Over the past 12 years we have, as a nation, made quantitative and qualitative advances towards a truly democratic and non-patriarchal society.
South African women constitute 41% of the Cabinet, 50% of the Presidency, 33% of the National Assembly (women also serve as the speaker and deputy speaker of that body) and 44% of premiers. Our progressive Constitution guarantees gender equality and is supported by laws that aim to advance women. Gender policy is coordinated at the highest level (the Presidency) and a range of machinery promotes women’s emancipation. Government programmes have improved women’s access to basic services, such as clean water and electricity, and the impact of this on women’s lives should not be underestimated.
Steps, painfully slow as they are, are being taken to transform other sectors of our society — the private sector, academia and the judiciary, among others.
The fact is that patriarchy is under attack in South Africa. Thanks to the historic women’s march on the Union Buildings 50 years ago, and all the struggles since then, we have something to celebrate. Malibongwe!
But patriarchy is a parasitic system that survives by adapting itself to the prevailing economic and political set-up. South Africa has a patchwork quilt of patriarchies experienced in different ways by different women depending on their class, race, religion and multiple other identities.
Even today, millions of South African women face the threefold oppression of class, race and gender. While our democracy is diligently bulldozing the edifice of racism, gender and class contradictions remain, even though the bourgeoisie is now tinged with specks of colour.
While the quality of life and status of women in society has improved, patriarchy has learned to co-exist with and survive in our democracy. Sometimes it even receives aid and comfort from the strangest places.
In the dying days of apartheid, many expressed fears of a black government and a black president. The only comforting feature was that it would be Nelson Mandela. These fears later re-emerged in the form of an irritating post-Mandela psychosis. Clearly, the only black that could be trusted to some extent was Madiba — all the rest were incompetent and would wreck the country. Fortunately, whenever this anti-black, swart-gevaar nonsense emerged above the parapet in our national discourse, the people of South Africa, black men and women in particular, acted decisively to chop it off — and we still do.
Now, a similar psychosis has emerged, but in the place of race is gender. The context for this “vrou gevaar” is the election of women presidents, vice-presidents and prime ministers in Africa and elsewhere — and the great strides our society is perceived to have made towards gender equality.
Granted, the manner and political environment in which it was raised will justifiably be questioned by some. However, this is a matter of principle. The question is: Can South Africa have a woman president or not? The question is not: Is South Africa going to have a woman president in 2009?
The anti-woman venom that has been spewed in this debate is frightening — not least because the vrou gevaar forces include “progressive” black men and women, some of whom were leaders of the struggle against apartheid.
What is the origin of this venom? Is it that women have reached their ceiling in politics? The answer may lie not only in suspicion about the intention of the question, but also in embedded and often suppressed patriarchal attitudes. Some feminists argue that advances on the gender front, especially where they include a rapid increase in women’s participation in political decision-making, can give rise to a harsh backlash. Could this be the case in South Africa?
But patriarchy is not an ideological construct. It is a violent system, as expressed vividly in the mind-boggling numbers of women and children who are raped in our society. It is a system that entrenches economic inequality, as expressed in statistics showing that the feminisation of poverty continues, particularly in rural areas, working-class communities and among the unemployed. It is a system that supports the unequal and ravaging effects of our national pandemic, as expressed in the fact that black women in particular are the hardest hit by HIV/Aids. This is directly attributable to the unequal power relations between women and men, with women having limited if any rights to decide on how, when and where to have (never mind enjoy) sex.
And in the media — an institution that has lorded it over society from the perch of moral superiority? The recent South African National Editors’ Forum (Sanef) study confirms that the media is not only patriarchal but is an agent of patriarchy. Had I been asked about the media 30 years ago when I worked as a journalist I would have responded just as one respondent did in the study: “Women are patronised and their opinions do not appear to be taken as seriously as those of men.”
Many women will identify with the description of the “boys’ club”. This is a damning assessment of a major institution in a democratic South Africa in 2006.
What next? The best tribute we can pay to women is to commit ourselves to fight all forms of oppression, especially patriarchy and in our own private lives, because patriarchy diminishes the value of our democracy.
Thenjiwe Mtintso, South African ambassador to Cuba, participated in the launch of the Progressive Women’s Movement in Bloemfontein earlier this month