Feminism and Contemporary Culture in South Africa

This project1 was born out of the rapidly shifting cultural geographies of post-apartheid South Africa where the position of women illuminates critical issues about how the political and social structure negotiates its contradictions and safe spaces. Works dealing with the ambiguities and complexities of gender in South African culture were sought for this special issue of the interdisciplinary journal African Studies. Most of the articles in the collection emerge from the fields of literary and cultural studies, perhaps reflecting the bias of the editor, and highlight the range of gendered analyses within these fields currently. The review article that concludes the collection reflects such debates and scholarship in the social sciences. The lack of dialogue between disciplines, in this case between the humanities and social sciences, points towards fractures within gender studies as a whole and this special issue is no exception. The framework outlined in the introduction is one specific to literary and cultural studies, though the issues involved traverse disciplinary boundaries in a way that much scholarship has yet to accomplish.

The idea of being simultaneously seen and unseen, included and excluded, is familiar to studies on race and gender across disciplines. Historically, huge differences have shaped the lives of South African women from different racial backgrounds, but patriarchy has been the one constant ‘profoundly non-racial institution’ (Sachs 1993:13) across all communities. In her formative article on feminism in South Africa published in 1998, Melissa Steyn examines how the feminist movement is contributing towards processes of national reconstruction as it moved away from its largely white upper-class intellectual profile of the apartheid era (Steyn 1998:41). In the present, South Africa has the largest percentage of women in parliament in the world which would seem to support Steyn's decade old assertion of women's (as opposed to feminism's) increasing contribution in the ‘new’ South Africa. Yet, South Africa also has the highest levels of rape and violence against women in the world. These contradictory indicators highlight the particularity of South Africa's past, as well as the continuities between the apartheid and post-apartheid periods. While women's struggles were subordinated to the larger anti-apartheid struggle out of the necessities of a nationalist agenda, in a post-apartheid context, the residue of these modes and repertoires of operation coupled with the patriarchal nature of apartheid, has resulted in ambiguous gender positionings that are highlighted by such polarised statistics – where women are clearly both empowered and victimised, seen and unseen, included and excluded in different ways.

Issues surrounding victimhood, voice, agency, subjectivity, power, gaze, silences, knowledge and nation have often been recast in African feminist theory and need further exploration in South Africa today. Many women in South Africa, as in the rest of Africa, eschew the label ‘feminist’ for different reasons but still carry out a broad feminist agenda. Alternative terms for feminism abound in African feminist theory. Alice Walker coined the term ‘Womanist’ to highlight the racialised nature of experience and to centralise black women within a different sort of (polarised) feminist tradition that recognises social, political, national and cultural issues in its conception of gender; O'Molara Ogundipe uses ‘Stiwanism’ which is an acronym for social transformation including women; Werewere Liking, often viewed as the most radical of African feminist theorists, constructed the term ‘misovere’ to refer to a woman who has not come across an admirable man. Other theorists have chosen to retain the term feminist due to its cultural cache, but have recast it to reflect an African context where African feminism is seen as a type of historical contestation of the oppressive social and cultural conditions that surround women's lives in Africa (Meena 1992).

Across such theories lies the desire to assert a varied and ancient cultural history that centralises women in Africa – a history of women who have been excluded from official accounts by both their male counterparts and western constructions. Analyses of the various images of women, from both colonial and postcolonial perspectives, yield a particular history of representations of African women. A sexualised narrative was projected onto African women in European representations from the middle ages onwards. Nineteenth century colonial discourse sought to naturalise racial difference, specifically ‘licentiousness’, through the application of a blood discourse (Sharpley-Whiting 1999). While contemporary scholarship has traced the shifting representations of blackness in the European imagination, little attention was focused on how gender intersected with these imaginings until recently. The black venus stereotype, perhaps best embodied by Saartjie Baartman or the ‘Hottentot Venus’, projects this particular image of racialised sexual alterity. Christa Baiada, in her discussion of Zoë Wicomb's David's Story in this special issue, examines how the image of Baartman articulates the silences of the history of racialised sexual alterity into post-apartheid South Africa, as Wicomb traces its ruptures and continuities in the present. While the history of racialised sexual representations is utilised as a metonymic device in Baiada's article, Tom Odhiambo positions this history within a more contemporary paradigm of late-capitalist consumer culture in South Africa in his article in this journal. He constructs a cultural history of the black female body as both consumer and consumerable, through his analysis of gendered representations in popular magazines, in the apartheid and post-apartheid periods. Both articles point towards a reading of contemporary South African culture as marked by both rupture and continuity in terms of racialised sexual alterity.

One of the challenges of South African feminism has been to rid itself of such racialised stereotypes and practices, where in this context white women have sometimes been charged with usurping the voice of black women within the name of gendered empowerment. Chandra Mohanty (1991) situates this problem as one effecting all third-world women in different ways where western/ised women place themselves as the primary referent from which others are measured in terms of their deviation. Western feminist representations of other women thereby form a discursive practice that is implicated in similar processes of domination as the ones that they ironically seek to dislodge. Gayatri Spivak's (1988:286) work is a crucial intervention into such debates in her assertion of the difference between ‘speaking of’ and ‘speaking for’ in what she terms her project of ‘measuring silences’ – where the violence of representation is mitigated against the politics of erasure. The question of silence is a theme that runs through all of the articles in this special issue in different ways and is discussed further in this introduction.

Another challenge for South African feminism has been to incorporate varying traditions within a woman centred agenda that respects different ideas of tradition, be these traditions struggle-based or part of indigenous practice. A precedent setting case that reflects both these concerns is currently before the constitutional court in which a sixty-five year old African National Congress (ANC) member of parliament, Tinyiko Nwamitwa-Shilubana, is defending her traditional right to be restored as chief of a community near Tzaneen. Her male cousin occupied the position when she was unable to take up her position and is currently contesting her right to be a chief, despite her community supporting her appointment. She is the rightful heir through her father's royal line but the Pretoria high court and the Appeals Division ruled that under customary law, she could not be appointed chief (South Africa has a dual legal system where secular and customary law co-exist but secular law takes precedent over customary law in the case of any dispute between the two legal systems). This case highlights an important area of contention that requires further elaboration – what is tradition and who defines it? In most histories of colonial conquest, the colonising power refused to negotiate with women or acknowledge women as leaders in a public context. The collusion between colonial powers and indigenous male leaders led to female exclusion from higher structures of power across colonial sites from Africa to Asia to the Americas (although women were central to the colonial project's ‘civilising mission’, as they were often the agents for the transmission of Christianity and western ‘values’ in the domestic sphere). The colonialists were thereby able to incorporate local male leaders within their enterprise to varying degrees, while indigenous male leadership could consolidate power and exclude women from such operations. History, or tradition in this light, has therefore been re-written.

In South Africa, flexible customary practice allowed women to become chiefs, while the processes followed to appoint chiefs in general was more complex than the current laws touted as custom would have us believe:

‘Male primogeniture in most African cultures is based on a historic misinterpretation of customary law through the colonial codification of it into rigid rules … We are basically saying these versions of custom are distorted rules and are highly contested. Actual customary law in perpetuity changes as society changes’ … by unanimously appointing Shilubana, her community and its highest organ, the royal family, had in fact acted in accordance with the constitution and the white paper on traditional leadership, which said that customary law should evolve in line with the bill of rights. ‘So here was a community that was developing and changing, and the irony would be if the old, incorrect rule-based version is now used to close down a very significant transformation process.’ (Love in Terreblanche 2007)

The codification of traditional practice to undergird patriarchal constraints, coupled with an andro-centric legal system in a male-dominated present, is challenged by a progressive constitution that is only as strong as its legal application allows in post-apartheid South Africa. The outcome of this case, which has yet to receive much publicity, has the potential to transform the relationship between gender and widely held beliefs around what constitutes ‘authentic’ customary practice due to the particular parties involved in this case. Shilubana, as an ANC member of parliament with royal blood, may be able to utilise her political credentials to help transform ideas of indigenous traditional practice and gender.

The utilisation of ‘culture’ to enforce compliance, particularly in terms of gendered roles, is not a new phenomenon in any context. In a contemporary period where feminism has become decidedly unfashionable in public cultures (despite its popularity in South Africa in the 1990s), and with the Jacob Zuma rape trial pushing issues of women's rights into the national spotlight, how women's issues are recast and appropriated are important indicators of where discourse resides in the present. The discourse surrounding the Zuma rape trial keyed into a similar layer of conservative cultural practice that is often displayed in an attempt to reposition the terms of cultural debate. While the central defence in a rape trial necessarily hinges on the idea of ‘consent’, in the Zuma rape trial the notion of ‘Zuluness’ took central stage in defining the terms under which the trial was conducted, often acting as a smoke screen for the sexist underpinning of the issues at hand. Part of Zuma's defence hinged on the idea that it is incumbent on a Zulu man to satisfy an aroused woman who can be identified, literally, by her ‘dress’ code which in this case was a sarong-type skirt. Issues surrounding women's sexual availability to men within a patriarchal paradigm were obscured by the obtuse insertion of ‘culture’ into issues of women's rights over their own bodies in private spaces.

The insertion of cultural difference as a mode of defence in the mistreatment of women hinges on the idea of traditions being ahistorical, immutable and misogynistic – an insult to any dynamic tradition. The ‘one-hundred percent Zulu-boy’ T-shirts adorned by Zuma supporters as they shouted abuse at the complainant and members of women's organisations outside the trial attests to the effective nature of this sort of argument, as well as the willingness of the public to believe that Zulu culture is fundamentally misogynistic, rather than examining the underpinnings of such effective cultural spin. At a fundamental level, this sort of argument and the way that it was received by both the judge in this case (Van der Merwe) and in grassroots popular culture, attests to the stranglehold that colonial and apartheid stereotypes continue to have over our understandings of race and gender. Within this homogenising racist discourse, black men are stereotypically designated as being oversexed and culturally conservative, while black women are positioned as docile and sexually compliant. When Judge Van der Merwe questioned whether the Zuma complainant saw all sexual encounters as rape, he effectively punished her for stepping outside of her received role within the gendered and racialised discourse of the past – a discourse that seems to have continued into post-apartheid South Africa through a number of different quarters – in this case from seemingly opposing ends of the political spectrum in the form of an apartheid era judge and a stalwart of the anti-apartheid struggle who became the deputy president of the new nation. The old image of racialised sexual alterity seems to haunt the present.

Mmatshilo Motsei (2007) makes a similar argument in her book on the Zuma rape trial when she questions whether people were really shocked to hear Jacob Zuma's remarks about Zuluness and rape – ‘For many of us it was a reminder of the ways in which the white man's misinterpretation of African custom was assisted by and contributed to Black men's manipulation of tradition to perpetuate male domination’ (Motsei 2007:28). While her analysis is essentialist, Motsei links these issues to racial and gender stereotypes which South Africa has normalised in one of the few sustained critiques of the trial to emerge (it is interesting to note that no articles dealing with this case explicitly were submitted for consideration in this special issue even though the trial dominated the South African public imagination at the time). By exonerating Zuma in the trial, Motsei sees the judge as endorsing Zuma's behaviour as it conformed to what was expected of black men under apartheid. She furthermore reads Van der Merwe's archaic and widely debunked decision to allow the complainant's sexual history to be taken into account as tacit approval for men to dominate women sexually as it allows them to blame women for rape (Motsei 2007:25). While cultural difference is a lived relation, the idea that we are able to identify conservative cultural practice as belonging to a specific ethnic group (in this case ‘Zuluness’) as authentic cultural production points towards an atavistic understanding that we can live without. This sort of reactionary logic can be seen as forming a trajectory between systems of understanding from colonial times into the present where the otherness of ‘native’ cultures is claimed, projected and disavowed in the construction of knowledges. Valentine Mudimbe has shown how colonial discourse established such binary systems of understanding that postulated absolute difference between coloniser and colonised, Europe and Africa etc. as normative. Apartheid applied this logic to racial taxonomies (which I touched on above in discussing racialised sexual alterity), with patriarchal underpinnings running through both ontological systems of thought. This type of ‘apartheid’ logic can then be seen as a legacy of occidental thought that needs to be dismissed, rather than inverted in further analyses based on essentialisms.

A disturbing relationship is posited by the outcome and dynamics of this trial as the former left and right of the political spectrum merge in their understanding of acceptable gender norms and conduct. Can this overlay of left and right be read as a feature of the transition from apartheid to post-apartheid South Africa, or does such an understanding perpetuate the idea that women must bear the symbolic weight of the nation? Meg Samuelson (2007), in her groundbreaking study on gender and stories of the South African transition, examines the silence around violence against women:

These silences allow us to trace the discursive genealogies of sexual violence and permit other submerged spectres to emerge. Conveyed in the (un)spoken of these texts are the dangerous double binds in which women are placed during a political transition marked by disjunctures and continuities in racialised and gendered power; uttered in and through pointed silences is a complex engagement with the re-domestication of militant women. (Samuelson 2007:8)

What do these silences articulate about South Africa and the gendered experience of transition? Irene D'Almeida (1994:2/3) distinguishes between ‘to be silent’ and ‘to be silenced’. In defining silence as a type of articulation, African feminism redefines marginal discourses where an ability to ‘see power, knowledge and agency in the margins is to wrestle with contradictions …’ (Nnaemeka 1997:2). This redefinition dissolves the strict distinction between central and marginal, silence and speech, in that each bleeds into the other, forcing a reconsideration of theoretical and methodological conceptualisations. This theoretical shift redefines the terms of agency and calls binaries into question because the reality from which such analyses emerge disrupt the binaries themselves.

The idea of ambiguous positionings is central to African feminist scholarship and reflects both the position of women and feminism in South Africa today. In applying this logic to the South African context, Samuelson interrogates the applicability of African feminist theories to South Africa while further tailoring such conceptual shifts to the peculiarities of context. Using Adorno's idea that coming to terms with the past means more than knowing what happened, she traces the gendered recursions, discontinuities and continuities between past and present in South African cultural history. The issues surrounding gender in different sectors are read as unspoken histories that ‘can be sought in the very textual elisions ostensibly silencing them’ (Samuelson 2007:124). Laura Wright, in her article in this edition on JM Coetzee's female narrators, argues that a white South African feminist agenda is silenced through self-negating narratives and a positioning in-between two patriarchal systems of oppression – as white women are aggressors as colonisers but subjected as women. Yet by articulating such a silenced narrative, an additional layer of buried histories is unearthed.

The issues around women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) reflect the dynamics of silent histories in that the majority of people testifying before the TRC were women, but most spoke about their male family members. Women therefore both spoke and were silenced. If the TRC may be seen as a performance of national redemption (Samuelson 2007:100), what does it articulate when women's voices are only recorded when they describe male suffering? Their own stories appear briefly in the ghettoised special hearings on women but do not make up a significant proportion of histories recorded by the TRC. Samuelson questions the idea that the end of apartheid necessarily provided a space for women's voices to be heard, particularly around issues of sexual violence that often render victims mute (Samuelson 2007:20). This notion stands in contrast to the argument put forward by Barbara Russell in this special issue in her interrogation of the TRC's special hearings on women.

Russell argues that the special hearings on women shaped, perhaps even distorted, what was recorded by the TRC in that the Commissioners only focused on women as secondary victims or as victims of sexual violence. This distinction is crucial in that she sees the Commission as shaping women's testimony to reflect more on the abuses inflicted on their male family members, rather than their own suffering as agents, thereby centralising men in the story of active anti-apartheid resistance. Alternatively, when testimony on the abuse of women was heard, the Commissioners directed the women testifying towards the sexualised nature of the abuse rather than allowing them to focus on their own activism, thereby contributing towards the idea of female victimhood and further facilitating the re-domestication of militant women post-revolution. Anne McClintock (1995) has extensively examined the climate of fear created for women post-revolution as a disciplinary mechanism of patriarchy, ensuring their re-domestication and men's more dominant position again. This idea is fleshed out by Zoë Wicomb in David's Story, which is fast becoming the formative text in post-apartheid literature and one that the Baiada article extensively discusses in terms of the ambiguous position of women in the anti-apartheid struggle.

A number of other groundbreaking studies have recently been published that examine the position of women in political organisations. Shireen Hassim (2006) links the development of feminism in South Africa to the extent to which nationalist organisations allowed feminist approaches to thrive (Hassim 2006:9). She sees political activism in postcolonial contexts as enabled by larger struggles against colonialism, which results in extensive alliances between women's and nationalist organisations. This negotiated alliance varies and in the South African context, the power struggle between nationalists and feminists within the ANC Women's League resulted in feminists leaving the organisation and the league becoming an ineffective political vehicle for women (Hassim 2006:13). Natasha Erlank's review article outlines further developments in South African gender studies. Of the books she reviews, three are single-authored monographs dealing explicitly with women's political activities in the region (Britton, Geisler, Hassim) and two of the books are edited volumes which cover women's and gender issues through the lens of citizenship and the law (Gouws et al., Bonthuys and Albertyn). The thread linking these books is women as political subjects: women and their access to the law, women and citizenship, women in politics.

Similar issues are articulated about contemporary South African culture in the articles by Shelley-Jean Bradfield and Chris Thurman in this special issue, through their different research into television programmes. Bradfield examines the locally produced series Home Affairs, focusing on alternative types of masculinity portrayed in the drama. She sees the programme as articulating a broader range of performances of masculinities that are available in a transformed society where gender relations reflect the alteration in social norms post-apartheid. While this television series is read as reflecting positive aspects of contemporary public cultures, Chris Thurman's article positions Oprah's television talk-show series as reflecting some of the less transformative aspects of contemporary South African public cultures. Oprah is a daily feature on South African television, which Thurman reads as misappropriating culturally distinct experiences to construct a generic female biography. Such homogenisation attests to the relentless insertion of this local market into a global cultural economy that furthers the gap between rich and poor, and has a particular resonance in South Africa due to apartheid history. The difference between Bradfield and Thurman's positioning of popular television programmes, and what they articulate about contemporary culture, is indicative of the ambiguities inherent in South African cultural formations. The diverse nature of all the articles in this special issue highlights the idea of ambiguous positionings central to African feminist scholarship and reflects both the position of women and feminism in South Africa today – where women are victims and oppressors, seen and unseen, included and excluded in the imbricated cultural sites that make up South Africa.

Notes

1. I would like to thank Prof Shireen Hassim for her invaluable assistance with this project.