Amidst all the confusion over
whether SABC COO Hlaudi Motsoeneng was indeed offered a woman as a present by
Venda leaders, one aspect was utterly unremarkable: that the ANC Women’s League
did not make a peep of protest. It’s the silence we’ve come to expect from a
League which seems to have a decidedly idiosyncratic approach to which issues
affecting SA women it chooses to make a noise about. But as a fascinating new
book on the League’s history explains, it’s a body which has been mired in
ideological contestation virtually from its inception. By REBECCA DAVIS. The Daily Maverick
When the ANC Women’s League is
spoken of today, it is often with a sense of frustration and betrayal. A
once-proud movement, one narrative runs, now inaudible on the real issues which
threaten South African women. Leaders of the League take up front-row seats at
the Oscar Pistorius murder trial, while staying invisible on less high-profile
cases involving gender-based violence. The League launches a prominent campaign
to protest against the abduction of Nigerian girls by Boko Haram, yet – as EFF
leader Julius Malema pointed out last week – they had nothing to say on the
alleged presentation of a woman to Hlaudi Motsoeneng.
The same narrative often
assumes a golden past era of the ANC Women’s League, where the real work of
advocating for women’s rights took place vocally and defiantly. As Wits
Politics Professor Shireen Hassim’s intriguing new history of The ANC Women’s
League: Sex, Politics and Gender (part of Jacana Pocket History series) makes
clear, this nostalgia for an imagined latter-day League is only partly
justified. Throughout its existence, the League has struggled to find a
coherent mandate and identity.
The African National Congress
may have been a movement of liberation, but it was also very much the product
of its time when it came to the issue of the emancipation of women initially.
In the early years of the ANC, Hassim writes, “the exclusion of black men from
power was self-evidently wrong but the exclusion of women was unremarkable”.
Women were only allowed to become full ANC members in 1943, 31 years after the
ANC’s formation. Prior to this they were denied voting rights, with women seen as
being tasked with providing “suitable shelter and entertainment for delegates
to the Congress”.
rebecca-WL-book-for-inside.jpgThe
notion of the patriarchal family has always been significant to the ANC, and
for much of its existence the ANC has itself replicated the form of a family,
Hassim suggests: “with the exclusively male National Executive Committee [NEC]
acting as the paternal head of the movement, the Women’s League playing the
lesser, maternal role and the Youth League treated as a space of radical
militancy needing the guidance of the parents”.
A tension between the
conception of Women’s League members as primarily mothers and caregivers vs.
activists has characterised much of its existence. With the ANC Women’s League
suspended after 1960, it was partially replaced with the Women’s Section, in a
role that Hassim defines as “the movement’s social worker”. Hassim points out
that this “caring maternalist” character does not inevitably lead to
conservative politics; it led women to be at the forefront of opposing the
presence of the SANDF in townships in the 1980s, for instance. But at other
points it defined all women’s interests as being able to be mapped on to the
interests of the family.
Yet the emphasis on women’s
maternal identity was not carried through consistently. Female members of
Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) were forbidden to become pregnant, Hassim records. Women
sent to training camps in Angola had contraceptive IUDs inserted as policy.
Young mothers and babies were often dispatched to a facility in Tanzania which
could be extremely isolating. There was a ban against ANC women marrying
foreigners due to the expectation that the woman would follow the man home,
rather than the other way round. Corporal punishment was sometimes meted out to
ANC women who dated PAC men.
The question of whether the
turn to the armed struggle helped or hindered women within the ANC is one still
up for debate, Hassim suggests. Albie Sachs argued the latter, saying that it
reinforced the masculine character of the movement. Others contend that it
gained respect for women, given the high esteem in which MK was held. Though
female soldiers wanted to be treated like anyone else, sometimes gender roles
were so ingrained that they weren’t easily discarded. Hassim quotes MK
commander Jackie Molefe: “In the beginning the boys expected to have their
clothes washed, and the girls would do it.”
From the early 80s onwards, the
Women’s Section put more energy into the political education of its members.
Hassim writes that younger members in particular travelled abroad and were
influenced by exposure to women’s movements internationally. Collaboration with
global women’s groups brought in much-needed donations, but they were often
told there were no funds available for women’s issues.
Around the mid-80s, ANC NEC
member Joe Nhlanhla was to voice the concern that “women have become women
first then ANC”. They were warned against “sectarianism”. Nhlanhla’s remarks
summarised another central identity conflict: whether the Women’s League’s (or
Women’s Section’s) primary role should be mobilising women for national
liberation or women’s liberation – with the former invariably dominating.
The ANC’s women’s movements may
have been mandated to act for women, but that should not automatically suggest
that their ideology was always informed by “feminism” per se. After the 1995
Nairobi Conference of the United Nations Decade for Women, Hassim writes, an
anti-feminism attitude within the ANC was fuelled.
This was because there was a
push from some international feminists there (like Ronald Reagan’s daughter
Maureen) to de-politicise the conference to keep it focused on pure women’s
issues. The US delegation, led by Maureen Reagan, opposed a resolution against
Apartheid, for instance. The attitude of these so-called “liberal feminists”
helped harden anti-feminist attitudes, Hassim suggests, because it was seen as
“bourgeois, imperialist and irrelevant to the South African women’s movement”.
But at the same time, some ANC
women’s leaders had their eyes fixed worriedly on the records of post-colonial
African countries. Continent-wide, writes Hassim, “women’s positions did not
significantly improve after independence, despite rhetorical commitments by
political leaders”.
In the final years of the
Apartheid system, with the ANC preparing for government, there were a number of
missed opportunities for genuinely progressive gender-related proposals. When
the ANC released its ‘Constitutional Guidelines for a Democratic SA’ in 1988,
it was proposed that a clause on gender equality should enshrine “the
establishment of women’s rights over their own fertility, and for childcare to
be equally shared by fathers and mothers”. It also proposed the removal of
“patriarchal rights over the family”. But these proposals did not find expression
in the final document, which merely acknowledged the need for gender equality
in the public and private sphere.
It’s another example of the
ANC’s reluctance to critique power relations within the family unit, which
Hassim cites businesswoman and former government official Lulu Gwagwa as
attributing to the ANC’s reliance on the family “as a mobilising tool”. This
attitude is evident to this day in documents like the Department of Social
Development’s Green Paper on the Family, which venerates the notion of the
traditional nuclear family even as evidence reveals its existence to be an
increasing anomaly in a South African context.
After its unbanning in 1990,
the Women’s Section reverted to the name of the Women’s League when it returned
to the country “on a wave of triumphalism”, Hassim writes. The return of the
League saw it effectively swallow up the women’s organisations which had sprung
up in the vacuum left by its movement into exile.
One of the side-effects of
disbanding these other women’s organisations was that the non-racial dimension
to the South African women’s movement was essentially lost. Among those who
mourned this departure was former ANC Minister Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, who
told Hassim: “We pointed out [to the returning exiles] how hard we’d worked to
build an alliance across class and race, and it was lost…treated as
unimportant”.
Another significant moment in
the history of the Women’s League saw Winnie Mandela elected president. At the
first post-unbanning conference of the League in 1991 in Kimberley, Gertrude
Shope was voted in as president and Albertina Sisulu deputy. But Shope had to
stand against Winnie Mandela, who as Nelson Mandela’s wife obviously occupied a
significant symbolic position within the ANC. However, Hassim writes, by this
stage Winnie was a controversial figure, being on trial for the kidnapping of
Stompie Seipei and the disappearance of Lolo Sono.
Being Mandela’s wife also
worked against her as much as for her, because “many feminists were concerned
that the league would simply become another ‘wives’ club’, like other leagues
in Africa”, Hassim suggests. Shope ended up defeating Winnie Mandela by 422 to
196 in a secret ballot, though some say the results would have been different
if the votes had been public.
But in 1993 Winnie stood again
for the presidency, this time successfully. In the view of some feminists, this
put the nail in the coffin of the prospects of the League as a genuinely
progressive women’s voice, because Winnie would prioritise loyalty to ANC leadership
above all other considerations.
The issue of gender quotas in
the ANC is one that the League frequently cites as among its greatest
successes. It had first raised the matter at the Women’s Section’s conference
in Lusaka in 1986, when there were only three women out of 35 of the ANC’s NEC.
In 1991 the League called for a female quota on the NEC of 30%, but the
proposal fell by the wayside. A report by the Emancipation Commission in 1994
found that “most women on the ANC payroll were secretaries, with little or no
participation in decision-making”. There was clearly a long route still to
travel. Ahead of the April 1994 elections, the quota issue was revisited, this
time successfully. Almost 30% of MPs in the first democratic Parliament were
women as a result.
Representation of women in
Parliament since then has not invariably meant advances for women, however.
Writes Hassim: “The intervention of ANC women MPs in policy debates have been
characterised by support for relatively conservative social attitudes that reinforce
the view that women are primarily nurturing, caring members of a community
rather than citizens with rights and entitlements to social and public
resources”.
Former President Thabo Mbeki
was a vocal advocate for women’s political representation, and yet the League
threw its weight behind rival Jacob Zuma when the leadership tussle picked up
steam. Hassim suggests this was not altogether surprising.
“Although, politically and
legally, women have been the biggest winners of democratisation, they are also
the key shock-absorbers of economic failures,” she writes. “Zuma supporters
argued that under his presidency the control of the party would return to the
branches and an agenda of economic redistribution would be foregrounded, and
that this consideration was so important that the implications of his social
conservatism and his problematic relationships with women should be set aside.”
Tensions between feminists and
party loyalists came to the fore during the trial of Jacob Zuma for rape in
2006 – something which probably did more than anything else to tarnish the ANC
Women’s League’s reputation as the defender of women’s rights. Some female ANC
supporters held signs outside court which said “Zuma, rape me,” Hassim records.
More recently, in addition to
the League’s refusal to challenge ANC leadership, it has seemed that the League
simply lacks the power or influence to shape policy. Hassim points out that
senior League members like Lulu Xingwana were vocal in their critique of the
Traditional Courts Bill, but apparently went unheard.
“As a vehicle for gender
equality, the ANC Women’s League has been far from a trusty ship,” Hassim
concludes. “It is apparent that the League is not the home of South African
feminism, however broadly feminism is defined.” But neither can it be
dismissed, she argues, as it has a crucial gatekeeper role to play for
positions in government and the selection of party leaders – not that it always
uses these powers in the best interests of women.
Fortunately, Hassim notes, the
ANC Women’s League is not the sole guardian of women’s rights in South Africa.
Aside from other political organisations, there is an active collection of
civil society groups who are taking up the mantle in defence of true gender
equality. It is to these groups, rather than the ANC Women’s League, that women
may look increasingly for the upholding of their rights.
