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Differences and samenesses
Writing theoretically on violence - especially violence against women - is extremely difficult if not impossible for us. We wish to submit in this essay that while we are different both in terms of gender and culture we are similar in terms of the centrality of gender violence in our cultures and experiences. The difference lies in the fact that one of us is a South African Indian woman and the other is a Black African male.1 However, both of us subscribe to a political and theological consciousness that considers ourselves Black.
In terms of this understanding, "blackness (or African-ness for that matter), is a condition - a material, spiritual and cultural condition",2 that encompasses an approach to and attitude of life in South Africa as an existential condition brought about by historical marginalization and victimization of the majority by White supremacy, known as Apartheid in South Africa. Furthermore, we come out of communities that are clearly marked by this experience of marginalization and victimization. Our own biographies have been scarred by the effects of Apartheid White supremacist practices.3
Yet, it is also true that we are really different and not merely in terms of cultural aesthetic terms, but in power and ideological terms. Recent media debates about the unequal and unjust relations between Indians and Africans, sparked off by playwright Mbongeni Ngema's song Amandiya (The Indians), illustrate this problem. While ruthlessly oppressed and suppressed, South African Indians as a group still occupied a more privileged place in comparison to Africans in the Apartheid scheme of things. This reality manufactured certain power attitudes and relations between Africans and Indians in terms of which many Indian people related to many Africans as if the latter belonged to the lowest caste of untouchables imaginable - relations of violence in essence.
The potency of the Mbongeni Ngema song - its much debated predisposition (and subsequent condemnation by the South African Human Rights Commission) for hate speech notwithstanding - lies in the suggestion that the legacy of Apartheid era relations between Indians and Africans is still with us nearly a decade after the official dismantling of the Apartheid system. Black and Indian relations are therefore neither innocent nor neutral. Indeed, a further unpacking of these...