“We Have Been Saying This for Thirty Years!”: Exploring Discursive Technologies of Disappearing African Feminist Knowledges

Abstract

One of the most difficult challenges facing African feminist knowledge production on gendered and sexual violence is its persistent erasure. Despite decades of rich, complex, multimodal and wide-ranging discourse on the meanings of gendered and sexual violence in contexts embedded in colonial legacies of racist and class-based systems, ideas as ordinary to African feminist activism as “rape is not sex; rape is violence” (a mantra of early Rape Crisis teaching in the late 1970s) get systematically “disappeared” by what Gqola calls “rape as a language”. In this article, I explore some of the agnotological technologies at work in disappearing key understandings of gendered and sexual violence, understandings developed through feminist activisms and research. The South African context informs the thinking, which entails rigorous concern with theorisations of gendered and sexual violence rooted in historical and contemporary discussions of race and racialisation. A key difference between Northern-oriented and Southern grapples with questions of gendered and sexual violence lies in Southern integrity regarding the death grip of colonialities and the concomitant epistemological imperative of revolution against these. In the article, I work with a group of participants based in the highly public and effective Western Cape Network on Violence Against Women together with a particular instance of gendered violence against women (Enhle Mbali’s accusation of domestic violence against Black Coffee, in 2021) where it is possible to watch the recirculation of ideas long debunked by African feminist activism. I argue for an approach to knowledge creation alert to the politics of “disappearance".