Even if the apartheid era ranks as one of the ugliest chapters of the twentieth century, we should expect no thanks from those who suffered if we reduce them to mere victims of history. One of the things that I came away with from the conference is just how far that applies to the women caught up in the struggle – which must include Winnie Mandela – whether despite or because of the enforced passivity and subjugation they endured. The random violence of the security forces whenever they raided activists’ homes was notorious. It did not stop Nomonde Calata from refusing to leave her house when ordered to do so by a police officer, or from telling him to get off her bed: ‘“You will have to take your gun and shoot me, and take me out of the house.” Well, they stood up and left.’ Their vulgar sexual taunting also failed to deter her: ‘Hau [sic] … you’ve got a baby without a father,’ one of them mocked at sight of her pregnancy, ‘don’t you want us to be the father of your baby?’40
In 1969–70, Winnie Mandela was held in detention without charge for 491 days, subject to beatings and torture, often in solitary confinement, sleeping on a blood-soaked mat in her cell next to the assault chamber, and for periods in a death cell. These details have only recently emerged with the publication of her prison diaries and letters in 2013. She is eloquent on how much better conditions are for a prisoner – read her husband – compared with a detainee. ‘I’d communicate with the ants,’ she recalls in her epilogue to the book, ‘anything that has life. If I had had lice, I would even, I would even [sic] have nursed them […] There is no worse punishment.’ ‘You are going to talk against your will,’ Major Ferreira, one of her interrogators, told her (the other was the notorious torturer Major Swanepoel). ‘We can go to the torture room now,’ she replied. ‘My defence has my instructions on my prospective inquest.’ She also snubbed a request to address her captors in Afrikaans, telling them she preferred to use the language of ‘her first oppressors’.41
‘You know what is so bad?’ Ferreira responded. ‘She means what she says and no one can do anything about it.’ Like Nomonde Calata, she was the target of sexual innuendo. ‘The bloody bitch has sucked the saliva of all the white communists,’ Swanepoel snaps during one of his interrogations. ‘[She would have] seduced the Pope if she had wanted to use him politically’ (‘they roar with laughter’). This is a prisoner who suffered frequent blackouts, palpitations, breathlessness, who regularly woke up screaming in the night, would mutter the names of her children, and at one point almost starved herself to death. For political reasons she did everything possible to conceal the fact that this was an attempted suicide. ‘And they wonder’, she comments in her epilogue, ‘why I am like I am.’42 A statement I see as undiminished in its impact by the fact that she is clearly trying to exonerate herself.
She has been the target of the most vicious sexual hatred, her refusal to retire as a sexual being seeming at moments to be the worst of her crimes. In the early 1990s, I went to visit a well-known writer on South Africa then based at Oxford University. My plan had been to discuss his take on the violence spreading across the country in the run-up to the 1993 elections. Instead, I found myself being regaled with endless stories of Winnie Mandela’s sex life as I gazed out at the college lawns while we sat sipping tea. She was meant to be carrying the flag for her husband’s and the nation’s freedom. Instead she became the sinner to his saint. ‘That Winnie began her fall from grace just as Nelson was beginning his ascent to sainthood’, Msimang writes, ‘is both a tragedy and another sort of fiction.’43 Or in the words of her character in The Cry of Winnie Mandela: ‘Whereas imprisonment had prepared him for the language of transcendence, I was too grounded in the muck of folly’ (both, surely, tragic outcomes).44
Why do we expect, in situations of vicious political injustice, that virtue accumulates on the side of the oppressed? At the very least Winnie Mandela does us the favour of demonstrating the folly of that belief. But why, we might still ask, do we rush to divest the downtrodden of the ethical ambiguity which is surely the birthright of everyone? It is a truism of psychoanalysis that nobody’s thoughts are pure. We are all traitors inside our heads. Lindiwe Hani is a model of giving in relation to the man who shot her father, but the day after meeting his mastermind she had woken up with ‘the pure and clear urge to kill’.45 Even De Kock is permitted ambiguity and not only in Gobodo-Madikizela’s book. Siyah Mgoduka told us that his feelings started to soften when De Kock stepped forward to say that he had issued the command to kill his father, just when the presiding magistrate, for lack of evidence, had been about to close the case. Only the woman, it seems, has to be one thing or the other. Only she is hurled into the vortex of her collapsed moral grace. ‘The woman who greeted [Nelson Mandela] on that sunny day in February 1990’, Msimang comments on the day of his release from prison, ‘was morally ambiguous […] she spoiled the picture of the perfect revolution that the ANC was intent on creating. She was a reminder that the country was burning.’ ‘Just look’, Msimang writes on the final pages, ‘at where we are.’46 Unlike Winnie Mandela, neither P. W. Botha nor F. W. de Klerk have ever been convicted in law for any crime.
By the end of the conference, I was still texting home that I was not sure I could stand any more. I had taken to walking in and out of the Stellenbosch Botanical Gardens at every available opportunity, even when there was only a ten-minute break. The gardens are another jewel in the area, established no doubt on the back of dubiously acquired wealth (and who was I, in any case, to go in search of solace?). So it struck me as nothing short of miraculous that, in one of the last plenary lectures, Cameroonian philosopher and activist Achille Mbembe managed to talk of beauty. He was not being sentimental. ‘The Trauma of the World and the World as Trauma’ was the title of his paper. Mincing no words, he spoke of the ‘traumatogenic’ institutions of capitalism and liberal democracy which to this day have never delivered racial equality, of the ‘genocidal unconscious’ which turns humans, foremost the racial ‘other’, into disposable commodities (violence under so-called ‘quiet conditions’, as Rosa Luxemburg would say, which is where this book begins).47 A more viable future will only emerge, he suggested, out of rupture, only if we begin by recognising the brokenness all around; only from here might we light on the potential beauty in everyone. We need a new political subject, no longer in flight from interiority, who deploys multiple selves, inhabits the cracks and crevices of the world, who knows how to be nobody, knows when she has nothing to hide, and when to rush to the other side to meet her double.
At first I thought that this version of political hope, grounded in brokenness, belonged to a different universe from that of Tumani Calata, the youngest daughter of Fort Calata with whom Nomonde had been pregnant when he was killed. While growing up, she had wanted to know nothing about her father, a stranger whom she never grieved. Then, slowly, she started down the path which finally allowed her to begin again, to take possession of the utterance, ‘I am the daughter of a hero. I know who I am.’ In the end, despite the apparent contrast between self-affirmation and breakage, it seemed to me that both of them were saying the same thing. Something unprecedented still has to happen. There will be no political emancipation for anyone until we all recognise the corpse still lying on the road, the continuing injustice, the work that remains to be done.
9
AT THE BORDER
In March 2018, 120 women detainees went on a one-month hunger and work strike at Yarl’s Wood Immigrant Removal Centre in the UK. Several received letters from the Home Office informing them that their deportation would not be paused by their action, in fact it would more likely accelerate. Serco, the private company running the centre, denied that the hunger strike was taking place. Serco is best known for its policy of changing locks on its properties as a means of evicting asylum seekers living in the community. Despite being fined £6.8 million for its treatment of asylum seekers, its contract to house asylum seekers was renewed by the Home Office in June 2019. (A year later, at the height of the Covid-19 pan
demic, it was also awarded the private contract for test-and-trace in the teeth of objections based on its past conduct.) The women were demanding that asylum seekers, minors, pregnant women and survivors of torture, rape and trafficking should not be detained. They were calling for an end to indefinite detention, a practice which is sanctioned in no other European country apart from the UK; in the US, it was first introduced under the post-9/11 Patriot Act and then signed into law under President Obama (the most notorious example being Guantánamo Bay). They were also protesting the conditions under which they were held. Three years previously, the non-profit London-based organisation Women for Refugee Women had published a pamphlet describing those conditions under the title I Am Human.
Both the pamphlet and the strike exposed to public view the cruel and degrading treatment that characterises the detention of migrant women in the UK. Why, for example, were women in detention being watched in intimate situations – naked, partly dressed, in the toilet or shower, or in bed – by male guards? Why were they being routinely touched and searched by men: ‘Men touch your knickers … A man touches your knickers and leaves them on the bed?’1 Given that detention is expensive – estimated at £35 million per annum – and that asylum claims could just as easily be processed while the women lived in the community, why in fact were they being detained at all?2 Today legal entry for refugees, asylum seekers or unskilled workers has been made virtually impossible in the UK. Migrant women who try to enter specifically as refugees or asylum seekers are increasingly being criminalised.3 In 2002, the ‘feminisation of irregular migration’ was already being described as ‘perhaps the most significant [migration] phenomenon of recent decades’.4 Out of thirty-one women whose cases were investigated in 2012 by the Cambridge Institute of Criminology, twelve of the fourteen whose outcomes were known had been refused asylum. Although most of them had been trafficked, they were treated as illegal migrants, rather than as the targets of abuse.
These women are being punished, often viciously, for already being the victims of crimes. When one woman was moved to Yarl’s Wood after seven months in prison on charges which were dropped, she said that it felt as if she was being punished ‘for being a foreigner’.5 The fact that conditions at the centre included being exposed to watching men – there were also reported cases of sexual assault by the guards – suggests that these detainees were no less being punished for being women. This reality is by no means restricted to the UK. In July 2019, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was the object of sexually explicit Facebook posts by Customs and Border Protection guards – 9,500 current and former guards are members of a secret Facebook group – after she had reported the horrifying conditions in US border detention centres where detainees described being abused by officers and where women were being forced to drink out of toilets. The posts also questioned the authenticity of images, which had gone viral, of a drowned man, Oscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, and his twenty-three-month-old daughter, Angie Valeria, who had tried to cross the US–Mexican border. ‘Nine thousand five hundred CBP officers sharing memes about dead migrants,’ wrote Ocasio-Cortez, ‘and discussing violence and sexual misconduct towards members of Congress. How on earth can CBP’s culture be trusted to care for refugees humanely?’6
Migration has become one of the most urgent political issues of our time. A politics purportedly founded on reason and utilitarian logic – the need to get numbers under control for the benefit of all – reveals itself as drenched in sexual hatred. Though the harsh realities of migration make no sexual distinctions (the sea is gender-indiscriminate in who it drowns), in this chapter I will be exploring the special pleasure which migration policy appears to take in targeting women. In the Ocasio-Cortez story, scorn of women and of migrants were visibly fuelling each other, spewed out in the same over-excited, violent run of memes (the posts also included Photoshopped pictures of Ocasio-Cortez performing oral sex on migrants and on Donald Trump).7 At Yarl’s Wood, a woman from Kenya, beaten by her family and forced to undergo FGM as ‘punishment’ for being lesbian, was dragged across a room at the centre: ‘They were taunting me … they were pulling on my legs.’ When she took refuge in the bathroom, they laughed at her, put her in a headlock, and bound her wrists and feet ‘like a goat’.8 A Nigerian rape survivor described how she was thrown on the floor ‘like a bag of cement’.9 Another detainee, who had been coming to the UK from St Vincent since she was nine, had been raped at gunpoint at fifteen by three men as a way of settling financial scores with her father. Disowned by her grandfather who first brought her to England, she then took to prostitution and, after a prison sentence, found herself at Yarl’s Wood as part of an immigration crackdown: ‘I thought prison was bad but Yarl’s Wood pushed me to the point of wanting to commit suicide.’ Male officers would enter her room behind her back, go through her bed, her underwear: ‘I felt raped all over again.’10 Serco dismissed the accounts as ‘uncorroborated’, insisted that this wasn’t their practice and said they would fully investigate the complaints.11
Exposed to sexual and physical insult, the women are also radically disempowered by being cut off from all knowledge. Anyone in indefinite detention enters a hallucinatory, interminable world, since the whole point is that you never know for how long you will be held: ‘In prison you know what’s your release date … But in Yarl’s Wood, you don’t know.’12 Although there has been some reduction in detention times in the past couple of years, Home Office data going back to 2010 show cases where people were held for as long as four years (cases of multiple detention, or detention and re-detention, which was routine for the opponents of South Africa’s government under apartheid, are known but not reflected in the statistics).13 ‘Everything is pending,’ writes poet David Herd in his afterword to Refugee Tales, a collection of stories gathered from refugees by campaigners on a solidarity walk from Canterbury that has taken place annually since 2015: ‘We are deep here within the logic of suspension.’14 No point in etching the number of days on the walls if at any moment you might be deported (with no prison sentence or release date, you ‘count up’ rather than ‘count down’ the days).15 In the literature on migration, the commonly used technical term for the forcible return of migrants to their country of origin is ‘refoulement’ (literally, pushing back or repulsing), which also happens to be the French word for the psychoanalytic concept of repression. As if somewhere it is being acknowledged that returning a migrant to the country from which they fled is not only inhumane, and most likely illegal under international law; it also straitjackets the detainees’ mental access to their own experience, makes it impossible for them to take the measure of their world. It is also an attempted cover-up, a way of pretending there is nothing ugly going on at either end of the journey. A Chinese woman trafficked for cannabis production, who found herself caught up in the UK criminal justice system, makes the direct parallel between here and there: ‘I just felt I was in their hands – like being in the hands of the people who brought me here’ – ‘hands’ in this case no metaphor.16
These women are being slammed by the system into positions of unwilled ignorance: ‘I didn’t know where I was going’, ‘They don’t explain anything to you.’ ‘Can you tell me what is happening?’ – this last addressed as a plea to one of the Cambridge researchers given access to a detainee in the course of her investigation (normally, anyone visiting a detention centre is not allowed to bring a pen and paper into the building).17 Often, the forced ignorance takes them right back to the place of unknowing where their journey began. In the words of a trafficked detainee who had been promised a new life: ‘We were not allowed to ask questions.’18 They are being held, writes Herd, outside ‘the skin’ of language, since, with no record of their appeal – there is only a written determination – whatever they may have said or tried to say leaves no trace (a key reason for the project of Refugee Tales).19 Not just repressive, what these women experience is closer to a wipe-out of identity in which all self-knowledge or self-recogn
ition is lost: ‘I did not know who I was anymore’, ‘I do not appear to exist’, ‘It is as if you are inside a grave.’20 The alienation is then matched by the world outside the walls of the centre, where little is known of these stories. There are exceptions. In a recent interview, campaigning journalist Amelia Gentleman, who has played such a key role in bringing the Windrush scandal into the public eye, tells the story of a woman who arrived in the UK from Jamaica in 1974 aged one, but was classified as an illegal immigrant decades later and sent to Yarl’s Wood, after which she killed herself.21 For the most part, a situation of ‘knowing and unknowing’ permits the rest of the world to continue blithely on its path through the ‘cultural production of ignorance’.22 Hence the felt urgency of the Canterbury tales project to undertake its criss-crossing of national spaces – Kent, Surrey, Sussex – to make visible a group of people around whom the nation has organised itself ‘in order precisely that they be kept from view’.23 One more instance of violence unseen as it has littered the pages of this book.
On Violence and On Violence Against Women Page 31
