You Have Struck a Rock: Women fighting for their power in South Africa

By Gugulethu Mhlungu

Drawing on the experiences of women ranging from political activists to domestic workers, sex workers and students, commentator and writer Gugulethu Mhlungu examines how history has shaped the conditions women face today. She also considers the impact of pass laws, land dispossession, racial discrimination and gender-based violence. She concludes that there is still plenty of work to be done in making real the South Africa imagined by the Constitution.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kwela
• Release date: Apr 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9780795709104

Gugulethu Mhlungu

Gugulethu Mhlungu is a writer, broadcaster and editor and has held positions as deputy editor of Bona, hosted NightTalk on Radio702 and Breaking Dawn on Newzroom Afrika.  Mhlungu's personal accolades include a National Arts Festival/Business Art SA silver award for feature writing and Media24 Legends Columnist of the Year. She lives in Joburg.

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9780624089810_FC

You Have Struck a Rock

Women fighting for their power in South Africa

Gugulethu Mhlungu

Kwela Books

In loving memory of my great-grandmother Ma Twala

as well as Gogo Sizani Ngubane, activist and founder of

the Rural Women’s Movement.

‘Wathint’ Abafazi, Wathint’ Imbokodo’

(you strike the women, you strike the rock)

Acronyms

ACCAmadiba Crisis Committee

ANCAfrican National Congress

ANCWLAfrican National Congress Women’s League

AZAPOAzanian People’s Organisation

BCMBlack Consciousness Movement

BOSSBureau for State Security

BPCBlack People’s Convention

CALSCentre for Applied Legal Studies

CASACCouncil for the Advancement of the South African Constitution

COIDACompensation of Occupational Injuries and Diseases Act

ConCourtConstitutional Court

COSATUCongress of South African Trade Unions

CPACommunal Property Association

CPSACommunist Party of South Africa

C-sectionCaesarean section

CTOPChoice on Termination of Pregnancy Act

DADemocratic Alliance

ESTAExtension of Security of Tenure Act

FCWUFood and Canning Workers’ Union

FedsawFederation of South African Women

FSWfemale sex worker

GBVgender-based violence

GenActGender Action Forum

GlowGay and Lesbian Organization of Witwatersrand

groundWorkThe Groundwork Trust

ILOInternational Labour Organization

ITBIngonyama Trust Board

IWHCInternational Women’s Health Coalition

JSEJohannesburg Stock Exchange

KZNKwaZulu-Natal

LHRLawyers for Human Rights

LRCLegal Resources Centre

MCEJOMfolozi Community Environmental Justice Organisation

MKuMkhonto we Sizwe

MRCMineral Resources Commodities

NPNational Party

NPCNational Planning Commission

PAC Pan Africanist Congress

PTOPermission to Occupy

RMFRhodes Must Fall

RWMRural Women’s Movement

SA-TIEDSouthern Africa – Towards Inclusive Economic Development

SACTUSouth African Congress of Trade Unions

SADSAWU South African Domestic Service and Allied Workers Union

SADWASouth African Domestic Workers Association

SAIRRSouth African Institute of Race Relations

SAMRCSouth African Medical Research Council

SAPSSouth African Police Service

SASMSouth African Students Movement

SASOSouth African Students’ Organisation

SERISocio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa

SWEATSex workers education and advocacy taskforce

TERSTemporary Employer-employee Relief Scheme

TRCTruth and Reconciliation Commission

UCKARThe university currently known as Rhodes

UCTUniversity of Cape Town

UFSUniversity of the Free State

UIFUnemployment Insurance Fund

ULTRAUpgrading of Land Tenure Rights Act

WitsUniversity of the Witwatersrand

Introduction

The idea for this book began to take shape in my mind in late 2017 and into early 2018 when, after years of working in print and broadcast media, I was exasperated at the general failure of the media to highlight issues around patriarchy and gender. At the time, I was working in what was considered to be one of the most progressive newspaper newsrooms. Nonetheless, I was deeply disappointed that, while the paper managed to deal with nuance on race and class, it failed to do so on gender. This was the case across the board. Within the media industry, newsrooms were getting race demographics right but were just appalling on gender representation. Radio wasn’t any better; in fact it had got worse over the years, with men remaining the predominant voices on primetime slots. Research by media scholars such as Professor Ylva Rodny-Gumede from the school of communication at the University of Johannesburg told us that male voices not only dominated as hosts and media managers but as sources and experts being quoted in the media, so we weren’t even hearing women’s voices as ordinary callers or as experts. This made discussions around poverty and inequality frustrating at best because it was impossible to generate valuable discussion without first getting gender (and how it is intimately linked to class and race) right. The situation, in terms of public discourse, was terrible – it still is – and I burnt myself out emotionally and mentally trying to lobby for us to do better on issues of race, class and gender if we hoped to make any progress as a country. In August of 2018, the Mail & Guardian published an opinion piece I wrote about the Federation of South African Women (Fedsaw) in which I argued that we needed greater research and discussion about the federation, its members, its work, as well as the demands in its Women’s Charter, which remained as relevant in 2018 as they were in 1956. I have incorporated portions of this and other pertinent articles I have written into the text of this book. I wrote then – and I still believe it’s relevant now – that we needed to be deliberate and unapologetic about foregrounding women in all our discussions of the past and the present.

This prompted me to consider how I could use the skills and ideas I have to do that. The result is You Have Struck a Rock, which I hope can achieve a few things. The first is that I hope it contributes to the work being done, especially by young Black women, to highlight, centre and prioritise the experiences of women. While there is immense work that still needs to be done in undoing systems of oppression and violence in South Africa, there is an incredible and growing literature by young South Africans that has a keen sense of history and how it remains relevant and important to understanding the present. While we need more, it is encouraging and exciting to see work by women creatives, academics, activists and professionals writing their own histories and the histories of other women and girls. I hope this book is a small but worthy contribution to that important work. There is much more material than can be accommodated in one book, and I intend to return to it in future. Secondly, I hope it contributes to what we understand as women’s participation in history and how history continues to bear on the present. This has been particularly important for me as a young Black feminist and as a young Black woman because there is work, as well as a long history of multitudes of other women writing and rioting. For instance, in looking at Fedsaw and women’s lack of access to land and housing we can see that the demand for equality in access to land is not a new thing. It is, at minimum, a demand that is as old as South Africa’s liberation history. The story of Mme Winnie Kgware is so significant and yet we don’t hear of it enough. She herself, according to my conversation with veteran journalist and editor Mathatha Tsedu, knew that her contribution deserved so much more attention. She knew she had been forgotten and that she and multitudes of women like her, such as the Manyono women of Duncan Village during the Defiance Campaign, deserve more books, documentaries, films and exhibitions. The final and possibly most important thing I hope this work can do is allow us to have broader conversations about the kind of society we want to live in because the lives and experiences of women provide real and urgent insight into what is not working. The continued experiences of landlessness and a lack of safe, affordable housing for women speaks to the broader issue of the failures of land reform. The experiences of domestic workers tell us the ways in which the legacy of apartheid continues to stalk the majority of the population, and how sexist ideas about work done predominantly by women continue to shape experiences of a lack of dignity and harm at home and in the workplace. In addition, the experiences of domestic workers give us insight into the reality of poverty and inequality and how access to work is not enough when said work is not decent. The chapter on sex workers gives us an opportunity to assess the ways in which failures to reform police and society put all of us in danger, and how ideas of purity, class and race make some of us more vulnerable than others. Each subject – land, domestic work, gender-based violence, sex work, youth movements and children’s rights – was chosen for the manner in which it highlights the immense work still needed in making real the South Africa the Constitution imagines. In writing You Have Struck a Rock, I have drawn on research, history and the expertise of people working in those spaces to provide insight into the task we must all fulfil.

Chapter 1

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission and equality

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?

The world would split open. – Muriel Rukeyser¹

It is impossible to make sense of South Africa’s present and its history without applying the lens of gender and sex. It would be inaccurate and not serve us well – unless we were invested in the way things are and the largely poor conditions that women endure. In general, the history of the world, of wars, of oppression and violence, is the history of patriarchy and its power. Even the making of nation states is the long, messy story of masculinity and violence, which replicates itself in every part of society – from how we create and maintain ‘order’ to how we imagine and form communities and individual homes. Even the so-called nuclear family is a product of history and power and is why feminist academics such as bell hooks (the pen name of Gloria Jean Watkins) and Audre Lorde have repeatedly written that if we are to truly undo oppressive systems that lead to the everyday violence under which so many of us live, we must be willing to examine what we consider to be ‘normal’ social and economic structures, such as the family; we must be willing to examine even our personal lives, our relationships and what we consider and believe to be our preferences and choices.

As Professor Leonhard Praeg, head of philosophy at the University of Pretoria, writes in The Geometry of Violence: ‘It is a world of manly states and stately men … men [who] have always engaged in acts of violence as a way, not of claiming their autonomy, but of asserting it through forced recognition.’² This sounds a lot like the apartheid regime. In contemplating the transition to a democracy, the violence of the manly apartheid state and violent stately men became an obvious and critical part of the history of trying to measure, to weave together, what had gone into the making of this crime against humanity.

Acknowledging that a vast number of South Africans had suffered not only the indignities associated with apartheid but also gross violations of human rights, the Interim Constitution of 1993 made provision for the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It was hoped that, as a forum for truth-telling, the TRC would provide a space where ordinary people could voice what they had suffered, and be heard. That, in the words of the Interim Constitution, the ‘gross violations of human rights, the transgression of humanitarian principles in violent conflicts and a legacy of hatred, fear, guilt and revenge’ could ‘be addressed on the basis that there is a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not retaliation, a need for ubuntu but not for victimisation’.³

These words illustrate the aim of the TRC: to begin the long, immense process of healing and reconciliation. While the proceedings were far from perfect, and some recommendations contained in its final report have not been implemented, we can still draw valuable lessons and insight from the TRC – in particular, how to make sense of history with a gendered perspective.

It was only once it had begun its work that the TRC realised the story of what happened during apartheid, as well as the transition years, could not be told accurately without considering gender and sex, which involved shining the light on women’s experiences.⁴

This realisation came about largely due to the Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS) at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), which highlighted that a gender-neutral take on the TRC’s work, and the apartheid events under examination (between 1960 and 1994), did not tell the full story. The TRC itself acknowledged that although women attended and gave testimony almost as often as men did, they came to give evidence about what happened to other people rather than what they had experienced as direct victims. As a result of this, as explained in the special women’s hearings chapter of the TRC report: ‘The Commission also attempted to amend its procedures in ways that would encourage women to speak. By April 1997, the form used by the Commission to record statements had been refined (Version 5) and included the following cautionary note: Important: Some women testify about violations of human rights that happened to family members or friends, but they have also suffered abuses. Don’t forget to tell us what happened to you yourself if you were the victim of a gross human rights abuse.’⁵

Furthermore, the TRC realised that both men and women had been the victims of violence at the hands of security police, but that women had experienced it in very specific ways. A recurring example was that while in detention women were, in addition to violence, routinely threatened with or subjected to sexual assault – especially if they didn’t ‘break’ during interrogation. The commission discovered that, in order for the full range of their ill-treatment to be revealed, women had to be asked, specifically, if they had been sexually assaulted. Shockingly, many victims regarded it as a given – part of the ‘severe ill treatment’ package – so they failed to mention it unless pressed to do so. As a result, the final report found that while rape and solitary confinement were considered individual types of severe ill-treatment, women describing rape during detention were often describing ‘a double experience of those abuses regarded as most severe’.⁶ One woman, Thandi Shezi, described how, when she was being interrogated, her hands and feet were bound and a sack was placed over her head, after which she was waterboarded with acid. She was also electrocuted – a common torture method. In addition to the assault and torture during her interrogation, Shezi recounted her sexual assault: ‘And one of [the security policemen] said: We must just humiliate her and show her that this ANC can’t do anything for her … then the whole four of them started raping me whilst they were insulting me and using vulgar words and said I must tell them the truth.’⁷

However, sexual violence, in addition to being an ever-present threat from the state and its agents, was also a threat from men women lived with, worked with or trusted, and from men who belonged to rival political organisations. While revisiting the transcripts of the TRC, especially the women’s hearings, the story of Kedibone Dube, who made her submission to the TRC’s special women’s hearings on 28 July 1997, stayed with me long after I had read it because it gives such a clear indication of the constant threat of violence women were subjected to.

Dube had been living in Swanieville informal settlement on the West Rand when 28 people were massacred in May 1991.⁸ In her testimony, she said she and her boyfriend had fled to Asatville when ‘Inkatha invaded us’. Afraid and separated from her boyfriend, she headed for the church ‘where all the people who had run away from Swanieville had gone’. She recounted that a man had told her there were comrades looking for her and her boyfriend and that he had said: ‘Let me go and put you in a safe place, because I know you.’ Later, he had told Dube he was going to take her back to the church, but had kidnapped her instead. She recalled:

But he didn’t take the direction towards the church. He took a direction that was getting out of the township. I said, but where are you taking me? He said to me, why do you know so much? He had a gun with him. So he hit me with the back of the gun. He says, you’re too knowledgeable, too clever. Because I was scared and it was at night and I didn’t know where he was taking me, but I do know this guy. He took me to another house. This house he took me to was a big house, but there was nobody living there. And each and everyone pulled their own girls there and they were sitting together with their girls. And I said to him, I’m not going to sleep here, I want to go home. He said, I will take you to the Xhosa people and the Xhosa are going to kill you. And he beat me up the whole night until he raped me. He raped me in different positions. I tried to fight him at that stage until in the morning and he was raping me. I had a purse which had money, and this boy took my purse and gave me R2,00 and said, go back to your home and don’t tell anyone; if you tell anyone about what I did to you, we’re going to burn you and I’ll burn your home as well.⁹

Dube was afraid to tell anyone what had happened to her, especially as she encountered her attacker from time to time. She told the commission: ‘When I look at this boy, this guy, my heart is very sore, because he raped me and he wasn’t arrested by the cops, and so many things that he does … Now he’s a criminal and he kills people. He mugs people and when he kills people, nothing happens to him. But I realise that he’s going to do so much damage to other people. After that I have been suffering from syphilis since this boy raped me.’ According to Dube’s testimony, soon after finding out that she had contracted syphilis, she was informed at the hospital where she was receiving treatment that she could not have children. She told the TRC this had put a strain on her relationship with her boyfriend; he saw her rape as ‘disgraceful’ and insisted they should not talk about it because he believed people would look at