Last week we commemorated the brave women who marched to the Union Buildings in 1956 to protest against the discriminatory policies of apartheid. But, after the marchers have gone home and the banners are packed away, how free and equal are South Africa’s women really?
In the same month the nation’s media were awash with self-congratulatory notions of “woman power”, a group of men in 17 Section of Durban’s Umlazi township brutally assaulted Zandile Mpanza. They stripped her and forced her to walk naked through the streets. They burned down her shack, destroying all her belongings and forced her to move out of the township.
Her crime? Wearing trousers as she did the laundry outside her shack. Women in the township who dare to step outside their houses while wearing pyjamas — even if only to sweep the front step — have been threatened and attacked.
Mpanza (19) has moved out of Umlazi and is in hiding: “I’ve been getting a lot of calls from people saying they will kill me when they find me,” said the terrified young woman. The attack has, quite literally, brought her life to a standstill. She has quit her job because she fears her persecutors might attack her in her workplace.
“At the moment I’m not working because I have to start everything from scratch. Life is very difficult for me, because everything I had was burned.”
Mpanza had little to celebrate this Women’s Day. “Men think they have more power than women, they want to be obeyed and not criticised.”
This attack is not an isolated incident, but part of a worrying trend of attacks on independent women who are moving away from traditional forms of control, says Professor Sheila Meintjes, head of the department of political studies at Wits University. “This is part of the dynamic unleashed by the [Jacob] Zuma rape trial. It’s a wave of anger coming through our society against women who transgress patriarchal norms.”
Meintjes cautions that as a society we need to be on guard against this reactionary behaviour. “This flies in the face of the Constitution and the policy gains we have made in the past decade.”
But women aren’t taking this lying down. This week heavily armed police officers had to keep furious ANC Women’s League members away from supporters of the accused at their bail hearing.
“It is wrong,” says Women’s League Secretary Nondumiso Cele. “People have the right to decide what to wear, not to be told. And 17 Section is not different from other areas of the country. It is not an island.”
The same men are accused of burning down the shack of another woman, who was apparently told “not to wear pants and not to attend meetings”.
The Commission on Gender Equality described the attack as “an utter violation of the human right to dignity” and pointed out that women wearing trousers does not violate tradition or custom as trousers were introduced only in modern times.
Zodidi Mhlana is a trainee reporter at the Mail & Guardian