But all this talking has an edge of anxiety: as South Africans look north to Zimbabwe (and feel the effects of that society’s disintegration through a flood of immigrants), questions are raised at to whether this country can dare to be the extraordinary exception in Africa, a post-colonial, peaceful democracy in which power can change hands as a matter of course.This article offers a fresh interpretation of the life of Krotoa/Eva, the famous Khoena interpreter of Jan Van Riebeeck, whose gender gave her a unique position in relation to both Dutch and Khoena society. And the fact that South Africans can talk long and hard about governance and power in multiple spaces (newspaper columns, book fair panels) could be thought a definite sign of health. This is as it should be, if the function of public deliberation is working according to democratic norms. The state-and health-of our democracy is probably the hottest topic in the South African public sphere right now.

This article explores the implications for feminism of reading and writing about women in the southern African war zone and its aftermath by focusing on Zoe¨ Wicomb’s novel David’s Story (2000), which grapples with the figure of a female militant and the myriad violations to which she is subject. Similarly, feminist understandings of rape have variously constructed women as victims of patriarchy and as potential agents of resistance (see Brownmiller 1976 Marcus 1992). Two strands of feminist thought diverge in conceptualizations of the woman warrior: one finds in war a potential realm of gendered equality and female liberation another associates women with nurturing and lifegiving qualities, linking them to an ethos of peace and pitting them and their interests against war (see Cock 1991, 189–91 D’Amico 1998, 120). Feminist discourses have aimed to render such bodies visible in and of themselves but have been embattled when faced with the figure of the female militant. The raped female body suffers a similar fate: figured as a rhetorical sign, its disfigurements slip from view (see Samuelson 2002 Sielke 2002). In the war zone, women’s bodies are simultaneously saturated with and stripped of meaning in the process, they are rendered invisible.

Krotoa-Eva by Trudie Bloem