Reflecting Rogue. Pumla Dineo Gqola
requires that they be the unpopular voice negotiating urgent political concerns and getting stereotyped as frightening man-haters. For Mavuso, feminist politics and self-identification are constantly in need of defence, even (and especially) within party culture.
All four protesting women were key members of #FeesMustFall and #EndOutsourcing. All four of them were either senior or postgraduate students at a leading South African university at the time of the protest. One of them is a member of the 1in9 Campaign, the organisation founded to support Khwezi in her 2006 court case.
The complexity that makes up the substance of women’s lives is all inconvenient when we do not want to listen to the anger, experiences and voices of women. In Johannesburg, there had been a 1in9 public event to mark ten years since the end of the rape trial a few weeks before the #RememberKhwezi event exploded onto national news. There had been minimal media coverage of the event. The 1in9 march to commemorate the day of Fezeka’s rape in November 2016, a few weeks after her death, was met with equal silence.
There was minimal media coverage of the University of Fort Hare students who marched down Oxford Street on 9 August 2016 carrying placards that shouted “My body is not an object to be analysed nor owned” and “You may look away but you can never again say you did not know”. They, too, had chosen a strategic day to challenge South African gender power. But the media had turned away, in the main.
These are just a handful of examples of women organising and engaged in protest action across the country. Their visibility or invisibility is a function of where we sit, our reliance on media pathways and our investment in an increasingly untenable notion of what feminist movement looks like.
Reducing women to mere pawns is looking away. Pretending women cannot choose political actions is looking away and refusing to listen. However, the Fort Hare students, like 1in9 members who insist that there is “no cause for celebration”, like #RUReferenceList and #RapeAtAzania and the #RememberKhwezi protestors echo the placard that says we cannot feign ignorance.
Dlakavu, Shikwambane, Mavuso and Chirwa are part of a groundswell of unapologetic feminist activism across our country, most of whom are not even EFF members. In concert, they are changing the face of what a feminist or women’s movement looks like. They are impatient and they are tired. They speak in their own names and in defence of women.
Finally, this was a very important moment, one that demands that we all listen differently. These actions, whether in the public glare, or subjected to averted gaze, invite us to think about gender in relation to nationalism and to confront questions about what is wrong with separating them rhetorically. We need to constantly puncture the farce of the patriarchal narrative’s lies that women are free in South Africa.
The #RememberKhwezi protest, like less visible protests in similar vein, was not about simply transgressing the boundaries of respectability, and/or embarrassing Zuma so much as exposing the generalised hypocrisy necessary for the performance of a patriarchally violent nation. Another clear example of this hypocrisy lies in the wide celebration of women’s leadership and visibility in the new students’ movement while ignoring the messy parts of the activism espoused by student activists. In other words, while there was obsessive attention paid to how many women’s bodies could be seen in #FeesMustFall, as well as screening footage of student leaders like Nompendulo Mkhatshwa and Shaeera Kalla on a loop, with very few exceptions, the texture of the issues activists faced was less important than the content and complications that came with radical political action. In other words, while soundbites from Kalla’s fiery speeches and Nompendulo’s headwrapped defiant body were circulated as evidence of women taking charge and ushering in a new order, the constant harassment of Mkhatshwa and thirteen bullets in Kalla’s back were too complicated a narrative and therefore needed airbrushing out.
The hypervisibility of radical student action on the one hand, and the refusal to engage with the brutality with which the state and public institutions dealt with them on the other hand was the reality for Fallists of all genders. What differed for women is the manner in which they were both held up as visually iconic as individuals and not engaged substantially. This ambivalence to women activists and women’s activism is an older trope in South Africa’s political sphere. This doublespeak is part of the hypocrisy the #RememberKhwezi protesters brought home. Doublespeak on gender talk rests on the refusal to engage the substance of women’s radical political action by averting the gaze in search of a women’s movement or re-centring men in avoidance of conversations that question the violence of heroic nationalism.
Having said that, the fact that so many hanker after a women’s movement that looks a certain way, and therefore often have to confront the repeated question of whether a woman’s movement is dead in South Africa is important. It reminds us, as Shireen Hassim’s work has insisted for three decades, that we need an autonomous women’s movement. Hassim’s work constantly shows that the work of building and recognising this movement is not easy work. It is neither recuperative nor repetitive, but requires risk and new generative epistemes in order to make sense of what is unfolding in front of us. This recurring question reveals ongoing anxieties about the state of gender in our nation, and reveals more than a mere desire for a resolution.
It is only possible to answer yes to this question if we anticipate the large numbers of women taking to the streets I mentioned earlier, as well as the visible formation of mass-based organisations. This is a reasonable expectation, since claiming public space is a strategy much loved by all movements of the left, whether we have in mind the stripping in naked protest historically by Kenyan women’s movements that has become so beloved of Fallist feminists in South Africa, the women’s marches that culminated in the 1956 March to the Union Buildings, or reclaim the night and anti-patriarchal marches across the world.
While women’s marches seldom attract the numbers that they once seemed to, and there are no attempts to come up with something akin to a Women’s National Coalition, this decrying of a dying or dead women’s movement is selectively attentive to history. When it is made, people forget why the Women’s National Coalition worked, and how hard it was to ensure that it achieved its successes, choosing to focus in their nostalgia on the power of women from different political homes working together. They also eliminate the existence of formations like the Natal Organisation of Women and other similar province-based women’s formations, or the specific processes that saw them weakened. Return is not simply possible. Nor has a singular approach ever advanced radical struggle.
There are many reasons why we do not see tens of thousands of women taking to the streets on a regular basis. Organising women in this way and to do so regularly continues to be a challenge in a context where the efficacy of such marches is under scrutiny. And in a context where women’s public action simply receives muted or no coverage, we are asking the wrong questions if we expect such activism to find us in the comfort of our living rooms.
Feminist poet Audre Lorde is often quoted as warning against the use of the master’s tool to topple hegemony. Marching against the state, where many seasoned women activists themselves are located, using tools that those in power now have intimate knowledge of can be as ironic as it is ineffective. This is part of the disillusionment with old forms and strategies associated with the anti-apartheid struggle. Feminist organisations like the 1in9 Campaign have long pointed this out. Fallist student activists understand the need for different kinds of formations, intimately working across old student organisations rather than within them.
Many of the older forms of women’s movement organising were premised on a very clear relationship to the state, whether as enemy or potential partner. Such orientation no longer works in the current dispensation. This is not to say that there are no women’s organisations that see the state as the enemy – indeed the more vocal ones occupy this position – given the free reign of violent masculinities in the political organisation of the nation as well as the ongoing brutalisation of sexual violence survivors within the legal justice system.
At the same time, many in the women’s movement are part of the state, or invest in models of patient collaboration with the state. They are linked to this taming of subversive political language in which the successes of the current democracy have also been premised on directly weakening an autonomous women’s movement. They have led to a more fractured