Fransman sex case ruling leaves women in chains

Just as we were forgetting how disjointed and complacent the South African feminist movement is, the tears shed by Khwezi, the applicant in President Jacob Zuma’s infamous rape trial, have come back to haunt us through Louisa Wynand’s ordeal. 

Sexual assault charges brought by Wynand against ANC Western Cape chair Marius Fransman have been dropped and, like Zuma in his rape case, Fransman sees himself as vindicated from a political conspiracy and is walking with an air of morality, uttering words like “righteousness” everywhere the case is concerned.

The 21-year-old Wynand appears to remain strong through her pain. Not only has she decided to reveal her identity to the media, but she has also said she will be persistent.

But how far will her strength sustain her? And where are the feminists to shout “this is not your kill” to all abusers?

In a world where Beyoncé Knowles is chief feminist, it doesn’t seem likely that old and young women alike are going to revolt beyond social-media outcries that will last all of one week.

In 2013, upon the release of her album Blow, Beyoncé sang “boy, this all for you... just walk my way... just tell me how it’s lookin babe”.

With that same breath, she labelled herself a feminist.

The problem is that while revered personalities like Beyoncé have strong agency in their actions, they are nonetheless, as argued by scholar bell hooks, colluding in the construction of women as perpetual slaves.

At face value it does appear far-fetched to blame Beyoncé for South Africa’s problems, but in our age of shrinking space and time, the impact of the hegemony of western masculinity and its historical (re)construction of the “sexualised exhibition” of black femininity runs as a common thread binding us all.

And it’s nothing new. Remember Sara Baartman? Born in the Cape around 1789, Baartman was used as a benchmark with which to judge the stages of western evolution.

In those early years of slavery and colonialism, westerners used medical and anthropological discourses to explain and establish black people as the most ignorable group in the progression of mankind.

Baartman was thus relegated to the terrain of the primitive and used as the lens through which the process of western self-reflection would assume itself as the pinnacle of human development.

The language used in reference to Baartman bolstered a global historical trajectory of derogatory images of black women’s bodies.

This is to such an extent that when she is mentioned in history, it is never as a person with feelings. She is perceived as a pathological body and confined to victimhood, prostitution, and drunkardness.

These labels continue to be synonymous with black womanhood worldwide.

Baartman was “taken” to London by one Hendrik Cezar in 1810 and displayed as an exhibition at 225 Piccadilly Circus where she was advertised as a human curiosity and exhibited like a wild animal, obliged to walk, stand or sit at her master’s orders.

Her sexuality, signified by her buttocks and genitalia, was classed as abnormally excessive in comparison to normative European self-representations.

This classification added to historically unmediated western derogatory notions of the black female body as inherently inferior.

Although Baartman was one of thousands of people exhibited as spectacles during her time, none were made “icons” of racial and sexual difference as she was, because of her ridiculed and pathologised buttocks.

Like Wynand, Baartman’s case was brought before the western judicial system.

Cezar was charged with enslavement and indecency and appealed, arguing that Baartman was under a consensually signed contract for her exhibition.

Through the voices of European male translators, Baartman is on record as a witness stating that she willingly exhibited herself.

She was thus held accountable for her own predicament and inadvertently charged with her own enslavement for the purposes of financial gain.

The case was subsequently dismissed on the grounds that Baartman was a willing participant.

Like Cezar, Fransman’s argument is that Wynand embarked on a trip with him of her free will and, in a manner similar to his boss Zuma, he has continuously blamed her accusations on “unknown individuals” set on destroying the ANC.

Like Baartman and Khwezi, Wynand is, in effect, said to be responsible for her own predicament.

Unfortunately, every time sexual assault cases against such politically powerful men are dropped, the destructive and demeaning representations of the agency of black women’s bodies are reproduced.

The consequences of such representation have highly negative effects and can be deadly for many black women who, as penned by one Ntozakhe Shange, “have considered suicide when the rainbow is enough”.

Rather somberly, the feminist movement has been unable to draw these theoretical connections and so respond justly to inequalities presented by bodily representations.

Consequently, the process of western self-reflection, marked by the yardstick of derogatory images of black womanhood, prevails in contemporary society.

But what does Beyonce have to do with this?

Though pseudo-feminists may vehemently disagree, Knowles’s sexual exhibition of her body renders her a symbolic defender of the same system that found Baartman guilty of her own slavery, and which continues to vilipend the bodies of Wynand, Khwezi, and millions of other black females.

Like the “feminist” Knowles, contemporary global pop culture is infested with female celebrities who exhibit their bodies for public consumption.

Some, like Nicki Minaj, Kim Kardashian and even Mshoza, have gone as far as having their buttocks surgically augmented to fit western notions of black female sexuality.

Sadly, these actions, particularly when modelled as “feminist”, play into the very same argument forwarded by the likes of Cezar, Zuma and Fransman, that Baartman, Khwezi and Wynand exhibited themselves out of free will.

Philile Ntuli is a social commentator with a special interest in gender issues