Back to ContentsThe many years of white - minority rule have seen the systematic and continued denial of black aspirations in all fields, stemming in the first place from total black exclusion from all positions of effective state power. The maintenance of such exclusion has necessitated the introduction of ever more repressive legislation and actions, together with enormous growth in military spending and political influence of the armed forces. The much - vaunted constitutional changes introduced in 1984, and which incorporate a small section of the Indian and Coloured communities into a segregated, undemocratic parliament under white control still leave the majority excluded from central government.
The economic changes of recent years have been profound, altering the basis of labour needs, and by the elimination of large sections of unskilled labour rendering whole sections of the population superfluous. The vast scale of modern agriculture needs machines and a smaller amount of semi - skilled or skilled labour, supplemented by seasonal unskilled labour; this latter work is today usually performed by women. Industry is undergoing the same process. It is not unique to South Africa but the method of dealing with the 'surplus' labour by means of the Bantustan and migrant labour systems is unique, and its impact on women particularly harsh.
These changes have been accompanied on the economic front by industrial and commercial development that has brought great prosperity to white South Africa even during periods of economic recession, now enjoying one of the highest standards of living in the world: measured in purely material terms, white women in particular have attained a life of exceptional privilege.
For the vast majority of African women, their lives have undergone substantial change, but they have not progressed towards a better life. On the contrary, their position is worse than it has ever been. Always the greatest victims of the system, they have become greater victims in a system whose anomalies increase.
Many claims have been made by the apartheid regime concerning the 'changing face' of apartheid. Fringe benefits have filtered down to a small section of blacks, so the casual visitor, seeing African men and women in the large towns in a variety of visible jobs that were closed to them a few years ago (cashiers in supermarkets, shop assistants and bank clerks) and noticing the relaxation of strict apartheid rules in some hotels and restaurants, or more Africans driving their own cars, receive the impression of change. But for all the acquisition of privileges the small African 'middle class' remains outside the laager of white society and white power; they are still segregated; they still carry passes or documents showing exemptions. They are still denied access to social, economic and political power. The few, as with Bantustan leaders, who are taken into the system become as despotic as their white masters. They do not represent the majority, who do not benefit by their private accumulation of showy houses and cars.
In many ways the lives of women have altered more substantially over the past few years than those of men. Women are becoming the heads of families to an ever - increasing extent, depending less than ever in the past on men for their survival and for the creation of a reasonable life, their independence and self - assurance is altering relationships.
The most oppressed and deprived women are the five million now living in the bantustans, trapped by the merciless constraints of apartheid that permit them no freedom of movement to seek work, to try and climb out of the pit of abysmal poverty and deprivation into which they have been cast. Mostly perpetual minors in law, denied rights over property and children, they are always subject to the authority of men. Yet even here, within this system, there is an increasing number of rural households headed by women. As Jacklyn Cock states, this contradiction between their subordinate existence and independent status further sharpens the edge of their disabilities.1
Yet women, contending with the devastating material conditions in the bantustans described in earlier pages, oppressed and deprived in every aspect of their lives, have emerged with militancy and confidence, with persistency and strength, in the struggle.
There seem to be vast contradictions between their status and deprivation, and on the other hand their strength and positive defiance.
The contradictions have entered the home. Many men in the liberation movements have shown an ambivalent attitude towards the women's movement, recognising the necessity for the organisation of women and for their part in political struggles, but sometimes resenting both the personal inconveniences (as in the two episodes in 1913 ad 1958, when many husbands paid fines to release their wives from jail) and also the threat of the abrogation of their own power over women. Yet women have often changed men's attitudes through their activities, as in the 1956 demonstration to Pretoria, which many men viewed with surprise and with awe, and which produced from men, who cared for children while the women were demonstrating, a co - operation that had not been evident in the past.
During the past few years there has been increasing recognition within the male - dominated organisations of the need for men to change their own attitudes; that the struggle itself demands the full and equal participation of the women. Speaking at the first conference of the Women's Section of the ANC held outside South Africa, in 1981, the President, Oliver Tambo, stated:
If we are to engage our full potential in pursuit of the goals of our revolutionary struggle, then, as revolutionaries, we should stop pretending that women in our movement have the same opportunities as men . . . On the other hand, women should stop behaving as if there was no place for them above the level of certain categories of involvement. They have a duty to liberate us men from antique concepts and attitudes about the place and role of women in society . . . The oppressor has, at best, a lesser duty to liberate the oppressed than the oppressed themselves. The struggle to conquer oppression in our country is the weaker for the traditionalist, conservative and primitive restraints imposed on women by man - dominated structures within our movement, as also because of equally traditionalist attitudes of surrender and submission on the part of women.2
Much more explicit attention is now being paid to the question of the emancipation of women and the role of women in the liberation struggles than ever in the past.
South African women are not indifferent to the feminist movements of other countries, and the literature of feminism has given impetus to research into the history and activities of women, and into the lives of women today, in areas that have never before been investigated. These are not mere academic exercises: they reveal circumstances, beliefs and changing attitudes that make it possible to open the way for a greater participation of women in the struggle for freedom, as well as uncovering the past history of women's struggles.
But at the same time women of developed countries can draw much from the struggle of women in South Africa. The fight to change their status is a political one because, without the ending of apartheid, there can never be any liberation for women. That is why the struggle to liberate women is also a part of the total struggle for liberation. Participating in it sharpens the women's perceptions of patriarchal oppression, whether rooted in colonial or in precolonial origins. Women must contend with this, nor can it be forgotten, for it holds them back from full participation in the fight to liberate South Africa.
Many Western feminists see the family as the seat of male primacy and of patriarchal oppression, maintaining that it has been the domestication of women, turning them into unpaid producers and reproducers, that has codified their oppression. But to women of South Africa the right to family life, to live as a family unit, remains a primary demand, and one that strikes at the very structure of apartheid - the migrant labour system.
All the issues that concern feminists in other countries must be seen in this context: sexual oppression, male chauvinism, discrimination within the law relating to employment, the need for divorce reform, reform of abortion laws - it is not that South African women are not concerned with these issues. It is that for a considerable proportion of the female population, these issues cannot arise in such specific ways.
Before one can speak of equal pay for equal work, one has to speak of the provision of work; before one can speak of reforming divorce law, one has to speak of abolishing the basis of the law which has created this distorted and perverted form of capitalist family . . . It is only the abolition of this and all its refinements that can alter their situation in any material sense.3
In South Africa black women, the most vulnerable of all people within the apartheid state, have been forced to embark on a struggle that takes them beyond their own specific oppression. The struggle of South African women for recognition as equal citizens with equal opportunities is primarily the struggle against apartheid, for national liberation. Nor is it a question of putting one first, then taking up the other. The victory of this struggle against apartheid is the absolute condition for any fundamental change in the social status of women; the participation of the women in this struggle is the absolute condition for its success. The participation of the women is an expression not only of their desire to rid all South Africa of the curse of apartheid, but also of their deep concern for their own status as women.
Thus under the conditions of apartheid South Africa's oppressed women cannot limit their objectives to those of simply trying to establish their legal rights in a modern industrialised society, nor can they hope to emerge with a few privileges in a male - dominated world. Instead they participate in the movement to destroy the whole basis of racial exploitation, and to open up the prospect of free development for both women and men. This is based on the understanding that the liberation of women is not simply a matter of amending laws or changing male attitudes, but of the fundamental restructuring of a society towards the aims of freedom and justice for all.
The struggle against apartheid has entered its most difficult and hardest phase: a time of confrontation when political struggle takes many different forms, of legality and illegality, of organisation and protest within the limitations of the suppressive regime, and of underground organisation and violent conflict.
The women of South Africa, always an integral part of this struggle, remain a key to its strength and mass development. They have come a long way: they have a long way to go.
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