Rea Bua: HerStory –Erasure is Violence – 16 Days of Activism

On 22 September 2021, Tekano convened The ReaBua Critical Dialogues, themed HerStory: Race, Gender and the Political Economy of Health Care in South Africa.

Pursuant to Tekano’s mandated commitment to health equity, the ReaBua:HerStory campaign and dialogues sought to highlight the contributions of women who dedicated their lives to challenging apartheid from within the “caring professions” — such as nursing, teaching and social work — and who have been silenced and erased. 

The campaign comprised a social media campaign, five short documentaries, five opinion pieces, two commissioned poems, and a day of critical dialogues and discussion highlighting the “forgotten women” who laboured within the caring professions and who sought to remove obstacles to poverty, racial discrimination, education and to health care; but whose contribution to the attainment of a more just and equitable society goes unacknowledged.

The ReaBua Critical Dialogues took place in Cape Town on 22 September, which marked the  culmination of a campaign that began on 9 August, Women’s Day and included Heritage Day and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s 85^th birthday, as critical milestones in the celebration of women’s contribution to the liberation, heritage and health equity of South Africa. 

Tekano commissioned five feminist thought leaders to reflect on the themes of The Rea Bua Critical Dialogues: Herstory: Race, Gender and the Political Economy of Health Care in South Africa.   Additionally, Tekano Life-Long Fellows were commissioned to write Op Eds as part of the ReaBua 16 Days of Activism for No Violence against Women and Children Campaign 2021.

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A map to the ancestors we wish to be

Curating a conversation about health equity on the canvas of women’s storytelling as resistance is a fundamentally feminist act, writes Nolwazi Tusini

On the day of her funeral on 14 April 2018,  just as Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s body was being prepared to leave a packed Orlando stadium for her final resting place, the sky heaved in mourning and the rain came down to take a hero home, defying the sun and cotton-candy clouds that had watched over the funeral proceedings thus far. 

Moments before, Thandiswa Mazwai sang her iconic anthem Nizalwa Ngobani in tribute. Near the end of her poignant rendition, Mazwai chanted “Madikizela! Madikizela!” in a haunting high note that sounded like a heart breaking. Mazwai sang her tribute as if to stop time, as if to will the heavens to crack open so God Herself could come down and embrace Mam’ Winnie.  And then it rained. Blessings.

The grief over Mam’ Winnie’s death was intimate for hundreds of thousands of us across the world, and it was held buoyant by a visceral rage expressed by her daughter Zenani Mandela-Dlamini at her mother’s funeral, when she said: “And to those who’ve vilified my mother through books, on social media and speeches, don’t for a minute think we’ve forgotten. The pain you inflicted on her lives on in us.” 

And so began the work of re-inscribing Madikizela-Mandela into history “with care”, as author Sisonke Msimang describes it.  Thousands of women across South Africa responded to Mazwai’s challenge in Nizalwa Ngobani: “Are the beautiful ones really dead?” with: “She did not die, she multiplied.”

Three years later in September 2021, Tekano, under the leadership of feminist Chief Executive, Lebo Ramofoko, continued this work with the inaugural ReaBua Critical Dialogues, an event commemorating Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s 85th birthday by using her legacy as the context to interrogate justice and health equity in South Africa. 

The dialogues were held in a space adorned in the words of great leaders, including Lillian Ngoyi, Sophie Williams De Bruyn, Charlotte Maxeke, Helen Joseph, Albertina Sisulu and Mam’ Winnie herself. The venue was bursting at the (Covid-compliant) seams with the bodies of the brilliant black women who are part of their legacy — artists, activists, academics and health professionals. 

The ReaBua Critical Dialogues centered Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s life and work as a social worker as a lens through which to explore the unseen but critical connections between health and social justice.  These themes were further explored through five short films, two commissioned poems and themed panel discussions that unpacked these intersections.

The Dialogues began with a screening of a short film on the life of feminist writer, Lauretta Ngcobo, Lauretta: And they did not die, directed by Zikethiwe Ngcobo.  In it, Lauretta Ngcobo asks: “Iphi inkaba yakho” (where is your navel?), starkly bringing to the center what poet, Nayiraah Waheed, calls “my first country” — the parents whose bodies are the sacred place that holds a human life, and yet are relegated to the margins in the telling of the story of humanity. 

Historically, and even today, maternity has been weaponised against women to disarm us of intellectual and political value and ingenuity. Yet, for many women who are mothers, it is the well from which they draw to change the world. 

Ngcobo references this in Lauretta, when she speaks about fleeing to exile because she did want to raise her children in the violence of the apartheid state and wanted them to “grow up in peace”. 

This is echoed by Winne Madikizela-Mandela in her memoir 491 Days, in which she recounts coming out of prison and finding her children: “Lean and covered in malnutrition sores… And then they wonder why I am like I am. And they have the nerve to say, ‘Oh Madiba is such a peaceful person, you know. We wonder how he had such a wife, who is so violent?’ ,” writes Madikizela-Mandela. 

Women like Madikizela-Mandela upend and reconfigure the notion of a maternity that is utilised to disarm them while it brutalises them; they use it as fuel for revolutionary action. 

We are all born of bodies that are (violently) thrust into womanhood and its often harsh realities. When people ask “Iphi inkaba yakho” what they are asking is: where are you from? Where is the home, where is the physical thing that connects you to your mother, and where your lineage is buried? 

It is a powerful question, because first, it assumes a belonging, that you are of a place and of a people which affirms your humanity.  Second, because it constructs this humanity around a matrilineal lineage — which, in Dr Athambile Masola’s words, is “always precarious and disappearing”, because of deliberate patriarchal action. And because of what historian Zikhona Valela calls “(self) erasure as a matter of survival”.

It was by racist patriarchal design that Madikizela-Mandela, a medical social worker, was banished to Brandfort, but, perhaps, also by divine design.  Because what made her an effective and beloved leader was her extraordinary ability to connect with people in a way that made you feel not only that she knew and shared your struggle and pain, but also that this mattered because you matter. Madikizela-Mandela’s presence at funerals, raising a fist in defiance, but also comforting grieving families, was testament to this. 

This aspect of Madikizela-Mandela becomes visible in the work that she did during her exile in Brandfort, which is the subject of two short films commissioned by Tekano as part of the ReaBua Dialogues: Winnie The Banishment, directed by Palesa Sibiya and Twiggy Matiwana, and Altared States: Brandfort, directed by Lesedi Mogoatlhe and Yumna Martin. Each film was screened at the beginning of each panel.  

In the panel, titled Social Work As Resistance – Brandfort, which followed the screening of Altered States: Brandfort, journalist and feminist writer Gail Smith pointed out that when the apartheid government brutally uprooted Madikizela-Mandela from her home and community in Soweto and dumped her in Brandfort in an attempt to re-enact the violent isolation she had been subjected to during her solitary confinement, they were in fact placing her at the very heart of her purpose and at the centre of what made her powerful — a forgotten community in need. 

In Winnie: The Banishment, Mam’ Nora Moahloli, one of Madikizela-Mandela’s closest friends and allies in Brandfort, speaks movingly about how Mam’ Winnie was able to integrate herself into a community that had been warned and even threatened to keep their distance from her. 

Once in Brandfort, Madikizela-Mandela mobilised her access to resources to build a clinic, a créche and an orphanage, among other things. She did this by tapping into black women’s age-old tradition of organising and caring for their communities — a revolution that is often ignored — and working with the Manyano women from the local churches.  It is not insignificant that the black women’s associations within churches are known as uManyano, an isXhosa word which speaks to uniting (and building) under a common purpose and vision. 

The church and Christianity were undoubtedly critical tools of the colonial project to not just dispossess, but render black people inhuman. That black women were able to create structures within this structure to organise around work that affirmed the humanity of black communities speaks to the transformative and sacred power of the gathering and collaboration of black women, historically and today. 

When Mazwai sings, “I still remember a time when Sundays would seem everlasting, so very long … if I knew what I know now I would have stayed all day” in Revelation, she is speaking to the quiet revolution of black women in churches.

Madikizela-Mandela recognised this revolution and leveraged it to do the labour at the heart of social work, which social worker and panelist Keitumetse Moutloatse described as “capacitating our people to [create] an equitable and just society [for themselves]”.       

Mouhloatse’s description of social work, a profession which began as the apartheid government’s response to the “poor white problem” of the depression of the 1930s, is profound because it conceptualises health as fundamentally a matter of agency, a question of freedom. And so, health equity is not just about access to healthcare and services; it is also about being free.

Another panelist, Tekano Lifelong Fellow Judiac Ranape, a nurse and abortion services provider, captured this truth when she said: “Race matters profoundly in healthcare. Society does not value black people and poor people; this remains the case, even though it is no longer visible in our facilities as legal segregation.”

Madikizela-Mandela understood this and even after she was fired from her professional position as a medical social worker because of her anti-apartheid politics, she never stopped being a social worker in the ways she served the communities of Brandfort and Soweto and poured herself into the struggle for liberation. And she continued this work into the democratic dispensation by publicly standing against ANC policy and adding her voice to those demanding that the government provide free antiretroviral treatment during the HIV/Aids epidemic. 

The care economy and care work as “women’s work” has been relegated to less than a footnote in the story of South Africa, even as it was, and continues to be, the very backbone of our society.

Tekano board member Siphokazi Mthathi articulated this at the ReaBua dialogues when she said that erasure of black women was “necessary not only to the machinery of apartheid, but also black nationalist patriarchs who need women for social reproductive labor and then erased them when the story of liberation was written”.  

In this context, the story of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela as a social worker and part of the care economy is an important one to tell. Particularly in this moment when we find ourselves in the midst of what researcher and panelist on Mine Work & Extractive Industries And Their Impacts On Women,  Qhawekazi Maqabuka, characterised as a “care crisis” exacerbated by a global pandemic in one of the most unequal societies in the world. Madikizela-Mandela, and many other women liberation fighters like her, contributed more than militancy and intellect to the struggle for freedom. They were not just raised fists and marches, they were also the comforting embrace and emotional strongholds that nurtured an entire generation, and this work has been deliberately hidden.

Maqabuka spoke to how the banishment and attempts to erase Madikizela-Mandela and her contributions to communities from public consciousness is symbolic of the invisibilising of the political and care work of black women. She highlighted how this “deep thread of invisibilising” is compounded for women who work as nurses, because not only is their physical labour as health practitioners treated as if it is less valuable, but the emotional labour that is required to provide patients with quality care is assumed to be innate to women and therefore completely erased when heath equity is discussed. 

This was echoed by Dr Asanda Benya during the panel on mining and land, when she asserts that “labour is envisioned as the act of men” while speaking about how the mining industry continues to benefit from the care work of women and explained that “women are exploited by mines even as they do not work there”. 

Because of her rural upbringing, land dispossession by colonialism was central to Madikizela-Mandel’s politics. She spoke about her father teaching her about the Nine Xhosa Wars and telling her: “The truth is that these white people invaded our country and stole the land from our grandfathers.” And she vowed in 1985 that if her ancestors had, “failed in those nine Xhosa wars, I am one of them, and I will start from where those Xhosas left off and get my land back”. 

In a time when the public discourse on land redistribution is dominated by the voices of men, remembering Madikizela-Mandela’s framing of land dispossession as pivotal to the liberation of the black majority and also her own individual freedom as a woman is a crucial act of resistance against the erasure of women in the land discussion.   

As argued by land researcher, Sthandiwe Yeni, during the panel on mining and land, in which she asserted that in order to answer who should be centered and compensated when we discuss land reform, we must look at “who is carrying the burden created by unemployment? Who is keeping these people alive? Black women. It’s poor black women who are carrying the burden of this huge population that has been rejected by the capitalist system”. 

In casting a conversation about health equity on the canvas of women’s storytelling as resistance, women’s political and structural banishment as a tool of erasure, care work as revolutionary work and land redistribution as a fundamentally feminist act, the Rea Bua dialogues unravelled the notion of health as a merely physical state of wellbeing. 

Health is about the complete wellbeing of a person, and this is inextricably linked to the kind society that they live in. And it is clear from the conversation that Tekano has started that the stories of women’s lives offer a roadmap towards health equity in our country.  

The contribution of heroes like Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, and all the women, known and unknown, who have capacitated entire communities through “unseen” care work, can be summed up in the words of Jonas Salk, who after developing the polio vaccine in 1953 and then refusing to patent it for profit, said: “The most important question we must ask ourselves is, are we being good ancestors?”

Mazwai offers an answer to this question in her refrain: Nizilibele uba nizalwa ngobani? — Do you know where you come from?  The answer lies with those who came before us.  Mazwai’s is both an answer and a clarion call for those of us who know that we stand on the  shoulders of giants. 

– Nolwazi Tusini, feminist and journalist

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Multiple articulations of entangled pasts and presents

By placing panel discussions alongside documentaries and songs, the Rea Bua HerStory dialogues recognised art as deeply intellectual work with revolutionary feminist potential, writes Danielle Bowler

I don’t remember the first time I watched Thandiswa Mazwai onstage.  Over the years her shows have blurred into each other with haze-tinged hues. But what I do remember most clearly is the intensity of feeling that arises each time; I remember the emotions that remain and return each time she takes the stage.

Watching Mazwai is the act of witnessing the transformative power of art when wielded with a poetic, personal and political intensity. It feels like it alters the air around it — offering, even briefly, a sense of possibility. It is as if everything can be changed, through a song, a dance, a poem, a film or an artistic offering.

This feeling returned when Mazwai performed Nizalwa Ngobani, to an already electrified room of feminists, at the end of Tekano’s ReaBua Critical Dialogues Race, Gender and the Political Economy of Health Care in South Africa, an event interrogating the legacy of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, occasioned by her posthumous 85th birthday on 26 September 2021. 

Reflecting on the ReaBua Critical Dialogues, in retrospect, I’m reminded of Angela Davis’s words:  “It’s through visual art, fictional literature, films, music and fashion that our deep emotions can be transformed.” 

Taking culture seriously 

Dedicated to “defiant women”, the day took culture’s transcendent potential seriously. Alongside panel discussions — featuring brilliant minds that included writers Sisonke Msimang and Dr Athambile Masola, academics Dr Asanda Benya, land researcher Sithandiwe Yeni, and health workers Judiac Ranape and Dr Tracey Naledi, with a keynote by Egyptian feminist, Mona Eltahawy  — were performances and five short-form documentaries. Cultural work was made central to the intellectual efforts and dialogue, marking a critical shift away from the way art is treated in many spaces.  

As art critic Gwen Ansell writes: “the arts, far from being something just to be consumed — are our voices to recall, express and if necessary reshape … culture and heritage”, as she traces the emergence of the “official view that flourishes today: the arts as something people buy, not something people make, and as a servant of official policies”, while gesturing to progressive histories and potential new directions.

Considering Nina Simone’s contribution to the Black Freedom Movement in America, Davis writes: “Her music was always more than a soundtrack of the movement. It was much more foreground than background. It was not mere accompaniment. It announced, asserted and innovatively played the changes of the movement.”

Similarly, when multi-award winning playwright, director and poet Napo Masheane, singer Thandiswa Mazwai, Lebohang “Nova” Masango and singer Zoe Modiga  performed at the ReaBua Herstory Dialogues, their work was infused with, was in conversation with,  and contributed to the questions that arise and emanate from the complex life and legacy of Winnie Madikizela Mandela. 

With art’s nimble dexterity, these artists tightly encapsulated a series of interrogations of the questions of defiance, erasure, equity and herstory that circled the room.  In a gathering of feminists doing different kinds of work — from culture, to academics, health, research, activism and more — it was this centrality of art that felt profound. 

Across the intersections of our politics, with their divergences (as feminist literary professor, Pumla Dineo Gqola, reminds us: feminisms as plural) — the day was marked by the call-and-response between panels and artists, that asked anew, and rhetorically,  “what can art do?”

Speaking in gestures

Napo Masheane’s words reverberated around the room.  As she recited For Nomzamo, a poem commissioned for the ReaBua dialogues,  her body tipped forward, as if propelled by the poetry she wrote for this moment. 

Words became embodied as she imbued each with the full weight of feeling and meaning intended by her pen. 

Masheane’s repetition of “she, I, her, we” became an incantation of collective action and community. She recited that we are “the wildest dreams that grew out of us as if released from your fist … we are your loudest screams made of bloodlines and clan names, a veil between the living and the coming, the rising and the becoming … we are stitched together by herstory”. 

Lebogang Masango began her poem, We Women, with: “What would we be if not for the wisdom of grandmother’s hands?”, echoing the same, reverberating with the spirit of Nizalwa Ngobani and the hashtag that rippled across screens in the wake of Madikizela Mandela’s death: #SheDidNotDieSheMultiplied, while simultaneously critically interrogating the meaning and demands of the phrase.

It is art that asks: “What must we do?” This compels us to consider our actions as we journey and struggle towards freedom. When Masango appeared on screen, Audre Lorde’s words were tattooed across her collarbone, amplified by the moment and the phrase “poetry is not a luxury”, which tells us that poetry, like all art, is vital. 

Cultural works speak in gestures and invitations. Offering different kinds of articulations of the entangled present and past, they are open towards multiple meanings, resisting the definitive, even when this is attempted to be enforced. Meaning is made in the space where we meet it. 

By placing panel discussions alongside documentaries and songs, the ReaBua HerStory dialogues accorded  to cultural work the respect it deserves; not as “entertainment” or a “support act” to knowledge production, but as deeply intellectual work with revolutionary feminist potential. 

Two of the five short films commissioned for ReaBua focused on Madikizela-Mandela’s life in banishment.  Winnie: The Banishment and Altared States: Brandfort — 15-minute narratives that emanated from Madikizela’s life but extend beyond it — in these films the idea of Brandfort is made real, imbued with a sense of place and community.  

During the dialogues, healthcare under apartheid and the present was probed; the impact of mine work and other extractive industries on women was questioned through personal narratives, and the professional opportunities for black women under apartheid were interrogated in the panel on Teachers, Nurses & Factory Workers. 

Through moving images, the memory, erasure and critical place of writers such as Lauretta Ngcobo was revealed, and the way songs explore and contribute to Mandela’s legacy was placed on screen.

These films expand these ideas — the themes of the day — in ways that are accessible and deeply human, linking with the project to offer different prisms and lenses through which to illuminate images and portraits of Madikizela-Mandela, the first medical social worker in South Africa, as a complex, human and black woman.

Like the cultural work that riffed on these ideas, the day did not attempt to arrive at definitive meaning, but to open up space, evoke interest in how history is made and how feminism can open pathways to herstory. It leaned into the ways that Madikizela-Mandela became metonym, while holding space for her to be human and her own person — and asked what her legacy means in the larger context of health, social work, women’s labour and more. 

It illuminated what academic and writer Gabeba Baderoon calls “ambiguous visibility”: being hidden while in plain sight, made to mean one thing, reduced to stereotype, a human being as a collection of ideas, prescripts and dominant ideologies only. 

Reimagining through art

A lyric reverberated and returned. Mazwai sang “are the beautiful ones really dead” in an inspired dance with Ayi Kweyi Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. It was also a dialogue, with the idea at the heart of “she did not die, she multiplied”. 

Watching Mazwai and Modiga sing, or Masango and Masheane recite, or the series of short films that anchored the ReaBua dialogues, I was reminded of that feeling, the one that arrives with the idea that everything is possible, that this world can and must be remade. 

That’s because hearing Nizalwa Ngobani is not simply to listen, but an invitation and insistence that calls to a new generation, enquiring if we remember where we came from, who birthed us, and what is still to be done and won.  Through the imaginative work of art we are asked to reimagine our present. 

– Danielle Bowler is a feminist writer and musician and was the Programme Director at the ReaBua Critical Dialogues

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Putting African women at the centre of the land

The story of South Africa’s land and mines is also a story of love, compassion, resilience and resistance, writes Sithandiwe Yeni

“Why do men dominate current debates on the land question in South Africa, yet we know land is very much a women’s issue too?” asked Tekano Atlantic Fellow, Ntebeleng Morake, the moderator of the panel on Land, Mine Work, Extractives Industries And Their Impact On Women, at the ReaBua Critical Dialogues – Herstory: Race, Gender and the Political Economy of Health Care in South Africa.

A good place to start to respond to Morake’s question might be with a brief historical overview of land and dispossession in South Africa, but this history of the destruction of African peasantry and marginalisation of women and separation and alienation from their land would be too long to summarise. Morake’s question resonates with those that have been asked by labour tenants and black women who have been dispossessed of land, that are very useful in giving us a glimpse of some of that history. 

During a workshop of land claimants I attended, Mama K asked why no one in the debates about land expropriation without compensation was talking about the labour she and her peers provided to white farmers as domestic workers from the age of 13, with little or no pay?  

Mama K was a labour tenant: a person dispossessed of her land. In order to survive, she and many others were left with no option but to work for white farmers, who had acquired the land through dispossession. 

She and other children worked for six months of each year with little or no pay, in return for the “right” to use a small portion of the land for their own purposes such as grazing, growing crops and living. 

Similar questions asked by women land claimants relate to the cattle and goats they lost every time white farmers evicted them from their homes. Others have spoken about their furniture, clothes and other possessions they lost when they were forcibly removed by white farmers, and their houses burnt down. All these questions force us to reckon with the past as a way of answering to the present about land struggles and the marginalisation of women in both the public discourse and that of land ownership. 

The questions from women like Mama K about forced and poorly paid labour invite us to unpack land dispossession from the perspective of women who were former labour tenants, so that we don’t lose sight of the depth and nature of injustices, violations and dehumanisation they suffered under the colonial and apartheid regimes. 

Today, former labour tenants continue to live under the same inhumane conditions on white commercial farms in a democratic South Africa. Their current concerns and historical experiences have featured minimally in debates about land redistribution and land expropriation without compensation. Instead, emphasis has been placed on whether or not the current private farm owners should be compensated and on agricultural production, thus centring commercial farmers and silencing the questions of historical dispossession and redress. 

Mama K’s question and the others it surfaces show us that African women who are marginalised in dominant public discourse and policies are not silent, and those of us who are privileged to be in the same room with them to learn history through their experiences have a responsibility to make their experiences visible. 

There were a number of African women at the ReaBua Critical Dialogues whose parents and grandparents shared a similar history to that of Mama K and her peers. Lebo Ramafoko, the chief executive of Tekano, and the board chair Tracey Naledi shared memories of their grandmothers, who were domestic workers that managed to create a better and healthy life for their children through education. Today, they stand on their grandmothers’ shoulders. 

Mining

The history of land dispossession is incomplete without the history of mining and the central role that rural African women played in bulding the economy of the country, and yet they continue to be excluded from eating its fruits, and their labour is deemed invisible. 

My co-panelists on the panel of Land, Mine Work, Extractives Industries And Their Impact On Women,  Dr Asanda Benya and Dr Salimah Valiani, shared other perspectives of the roles African women played and continue to play in the mining industry, both as mine workers and as wives, girlfriends or sisters of mine workers. 

From Benya and Valiani we learnt about women who kept the rural households alive on the limited land they were left with, while their husbands and boyfriends were forced to go and work in the mines. These women were forced to grow crops for subsistence on small pieces of land, as the wages their partners earned were insufficient to sustain households. They raised children who would later replace their ill or retired fathers on the mines, and in so doing ensured that mining companies had a replicating workforce, guaranteed to increase their profits and build the economy of the country. 

These women looked after the children,  the elderly and the men who fell ill due to the dust and chemicals from the mines and were no longer needed by the employers, and were sent back home to be taken care of by African women. 

We were reminded of the Marikana miner’s strike and massacre in which workers were killed by the police, and also of the central role women played during the strike, providing emotional support and food for their partners. 

Despite all this complex history of work and dispossession, the history of rural African women is not only about their plight, which they didn’t create; it is also a story of love, compassion, resilience and resistance, all expressed in various forms such as music, singing, dancing, storytelling to children, making delicious food, making art works and simply by giving us hope. 

It was fitting then, that the ReaBua Critical Dialogues also featured poetry and music as central to the exploration of race, gender and the political economy of healthcare in South Africa.  We danced to the music of Thandiswa Mazwai and  Zoe Modiga and listened to poetry by multi-award winning playwright, director and poet Napo Masheane and Lebohang “Nova” Masango.

All these experiences of women reminded us why we cannot afford to stop revisiting and writing anew from the perspective of women, writing “her-story”, making visible women who have been and continue to be erased. Additionally, we should also continue to challenge platforms, institutions and dominant narratives that marginalise or erase women’s work and their historical relationship to the land. 

– Sithandiwe Yeni is a land researcher and academic

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My mother was a kitchen girl: Resisting misogynoir through song

Centering black women is to centre the energy around which the world spins, writes Lindokuhle Nkosi

France, 1982 where Nina Simone is living out her sunset years after America tries to eat her alive. She lives alone in a tiny apartment in Paris, near a nightclub where the “Empress of Soul” plays ad hoc gigs for a couple of hundred dollars at a time. Into the album she has poured all her hopes and disappointments. Everything that being alive, black and woman makes you unblind to.

“It’s as if she poured every musical idea or influence from the past 10 years — as well as all her grief, joy, and rage — into these 13 songs,” says the Jazz Times. “She plays simple, moving chants in French; recalls the fond memories and infectious sounds of her life in Liberia on Liberian Calypso; and transforms Gilbert O’Sullivan’s Alone Again (Naturally) into a chilling, condensed history of her relationship with her father.  Over the riddim of Liberian Calypso, she tells a story of dancing in a disco in Monrovia, unburdening herself of her restrictions, her clothes.”

My joy was so complete, you know. My friend was happy, he said, “Go, go!”
I danced for hours, hours on end. I said, “Dear lord, you are my friend”
He brought me home to Liberia, and all other places are inferior.
He brought me home to Liberia, and all other places are inferior (run, Nina)

By the ‘60s, America had begun to chew at Nina. “I can’t stand the pressure much longer,” she sings on Mississippi Goddamn. The King of Love had been murdered. Her neighbour Malcolm X too. Her bestie Lorraine Hansberry died of cancer and Simone sings Young, Gifted and Black in tribute. It’s another friend who offers a hand. A different way to breathe. Married to the Black Panther Kwame Touré (Stokely Carmichael), Miriam Makeba lives between Guinea and Liberia, when she invites Simone to move to Africa.

“That night at The Maze, the Monrovian discotheque, Simone was in her element,” says Ozy.com. “She was dancing to American pop music and drinking to her heart’s content while the movers and shakers of society grooved along. Then, to the surprise of everyone, the superstar suddenly took off her dress and danced blissfully naked on tabletops all night. It was a much-needed relief for a woman struggling to shed multiple burdens. “He [the Lord] brought me home to Liberia and all other places are inferior,” she would later sing on Liberian Calypso.

Makeba brings Simone home. Simone dances naked on gratitude and liberation, but Makeba can still not go home. Still banned by the apartheid government, she cannot dance free. Her clothing anchors her to places she cannot call home. 

“There is really no difference in the struggle of the people you have mentioned because we are all Africans,” she says of her pan-Africanness. “We were just put in different countries by white people, who took people from Africa and spread them out. It is true that our problems are the same.” 

16 June, 1963: Makeba addresses a United Nations special committee on apartheid. In the black and white footage on the UN multimedia website, she walks up to the petitioner’s table; long table lined with chairs, in a light coloured two-piece, her hair like a helmet, cropped close to her head. She’s solid in her delivery, breaking only in voice when she speaks about Sharpeville. “The story of the shootings at Sharpeville is well known throughout the world. Indeed all men and women of goodwill all over the world raised their voices their voices in anger on that occasion, but all these protests just fell on deaf ears.” 

On that podium, the world’s eyes watched as she blamed the world’s leaders for their complicity in the atrocities played out by white people in South Africa. “Since Sharpeville, many terrible things have occurred in my country. Our political parties were declared illegal and their leaders were forced to go underground.” 

Here her voice breaks. Can she even imagine what home looks like now? Does she understand the underground, that home no longer exists? She swallows hard. The paper in her hand shakes. “Or go into, uh, exile … go into exile to continue the fight from outside and appeal to the world for support,” she continues. Is she speaking about herself? Does she see the years playing out before her. Not being able to bury her mother. Putting her only child in the ground, far from home, with no one around but a handful of journalists.

“However since the South African freedom fighters started making representation to the United Nations for the removal of the Verwoed government and the restoration of power to those to whom it belongs, we have received nothing more than lip service from most of the big powers of the world. We all know that if positive action were taken by these powers to assist in solving the South African problem, it could solve it with much less disaster and suffering. Mister chairman, I have already stated that you and the committee know that the political situation in my country is tense. This therefore does not leave us with any option but to ask the United Nations to take positive action against the South African government. By positive action I mean, of course, that the United Nations should put into action the very good resolutions calling for the complete boycott of South Africa, and especially the sending of arms by outside powers to South Africa. I have without a doubt that these arms will be used against the African women and children.”

This would not be the last time she points her finger directly in the face of power. Thirteen years later to the day, the South African government would fire teargas, grenades and bullets into a crowd of South African students. The official count places 176 black children dead, but thousands disappeared on that day.

“Soweto Blues was written for me by Hugh Masekela after the June 16th uprising,” explains Makeba in a video interview. She sings it mournful. Desperate. As if she could have stood in front of those children and taken the bullets on their behalf.

Well children were flying, bullets, dying
Oh the mothers screaming and crying
The fathers were working in the cities
The evening news brought out all the publicity
Just a little atrocity
Deep in the city
Benikuphi na madoda?
Xa bedubula abantwana
Benikuphi na?
Abantwana xa bejikijela ezizimbokodo
Benikuphi na?
There was a full moon on the golden city
Knocking at the door was the man without pity
Accusing everyone of conspiracy
Tightening the curfew charging people with walking
Hmm the border is where he was waiting
Waiting for the children
Frightened and running
A handful got away but all the others
Are in the jail without any publicity
Just a little atrocity
Deep in the city
Benikuphi na madoda?
Xa bedubula abantwana
Benikuphi na?
Abantwana xa bejikijela ezizimbokodo
Benikuphi na?

Soweto blues
Soweto blues
Soweto blues (Awu yelele mama)
Soweto blues (Oh they are killing our children)
Soweto blues (Without any publicity)
Soweto blues (Hmm they are finishing our nation)
Soweto blues (While calling it black on black)
Soweto blues (While everybody knows they are behind it)
Soweto blues (Without any publicity)
Soweto blues (Basiqedil’isizwe sethu mawethu mama)
Soweto blues (Awu yelele mama)
Soweto blues

“Benikuphi na madoda mabedubula abantwana?” She asks. Where were you? When they mowed the children down in the streets? Where are the men who said they would fight? Who is protecting the children?”

In doing this, in this simple question, she asks black masculinity to look at itself. “They are shooting our children,” she says, “and where are you?” She points out that in order to survive, patriarchy must frequently and consistently side with the violence in power at the time. 

Miriam is also the daughter of a domestic worker, Christine Makeba, who dies the same year as the Sharpeville Massacre. A domestic worker and sangoma who kneaded, with herbs and prayer, the cancer from her daughter’s breasts before she left the country. “Where are the men?” She points a finger at patriarchy. At the fighters who raped their female cadres in the bush. At the dads who beat their children to stop them from protesting. At the beer halls full of freedom fighters who, we have lived long enough to find out, only wanted  the freedom to oppress us again.

When Tekano’s chief executive, Lebo Ramafoko speaks to the audience at ReaBua – Herstory and says “all of us have a domestic worker in our lives” — an experience echoed and shared by Dr Tracy Naledi, Tekano Board Chair — she’s making visible a particular kind of racialised and gendered labour that has been erased, or invisibilised, even though the whole world spins on the expenditure of this energy.

Or, to paraphrase the words of decolonial feminist scholar Françoises Vergés: black women clean the world.

– Lindokuhle Nkosi is a writer and essayist

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We women, forgotten by history

The ReaBua Critical Dialogues sought to contextualise Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s work, activism, and life, through an intersectional lens and in relation to her peers, writes Gail Smith

The ReaBua Critical Dialogues sought to contextualise Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s work, activism, and life, through an intersectional lens and in relation to her peers, writes Gail Smith

On 2 April 2018, Nomzamo Winnie Madikizela-Mandela died and the world mourned the loss of a woman who had come to symbolise the South African liberation struggle. Madikizela-Mandela was the first medical social worker in the history of South Africa.  The significance of this is often undermined and is not clearly understood.  

The ReaBua Critical Dialogues, which took place in Cape Town on 22 September, was the culmination of a campaign that began on 9 August — Women’s Day — and embraced Heritage Day and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s 85th birthday as critical milestones in the celebration of women’s contribution, both to the liberation and heritage of South Africa.  

Speakers at the ReaBua Critical Dialogues included Dr Tracy Naledi, Tekano Board Chairperson;  Sipho Mthathi, Tekano Board Member; Lebogang Ramafoko, Tekano Chief Executive; Egyptian feminist Mona Eltahawy; musician Thandiswa Mazwai; author Sisonke Msimang; Dr Makgoale Magwentshu, and other leading social change leaders, who spoke on the themes of health equity and erasure across various disciplines.

Five short films, commissioned by Tekano to inspire a new generation of women to shed light on histories routinely forgotten, overlooked or suppressed, were produced and screened, while the panels comprised women leaders in the fields of mining, social work, medicine, farming and education. 

Madikizela-Mandela’s 85th birthday provides an opportunity to recognise her revolutionary role as a medical social worker and to highlight the contributions of other women who dedicated their lives to challenging apartheid from within the “caring professions”, and who have been silenced and erased.  

As a medical social worker, Madikizela-Mandela revolutionised social work and harnessed her professional skills and knowledge to advance health equity as a critical and inextricable part of her revolutionary activism in pursuit of the struggle for liberation from apartheid. 

Madikizela-Mandela often used the term “we” when speaking.  She did so in implicit recognition that she was a symbol of a larger whole — of communities of women banished, exploited, oppressed and defiant. 

In recognition both of her contribution, and of the role and contribution of the known and unknown women who challenged the political economy of white supremacy, Tekano celebrated Madikizela-Mandela’s birthday by recognising women routinely forgotten or rarely heard.

“Native” women were the “unwanted appendages” of the apartheid imagination; they were cemented into the lowest rungs of the racialised hierarchy of the political economy, which posited white men at the top and black women at the very bottom of the race-caste system.  

The apartheid political economy was built on the exclusion of black women, and, when it became clear that they were indeed a necessary part of the economy, their economic and professional options were deliberately constrained and confined to “care work” such as nursing, teaching, social work, or unpaid and low income work like factory work, domestic service and childcare. 

In celebrating Madikizela-Mandela’s birthday, the critical dialogues sought to highlight the contributions of women who dedicated their lives to challenging apartheid from within nursing, teaching and social work, and who have been silenced and erased.  While much is known about women in the labour movement and women in the anti-apartheid movement, not much is known about how women organised as nurses and social workers to confront and subvert white supremacist hetero-patriarchy and to assert the right to equality for all. 

Winnie’s death in April 2018 and the narrative fall-out that followed forced us to ask, why were we so susceptible to the lies and misinformation about Winnie Mandela? This reckoning with our past, catalysed by her death, forced a new conversation about culpability, about white supremacy and the violence it required, about the machinery invented to destroy her. It exposed the dirty secrets of white supremacy, of black liberation, of the national family, and of the hidden faces for whom destroying Winnie Mandela was a matter of white nationalist pride.

The ReaBua Critical Dialogues did not seek to eulogise or exalt Madikizela-Mandela.  The dialogues sought to contextualise her work, activism and life through an intersectional lens; to reflect her contribution in relation to her peers and to highlight the work, contribution and activism of other women of her generation, and to bring into view the “we”, she always spoke of.  

In pursuit of raising awareness of the systemic causes of injustice and socioeconomic inequalities, as well as seeking to promote the transformative power of collective social change, Tekano commissioned and premiered five short films to highlight histories routinely forgotten, overlooked or suppressed.  

Lauretta: And They Did Not Die explored the work and legacy of literary giant Lauretta Ngcobo.  The 10-minute documentary, directed by Kethiwe Ngcobo, Lauretta Ngcobo’s daughter, tells the narrative of Lauretta Ngcobo’s transformatory impact on black women’s literature and her own struggles to be a writer and an activist. 

The Undocumented: Women On Mines, directed by Lesedi Mogoatlhe and Yumna Martin, is a poignant and powerful indictment of the mining industry and its impact on women. The film illustrates the impact of a political economy built on the extractive industry and the long-term impacts on women and children, who are often the forgotten victims of the mining industry.  

Celebrating Winnie Through Song, directed by Sihle Hlophe, is a moving film exploring the songs dedicated to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, featuring the iconic song by Thandiswa Mazwai, Nizalwa Ngobani.  The film explores the role that music and art have in revolution, and the impact Winnie’s revolutionary commitment had on women musicians. 

Altered States: Brandfort,  also produced by Lesedi Mogoatlhe and Yumna Martin, is a poignant and powerful exploration of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s banishment to Brandfort, featuring writer Sisonke Msimang. 

Winnie: The Banishment, produced by Twiggy Matiwana and Palesa Sibiya, utilises rare archival footage of Madikizela-Mandela’s social advocacy in Brandfort and the ways in which she subverted the intentions of her “exile”.  

Both Altered States and The Banishment are poignant explorations of Madikizela-Mandela’s radical and transformatory impact on Brandfort — a town meant to break her — but which she broke and built in equal measure.  Mogoatlhe, Martin, Matiwana and Sibiya — four young women filmmakers —utilise skill, artistry and depth to explore Winnie’s transformatory impact on Brandfort and illustrate the power of a progressive leader, equipped with tools and opportunities and willing to strengthen a community’s capacity to  fight systemic injustice and inequality. 

Celebrating Winnie, Altered States, and The Banishment are historic firsts in film portrayals of  Madikizela-Mandela: all made by black South African women — born after Winnie Madikizela-Mandela defied her banning order and returned to Soweto in 1986 — showing rare footage and artistic interpretations, and providing challenging new perspectives on apartheid and our past and how we adjudicate women in the present.  

Lauretta utilises private family archives from the Ngcobo family to illustrate the power, influence and revolutionary context to the life of Lauretta Ngcobo.  The Undocumented is a stinging indictment of a political economy built on extractive industries, which is as violent to “native” women today as it was during apartheid and colonialism. 

To expand on the theme of the dialogues — HerStory: Race, Gender and the Political Economy of Health Care in South Africa — Tekano invited leaders in the fields of mining, social work, medicine and women on farms to discuss women’s contribution and erasure from the mining, farming and healthcare sectors, and to shed light on the deep structural roots of women’s economic exclusion from mining and land, and women’s hidden contributions to mining and land.  

Researchers and academics in the field of land and mining, Stha Yeni, Dr Salimah Valiani and Dr Asanda Benya, outlined the historical and contemporary connections between mining and land and how these both exploited and erased black women simultaneously, and the ways in which this inequality was built into the structure of the economy and continues into our constitutional democracy. 

Historian Zikhona Valela and academic Dr Athambile Masola addressed black women, erasure, resistance and persistence,  while social worker Keitumetse Moutloatse and Sisonke Msimang, author of The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela, discussed social work as resistance and Winnie’s impact on Brandfort.  

Academic Qhawekazi Maqabuka, Dr Makgoale Magwentshu and nurse Judiac Ranape  gave powerful historical context to the deep and historic relationship between racism and healthcare under apartheid, and of the black women who excelled as doctors and nurses, against all structural impediments put before them.   

Musician Thandiswa Mazwai — who rarely speaks publicly about her work — spoke about her now-iconic song Nizalwa Ngobani, in a Q&A with Tekano Chief Executive, Lebo Ramafoko.  During this panel, Mazwai spoke about being a woman in male-dominated industry and about her own agency and refusal to be diminished or erased. 

The ReaBua Critical Dialogues celebrated Madikizela-Mandela’s birthday by shining a light on women’s history and contributions to our constitutional democracy through critical discourse, poetry, film and music, in a historic celebration of women’s incontrovertible contribution to the cause of liberation, often achieved at great cost and with little or no recognition. 

– Gail Smith is a feminist writer, journalist and project manager for the Rea Bua: HerStory Critical Dialogues

 – All panel discussions, poetry and films are available online at https://tekanoreabua.org.za/

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Our untamed pandemic: time to take action against entrenched violence

At the end of each year there is a lot of hot air from those in power, but women are still abused, and with increasing frequency, writes Rene Sparks

Despite numerous plans and programmes by government and funders, femicide and violence against women and children are on the increase across South Africa. As we commemorate yet another 16 Days of Activism against gender-based violence (GBV), we must call out these empty promises. As a country, we are not doing enough; we can no longer accept the strategies we have depended on to shift the continuous and entrenched violations of women’s rights. It is time for South Africa’s leaders to champion a solution that centres survivors and has real consequences for perpetrators. 

At this time of year there is always a flurry of activity for those of us working in the sexual health and rights space, punctuated by a series of globally recognised events: World AIDS Day on 1 December; International Day of Persons with Disabilities on 3 December; and the 16 Days of Activism dedicated to the many women and children that suffer unacceptable violence. While these days bring awareness to complex challenges, we have spent enough time introspecting. These three dimensions — GBV, HIV and disabilities — are intrinsically linked, and we need comprehensive and integrated solutions that address them in an interconnected way.

On 1 December 2021 , Tekano Health Equity South Africa hosted a Twitter conversation to discuss the intersections. For example, GBV and intimate partner violence (IPV) exacerbates HIV infections: globally, one in three women experience physical or sexual abuse, and research has shown that women are 1.5 times more likely to acquire HIV when experiencing this type of violence. Locally, in South Africa, Women for Change, a civil society movement, states that a woman is killed every three hours and one is raped every 29 seconds. These shocking figures only represent incidents that are reported or captured in studies. When it comes to disabilities there are many cases of abuse or violence that go undocumented or unreported. 

This year and last, hard lockdowns in South Africa left many women locked up with their perpetrators, a phenomenon described as “home sweet hell” in a Bhekisisa article highlighting the amplified struggle for survivors of abuse during the Covid-19 pandemic. HIV testing and access to treatment has also been challenged by the pandemic, as healthcare workers tirelessly fight the onslaught of a relentlessly mutating virus. The pandemic shows us a violent South Africa, with ever-increasing rates of GBV, rape and femicide, which amplifies the other silent pandemics that we are failing to address. A meaningful healthcare response must consider these crises happening across our country.

South Africa is renowned for its progressive Constitution and beautifully drafted plans, such as the National Strategic Plan for GBV launched in March 2020, but we have yet to witness any justice as a product of this ambitious plan. As a healthcare worker and activist, I have been part of drafting the South African National AIDS Council (SANAC) National Strategic Plan for HIV, STIs and TB (2017-2022) which also includes targets and interventions to combat the scourge of GBV across all HIV prevention programmes. I have supported survivors of sexual violence and therefore know all too well the efforts of the South African Department of Health (in collaboration with funders) to integrate GBV and IPV health screening into their programmes. Unfortunately, these activities merely identify survivors, but do not fundamentally address the underlying issues; they do not tally with reports made or equate to successful convictions. 

While the statistics speak for themselves, it might seem that the solution doesn’t lie with leadership or legislation — it surely needs to be addressed within families and communities, which is where the complex mix of issues plays out? There is much to be done to uproot the prevailing toxic masculinity and patriarchy within the minds of everyday South Africans, but our public officials have a role to play in setting the tone and creating the right incentives and preventative measures.

Post-November elections  the mayor of a Western Cape district was deemed eligible to stand for re-election and was appointed by the ruling party, despite being a convicted child rapist. This is an outrage and an insult, rendering the 16 Days of Activism futile. It sends a message that women and children are not important or valued and highlights the continued gender inequality in South Africa. 

We need leadership that not only passes clear legislation but that also builds a supportive structure that holds survivors of violence and sexual abuse through the process and ensures that perpetrators receive appropriate sentencing. 

Away with short, insignificant statements from our leaders. We need to see change. The Constitution demands a safe environment for all of South Africa’s citizens to thrive. It is time to call on the highest office, and demand action from the president and the judicial system. They must ensure that perpetrators face consequences when they violate, and most importantly, that survivors have access to a system they can trust, and that will support them when they need it most. 

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What exactly constitutes gender-based violence?

‘Silencing violence’ can make you doubt that you were abused; perhaps you imagined it, writes Amanda Fononda

When do you know that what you have experienced is gender-based violence (GBV)?  Are there levels of experiences that get to define what GBV is? I found myself asking this question in the past days as commemoration of 16 Days of Activism for no violence against women and children started on 25 November 2021. 

You see, between ages of six and nine I was sexually abused by a cousin who was in his late teens. He would rape me repeatedly, every day during the school holidays, as he looked after us while my aunt was at work. My aunt was a nurse and had to catch the train at five in the morning, and I knew as the door closed that my cousin brother would slip into the bed and rape me. He would call me during the day while I was playing and rape me. 

I finally had the courage when I was 10 to tell my mother that I did not want to visit my aunt anymore, and that is how it stopped. Fast forward to me at age 40 in 2019, when I finally had the courage to call him and ask him straight out why he raped me. He fumbled over the phone and ultimately dropped it. I found myself asking what kind of response I wanted; but I didn’t know. All I could think was that finally he must know that I know. 

You see, when I think about my experience of sexual assault, I do not recall violence. There were no threats, no harm mentioned and no force.  I do not even think I displayed any of the expected traits that are expected from children who have been sexually abused. It is only when I was older that I realised that this was also violence; “silencing violence” is what I call it. The kind that is so subtle that you start doubting whether it happened or not, questioning oneself as to why I never told anyone and why I let it continue for so long. 

That is why I am asking what and how one gets to define GBV. What is violence on women and children? We all have heard, seen and know women and children who have been violated. They are us and we are them. The violence is at all levels: home, the work place, public spaces and just about anywhere now. In South Africa, as women, we are living scared each day that it will be me today. Will I make the news today; will I be a hashtag? As women and children our voices are not heard, we are not seen and we seem to merely exist to be statistics every day. 

In my work community the voices of women who are the pillars and foot soldiers of the healthcare system are never heard. The community healthcare workers, the caregivers, the linkage officers, the tracers … are all women. The role of these women in the public health system is crucial, as they navigate their communities to trace clients to be brought back to care, and they provide household healthcare services. 

However, what we never hear about is the danger of the work they do and where they do it.  The women report fear of muggings, sexual assault, safety in going into different households. Community health workers also highlight the importance of psychological support for caregivers. The amount of burden experienced by both professional and lay caregivers is indescribable. The scope of their work predisposes them to a degree of trauma through home visits and interacting with critical conditions of terminally ill patients. There is some social support provided through debriefing, but,  due to time constraints as a result of work demands, such interventions are barely utilised. 

Prioritising the safety of health workers is needed because they promote and improve health outcomes of individuals and communities. Their daily efforts reach more disadvantaged communities and address barriers to access, including those that are physical, financial and cultural. Investing in programmes to remove human rights-related and equity-related barriers is essential. Involving communities to be active and equal partners in health responses, supporting quality health services that are accessible and acceptable to meet the needs of all communities and key affected populations is critical. 

As I end off, I would like to reiterate again what I asked at the beginning. When do you know that what you have experienced is gender-based violence?  Are there levels of experiences that get to define what it is? It is important that we see, hear and listen to everyone. No voice or person and their experience is superior to the other. Sixteen days are not enough; we can only  profile a few of these stories. Every day is a day to say, think and act on no violence towards women and children. 

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Unpacking the often-erased intersectionality between gender-based violence, HIV/AIDS and disability

These intersecting issues need to be addressed concurrently, to avoid wasting time and effort, writes Andile Mthombeni

The global United Nations’ 16 Days of Activism for No Violence against Women and Children campaign is annually recognised from 25 November  (International Day of No Violence against Women) until 10  December (International Human Rights Day). Across the globe and in South Africa, various civil society organisations, activists, government departments, academic institutions and others run campaigns and host activities and events to raise awareness of the global issue of violence against women and children. UNISA’s Institute of Gender Studies is involved in a campaign themed Victim-Survivors of Gender-Based Violence, Femicide and Trafficking.

Furthermore, within the 16 days, there are two critical global health days that are annually recognised: World Aids Day on 1 December, and International Day of Persons with Disability on 3 December.

Tekano has been running a campaign called ReaBua Her Story: 16 Days of Activism Campaign, which seeks to amplify the voices of those whose work has been erased by violent systems. Drawing on the synergy of the theme #ErasureIsViolence on 1 December, Tekano hosted a Twitter Space talk on the intersectionality between GBV, HIV/AIDS & Disability in commemoration of World Aids Day and within the 16 Days of Activism campaign, as well as recognising the International Day of Persons with Disability. This paper is a reflection on the conceptualisation behind this talk and an unpacking of some of the discussion points that were highlighted from that Twitter Space engagement.

It is crucial that as we honour and commemorate these world health days, that we as activists reflect and investigate our own erasure; how we ourselves are erased but also erase others in our activism. As part of my activism work, and having submitted my Civil Society Organisation’s project back in 2020 as a second cohort fellow of the Tekano Health Equity Fellowship, I focused my project on raising awareness on GBV through initiating a dialogue with women from faith-based organisations. As part of the outputs of the project, one of the themes that was highlighted was the intersection of GBV with HIV/AIDS and women with disability. 

It is equally important to reiterate that recently the Crime Statistics in South Africa Report was released, stating that from July 2021 until Sept 2021, 6 163 people were murdered, of which 897 were women and 287 were children; and 9 556 rapes were reported. Another recent report from Statistics South Africa noted that over 600 girls between the ages of 10 and 13 gave birth in South Africa in the year 2020, meaning that the sexual act which led to these pregnancies constitutes rape, sexual assault, and child sexual abuse. According to the same report, 33 899 babies born in 2020 were to mothers or girls aged 17 and younger. Of all the births registered in 2020, more than 60% of the mothers had no reliable information on fathers. 

The high rate of teenage pregnancy and child pregnancy in South Africa links directly to the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the country. There are currently 8.2-million people who are HIV positive, with the highest number of new incidence cases being among young women and adolescent girls. There is a direct connection between HIV and GBV, as the statistics above show us that young women and adolescent girls are often raped or forced into unwanted sexual relationships. They are at higher risk of sexual violation, with no condom use, hence the high rate of pregnancy among girl children, adolescent girls, and young women. Unprotected sex and rape also increase the risk of them also contracting HIV, which further explains the high incidence of HIV among adolescent girls and young women. These intersecting issues need to be addressed concurrently, to avoid wasting time and effort.  

At the same time, it is also important to recognise the positive strides taken by the country and global agencies to curb and fight the spread of HIV/AIDS as well as GBV, and in the spirit of eliminating erasure, recognise the great unsung and sung heroes who have fought and continue to fight to contain the spread of these pandemics. The South African National Aids Council (SANAC) National Strategic Plan (NSP) for HIV, TB and STIs for 2017-2022 recognised the need to address the economic, social and structural drivers exacerbating the spread of HIV/AIDS, of which one these is GBV, through goal #04 of the NSP. This goal seeks to address the social and structural drivers of HIV, TB and STIs.  However, the NSP is yet to be concluded and the question remains whether we have or are doing enough as a country to address GBV. 

Moreover, it is quite crucial that we understand that most Sexual Reproductive Health (SRH) work does not do justice in highlighting and amplifying the sexual and reproductive needs of people with disability, and the fact that they, too, are vulnerable to sexual crimes and violence, including but not limited to rape, sexual assault and femicide. Take into consideration that the 2020 General Household Survey noted that 4.9% of South Africans aged five years and older were classified as disabled in 2020, with a larger percentage being women (5.1%) than men (4.6%). 

In the Twitter Space discussion, it was highlighted that women with a disability are more vulnerable to sexual assault and their perpetrators often get away with the crime, because few believe that men can rape a person with a disability. This due to the existing taboos and stigma in our societies still attached to persons with disability. Furthermore, persons with disability face stigma from healthcare facilities, in that when they do fall pregnant and test positive for HIV, the question is often, “how did you get pregnant or get HIV, I didn’t think that you have sex,” or other degrading comments of that nature. Another issue raised in the discussion was the fact that there is still the misconception in society that having sex with someone with albinism can cure HIV, and hence the exacerbation of sexual assault and murders of persons with this disability. 

As we approach the Human Rights Day, we also ought to reflect how the human rights of persons with disability are constantly violated, through sexual assault, stigma when seeking health services, and murders. As activists, NGO organisations and academics, we also need to stop the erasure of persons with disability in our activism, and be inclusive of their struggles, and ensure that their voices are amplified in all spaces. We have to stand in solidarity and do more when it comes to involving and engaging the voices of persons with disability when conversing about GBV and HIV, including being allies of persons with disability and understanding the intersectionality of their sexual and reproductive issues. 

The Twitter Space discussion brought to light the intersection of the pandemics of GBV, HIV and the erasure of those living with disability within these pandemics. There was a strong commitment to continuing to integrate all these issues and addressing them in an intersectional way going forward. 

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Addressing gender-based violence in an Access to Water Programme in KZN

WLTP involves boys and men in gender and leadership sessions to help them redefine what a ‘man’ is, writes Sibongile Mntungwa

To bring about change, multiple approaches that are relevant and applicable to the individuals, groups and society that one is working in are needed. These approaches and strategies must respect the identity and autonomy of those they are working with and ensure that existing policies both humanise people and heal the dehumanising, stereotyping and undermining that has happened over time. 

The Women’s Leadership and Training Programme (WLTP) was established in 1985 as a way to respond to girls’ requests for leadership training during the political unrest which made them stay at home and not attend school. By the 1990s WLTP was in six provinces of South Africa training girls and young women in Leadership, Gender, Life Skills and Health. Twelve young women’s centres were established and became sustainable enough to be run as independent organisations.

WLTP left its headquarters in Johannesburg in 1999 and decided to deepen its practice in KwaZulu-Natal. Groups still come to WLTP there for various training including Agro-ecology, Climate Change, Cultural Heritage, Biodiversity, Entrepreneurship and Economic Literacy. WLTP now also travels to groups to support them on various themes.

In 2014, the girls raised their feelings about the shortage of water and how boys and men did not understand their suffering because of the shortage. This opened our eyes to the realities of water, as it affects girls’ education, health and safety. A dialogue and action to raise awareness about water, linking it to climate change and the depletion of ecosystems became a key theme for WLTP and still is today. It became clear that on the way to fetch water, many girls/young women experience shocking gender-based violence such as harassment, rape, living in fear and ukuthwala (bride capture). 

WLTP decided to involve boys, young men and traditional leaders, because they were the strategic group performing and institutionalised ukuthwala in behavioural and cultural norms. Young men were employed to be on the WLTP staff for this campaign, to talk men-to-men. Women were involved because most of them believe “the place of a girl is to be with her husband” and they will accept dowry without question.  Church leaders were engaged because of the biblical traditions relating to women being subordinates, dirty and not allowed to certain church activities if they have been abducted or have lost their virginity. 

Today WLTP runs the My Water My Right campaign, in which party candidates for the Local Government Elections 2021 were engaged by girls and young women, proposing the diversification of water sources so that no girl has to walk long distances to fetch water. Meetings have been secured with candidates who won and are in the Municipal Council, to follow up on their promises and to demand improved water delivery. 

WLTP has started to change the gender stereotype of fetching water being a “girl’s task” by looking into indigenous knowledge and how it relates to water. Fetching water has no gender face in the traditional and indigenous health, healing and spirituality practices. In this way WLTP uses this indigenous knowledge and climate science to conscientise boys and men about the gender myth that only girls and women fetch water, so that they will become responsible at least for their own water at household level.  

When I became a Tekano Fellow in 2018, I said: “I knew I was advocating for girls’ and young women’s rights, but then I learnt about the social determinants of health for the first time. The dots connected on how gender inequality and other inequities were contributing to the health of girls and women in my community and in the world. I reflected on how the HIV/AIDS pandemic portrayed the vulnerability of abducted girls and women in the communities where I worked and I got ‘new eyes’ to connect gender and health in my context and worldwide.” 

This multisectoral and multi-layered approach of WLTP has enabled us to work well with traditional leaders, church leaders and other groups on the ground; and to motivate them to use their influence to critique outdated traditions and co-create with communities constitutional democratic values rooted in uBuNtu (an African philosophy of being human and be at one with nature) and other philosophies. These groups are seen as patriarchal and the assumption at the outset was that they would not be open to participation in the work being done by WLTP. The reality was different.

The lesson learnt in this process was that, for any change to take place, as development practitioners we can facilitate and engage people to believe in positive change. At the same time, if we were to wait for them to be “ready” to discuss gender-based violence (GBV) and to challenge patriarchy by themselves, we would still be waiting. Therefore, GBV work is done not because everyone approves, but because it is a deep-seated social ill that is unfortunately experienced from childhood to adulthood. That is why WLTP works to transform gender roles, relationships and socialisation that have been normalised in communities and in institutions because GBV perpetrators come from these same homes. That is why WLTP involves boys, young men and men in gender and leadership sessions as this prepares them for participation in redefining how a man should be living his humanity. 

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Reflections on a Twitter Space dialogue

Myths help to justify GBV by placing the blame on its victims

South African society is characterised by high levels of violence, many of which are gendered and institutional. There are multiple theories that seek to make sense of this violence. Among these is that South Africa has a culture of violence, especially a culture of male violence against women. This means that there are societal norms and approaches that not only normalise the use of violence, but also encourage it as a legitimate form of expression. 

Thus, when a country has a culture of violence, gendered hyper-violence becomes embedded in the social fabric of that country, and becomes used as an everyday practice to maintain male power in society. Stories of gendered violence and femicide that we hear of daily on various platforms illustrate that gendered hyper-violence is an everyday practice, often used by men to achieve and maintain patriarchal male power over women and children. 

There are multiple factors that have resulted in a gendered culture of violence in South Africa, which has ultimately resulted in an unsafe country for women and children. These factors were discussed in a Twitter Space hosted by Tekano on 24  November 2021. These include:

Rape myths and rape culture

In the crime statistics for Quarter 3 of 2021, Minister Bheki Cele announced that between 1 July 2021 to 30 September 2021, there were 9 556 reported rapes. This number, though very high, does not begin to paint the real crisis of sexual violence in South Africa. Rape in South Africa cannot be understood outside of rape myths, which shape perceptions of sexual violence. Rape myths are false perceptions about rape that are often used to justify sexual violence and the impact it has on those who are violated. 

The Twitter Space dialogue explored how rape myths facilitate the construction of beliefs about sexual violence. This includes attitudes about the victim or survivor, perpetrators and what constitutes sexual violence. For example, if a survivor or victim of rape does not behave in ways that rape myths prescribe that she should act, rape myths facilitate an environment where she may not be believed. 

This extends to the police’s treatment of victims and how the criminal justice system responds to the crime. It is problematic because it places the additional responsibility on victims and survivors of sexual violence to prove that they have been violated, and simultaneously removes any responsibility from the perpetrators. 

The Twitter Space dialogue explored rape myths and other aspects of rape culture, including beliefs such as that rape cannot happen between intimate partners; only poor men rape; that false rape reports are common; and many other myths that  tend to justify rape and sexual violence. 

Rape myths and rape culture thus create an environment wherein there are no victim- or survivor-centred approaches when it comes to sexual violence;  instead, the approaches automatically protect and shield the perpetrator from any accountability by blaming the victim or survivor. 

Gendered hyper-violence and the portrayal of victims in the media

Rape culture, rape myths and a culture of gendered hyper-violence by men towards women are interconnected and are sustained by multiple institutions such as the media. The media is a necessary and significant tool in our society. It shapes many of our collective beliefs and how we respond to some of our societal challenges. Thus, the media plays a huge role in how we construct and understand gendered hyper-violence, rape culture and myths. 

The media also plays an important role in how we respond to these. Due to white capitalist patriarchy, the media can reinforce rape culture, rape myths and gendered hyper-violence. This is done through news reporting that can be interpreted as victim blaming, pardoning the perpetrator and their actions, dismissing reports of sexual and gender-based violence (GBV), positioning only certain women and children as “plausible, credible and believable” and other constructions that frame sexual and GBV as incidents that women bring upon themselves; and not a structural issue that is deeply embedded in patriarchal male violence and domination. 

For example, in 2018, after Siam Lee was murdered, her profession as a sex worker was used to blame her for her own murder. This placed the responsibility for her murder on her and not on the perpetrator who committed the crime. Similarly, the media’s portrayal of the Dros rapist Nicolas Ninow sought to excuse him from raping a child by providing space for him to share a complex human story through his mother, and to also portray what he did as a mistake. This is an act of rape culture.

For us to effectively address men’s hyper-gendered violence against women, we need to move beyond just saying “we condemn violence against women and children”, but to rather have systems in place that firstly support victims and survivors while also holding those who perpetrate this violence accountable. This requires both structural and interpersonal interventions that will centre the voices of survivors and victims of GBV. 

The ReaBua HerStory Campaign was a campaign of Tekano: www.tekano.org.za