By Siphokazi Magadla, Thought Leader
Saggy pants is a popular form of displaying rebellion to teenage
respectability by young men who wear their trousers far down their
waists, often times generously exposing their underwear. Saggy pants are
mostly associated with black male masculinity, which has been
highlighted by the imagery often associated with mainstream hip-hop
culture. Of course today this phenomenon is no longer the privilege of
young black lads as many white boys in my classrooms and elsewhere
subscribe to the ”sagging” pants phenomenon. Yet, nevertheless, sagging
pants are historically linked to black male adolescence. Like many black
sisters and mothers I had been particularly averse to my two brothers
engaging in these displays as I unconsciously saw them as yet another
easy way black men attract negative attention (read racism and police
brutality) to themselves. I have however shifted in this view.
In an interview on her brilliant book Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America,
Melissa Harris-Perry shows the intersection between the language
embedded in racism and sexism. She critiques the frequently held view
that young African-American men can escape the brunt of racism by
pulling their pants up and dressing up like ”respectable” men,
forgetting of course that many black men who grew up under Jim Crow had
worn their pants properly, but even that could not rescue them from the
violence of racism in the US. Hearing Harris-Perry making this case I
could not help but also be reminded of the fact that the founders of the
African National Congress in 1912, the likes of Pixley ka Isaka Seme,
John Dube and Sol Plaatje and the generation of Mandela, Sisulu and
Tambo were by all means, very respectable men who would never be caught
wearing their trousers as if they were auditioning for a hip-hop video.
Yet what connects them to their African-American counterparts working in
the plantations of the US south is that their efforts at aesthetic
respectability could also not rescue them from the violence of the
racism of apartheid!
I have been thinking about my brother’s saggy trousers because I have
been failing to articulate the very problematic language that continues
to frame South Africa’s rape culture. Eusebius McKaiser in his
ambitious and timely book A Bantu in my Bathroom reminds us
that indeed race and gender are curious cousins that offer us
interesting parallels on how to understand the ill logic of both sexism
and racism. I have thought of this more and more in the past weeks as
those of us in the small town of Grahamstown grapple with the tragic
gang rape and murder of Thandiswa Qubuda of Hlalani township. The
questions that were first asked about the circumstances of this crime
centred on what time she was walking and how come she was not cautious
enough not to walk around at 2am as a woman in a dangerous township.
These questions have come to be as predictable as they are boring. Just
like the narrative of the events of that fateful January morning in
Hlalani are already indicating that this is most likely a case of
another woman who has yet again been betrayed by people she knew, not
strangers.
Those of us who attended the memorial service were all too awake to
this prevailing victim-blaming culture that underscores the reaction to
rape in this country, which most certainly informed the appalling
response of the police who were called to come for Thandiswa at 2am but
arrived at 6am to the crime scene. This is despite the police station
being a mere 2km from the crime scene. The pervasive lack of reflection
on the impossibility of individual women to act themselves out of rape
is particularly tragic in this country where we should simply know
better if we take our history seriously.
The view that a black person under apartheid could, if they abide by
the madness of apartheid rules, be able to escape it, is not only absurd
but would have been a gross misunderstanding of the workings of that
system. Yet today in this country we move from a view that women can
manage the war on their bodies by staying clear of the places that are
populated by these violent men. We continue to believe despite ample
evidence to the contrary that these violent ”beasts” are nothing but
aliens who otherwise visit our neatly organised society from time to
time. McKaiser reminds us that this is another flawed manner in which we
continue to deal with racism in this country because instead of
addressing the many ways we continue to harbour racist views of each
other (revealed mostly in the privacy of our homes), as a nation we are
quick to exile those who dare bring their racism to our public spaces
into the Siberia of racists who are nothing but a reminder of a distant
past instead addressing the reality that our day-to-day lives reproduce a
racist culture.
In cataloguing the shame that is caused by the stereotypes
surrounding the imagery of black women in the US, Harris-Perry draws on
WEB Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk to argue that to view
citizenship in America today from the eyes of the black woman is to
essentially ask the same question that Du Bois asked in 1903: “How does
it feel to be a problem?”
We do this too with rape in this country where we have refused to be
alive to the reality that the collective punishment of apartheid simply
meant that any black person was fair game to the brutality of the police
whether in the public or private space. We refuse to see how rape
translates to being a similar collective punishment for women
everywhere, in public and in private.
Just like young (black) men wearing saggy pants are often judged
harshly, to me our framing of the current war on the bodies of South
African women frames all South African women as problems.
Questions such as the dress code of women who have been raped
perpetuates the victim blaming of women and ignores a larger system of
patriarchal male dominance that allows rape culture to continue. As a
country we have not been able to appreciate the parallels between
different forms of oppression. This demonstrates the fact that we are a
country that thrives on dangerous levels of short-term memory
