In 2019, President Cyril Ramaphosa acknowledged South Africa’s GBV crisis as a national emergency. Contemporary analyses of this typically focus on immediate institutional failures: under-resourced police services, overburdened courts, and protection orders that fail to protect. These bureaucratic inefficiencies, training gaps, and funding shortfalls are meticulously catalogued. Yet this analytical approach fails to acknowledge that such ‘system failures’ are not accidental—they are the predictable outcomes of foundational structures that normalised violence against women centuries ago.

South African femicide rates stand at five times the global average. Approximately 100 rapes are reported daily, although this represents only a fraction of actual incidents, as a result of severe underreporting. At least 51% of South African women experience intimate partner violence. The crisis demands analytical frameworks that dig into historical roots, rather than treating contemporary violence as an isolated disorder. These statistics represent more than numerical abstractions—they constitute the lived experiences of mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, and ancestors, whose suffering is directly linked to the deep-rooted violence that shaped South African society.

 Colonial foundations and ideological violence

Colonial conquest required the systematic dismantling of indigenous social relations and replaced them with colonial, hierarchical structures that served extractive capitalism. Traditional land tenure systems maintained communal and sustainable relationships with the land. They were destroyed and replaced with individual property ownership. Similarly, colonial authorities fundamentally reorganised indigenous kinship systems and gender relations to create new forms of social organisation based on domination rather than collaboration.

When European colonisers first mapped South African territory, they treated both land and women’s bodies as a single target for domination. Colonial language consistently represented women as extensions of the land—primitive, conquerable, and exploitable. The environmental destruction of cutting trees, stripping soil, and poisoning water served to sever African people from territories to which they maintained spiritual connections. To rape the land was therefore to rape its people. This established a basic logic that connected territorial and bodily violation. This merger of language and ideology was not accidental. It was a deliberate strategy, designed to normalise violence as conquest. Terms like “taking,” “penetrating,” and “owning” applied equally to territorial acquisition and sexual domination. This established a conceptual framework where rape became simultaneously the violation of women and the violation of the land.

Women’s bodies became critical sites where this social reorganisation played out most violently. Their traditional roles as agricultural producers, community decision-makers, and cultural transmitters directly threatened colonial control systems. Sexual violence against women, therefore, was not a matter of personal deviation but rather a systematic strategy for dismantling indigenous social structures while asserting colonial authority over both reproduction and production. The question is not which domination came first—of land or women. It is how colonialism manufactured social relations that taught communities to fragment themselves, creating hierarchies where men could claim power over both soil and skin.

 Institutionalised sexual exploitation and capital accumulation

In the Cape Colony, enslaved women became testing grounds for comprehensive systems of control that would define South African social relations for centuries. The VOC Lodge operated as the colony’s first brothel, serving travelling soldiers and sailors while generating profit from women’s bodies. It represented the systematic intersection of sexual violence and capitalist accumulation. It transformed women’s bodies into sites of both exploitation and wealth generation.

Colonial capitalism required the complete commodification of human beings, but this commodification operated through distinctly gendered mechanisms. While enslaved men were valued primarily for their labour power, enslaved women faced multiple forms of simultaneous exploitation. Their labour, sexuality, and reproductive capacity all became sources of colonial wealth accumulation through methodical and comprehensive systems of control.

The records of the Office of the Protector of Slaves reveal numerous cases of sexual abuse brought by enslaved women against their owners. Yet throughout the entire period of Cape slavery, not a single free or enslaved man was convicted of raping an enslaved woman. This legal vacuum was not oversight but design—violence against Black women was institutionalised as normal business practice, rather than criminalised as assault.

The exploitation extended beyond domestic labour into systematic forms of bodily violence that established foundations for future oppression. Sexual exploitation through assault and rape positioned enslaved women’s bodies as territories for male conquest, while generating revenue through sexual slavery. Slavery was inherited through the female line. So, reproductive exploitation transformed wombs into sites of economic production, with children becoming future property that expanded colonial wealth. Legal frameworks classified enslaved women as property rather than people. This made violence against them a matter of “property management” rather than assault, and established precedents that prioritised capital accumulation over human dignity.

 Intersectional dynamics of colonial violence

Although colonised people share universal experiences of racist and capitalist oppression, colonised women’s struggles were further marked by systematic sexual violence. Traditional colonial analysis has often assumed that colonised men and women experienced oppression uniformly. It has focused primarily on racial domination, neglecting gendered dynamics. This limitation takes the male colonised experience as universal, obscuring the specific forms of violence directed at women. Enslaved women also worked on plantations and sometimes in mines, exposing them to similar physical violence as enslaved men. However, they simultaneously faced additional forms of exploitation that their male counterparts rarely did.

The pursuit of power and capital extended beyond white-Black relations into colonised communities themselves. The systematic dehumanisation of enslaved men created conditions that intensified the violence faced by enslaved women. Women confronted both the structural brutalities of the plantation system and the gendered dimensions of racial oppression within their own communities. Some enslaved women were sold into prostitution by fellow enslaved men, including their own husbands. This was one of the ways that colonial systems generated internal hierarchies that reproduced violence within oppressed communities.

Colonial administrators understood that maintaining extractive systems required breaking traditional social bonds that might enable collective resistance. The resulting trauma was not an accidental byproduct. It was an essential component of systems designed to generate and entrench wealth through systematic dehumanisation.

Contemporary gender-based violence in South Africa cannot be understood as isolated deviant behaviour. It must be examined as the continuation of structural relations established through centuries of colonial exploitation. The violence that President Ramaphosa declared a national crisis in 2019 has deep historical roots. They lie in systems that taught communities to understand women’s bodies as sites of conquest, profit, and control.

 Apartheid’s institutional architecture of gendered violence

The apartheid government institutionalised colonial violence with industrial precision. It created comprehensive legal frameworks that transformed brutality from a possibility into a structural necessity. This systematic approach used two mechanisms of normalising violence. It spread throughout society, transcending racial boundaries, while at the same time working uniquely in different communities.

The state’s systematic deployment of violence—through forced removals, detention without trial, and torture in police facilities—normalised brutality as a legitimate method of governing. This created a society in which violence became a standard conflict resolution mechanism across all relationships, including intimate ones. It established an unacknowledged gender civil war.

The apartheid system’s approach to sexual violence was strategic rather than negligent. Legal frameworks operated with mathematical precision in their discrimination: in 1992, during the supposed transition toward democracy, rape cases achieved conviction rates of only 53%, while perpetrators of non-sexual assault faced conviction rates of 86%. These disparities were not administrative failures; they were systemic and deliberate. They were designed to signal that men still had power over women’s bodies, that women’s testimony carried less weight in court than men’s denials, and that sexual violence would face minimal legal consequences.

Even more revealing: no white man was ever sentenced to death for rape under apartheid law. Capital punishment was reserved exclusively for Black men and only for those accused of crimes against white women. This surgical precision in legal racism demonstrates how the justice system functioned as an instrument of both racial and gender control. It protected certain forms of violence, while criminalising others, based on the racial identities of perpetrators and victims, rather than the nature of their crimes.

 Separate mechanisms of social control

Within this overarching framework, apartheid created separate systems of gendered violence that operated through distinct mechanisms across racial communities. In Black communities, there was systematic dehumanisation through economic dispossession, spatial displacement, and political disenfranchisement. This created conditions where women’s suffering was often subordinated to broader liberation struggles. This prioritisation was strategically understandable: individual trauma appeared less urgent when entire populations faced systematic dehumanisation. However, this hierarchical approach to suffering came at a cost measured in silenced voices and unaddressed violence.

In white communities, gendered violence was hidden behind performances of respectability and buried beneath mythologies of civilised superiority. Incest and marital rape were relegated to the realm of family secrets, rather than being seen as social problems requiring systematic intervention. The maintenance of white decency required these violences to remain invisible, their costs calculated in women’s trauma and children’s silenced suffering.

South Africa’s catastrophic rates of gender-based violence represent the world’s highest recorded figures outside active war zones. They directly reflect the enduring structural legacy of apartheid’s dual systems of gendered control. The apartheid regime deployed hypervisible violence against Black women to reinforce racial hierarchies. At the same time, it maintained invisible violence against white women to preserve patriarchal authority. This created intersectional frameworks of dehumanisation that persist. Contemporary gender-based violence thus represents not merely a social ill but a structural continuation of apartheid’s foundational project of social control.

 Intergenerational transmission and structural reproduction

The psychological mechanisms through which apartheid violence reproduced itself across generations operated through complex intersections of trauma, socialisation, and structural constraint. Children witnessing systematic violence came to see brutality as a normal way to resolve conflicts. These early exposures created coping mechanisms that enabled children to survive. But at the same time, they generated dysfunction of relationships in adulthood. This established transmission cycles between generations—unwanted patterns of inheritance that are hard to break.

The gendered dimensions of this transmission require particular attention. Colonial and apartheid systems emasculated men through the denial of traditional provider and protector roles. At the same time, patriarchal structures provided alternative channels for reclaiming dominance through violence against those with even less structural power—women and children. Women, meanwhile, were positioned as cultural preservers and family stabilisers. They were pressured towards endurance and internal coping rather than external resistance. These different responses to systematic trauma established distinct patterns of violence that continue to shape contemporary social relations.

 Contemporary manifestations and structural continuities

Contemporary statistics reflect this historical architecture with devastating clarity. Countries with colonial histories have rates of intimate partner violence that are 50 times higher than those without such legacies. When patriarchal structures combine with colonial inheritances, domestic violence transcends individual pathology to become a systematic social organisation.

The women whose deaths generate today’s hashtags, before becoming tomorrow’s memories, connect through direct structural lines to colonial violence. Every woman dying at the hands of intimate partners remains connected, through unbroken chains, to enslaved women in the VOC Slave Lodge, to those whose suffering was subordinated during apartheid, and to those whose experiences were never deemed worthy of judicial consideration. These connections are not metaphorical but structural. They operate through legal systems, social relations, and cultural practices that remain fundamentally intact.

As scholar Shalu Nigam observes, “Violence against women implies not only an assault of the body, mind, or soul, but it also occurs when the conditions are being enabled to facilitate it and when the system—the state and the society—excuses it.” The women dying today—from Ntokozo at 21 to Nolusapho Eunice at 75—are not dying due to insufficient knowledge about gender-based violence. They are dying because South African society continues operating systems specifically designed to enable their deaths, and then expresses performative surprise when those systems function as intended.

 Toward structural transformation

The question confronting South Africa goes beyond whether gender-based violence can be addressed through improved resource allocation and enhanced training programmes. The fundamental challenge is whether South African society can acknowledge that current approaches address symptoms while leaving underlying diseases untouched. Is there the political will for the excavation work necessary to construct genuinely different social relations?

Until contemporary violence is traced to its colonial and apartheid roots, and until inherited systems face dismantling rather than reform, South Africa will continue counting bodies, speaking names, and wondering why nothing changes. The architecture of violence remains intact because political and social responses have chosen renovation over reconstruction, reform over revolution. This represents not policy failure but structural success: systems designed to enable violence against women continue functioning as intended, requiring not adjustment but fundamental transformation.

Roomaan Leach

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