the fear of being female

i wrote this for our "critical rural incident", and thought it might be an experience worth sharing.

I am a woman, and because of this I am vulnerable. An experience in the rural village of Amacabini underscored this statement and created feelings of turmoil for me.

During my stay in Amacabini, I lived with a large family consisting of many brothers and a single thirty-five year old woman who ran the house. After talking about it all week, my brothers and I made a journey down to the beachfront. The hike is long and hot, but we finally reached it and had a lot of fun jumping in the waves. Several SIT students and their families were also at the beach, and when it was time to go, I left with fellow students Joyce and Danica, three of their sisters, and my fifteen year old brother, Spha.

As soon as we began walking, Spha insisted on carrying my bag. This was funny to me because he hadn’t offered at all on the way down, but his manhood seemed to be at stake in front of the three teenage girls and so I gave him the bag. Our group quickly reached the spot on the trail where the main road and the shortcut trail diverge. We had previously decided to walk on the main road to avoid the plants and ticks, but Spha had different plans and disappeared into the forest with my bag on his shoulder.

The rest of us continued on the main road. After about thirty minutes, we reached the turn to the road where Joyce and Danica’s family lived. My house was farther along the main road, at least another fifteen minutes by foot. At the intersection, we stopped and had a conversation about how I should get home. It was three in the afternoon, the road was fairly busy with men, women, and children. I told Joyce and Danica I felt comfortable walking by myself if Joyce lent me her phone to have just in case. They agreed and Joyce gave me her phone. As we had this conversation, three high school boys passed by on the road, walking in the same direction as my house. I recognized one of the boys and he greeted me. He was in a grade ten class I had taught all week and he was one of the few truly attentive students that asked frequent questions. Joyce recognized another one of the boys from teaching as well.

After Joyce gave me her phone, I said goodbye to the group and started walking up the hill. I had been walking for about ten seconds when both Joyce and Danica began yelling, “Claire! CLAIRE!” and I walked back to them and said, “What?” Joyce and Danica’s sisters were concerned about me walking by myself, especially after they saw those boys walking by. The three of them kept saying, “No. No. They’re dangerous. Dangerous. They could hurt or rape me- dangerous.” Joyce and I asserted that we had taught two of them and they seemed fine. All of us were tired and hot after the climb and the group did not want to accompany me home. The solution, according to the girls, was for me to take the shortcut that led from their house to the school and then walk the remaining five minutes on the road. I was not happy with this solution. This easily doubled the time it would take me to get home, in addition to hiking down and up an unnecessary hill. Danica was insistent that we should trust the girls’ intutions. Joyce and I assumed the girls were being overprotective, but they decided that I should take the shortcut because it’s “better safe than sorry.”

As we walked down the road to Joyce and Danica’s house, I was fuming. All I kept thinking was, “If I were a man, this would not have been an issue.” And it’s true- if I had been any of the three males on our program, I would have said, “See you later!” and there would have never been a second thought regarding the safety of me walking by myself for fifteen minutes. As soon as we got to Joyce and Danica’s house, I said a brief hello to their gogo and started on the trail. As I walked down the path through the sugar cane field, my anger intensified. By cutting through the sugar cane field, I was literally hiding from men. The inequality burned me.

As I began the climb up the hill, an older woman and her grandchild stood at the end of a pathway connecting their house to the trail. We exchanged greetings in Zulu, and then she told me something more complex that I didn’t understand. I stopped my hiking, and told her in Zulu that I didn’t understand. She switched to English, and exclaimed loudly, “YOU NOT AFRAID TO WALK ALONE?!” I explained that I was coming from a friend’s house to the school, but she remained perplexed and worried. I continued my hike, my steps becoming stomps as I replayed in my head the scenarios with the old woman and Joyce and Danica’s sisters.

By the time I reached the top of the hill I was winded and sweaty and swatting away flies. As I continued on past the school, I saw a different group of three men standing together talking. I overheard the word “American” and knew they were referring to me. They didn’t smile as I approached, and I quickened my pace. After I passed them and my house was in sight I let out a sigh of relief. I felt like I had averted a potential landmine. I could not gauge if I was overreacting because of the experiences in the last half hour or if I had just avoided a potentially dangerous situation.

When I walked up to my house Spha greeted me cheerfully, and I thought to myself, “You have no idea how much your decision to cut through the woods affected me.” My experience as a woman (in both South Africa and the United States) has been this: good men are oblivious to the reality that women must constantly be on their guard against sexual assault and bad men perpetuate this reality. It frustrates and deeply saddens me that society continues to be so unequal. Experiencing how many women in the rural areas were extremely concerned for my safety troubled me. I would like to brush it off as overprotection, but what if it wasn’t? What if their concern was legitimate? If that was the case, the women of Amacabini suffer greatly from an oppressing, constant fear. I am clearly a foreigner in that area. My white skin both attracts more attention and also offers me a certain level of protection; it would be a publicized crime if I were to be harmed. This experience gave me cause to worry for the average women in this community, the women who don’t have the luxury of a blue passport book and the privilege that it indicates. These women may know how to avoid the men by cutting through jungle pathways, but they cannot completely avoid men. They cannot avoid the oppressive power struggle that constructs their reality.