‘It Felt So Good To Stab My Father’: Nida Webber’s Story

Abstract

This chapter tells the story of an Afrikaner incest survivor, Nida Webber (her real name), who was subjected to considerable violence, emotional and sexual abuse by her stepfather. At the time of the interview she was a petite young woman whose strength was masked by the usual feminine accoutrements that signify softness and fragility rather than toughness and willingness to kill. The stereotypic picture of cowed, submissive incest survivors who internalise their rage in self-destructive and life-threatening ways is shattered by Afrikaans women like Nida, Elsa Foster (Chapter 3) and Elsabé Groenewald (Chapter 6), as well as by other Afrikaner survivors I interviewed. Interestingly, there were no examples of this degree of violent resistance among the English-speaking South African survivors, nor do I recollect any comparable accounts of militant self-defence in the published or unpublished literature on or by incest survivors in the United States or Britain.

‘I stabbed my father, just missing his heart. His blood squirted on to me and my clothes got all bloody … It felt so good to stab him.’