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We must dismantle South Africa’s female fear factory, brick by brick

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Professor Tinyiko Maluleke is Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the Tshwane University of Technology.

The point of the female fear factory is to ensure that gender-based violence is incubated and nurtured long before the actual maiming and the actual murdering, mutating from the verbal to the psychological before going physical.

Some years ago, as an associate professor at University of KwaZulu-Natal, I went to the cinema in Pietermaritzburg. It was dark when the film ended. Walking through the corridors towards the parking lot, I noticed a woman in front of me. She looked nervously at me over her shoulder. I walked faster towards her, hoping to reassure her that I meant no harm.

The faster I walked towards her, the faster she walked away from me. Eventually, she broke into an open sprint. And while half-walking and half-running, I shouted: “Please don’t run away! I am a professor, I mean no harm.” But the more I shouted, the faster the woman ran away from me.

Though I personally meant no harm, the woman did the right thing to distrust, fear and run away from me. Woman beaters, rapists and woman killers do not come with labels written on their foreheads. I may not have considered myself a perpetrator of violence against women, but in some ways, I am a beneficiary of partriarchy, conscious or unconscious, willing or unwilling.

The sick ties that bind South Africans

The South African crimes of men against women — recently referred to as “the GBV pandemic” — may not be explained away by making reference to a few good men who do not engage in such acts. Nor are these crimes of men limited to a particular race, religion, ethnicity or class. The perpetrators are white, black, rich and poor. 

Perhaps the ties that bind South Africans are not the national flag, which Minister Nathi Mthethwa wishes to turn into an extravagant monument; not the Constitution, on the occasion of whose adoption then President Thabo Mbeki delivered his lyrical “I am an African” speech; and certainly not the national anthem, which has since been “decolonised” by the Fallists.

The sick and codependent ties that bind South Africans are those of gender-based violence — a scourge that is not limited by time or space. There is GBV in Slovo Park, Ivory Park, Olijvenhout Bosch and in Bram Fischer. There is GBV in the seemingly serene and gated communities of Kyalami, Mooifontein, Steyn City and Camps Bay. GBV lurks in the home, on the shop floor, in public transport facilities, in schools and in universities.

We dare not betray the dreams of Ngoyi and her sisters

Sixty-six years since the march of 20,000 women on the tower of apartheid power, the Union Buildings, we have to try harder to understand the sociology, the psychology and the spirituality of South African gender-based violence.

We owe it to pioneering trade unionists Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Rahima Moosa and Sophie de Bruin. We owe it to the women who poured into Pretoria, from big cities, towns, townships and from far-flung villages on that fateful Thursday, 9 August 1956.

Resplendent in the colourful apparels reflecting traditional, church, work and stokvel uniforms, the women stood tall at the entrance of Herbert Baker’s architectural behemoth, carrying placards that read: “Passes mean destitute children” and “With passes, we are slaves”.

They sang militant songs and shouted revolutionary slogans. After they had listened to the stirring speech of Ngoyi (the text of which has been lost) and after they had delivered their petition to the authorities, at the instruction of Ngoyi, the women fell into silence for nearly 30 minutes. Such Mahatma Ghandi-like protest discipline was as difficult to pull off then as it is now.

We dare not betray the dreams of Ngoyi and her sisters.

Dismantling the female fear factory

And yet today, South African women are under the siege of what Pumla Dineo Gqola, in her award-winning book Rape: A South African Nightmare, calls, “the female fear factory” — a “factory” whose role is the constant manufacturing of fear, especially among females.

As a country in which women must and do live in morbid fear, a country where women get killed by the thousands, South Africa is becoming the ultimate embodiment of the “female fear factory” of which Gqola wrote only metaphorically.

Read more in Daily Maverick: “Framing gender-based violence as a ‘crisis’ merely bandages a festering societal wound

I would venture to suggest that all our key institutions — including government, schools and universities — are cogs in the production line of the fear factory. But this scenario is not ordained by the gods, it can be changed.

The point of the female fear factory is to ensure that gender-based violence is incubated and nurtured long before the maiming and the murdering, mutating from the verbal to the psychological before going physical.

By the time bones are broken, skulls are cracked and necks are slashed, the female victims have long been immersed in the terror of the female fear factory. And long after the blood and the gore have dried, long after the screams that pierced the night, the violence and the trauma continues in the minds of victims and witnesses.

We misunderstand gender-based violence when we only begin to track it at the ambulance and police station stage. If we are ever to make headway in our efforts to stem the tide of gender-based violence, we will need to understand the nature and the logic of the female fear factory across all key social structures of society. It is at that level that the “war” against gender-based violence must be waged.

The female fear factory encompasses the policies, structures and practices of government institutions, schools and universities. In these and other key institutions, fear is constantly being produced and reproduced. In these institutions, women are prepared to serve and to die, while men are trained to rule and to kill — spirits and bodies alike.

Schools and universities need to probe how they may be contributing to the female fear factory through disempowering curricula, injurious pedagogies, exclusionary institutional cultures and practices as well as exploitative and violent research methodologies.

But more than understand the female fear factory, we need to disrupt it — and we need to dismantle it, brick by brick. That work must start yesterday. DM

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Comments - Please in order to comment.

  • Dennis Bailey says:

    Agreed but what needs to happen at the Tshwane University of Technology to promote, model and institutionalise the change you preach? We all know things need to change, how would you change them Professor Tinyiko Maluleke, Vice-Chancellor and Principal?

  • Zarina Rahman says:

    Well said, Prof. It is this paragraph that encapsulates it for me:
    ‘We misunderstand gender-based violence when we only begin to track it at the ambulance and police station stage. If we are ever to make headway in our efforts to stem the tide of gender-based violence, we will need to understand the nature and the logic of the female fear factory across all key social structures of society. It is at that level that the “war” against gender-based violence must be waged.’
    We must move beyond strident voices that address only the resultant violence to understand the underlying conditions that give rise to and support it.

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