Race, the Public Sphere, and Sexual Violence in the Mothertongue Project’s Walk: South Africa

Abstract

In 2013, the Mothertongue Project, a women’s theater collective based in Cape Town, South Africa, developed a performance called Walk: South Africa (Walk: SA) as a critique of rape culture. Walk: SA was prompted by the rape and murder of Anene Booysen, a Black South African teenager, in February 2013 and directly inspired by Maya Krishna Rao’s Walk, created in response to the similar rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandey in Delhi, India, in December 2012. This essay analyzes how a 2014 performance of Walk: SA contributes to theorization on the interconnectedness of racial, gender, and sexual exploitation. I focus on three vignettes within the performance that connect histories of racialized violence against Black South African women to Booysen’s case and that of other women in the contemporary period. Using walking as a mnemonic device, and with commentaries on actual women’s experiences, the performers make a claim for women’s right to traverse the public space, and they exhort their audience to action. With its public engagement and no-holds-barred approach to the issue of sexual violence, Walk: SA participates in feminist discourses that include race and gender in ongoing conversations around democracy in South Africa. More broadly, it exists within the new iterations of women-led public activisms against sexual violence that have taken root throughout the world in the twenty-first century.