Prof Louise du Toit from the Department of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences delivered her inaugural lecture on Thursday 14 August 2025. The title of her lecture was “Of flesh and ore and the death of birth".
?Du Toit spoke to the Corporate Communication and Marketing Division about the pervasive sexual violence in South Africa and what we can do to help prevent it.
Tell us more about your research and why you became interested in this specific field.
In South Africa, we seem to be occasionally shocked by a particularly brutal or spectacular instance of sexual violence: think of Uyinene Mrwetyana, Anene Booysen, Tshegofatso Pule, and my former student Hannah Cornelius. Anger flares up, and there are protests, but nothing much seems to change. Baby Tshepang, a baby of nine months, was one of the first of these. I had small children at the time (2001) and was haunted by this. I realised then that our post-apartheid, ostensibly free and democratic country was a dangerous place for women and children. We had and still today have sexual violence numbers that suggest we are at war. Of the roughly 50 000 rapes reported to the police annually, about 40% relate to children under 18 years of age and about 15% to children younger than 12. We clearly had a systemic problem, and I wanted to understand and attempt to address it, using a philosophical lens.
How would you describe the relevance of your work?
Women and girls in South Africa live in an atmosphere of pervasive threat. I understand this situation less as the result of unbridled male lust and much more as the way power is distributed in our society, and every day re-distributed, through violence and threats of violence. Women's sexuality, reproductive labour, their care and emotional work, are all to be forcibly appropriated by others, to serve a world where women have no intrinsic value. Pervasive violence against those designated “feminine" (including non-binary and queer persons and some men and boys) ensures that they remain an underclass of second-tier citizens that can be exploited with impunity. Women's freedom struggle has been depoliticised throughout the struggle and transition and described as merely a “social" issue that can wait until after the political transition “proper". We are still waiting. Women's unfreedom means that democracy has not yet arrived.
Based on your extensive research, why do sexual violence and rape remain so widespread in our society?
As I see it, both the racist-colonial regime in our past and the African-nationalist regime of our present established and maintain(ed) a symbolic universe that allows for the oppression and exploitation of everything feminine. The tragedy of women in South Africa is that the violence and cruelty of our colonial history (including our slave, apartheid, and migrant histories) have not disappeared but have simply morphed during our transition to a democratic dispensation. Although women were often the driving force of the liberation struggle, they were only belatedly included in the transitional processes and mechanisms, as if they were being done a favour. Also, too often, Black and African liberation has been described and couched in predominantly masculine terms (e.g., in Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko), which has left the emancipation of Black women untheorised and to some extent unimaginable. Because of the ultimate collusion between Western-colonial and African-decolonial patriarchies, women's freedoms have been placed on the back burner.
You focus on the logic and language of mining as plunder. How has this contributed to a culture of sexual violence?
It seems that there are connections between mining and sexual violence as two forms of plunder. To “plunder" originally meant to clean out someone's house and to take with force and impunity what they need for their survival. The etymology of “pillage" suggests an even more invasive theft, as it refers to hair being shaven, as one would typically do to a domestic animal, like plucking a fowl. Thus, if someone is “pillaged", what their very bodies have produced to protect them (hair, wool, feathers) has been forcibly removed. They have been stripped naked and robbed of the infrastructure they have built or grown that supports their own survival. In the ongoing genocide in Gaza, we see daily how the infrastructures people need for their survival are being deliberately destroyed, to create unlivable conditions for millions.
Mining practices, especially poorly regulated ones, are typically also plundering practices, because they take freely what the earth has produced, in ways that too often destroy the conditions of life of other human and more-than-human communities alike. On the African continent, sexual violence and rape often track the violent conflicts associated with control over minerals. Thus, there is not only a metaphorical link between mining and sexual violence; there is also a more direct, material link. In these conflicts over precious natural resources, women and girls are raped to terrorise and subjugate communities, or to destroy them completely.
You've also highlighted how we talk about sexual violence and rape. What do you think we should change?
We should stop naturalising and normalising rape and treat it as the gross human rights violation that it is. It is sobering to consider that sexual violence in armed conflict has been framed by the Rome Statute as crimes against humanity and war crimes, and sometimes as indicative of genocide. Why should we treat sexual violence in peacetime any differently? We must work harder to shift the burden of shame and blame from the victims and survivors of rape to the perpetrators. We seem to put rape-and-murder victims on a moral pedestal (e.g., the names listed above) but routinely doubt rape complainants who have survived their attacks.
We should also shift our understanding of the perpetrators from men who cannot control their sexual urges, to men who are exerting control over women's movements, sexuality, and autonomy. Perpetrators of sexual violence are the guardians of patriarchal power, where women are made to fear men and ultimately to serve them. We should “read" sexual violence not as a personal, private, or purely social crime, but as a political crime that attacks the heart of our democratic dispensation. We must also acknowledge male victims of sexual violence and oppose the gross violation that is prison rape as vehemently as we oppose the rapes of women.
Your inaugural lecture coincides with Women's Month. What message would you like to share with the women of South Africa?
My message to the women of South Africa is that we must rebuild the national women's movement. Even progressive legislation and constitutional rights mean little if they are not accompanied by women's unrelenting activism. Women have never been given anything for free. Legal structures and policies in themselves will not liberate South Africa's women from their centuries-old oppression; only political action will do so, making use of these tools. Let us not be paralysed by our internal differences; let us focus on rallying all women and all designated “feminine", all queers, and all allied men, around key issues like sexual violence. The shared identity will then follow from the alliance, from working together, instead of being a prerequisite for the alliance.
Let us take inspiration from the multiple women's struggles present and past against colonialism and patriarchy on our continent; let us research them and visualise them and make them publicly known. Let us also build networks of solidarity with women's groups internationally – on our continent and beyond – to learn from other struggles and in our turn to inspire them. Let us erect memorials for our victims and survivors so that we start publicly changing the narrative and imagination around what it means to be a survivor of sexual violence.
You have spent many years in the challenging environment of higher education. What keeps you motivated when things get tough?
My motivation has always been sustaining relationships and exciting collaborations. These notably include colleagues at UJ and SU that became dear friends, students both undergraduate and postgraduate, who have challenged me always to make philosophical thinking accessible, empowering, and transformative. I owe much to my students. I have also been inspired by international collaborations, especially by other feminist philosophers who try to make sense of sexual violence in their own contexts, but also very much by courageous activists and survivors from various countries and contexts who work hard to make the world safer.
Tell us something exciting about yourself that people would not expect.
Is this the most exciting thing about me? Not sure. In Grade 3, I played cowboys and crooks with the boys, jumped from a high beam in our backyard after being “rescued" by my mate (who had “shot" through the ropes that had supposedly tied my arms to a metal post), fell headlong, and broke both my wrists! It was on my mother's birthday, all the ladies were drinking tea in the sitting room, and my poor mother had to abandon them all to take me to the hospital.
How do you spend your free time?
I am very fond of road trips and love to do them on my own or in company. I love to explore the backroads of our country and to follow my nose, not making plans or any bookings ahead of time. And I fall in love with every small town that we drive through, always looking for pretty townhouses or small farms where I can go and live! ?
