As we commemorate Women's Month, August also calls on us to look honestly and critically at the conditions that shape the lives of women and girls.
We write from this concern as researchers whose work has engaged with marriage, culture and violence.
Marriage in South Africa remains shaped by the legacies of colonialism and apartheid. The systems of inequality left black, Muslim and other non-white South Africans with inadequate marital protections. Since the end of apartheid in 1994, South Africa has made efforts to improve the laws, as is most recently illustrated by the proposed Marriage Bill, introduced to parliament in 2023.
The new law will create a unified framework to govern all marriages. It is also designed to address discrimination against women in marriages and prevent child marriages by raising the minimum age of marriage to 18. Public hearings on the Bill were completed in February and parliament continues to refine it, with discussions taking place in June.
One of the motivations for the Bill is to address violent forms of abduction marriage, which are colloquially referred to as ukuthwala, a Nguni language term. Ukuthwala encompasses diverse customary practices undertaken to hasten a marriage, not all of which are harmful. Over the past two decades, however, the subject of violent ukuthwala became prominent in public discourse because of reports of girls being forced into marriages with older men through abductions, beatings, rape and familial control.
In a presentation before parliament in June, a representative from the department of women, youth and persons with disabilities stated that present and proposed laws, such as the Marriage Bill raising the minimum age of marriage to 18, would address harmful practices such as ukuthwala and forced marriage. The Bill has also created hope among the public for combating coercive abduction marriages.
We have spent many years studying ukuthwala. Our research findings, however, show that changing the law will not shift violent marriage practices.
Our individual research on violent ukuthwala has included historical inquiry, sociological analyses and ethnographic research in the Eastern Cape. Collectively, our research findings illustrate that to effectively confront ukuthwala we must understand it as being situated in a broader landscape of normalised violence against women and girls. Violent ukuthwala is not simply a cultural practice gone awry and outside tradition, as is often claimed in research and policy. It is part of a continuum in which women's bodies are rendered violable and coercion is normalised in the name of tradition.
Dr Thatshisiwe Ndlovu's ethnographic work is particularly illuminating because it draws on her experience during months of fieldwork in the Eastern Cape. Her research shows that communities understood the violent forms of the practice as part of an accepted cultural and moral order. Ukuthwala was often justified through appeals to custom, elders and the ancestors, giving the practice a spiritual legitimacy that made it difficult to question.
In this context, challenging ukuthwala could also be read as challenging culture, ancestral authority and belonging, with the harms experienced by girls and young women pushed to the margins.
Her months of immersion in affected communities capture how violent ukuthwala is reproduced across legal, familial, cultural and spiritual domains, rendering women's bodies available for violation.
The Marriage Bill is welcome for bringing about much-needed simplifications and expansions in South Africa's legal landscape. But undoing coercive ukuthwala will require paying attention not only to its illegality but to the social conditions that foster its legitimacy in community life. Like other forms of family violence and intimate partner violence, it continues despite the robust legal frameworks South Africa has. Legal prohibition alone will have limited force where practices are socially sanctioned and culturally embedded.
Our experience has also shown that there is great resistance to understanding ukuthwala in the ways that our research encourages.
In her fieldwork, Ndlovu encountered accusations that her research and other advocacy are bringing amahlazo (shame) to communities and their culture by exposing violent ukuthwala. Dr Nyasha Karimakwenda's work shows there is a collective denial of the histories and cultural standing of violent ukuthwala. Such resistance further silences victims and obscures the scale of this violence.
It is imperative that, in addition to law reform, South Africa creates spaces to have safe, open and difficult conversations about the nature and complexity of violent ukuthwala. Without such recognition, our society will never see the linkages across all forms of violence against women and girls and will not dismantle the norms that sustain their victimisation.
Dr Nyasha Karimakwenda is a feminist researcher of gender-based violence, with a focus on violence against women and girls in marriage. She is an associate research scientist at the Wellesley Centers for Women, Wellesley College, in Massachusetts.
Dr Thatshisiwe Ndlovu is a postdoctoral fellow at Wits. Her work focuses on gender, memory, violence, culture and the enduring social and political afterlives of apartheid.