ABSTRACT
Older women’s personal recollections of marriage, violence and custom remain largely peripheral in contemporary and historical accounts of ukuthwala (a customary process precipitating marriage, and sometimes involving abduction). This reinforces the notion, present within prevailing policy and legal discourses on this practice, that violent forms of ukuthwala are both non-customary and novel. Against the relative exclusion of women’s intimate perspectives of ukuthwala as it took place in the past, the chapter recites the oral histories of two older women – Asanda and Anele – who survived violent ukuthwala in their adolescent years while growing up in the former Transkei in the early 1970s. The privileging of Anele and Asanda’s narratives embodies the black feminist practice of retrieving women’s voices to diminish silences around interpersonal violence in the past eras. The unique power and particularity of these oral histories enriches existing literature on ukuthwala that documents the power of elders in the realm of the customary and the multi-generational persistence of violence. Through Anele and Asanda’s intimate accounts, the chapter elaborates on two themes of gerontocratic authority: the unqualified authority of elders in consenting to marriage on behalf of girls, leading to forced marriages; and flowing from this consent, elders’ sanctioning of sexual violence committed against girls by the husbands chosen for them. Interweaving Anele and Asanda’s reflections on modern developments, the chapter further examines the varying influence of human rights discourse in communities where violent ukuthwala is practised.
