Gendered Inclusions and Exclusions in Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story

Abstract

David’s Story (2002) pertinently brings to the fore the way in which the female body was (ab)used and the female voice silenced in the name of a phallocentric South African nation-building project both in the early nineteenth century and the post-1990 transitional period. In doing so, it courageously strays from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s implicit assumption that healing and reconciliation ultimately serve the higher goal of forgetting and moving on. This article traces the means by which Wicomb shifts the focus to the way in which, despite the discursive silencing of the experiences of torture and rape within the ANC’s armed wing Umkhonto weSizwe (MK), female cadres were able to carve out a space of agency in which they could speak through endurance, defiance, and even silence.

Keywords:

• transition
• truth and reconciliation commission
• Umkhonto weSizwe
• gender violence
• discursive silencing
• female agency

Notes on Contributor

Alexandra Negri completed her MPhil at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, prior to which she studied at the University of Cape Town and the École Normale Supérieure of Lyon, France. Since 2014, she has been a doctoral student and lecturer at the Institute of American Studies, University of Stuttgart. Her research interests include South African literature, gender and sexuality, the ethics of writing violence, and theories of space and place.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 On 16 December, 1961, Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) was launched as the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC). It can be seen as:

a culmination of the violence and brutality of the apartheid system manifested in the 1960 Sharpeville massacre; the outlawing of the ANC and PAC; the closing down of all means of non-violent struggle; the fact that change was seen as impossible unless revolutionary force was utilised. (Kasrils 2016)

2 Former activist Jessie Duarte asserted that most women chose to conceal experiences of rape because “from the position of the people they worked with that was considered a weakness” and, similarly, the TRC report stated that “[w]here the sexual abuse was perpetrated by men within the liberation movement, there were further pressures not to speak” (in Graham 2009: 157–8).

3 In 1992, the Skeweyiya Commission reported torture and gross human rights violations committed in ANC detention camps abroad, particularly against alleged government spies at the Quatro rehabilitation centre in Angola. Amnesty International’s independent report largely confirmed these findings.