Colonizing Consent

In early September 2019, a wave of protests swept South Africa: participants called on President Cyril Ramaphosa to address the country’s crisis of violence—especially sexual violence—against women, and called for tougher sentencing for those convicted of rape. In 2018/19, 41,583 rapes were recorded in South Africa, a rate that equates to 114 reported rapes a day. Some protesters called for capital punishment to be reinstated. Elizabeth Thornberry’s immensely detailed study of rape in colonial South Africa’s Eastern Cape region is therefore a timely one; there is a pressing need to historicise sexual violence in the country in order to better understand and address its complex, devastating and ongoing reverberations in the present. Thornberry’s enquiry is part of a wave of publications scrutinising the gendered and sexual dimensions of colonial and apartheid South Africa, which, taken together, powerfully demonstrate how control and exploitation of women’s bodies was integral to the maintenance

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