LITMIR.BIZ

       Introduction

       Gender and Violence in the Market and Beyond

      During my first year as a student at the University of Zambia, when I was seventeen, I left campus one Friday for a weekend with my family. It was not yet dark, and the Lusaka Central Market was busy. The lines for the minibus to Kabulonga were extremely long, but I waited patiently for my turn to board. I actually enjoyed the commotion all around.

      Then two young men approached me. I recognized one as Chitumba, a friend of my cousin Natasha. They joined me in the line, and we chatted briefly before they invited me to join them in a taxi ride home, at their expense, as they lived beyond my parents’ home anyway. I agreed readily, and we walked together, one on either side of me, stepping over vegetables and past vendors until we got into a parked taxi. As we did so, an old woman shouted after my young men, “You’ve done well. Take her away from here. They were going to strip her naked!”

      I remember my shock at realizing that the commotion—whistling and shouting from the young men loitering around the market—had been directed at my legs and thighs. My cotton floral summer dress, a gift from my mother, was apparently attracting mob justice. It is an infrequent occurrence, but an occurrence nonetheless, that an “indecently attired” young woman in Lusaka is pursued by a gang of vigilante youths ostensibly trying to preserve the dignity of Mother Zambia and traditional African values. If she is captured, the woman is normally stripped naked, groped, and roughed up as an appreciative crowd gathers to witness the spectacle. The woman might escape the mob if she is rescued by a shopkeeper and his workers, who will barricade her in their shop until the police arrive to disperse the party.

      My two young rescuers were better acclimated than I was to the body and gender politics on the streets of Lusaka and foresaw that I was on the verge of falling victim to a sexual assault. Chitumba admitted that the taxi invitation was a ruse to get me away from danger. I recounted this story to my parents that evening, choking on tears of rage. My father tried to rationalize: “You should understand our culture, mama; those people are grassroots people.” I shouted in response: “They’re not grassroots! They don’t know anything about our culture! They’re just thugs!”

      In the southern African society of my youth, sexual violence was the bogeyman of morality tales, articulated through commentary or narratives that attached to and sexualized specific body parts and conduct. The shape and tone of these narratives was often censorious of women and girls irrespective of the sex of the narrator. Girls who showed their thighs, girls who stayed out after dark, girls who did not respect themselves—these girls attracted aggressive sexual attention from men, name calling, and ostracism from women’s peer groups. If they really pushed the boundaries, they would get the punishment of rape.¹ However, rape was not the ultimate punishment. The ultimate punishment would be that nobody would believe it was rape, or, if they believed it was rape, the conclusion would be that it was well earned by the victim and perhaps even overdue. The social narratives I grew up on often married gender with violence: for example, they easily attached such adjectives as “drunken,” “careless,” “wild,” “provocative,” or “stupid” to women victims of sexual violence.² These narratives made words such as “no,” “consent,” “force,” and “coercion” ambiguous on my university campus. If I believed in the narratives, I would have had to accept that it was the shapeliness of my bare legs that threatened public morality and order as well as my own dignity and physical integrity in the Lusaka market. However, this acceptance would require submitting to the narratives of gender and violence and their objective of privileging men by policing women’s autonomy.

      In

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