Women’s Rights Get a Dressing Down: Mini Skirt Attacks in South Africa

Abstract

(The Star 2008: 2). She was the fourth woman to be assaulted in this way at the rank on that evening. Three other women were stripped and sexually assaulted at the same taxi rank on the previous day. In each of these cases the fact that the women were wearing mini skirts was cited as the reason for the attack. Sexual harassment of women in mini skirts at Johannesburg taxi ranks has a long history. Police records suggest that the practice has been documented for the last eight to ten years and first-hand accounts suggest a much longer history to sexual harassment of women in South Africa's taxis. But Ngcukana was the first victim to report such an incident to police. Ngcukana's public account of her attack was followed by an outpouring of stories from other South African women about their experiences of having been groped and humiliated by men at taxi ranks and in crowded taxis. Controversy over the clothing choices of African women is not new. In the immediate postcolonial period African leaders across the continent took a personal interest in what women wore and berated them for 'unsuitable' choices. From the late 1960s news reports record widespread incidents of women being 'jeered at, physically assaulted and striped of their clothes in public by youth wingers and college students' (Wipper, 1972: 330). These attacks were not confined to a single country but occurred in Kenya, Uganda, Malawi and Zambia among others. The justificatory narratives that were invoked had several threads. In some cases the targets of mob violence were the more obviously racialised ones of wigs, hair straightening and skin lighteners which were seen as an indication of blackness being denigrated and regarded as inferior and ugly. But a second thread targeted fashionable clothing in general – bell bottoms, tight pants, jeans and mini skirts were all regarded as 'unAfrican' and those who wore these items branded as having had their minds occupied by western cultural imperialism at precisely the moment when African nations were seeking to throw off the colonial yoke. African leaders like Julius Nyerere and Jomo Kenyatta saw themselves literally as 'fathers' to the nation – indeed they were dubbed the founding fathers of their respective countries. Consciously engaged in a project of nation-building, often involving the unification of different classes and ethnic groups in the service of pressing national developmental needs, these leaders took a personal interest in all aspects of national life which was styled as an extension of family life. As is typical of such projects, nationalist leaders both drew on a local repository of imagery (African culture, heritage, tradition) and sought to present their new nations as able to advance, flourish and succeed on a world stage. The balance was a delicate one between mining Africanness for legitimacy and popular approval while at the same time combating the idea of Africa as a dark and backward place. Mini skirts in particular became, for many African leaders, emblematic of both the