Towards a South
African women's
SOUTH AFRICA women's employment?
Commercial and catering food industry work, domestic work and garment work- in the traditional female sectors. In the metal and electrical industries there are very few women. In mining there are no Black women.
So women are concentrated in the traditional health and service sectors. • What has been the role of women
MERCIA ANDREWS is a member of the secretariat of the
Workers' Organization for Socialist Action (WOSA), a South
African revolutionary organization. In the following interview, which first appeared in the French feminist magazine Cahiers du Feminisme, she speaks about the situation of South African women today. The interview was carried out by Catherine Rosehill.
W
HAT are the main features of
Black women's lives in
South Africa, both in the families and in work places?
I think that the idea of the liberation of women from oppression in the home as well as exploitation in the workplace is at different stages in different circles.
Debates are occurring but mainly within certain political organizations. It certainly hasn't reached townships or rural villages, where it is in its infancy.
In this country there has never been an autonomous women's movement amongst the oppressed women. Women's organizations have been mainly linked to political organizations.
Because of this, they were never free to follow their own agenda. Women's organizations have neglected the whole issue of gender and of the position of women in our society. Mainly, they were the support mechanisms for political organizations.
So, I should say, as in the rest of Africa, there is no real grassroots movement of women.
Over the last ten years women have become unionized but even here they have had to battle for positions of union leadership.
A classic example is of the South
African Catering and Commercial
Union (SACCU) - one of the unions which has won the most gains for women in the workplace - but where very few of these women are represented in the leadership
Another example is the teacher's union where 70% of the membership is women but very few are represented in the leadership.
The legacy of these organizations was the idea that first we must build the organization before gender issues could be taken up.
Within the home I think the traditional role of women is the same. Even for young women it hasn't really changed. Women still play the role they have always played, providing services for their husbands or for their children.
The church has played an important role in tying a rope around the necks of women. Things like wearing jeans in many Black communities is taboo.
Most women, even those who are in the trade union movement or who are in leading bodies, still object to women wearing jeans.
If you look at a simple thing like abortion rights everybody is afraid to put it on the agenda - political organizations as well as the women's movement. In fact, it is quite ironic that women in the [ruling white] National Party have taken this up before the liberation movement has done
To sum up, as in the rest of Africa, very little progress has been made in liberating women from the home and giving them leadership positions within political organizations. In the workplace, some gains have been won such as paternity rights and so on, but only for a very small percentage of women. • What is the proportion of women involved in wage labor?
By 1989 (before these last two years of recession and lay-offs) it was up to
But these figures are not accurate because they exclude women in the so-called Bantustans and it does not include under-employment. There are hundreds of thousands of women in • What are the biggest sectors of in the most recent major struggles?
This question needs to be approached at a number of levels.
If I take community struggles, economic issues, housing issues and so on: in the neighborhood organizations and in civic associations, ordinary women have played an important role.
They have fought battles with the municipalities, with the authorities and with the police and against the state. Often they have to take the lead because they have been driven to do so by the economic situation.
So, the struggle for improved housing, for electricity or for education has been predominantly fought by women. Within the trade union movement both men and women have been involved in struggles. Here, women have often been a little more reluctant to lead these struggles.
I think it is because of the maternal instinct that asks: if I lose my job who will provide for the family? But in many cases, as in the SACCU strike, as well as the nurses strike last year, they have played a leading role.
So, I should say that over the last ten years the role of women in fighting for liberation in this country has been very significant. It is unfortunate that none of this has been consolidated into women leading organizations.
Mostly, they fight the battles and then return back home to the oppressions within the family, of their husbands not allowing them to attend meetings.
During the day when the husband is at work the women are in the battle field, and at night the men go to meetings and the women stay home.
Also, I think in many organizations like the civic movement and the neighborhood movement, the majority of members are women, as is the case in the unemployed and cooperative movements.
In the church the women are also the bulk of the membership. Overall, women in this country have played an important and major role in building organizations and in the struggle for a new South Afri• There are in this country two different types of division: the apartheid division into racial groups and the division between social 21
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movement
SOUTH AFRICA groups.
How have these two lines of division affected the possibility of building a genuine grassroots feminist movement, feminist consciousness, and women's mobilizations?
Firstly, because of the legacy of apartheid and of tradition, you find that many Black working class women from the townships have very few of the skills or education of their white and middle class women counterparts.
Therefore in many of the organizations the debates around gender issues do not take place at the grassroots level, because people have not been exposed to these questions. The idea of a discussion around sexism is difficult.
I find this in my own work. It will take a long time to be able to say to women that they have a different role in society. We need to find a mechanism to take these debates to ordinary women.
An example is the big gender conference that was organized in mid-1991. Invited were feminist academics, and activists in political and other organizations, some grassroots women as well as some international guests.
At this conference 80% of the women were either white intellectuals or middle class coloreds or Indians. Ten percent were women from political organizations, and there was a small percentage of women from grassroots organizations.
All these academics had papers to present. By the second day, the 20% of activists who were Black women and rural women stopped the conference. They said "we are sick and tired of you academics and white feminists coming to give papers on us, Black women. You do research on Black women in rural areas, Black women in the factories, but you never taught us the skills to do this.
"You never taught us the skills to talk about our own lives, to control our own lives. You want to write on our backs and often it is not even to make a contribution to our liberation but to make a contribution to your academic qualifications and we object to that". So they stopped the conference.
That was the start of a revolt against the circles that make decisions and carry out the debates around working women. So the point I am making is that unless us politicos find a new vehicle to take some of these issues to rural and working class women we will not have a real feminist movement in this country or a movement that is going to be able to speak about the interests of working class women.
We will have a petty bourgeois feminist movement that will highlight irrele22 vant issues. So we will have to grapple with this. International Viewpoint # 226 • April 13, 1992
We don't yet know how to do it. Many of us political activists have neglected these issues and have instead built political organizations at the expense of building a women's' movement in this country.
• What are the specific concerns of young Black women involved in social struggles?
There are a number of issues that are coming to the fore.
One of them is the concern that women often make up the bulk of the membership of organizations but that they are not in the leadership.
There is also a desire to understand politics. Women have often been pushed to sing songs and shout slogans without really understanding the political issues. In our own organization there is the desire to set up study groups and debate the political issues raised by the feminist movement internationally.
There is also a demand for a different approach to education. People want to go to school, to educate themselves.
So, people want all the things in the new South Africa that have been previously denied to them. They want the fruits of their struggle, to go to school, to have work.
There isn't a specific issue of what women want as women except the question of violence against women. In 1991, there were many protests against this violence and women are saying that this is a political issue and that they want greater
There is also a very strong anti-labola feeling. Labola is the traditional way of buying a bride - an arranged marriage
Women are saying that they do not want to be bought and sold like cattle. Working women in the trade unions have taken up this question.
• In a country where people are supposed to fight against their oppressor, what is the level of violence against women?
Its extremely high. Even some men who are members of political organizations beat up their wives.
There isn't the consciousness that we are equals, that there shouldn't be an abuse of power against someone who is physically weaker.
Women are used within political organizations, and are victims of sexual abuse in trade unions. Some trade union tops will try to sleep with all the women. There is a lot of that type of sexual abuse.
Rape has become a major problem. Statistics show that there is a rape in our communities and in our cities every twenty minutes. Women cannot think of taking trains at night alone. We cannot walk in our cities or streets by ourselves.
The level of violence and incest is very high. I think that the sociological expla nation probably has something to do with rapid urbanization and the breakup of rural communities and the inability to cope with society.
Incest is on the rise, which is an unusual phenomenon for so-called African families where the family, children and the extended family are very important, which is disintegrating. We will have to deal with these problems but I am not sure exactly how.
• Concerning this violence, are there any state structures or proposals in the political or mass organizations to set up centers where battered women can go to?
Slowly, such centers are being formed. They include groups like "rape crisis" "lifeline" and "childline" as well as centers for battered women. But very few women actually go to such centers. I know of a comrade whose husband is also an activist. Every weekend she is beaten. She has a broken nose, a broken arm.
It is difficult to intervene even though we treat it as a political issue. It is difficult to know what to do because the next week they are together again. Very few working class women actually go to these centers. It is mostly students or petty bourgeois women who go.
The working women see it as part of their lives and even if they fight back there isn't a political consciousness about it. Another example is that in many of our communities it is still the case that, if a woman marries the chief, he is allowed to have three or four more wives and she must accept that.
This is part of the tradition and culture not only amongst Muslims but amongst
Over the last two years a gay and lesbian movement has emerged. In 1990, there was a march in Johannesburg but most of those marching wore a bag over their head because it is against the law in this society to be gay. And to be gay in an African township is even worse because it is seen as being sick.
Many of the women in the ANC women's league used to say that gays and lesbians are the result of capitalism and apartheid and once apartheid is destroyed there will be no more gays or lesbians. So there is a real conservatism concerning these issues.
• What is the situation as far as maternity and contraception are concerned?
There are two problems with contraception in this country. The biggest pro-
WOMEN
April 13, 1992 • blem emerged at the beginning of the 1980s when the National Party government tried to enforce the use of contraception because they claimed that there was a population explosion.
But the communities saw this as an attempt by the white apartheid government to suppress the number of Black people in this country.
It was seen like this partly as a result of how it was done. They were encouraging whites to have three or four children but they were saying that Blacks must use contraception and this marred the whole political conception of what contraception can actually mean for a woman -the freedom that she can have, all of that.
So there are many problems and I don't think that political organizations or feminists have done enough to politicize the whole issue of contraception.
What we have done is to highlight some of the ways in which contraception has been used in this country. A woman would go into a hospital to have a baby and without any consultation or permission they would give her injections and a hysterectomy. This was done in many hospitals and people would only discover afterwards what had happened.
So we have tried to highlight these wrongs of the system and to educate people about this and explain their rights
But we have not done enough to raise the importance of what contraception can do for women in terms of economic independence, social independence, and so on. I think we have to do a lot more of
In many rural communities contraception is taboo. So I think that women have not woken up to the fact that their lives can be dramatically changed if they consider the available options. Also, the kinds of contraception that are given to women, particularly working class women, has always been the cheapest.
These women have always been used as guinea pigs, and they have never been given education or options to choose this
Maternity benefits are still a big problem in this country. Legally, the situation is that a woman can take three months maternity leave and the state will pay forty percent and the employer a small amount. So there isn't full pay compensation when women go on maternity. There is therefore no proper mater-
Some unions have won certain benefits, including SACCU which has won good maternity benefits. They have six months of maternity benefits fully paid by the employer and guaranteed jobs from the employers when they can return to work.
They have also won the right to take their children to health clinics once a month. So some unions have very good benefits and others have not.
A large section of the workforce, such as domestic workers, who make up a large section of the workforce in this country, and farm workers, have none of these rights.
• What can changes South Africa?
Like the rest of they can expect nothing. An alliance has been set up in this country between the ANC women and women from the National Party, and they have invited other sectors of organized women to participate in this alliance.
But it is a mixed bag going from the woman editor of Cosmopolitan magazine to executive forum business women, to women from some political organizations. I cannot see that any gains for working people will come out of such an alliance. And this alliance is allegedly to discuss constitutional changes.
The bulk of working class women are not really concerned about this because it is never discussed in their communities adequately. So I doubt there will be any major changes for women. One new thing is that they have changed legislation for women. Women are no longer seen as minors.
Previously, women could not open accounts or sign checks without the consent of their husbands. Women can now act economically independently.
But I think that this is more because they needed to extend their market than because they believe that women are capable. So I can't see any major changes coming for women.
• What kind of international solidarity is needed between the feminist movement in South Africa and the feminist movement in Europe?
I think that we should establish links but that they should be links based on equality where we can learn from each
SOUTH AFRICA
UNITE
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South For
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Presdom bikers other. The European feminist movement mustn't believe that we must import their brand of feminism into this country or into any other Third World country
Here we have a completely different social and cultural setting with different traditions. So they have got to learn from
I think they have gone through many years of struggling to build a feminist movement in their countries and perhaps they should begin to draw a balance sheet of their movement before coming to tell
We realize that the feminist movement in our country is very young. At the same time many of the women activists are clear that they do not want to import bourgeois feminism into our struggle.
Insofar as we can learn from the international and European community, I think it will be good. Maybe it will take a long time but we are going to build an indigenous brand of working women's politics in this country. I think that is our
There are lots of skills that we may need but I think that it must be on an equal basis and not an unequal big sisterlittle sister relationship
I also think that the women in this country have a rich history of mobilization and struggle that surpasses any experiences in the "first world". So I think that when we do get our act together it will be a powerful feminist movement.
I also think that there are lots of things we can learn from similar communities in Asia as well as women in the Latin Ame- 23 rican countries. *