Facing the sexual demon of colonial power: 1 Decolonising sexual violence in South Africa

Introduction

In 1877, Cecil John Rhodes, a young student at Oxford, wrote his so-called ‘Confession of Faith’, saying, ‘Africa is still lying ready for us [and] it is our duty to take it … more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race, more of the best, the most human, most honourable race the world possesses’ (quoted in Meredith, 2007: 127–128). He spent the rest of his life trying to place as much as possible of African territory under British control. Claims to racial superiority served routinely as a way to justify the British imperial project in Southern Africa and to distinguish it for the paying British public from mere plunder, conquest, genocide and theft. When in 1885 the British Colonial Office ruled against Rhodes’s land claims in the Bechuanaland territory (effectively forming what is today Botswana), and in favour of the three Tswana chiefs who brought the petition, he fumed:

A large country as big as the British Isles will now be definitely beaconed and dedicated to these people. It will be very difficult in future to alter these reserves. Who are these people? They are only sixty thousand in number and the worst specimens of humanity – certainly in Africa – and perhaps in the whole world. (quoted in Meredith, 2007: 288; emphases added)

These examples illustrate the well-established insight into the role of race and racism in the process of Western colonisation (see especially Quijano, 2008). Race is integral to the systematic inferiorisation of the conquered which supposedly allowed for violent conquest, slavery and subjugation as central elements of European global expansion. The logic was that those naturally (inherently, and biologically) superior should by right rule over those naturally inferior. This construct allowed the colonial conquerors to simultaneously ‘save’ or ‘civilise’ the supposedly inferior groups, even while mercilessly exploiting their lands, labour and sexuality. The importance of the pseudo-biological category of race for the colonial enterprise must therefore be kept firmly in mind when we consider what is at stake in the project of decolonisation.

Having said that, our aim in this article is to make a convincing case for the equal importance of gender/sex ² as a particularly affective pseudo-biological category operative within the racist colonial project. This claim is not new: Maria Lugones argues in response to Quijano that gender is as central to the colonial power project as race (Mendoza, 2016: 102). And yet, this view is much less established, and indeed, in contrast with race, it is curiously widely ignored, neglected, or glossed over in debates about decolonisation, in South Africa, but also globally. ³ Our insistence on the centrality of sexuality to colonial subjugation does not mean to detract in any way from a focus on race, thus colonial sex and race, though distinct, are in no way to be regarded as separate or competing lenses for analysis. Instead, we argue that these two pseudo-biological categories should be understood as deeply intertwined, mutually interdependent and reinforcing, as well as mutually qualifying, within the colonial mind-set. Our claim is thus that neither the logic nor the effects of racial inferiorisation within colonial and postcolonial contexts can be properly grasped without a clear understanding of its gender/sexual dimension. The inverse is also true: expressions of sexual fear and contempt often contain a racialised undertone, and are projected onto the racialised other, which helps to account for their particular sting and social force.

It is our further contention that both the phenomenon of ongoing rampant sexual violence mainly against women and children in the South African post-colony, and the large-scale social and institutional complicity which prevents it from being effectively contained, should be interpreted against this historical background, inclusive of slave history (in this regard, see also Baderoon, 2015). With this article we thus want to frame the problem of sexual violence in South Africa as a central part of the colonial legacy, and as therefore properly a top priority for any decolonisation agenda worth its salt. We develop the claim that racial inferiorisation in the colonial context cannot without distortion and reduction be separated out from the imposition of sexual shame and associated dehumanisation. A crucial dimension of coloniality ⁴ is that its logic continues to shape and structure subjective sexualities and often unconscious drives and desires.

We write from within the theoretical framework of decolonial feminist theory, rather than postcolonial theory. Feminist decolonial scholar Breny Mendoza characterises decolonial theory as the ‘most recent arrival on the anticolonial scene’ (Mendoza, 2016: 111). She explains that decolonial theory differs from postcolonial/subaltern theory in certain crucial ways, including the fact that, unlike the latter, decolonial theorists believe in the subaltern’s ability to subvert colonising discourses (Mendoza, 2016: 112). Moreover, decolonial theorists generally conceptualise colonialism as inseparable from Western modernity, insofar as the freedom of the European depends on the unfreedom of the colonised (Mendoza, 2016: 112–113).

We endorse this larger critical frame, while insisting that what is still lacking in it is a clearer understanding of how sex together with race shapes the ongoing legacy of coloniality.

While different feminist scholars have written about the role of sex/gender in colonialism, in different colonised societies, ⁵ arguably their work has not sufficiently been integrated into mainstream decolonisation discourse. In this article we discuss in broad strokes the work of two theorists, Nigerian sociologist Oyèrónke Oyĕwùmí, and Argentinian philosopher Maria Lugones, who help us in different but complementary ways to flesh out our central claim, namely that the current problem of sexual violence in South Africa cannot be separated out from the sexual dimension of colonial violence. While Oyĕwùmí gives a detailed empirical analysis of the gender dimensions of the British colonisation of the Yorùbá, Lugones in more general, philosophical terms works out the details of the relationship between race and gender in the functioning of colonial power. For this, she draws on the work of many non-Western scholars who argue that gender was a colonial imposition in their societies, Oyĕwùmí among them. Accordingly, Lugones’s theory also flows from, and is explicitly informed by Oyĕwùmí’s theory.

Oyĕwùmí and the colonial invention of women in Yorùbáland

Oyĕwùmí is one of the most famous and controversial figures in sub-Saharan African feminist thought. She appeared on the scene with the publication of her book The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (1997) in which she offers a critique of Western dominance in African knowledge production, focusing specifically on gender relations among the Yorùbá people of Nigeria. Oyĕwùmí shows in detail how the British colonial administration in Yorùbáland, Nigeria, not only posited the superiority of settler over native, but, at the same time, in one seamlessly interwoven bureaucratic system, also of man over woman (Oyĕwùmí, 1997: 121). African women were relegated to the bottom-most rung of this colonial hierarchy (Oyĕwùmí, 1997: 153). She writes:

We can discern two vital and intertwined processes inherent to European colonization of Africa. The first and more thoroughly documented of these processes was the racializing and the attendant inferiorization of Africans as the colonized, the natives. The second process … was the inferiorization of females. These processes were inseparable, and both were embedded in the colonial situation. (Oyĕwùmí, 1997: 152; emphasis added)

In other words, for Oyĕwùmí the process of the inferiorising of the colonised was bound up with the process of enthroning a certain ‘native’ male hegemony. Oyĕwùmí outlines two separate but related processes through which this violent disruption happened and is still happening. The first process, our main concern, was the way in which formal colonial policies, laws and practices embedded in the patriarchal legal and social frameworks of Western society directly entrenched the inferiority of females in the previously more egalitarian Yorùbá society, with lasting effects. The second process is the still ongoing interpretation of Yorùbá society through a Western conceptual framework which assumes the existence of ‘woman’ and her social inferiority – an approach followed by Western and also many African (especially feminist) scholars.

Regarding the first process mentioned above, Oyĕwùmí writes that the creation of ‘woman’ as a category was one of the very first accomplishments of the colonial state (Oyĕwùmí, 1997: 124). She argues that females in precolonial Yorùbá society had multiple identities that were not gendered or linked to their female anatomy (these could for example include farmer, hunter, mother, cook, warrior, ruler ‘all in one body’) (Oyĕwùmí, 1997: 14). However, under colonial rule women were reduced and homogenised into an identifiable legal, social and biological category defined by their anatomy and subordinated to men in all situations (Oyĕwùmí, 1997: 124). In other words, under colonial rule Yorùbá females were ‘categorised as and reduced to “women” ’ (Oyĕwùmí, 1997: 124) in a way that froze them in a singular and clearly demarcated, predetermined and naturalised identity.

‘Women’ were subsequently disqualified from roles and positions that they had previously occupied, like rulers and traders. The colonial wage and taxation systems entrenched men’s power over subjugated women within the degraded category of the colonised or native. Moreover, the Christian education system which targeted the Yorùbá family for reform, focused exclusively on the formal education of men, because the church had a vested interest in producing mothers as purely domestic beings and caregivers who would be the foundation of Christian families (Oyĕwùmí, 1997: 128–130). Christianity, the male dominant religion installed in Yorùbá society through colonialism from the 1840s onwards (and taken as the benchmark of ‘civilisation’), also led to a reinterpretation of the indigenous Yorùbá religious system in a male-biased way (Oyĕwùmí, 1997: 136–142). The previously gender-neutral gods were masculinised and the feminine ones were stripped of their powers (Oyĕwùmí, 1997: 141). In this way, not only the Yorùbá present and future, but also the Yorùbá past, were aligned with the Western patriarchal perspective, in which women are systematically designated as naturally (a-historically and biologically) inferior due to their sexuality construed as the epitome of the abject.

Yet, recall that Yorùbá women were subjugated within the already racially inferiorised ‘native’ category, which means that it is through a combination of sexualised and racialised essentialist marking of their bodies that they were positioned as the abject par excellence of the colonial world. Oyĕwùmí therefore outlines how the creation of colonialism’s most degraded category, ‘native woman’, was paradoxically central to the colonial sexual-racial reordering of all spheres of African indigenous life. Oyĕwùmí argues that a major way in which the creation and subsequent subjection of woman was effected was by excluding females from the newly created colonial public sphere (Oyĕwùmí, 1997: 123) – an ordering fundamentally alien to the precolonial Yorùbá world, as in many other indigenous African societies (Oyĕwùmí, 1997: 123). Oyĕwùmí calls the creation of the gendered public sphere the ‘hallmark and symbol of the colonial process’ (Oyĕwùmí, 1997: 154).

As indicated, Oyĕwùmí argues that the process of distortion of Yorùbá society through the imposition of the colonial gender system is continued or repeated through a second type of process which has to do with regimes of knowledge production. Briefly, she argues that by analysing a society through a framework that assumes the existence of gender categories, one in effect creates such categories in that society (Oyĕwùmí, 1997: xv). Another way in which the gender-free nature of Yorùbá society is continuously erased, ⁶ according to Oyĕwùmí, is through the gendered translations of gender-neutral Yorùbá terms. ⁷ Moreover, Oyĕwùmí effectively accuses Western feminism of sustaining a discourse that assumes the universality of its stances, such as the universality of the category ‘woman’, despite the fact that the concerns and questions that have informed it are distinctly Western (Oyĕwùmí, 1997: 13). ⁸ We do not however have the space to go into this second set of arguments in detail.

Concluding our discussion of Oyĕwùmí for our purposes, we draw attention to the criticisms she has received, as well as the importance of her contribution within the larger debate. Although The Invention of Women won the American Sociological Association’s 1998 Distinguished Book Award in the Gender and Sex category, the praise for Oyĕwùmí’s work seems to be overshadowed by the criticism. Many scholars dispute the empirical veracity of her claims. For example, Nigerian feminist philosophers like Oyèrónké Olajubu (2004) and Amina Mama (2001) simply argue that Oyĕwùmí’s claim that gender was not an organising principle in precolonial Yorùbá society is empirically wrong. ⁹

And yet, in spite of these criticisms of the details of her empirical position, more scholars from different parts of the world have been making the broader point that the dominant heterosexual patriarchal gender construct is a concept that is not indigenous to their cultures and was imposed through Western colonial rule. It is for example argued that before colonisation, all Native American societies acknowledged three to five genders (see Jacobs et al., 1997). Maria Lugones names Silverblatt (1990, 1998), Dean (2001), Pozo and Ledezma (2006), Calla and Laurie (2006), Marcos (2006) and De Ayala (2009) as scholars who show that gender is a colonial imposition in different Central and South American societies. Also many precolonial Asian societies were characterised by a gender pluralism that is not based on a binary division at all (see Wieringa, 2010). The idea that gender as we know it – hierarchically dichotomous, static and essentialist – is a construct of Western colonial modernity, is therefore becoming more commonplace.

As philosophers, we are not in a position to judge the reliability of Oyĕwùmí specific historical claims. ¹⁰ Nevertheless, what she describes does strongly suggest that the colonial-Victorian sexual morality which was forced onto African societies, and used to ‘measure’ the extent of their inhumanity, was deeply alien to the social orders of the indigenous people as these existed at the time.

Thus, whatever the precolonial worlds had looked like, clearly the Western patterns were violently enforced in ways that were extremely and holistically disruptive, and that turned any deviation from the Western sexual norm into a source of embodied racialised-sexualised shame for the colonised (Gqola, 2015: 40). This dual-structured embodied shame formed the core of all constructions of the ‘native’ as lesser beings closer to the animal than the human (see also Mbembe, 2001: 1–2). Mendoza agrees, and claims that ‘the question of whether gender is a colonial construct or an ancestral practice may pose a false dilemma’ (Mendoza, 2016: 118). Whatever the actual historical facts may have been in diverse pre-colonies, she sees ‘the imposition of a European gender system’ as central aspect of the colonising or ‘humanising’ mission (Mendoza, 2016: 118). She regards this imposition as having had ‘profound effects on relations between men and women in the colony’, and argues that the forces unleashed thereby against indigenous women were sufficiently lethal to be considered genocidal (Mendoza, 2016: 118).

Lugones, gender and colonisation

The work of Maria Lugones suggests that Oyĕwùmí’s arguments resonate far beyond the Yorùbá context. As noted above, Lugones reads various authors as confirming the point that the dominant Western ways of doing gender constitute a colonial imposition of hierarchical, exclusionary dichotomies onto radically incompatible indigenous cosmologies, metaphysics and philosophies (Lugones, 2010: 748). Through a critique of decolonial scholar Anibal Quijano’s conception of coloniality of power, Lugones (2007, 2010) develops the notion of coloniality of gender.

Lugones argues against exclusively race-based analyses that certain constructions of sex and gender are central to the colonial production of racial categories. For Lugones the masculine/feminine distinction as a hierarchical opposition served in the colonial encounter as a mark of civilisation so that becoming ‘civilised’ meant internalising this distinction with all its concomitant norms and values. In other words, to be fully human meant to fit clearly and unambiguously into one side of this dichotomy and to act according to its prescriptions, to embody its values. It is in this sense that Oyĕwùmí’s idea of the ‘invention of women’ in Yorùbáland can be more globally contextualised and interpreted. Lugones explains that through colonisation a hierarchical, dichotomous distinction between human and non-human was imposed on the colonised in the service of Western man’s sovereignty (Lugones, 2010: 743). This distinction clearly echoes Oyĕwùmí’s idea of the ‘inferiorisation of Africans as natives’. Explicating further Oyĕwùmí’s insistence on the inseparability of racial and sexual inferiorisation in the colonial situation, Lugones regards this central dichotomous hierarchy of colonial modernity to be most pertinently shaped and enforced through the yardstick of ‘civilised’, i.e. modern Western, practices and expressions of sexuality. Thus the superiority of the settler/coloniser and the inferiority of the native are seen as rooted in the native’s perverse sexuality which in turn is rooted in his flawed, racialised biology. The two pseudo-biological categories of race and sex thus mutually imply and reinforce each other: the racial ‘backwardness’ of the ‘native’ (masculinised) is rooted in his biology as expressed most pertinently in his ‘unruly’ sexual practices. By locating his inferiority in his very body as sexual deprivation epitomised, colonial logic justifies violent external control over the native.

According to Lugones the Western-style distinction between man and woman (the subject and his non-subjective material foil) became the preferred sign for marking the human (in opposition to the non-human) in the colonial encounter (Lugones, 2010: 743). She writes: ‘[o]nly the civilized are men and women. Indigenous peoples of the Americas and enslaved Africans were classified as not human in species – as animals, uncontrollably sexual and wild’ (Lugones, 2010: 743). Aligned with animal sexuality, the uncivilised could be disqualified from full human and full political status. Accordingly, any social order for the organisation of gender which would differ from that of the coloniser would henceforth be labelled scandalous, unnatural, barbaric or animal-like, i.e. sub-human. Thus, Lugones would say, in response to Oyĕwùmí, that both native ‘man’ and native ‘woman’ are colonial inventions, and the very fact that they had to be sometimes violently ‘fabricated’ in the face of an unspeakable precolonial alternative organisation of sex and gender marks ‘the native’ indelibly as that which deserves to be controlled and re-made in a Western image.

But we must push further and look at how the colonial violence structured relations between these newly formed categories of ‘native’. According to Lugones, the Western categories of man and woman have very specific meanings which form the yardstick for being human. The European bourgeois colonial man was regarded to be an active agent, a being of civilisation and reason, whereas the European bourgeois woman was passive, sexually pure, home bound and in the service of the white European bourgeois man. As indicated, this hierarchical dichotomy as a mark of the human became a normative tool to damn the colonised: ‘[t]he behaviors of the colonized and their personalities/souls were judged as bestial and thus non-gendered, promiscuous, grotesquely sexual, and sinful’ (Lugones, 2010: 743). According to this model only white bourgeois women have consistently counted as women as described by the West (Lugones, 2007: 202). Females excluded from the definition of woman were sexually marked as female, but they did not have the characteristics of Western femininity (fragile, weak, secluded in the private and sexually passive), because they were characterised by sexual aggression and perversion and regarded to be strong enough for any kind of labour (Lugones, 2007: 203). We submit that it is because of this double disqualification of native women from the standards and norms of the human, under colonial conditions, that this category takes on the particular (socially abject) meaning that Oyĕwùmí both identifies and decries as a social category non-existent in precolonial society.

Black and/or working class females through their double (racial-sexual) exclusion from humanity and viewed as sexually deviant (and thus justly conquered), became largely unrapeable under colonial rule, with lasting consequences for a place like South Africa (Gqola, 2015: 50). The looming figure of the Black rapist across various colonial contexts is discussed in Ania Loomba (1998), who sees this caricature as created in anxious response to the threat of native rebellion. While Black male sexuality is demonised as bestial and predatory, Black female sexuality is structured as its counterpart, namely as always already raped and therefore unrapeable both in law and in social understanding. These opposing yet complementary constructs of Black sexuality are strikingly borne out in the South African historical context: Sue Armstrong shows that before the abolishment of the death penalty, ‘no white man had been hanged for rape, whereas the only Black men who were hung for rape had been convicted of raping white women; no white man or Black man had been … sentenced to death for raping a Black woman’ (referenced without bibliographic details in Gqola, 2015: 52).

The process of ‘civilising the native’ was therefore not only a racial one, but a deeply both sexual and gendered one. Lugones’s aim is then to reveal how the gender structures which are still in place today, subject both women and men in postcolonial/neo-colonial societies in all domains of existence and that the transformation of gender relations is central to resist and dismantle Western hegemony and to restore, cultivate and develop alternative subjectivities, cultures and traditions in the place of those ravaged and erased by colonialism and Eurocentred capitalism (Lugones, 2007: 189). Indeed, it might be the key to such resistance.

Like Oyĕwùmí, Lugones is often criticised on empirical grounds. Scholars like Julieta Paredes (2008), Rita Laura Segato (2001) and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2004) all argue in different ways that Lugones underestimates the role of gender in patriarchal indigenous societies prior to European colonisation. However, Mendoza points out that despite their criticism of Lugones, these scholars still agree on the fact that European gender systems had profound effects on relations between men and women in the colony (Mendoza, 2016: 118). Mendoza argues that the strength of Lugones’s position is exactly in the way in which she situates gender in relation to the genocidal logic of coloniality (Mendoza, 2016: 118). ¹¹

Facing the sexual demon of coloniality in post-apartheid South Africa

As argued, we contend that these feminist decolonial insights are crucial for a better, more effective, framing of the problem of very high levels of sexual violence in post-apartheid South Africa. South African sociologist Deborah Posel expresses surprise in a 2005 article about what she calls the ‘unexpected and enigmatic … politicization of sexuality in post-apartheid South Africa’ with reference to the heated public polemics during the HIV controversy and the rape ‘epidemic’ under the Mbeki presidency (Posel, 2005: 127). Yet, if the insights of Oyĕwùmí and Lugones are taken on board, one might argue that her surprise could only have been due to a deep misunderstanding about the true nature of coloniality. In her defence, one has to admit that Posel was not alone in finding these heated debates around sexual matters surprising, and indeed, as indicated, in spite of the more than 20 years that have passed since the political transition, the sex/gender dimension of coloniality has yet to be integrated into local understandings and analyses of decolonisation. We believe that this gross neglect speaks directly to the lack of political will to tackle the sexual violence against women and children as the threat to the health and stability of the new nation that it undeniably is.

It is not an exaggeration to say that over the past 17 years since the start of the Mbeki era in 1999, our political leadership has been particularly inept in dealing with sexual matters of public concern. We will only mention some of the most salient sexual controversies of public interest which surrounded our two Presidents during this time: Thabo Mbeki is today most blamed for his poor handling of the HIV crisis and his steadfast refusal to act decisively in rolling out anti-retrovirals, as well as his response to the staggering rape statistics. He was among other things notorious for lashing out at activists writing about rape in the newly democratic South Africa, for instance by calling journalist and rape victim Charlene Smit, a racist. He commented: ‘She was saying our cultures, traditions and religions as Africans inherently make every African man a potential rapist … [a] view which defines the African people as barbaric savages’ (cf. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3716004.stm). Ironically, he seems to have been the one who equated rape with blackness, rather than she. With hindsight, one may be allowed to speculate that the spectre of colonial demonisation of Black male sexuality was never far removed from Mbeki’s heavily racialised responses to anti-rape advocates, nor from his government’s refusal to prioritise as the crisis that it is, the ongoing world-record rates of sexual violence experienced in post-apartheid South Africa.

1999 was also the year in which the reform of the outdated 1957 Sexual Offences Act began supposedly in all earnest (https://pmg.org.za/committee-meeting/4440/), yet the process was stalled under both terms of the Mbeki government and finally the new Act was only promulgated in 2009, this time because of renewed social pressure springing from the rape trial of Jacob Zuma, during 2006. In 2007, his rape accuser was granted asylum in the Netherlands, ¹² and in 2009 he became President of the country. Both the delay surrounding the passing of the new rape legislation and the fact that Zuma could bounce back from a highly publicised rape trial and take the highest office in the country, we read as indicative of the lack of political will to seriously tackle the problem of sexual violence.

Starting with this rape trial, and continuing throughout his presidential reign, his sexuality was never far from any discussion of the current President. Jacob Zuma is a proud polygamist and an open philanderer and has fathered numerous children both inside and out of wedlock (usually justifying his sexual behaviours on Zulu ethnic and cultural grounds); he is often quoted making misogynist comments; and he has been regularly depicted in satiric art works as a hyper-sexed individual who rules and ravages the nation through the unwieldy phallus. Examples of the latter include Brett Murray’s ‘The Spear’ (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spear), Zapiro’s satirical cartoon ‘The Rape of Justice’ and Ayanda Mabulu’s ‘Spear Down My Throat (The Pornography of Power)’ (cf. http://www.culture-review.co.za/pornography-of-power). What these depictions share, is the portrayal of Zuma as a corrupt leader, but expressed in terms of his very public and politicised sexual persona.

In an important article, South African feminist Shireen Hassim (2014) analyses how issues of sexuality in South Africa cannot be separated from race and culture, and vice versa. She argues that the South African public arena is bedevilled by a kind of race discourse which serves to silence and displace feminist attempts to discuss rape as a form of sexual or gender power politics, and at the same time, political power is gendered and masculinised in ways that remain unacknowledged. She shows how the debate in the South African context has been dominated by, on the one hand, advocates of freedom of speech and liberal values who deny that these depictions of Zuma are racist, and are meant only to expose the emperor’s nudity as it were. On the other hand, it is dominated by anti-colonial critics who say that these depictions repeat the racist-colonial notion of the Black man as reducible to his animalised or bestial sexuality (Hassim, 2014: 172). This creates a particular predicament for feminists who make resistance against ‘the daily forms of violence against women’ their priority. Hassim argues that a balancing act is required between reinscribing ‘a white gaze on the body of black men (however powerful those black men may be)’ and being ‘circumscribed by fear that their critiques of the sexual violence of powerful men may expose them to charges of racism’ (2014: 175).

It is therefore our contention that the sexual demon of colonial power must be faced head-on instead of in the selective ways in which it has hitherto appeared on the public scene. We acknowledge that the Zapiro cartoons are problematic not only in that they repeat the colonial image of the Black male rapist and reinforce colonial-racist stereotypes by bestialising the Black male president’s sexuality, but also, and more importantly, in that they metaphorise and thereby implicitly trivialise the unrapeability of the Black female body. And therefore, we are also critical of the well-known trope of the ‘emasculated’ colonised man. This well-known trope tells only one half of the story of sexual shame induced in the colonised, problematically glossing over the even more violent casting out of Black female sexuality from the domain of the human, and it may well be abused to overemphasise Black male sexual vulnerability while ignoring Black female sexual vulnerability. In particular, we find it important to distinguish the idea of ‘sexing the native’ from the over-used yet too seldom critically investigated idea of the ‘emasculation of the colonised man’.

Although the idea warrants further research, we are sceptical about the construct for a number of reasons. The phrase suggests that indigenous men were symbolically castrated through the processes of colonial conquering and subjugation, being robbed of their lands and wealth and cultural worlds. This stance seems to us to make a number of crucial assumptions that are at least contestable. First, the notion assumes that the genders operated in much the same way in precolonial Africa as they did in the colonising countries, and that social status was distributed similarly along hierarchical binary and gendered pathways, with the result that under colonisation the men of a subjugated group would lose status relative to the women of their group. The construct is clearly dependent on precisely the kind of gender construct which is now widely criticised (as discussed in the previous sections) as an a-historical Western imposition, which not only aligned indigenous present and future, but also indigenous pasts, with Western gender norms.

Second, the notion assumes that subjugation of an indigenous nation would be experienced as an affront to the ‘manhood’ of the collective, along the lines of the heroic manliness (as the superior opposite of a kind of vulnerable femininity) in which ethnic collectives were routinely framed in the West. Again, we have reason to believe that more egalitarian, ‘softer’ or more fluid gender structures characterised many of these societies. Also, as the work of Lugones and Oyĕwùmí shows, both men and women from indigenous or ‘native’ communities were placed in a position of supreme precarity vis-a-vis the Western gendered constructs: just as a Black man under coloniality could never be certain of his ‘manhood’, or even more so, could a Black woman under the same conditions not claim to be a true ‘woman’ in the dominant Western sense of the word. Since it was their very humanity which was at stake in these gendering structures, the anxiety and precarity surrounding possible shaming were powerful instruments in subjugating the natives as less than. It is thus a gross reduction and simultaneous distortion to reduce the psychological wound of colonisation to the ‘emasculation’ of the native man, as if his human dignity had depended all along on a patriarchal construct, and as if the native woman already had nothing to lose. Decolonial feminists confront us with radically different claims about human dignity that is devoid of sex/gender hierarchies.

Third, and following from the first two assumptions, the notion of ‘emasculated man’ assumes that the collective trauma of colonisation and the cultural self-alienation which accompanied it would find a natural and dominant expression in terms of wounded patriarchal masculinity manifesting in violence against the indigenous group’s women and children; thus a wounded pride turning its violence inward through outward impotency. As with the other assumptions, we find such a reading to be dependent on a colonial sex/gender imposition, which elevates injury to masculine pride or honour to an a-historical and universal principle. Even worse, this type of reading of the psychology of oppression systematically eclipses the psychic damage done to women and children, and renders them doubly invisible. And of course, it neatly plays into the ways in which Black male sexual violence is perniciously naturalised.

Conclusion

In conclusion, then, we have argued that the insights of Oyěwùmí and Lugones, taken together, show in rich detail how the logic of sexualisation which lies at the heart of the Western metaphysical order and subject formation, was also violently and effectively at work in the construction not only of the settler-native dichotomy but also in the colonial re-construction of the ‘native’ world. In particular, the category of native or Black ‘woman’ was created which subjugated indigenous women to a sub-human category, twice removed from full humanity, and which rendered them unrapeable under the law. The colonial logic of sub-human sexual categorisation of the Black woman as unrapeable and of the Black man as essential or natural rapist, permeates, and thoroughly infuses the ongoing colonial project of racialising the ‘native’. The sexual wound at the heart of racial-colonial denigration and exploitation, and which to a great extent explains the abjection of the racialised body, is a key aspect of the colony and should therefore also be a central theme in any discourse on decolonisation in Africa.

Decolonial theory, as we have shown, believes in the ability of the subaltern to radically subvert colonising discourses and to make place for alternative imaginations of the world. Nothing short of a complete dislocation of the colonial remnants of gender structuring is needed to end the sexual violence against women and children in South Africa. It should be pointed out that the fears and anxieties, as well as the ambitions and desires, that underlie this pervasive violence were created by the colonial sexual demon, with adverse effects for everyone, now as then (in colonial times).