Reflecting Rogue. Pumla Dineo Gqola
out those who do not belong there has the same idea. In the same province, a vice chancellor of a prestigious South African university defends his institution’s failure to hire significant numbers of Black staff and its negligible numbers of senior Black academics through statements so baffling it is not clear how they are to elicit sympathy for the institutional choices. “We” had one African woman professor two years ago but she left. It takes an average of twenty years from PhD to full professorship. “We” are not the only ones.
It is an exhausting list even as it is the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The dream of a miraculous democracy has turned into a nightmare. It is unlikely to be moved by the rhetoric of social construction, ubuntu and further mythologisation of diversity under the guise of race as colour. In the official public political sphere, we are beginning to see the emergence of a new grammar of resisting racial terror, one that disrespects the regimented conventions of academic and parliamentary protocol. As one “born-free”, Model C educated, Black radical with two Wits degrees pointed out in a conversation on everyday racism and investor confidence recently “if the country has to collapse first for us to own it, then so be it. It may be a mess we need to build from scratch, but let it be.” Another similarly located Black radical challenged “you keep telling us that we are worlds away from apartheid, so tell those of us who were not alive in the ’70s and ’80s, how is it different? Why are you not angrier?”
It is a good question.
CHAPTER 3
On the beauty of feminist rage
Every August, millions of South Africans move collectively in a carefully choreographed dance called Women’s Month. For almost five dizzying weeks, women are praised, patriarchy decried and women’s gains celebrated. There are awards ceremonies, gala dinners and public service announcements. Inspired by the courageous coordinated efforts of savvy women who organised the march to the Union Buildings to protest against the extension of passes to African women in 1956, each August we recall their names and marvel at their achievements. We catch our collective breath to take stock of how far we have come, and to reflect on how rocky the ground beneath our feet remains. Sometimes we re-enact the march as spectacular and miraculous; stirred by how twenty-thousand women could organise across class, geographic and race barriers such a feat at a time before cellphones and social media.
Even as we marvel at the women led by Sophia Williams-de Bruyn, Rahima Moosa, Lilian Ngoyi and Helen Joseph, we pretend they represent a moment, rather than sophisticated movement building. History has airbrushed the other successful women’s marches that predated 9 August 1956 out of view. Women’s world-changing collective political organising is inconvenient to national history. Yet, the memory of this march stands as a reminder of this legacy of intergenerational, bold women’s activism and power to galvanise against a powerful apartheid state in ways not easy to explain or co-opt into a masculine narrative of heroic nationalism that would usher in a new dispensation.
Today, and increasingly these days, I find myself turning to June Jordan, Jamaican-American feminist, essayist, activist. I re-read her poem first read in 1978, and first published in 1980 titled ‘Poem for South African women’. It is in that poem that she declared “we are the ones we have been waiting for” as her closing line.
The poem is about the power of bold, collective imagination, which stands defiantly in the larger context of individual fear, personal shadows and need for clarity. In it, Jordan writes the women’s collective action as a way to overcome individual limitation, and to band together to make a new earth. Quite literally, in the third to sixth lines, the women’s thousands of feet “pound the fallow land/into new dust that/rising like a marvellous pollen will be/fertile”. In the stanza that follows, what these women create through their “ferocious affirmation/of all peaceable and loving amplitude” is certainty for a different future that has become “irreversible” by the end of the third stanza. The fourth and final stanzas read:
And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea
we are the ones we have been waiting for.
In this poem, then, June Jordan projects forwards the enormous impact this march will continue to have, even as she is aware that it did not technically succeed in stopping the extension of Pass Laws to African women under apartheid. The optimism, celebration and commemoration in the poem, then, are not about the immediate success of the direct course of action. Rather, when the women’s action changes the world, this gestures to the many other successes we continue to reap from the collective action of those women more than sixty years ago.
It seems impossible to imagine that under such repressive times and surveillance, women could organise repeatedly and refine a model of organising that worked to mobilise across class, race, geography, religion, transgress the boundaries of who was directly affected and who not, and in coordinated action speak in one voice. In Jordan’s poem and for many of us, the march was not about glossing over differences. Nor was it about transcending differences. Those women activists knew the value of working in different organisations – church, union, organisational, social – and many came from sites that were not non-racial or multi-racial. Some of them came from organisations that had a single class, or were only Black or only white women’s organisations. Some came from black, Indian and coloured only groupings. They understood something profound about organisation and movement building, how to render some political action important. They also understood – in varied and sometimes oppositional ways – how crucial it is to organise in women-only radical action.
These are important actions and lessons that remain with us. Even when we do not fully grasp how profound that moment’s symbolism is, it is no accident that at a time when so much of historic South African women’s radical activist work has been erased, denied, obfuscated, maligned and pushed out of public memory, this march will not be erased. Even in the tamest representation of how it was possible to organise tens of thousands of women to the Union Buildings, it stands as “ferocious affirmation” well into the future.
Finally, Jordan’s poem importantly reminds her reader/listener of those who would not join these women, and asks questions about who will join and stand apart from the future these women created. She reminds us that women’s action is easy to celebrate retrospectively for those who have no real interest in creating a world friendly to women, a world fully owned by all.
This final line “we are the ones we have been waiting for” reminds us that women have to change the world through audacious action, and that we have it in us. It is a line that has been echoed across the works and movements of various African and African-world political movements since then. The award-winning African American women’s musical sensation Sweet Honey in the Rock turned the phrase into a song, Alice Walker turned it into a book title, the radical Blackwomen who founded Blackwash turned it into a slogan for a new movement, even if that same phrase was later sometimes used patriarchally against them. That poem was inspired by the women who marched on the Union Buildings on 9 August 1956; Jordan names it a commemoration of these women’s political work. It is a hopeful poem, and one that serves now as a reminder not just of June Jordan’s genius, but also to us as women living in South Africa today of the women we come from, live in the midst of, and offers an important vision of ourselves and who we can be. As a South African woman and feminist, I have no doubt that we are up against some more tough times. The backlash continues to mutate more virulently than ever and we need to keep up with the business of crafting and recrafting new feminist strategies and tools. We cannot ever rest on our laurels. The high levels of violence against women, queers and gender non-conforming people, all of which are categories that leak into each other, are real; the intimate femicide, rape, routine sexual harassment are clear evidence. The increasingly brazen, spectacular violent masculinities in public political and popular culture remind us constantly how far away we are from a country in which gender is not used as a weapon to terrorise and annihilate.
While we have clear ideas of the work women in different groupings did