19
Lisa Sharlach
APSA 2004
I don’t remember any woman telling us that ’After detentions, I was raped.’
But I was shocked, when I was there, people that I knew, they spoke for
the first time, that we were raped.
[I ask what caused women to suddenly start talking about it].
I think that people had had enough. And, like, in the ANC, it’s the well-
respected organization. And people wanted us, you know, the world, to
know that the very people that you respect are the ones that are doing a-b-
c (Interview of Ntombi Mosikare, Oct. 26, 1998).
Rape by South African Police in Townships
Police’s sexual violation of women took place in townships across South Africa
(Cawthra 1985, 252). Nonetheless, reports from this era of police rape are scattered (see
Cock 1993, 213-215; Brewer 1994, 303).
11
Mrs. Diana Taunyanie-Nkobo, who was a
schoolteacher in Soweto, relates one example:
The violations of women were many. Because, as far as we know, the
police used to violate young girls during the time when they would raid
the schools and arrest a lot of children. Some children came out pregnant,
raped, some by police of course (Interview of Oct. 27, 1998).
12
Rape Encouraged by Police in the Townships
The men’s hostels, where rural African men lived while they worked in the cities,
were the locus of much of the black-on-black violence. As noted, the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission findings demonstrated that the state covertly sponsored or
encouraged much of this black-on-black, or “third-force,” violence.
Hostel-dwellers abducted women, sometimes for days, for sexual violation.
Observers believed that the abductions were a strategic tool in the ethnic conflict. Rape
not only debased the victim, but also humiliated the men of her ethnic community who
failed to protect her (Goldblatt and Meintjes 1996, 28).
Winnie Makhubela in 1997 testified to rape by Zulu hostel dwelling men – as
11
The Sowetan reported that white police forced black men and women at gunpoint to commit rape, both
heterosexual and homosexual, on other township dwellers. The police took some of these people away, and
they were not seen again (Sowetan Oct. 27, 1983).
12
The police accused Mrs. Nkobo of terrorism. They believed that she had incited her pupils to stage the
1976 Schoolchildren’s Rebellion, and detained her for 18 months without trial. After her release, the
government revoked her teaching certificate. Mrs. Nkobo became, in her words, a freedom fighter
(Interview of Oct. 27, 1998).
Convention