When the body goes to war: Rhodes at NMU

THE #RhodesWarAtNMU solidarity demonstration/protest held at Nelson Mandela University last month affirmed once more the permanent state of vulnerability that victims of gender-based violence have to live with.

The solidarity protest followed the expulsion of two Rhodes University gender activists in November, after they allegedly kidnapped two rape suspects from their rooms.

The demonstration was staged around the iconic Mandela shirt sculpture on the campus (pictured left).

The shirt forms part of the university’s public art legacy programme which is affiliated to the Vision 2020, a deliberate interrogation of the university’s identity to “determine strategic priorities that will secure the long-term sustainability of the institution”.

This relationship between protest and place is just as important as the message behind the demonstration.

The shirt represents the idea of ubuntu, with its alignment to Vision 2020. It speaks to the call of transformation, and therefore The Collective, in positioning the protests at the shirt, asked the Nelson Mandela University, “what kind of university do you envision to be?” and “and is my body represented in that ideal?”

Subsequent to the locality, the protesters are naked, slutty and dressed in black, in this rhetorical performance, the body deconstructs the societal expectations placed on it. It is women, therefore it is property, it is an entity used by “the power” (the patriarch).

The body reconstructs its position in the face of the power (patriarch), it takes shapes and forms that are non-binary; on its conditions, it is naked on its own account, the body has affirmed itself, as Foucalt argues, it has resisted the power.

The body, naked, slutty and black, lies on the ground, next to this sculpture of dignity, just close enough for the sculpture to feel its presence. It does not destroy, it simply asks, “where is my justice, Mandela?”

The silence is deafening, it lies in the scorching sun for an hour, bare, displayed for all to see, for the power (patriarch) to dare to come at it. It speaks to those who did not have the strength to fight, it speaks solidarity, it screams that you are not alone, and where your voice fails you, the body will go to war for you.

And so as our bodies go to war, when we protest and make political demands without uttering a word, the space where it chooses to demonstrate, those spaces become elements/attributes to staging the political, the space becomes political too.

These bodies, although political and powerful, are still precarious, they are delicate and insecure in the same breath. However, “these bodies, in showing this precarity, are also resisting these very powers; they enact a form of resistance that presupposes vulnerability of a specific kind, and opposes precarity” (Butler; 2014).

The Collective, in staging the demonstration, exposes the inconsistency and absurdity of hypervisibility.

Megan Ryland explains that hypervisibility is “scrutiny based on perceived difference, which is usually (mis)interpreted as deviance. Often, this deviance becomes a focal point for outside attention and comes to symbolise or represent a hypervisible person, group or place”.

In essence, when The Collective argues that there is an entitlement that people and in particular men feel towards women’s bodies, which manifests through GBV, there is a need to defy “this entitlement that is created by patriarchal systems that we are brought up in. We are reclaiming our power back” (Nangamso Nxumalo, from The Collective).

The courageous demonstration by The Collective reminds us that at times acts of courage at their core require us to be vulnerable, it necessitates that we are deliberate, that we are militant, even as a few, it reminds us that sometimes wars are won by the underdogs.

That courage reminds us that we are “wordless without another” and that not all just wars are understood as that at first.

Siphokazi Tau, intern, Centre for the Advancement of Non-Racialism and Democracy