(Un)Remembering Sexual Violence in South African History

Abstract South Africa is a country known for its high rates of gender-based and sexual violence. Historical research demonstrates that such issues are not new to the post-apartheid era but have deep roots stretching into the country’s colonial and apartheid periods. Yet when asked to reflect on historic sexual violence, oral history interviewees — Black women in their sixties, seventies and eighties — largely recalled the apartheid past as a period devoid of sexual violence, describing the problem to researchers as something that only started happening ‘now, in your days’. This article unpacks such statements and argues that much rape perpetrated during apartheid, particularly within communities, has been subject to a collective unremembering. It highlights four central explanations for this: how rape was historically silenced by families, communities and the police; the refusal to name rape as such in the past, with sexual violence more commonly characterized as ‘force’; how histories of intra-communal sexual violence have been sidelined within dominant historical or political narratives of apartheid; and how discourse of South Africa’s present rape ‘crisis’ fosters historical amnesia and promotes nostalgia for a past believed to be without rape.