Male violence, the state and the dehumanisation of women in three South African novels by women

This chapter provides a discussion of dehumanisation in times of crises by focusing on the state’s implication in the perpetuation of gendered violence and the resultant dehumanisation of women, as represented in a selection of South African women’s writing. It focuses on Kagiso Lesego Molope’s This Book Betrays my Brother, Carol Campbell’s My Children have Faces and Meg Vandermerwe’s Zebra Crossing. This Book Betrays my Brother presents a narrator who is only 13 years old and through whose presumed innocent eyes the reader gets exposed to the brutality of male sexual violence. In My Children have Faces, Campbell brings the light of Khoisan people, especially the women whose vulnerability to male violence is exacerbated by the lack of proper identification documents to give them recognisable legal status as South African citizens. In Zebra Crossing, Meg Vandermerwe puts the spotlight on immigrant women as another minority group in South Africa, and paints a bleak picture of state complicity in their dehumanisation.