‘[I]f I am Alone I feel like a Target Sometimes’: The Making and Unmaking of the Vulnerable White Woman in Strange Encounters with the Black Man in the South African (Post)Colony

Abstract

In research about South Africa and its troubled past it has now been well established that the devastating systems of racial categorisation and oppression of colonialism and apartheid were deeply and thoroughly gendered. Colonial/apartheid logic constructs white femininity as highly vulnerable, passive and private, specifically in relation to the imputed hypersexuality of the Black man – a contrast that historically justifies and consolidates hetero-patriarchal control over the white woman (as ‘protection’) and control and surveillance over Black people (and specifically Black men) as origin of danger. Using Sara Ahmed’s theory on strange encounters, this article provides a close reading of the story of Helena Marais, a young white woman from a South African town (as narrated by herself to researchers of the Centre of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest) with a particular interest in how colonial/apartheid gender logic continues to condition the terms on which she inhabits her body and the world, which in turn, renders her both instrumental to and complicit in the reinscription of colonial/apartheid racial logic and spatialisation decades after the formal ending of apartheid. In conclusion, the article will ask what is at stake if the white woman should attempt to encounter the Black man differently.