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Profiles in Diversity
Women in the New South Africa
By Patricia W. Romero Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 1998 Patricia W. Romero
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87013-948-2
CHAPTER 1
THINGS HAVE CHANGED
IN DOWNTOWN JOHANNESBURG, an elderly white woman with a small poodle tucked under her arm boarded the city bus, bound for one of the suburbs. Taking an aisle seat, the woman carefully placed the animal on the seat beside her. Gradually the bus began to fill. Soon, a young black woman boarded. Forced to stand, she deposited a large box in front of the woman with the dog, but did not actually close her in. The white woman remarked quite loudly that the box was blocking the aisle. A few stops later, and still in her seat, with the dog next to her, the white woman again complained about the box, shouting, "you people think you own this country now." The black woman then pushed forward. As she struggled to grasp her package, she quietly but sternly replied: "Things have changed now and the sooner you get used to it, the better it will be for all of us." This is the new South Africa.
Women comprise 53 percent of the population of this country, which was militarily the most aggressive state in Africa until the end of the cold war, and until internal chaos forced the leadership to turn its attention inward. South African women—past and present—have enjoyed significant reputations at home, although only a handful are known beyond the national borders. Nobel Prize-winning novelist Nadine Gordimer is but one of many South African female writers.
Premature death silenced the so-called Coloured novelist Bessie Head, whose books continue to be widely read. African Miriam Tlali's books include Mihloti and Murial at the Metropolitan. Less prominent but no less talented is Sindiwe Magona, whose insightful vignettes on domestic life are to be found in Living, Loving, Lying Awake at Night. Among those who publish in Afrikaans are Wilma Stockenstrom; Linda Joubert, who writes under a series of pseudonyms; and Elisabeth Eybers, a prize-winning poet who lives in Holland.
Among the many academic women who have produced noteworthy books are Kagila Moodley, and Fatima Meer, whose publication on Gandhi has been made into a film. Anna Boeseken (who died in 1997), a former archivist who published a number of histories over the years—always listing herself as A. J. because she believed no one would take her work seriously if they knew she was a woman. Of Dutch ancestry, Boeseken was educated in South Africa and Europe before the Second World War. Unfortunately she never wrote her autobiography nor engaged in lengthy discussions about some of her own rather unique historical experiences. In 1933, she followed Hitler around Germany for a few months, listening to his speeches with a friend who was studying dictators.
Ruth Bhengu, the Sowetan journalist, is among the few female investigative reporters in South Africa. This intense, smallish woman in her late thirties was born in Sophiatown. When the racially mixed suburb was razed to make room for whites, Bhengu's family was removed to Soweto, where her father, a Zulu, left her mother behind to raise the family. As a child Ruth loved to read, but because of the poverty in which she lived, she turned to trashbins for the magazines and papers that helped compensate for an otherwise inferior education. After a stint at art school, Bhengu turned her talents to writing, working for several publications before joining the Sowetan. She pulls no punches in her columns.
South Africa is bordered on the west by Namibia, which was handed over to her as a temporary mandate by the League of Nations following World War I. Instead of preparing Namibia for self-government, South Africa colonized the area. After years of conflict, including guerrilla warfare, Namibia finally achieved independence in 1990. Botswana, a former British colony, lies to the north, next to Zimbabwe, another white settler colony that went through agonizing struggles before achieving—briefly—democratic elections that led to black rule in 1980. On the northeast lies the former Portuguese colony of Mozambique, which has been fraught with internal strife. South Africa's military was heavily involved in keeping Mozambique destabilized, as was also the case in Angola, another former Portuguese colony, which lies to the north of Namibia.
Located at the very southern tip of the continent, South Africa was regarded as strategically important to the Western powers, which at all costs were bound to keep the shipping lanes between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans open. South Africa played the anticommunist role to the hilt and, in process, used the cold war for its own internal purposes.
There is no comparable model for South Africa on the African continent. Economically South Africa may be roughly compared to Brazil. There are social, economic, and political parallels with Israel, too, where the western Jews held sway over those from the east and the Palestinians, like the blacks in South Africa, were not even marginal. In South Africa the elite—almost all of them white and many English speakers—are wealthy, well educated, and their businesses are tied to the First World economies of Europe, Japan, and the United States. Long industrialized through the discovery, first, of diamonds in the 1870s, followed by that of gold in the next decade, and other minerals over time, the landscape of South Africa was drastically altered by the turn of the century. Largely rural until the industrial revolution, the country has since witnessed the growth of the cities, sprawling suburbs, and high-rises that mark Johannesburg, the New York of South Africa; Pretoria, the administrative capital; and the ports of Durban and Cape Town. By the mid-twentieth century, other port cities and industrial areas in the interior emerged to enhance South Africa's growing reputation as a First World economy.
Industrialization and all that followed brought in its path immigrants and jobs. Blacks, who originally staked out claims in both the diamond and gold areas, joined the whites who flocked into the country, in being dispossessed by men like Cecil B. Rhodes. Black men left their women and families and streamed into the mines and other industries, and in process became tied to the cash economy, although their pay was ridiculously low.
Then, too, the farms became increasingly mechanized. As the twentieth century wore on, fewer farmhands were needed. The result was displaced African families who were turned out of lands occupied by their forefathers, and increasingly forced onto the reserves. This was a further hardship on women and children, who most often were forced to scratch out a living while their husbands and fathers sought work in the cities.
With a tinge of pathos in his voice, historian Charles van Onselen acknowledged that "the black women" have been "the backbone of their families. Black men were marginal." This statement is borne out in the townships, in the rural areas, and even on city streets. The poor woman in Grahamstown who begs nightly has her counterparts in every urban center in the country.
From the 1950s, as the colonial powers gradually withdrew from the African continent, in South Africa the colonial noose began to tighten around the necks of the Africans. This was because of the birth of apartheid, which was divined to separate blacks and whites. Apartheid was a euphemism for the practice of removing blacks from sight except during the hours their labor was required. What developed was the "other" South Africa: a Third World economy that reflects the dichotomy between most blacks and most whites.
Jobs, for men, meant leaving home. Frequently jobs for women called for long absences, too, from both their children and their families. Apartheid required separate dwelling areas for all the races; new and substandard housing sprung up in what were referred to as townships but were, in fact, ghettos for containing people of color. As blacks poured into the urban areas seeking work, the townships grew apace—and hovels made of wooden crates and covered with cardboard became all too common.
Then, when television cameras beamed the carnage of Sharpville and later Soweto around the world, apartheid came increasingly under attack. Ultimately, economic sanctions were applied in attempts to force the government to capitulate to black demands for equality and for the vote. (In South Africa, by the mid-1950s, the last of the black population had been disenfranchised and only whites could vote, as only whites could represent blacks on either the local or the national level)
Helen Suzman, the same age as President Nelson Mandela, retired from active politics more than a decade ago. In 1993 she published her political memoir, In No Uncertain Terms. Suzman is remembered as the early and then lone voice of the Federal Progressive Party, calling for an end to apartheid when other politicians walked around the issue, if they did not give it their wholehearted support. Suzman was also one of the liberals who opposed economic sanctions because she believed they harmed the blacks more than the whites. Sheena Duncan, the chain-smoking church leader who is a former president of the Black Sash, disagrees. To Duncan, the sanctions were crucial "in forcing the government to change because we could-n' t do without foreign investment and bank loans." Furthermore, "the sports boycott was very effective indeed. That was one that all South Africans were aware of and knew what they were missing."
There have been many women politicians in South Africa, but most were relegated to the role of community leaders (see Zora Odendaal Chapter, following). Dr. Selma Browde was the first woman to sit on the Johannesburg City Council—back in the 1970s—and she quickly learned that being female was a greater handicap than being the sole member of a minority political party. "The men shouted me down," she said, and "I had to practically shriek in order to gain the right to be heard." Those few women in recent years who have had appointments on the national scene have been virtually ignored because they have been seen as tokens of an oppressive government. Women's rights activist Bridgette Mabandla succinctly summarized her gender in South Africa by noting that "we are absent from the history books."
This absence, of course, will change when the current history of South African is written. On 26 April 1994, a woman in Wellington, New Zealand, cast the first vote in the multiparty election. She was Nomaza Paintin, a niece of Nelson Mandela, and hers was an absentee ballot. Within the country, women from the rural areas struggled to the polling stations, joining their ballots with those of women from the townships—all first-time voters, and many overwhelmed that this opportunity had presented itself in their lifetime. Among the women elected to Parliament was Frene Ginwala, who was not only the first female speaker ever elected, but also the first black. Of the sixteen-odd parties on the ballot, one was the Women's Rights Peace Party, but resentment against apartheid took precedence over gender, and that party received only a small percentage of the vote.
Spirits soared and hopes were raised to new and perhaps unrealistic heights. The old problems of political upheaval coming in the wake of sanctions, followed by the deepest recession to hit South Africa since the 1930s, began to look to some like ancient history. Still, in the best of times the economy could not support all those who sought jobs. The years immediately preceding the 1994 election were among the worst of times. Even as the economy improved, the country's infrastructure could not expand quickly enough to incorporate the millions of unskilled and poorly educated blacks whose middle-class aspirations led them to believe that jobs would be theirs under democratic rule. The hopes of young college students like Tossie Mpandle, Carol Nkumanda, and Nelly Mashishi are all the more poignant because they are representative of an entire generation of young black women whose futures dimly hang on the economic expectations some of their leaders created in the glow of the campaign. The African National Congress (ANC) led government cannot in the foreseeable future correct the First World - Third World dichotomy that characterizes this economically and racially divided nation. No matter who rules South Africa in the next few decades, expansion of the infrastructure will not be easily accomplished. The ambitious Reconstruction and Development Program calling for jobs, housing, and education that the ANC unveiled in its march to victory at the polls had to be dropped from its cabinet-level importance for a variety of reasons—not the least being lack of money.
Beyond the political promises and the tremendous burdens on the economy is the educational lag between the haves and the have-nots. These inequalities must be addressed along with all the social ills that must be cured. The Third World aspects of South Africa cannot be read entirely in black and white: Many Afrikaners lag behind English speakers in education. The African children, however, are the ones who have suffered the most through the inferior Bantu education system. Approximately 68 percent of rural blacks are illiterate. The figures dwindle significantly for urban dwellers, but are still remarkably high in comparison with their white counterparts.
Integration has not come easily to many of South Africa's primarily white schools in suburbs and small towns throughout the country. Whites have balked, and in the cases of Afrikaners, the matter of language has been a considerable barrier to opening their schools to blacks. Controversies over admissions, remedial education, and school fees have plagued some of the universities as well. Riots and demonstrations have taken their toll at several schools, including the University of Witswatersrand, the University of Westville-Durban, and the University of the Western Cape. The University of Cape Town has tried to rectify the old system by radically altering racially selective admissions. In 1996, the university accepted more than 50 percent blacks in their entering class, with 42 percent of those who entered needing remedial work.
This same type of remedial study was responsible for sending Carol Nkumanda to Khanya College, a community college in Johannesburg with ties to Indiana University in the United States. Carol grew up in poverty in a township outside Port Elizabeth. She passed through the African equivalent of secondary school but found herself unqualified for university-level study. Tossie Mpandle, too, was in a remedial education program, working to qualify for university.
Nelly Mashishi comes from the Orange Free State, and has experienced the bitter consequences of apartheid in every facet of her young life. Nelly's middle-class parents sent her to boarding school, where, they believed, she would have an educational advantage. In her brief story she discusses some of the vicissitudes of private education for blacks during the period of political transition in South Africa.
If these relatively advantaged young women have faced problems in meeting their educational goals, one is hard pressed to imagine what the future holds for the millions of children, now adults, who dropped out of school from 1976 onward, and who have no basic skills on which to build. They may be written off as yet another lost generation of South Africans for whom little or nothing can be done, except perhaps creating the welfare-type dependency that has characterized similar women in the United States. Efforts are underway to put training programs into effect but, again, the economy cannot expand rapidly enough to incorporate most of those who fell between the cracks.
Dungi Cynthia Merivate, a Tsonga from the Northern Transvaal, created her own opportunities under apartheid. Born into a middle class family, Dungi followed her father into the teaching profession and eventually to the University of South Africa, where she is on the faculty.
The African models that might be used to measure social and economic change in South Africa are those of Kenya and Zimbabwe. Both were settler societies. Each came to independence after internal disorders between blacks and whites. Kenya, independent since 1963, is a prosperous country where the races coexist rather well (although ethnic differences have been a problem even under the rather benign presidency of Jomo Kenyatta). At independence, a few whites sold their farms and left. Ironically, this included many of the Afrikaners who had trekked there in the years following the Anglo-Boer War, and who then moved back to South Africa after Kenyan independence. Land redistribution produced some friction, but no major conflicts erupted in the wake of self-government. Even though questions were raised about the results of multiparty elections, which were forced on the country by outside donor agencies in the early 1990s, and even though the economy spun out of control, most Kenyans preferred to wait for another chance at the ballot rather than reaching for the bullet. Tribalism fanned by President Daniel arap Moi, however, has kept the opposition divided, and Moi in power.
Zimbabwe, which lost 170,000 whites (many to South Africa) in 1980 at independence, witnessed internal chaos as the minority Ndebele under their leader, Joshua Nkomo, carried on low-level guerrilla warfare in parts of the country. President Robert Mugabe brought Nkomo into his cabinet and, over time, hostilities ceased. Many of the whites who fled returned. Relative prosperity marked Zimbabwe and multiparty national elections were allowed to take place. Internal problems remain, however, with the whites often serving as convenient scapegoats to an ever more repressive government. Land redistribution remains a thorny problem and whites continue to hold a disproportionate amount of the land.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Profiles in Diversity by Patricia W. Romero. Copyright © 1998 Patricia W. Romero. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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