Rachel Sandwell McGill University [email protected] Draft, please do not cite or circulate FOR seminar May 31, 2021

This is an excerpt from a chapter of my current book manuscript in progress, which explores the history of women and gender within South African exile politics.

The Impasses of Politics: Sexual Violence and the ANC in Exile

In October 1981, senior African National Congress (ANC) Women’s Secretariat members Gertrude Shope and Florence Mophosho, both based in Lusaka at the time, visited the ANC exile community of Morogoro, Tanzania, where some 5,000 South African exiles then resided. Their visit was one of many undertaken to investigate problems among the young people living at SOMAFCO school and in the Charlottes (residential homes from mothers of infants and young children) – in this case, to address the issue of young women dating men from another South African political formation (the PAC), but also broader problems of “discipline” among the young cadres. Dividing the students into separate groups of men and women, Shope and Mophosho addressed the students about the importance of maintaining discipline, particularly in avoiding alcohol consumption and dagga (marijuana) smoking. To the boys, they “appealed to male students to take their women folk along to be on par with them politically and otherwise by assisting them where they are weak and accept them as sisters and comrades and not as objects for their entertainment, where they will end up at Charlottes with unplanned babies.”1 To the young women, they were “equally frank and harsh”, counselling the female students “not to allow themselves to be misused”, and to avoid drinking alcohol. They also addressed one particular situation, that of a young woman who had been gang- raped by a group of five SOMAFCO students. After discussing the incident publicly and with leadership, Shope and Mophosho came to share the conclusions reached by the woman’s classmates and leadership, saying “After getting reports of the girl’s general conduct, we shared the view of the committee and of other girls that she should have received some [sic? Same?]

1 “Report on Visit to Morogoro, by F Mophosho and G Shope,” 1981, MCH01-1.7, Mayibuye.

1 kind of punishment as boys as she also enticed the boys, in that she went with them on a drinking spree.” They then “spoke very strongly to her outside the meeting. She apologised and promised not to repeat this mistake again.”2 Almost forty years later, in 2017, South African media personality Redi Tlhabi published a book on Fezekile Kuzwayo, or Khwezi, the young woman and former exile who in 2006 accused Jacob Zuma of rape. Tlhabi’s account delves into sexual violence in exile in greater depth than any other book and includes a recounting of an event that echoes against the 1981 events captured in the ANC archive: Tlhabi describes a woman who was gang-raped by her comrades from SOMAFCO after drinking with them, but chose not to say anything to the authorities, knowing she would be punished as much as the men would be. Tlhabi includes the account as part of her passionate call to action – the sexual violence of exile has not, she insists, been dealt with in post-apartheid, post-exile South Africa.3 Despite its absence from discussion in official programming for women within the ANC (and there was extensive programming aimed at “upgrading” women’s political awareness), it seems clear that sexual violence, the rape or assault of women and girls, was widely understood to occur with some frequency. Shireen Hassim has observed that “A significant and widespread problem [in exile] was violence against women."4 No comprehensive audit or commission has been done, as Redi Tlhabi highlights.5 But in multiple sites and on multiple occasions, public commentators have affirmed that rapes took place in the ANC’s military camps and at the SOMAFCO school.6 Indeed, the discussion of exile’s sexual violence is something that has surfaced repeatedly in the South African public sphere in the decades since exile ended – shortly after the ANC’s return from exile, during the TRC, during Zuma’s rape trial, and again in 2016 with the (final if partial) decline and fall of Zuma from public legitimacy. The topic of sexual violence and violence against women in exile has run unevenly alongside another public discussion about exile – namely, the public conversation about abuses

2 “Report on Visit to Morogoro, by F Mophosho and G Shope,” 1981, MCH01-1.7, Mayibuye. 3 Tlhabi, location 708 4 Shireen Hassim, Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa: Contesting Authority (Madison WI: Univ of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 94. 5 Redi Tlhabi, Khwezi: The Remarkable Story of Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo. (La Vergne: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2017), 542. 6 Sean Morrow, Brown Maaba, and Loyiso Pulumani, Education in Exile: SOMAFCO, the African National Congress School in Tanzania, 1978-1992 (Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council, 2005). Blanche La Guma mentioned the same in her memoir. Author interview with Sukhthi Naidoo, May 19, 2012.

2 that took place in the ANC’s military camps and detention centres, which included torture, detention without trial, and executions. But while this ‘camps’ violence has been the subject of substantial investigation, by the ANC, by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and by journalists and scholars, violence against women in exile has not received the same organized or sustained investigation.7 Discussion of violence against women and sexual violence in exile has tended to surface briefly and allusively – events are “referred to” but seldom described, and consistently commentators suggest, as Redi Tlhabi does, that the sexual violence and violence against women and girls in exile has not been reckoned with. The subject of sexual violence then has become a charged and signifying topic, “difficult knowledge” that demands to be discussed and yet reiterates itself through public dialogue around silences.8 As a topic, it is braided into a discussion about the South African nation itself, and the place of the ANC in that nation. This chapter examines why and how the intimate violence of exile resurfaces and recurs in the South African public sphere without resolution, suggesting that what happened in exile cannot now be meaningfully separated from the efforts to talk about it post-exile. We know, in broad strokes, what happened in exile – many women have reported that they were raped or sexually taken advantage of, many women suffered domestic abuse from their partners, and the ANC did a very uneven job of addressing these issues, punishing some perpetrators, but also punishing women, as the account above indicates. But the meaning of these situations persists as unresolved – the signification of these events for ANC history and for post-apartheid South Africa, as well as for the victims and survivors, remains unsettled. It is this unsettling that pushes the conversation back again and again. Commentators, including some who were present in exile, have offered sociological explanations for sexual violence in exile which fit the facts. In 1996, the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at Wits University hosted a workshop entitled ‘Gender and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).’ By this time, TRC hearings had already commenced. The workshop engaged scholars and activists, including current ANC members, most notably, Thenjiwe Mtintso and Jessie Duarte, both prominent political women in exile and after.

7 The most comprehensive accounts of the problems in the camps are in Trewhela and Ellis; Hugh Macmillan has also offered sensitive and nuanced analysis, as has Luli Callinicos, and a number of other scholars have discussed the events as well (Steve Davis, Van Vuuren, Cleveland). 8 See Erica Lehrer, Cynthia E. Milton, and Monica Patterson, Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places (Houndmills, Basingstoke Hampshire ; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

3 Researchers associated with the workshop also conducted in-depth interviews with women about their perspectives on the TRC. From this event, its conveners Sheila Meintjes and Beth Goldblatt made a detailed submission to the TRC suggesting that its format lacked sensitivity to women’s issues.9 Also contained in Goldblatt and Meintjes’ submission is the brief but compelling analysis of the possible causes of the particular violence against women in the ANC’s camps, performed by Thenjiwe Mtintso. She highlighted the challenging environment of the camps, the psychological damage most people there would have suffered in detention inside South Africa before leaving, the lack of support for people with psychological problems within the ANC, and gendered social roles and expectations as all potentially precipitating violence against women, including sexual violence. Indeed, such explanations resonate with contemporary African feminist work on the politics of militarism and the harms of militarization for women.10 While compelling, Mtintso’s analysis placed the violence against women in the camps squarely in the realm of the sociological – it suggested the phenomenon could be explained by a mixture of personal psychology and objective characteristics of the context. This reading maintains the events safely outside of history, and outside of meaning or significance. But these sociological explanations have been insufficient to satisfy the recurrent search for meaning around the sexual violence that occurred – despite these explanations, Redi Tlhabi could still argue in her 2016 book that the ANC had not come to terms with the meaning of sexual violence in exile. An additional complexity of discussing sexual violence in exile is the fact that, as Pumla Dineo Gqola highlights, the myth of the Black male rapist has been a central trope in global racist thought, and has concretely justified the lynchings of countless Black men and boys.11 More complicated still is the fact that Jacob Zuma’s rape trial was the spur for much of the conversation around exile’s sexual violence in the last decade.12 As TJ Tallie has demonstrated,

9 See description in Fiona C Ross, Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconcliation Commission in South Africa (London; Sterling, Va.: Pluto Press, 2003). See also TRC Report, Volume 4, p.284 10 See discussion in Tlhabi, also see for example Alicia Catharine Decker, In Idi Amin’s Shadow: Women, Gender, and Militarism in Uganda (Athens, OH, UNITED STATES: Ohio University Press, 2014),; Amina Mama and Margo Okazawa-Rey, “Militarism, Conflict and Women’s Activism in the Global Era: Challenges and Prospects for Women in Three West African Contexts,” Feministreview Feminist Review, no. 101 (2012): 97–123. (No page numbers available) 11 Pumla Dineo Gqola, Rape: A South African Nightmare, 2015, 12. 12 Zuma’s trial attracted substantial public and academic commentary. See for example: Shireen Hassim, “Democracy’s Shadows: Sexual Rights and Gender Politics in the Rape Trial of Jacob Zuma,” African Studies 68, no. 1 (2009): 57–77; Pumla Dineo Gqola, “‘The Difficult Task of Normalizing Freedom’: Spectacular Masculinities, Ndebele’s Literary/Cultural Commentary and Post-Apartheid Life,” English in Africa 36, no. 1 (May 1, 2009): 61– 76; Mmatshilo Motsei, The Kanga and the Kangaroo Court: Reflections on the Rape Trial of Jacob Zuma

4 even aside from the rape trial, western media and a large swathe of South African society has used Zuma’s imputed sexual rapaciousness as a means of delegitimating him as a leader, relying on tired tropes of the sexually uncontrolled Black man.13 Indeed, the judgment in Zuma’s rape trial (he was found not guilty) skillfully combined the worst of misogyny and colonial racism when the presiding Judge quoted colonial thinker Rudyard Kipling to suggest that Zuma had sexual intercourse with his victim due to his sexual impulses which he had not yet “learned to master,” making him therefore “not yet a man.”14 Despite these freighted contexts, as Pumla Dineo Gqola reminds us, “guarding against stereotypes cannot be a justification to silence activism on rape.” And equally, as Gqola goes on to say, the subject position of Black women must not be ignored – and here, Gqola suggests scholars must attend to the ways in which the same racist myths of Black sexuality make Black women “unrapable” and therefore always open to rape.15 These two directions, acknowledging the necessity of criticizing sexual violence but attending to the infusion of racist thought into so many discussions of sexuality under apartheid, must inform any discussion of sexual violence and exile. Why does the fact of sexual violence that occurred in exile require a particular reckoning, when sexual violence is (tragically) common in post-apartheid South Africa and was equally so during the apartheid period, in changing and historically traceable ways connected to migrant labour regimes, war, violence, and the damage done to families and family structures by apartheid, as historians have demonstrated?16 At the most obvious level, and as Tlhabi argues, because the ANC was supposed to be better – because the movement was supposed to be dedicated to higher aims and ambitions, and inspired by a sense of justice. “The rape of some women and children,” Tlhabi suggests, “debunks the heroic narrative of the struggle.”17 Indeed,

(Sunnyside: Jacana, 2007); Steven Robins, “Sexual Politics and the Zuma Rape Trial**,” Journal of Southern African Studies 34, no. 2 (2008): 411–27. 13 T. J. Tallie, “Queering Natal Settler Logics and the Disruptive Challenge of Zulu Polygamy,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 19, no. 2 (January 1, 2013): 167–89, https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1957195. 14 Cited in Tlhabi, 2743. See also Peter Hudson, “The State and the Colonial Unconscious,” Social Dynamics 39, no. 2 (June 1, 2013): 273, https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2013.802867.RE Zuma 15 Gqola, Rape, loc12. 16 See for example Glen Strauch Elder, Hostels, Sexuality, and the Apartheid Legacy: Malevolent Geographies (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2003); Anne Kelk Mager, Gender and the Making of a South African Bantustan: A Social History of the Ciskei, 1945-1959 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999); Elizabeth Thornberry, Colonizing Consent: Rape and Governance in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108659284. 17 Tlhabi, location 534

5 one anonymous woman quoted in the Goldblatt and Meintjes report, obliquely discussing sexual violence in exile, observed, “At least in prison I knew I was in the enemy camp.” The phrase forces its listeners to imagine unspoken (and therefore, by implication, unspeakable) violence, and via its juxtaposition of terms brings prison, enemies, and the ANC camps into the same framework of meaning.18 Dominick LaCapra has fruitfully developed the concept of “working through” in historical writing, in his work suggesting indeed that this psychoanalytic concept intersects with historical analysis and political critique.19 “Working through” is an articulatory process, LaCapra argues, that can enable time to be distinguished, demarcating past, present, and future.20 Working through counters the effects of trauma which otherwise, LaCapra argues, “brings about a dissociation of affect and representation: one disorientingly feels what one cannot represent, one numbly represents what one cannot feel.”21 It is precisely via understanding these effects of both trauma and working through that the peculiar repetitions and silencing of sexual violence in the South African case can be understood. While information abounds about sexual violence and exile, a narrative that could provide meaning is lacking; excess feeling surges in suppressed utterances and allusions, as described above, while sociological analyses fail to capture the significance of the events that occurred. What if we take the concept of politics itself as that which has unsettled efforts at “working through” the ANC’s histories of sexual violence? What seems clear in the limited and repetitive public conversations about sexual violence that have occurred is the uneasy intersection between South African vernacular meaning of “politics” as “party politics” or “party policy”, versus feminist readings of “politics” as the relationships of power in everyday life, versus the ANC meaning of “politics” as, roughly, affiliation to a transcendent moral struggle. Unable to reconcile these definitions, the question of the politics of violence in exile, and particularly violence against women in exile, circulates and return with a haunting quality. Indeed the TRC, supposed to be the prime site of national “working through”, to arrive at a coherent national narrative and to heal the divisions of apartheid, itself foundered on the possibility of accounting for “politics” in the violence done to women inside the ANC.

18 Goldblatt and Meintjes, “Gender and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” 19 LaCapra Writing History, Writing Trauma, xxxi 20 LaCapra Writing History, Writing Trauma, 21 21 Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 42.

6 The impossible politics of sexual violence in the context of a national liberation movement have produced what could be described as two impasses22: the impasse of totalizing politics and the impasse of a politics of violence. Exploring these political dead ends reveals the ways in which “working through” is short-circuited by their formulations. Exploring these blocks also demonstrates the central place the ANC itself occupies. It is in the aporetic space of these conceptual dead ends that the ANC asserts itself as the South African nation, insisting on its right to define South Africa, including to foreclose on questions of the meaning of sexual violence.

The Impasse of Totalizing Politics

In the rich archives of the exiled ANC, there is very little discussion of sexual violence, although discussions of intimate life, the politics of reproduction, and gender itself abound. This silence doesn’t imply there was no problem in these domains, but does reveal that there was, perhaps, no language with which to discuss such problems. As Hassim observes, “[questions] about the nature of family and personal relationships were seen as bourgeois concerns."23 In fact, precisely the fact of the ANC defining so much of intimate life as subject to politics seems to have short-circuited the organization’s capacity to consider the intimate politics of unequal gendered power. The ANC in exile, particularly in the 1980s, was in the process of developing a significant bureaucratic infrastructure, one that seemed particularly fond of “reporting”. Anthropologist Fiona Ross suggests that early ANC commissions of enquiry in fact provided one example for the eventual constituting of the TRC – Ross names the Motsuenyane and Skweyiya as examples.24 In naming only these two, she understates the case – in exile, the ANC held numerous other major investigations, notably, Shishita in 1981 (into spy infiltration), and the Stuart in 1984 (into the first camps mutiny), as well as an investigation into the death of Thami Zulu (unpublished). In addition to these publicized inquiries, the ANC conducted inquiries into a number of bureaucratic problems in the 1980s – for example, into “the crisis at the Charlottes” (see earlier chapters), “Disciplinary problems in Mazimbu/SOMAFCO”, “Problems in the Health

22 Note, in the chapter there are three impasses, I consider symbolic as well, but for sake of shortening word count I include just 2 here 23 Hassim, Democracy’s Shadows, 68 24 Ross, Bearing Witness, 9.

7 Department”, and even a prolonged inquest into a car accident that occurred on a SOMAFCO school holiday. All of these inquests shared a relatively similar format – a certain number of people were appointed as investigators; these investigators physically travelled to the site of the problem, met the people involved, and interviewed them; they then wrote up a report of their findings, with recommendations. In some of these cases, only the final report survives (in other cases, such as the Shishita Report and the report into Thami Zulu, the reports are difficult to access), and in others (such as the SOMAFCO car accident), pages of notes from the investigation survive. But in amongst these inquests, there is none devoted to sexual violence specifically. Instead, sexual violence surfaces as something mentioned in conjunction with other problems or issues, and is seldom named as such. The absence of any report dedicated to sexual abuse is, in the context of so much reporting, worth remarking. It is possible that such a report was made and then hidden or lost (this is not impossible – the security archives of the ANC are not publicly accessible).25 The ANC has itself admitted, in its internal reports and TRC submissions, that violence against women within its ranks was a problem. But absent a dedicated report, it is possible to conclude that for the ANC, although sexual violence was acknowledged to exist, it was not a problem that “signified” – it was not a problem that demanded investigation and accounting, unlike other problems of discipline, violence, or dissent within the ANC. This gap has become telling in the post-exile period, where recurrent public conversations insist that sexual violence in exile did signify, that the experiences of sexual violence in exile tell us something greater about the nature of exile and of the post-apartheid South African nation, despite the apparent lack of interest in addressing the issue during the exile period. The ANC did run small courts to judge members accused of rape or domestic abuse. According to prominent ANC member Baleka Kgositsile-Mbete, such courts were necessary to prevent the ANC “losing” members to the judicial systems of host countries – it was more expedient to manage such issues internally.26 Redi Tlhabi describes such courts responding to rapes in exile, in the case of Fezekile Kuzwayo – they were, according to Tlhabi’s account, run

25 See Hugh Macmillan, “Was Madiba Co-Opted into Communism?,” The Mail and Guardian Online, January 17, 2014, http://mg.co.za/article/2014-01-16-was-madiba-co-opted-into-communism/. 26 Baleka Mbete, “In for the Long Haul,” in Prodigal Daughters: Stories of South African Women in Exile, ed. Lauretta Ngcobo (Durban: University of Kwazulu Natal Press, 2012), 81.

8 by ANC women, “aunties”, who would usually dock pay for men found guilty.27 While the archive is largely silent on the functioning of these courts – it is unclear if written records were kept – a few moments stand out from the archive, opening a narrow window onto the ANC’s efforts to manage sexual violence and to theorize the import of such violence in a context where, as we have seen, theories of gendered relations relied on “upgrading women” and condemning “male chauvinism,” but offered no deeper theorization of gender, sexuality, or power. The 1981 events, when Shope and Mophosho punished a young woman for being raped, illuminate the complex politics of sexuality and responsibility at work within the ANC. The ANC’s logic here is not that of a contemporary criminal court. The complicity of the victim is typically used in rape trials to discredit the victim and let the assailant off, either to mitigate or absolve his sentence (as indeed Tlhabi describes in her sharp analysis of Zuma’s rape trial). But that is not the case here. The boy students have been punished, and there is no question that they should be punished. Their crime is clearly named as “rape” – the girl’s consent is not in question. But equally, some of the girl’s compatriots (“other girls”), as well as the Women’s Committee, believed the girl also should be punished. She should be punished, the line of reasoning goes, because she led the boys on, and drank with them. It is difficult to get a sense, from the document as written, whether she was to be punished for the “enticement”, or for the “indiscipline” in drinking with them. Drinking was a general concern for the leadership at this time, as the senior women’s comments to the students more broadly suggest. There is no further information about this case, probably because it was then dealt with by the national leadership, and records from this body are not comprehensively publicly accessible. But on the basis of the limited sources available on this incident, it is possible to read the incident and response as evidence of a particular politics of “upgrading,” the ANC’s approach to shaping cadre behaviour. In this framing, “rape” becomes something of which both parties can be guilty: the man for committing the act, and the woman for enabling it through incorrect behaviour. In most contemporary criminal courts today, with a liberal individualist reading of responsibility, rape is theorized as an act of specific violent assault, made equivalent by the law to any other form of assault, with a clear perpetrator and a victim, a victim who should, according to the understandings of the court, behave like a victim to any other crime – as long as rape, and not sexual intercourse, is deemed to have occurred, the perpetrator is guilty. If

27 Tlhabi, Khwezi.

9 what occurred is deemed to be sexual intercourse and not rape, then it is not simply that the perpetrator is not guilty – there is a determination that no crime has occurred. The very interpretation of the act changes, from sexual violation to sexual intercourse, a deliberation that typically hinges on the court’s evaluation of the victim’s credibility (in cases where the assailant acknowledges sexual contact but insists it was consensual). Indeed, such readings of rape are clearly on display in Zuma’s rape trial. In Tlhabi’s astute reading of the trial, she highlights issues to which other feminists have long drawn attention: the complex interplay of consent and power, and the impact of trauma on how women respond to a rapist’s advances. For these reasons, Tlhabi demonstrates, the narrow view of the court misunderstands sexual violence, too often, as in the Zuma case, finding that sexual intercourse had occurred, and not rape. Against such an approach, Tlhabi, as other feminists before her, insists on a reading of rape as a performance of gendered power, not generic violence. But the exiled ANC’s reading reflected neither the legalistic nor the feminist approach: instead, they theorized rape as undisciplined behaviour on the part of both, not a particular form of violent assault nor as a gendered assertion of power. Such a reading flattened male responsibility, denying rape as a uniquely violent act and transforming it instead into mutual misbehaviour. But unlike liberal readings, with their narrow focus on formal consent and ideal victims, the ANC approach did make it possible to admit rape had occurred, even as it minimized what that meant. But like many other aspects of ANC gender politics, approaches to rape shifted over the 1980s, again, it seems, driven by younger women’s energy. In November 1989, the headmaster of the SOMAFCO school encountered a young woman student exiting the male dormitories, late at night. On seeing her, he “forced [her] to his room for sexual intercourse.”28 The other students at the school realized what was happening and surrounded his house, expressing their consternation. The young woman eventually escaped the house – accounts do not detail how – and later, other students recorded an interview with her about the events. The decision of her colleagues to elicit an interview, and of her to give it, suggests a strong criticism on the part of the students towards the principal, as does the students’ action in surrounding the house during the rape. The sources on this incident are not sufficient to draw broader conclusions about student solidarity and mutual aid, but the minimal facts do point to such sentiments and practice.

28 “Letter to Director of Schools, Cde. Manghezi, from S. Khoza, Dakawa.” 17 November 1989, Director 19.5, UFH

10 The very presence of these accounts in the archive, and their place there, tells us something about gender analysis in the ANC in the late 80s. The event enters the archive via a series of concerned letters exchanged between the SOMAFCO Directorate and the Dakawa staff. Again, the staff clearly took the incident seriously, and intended to discipline the principal – who did not deny the allegations” and admitted to being “under the influence of liquor,” and was subsequently relieved of his duties.29 But no broader discussion about sexual violence on the campus took place, as far as the records indicate. On the administrative level, this incident seems to have been read merely as unfortunate; unlike the earlier incident of rape, in which both parties were held to be guilty of political misconduct, here, the incident seems to be read administratively rather than politically – but the guilt of the perpetrator is the only thing at issue, the conduct of the student herself is not questioned. Equally, the students’ strong objections, which forced the incident into view, suggest they did not share the view that this was a mere administrative issue, nor did they view the perpetrator and victim as equally responsible. These events suggest that by the late 1980s, women’s more assertive politics had begun to challenge the ANC’s readings of gender, power, and violence. Domestic violence was also identified as a problem in exile. Women’s Section reports, particularly from East Africa, note efforts to address this issue, while disciplinary investigations, such as the investigation into SOMAFCO, cite it as a problem to be corrected. In her memoir, Women’s Section member Baleka Mbete-Kgositsile recalls establishing domestic violence courts, and arresting men. The ANC, she explains, had “facilities to lock our own people up for a few days…. This was better than handing them over to the host country’s justice system, where we would lose control completely.”30 Mbete-Kgositsile’s discussion suggests considerable engagement by women within the ANC on this issue. At the same time, however, there is no evidence of a dedicated investigation, as there was into spying, misconduct at the Charlottes, or disorder at SOMAFCO. It would be unfair to characterize this as “official silence” – domestic violence was officially mentioned, on multiple organizational levels. But what was missing was a particular analysis that would have given domestic violence meaning. Spying, misconduct, and disorder were all behaviours that “signified” – they could be read as indicative of a deeper

29 “Letter to Director of Schools, from Dakawa Staff,” 14 November 1989, Director 19.5, UFH. 30 Mbete, “In for the Long Haul,” 81.

11 problem, therefore demanding investigation. Domestic violence, and rape, did not signify in the same way. Part of the reason for this was the narrow feminist politics of liberation, which did not themselves address intimate relations as within their purview. In exile, the ANC failed to address sexual violence as a problem in itself because it didn’t view the sexual as political in the sense of gender politics (i.e. as being about power between men and women, or women’s right to power, freedom, and public space). The ANC’s reading of the politics of sexual violence instead relied on ideas of vice and licentiousness or simply license – they saw sexual violence as arising from a failure of discipline and control, on behalf of both parties, perpetrator and victim (or survivor). Sexual violence was condemned as wrong, and as more wrong for those in power, but it didn’t signify beyond being read as a violation of the moral codes a cadre was expected to follow. In this sense, it had no greater traumatic ‘truth’ or ‘telling quality’ beyond any other incident in exile. It is this “folding in”, this non-exceptionality that commentators, including former exiles, resurface post-exile, as critics of the ANC demand an accounting of the sexual violence of exile as something that signified – something more than a mistake, an error of judgement, a failure of discipline. In defining it as a disciplinary issue, the ANC confined sexual violence to a narrow field of accounting, admitting it as a potential “political” problem, but only insofar as other disciplinary problems were potentially political. With such a framing, the ANC excluded feminist analyses that examine gendered power and intimate politics. As Shireen Hassim has pointed out, many proponents of transformation in South Africa “do not address the asymmetries of power in the private sphere, nor do they grasp the multiplicities of ways in which sexual and gender relations and identities are upheld, contested and negotiated by individuals in their personal relationships.”31 Against this, feminist scholars have drawn attention to embodied and intimate politics. Writing on group rapes known as jackrolling, Tlhabi insists, “Jackrolling was a political act reflecting militarized masculinities and patriarchal practices.”32 A feminist politics analyzes rape and sexual violence as rooted in relations of unequal gendered power and as such, criticizes the ANC for failing to acknowledge these gendered relations of power (justly so). But how to theorize the politics and politicality of an organization aimed at such ‘intimate transformations’ in other domains – and the comparable silence on

31 Hassim, “Democracy’s Shadows,” 61. 32 Tlhabi, Khwezi, loc 790

12 sexual violence? The ANC was able to analyse sexual violence only as related to violations of conduct expectations, again failing to take into account politics beyond a narrow politics of discipline. As Hassim observes, the ANC “ [ruled] out any form of explicitly feminist debate that went beyond national liberation.”33 Political exile was a context where so much of intimate life was rendered as political, where members were explicitly called to sacrifice the personal in their commitment to ‘the struggle’ and as part of their transformation into loyal cadres, a process that was often narrated or rendered legible through an abbreviated discussion of familial loss. Given this context, the exclusion of sexual violence from the domain of the “political” is not a given, and the fact of its exclusion needs to be taken seriously. Attending to the ways in which sexual conduct as a whole was politicized (ie rendered visible to political discussions) is one way in: we see sexual conduct was understood solely as a failure of discipline, which is to say, a failure to be “properly political.” In this sense, a feminist politics that analyzes masculinity and power relations as contributing to sexual violence meets head on a politics that insists on ‘living a political life’ as a sufficient end, and the two lock in an impasse. (The escape to this impasse may rest in disrupting the ANC’s claim to politics in both the exile period and in recollections of that exile period, as the students’ anti-rape direct action suggests.)

The Impasse of Violence One reason these incidents of sexual violence unsettle is because they force the question: what was the place of violence in everyday life in exile? How close to the surface of banal and ordinary experience was exceptional violence, in these lives lived in the pursuit of military takeover of South Africa, lives lived across the militarized zones of camps as well as the SOMAFCO school? Was exile as such violent, or were incidents of violence, of all types, aberrant? Did sexual violence matter differently, or did all violence signify? These questions have dogged post-apartheid, post-exile life. Post-apartheid, scholars and public intellectuals in South Africa have been preoccupied with the problem of violence more broadly, including the legacies of the extraordinary everyday violence of the apartheid state, but also including violence

33 Hassim, “Democracy’s Shadows,” 68.

13 that took place within the ANC in exile. In these public conversations about violence, however, the specific space of sexual violence has often been elided. 34 Even before the ANC returned to South Africa, stories had begun to surface about violence in the ANC’s military camps in particular. The earliest media mentions of the camps violence, and exile violence more broadly, came from a Trotskyist journal based out of the United Kingdom, Searchlight. The periodical, run by former ANC member Paul Trewhela, and historian Baruch Hirson, was published twice a year from 1988 to 1993, with a final issue in 1995.35 Trewhela is still publishing on these questions today. From the first issue, the paper posed itself as propagating a new left movement in South Africa (one historically linked to Trotskyist movements in the South African past), and defending this (pure workers’) movement against “Stalinists and nationalists” – namely, the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the African National Congress (ANC) and other potentially black nationalist groups.36 The main argument of Searchlight throughout was that the ANC was a violent and Stalinist organization, dominated by the South African Communist Party, white Communists, and the Soviet Union. In exile, Searchlight argued, members who attempted to push for democratization of the ANC were harshly punished, including with torture. The core of Searchlight’s argument was political: that the abuses in the camps revealed the corruption at the heart of the ANC, because incidents of detention, torture, and execution were linked to political disputes within the ANC, not simply security concerns or violations in a time of war. Stephen Ellis, a scholar and journalist, has made similar arguments also since the early 1990s, also attributing violence within the ANC to the nefarious influence of the SACP, which he has claimed had near total control over the ANC.37 As we shall see, these findings have influenced many other analysts of the ANC. Once the ANC had returned to South Africa, information about violence in the ANC’s exile camps, or the “camps scandal”, burst rapidly into public consciousness, admittedly, as

34 An unanswered question persists, provoked by Gqola’s critical attention on the rapist: how is the history and experience of exile unsettled by the experience of the many perpetrators of violence, not just the survivors of it? 35 “Searchlight South Africa,” http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/otherstu/srchlght.htm (Accessed April 30, 2014) 36 “Editorial,” Searchlight South Africa, 1, 1, 1988. P.7 37 Ellis and Sechaba, Ellis 2012, Ellis external mission. Note, Ellis does introduce important observations about criminality, demonstrating that the ANC both deliberately and accidentally accepting people with criminal and gang ties into their exiled administration; unsurprisingly, this provoked challenges within the movement.

14 Steve Davis has cautioned, in a fraught and charged political context.38 In 1990, a group of men who had been detained by the ANC, and then released, returned to South Africa and formed the Returned Exiles Coordinating Committee (RECOC). In mid-May 1990, RECOC gave a press conference in South Africa denouncing abuses in the ANC camps, recounting their own experiences of torture and prolonged detention. In June 1990, ANC cadres in Umtata, in what was then the Bantustan of the Transkei, assassinated RECOC member Sipho Phungulwa.39 His assassins later applied for and received amnesty from the TRC on the grounds that the killing was politically motivated.40 In their eyes, Phungulwa and other RECOC members were askaris, namely, former ANC members who had been ‘turned’ by the apartheid state to work for them, and betray the ANC. RECOC’s public denunciations of the ANC served as evidence, for these men, that RECOC was subverted by the state, and secretly politically motivated against the ANC.41 In the aftermath of the events around RECOC, the ANC, in response to considerable public pressure, called two internal Commissions of Inquiry, the Skweyiya and Motsuenyane – both heard from witnesses, and reviewed extensive documentation, although with varying degrees of independence from the ANC, and both came to the conclusion that significant violence had occurred in exile. Amnesty International also conducted independent research at this time and came to the same conclusions, in 1992 publishing a report calling for more comprehensive and public accounting of what had gone on in exile. All three publications described consistent and credible accounts testimonies regarding length of detention, and conditions of detention, particularly at Quatro prison camp, an ANC military camp in Angola. There, they found, detainees were subject to solitary confinement, inadequate food supply,

38 Steve Davis, “The ANC: From Freedom Radio to Radio Freedom,” in Southern African Liberation Struggles: New Local, Regional and Global Perspectives, ed. Hilary Sapire and Chris Saunders (Cape Town: UCT Press, 2013), 117–41. 39 “Report on Torture, Ill-Treatment, and Executions in ANC Camps,” Amnesty International, Dec 2 1992. p.11. Yasmin Sooka Collection, Traces of Truth, University of the Witwatersrand. 40 See Amnesty Committee TRC, Application In Terms Of Section 18 Of The Promotion Of National Unity And Reconciliation Act, AC/98/0034, Amnesty Application (Truth and Reconciliation Commission, August 18, 1998), http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/decisions/1998/980818_ndzamela%20kubukelietc.htm. 41 It is worth noting that the political motivations of RECOC and its supporters are unresolved, and that the apartheid government and its allies certainly, throughout this period, actively worked to destabilize the ANC. See Terry Bell and Dumisa Buhle Ntsebeza, Unfinished Business: South Africa, Apartheid, and Truth (Verso, 2003); Daniel Douek, “Counterinsurgency’s Impact on Transitions from Authoritarianism: The Case of South Africa,” Politikon 40, no. 2 (2013): 255–75; Daniel Douek, “‘They Became Afraid When They Saw Us’: MK Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in the Bantustan of Transkei, 1988–1994,” Journal of Southern African Studies 39, no. 1 (2013): 207–25.

15 inadequate medical care, and harsh treatment, including forced labour, beating, suffocation, being buried alive, being burned with boiling water, and being forced to crawl through stinging plants (dubbed “napalm” for the burning sensation they produced) and red ant colonies.42 Many also described making false confessions under torture at various locations, including in ANC residences in Zambia and Tanzania. In contrast to RECOC, Searchlight, and other critics, however, the ANC’s reporting insisted that such incidents were aberrations, momentary excesses, or policy failures that the ANC then overcame. For example, they did not deny having used torture, but suggested they updated their policies in the 1980s to reject such methods.43 Consistently, the ANC insisted that these methods were not used politically, against suspected ideological dissidents, but exceptionally, against people who were dangerous to the movement.44 This argument – about whether or not violence was being used for political means against suspected dissidents – leaves little space to attribute meaning to or to understand sexual violence. The Motsuenyane Commission report marked the first time that violence against women was publicly mentioned in the context of camps abuses.45 The Report mentions one cadre, Dumisani Khosa, who reported being detained at Quatro after protesting the sexual harassment of ANC women.46 The Report also mentions one camp security guard being accused of rape in 1987, but provides no further details.47 Most of the report focuses on providing specific and detailed descriptions of individuals’ experiences of torture and detention, and making recommendations to the ANC (largely for apologies). They also list the names of some of the alleged perpetrators of abuses, including Andrew Masondo, who would later testify at the TRC.

42 L. Skweyiya, B. Mabandla, and G. Marcus, “Skweyiya Commission Report” (African National Congress, 1992), http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=95. 43 See for example discussion in Olivia Greene, “The Embryonic State Idealisms in an Armed Struggle,” Radical History Review 2014, no. 119 (March 20, 2014): 146–60, https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2401978. 44 As even Ellis acknowledges, the South African government throughout the 1980s worked actively to subvert the ANC in exile, infiltrating spies and people with the mission to damage the organization. Ellis 2012. See also Nicky Rousseau and Hugh Macmillan’s work on infiltrators. Hugh Macmillan, “Shishita: A Crisis in the ANC in Exile in Zambia, 1980–81,” in 100 Years of the ANC: Debating Liberation Histories Today, ed. Arianna Lissoni et al. (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2012), 233–54; Nicky Rousseau, “Counter-Revolutionary Warfare: The Soweto Intelligence Unit and Southern Itineraries,” Journal of Southern African Studies 40, no. 6 (2014): 1343–61, https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2014.966292. 45 The ANC’s internal Stuart Commission, conducted in 1984, did mention harassment of women as a problem (one that led to conflict between men in the organization), but this report was not made public until the TRC hearings. 46 SM Motsuenyane, “Reports of the Commission of Enquiry into Certain Allegations of Cruelty and Human Rights Abuse against ANC Prisoners and Detainees by ANC Members,” REPORTS OF THE COMMISSION OF ENQUIRY INTO CERTAIN ALLEGATIONS OF CRUELTY AND HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSE AGAINST ANC PRISONERS AND DETAINEES BY ANC MEMBERS, August 20, 1993, 41, Traces of Truth Online Archive, Wits University, http://truth.wwl.wits.ac.za/doc_print.php?fl=2_2/3021-h1-2-1-01.html. 47 Motsuenyane, 32.

16 Thus, for the first time violence against women emerged as an issue, and for the first time, specific ANC perpetrators were named. Despite these revelations, despite the public knowledge of these abuses in exile, the issue simmered on, and surfaced again at the TRC.

Created by Act of Parliament in 1995, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission eventually was to hear many thousands of testimonies from both victims of apartheid, and perpetrators. Its goal was to elicit testimonies from these witnesses in order to “establish as complete a picture as possible of the causes, nature and extent of the gross violations of human rights” between 1960-1994.48 It did so via Gross Human Rights Violations hearings; roughly 2,000 witnesses testified to such violations at sixty hearings around the country, and an additional 22,000 written statements were taken.49 The TRC also heard from perpetrators of these human rights violations. In replacing court trials as a means for resolving past violence, the TRC was instead intended to “[transform] the country’s fragmented ‘collective memory’ into a shared national history.”50 The TRC’s project was one of healing and national reconciliation, rather than prosecution. Commissioners chosen from civil society, religious organizations, and political organization held hearings across the country, over several years. These hearings gathered significant media interest at the time. Outside of the hearings, teams of researchers compiled written submissions from witnesses, and did additional investigations. The TRC Commissioners also held a judicial function – they had the power to grant amnesty to perpetrators who testified, if they confessed, and if their crimes were deemed political. The South African TRC is the only Truth Commission to have been given such power.51 Unsurprisingly, the Amnesty hearings generated a great deal of controversy. At these hearings, perpetrators who confessed to acts of violence were able to escape legal prosecution – but critics

48 M. Sanders, “Ambiguities Of Mourning Law, Custom, Literature and Women before South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” Law Text Culture 4, no. 2 (January 1, 1998): 107. 49 “TRC Category 2 – Human Rights Violations,” Traces of Truth, University of the Witwatersrand. http://truth.wwl.wits.ac.za/cat_descr.php?cat=2 (Accessed August 4, 2014) 50 Sanders, “Ambiguities Of Mourning Law, Custom, Literature and Women before South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” 108. 51 “TRC Category 3 – Amnesty,” Traces of Truth, University of the Witwatersrand, http://truth.wwl.wits.ac.za/cat_descr.php?cat=3 (Accessed August 4, 2014)

17 have pointed out that the TRC generated few ‘new’ confessions by previously unknown perpetrators, but instead, absolved known perpetrators while letting others keep their silence.52 The ANC’s record at the TRC is controversial and mixed. Famously, it attempted to block publication of the TRC’s final Reports in 1998, arguing that they erroneously and unjustly drew a moral equivalence between the crimes of the apartheid state, and the crimes of those who struggled against apartheid. Todd Cleveland highlights here the changed attitude of the ANC, noting that by the time it had acceded to power, it was less open to discussing its own troubled past than it had been at the time of its earlier commissions.53 However, the TRC’s Final Report praised the ANC’s openness. It highlighted the ANC’s willingness to hold its own inquiries prior to the TRC, noting that “the ANC should be commended for setting a high standard in this regard.” Equally, the Report acknowledged the ANC’s willingness to submit information about its own past, citing the lengthy written submissions the ANC made. The Report observed that “Much of the detail contained in this section comes from the ANC’s own enquiries and submissions to this Commission.”54 At the TRC, the ANC made an official submission, and then a second, more detailed submission, in response to questions from TRC Commissioners. These written submissions, each over 100 pages in length, provided explicit detail about the administration of exile, listing names of committee members and describing the responsibilities of each committee. The submissions included copies of the ANC’s own internal commissions, in the 1980s, into both spy infiltration, and into the camps abuses – the ANC held their first inquiry into this matter as early as 1984. (These reports were confidential and were therefore not included in the TRC’s Final Report, and are not archived on the TRC website, although they are accessible through archival holdings in South Africa.) In addition, the ANC listed the names of people detained in exile, and people executed in exile, as well as those who went missing or died of other causes. Despite the inclusion of these details, though, for the most part the ANC’s submissions contained statements of ANC policy, and analysis of the political situation (apartheid) that necessitated armed intervention.

52 See discussion in Bell & Ntsebeza. Mahmood Mamdani has also drawn attention to the fact that, in focussing on perpetrators, the TRC neglected “beneficiaries” of apartheid, who were many. 53 T. Cleveland, “’We Still Want the Truth’: The ANC’s Angolan Detention Camps and Post-Apartheid Memory”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Vol 25, No 1, 2005. P.10 54 TRC Final Report, Volume 2, 1998, p.326

18 The ANC’s written submissions reveal its attempts to manage its narrative about the camps’ abuses. If RECOC and Searchlight had sought to portray the ANC as an organized and malicious Stalinist organization, in which internal democracy was violently suppressed, the ANC used the TRC to propose an alternative reading of their time in exile, via their first report, 190 pages long, submitted in 1996, and the second, 248 pages long, submitted in 1997. In these reports, the authors foregrounded three main ideas: that the ANC was a committed political organization, not an ordinary army; that it was under massive threat from the apartheid state’s campaign of military raids, spy infiltration, and targeted assassinations; and that “excesses” were exceptional, and occurred due to lapses in training, the infiltration of agents, and the climate of anxiety. The first two points are undeniably true – historians and memoirists agree that ‘political education’ was a core component of ANC training in exile, including in the camps in Angola, and that cadres were instilled with a strict sense of political ethics.55 The ANC developed a Code of Conduct for its members, specifically designed to prevent abuses, and was one of the only liberation organizations in the world to sign onto the Geneva Convention, in 1980, conventions aimed at regulating military conduct towards civilians.56 Equally, it is widely recognised that the apartheid state vigorously infiltrated spies into the ANC, particularly in the 1980s; assassinations of ANC members, and attacks on ANC camps, including both mass poisonings and bombings, are well-documented.57 The third point though, the exceptional nature of the abuses, is worth exploring, as it reveals the crux of the eventual debate over the abuses: do they tell us something about the ANC (as RECOC, Searchlight, and others would eventually argue), or do they for the most part tell us only about the hardships the ANC faced?

55 See discussion in chapter four. See also discussion in Luli Callinicos, Oliver Tambo: Beyond the Engeli Mountains (Cape Town: David Philip, 2004); Barry Gilder, Songs and Secrets (South Africa: Jacana Media, 2012); Ronald Kasrils, Armed and Dangerous: From Undercover Struggle to Freedom, Rev. and further updated (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2004); H. J Simons et al., Comrade Jack: The Political Lectures and Diary of Jack Simons, Novo Catengue (New Doornfontein [South Africa]; Johannesburg: STE Publishers ; African National Congress, 2001); Raymond Suttner, The ANC Underground in South Africa, 1950-1976 (Boulder, Colo.: FirstForumPress, 2009). 56 “ANC becomes signatory to the Geneva Convention of 1949 and Protocol 1 of 1977”, South African History Online, http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/anc-becomes-signatory-geneva-convention-1949-and-protocol-1- 1977 (accessed July 31, 2014) 57 See Luli Callinicos, “Oliver Tambo and the Dilemma of the Camp Mutinies in Angola in the Eighties,” South African Historical Journal 64, no. 3 (2012): 587–621; Davis, “The ANC: From Freedom Radio to Radio Freedom”; Hugh Macmillan, “After Morogoro: The Continuing Crisis in the African National Congress (of South Africa) in Zambia, 1969–1971,” Social Dynamics 35, no. 2 (2009): 295–311.

19 In its submissions, the ANC emphasized its role as a political organization, committed to national liberation struggle, and engaging in what it termed “a just war”. The ANC, it noted, “trained all its combatants as armed political activists and not as mere soldiers whose only responsibility was to understand and carry out orders from a superior command.”58 Quoting its own internal documents from the 1980s, the First Submission argued that "When we talk of revolutionary armed struggle, we are talking of political struggle by means which include the use of military force (...) It is important to emphasise this because our movement must reject all manifestations of militarism which separates armed people's struggle from its political context.”59 According to this argument, then, the ANC was systematically good, vigilant, and disciplined. The submissions pose this reality in direct opposition to the apartheid state, reminding their readers that, “The system of apartheid and its violent consequences were systematic; they were deliberate; they were a matter of policy.”60 By contrast, the submissions insist, the abuses that took place in the ANC prison camps were exceptional. Referring to the abuses at Quatro, to which they admit, the First Submission argues, “The conditions in this detention centre, which are graphically illustrated in the commission reports, should be considered against the 'norm' which existed in general in the camps, given that conditions in any guerrilla military establishment are very difficult and abnormal.”61 In other words, while the conditions at Quatro were bad, they should be understood with reference to the conditions in other ANC military camps, not for detainees, which also suffered from shortages of food, water, and medical care. In this reading, which the ANC maintained throughout its detailed submissions, the violence in its camps was aberrant, exceptional, and without meaning, except insofar as it testified to the challenging conditions the ANC faced in exile. The question that could not be settled was the political meaning of violence – was it systemic or an aberration, periodic moments of ‘excess’? The dead ends of this question shows themselves most starkly in one woman’s testimony at the TRC – the only woman to testify about experiencing rape in exile, a rape she describes in the context of torture that most closely resembles the torture cadres suffered in the ANC’s detention camps.

58 African National Congress, “African National Congress Statement to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” August 1996, 28, http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/hrvtrans/index.htm. 59 African National Congress, 100. 60 African National Congress, 20. 61 African National Congress, 18.

20 Lita Mazibuko had been based inside South Africa, and helped facilitate ‘escape routes’ out of the country, channelling willing volunteers into nearby Swaziland. In 1988, an expedition she had organized was caught by the South African forces, and some cadres died in the ensuing struggle. As a result, Mazibuko came under suspicion of being a spy or double-dealer, who had potentially turned in her own expedition. She was then kidnapped, tortured, and interrogated over a period of months by ANC cadres.62 The late date of these events, 1988, is a tragic indictment of the failures of the ANC to reform its security services, even after the 1985 Kabwe Conference, usually cited as a moment of reckoning that crystallized reforms.63 Mazibuko had never heard of, according to her testimony, the Motsuenyane Commission, and therefore did not testify there.64 Mazibuko’s account is striking both in its ruptured and traumatized narrative, and in the violence it describes. In these regards, it resonates strongly with accounts given of the abuses in the camps, situations where (male) victims also described seemingly random abductions and detentions, interspersed with torture, interspersed with unexpected release, and reintegration into normal ANC work.65 These testimonies too are significant in their collapsed agency, and in the extent to which they convey the massive confusion and incoherence of those subject to erratic and prolonged detention in multiple sites by the ANC. In the case of Mazibuko’s testimony, her evidence is no less bodily than theirs, but the torture she describes is occasionally, though not entirely, sexual in nature. She describes being kidnapped by ANC comrades, being tied to a pole and immersed in a ditch of water for hours in Zambia, then being smuggled over the Mozambican border. In vividly physical, if terse, language, she recounts begging to be able to blow her nose, and begging for a change of clothes. In Maputo, Mozambique, she was made to lie in a hole for four days, with no food. In a confusing series of events, she recounts being flown from Mozambique to Zambia, and there being detained in a variety of locations, including a spell from December to March where she was kept underground and alone, fed only once a day.

62 TRC Report, Volume 4, 1998, p309 63 See Callinicos, “Oliver Tambo and the Dilemma of the Camp Mutinies in Angola in the Eighties”; African National Congress, “Further Submissions And Responses By The African National Congress To Questions Raised By The Commission For Truth And Reconciliation,” May 12, 1997, http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/hrvtrans/submit/anc2.htm.; ANC Second Submission 64 Lita Nombango Mazibuko, “Truth and Reconciliation Commission - Women’s Hearings,” Pub. L. No. JB04442/01, § Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 1 (1997), 11, www.justice.gov.za/Trc/special/women/mazibuko.htm. 65 See Mwezi Twala and Ed Benard, Mbokodo: Inside MK : Mwezi Twala : A Soldier’s Story (Johannesburg: J. Ball Publishers, 1994); Paul Trewhela, Inside Quatro: Uncovering the Exile History of the Anc and Swapo (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2009).

21 During this time, she wore the same clothing, and had no opportunity to bathe. On one occasion, she was taken above ground and beaten. In this moment, she explained, she felt her treatment was more due to competition between her two male jailers, who wanted her to pick one of them to have sex with – rather than her alleged betrayal of her comrades.66 Later, she was taken to another prison. Eventually she had the chance to meet Comrade Zola Skweyiya, a high-ranking figure in the ANC, who told her she was exonerated. In uneven temporality, she describes being released and baking cakes for Comrade Skweyiya, being trusted with cooking. Stepping back in her narrative though, she acknowledges being raped at another prison in Zambia, saying, “I don’t know how to describe this.” It is as this point in her account that the Commissioners of the TRC intervene. Commissioner Mkhize, a woman, asks her, “was it a principle or a rule of prison that women would be violated in this manner?”, and Mazibuko replies in the negative. This question itself is searching for a narrative: the commissioner is asking if rape was the rule inside the ANC, in other words, an official policy of a way to punish women. Mazibuko resists this narrativization. Indeed, she cites instead ANC policy to the contrary, explaining:

“We used to be in camps and we would be told that men do not have the right to violate us. You could only get involved if you wanted to, but if you didn’t want to you couldn’t. But it did happen that at that Sun City [prison] one Desmond raped me nine times.”67

For Mazibuko, her assault was specifically not the result of ‘policy,’ and indeed she cites transformative gender policies in the camps positively. The difference, however, is between policy and what she experienced as a captive, not a cadre. She detailed further sexual torture by another “comrade,” Tebogo, “who was also very young.” She testified:

He raped me and he also cut my genitals. He cut through my genitals and they were cut open and he put me in certain room and he tied my hands, my legs, they were apart, he

66 Mazibuko, Truth and Reconciliation Commission - Women’s Hearings, 6. 67 Mazibuko, 8.

22 also tied my neck, and he would pour Dettol over my genitals. The pain that I experienced I have never spoken about.68

After these incidents, she recounts, she was assaulted again, hung by her neck from a tree. But she did not die, and was eventually moved to Tanga Prison, in Tanzania, where the conditions were better. After a year, an ANC tribunal came and found her not guilty, and she was released. For the TRC, regarding Mazibuko, the only understanding of politics that was possible was one of policy, and so the question they sought to answer was if rape was ANC policy – was sexual violence systematically used against women. Finding that it wasn’t, the Commission treated the question of sexual violence, then, as “answered”: it was not policy, and so it was aberration or exception. This is a curiously limited understanding of the politics of sexual violence, although it tracks in its logic the TRC’s conclusions about the violence in the ANC’s camps. Again, for this violence, the TRC’s question was whether such violence was a policy. The Commission ultimately found that the ANC did not use torture in a systematic or widespread way. They found instead that torture “was used by a limited number of ANC members who were members of the security department and in specific time periods. It was not an accepted practice within the ANC and was not used for most of the three decades with which the Commission is concerned.”69 Nevertheless, they did also find that the ANC did not act sufficiently to prevent torture, and that the organization was guilty of gross violations of human rights in conducting torture, and in executing people on the basis of confessions and information acquired through torture.70 The very fact of these findings gave a logic to the abuses – abuses that victims testified about and the ANC admitted to. The logic of the TRC – that abuses occurred under difficult situations, in which security officers got out of hand and committed “excesses” – is the same logic the ANC offered via its internal investigations. In the case of sexual violence, then, the TRC also accepts the violence as “exceptional”, and does not enter into discussion of what a broader “politics” of sexual violence might look like. Another element of Mazibuko’s testimony was left unaddressed by the Commissioners, namely, Mazibuko’s experiences on return to South Africa. According to her testimony,

68 Mazibuko, 9. 69 TRC Report 1998 Volume 2, p.362 70 TRC Report 1998 Volume 2, p.366

23 Mazibuko was sexually assaulted again after her return to South Africa, when she went to Shell House (the ANC headquarters) to seek out compensation for her house in Swaziland, which had been sold, and all her belongings taken, when she was abducted into ANC detention. Although some, including Jacob Zuma, helped her there, another man, Comrade Mdu, took her to see a house (with the promise it could be hers), and then held her there, and raped her overnight, at knifepoint. When asked by the Commissioners what should be done, either to prevent other women from suffering similar violence, or to compensate her, her only demand for redress is shelter and compensation for her lost household property. “If there could be some consideration,” she said, “I would appreciate to get a shelter. … If I could be restituted and get the things that I need or that are necessary to subsist I would appreciate that.”71 At the time of testifying, it seems that Mazibuko was impoverished, without resources and without access to stable housing. Despite the similarities between the violence Mazibuko suffered and the violence of ANC prison camps, her account has not been read alongside these other detainees’ testimonies. The most critical accounts of the ANC’s abuses, Stephen Ellis’s External Mission and Trewhela’s Inside Quatro, make no reference to her testimony.72 Equally, the more exculpatory pieces that emphasize the security challenges the ANC faced also exclude her testimony.73 Her gender, and the centrality of sexual violation in her experience, disqualify her from the purportedly gender- neutral but in fact male-centred accounts of Ellis and Trewhela. In this way, the gendered-male experiences of ANC detainees stay firmly and safely in the realm of the ‘public’ and avoid any risk of being seen as ‘intimate’.74 It is in this way that we see a doubled silencing of the politics of violence – on the one hand, Mazibuko’s experience of sexual violation is largely excluded from mainstream accounting of the ANC’s violence in the camps. Her case is rhetorically separated from the more well-known abuses of exile. Sexual violence in this framing is posed as an intimate concern, a women’s concern, outside the realm of politics, because the only understanding of politics

71 Mazibuko, Truth and Reconciliation Commission - Women’s Hearings, 10. 72 Mwezi Twala and Benard, Mbokodo; Trewhela, Inside Quatro. 73 it’s possible to speculate that her status as an outsider (an accused spy) tainted her still in ANC circles, preventing her recuperation within the self-critical ANC literature. See Fiona Ross’s discussion of Yvonne Khutwane, who also suffered loss of political legitimacy through probably false allegations. See Ross, Bearing Witness. Chapter 4. 74 E.g. Callinicos, “Oliver Tambo and the Dilemma of the Camp Mutinies in Angola in the Eighties”; Stephen Ellis, External Mission (South Africa: Jonathan Ball, 2012).

24 offered by the TRC’s framing is that of organizational policy. A politics of gendered relations, a politics that views sexual violence as part of a play of power, as countless feminists have theorized, is again excluded from consideration. In an inverted way, the sexual violence done to men within the ANC is silenced as well. It is clear from accounts submitted to the TRC, and detailed in Trewhela’s work as well as in previous ANC Commissions of Inquiry, that a certain amount of torture carried out in the ANC camps was of a sexual nature – men had their testicles squeezed with pliers, or were forced to “make love to a tree.”75 The significance of the intimate violations of exile is silenced by narratives that focus on organizational politics, and pose responsibility as hanging in the narrow balance between ‘a policy of violence’ or a ‘failure to prevent violence.’ Emery Kalema’s recent work on suffering in the aftermath of the Mulele “rebellion” offers important insights on how to theorize the legacies of ANC violence. Describing the scars visited on the bodies of Congolese people who were tortured in the 1960s, Kalema argues for reading scars as not merely personal or about embodied suffering, but as imposing directly on temporality. Scars produce and reproduce suffering, he argues, “a psychic suffering that not only exceeded the physical, but also extended across time,” including by annihilating the possibilities of “future time.”76 In the ANC context, where life was lived so much in pursuit of an explicitly iterated, theorized, and desired future, what was the significance of the physical and emotional scars visited upon survivors of violence? In what ways has physical pain and lasting mutilation transformed the capacity of former exiles to live in the South African present or to aspire for a future? In the Congo context, Kalema emphasizes the fear of the future engendered in survivors by their torture and resultant disability, describing it as the “terrifying ‘yet-to-come.’” By contrast, however, in survivors of ANC violence it is possible to discern not waiting for a terrible future but waiting for resolution. Survivors express a concrete demand for restitution and apology. While survivors of the Mulele-related violence see no political avenue for their suffering or redress, the purchase of ANC futures is stronger. Ongoing faith in the ANC – and its effective insertion of itself into the state and the nation – may contribute to this hope.

75 “Torture was a daily occurrence in Quatro,” TRC media release, accessed June 18, 2020, https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/media/1997/9707/s970722f.htm ; Amnesty International Report 76 Emery M. Kalema, “Scars, Marked Bodies, and Suffering: The Mulele ‘Rebellion’ in Postcolonial Congo,” The Journal of African History 59, no. 2 (July 2018): 265.

25 Indeed, the survivors’ hope for a better future-yet-to-come, so distinct from the fears of the survivors of violence of the Mulele rebellion, echoes the intimate hopes of many associated with the ANC. There is a striking resonance between the intimacy of Mazibuko’s account, and Redi Tlhabi’s depiction of Fezekile Kuzwayo’s conduct after she made her formal complaint of rape against Zuma. Kuzwayo describes to Tlhabi a number of puzzling decisions – decisions Tlhabi herself admits, in her dialogic style, that she finds frustrating. Kuzwayo describes herself and her mother receiving financial support from Zuma in the period around the trial. She mentions friendly visits with Zuma allies, as well as complaining about unfriendly accusations and pressure from “aunties from exile.” Most startling, perhaps, Kuzwayo describes meeting with a lawyer sent by Zuma, paid by Zuma, whom she and her mother felt they could trust, even as the trial was close to starting. Tlhabi, exasperated and empathetic, attributes these startling decisions to naiveté on the part of Kuzwayo and her mother, and lack of experience with court systems – as well as to them being misled in alarming ways by the police. But it’s possible to read beyond this assessment to see something deeper about the relationship between the ANC and its members, an echo between Kuzwayo’s experience and Mazibuko’s. On the one hand, these accounts read as the shattered accounts of trauma, where narrative coherence has been broken down by the fracturing of the suffering incurred. Certainly in speaking of their suffering in a way that resists smooth incorporation, these survivors make clear the present-day pain they endure as a result of their past experiences. But these accounts also underscore a dimension of ANC life, a side-effect of the peripatetic networked life of exile: total dependence on the ANC. This element reveals itself both in the speakers’ unqueried lack of explanation for events, and also in their otherwise surprising returns to the ANC. How else to understand Mazibuko’s startling testimony that she was happy to be reintegrated into ANC structures, to work with them again in exile, and that she returned to Shell House after exile in search of help (to be, tragically, raped again)? Despite the intense harms the ANC had inflicted on her, she still experienced herself as “inside” the ANC – a connection that underscores how the ANC functioned as a ‘family’ for its members, and as a totality. Her quest for succor and real aid from the ANC shows us two interwoven elements: first, it shows us the ideological force of the ANC, its power at asserting itself as the free South African nation and as the only possibility for life post-apartheid. And secondly, it reminds us of the practical abjection of many within the ANC, who depended especially in exile so materially on the ANC for everything – to theorize

26 the movement successfully, to understand the everydays of exile, it must be clear how much and how concretely members depended on the ANC to make their world: to move them from place to place, to transport them, to house them, to feed them. After years of living this way, it is unsurprising that Kuzwayo and her mother were willing to accept aid from the ANC – the ANC had for many years been their life. As Arianna Lissoni has observed, writing on the relationship between cadres and the ANC leadership in exile, members “were completely enveloped by the only life that they had, that of the ANC and the liberation struggle.”77 More positive commentators have described the ANC as a family in exile – indeed, Kuzwayo spoke of it that way to Tlhabi, and most memoirists of exile have echoed this sentiment. In tracing the intimate violence of exile, it is possible to acknowledge that families, in general, have been prime sites of violence for many who inhabit it, as feminists have for years theorized. In this cloistered and dependent space of exile, a home made of necessity away from home, violence of the most intimate sort could flourish. In particular, these vulnerabilities underscore a point Tlhabi mentions but which few histories of the exile period account for, which is the ‘class system’ of exile – the extent to which elite cadres and those close to leadership had much more stable access to resources and freedom of movement, while poorer cadres (more likely to be Black, more likely to be young) were much more subject to the whims of the organization, and devoid of ‘protection’, as (elite) Gertrude Shope’s daughter described, critically, to Redi Tlhabi.78 In this sense, dependence on the ANC or its totality was unevenly experienced by members with varying degrees of social power.79 Returning to Kalema’s point about violence as annihilating possibilities of the future, we see in the returns of Khwezi and Mazibuko to the ANC the ongoing power of the ANC to determine the future, its ongoing claim to be able to remedy ills of the past. Via these returns, the ANC’s own reading of the politics of its violence can reassert themselves: the violence of exile, the ANC insists, was exceptional, against policy, and an aberration. The difficult narratives of survivors of that violence speak against themselves to reveal a different theorization of violence: of life in exile as fragile, vulnerable, and often incoherent. But against the potential of their own

77 Lissoni “Comrade Chief,” 8 78 Tlhabi, Khwezi, loc. 79 See Nadine Gordimer, Sport of Nature, for quite a different rendering of the sexual politics of exile

27 narratives, the speakers return frequently to the pathways for formal restitution, the ANC and the TRC, and the proffered “logic of redemption” of the TRC.80

Aftermaths and revenants

Events of recent years have made it abundantly clear that the sexual violation of women is, cross-culturally and trans-historically, a feature of power, and a common practice of powerful men. With the surge of energy from the #metoo movement in the second decade of the 21st century, we came to understand that large parts of the entertainment industry were subtended by an economy of sexual exploitation and abuse. Recent revelations in the political sphere in the US, Europe, and Canada make it clear how many powerful men assault women, and how meagre the consequences are – being accused of rape appears to make little difference to men’s capacity to accede to positions including Supreme Court Judge and President, among others (although men of colour and gay men seem to suffer higher penalties from such disclosures). Such revelations indeed long predate the #metoo crisis, as those old enough to recall multiple women’s allegations of harassment and assault by Bill Clinton, or Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s trial for assaulting a hotel maid, an experience which did not deter him from considering a run for Presidency some years later – an ambition derailed only by new revelations of his involvement in the trafficking of women for elaborate sex parties, as well as alleged involvement in gang-raping women in Washington, DC. One could equally consider the extensive ring of personal contacts in high places maintained by the pedophile and child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. One could also of course draw the academic realm into this discussion – it seems like scarcely a month has passed in the last years without new allegations of sexual misconduct emerging against powerful academics across multiple fields of academic inquiry; many such cases are well-documented and in many cases universities or police have made findings of wrong-doing against the accused. While the overall economy between sex and power has been extensively analyzed by feminist thinkers and clearly requires still more analysis, the point in detailing this litany of transgressions is to note, simply, that the overlap between sex, violence, and masculine power was in no way unique to the ANC’s exile period – instead, it is something that is

80 See Hassim, Not Just Nelson’s Wife, p. 905

28 borderline ordinary.81 In the light of this banality, the question becomes, why does sexual violence stand in so frequently as a talisman of the ANC’s failures? In particular, why does the discussion of “the ANC and sexual violence” circulate and return so episodically, always presenting itself as something only partially uttered and yet unresolved? The curious public speech of silence, the repetitive performance that “there is something that must be known and explained”, itself demands explanation, especially because each time this public conversation surfaces, it does so as if it is new. In an analysis of women’s testimony at the TRC, Nthabiseng Motsemme has powerfully demonstrated that “the mute always speak,” insisting on taking women’s silences as a constitutive part of the narrative of their experiences.82 Tracing women’s silences, Motsemme argues, lets us better understand the quotidian impacts of violence, including the violence of apartheid, on women’s individual lives, restoring to survivors some ownership of their experiences, rather than folding them into overarching national narratives.83 Redi Tlhabi makes a similar point when she recounts a conversation she had with Makhosazana Xaba, a scholar, writer, and former exile. Tlhabi describes her own valorization of voice and speech, her conviction that the story of exile’s sexual violence must be told; Xaba, in Tlhabi’s telling, offers critique of this aim, reminding Tlhabi that speaking won’t necessarily bring the hoped-for relief, and that silence has its value. Silence was, Xaba suggests, a strategy of survival for many involved in the anti-apartheid struggle; and in this case, there is little certainty that the work of disclosure, the work of talking and writing, would make a difference.84 Her critique recalls Motsemme’s critique of the TRC – that “it assumed that the world was only knowable through words.”85 These critiques complicate any easy equation of speaking with freedom, and draw our attention to the significant of silence. It is in this spirit that it is useful to examine the silences that do speak, in Motsemme’s compelling phrasing – and in particular, the genres of silence that enable an uneven forgetting, of alternative analyses of gender and power, of conjoined forms of

81 See also Pumla Dineo Gqola, “How the ‘cult of femininity’ and violent masculinities support endemic gender based violence in contemporary South Africa” 2007 82 See also Panashe Chigumadzi’s recent writing on this topic of silence – excerpted for example here https://johannesburgreviewofbooks.com/2021/04/15/black-womens-imaginative-works-are-wreaths-lain-on-the- graves-of-ancestors-so-that-they-may-not-weep-read-an-excerpt-from-panashe-chigumadzis-essay-hearing-the- silence/ 83 Nthabiseng Motsemme, “The Mute Always Speak: On Women’s Silences at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” Current Sociology 52, no. 5 (January 9, 2004): 909–32. 84 Tlhabi, Kwhezi, loc 840-859 85 Motsemme, “The Mute Always Speak,” 915.

29 violence, and of lived experience of violence before it is transmuted into a symbol of something else. It is useful to turn to Althusser’s observation that,

The distinction between the public and the private is a distinction internal to bourgeois law, and valid in the (subordinate) domains in which bourgeois law exercises its ‘authority’. The domain of the State escapes it because the latter is ‘above the law’: the State, which is the State of the ruling class, is neither public nor private; on the contrary, it is the precondition for any distinction between public and private.86

At least part of the tension around the ANC and sexual violence stems from the fact that exile was the space where the ANC attempted to become a State and impose bourgeois law – and in the specifics of this, it was called upon to define what was public and what was private. In the 1980s, as ANC bureaucracy proliferated and as the ANC became more and more a “quasi-state” or a “desiring state”, that bureaucratization intersected uneasily with the movement’s commitments to politics and efforts to define itself and its members as having a transcendent mission.87 The quotidian dynamics of living for and in a supreme cause are challenging. Equally, as Jacob Dlamini (and others) have pointed out, in exile, “the ANC itself was aware that there might not be a clearly defined people with an identifiable set of characteristics and interests that bind them together. The organization understood that the imagined community in whose name it was fighting was in fact far more imagined than community.”88 It is precisely this fact, the fragility of exile and the non-real qualities of the object called “the ANC in exile” that should help us to resist a narrative of overarching ANC plan or power. What emerges from such a reconsideration of exile is neither the Stalinist conspiracy rendition of exile favoured by some analysts, nor the ANC’s own narrative of a just and intentional political community, but rather, something more fragile, fractured, and dissipated, that we might call, after Badiou via

86 Louis Althusser, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm 87 Michael Neocosmos’s theorizations of this moment are particularly useful here – the shift from a ‘national liberation struggle’ politics to a state politics 88 Jacob Dlamini, Askari, p13

30 Neocosmos, “the ANC unbound.”89 Such an analysis would recognize and attend to the political possibilities that occurred in exile outside the formal and given structures of the ANC. In contrast to this perspective that looks outside of the ANC, the repeated call for reckoning and for working through of ANC sexual violence risks inadvertently becoming an inverted way to continue to pose the ANC as the nation, as the arbiter of South African history, to pose exile as a quasi-divine period, and to demand that the ANC solve these problems – attributing to it a supremacy it does not have. This is what we can read from the returns of survivors of ANC violence to the inner confines of the ANC. This reading of the ANC’s power becomes a distraction, drawing us away from confronting the very real and ongoing, non-ANC specific, problem of sexual violence in South Africa (and the world). At the same time, this return of the repressed of ANC sexual violence risks posing it as secret and “of” the ANC and invests the ANC itself with a power it did not and does not possess.

89 See Neocosmos Thinking Freedom in Africa, esp chapters 4 and 5;

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