Reading the history of a political organisation is an
exercise in reading against powerful official narratives – powerful both in
their capacity to tell a story and in their rootedness in the hearts of their
supporters. In the case of the ANC, that official narrative is one of a
progressive and natural line of development, an arc of redemption from
oppression. It is history told as a triumphal march rather than a series of
conflicts, several of which may remain unresolved.
The line of struggle for gender equality inside the ANC and
by the ANC is discontinuous; it was not a straight line from 1912 to 1994 and
was an even more crooked line from 1994 to 2014.
In its popular register, the ANC stands for nonracialism,
nonsexism and a democratic South Africa, but it did not always stand for all of
those values. It had to be made so and, indeed, many within it may still not
stand for those ideas. Support for the idea of women as autonomous agents has
always been tenuous in our politics.
In my recent book, I traced the history of the idea of gender
equality in South Africa through one of its vehicles, the ANC Women’s League.
Of course, the league was not the only vehicle through which gender equality
was advanced. And the idea of equality did not reach any degree of finality
with the enactment of the Constitution in 1996.
Indeed, equality is, in many respects, inadequate to the work
of liberation: in the history I trace, the idea is rooted in the binary
conception of male-female and offers us weak tools to address the forms of
gender that escape heteronormative framings, bodily forms and identities –
those that are expressed outside two fixed genders.
Those binary framings are revealed now in the floundering of
the women’s league as it tries to come to terms with the multiple ways in which
citizens are claiming their rights to voice, autonomy and identity.
But even within the binary terms of gender, and even within
the official framing of the ANC’s support for equality, women’s political
status and claims went unrecognised for most of the 20th century. It is not
that women were passive. They have always been politically active and have
always mobilised as women, for women, whether it was against colonial
authorities, the apartheid state or men who rape.
Yet throughout the 20th century, African women were confined
to a limited political space in the ANC. For the first half of the century they
had no voting rights. They were simply “all the wives” of the male members.
Their main role, in the ANC’s own words, was to provide shelter, food and
entertainment for male delegates. It was only in 1943, 31 years after the ANC’s
formation, that women were allowed to become full members of the movement, with
the right to vote and participate in its deliberations. Part of this new
position of the women in the ANC was the result of economic change, growing
urbanisation and unionisation, and women’s own militancy in the urban
townships.
The women’s league was part of the ANC’s attempt to build a
mass membership base; women were seen as potential recruits. Slowly the idea
emerged that the status of women was in itself something that needed to be
“upgraded” as part of the emerging, modernising nationalism in the ANC. But the
women’s league retained its auxiliary and secondary status as a substructure of
the ANC and, very importantly, remained under the political control and
direction of the congress throughout the first half of the 20th century.
It was very significant that the ANC did come finally to incorporate
one half of the population it claimed to represent into its political frame of
reference. But it was always a tentative kind of inclusion.
Those women who found themselves to some extent stifled by
male-dominated organisations endeavoured to form something different: the
Federation of South African Women, a nonracial body formed to articulate some
kind of separate voice for women. The roots of this idea lay in the unions and
the Communist Party, where working-class women had been organised across race
lines.
The federation became an important part of the growing
Defiance Campaign and, bolstered by an organisation outside the ANC, women in
the ANC decisively went beyond their tea-making role.
The federation adopted a Women’s Charter, seen by some as a
trial run for the Freedom Charter, whose demands for women to be recognised as
economic agents and as deserving of respect and dignity remain relevant over
half a century later.
In this highly mobilised phase of the ANC’s history, there
was a realisation that national liberation would not automatically lead to
women’s liberation. Still, the ANC was seen as the leading organisation, the
vehicle through which democratic demands could be advanced.
In 1955, the federation launched an independent militant
campaign against the extension of passes to women. The march of women from all
around the country to the Union Buildings on August 9 has become symbolic of
women’s resistance to apartheid. Left out of the telling is that the male
congress leadership was not entirely supportive of the march in its planning
phase. They thought it was too confrontational and that the federation should
concentrate on educational campaigns. After all, if the women went to jail, who
would look after the children?
The ANC now celebrates this moment, but its leadership at the
time had to be convinced it was a good idea. And although women were defining
and shaping political strategies, ultimately they too accepted the primacy of
national liberation and the ANC as the vehicle for change. That meant working
within the confines of male domination while chipping away at its edges.
Even late in the century, on the cusp of the transition to
democracy, women in the ANC found that their chipping away inside the movement
had made so little impact that they supported the formation of the Women’s
National Coalition. Once again, they had to step outside the movement to make a
significant impact. Once again, they formulated their demands for equality in a
Women’s Charter. This time, they were able to affect the shape of the
Constitution, but their organisational autonomy crumbled rapidly as the new
state took shape and co-opted the language of equality.
The tensions and contradictions, the results of the
compromises made over the course of a century to stay within the language of
national liberation, were to become glaringly apparent in the democratic era.
Women took their place in the democratic Parliament in no
uncertain terms – among the highest number of women in any Parliament around
the world. The global image of South African democracy was much burnished by
its presentation as a women-friendly state. For a time, the locus of gender
politics shifted to the civil service and Parliament, and there was significant
optimism about what might be achieved with the right combination of political
will and the right institutional design.
Yet even in the earliest years of democracy, there were signs
that the women’s league would be challenged by other women’s groups on the
extent to which they represented the interests of all women. The space of
opposition and new thinking about gender inequalities shifted to
nongovernmental organisations, especially those dealing with rising levels of
violence against women and with homophobia.
Inside the state, the women’s league began playing an active
– and, some argue, a gatekeeping – role, ensuring that reliable ANC women were
appointed to parliamentary committees, government departments and parastatals.
Appointments were driven by considerations of party loyalty and political
mobility rather than by a track record in gender activism.
The Commission for Gender Equality, designed to be a
mechanism for accountability, independent from political parties and assured of
wide powers by the Constitution, was a casualty of the emerging politics of
patronage. So too was the presidency’s office on the status of women, which had
overall responsibility for ensuring gender equality across all government
departments and programmes.
Lack of resources, institutional resistance and, not least,
the reluctance of the women in these structures to openly challenge the ruling
party undermined their effectiveness, deepening the rift between state and
civil society.
Although most forms of unfair legal discrimination against
women were removed by the first democratic Parliament, various laws that
troubled feminists, such as the Traditional Leadership and Governance Framework
Bill, were later introduced by the ANC.
The women’s league seemed either powerless or unwilling to
stop them. The Communal Land Rights Act was ultimately struck down by the
Constitutional Court in 2010 and the Traditional Courts Bill was halted this
year – not by our celebrated women parliamentarians but by activists outside
the state.
The rift between women in government and feminists in civil
society began under former president Thabo Mbeki and intensified under
President Jacob Zuma. Feminism in the ANC became increasingly associated with
positions in government. The politics of quotas and inclusion in the formal
political sphere catapulted a few well-placed women into positions of influence
and wealth.
But structural inequalities remain shaped by gender. Poverty
and unemployment are still disproportionately distributed by gender, and gender
inequalities are compounded by poor economic growth and deep, inherited
problems in our economic framework. As women became more politically visible,
the limits of representation became paradoxically more apparent.
Despite its outward commitment to equality, the ANC has not
provided the political and theoretical leadership that might shape economic and
social policies. The league remains locked in relatively conservative social
attitudes that reinforce the view of women as primarily nurturing, caring
members of a community rather than as citizens entitled to social and public
resources.
The language of gender equality, interpreted as meaning
access to positions within the system, could not robustly engage the demands
for sexual autonomy or for creative and imaginative freedoms that would allow
women to think of themselves outside the frame of virtuous motherhood.