Colonizing Consent: Rape and Governance in South Africa's Eastern Cape by Elizabeth Thornberry (review)

"[T]here is someone here zuma-ing among us," (15) is one of the more captivating quotations from the opening of Elizabeth Thornberry's remarkable study on rape in the Eastern Cape. It underlines the connection, silences, and preoccupations between past and present debates on sexual violence, as well as the levels of competing or congruent discussions between local inhabitants, settlers, and political agents. Ukuzuma (having carnal connection with a person asleep), for example, was a common rape-accusation during the colonial period in the Eastern Cape and surrounding states. Unfamiliarity with Xhosa sexual culture by colonial agents and settler communities meant that acts such as these remained relatively absent from colonial discourses.

Perceived notions of culture and sex were again in the spotlight during the infamous 2006 Jacob Zuma rape trial. The unfolding legal battle was interpreted as a political drama, revealing deep social cleavages in South Africa regarding sexuality, and female sexuality in particular. Thornberry traces the origins of these debates in the Eastern Cape region known as Xhosaland, between 1820 and 1927. This represents a span of time from the late precolonial period to the implementation of the 1927 Immorality Act, which prohibited interracial sex outside of marriage, and the Native Administration Act, which fully segregated South Africa's legal system. This period was marked by a variety of "black peril" panics—the unfounded preoccupation with the omni[potent] black rapist—which swept through white communities in South Africa and beyond, fundamentally shaping the racial politics of the state and regulating both consensual sex as well as nonconsensual sexual violence. Similarly, the changing nature of Xhosaland geo-political boundaries, along with changing demographics, meant that different clans and sub-clans inhabited the area, each with their own dialects, cultures, and understandings of sex and sexual violence. This was further complicated by varying interpretations imported into the region through Christian proselytization, colonial conquest, and African nationalisms. These competing paradigms made defining and responding to sexual violence an almost insurmountable challenge.

Thornberry portrays the ways that sex and politics remain deeply entrenched within South African society, and she concludes her study by reiterating that sexual consent should essentially be a political project. This is based on, and supported by, the central tenet of her study: "The question of who has the right to consent to—or refuse—sex is intertwined with the question of who has the legitimate right to exercise political power" (2). She provides a detailed analysis of two interrelated histories: a social history of sexual violence in the Eastern Cape, and the relationship between consent and authority in four particular domains: custom and familial authority, the spiritual world, liberal humanitarianism, and the individual subject defined in racial terms. These competing nodes are explored in the four substantive chapters, with the final chapter assessing the implications of these changes by the turn of the twentieth century, pointing to their relevance to contemporary debates on sexual violence. Intrinsic is the violation of perceived sexual norms of the time. Thornberry argues that colonialism created not one singular claim but rather a proliferation of competing claims to sexual and political authority, thus offering a sophisticated and nuanced exposition on the competing, and at times complimentary, nodes of authority which regulate the female body.

One of the greatest methodological challenges, yet the ultimate triumph, of this study is the intricate way in which sexual violence is defined, contemplated, and regulated over time. Questions constantly arise about whose definition of rape had more credence at a specific moment in time. It is here that Thornberry negotiates the range of vocabulary of both black and white South Africans' understanding of sex: from the better known imperial vocabulary of seduction, adultery, fornication, immorality, and miscegenation to the lesser known traditional isiXhosa variations such as ukuhuwula (seduction), ukurexa (adultery), and uku jlwengula (to commit a rape). The task is made more complex as...