Reflecting Rogue. Pumla Dineo Gqola
movement might look like. Many are pointing to this frustration when they repeatedly declare that the women’s movement in South Africa is dead. They have a very set idea of what such a movement should do – take to the streets in the kinds of numbers that trade unions can marshal and shut down cities for a day, organise in the manner of the Women’s March.
I am ambivalent about South African Women’s Month because I wish there was less to complain and worry about, less to work against as far as the state of gender in the nation. I wish that one August we would actually be able to have a real celebration of how far we have come. I look forward to the August when we will not have to contend with doublespeak from those in elected positions of power, when the legal justice system will not be a huge violent patriarchal matrix, when violent masculinities will no longer hold us hostage, when little girls, boys and children of all genders will not be bludgeoned into submission to the regimes of heteropatriarchy.
Discussing the phenomenon of August in post-apartheid South Africa with a few feminist friends and sisters again each year, we spend some time on the usual irritations. Each August, there is a high demand for speakers on women specifically and gender more broadly in order to be in line with what matters; feminists and gender activists are suddenly A-listers since everybody gets invitations to more events that s/he/they can get to; commissions to write, speak, workshop and sit on committees abound; and phones ring non-stop in an attempt to rent-a-feminist for every institution’s themed programme.
However, annually, even as we laugh at the farce of it all and the paradox of how important this month and marking is, we pause after we have made all the jokes about rounding up all the country’s feminists and disappearing, going into hiding for the month. It is wonderful that the 1956 March demands and retains memory even in a very patriarchal nationalist narrative, marked by a day and an entire month. I love knowing that more often than not smart women are featured as experts on a range of topics on more radio and television shows than not, that intelligent women are everywhere, whether I agree with them or not. It makes me hopeful for what a truly free future looks like. It brings me joy to remember that Prof Fatima Meer, activist, feminist, intellectual was born in this month even if she has since transitioned to the ancestral realm.
It also brings me joy to remember that in August 2012 it was a celebratory march led by the African National Congress Women’s League (ANCWL) that was disrupted by members of the 1in9 Campaign declaring “no cause for celebration”. This moment of confrontation between different generations of women activists was an important reminder that the battle is not won. When so many women live in perpetual fear, and have little recourse in state institutions against that fear, we do need to temper our celebration. And the seasoned activists of the ANCWL recognised the importance of marking the moment of silence demanded by the younger feminists in purple shirts. Even if this acquiescence was tacit acknowledgement of their own duplicity with the strengthening of an increasingly patriarchally violent ruling party and government.
In 2016, however, the self-induced women’s month love-fest was punctured by an inconvenient reminder that could not be brushed aside. On 6 August, at the Independent Electoral Commission’s ceremony to announce results and declare the elections free, fair and peaceful, four women stood up and insisted that we reflect on how democracy fails women. Clad in black, they stood in front of the presidential podium, holding up placards, one of which implored us to #RememberKhwezi. Simamkele Dlakavu, Tinyiko Shikwambane, Naledi Chirwa and Amanda Mavuso reminded us that it had been ten years since the Jacob Zuma rape trial that introduced the word and garment “khanga” into everyday South African parlance.
When Pregs Govender posted on her Facebook page the four women’s placards against a background of the four leaders of the 1956 march, what she communicated visually was unambiguous. Pregs Govender’s own record as a unionist, anti-apartheid feminist activist, and as the only member of parliament to have voted against her party, against the nuclear deal, marks her as a Blackwoman who does not bow down to party discipline at all cost. As this edited image travelled – Shikwambane in front of Moosa holding two placards with “I am 1 in 3” and “#”, Mavuso in front of Ngoyi holding up “10 yrs later”, Chirwa’s hands held up “Khanga”, and Dlakavu’s sign was “Remember Khwezi” as she stood in front of the only surviving leader of the 1956 March, Sophia Williams-de Bruyn. The black and white background of the leaders of the 1956 march, holding pages with petitions signed by tens of thousands of women, introduced a specific reading of the 2016 women’s protest.
Whereas the Women’s March is on the official annual calendar, it is associated with the ruling party in the post-apartheid public. This is why it is so easy to associate women’s collective organising as belonging legitimately to the ANCWL before all other women’s formations. The four leaders of the historic march enter the narrative as a reminder that women’s activism sits uncomfortably with heroic nationalism. The giant image of the 1956 leaders stood as legitimation, offering a reading of #RememberKhwezi protestors as located in a long tradition of women’s radical organising in their own name.
In the minutes, days and weeks that followed, the question of legitimacy was everywhere in discussions of the #RememberKhwezi protest. The successful link with the 1956 leaders had to be expanded by some and contested by others. Some activists who see themselves as the legitimate heiresses of the 1956 tradition of women’s radical organising exploded in rage against the 2016 protesters. “These young women are cheapening rape and the experience of survivors of violence,” they claimed. It did not matter that some of them had publicly come out as rape survivors themselves. They were accused of illegitimate and disrespectful action, of simultaneous political opportunism and political immaturity and being the pawns of the politically powerful men who lead the Economic Freedom Fighters political party. It was inconceivable that women could act in their own name, even to some of the most powerful governing women who saw the protest as disrespecting the President.
Yet, in Govender’s visual sign, the image of the 1956 women’s march leaders stood as giants authorising the protest by the 2016 women protesters. In the photographic background were thousands more women. They replaced Jacob Zuma in the image, deflecting his centrality, and inviting a reading of Shikwambane, Mavuso, Chirwa and Dlakavu, as the heiresses and actors in a long line of women’s radical action. Soon, Fezeka Kuzwayo, the woman named Khwezi in 2006 by the 1in9 Campaign, a feminist formation established to support her in her court case against Jacob Zuma, was again on everyone’s lips. April 2016 marked ten years since the awful spectacle of her brutalisation because she had laid a charge of rape against the man who would be the president in 2016. In April 2006, Jacob Zuma was acquitted of raping Fezekile Kuzwayo at the end of a trial that authorised misogynist brutality on a scale that should have been impossible in a democratic South Africa.
In television interviews the day after, Kwezilomso Mbandazayo and Mpumi Mathabela, feminist leaders from the 1in9 Campaign, expressed their unqualified support of the 2016 protest, and informed the public that Khwezi had received their protest as recognition and as support from fellow feminists. A week later, in an evening radio interview, the only surviving member of the four from the 1956 Women’s March, Sophia Williams-de Bruyn, spoke of the necessary courage of the four protesters, the validity of their concern and stated that she saw no contradiction between her action in 1956 and theirs in 2016.
It is true that the protesters are EFF members but this does not reduce them to EFF opportunists. Rather than the positions of Jacob Zuma and EFF leader Julius Malema, we should pay attention to what these feminists’ actions said.
First, the four activists walked to the front in black while their party in red left the Results Operations Centre. They could have asked their comrades to join them, or acted in concert with them. It means something that they chose not to. What bodies adorn and perform in political action matters. Rather, they chose to walk up, dressed in black, a colour that would not immediately associate them with any particular party. It must have been obvious to them that being dressed in their organisation’s red would immediately work against them. It would reduce their important political action to the business of legitimacy and masculine power. To those hostile to the Economic Freedom Fighters, these women would be read as disruptive, undisciplined and badly behaved. The disapproval would trump any validity their message might have. After all, these same adjectives are used against the increasingly effective