Gender-Based Violence as a Pandemic: Sociocultural and Religious Factors Perpetuating Violence Against Women in South Africa

Abstract

Using African Women's Theology as its lens, this article names an uncomfortable truth: with over 86% of South Africans identifying as Christian, the Church cannot separate itself from the sociocultural forces driving the country's staggering GBV, VAW and IPV rates. It traces how colonial and Western patriarchy became entangled with African culture, and how the Church has too often been complicit rather than corrective — but also shows what accountability could look like. The article draws on the work of Mercy Amba Oduyoye, founder of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians, who argued that colonialism and Christianity together intensified gender inequality in ways that left many African women more vulnerable than their precolonial ancestors. It also examines how common biblical interpretations — such as reading women as mere "helpers" in Genesis — have been used to justify women's subordination within church life, and calls for clergy training in gender-sensitive ways of reading scripture.
The article's real contribution is its "reimagining" section, which names three concrete, culturally-rooted resources for change — each worth understanding in its own right, since they aren't widely known outside academic theology.
The first is Ubuntu, from the Nguni proverb umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu: a person is a person through other people. Ubuntu holds that our humanity isn't something we possess alone — it's discovered and built in relationship with others, making dignity and moral worth fundamentally communal. It is often celebrated as the heart of African ethics, but the article is honest about its double edge: because the "community" whose respect matters most has often been defined through male ancestry and authority, Ubuntu has sometimes been used to tell women to endure hardship "for the family" rather than to demand their equal dignity. Reimagining Ubuntu means insisting on what it always implied in principle: a relationship built on violence or control is a betrayal of Ubuntu, not an expression of it.
The second is the Bosadi hermeneutic, developed by South African theologian Madipoane Masenya. "Bosadi" is Northern Sotho for womanhood, and a "hermeneutic" is simply a method of interpreting a text. Where most biblical interpretation in Africa has historically been shaped by male, Western missionary perspectives, the Bosadi hermeneutic reads scripture and African culture together through the specific, lived experience of African women — attentive to race, gender, and class. It doesn't reject the Bible or African culture; it holds both up to the same question: does this affirm African women's full humanity and dignity, or diminish it? Where a practice or interpretation does the latter, Bosadi gives African women the authority to read differently.
The third is Musa Dube's decolonial biblical interpretation. Dube, a Botswanan theologian, argues that missionaries brought more than the Bible to Africa — they brought a Western, patriarchal way of reading it, shaped by colonialism itself. Colonial-era interpretation often used scripture to reinforce hierarchy: European over African, male over female, frequently through the very same verses. Dube's method asks readers to trace whose interests an interpretation originally served, what colonial power gained from reading it that way, and what the text looks like once that inherited lens is set aside in favour of African women's own experience and history.
Together, these three resources work at different levels — Ubuntu at the level of ethics and philosophy, Bosadi at the level of cultural and scriptural interpretation, and Dube's method at the level of history and power — giving faith communities a genuinely African toolkit for telling apart what in their heritage is truly lifegiving from what is inherited harm wearing the costume of tradition. The article argues that faith communities and cultural institutions must jointly re-examine practices like lobola and initiation rites through this lens — not abandoning culture, but sifting what sustains life from what sustains harm.