Afrikaner patriarchy gave men a ‘God-given’ right to abuse children as well as women and black people. Glynis O’Hara speaks to Diana Russell about her book on the subject
You’re four years old, lying in bed dreaming about Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet, when suddenly you’re awakened by the hot breath and fumblings of your father. Or grandfather. Or brother … He starts fiddling with your genitals, really hurting you, and covers your mouth so you don’t scream. Or threatens to kill your mother/brother/sister if you fight. Or both.
By the time you’re nine, he’s penetrated you and does so whenever he can. He tells you to submit or he’ll do it to your sister as well. Trouble is, you find out years later that he was doing it to all your sisters all along.
That’s incest. It’s not an unusual story. It is hard to say exactly how much it happens because it’s so rarely reported. But rape counsellors, social workers and therapists know it’s happening far too often.
It is also hard to say who the most frequent perpetrators of incestuous abuse are in South African families, because there hasn’t been sufficient research. Clearly, fathers and stepfathers are way up at the top, but not alone, according to Dr Diana Russell.
Although living and working in the United States, Russell was born in South Africa and left the country in the early 1960s. She has a doctorate from Harvard and is currently professor emerata at Mills College, Oakland, California. She has a huge list of publications, including 14 books, mainly on topics such as rape, incest, femicide and pornography. She’s also written numerous articles on South African gender politics and struggles.
Her new book, Behind Closed Doors in White South Africa (Macmillan, R96), not only allows five incest survivors to tell their horrifying stories, it also makes a clear link between extreme Afrikaner patriarchal abuse of little girls within the family and abuse of that other hated ”other”, the black person.
”There are many similarities in the ways the Afrikaner patriarchs have treated ‘their’ women and children and black South Africans. In addition to sanctifying racism, their fundamental reading of the Bible permitted a strenuous endorsement of the ‘God-given’ notion of men’s rights to rule over women,” Russell says.
”I was struck,” she adds, ”by the extreme violence in several of the white Afrikaner homes, as well as by the profound sense of ownership and entitlement to abuse that some Afrikaner fathers revealed towards their children.”
Some of the men in Russell’s book constantly beat the little girls into submission to make them ”maids”.
Their role in life was thus to serve the man’s needs — both as a servant and as a fuck. One of the men, wheelchair-bound but powerful and sadistic, also brought two of his friends along to do as they liked with his 10-year-old stepdaughter. (Boys do suffer incestuous abuse as well, of course, but less frequently than girls, and far too often learn the pattern from the fathers and repeat it.)
”This book is not based on statistics. Rather than being quantitative, it’s qualitative,” Russell says. ”I’m an activist as well as an academic and consciousness-raising is the first thing to be done. Statistics are dry and boring for most people, but actual stories can get the issue aired and debated in all sorts of ways.”
She recorded 20 cases before choosing the five in the book and found that while incestuous abuse does occur among white English-speakers as well, it seemed to occur less. Four of the cases in the book are from Afrikaans families, one from an English family.
The book also challenges the notion that ”white South African women automatically share all the privileges of their male relatives” and criticises the way in which the oppression of women was often dismissed during the struggle against racism. In choosing white case studies, the book also aims to trounce the racist notion that incestuous abuse ”only occurs in black families”.
Such abuse could also be all too familiar in South Africa, she says, because of the generally violent nature of our society. ”The more accustomed people become to using violence for political and/or criminal ends, the easier people (typically men) find it to employ force and violence in personal relationships as well.” Guns and sjamboks were prevalent in most of the Afrikaner homes. Ostensibly, the weapons are there ”to protect their families from die swart gevaar” but, of course, some men also used them ”to coerce and threaten members of their family to do their bidding”, according to the book.
Two of the girls, Nida Webber (her real name) and Elsa Foster (not her real name), fought back against their tormentors with a ferocity that amazed Russell. Nida once stabbed her father in the chest, just missing his heart, and Elsa shot at her stepfather to frighten him, threw boiling butter over him and tried to pay a passing black man 50c to kill him.
”I was surprised by this and I was fascinated to find out more. I do think class is a factor; middle-class women are not brought up to be violent. Everybody’s heard about the Afrikaner male being violent, but I’ve never heard about the Afrikaner female being especially feisty.
”However, most of the stories collected up till now, also in the US, have been from middle-class, articulate women.” Most of the Afrikaner stories, by contrast, were from the working class. Unfortunately, feisty as the girls were, they did not escape.
All the girls in the book developed severe psychological problems, starting with dissociation — cutting your mind off from what’s happening to you, literally dividing into two, the person who is being assaulted and the person who has removed herself and is watching from a distance. It is well known that victims of such abuse frequently develop multiple-personality disorder.
All five girls in the book experienced epileptic fits, rebellion, depression, suicide attempts, nightmares, sleeping problems, violent headaches, addiction, school failure and, of course, an inability to ever trust anyone again. When they grow up, such women are likely to land up in violent marriages.
Perpetrators and society are adept at getting the girls to blame themselves and/or to blame the mother for not seeing it. Oddly, society at large is less eager to damn the perpetrator, when clearly these men are violent child-abusers who should be locked up. ”The perpetrator is the person who does the abusing, not the mother or the child,” says Russell, quoting Kathleen Faller’s study, Child Sexual Abuse.
As if the tales of family abuse weren’t bad enough, one of the women reported sexual abuse and sadistic mental torture by a male therapist. He claimed to be involved with the Civil Co-operation Bureau (CCB) and said the security police would harm her children if she told anyone what was going on. He also said he’d been offered a contract to kill Nelson Mandela, Alan Boesak and Desmond Tutu and revelled in stories of atrocities against black women on the border.
”I’ve heard incredible cases,” says Russell, ”and the case in the book is nothing compared to some men who have violent sexual problems who become therapists, threaten women’s lives, beat them up and torture them. It’s shocking stuff …
”This kind of thing is particularly likely to happen to incest survivors though. The therapist can get titillated by the stories and the women can be seductive because that’s what they’ve been trained to be. The psychological process is called positive transference, I believe, and it’s supposed to be good, but it’s a set-up. The taboos have already been broken with an incest survivor, their trust has been shattered, betrayal is the norm, and the therapist holds the power …”