*Please note: There is content within the article readers may find upsetting and distressing including sexual violence.

“By the time I arrive for this class, at 9:00 a.m., I have l already fought a hundred wars.” This is an account shared by Professor Pumla Gqola about her student who has to navigate her transport route to the University of Witwatersrand while constantly being aware of the compounded threat of being black and woman in South Africa.

In her book, Rape: A South African Nightmare, Professor Gqola interrogates and exposes rape culture in South Africa. She unpacks the complicated legacy of colonialism with the residual effect of Black women deemed as “unrapeable” and unable to receive justice from a system that legalised the rape of enslaved women. Although sexual assault is the most common form of punitive measures taken against those gendered as women in society, another text authored by Gqola, Female Fear Factory, theorises beyond this singular performance. The idea of the female fear factory was initially a chapter in Rape which has since become a coined term that denotes the manufacturing of female fear for the sustenance of a patriarchy. Female Fear Factory was borne out of the expansion of the idea and understanding violence is performed as a spectacle and that spectacle being an intrinsic part of manufacturing fear for those people socialised as female or seen to be occupying a space outside of hegemonic masculinity.

Gqola describes the term as follows: “It is a theatrical and public performance of patriarchal policing of and violence towards women and others cast as female, who are, therefore, considered safe to violate.” Acknowledging that patriarchy is dependent on fear to continue its domination over those who do not adhere to heteropatriarchal norms and those who dare to step out of the jail of gender expectation. This fear also influences decisions that may seem mundane such as jogging routes, allowing repairmen into your house, and choosing Uber drivers based on the number of trips they have successfully concluded. “The manufacture of female fear requires several aspects to work: the safety of the aggressor, the vulnerability of the target, the successful communication by the aggressor that he has power to wound, rape and/or kill the target with no consequences to himself,” Gqola states in Rape: A South African Nightmare. Therefore, in understanding the manufacturing of fear, it is pertinent that we acknowledge that it relies on non-interruption to continue to produce a product in the form of female fear.

In illustrating the ubiquitous nature of patriarchy, albeit the iterations being different in other geographical locations, Gqola draws from South African, Nigerian, American, Saudi Arabian, Ugandan, Kenyan, Egyptian British, El Salvadorian and Indian stories to illustrate the manufacturing of female fear. In the book, she also notes that by using the term “female,” she does not refer to biology but rather those identities who have been made to be "female" by patriarchal mechanisms and thus deemed safe to violate. In explaining her use of the term, Gqola says, “Women are not automatically female but are made so, in a process that leads to different genders being made female.”  

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Interruption of the female fear factory

On a recent trip to Cape Town, I experienced various verbal assaults which were deeply rooted in misogynoir. Considering the racial politics and tensions that are the consequence of Cape Town being anti-black, I considered silence as a means of self-preservation instead of my usual stance to defend myself. This resonated as a deep betrayal to myself as a feminist scholar and activist. The knowledge that I could be assaulted in public and witness the aggressor’s arrogance in his ability to harm me with impunity is the exact function of the female fear factory.

The thought that violence against women and those who are perceived as such is so commonplace in South Africa that a person who is targeted will simply ignore the situation. I had been grappling with this betrayal of self and considering the cognitive dissonance I was faced with, I decided to confront a man who cat-called my date. Unyielding and uncompromising in my demeanour, I took him to task realising that the abuse would occur with or without my silence. He was visibly disturbed and taken aback by my response, not expecting me to cleave through his casual arrogance and expose him as vulnerable. I was not fearful. In the book, Gqola addresses the false sense of safety we experience while situated in a patriarchal society. She says, "In societies where public sexual harassment is acceptable, women and other gender fluid people learn early that when they are attacked or belittled in public, others will look away. They learn just as quickly that the best way to avoid escalation of this violence — which, again, is unlikely to be stopped by those witnessing it — is to pretend it is not happening." My confrontation was a deliberate interruption of the female fear factory which, as she describes a similar incident in the book, is considered strange and unusual. This was, of course, a deviation from “the script.”

Ideating on the idea of safety premised on “scripts” that women are told to follow, Gqola highlights how women are taught to blame themselves should they be violated. The idea of women following scripts to avoid violence and violation is an apparatus of the female fear factory. It places the burden on those gendered as women well as queer folks to self-police and violate our freedoms. The blame again lies on the same category of people should they be the site for the performance of violence and leaves us questioning whether a deviation from the script was the reason for the harm. In her second book, Reflecting Rogue: Inside the Mind of a Feminist, Gqola shares her experience of her grandmother constantly reminding her to sit like a girl while being worried of the willful spirit growing in the professor as a young child. That directive is not foreign to the ears of Black girls growing up in South Africa. In an anthology titled Red Cotton, South African writer Vangile Gantsho recalls the heaviness of the responsibility of policing one’s body lest the hands of men find you and the understanding from a young age that society will tell you that you are at fault. In an untitled poem, Gantsho traces a generation through sexual assault and ends the poem by stating, “When I was six, mama told me to sit with my legs closed otherwise men would hurt me.” 

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The false promise of safety

Although Gqola mentions various scripts and illustrates how they are inherently flawed as those who adhere to these scripts are still harmed, the script which is pervasive in South Africa is as follows: Do not head out after dark and, if you do, ask men you know to walk with you. In a report of the rape cases that took place between April and June 2021, the Minister of Police said 10,006 rapes were reported and that sample of 5,439 rape cases revealed that 3,766 of the rape incidents took place at the home of the victim or the home of the rapist, while 487 rape cases were domestic violence-related. It has become increasingly apparent in the sexual assault trends in South Africa that most victims of rape are violated by a person that they know.

When considering lesbian hate rape in South Africa, it is often reported that the perpetrator is a friend or acquaintance of the victim. Artist Zanele Muholi recounts the story of a lesbian woman assisted by Muholi after being attacked by her friend following a night out at a local pub. In my research of lesbian hate rape, I have found similar stories of friends and acquaintances becoming violent towards their victims who trusted them as friends. This account and many others highlight the incongruous notion that male acquaintances can keep others safe because they are legitimate owners of public spaces. 

Concluding thoughts

Gqola offers an imaginative and in-depth analysis on the machinery of patriarchy and the manufacturing of female fear. This text also provides interventions and courage for those who are held by fear that there is no safety while occupying a marginalised position in a patriarchal society that imposes compulsory heterosexuality, strict gender binaries and submission.

Drawing similarity from the utterance made by Mona Eltahawy in Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls, these texts require feminist action to chip away at patriarchy. Eltahawy says, “Patriarchy refuses to believe that girls and young women can be angry, attention-seeking, profane, ambitious, powerful, violent, and lustful." In a review for Newframe, Gorata Chengeta succinctly captures the essence of Gqola’s book by stating: "Throughout the book, she carries feminist hope and remains instructive about the need to explode the mechanisms of female fear. In this she is unshakeable, and through Gqola’s personal reflections on the Female Fear Factory, the reader sees its roots in her decades of anti-rape advocacy work.”