘their days’, girls would be around boys or older men in various forms of undress — swimming, bathing or wearing traditional clothing — and ‘nothing would happen’. Such stories were used as evidence of rape’s past nonexistence. ‘It was not the same as today’, explained one interviewee. ‘You can’t go out now wearing traditional attire for girls which is short. In our time, we used to walk around with our asses hanging out and nothing ever happened to us but today you will get raped because of that’.¹⁰⁷ Another woman likewise commented,

You see, back then life was nice because as girls we loved walking around everywhere. And when it was raining, we will just be left with our panties and boys in their underwear and we will be playing in the rain. Nowadays you can’t do that . . . because times are bad and there is a lot of rape going on.¹⁰⁸

Such memories often led to broader statements of nostalgia. She continued, ‘There was no rape and this thing of neighbours hating neighbours was not there . . . We got along well back in the days, but now it’s bad’. Lamenting how today’s rapists go unpunished, another woman declared, ‘Yes, we hate apartheid because it was evil, but it got some things right’.¹⁰⁹

In making such statements, women often blamed today’s rape rates on generational change and a lack of respect amongst youth. One Thokoza interviewee expressed that ‘women abuse’ did not happen when she was young because ‘we were raised well, not what is happening today’.¹¹⁰ When interviewing two Thokoza women together, Makena asked what their lives were like growing up as girls. One woman responded, ‘It was nice, we didn’t have this rape problem we are seeing now’, then the other furthered, ‘The whole thing of being raped by your own uncle was not there back then. It was nice in the 70s but . . . after we got freedom, things got bad, and now we hear that children have rights and so you can’t discipline them’.¹¹¹ Other women located the change in men’s behaviour. Despite disclosing two stories about her own experiences of attempted rape during apartheid, one woman framed sexual violence as a post-apartheid problem, saying ‘it was not something that happened a lot’ in the past. But ‘during the time of the violence and now after democracy, they [men] don’t care, they even rape old women . . . They don’t respect women like before where men had pride in themselves’.¹¹² Others identified a shift in community responses. As one Khulumani interviewee stated, ‘back then’ the community would come together if someone was raped but now ‘people don’t care’; ‘the generation today doesn’t feel pain for each other like the older generation’.¹¹³ Yet such statements contradict other historical evidence provided by interviewees or by wider literature: of how these women themselves flouted parental control and engaged in youthful indiscretions; how rape victims often received little community support or sympathy; or how sexual violence has been accredited to a breakdown in generational respect in South Africa since at least the 1950s.¹¹⁴

Interviewees’ longing for the past sits glaringly at odds with their memories of apartheid’s brutality and the poverty, insecurity and violence it inflicted. How then should we understand such nostalgia? Having encountered similar sentiments in their work, the historians Jacob Dlamini and Sean Field posit that nostalgia ‘is not to yearn for the depravity visited on South Africa’ by the apartheid state but is ‘about present anxieties refracted through the prism of the past’, or ‘a comforting discourse with which the uncertain present and future can be understood and faced’.¹¹⁵ In other contexts, scholars have found that women similarly romanticize the past as a time before rape, using nostalgia to express ‘how things ought to be’ or to externalize their ‘ongoing painful fears about violence’ and find comfort in the present.¹¹⁶ South African women’s longing for a past believed to be without sexual violence reflects overlapping present worries and grievances: perceived generational change and youth disrespect; rising rates of crime, rape, and alcohol and drug addiction; and anger with the post-apartheid government for the lack of economic or social progress in their lives. Denying the past existence of rape helps them to cope with uncertainty and change, and to forge an idyllic image of how life was before things went so wrong, constructing their contemporary grievances as brief aberrations rather than long-term trends.

V conclusion

Despite significant evidence of the widespread perpetration of rape across South Africa’s racial and class divides during apartheid, older Black women living in Thokoza and Katlehong predominantly characterized the apartheid past as a period without or before ‘rape’. In analysing such statements, this article has argued that much rape perpetrated during apartheid, particularly within Black communities, has been subject to a collective unremembering in South Africa. Returning to Stoler’s concept of ‘aphasia’, we can see how certain conditions — both historical and contemporary — work together to occlude much historic sexual violence from collective memories of the apartheid period. As Nancy Rose Hunt notes in her appraisal of Stoler’s work, ‘aphasia is found among subjects distancing themselves from difficult histories and vexed presents’.¹¹⁷ In saying that there was no rape during apartheid, women are thus making multiple statements. They are saying that rape as a sayable, nameable problem in many ways did not exist in the past because of its active silencing and the refusal to identify acts of sexual violence as ‘rape’. They are speaking to dominant, politicized narratives of the past which subordinate histories of gender oppression to histories of racial oppression, and attribute sexual violence to the apartheid state. And they are using nostalgic images of a past without sexual violence for explanations and comfort in a disappointing and often dangerous present.

These conclusions are drawn from the analysis of a particular set of oral history interviews conducted with older women from Thokoza and Katlehong. As with all oral histories, these women’s positionalities, as well as those of the researchers, shape what they recollected and why. Their narratives are particular to their personal experiences of living through the political violence that devastated Thokoza and Katlehong in the early 1990s, to the relationships they forged with me as a foreign researcher and Makena as a local one, and, for Khulumani members, to their ongoing pursuit of reparations. These subjectivities lead them to remember historic sexual violence in particular ways. However, the unremembering of rape that this article highlights is not unique to these women. It is part of a wider occlusion at work in South Africa, which shields from collective memory much sexual violence in the past beyond that perpetrated by agents of colonialism or apartheid. Moreover, we can see similar unremembering at work in other contexts where memories of sexual violence have become politicized, or where current concerns about rape foster idealized visions of a past without it.

Footnotes