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The settler still in the bedroom: Ayah Omran-Randall, Maryam Al-Khater, ‘Executing Sharia court decisions in the dissolution of marriages between Jerusalemites with different identity cards: implications for the Israeli settler colonial project’, Journal of Gender Studies, 2025 »

The settler in the bedroom: Sivuyisiwe Wonci, ‘The Ontology of the “Swart Gevaar”: Decolonising Black Women’s Wombs in South Africa’, in Mtisunge Isabel Kamlongera (ed.), Decoloniality in Gender Discourse and Praxis, Routledge, 2025

06May25

Abstract: The history of South Africa is publicly commemorated as a process of dispossession of people from the land, massacres and cultural and linguistic attempted erasures. This public commemoration hardly recognises intimate geographies of settler colonialism in which Black women’s wombs were subjected to violent reproductive health technologies which had the intention of reducing Black fertility. This chapter asks how did the ontology of the ‘swart gevaar’, which is the fear of White people being swamped by Black people, institutionalised by settler colonial administrators and the apartheid government managed to wage war on Black women’s wombs. Inequalities of reproductive healthcare system in this post-apartheid moment are examined, and how they continue to send Black women to shallow graves. This chapter also reflects on ways in which Black women resisted settler colonial reproductive violence and developed their own reproductive health agencies, intimate freedoms and maintained indigenous reproductive health systems. It proposes that decolonial feminist project in South Africa should begin by exhuming Black women’s bodies from shallow of settler colonial reproductive violence and publicly commemorate them as radical sites of liberties, desires, names, songs, resistance, community and human dignity. Decolonising women’s wombs in South Africa will also require birthing new cultures of intimacy, building new homes of agency, reproductive liberties and dignified reproductive health services.


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