For their Triumphs and for their Tears

[First published by the International Defence and Aid Fund, London, May 1978, Revised March 1985]

Remember all our women in the jails

Remember all our women in campaigns
Remember all our women over many fighting years
Remember all our women for their triumphs, and for their tears

(from 'Women's Day Song')

II.1 Marriage and the family
II.2 Children
II.3 Social security
II.4 Control of fertility - or populations
II.5 Rape
II.6 Health and poverty in the countryside

III.1 Overview
III.2 Agricultural labour
III.3 Domestic work
III.4 Manufacturing industry
III.5 Border industries
III.6 The informal sector
III.7 Professions
III.8 Trends and patterns of discrimination
III.9 Trade unions

IV.1 A history of struggle
IV.2 Women's resistance
IV.3 Boycotts
IV.4 A legacy of hope and defiance
IV.5 The struggle continues
IV.6 Soweto and after

Preface

This book is about women in South Africa and the circumstances of their lives. It is about the social conditions and the laws that affect them, both in those areas concerned with personal, sexual and marriage relations, with children and property, and in the wider field of education and conditions of work. It is also about the ways in which women have organised in the past and are fighting today to overcome the disabilities and difficulties under which they live. It is about the part they play in the struggle for the liberation of the people of South Africa.

Earlier versions of this book were published in 1975 and 1980, and it was intended that this would be a revised and up-dated version of those editions. However, two important factors compelled a change in both the structure and the contents with the result that while this book incorporates some of the information in the earlier editions - such as those legal conditions affecting women that have not changed, and some of the historical material - the book has been substantially rewritten.

The first factor is that certain changes have taken place in South Africa in the past decade - they encompass legal, social and economic conditions and embrace the lives of people in all layers of society, and thus the lives of women in towns, in rural areas, in homes, schools and workplaces. While the fundamental structures of apartheid remain intact, some of these changes have altered the specific conditions of women's lives in important areas, and also called forth differing responses from the women. The nature of these developments is dealt with more fully in other publications, and it is the impact on women that concerns us here.

The second factor is that in the past few years, partly as a result of the increased organisation and militancy of women, there has been a growing body of research in South Africa into women's lives. There has been both a recovering of historical material, and an uncovering of contemporary conditions. Much information is now available that was not known and therefore not incorporated in the earlier versions of this book.

This book is like the opening of a front door to a house that has many rooms. What is contained here arises out of the specific South African conditions; but while apartheid is a unique system, the struggle of the women in South Africa has great significance for women in many different countries. The book shows the extent of women's opposition to the laws of apartheid, as well as to their own specific oppression that may come from historical and cultural conditions not arising directly from apartheid. Superficially the situation is a contradictory one: the extent of the oppression of women, legally, socially, in every way, can scarcely be over-emphasised; they are half the population, and of that half the black majority is bound by the most extreme and harsh conditions. Yet at the same time these most oppressed women reveal the capacity for defiance, a great power of endurance, abilities to survive and protect their families, to fight oppression with ever-increasing strength and consistency.

It is the aim of this book to document the struggle of women under apartheid in South Africa. Inevitably, under the repressive conditions that exist in that country, much of the struggle is and must remain invisible and goes beyond what is recorded here.

Because apartheid is a unique system of society, without an equivalent anywhere else in the world, and because it directly affects the situation of women, it is necessary to set out briefly the most fundamental and outstanding features of this society in order to understand the legal and social position of women and the forms of their resistance. These laws are dealt with in Part I, which encompasses an explanation of migrant labour and segregation, the large-scale uprooting and removal of populations that has affected the lives of millions, and the resulting conditions in the bantustans. More detailed information on the laws and subsequent conditions may be obtained from other publications by the International Defence and Aid Fund; the concern here is to set the framework within which women's lives are enacted.

Part II deals with the family and related concerns, with the laws controlling marriage, social security and welfare, and those affecting the lives of children and the health of women and children. Some of this has been incorporated from the earlier edition, but the section on contraception, abortion and rape is entirely new, as this information has only become available fairly recently.

In Part III the changes of recent years reveal their impact upon women in relation to their work. This section covers women in all their various occupations, in industry, domestic service, agriculture, and the professions. It also describes the role of women in trade unions.

The role played by women of South Africa in the political struggle is described in Part IV. It deals with the historical background and with more contemporary events. It covers both those areas in which women, through their own organisations, mounted campaigns as women, and the campaigns of organisations embracing both men and women, in which the participation of women was vital. It also discusses the position of women within such organisations in relation to men, and in the light of feminist ideas that occupy women in many parts of the world today.

An Appendix contains an explanation of some of the institutions and terms of apartheid. For those not familiar with the apartheid system, a reading of the Appendix will make the book easier to understand.

Introduction - Women Under Apartheid

South African women live in a society split by the cleavages of apartheid. The system divides the people of South Africa into separate groups, and from the enforced divisions arise differences in the position of women. It is necessary, therefore, to differentiate in describing their conditions and their lives.

The whites are a powerful and privileged minority. In spite of a considerable linguistic and cultural variety amongst them, under apartheid they form a single group in contrast to the black majority which is divided into several groups in order to facilitate the maintenance of the apartheid system and white domination.

Life roles are laid down at birth, in the first place by skin colour, in the second place by sex and economic class. To an overwhelming extent the child's whole life, her education, her possibility of achievement, jobs and status, as well as everything affecting her personal relations, is predetermined by these three factors. If the child questions the role into which she has been cast, then she will find there is no way of changing it save by changing the whole society. This applies to men as well as women, but it applies most forcibly to African women. Sexual and racial discrimination condemn them to the bottom of the pile; on their backs rests a vast superstructure of law and of custom, in which the habits and institutions of an old, pastoral society are cemented into a modern industrialised state.

A crucial factor has been the impact of imperial power on an indigenous culture. Inferiority was imposed on Africans by colonialism in Africa. The black woman had the burden trebled. The first imposition, on both women and men, was the ideology of 'inferiority' ingrained and maintained by the colonists, along with the destruction of pre-colonial social structures, and the denigration of any culture other than that of the colonists themselves. The second imposition arises from both the traditions of the old society and the doctrines of the new - that is, the inferior status imposed on women by the relationships between women and men. The third is that from the beginning of the development of industrialisation, sexual discrimination was embedded in the overall system of exploitation.

The black majority of South Africa was divided into separate groups by the colonial powers, and is still divided today by apartheid. Each group is administered in different ways, reflecting the differences in the conditions and origins of their oppression. The principal divisions of the black population (explained more fully in the Appendix) are referred to here as 'African', 'Indian' and 'Coloured'¹ (see Table I). Within each group, the position of women is generally even worse than that of men.

The factors that most strongly control women's lives are embedded in the apartheid system. Apartheid divides people into separate groups where class and colour tend to coincide. Different laws apply to the separate groups and their living conditions differ widely. Therefore the descriptions and explanations of these must also be separated although there are some areas where the problems and disabilities arising from sexual discrimination overlay those deriving from racial discrimination. But generally speaking, the majority of South African women suffer first and foremost from the effects of apartheid. Since an awareness of what apartheid is and how it operates is essential for understanding the position of women in South Africa, the briefest outline follows.

The stratification of South African society has its basis in colonial conquest. The consolidation of domination by the white minority, and the perpetuation of racial laws and ways of thinking, has been basic to the policies of successive governments.

The economic foundations of the modern industrial economy in South Africa were laid down with the establishment of large-scale gold and diamond mining in the nineteenth century. The economy of the region, until then predominantly agricultural, underwent rapid industrialisation, based on a supply of cheap labour secured largely through control of the land by the white minority.

The process by which the mass of the people who occupied the land were dispossessed and excluded from access to it has been a long and continuous one. They were driven off the land by force of arms in most of the country over a period of over two centuries; by the imposition of taxes which could not be paid without a cash income - which in turn could only be obtained by participating in the settler economy; and by other administrative means.

The scale of the dispossession has been enormous. It is reflected in laws which together designated 13.7 per cent of the whole country for Africans, and the rest, nearly 87 per cent, for the white minority (apart from a very small amount designated to black people other than Africans). The African areas consisted of fragments scattered throughout the country, and these, the 'reserves', have today become the basis of the Bantustan system.

The second outstanding feature of South Africa's industrialisation was the utilisation of migrant labour, originally almost entirely male, controlled by the pass law system. The vast majority of African women were left outside the industrial labour market, while male migrants served a period of contract labour away from their homes for most of the year, with women, children, old and disabled people subsisting on small pieces of land in the bantustans. The result has been an extreme form of exploitation of both migrants and their families. By leaving the workers' families on the land it was possible to pay lower wages and avoid having to build houses and supply those services that are essential to maintain urban populations and ensure the reproduction of the labour force. It was assumed that the women would feed their families off the produce of the land. The employer could obtain a labour supply at less than the wage necessary to maintain the worker's family, while ensuring the continued supply of labour through annual leave periods which allowed the conception of children.

From the beginning of industrialisation, therefore, African women were relegated to a position which had ever-spreading disadvantages. They were to fulfil their traditional role as bearers of children; they were to work on the land to supplement the low wages of the male migrants (only now they had to perform both their own tasks and those of the absent men). And they were to be denied the gradual access to paid employment that would normally have provided them with a new status in a changing society.

The original conditions of this pattern of labour have long disappeared. For several decades the bantustans have no longer been able to support their populations, even at subsistence levels. The policies of apartheid have caused a further decline in the capacity of the Bantustan areas to produce enough to feed the population there. Enforced removals of people into the bantustans led to a massive rise in their population. Black agriculture was starved of investment funds. At the same time government policies have in various ways further restricted black access to land for cultivation to an even smaller proportion of the population in the bantustans: two-thirds of that population is now landless.

The breakdown in rural life could not lead to the profound changes in social structures that would normally have followed a shift from a subsistence-based economy, because of the laws of apartheid, and because of the way in which colonial administrators perpetuated certain customs long after the type of life that gave rise to them had been lost. These customs maintained and reinforced the subjugation of women in ways described in the chapters that follow.

But the most devastating aspect of apartheid has been the programme of mass removals, the uprooting and relocation of people through forced evictions in order to achieve a territorial segregation of the population according to the policies of apartheid (see Appendix for further explanation).

One of the principal means by which this policy of relocating and controlling populations is enforced is the pass law system, a key instrument of apartheid and one of the main factors in the oppression of women.

It is through the operation of the pass laws and other instruments of apartheid that human beings become units to be shifted around a changing map of South Africa with total disregard for families, communities, homes, employment. In our times in different parts of the world there have been large-scale emigrations and movements of populations caused primarily by war, conflict or famine. But not since the era of the slave trade have such huge numbers of people been forcibly taken from homes and land, forcibly removed, and 'relocated', against their will. The apartheid regime may claim the unique distinction of being the only ruling power of our times which is deliberately dismembering a unified country, to separate the different strands that make up a nation long consolidated by industrial development.

The map of South Africa has been cut to pieces and reassembled to suit the ideology and economy of apartheid. The cost in mass human suffering is appalling and the divisions created will leave deep scars.

Yet in South Africa it is not the differences between groups of people that are crucial; it is the fact that regardless of all apartheid laws, they share the same country, are integrated into its industrial apparatus and cannot truly be separated without destroying the way of life that the whites wish to hold for themselves. The advance of industrialisation brought about a process of assimilation that cannot be abrogated. Under the impact of urban conditions, black and white increasingly share the same culture, a unique culture arising from the mingling of contributions from many different origins.

The strongest impulses in South African society are towards national integration. Hence the tremendous barriers of laws that apartheid must erect to divide people.

It is from this complicated range of custom and law that women's conditions must be extracted. The span of conditions is enormous, from the desolation of the bantustans where many women live in extreme poverty and near-starvation to the luxurious suburban areas of the towns where white women are encased in splendidly appointed homes.

South African women, black and white, live in a society that is not only racialist, but also deeply sexist. The racialism and sexism are intertwined. Sexism in South Africa is not only revealed in cultural attitudes, but is embedded in the legal institutions.

White women, who share the right to vote with white men, and who have access to higher education and live in physically well-endowed conditions, live also in this sexist, male-dominated society. The women are absent from the organs of decision-making and control in politics, in the economy and in the armed forces.

However, the range and potency of these disabilities vary greatly between the different 'population groups', and the system of apartheid under which they live exercises decisive control over the direction of all their lives. Despite their disadvantages relative to white men (familiar to women in many countries), most white women support or actively help to perpetuate the apartheid system which gives them privileges and benefits at the expense of the black majority. The majority of women, that is the black women and more specifically African women, suffer first and foremost because they are black. Black women's specific disabilities, whether arising from social custom, cultural indoctrination or legal barriers, cannot be separated from the overall system of apartheid.

Black women in South Africa suffer from a three-fold oppression: as blacks; as women; and as workers who largely form a reserve army of labour. The three strands are interlaced. Black women cannot change the immediate conditions of their lives without fighting against the restrictions on, for example, free movement or access to education, both of which are controlled by apartheid laws. To fight male domination they need to fight the basis on which bantustans are established, in fact to fight the whole balkanisation of their country. To maintain family life, they must enter the field as protagonists against migratory labour and the pass laws.

It is for these reasons that this book concentrates mainly on the laws, customs and situation of African women, for they are both the majority and at the same time the most oppressed women in South Africa.

1. Survey of Race Relations in South Africa South African Institute of Race Relations, Johannesburg, 1983, p.67; C Simkins, 'The distribution of the African population of South Africa by age, sex and region-type: 1960-1980', SALDRU Working Paper, No. 32, Cape Town, January 1981, p.3. Back

For their Triumphs and for their Tears

Women in Apartheid South Africa

Hilda Bernstein

Contents

Preface

Introduction - Women Under Apartheid