This chapter discusses gendered violence and its relationship to South Africa’s apartheid history. The chapter argues that through its white heteropatriarchal ideologies, apartheid’s construction of black men continues to influence how they experience contemporary manhood as hierarchical. In this chapter, gendered violence is analyzed through a multidimensional approach that considers how race and class are intertwined in defining what constitutes ideal manhood. We argue that gendered black violence in South Africa is partly a legacy of the unresolved “colonial wound” that continues to be felt in South Africa’s social, economic, and political arrangements, which exclude most black men (and women). While this is not an excuse for gendered violence, the colonial wound stirs multiple discourses that suggest that violence is a legitimate response to the structural violence black men encounter. These unjustifiable acts of violence require a psychosocial, not an essentialist, analysis that risks constructing black masculinities as inherently violent. The perspective in this chapter considers that gender-based violence in which some black men are perpetrators results from nuanced and multi-layered historical and contemporary processes. For example, in South Africa, black men historically and currently experience(d) systemic white heteropatriarchal domination that places white and women above them. While black women are also victims of these processes, black men occupy much more powerful positionalities in comparison, enabling them to oppress the former in their responses to this structural violence. This chapter argues that while history still matters when discussing gendered violence in South Africa, the contemporary black male agency is not far removed from the problem.