What if the answers to gender-based violence (GBV) already exist, but are unevenly remembered?

This was the starting point of University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) staffer Dr Hleliwe Khumalo’s doctoral study in Community Development, ‘The Influence of Place in the Use of African Indigenous Knowledge Systems as a Mechanism for Addressing GBV: Case Studies of KwaNgcolosi and Umlazi’, supervised by Professor Yanga Zembe and Professor Maheshvari Naidu.

Where responses to GBV are sometimes framed through imported models, Khumalo instead turned to African Indigenous Knowledge Systems (AIKS), understood as lived, inherited, and evolving practices rooted in land, community, and ancestral knowledge.

For her, the question was both personal and political: why are communities so often described as sites of violence, but rarely as sources of solutions?

Her research traced this question back to place. In rural KwaNgcolosi, indigenous practices remain more visible, sustained through land-based ties and collective memory. In peri-urban Umlazi, shaped by mobility and urbanisation, that memory is more fragmented. What emerged in her findings is not a simple rural-urban divide, but a shifting landscape where knowledge is preserved, adapted or quietly lost.

AIKS, as Khumalo explained, is not abstract. It lives in practices: mentorship of young men by izinduna zezinsizwa, the moral formation embedded in imidlalo, and the work of amaqhikiza and onomehlo in guiding young women and addressing unintended pregnancy. These are not symbolic traditions, but functioning systems of accountability, mediation and social regulation. Yet she found their effectiveness to be uneven. In KwaNgcolosi, participants could recall historically grounded interventions with clarity. In Umlazi, many struggled to distinguish indigenous practices from contemporary ones. Khumalo read this not as absence, but as erosion and a deeper process shaped by what she describes as ongoing “re-colonisation,” where globalisation and dominant knowledge systems displace local ways of knowing.

At the same time, she is careful not to romanticise tradition, acknowledging that some of the same systems that regulate behaviour also reinforce patriarchal authority. This tension became one of the most difficult aspects of her research: how to honour indigenous institutions while critically examining the ways they may silence or subordinate women.

Her proposed framework addresses this balance. Beginning with participatory engagement, communities are encouraged to “excavate” their own knowledge systems, followed by critical filtering through feminist and decolonial lenses. What remains is then tested, refined and returned to communities as contextually grounded interventions – an approach that aligns with broader development goals around gender justice, community empowerment and locally driven solutions.

For Khumalo, the implications are practical. Her study argues that national policy responses, including those addressing GBV, must move beyond generic frameworks to support community-led, culturally resonant strategies. This includes working with traditional leaders, healers and women’s groups – not as symbolic stakeholders, but as co-creators of knowledge.

As a lecturer in Development Studies, she described her commitment as one shaped by both scholarship and accountability to the communities she studies.

“Do not assume that solutions must come from outside the community. Learn to listen deeply and question whose knowledge counts as legitimate,” is her advice to emerging researchers.

The study is also marked by collaboration and recognition.

As her supervisors note: “We applaud Hleliwe on a study that is rich and unique. Hleliwe was also a recipient of the Andrew W Mellon Spatial Humanities Project Scholarship. Her study was funded as it dovetailed with the space and place focus of the project and entanglements of spatialised identity and cultural enactments, and Hleliwe was able to excavate African indigenous knowledge frameworks in the context of GBV. Her study is therefore both empirically and theoretically rich.”

Supported by this Scholarship and UKZN’s Talent Equity and Excellence Acceleration Scholarship, the research is as much about restoration as it is about analysis. It asks what it means to remember differently and what might change if communities are trusted to lead.

Khumalo is profoundly grateful for the funding and support of her PhD. She thanked her supervisors for their guidance, belief in her and constructive criticism. In addition, she gives thanks to her colleagues, participants, izinduna, omama, izangoma and community members of KwaNgcolosi and Umlazi, as well as family and friends, for their love and patience.