‘It's not right!’: Death as Gendered Experience in Contemporary South Africa

Abstract

This article examines how the concept of ‘not-rightness’ is embedded in African women's talk and sense-making about death in present-day urban South Africa. Moving from a Christian NGO context in Pretoria's inner city to the surrounding townships, it focuses on the ways women NGO workers engage with notions of rights, empowerment and behavioural change in their concurrent roles as kin, burial society members, widows and lovers of deceased persons. It argues that the senses of not-rightness women express in relation to these gendered roles are newly animated by South Africa's turn to democracy and the dramatic impact of HIV/AIDS; senses which, if subtly, speak to locally salient, vernacularised conceptions of ‘women's rights’ and ‘fidelity’. Through two case studies – the first of the death of an elderly woman; the second of the murder of an interlocutor's boyfriend – the article elucidates the central role of death experiences in women's (re)conceptualisations of gender identity and subjectivity in the post-apartheid moment. More broadly, it reiterates the need to move beyond questions of the limits of rights-based rhetoric to analyses attentive to the complex, contingent and possibly contradictory ways people evoke such discourses.

Keywords:

• death
• gender
• not-rightness
• democracy and HIV/AIDS
• women's rights
• fidelity
• South Africa

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Sheri Gibbings, Michael Lambek, Lieketseng Mohlakoana-Motopi, Fiona Ross, Elaine Salo and Todd Sanders for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. A later version received generous and valuable feedback from Rebekah Lee and Megan Vaughan, for which I am especially grateful, and from an anonymous African Studies reviewer. The research on which this article is based was supported by a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and a Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Institute for Women's and Gender Studies, University of Pretoria in March 2010, and at the ‘Managing Uncertainty: Death and Loss in Africa’ conference held at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), University of the Witwatersrand in April 2010.

In 2000 Pretoria was incorporated in the City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality. This new administrative region contains many of the surrounding areas which previously, according to the logic of the ‘apartheid city’ urban planning model, were governed separately, including the townships of Atteridgeville, Mamelodi and Soshanguve. In Pretoria's inner city and surrounding townships, however, people rarely used the name ‘Tshwane’, continuing to refer to the different areas within this region by their established names.

I describe the NGO, including women's positions as participants and lay employees therein, in greater detail below and in note 8.

Women's movements between the inner city and various townships call to mind the extensive literature pertaining to the migrant labour system under colonial capitalism and apartheid, particularly studies concentrating on women's experiences of labour migration and urban life (Bozzoli 1991; Cock 1989; James 1999; Lee 2009; Van der Vliet 1991; Walker 1990). In the post-apartheid period some scholars have reconsidered the structuration of urban-rural relations and/or urban township life (for example Bank 1999, 2001; Lee 2011; Ross 2010; Salo 2003), while others have turned their attention to the transformative processes at work in inner cities (for example Landau 2006; Margaretten 2011; Morris 1999). Within these latter literatures, however, ethnographic studies of how women and men negotiate their lives between such diverse urban domains as inner cities and townships remain scarce (but see Mbembe et al. 2004).

Statistics SA (2009) has reported that the annual number of registered deaths grew from about 320,000 deaths in 1997 to just over 612,000 in 2006, with a slight drop in 2007. Of the top 25 causes of death in 2007, ‘Ill defined natural’ topped the list (at 83,208 deaths), followed by ‘Respiratory tuberculosis’ at number two (66,500 deaths), ‘HIV/AIDS’ at number five (38,751 deaths), ‘Injuries with undetermined intent’ at number eight (20,128 deaths), ‘Road injuries’ at number 18 (6,038 deaths), ‘Mechanical forces; firearm’ at number 22 (4,903 deaths), and ‘Interpersonal violence without firearm’ at 23 (4,813 deaths). The highest percentage of deaths occurred among black Africans (62.5 per cent), followed by whites (6 per cent), coloureds (4.3 per cent) and Indians/Asians (1.3 per cent) – but with a large number classified as ‘Other, Unknown or Unspecified’ (25.9 per cent). Problems with these estimates abound due to the high number of deaths classified as ‘ill-defined’, misclassification, and the fact that many deaths remain unregistered (Bradshaw et al. 2010). According to Rebekah Lee and Megan Vaughan, in South Africa ‘violence (including self-inflicted violence and road accidents, as well as criminal violence) is the leading cause of mortality and morbidity’ (2008:351).

This initial mandate bore a notable resemblance to the Afrikaner nationalist project of ‘uplifting poor whites’ of the first half of the 20^th century and beyond (see for example du Toit 2003; O'Meara 1983).

The three languages spoken most often at JPP were English, Afrikaans and Northern Sotho; beyond these, Shangaan was also common. While the majority of the research was carried out in English, some was also conducted in Afrikaans and in Northern Sotho.

These programmes and projects were operated through an institutional framework that divided employment positions into three main levels: top management, middle management, and lay posts. The majority of the African women I worked with were employed at the last of these levels. As lay workers they did not have a tertiary education; while some had gained matric (a high school diploma), others had not. Lay posts included a variety of positions, ranging from employment in a specific programme or project to general cleaning, handyman or guarding jobs. In 2006/07 the monthly salaries of lay workers ranged from R1,000 (about US$140 in 2007) to R2,500 (US$350). Besides these positions, two other categories of persons were also recognised within the NGO: participants and clients. Participants were those who partook in the NGO's job training programmes (sewing, beading and cooking classes), while clients were those who (partially) depended upon the NGO out of need or to ensure or enhance their basic survival. In the region of the everyday the boundaries between clients, participants and lay workers were permeable, and people often moved between these positions or held multiple roles at once.

Based on an average 2007 exchange rate of ZAR1 = US$0.14.

The use of the word ‘superstition’ was ambiguous here, and highlights the difficulties and limits of the fieldwork endeavour (including the position of the researcher versus ‘the researched’) and problems of language and translation. In the case at hand it was telling that a few hours earlier, at Keromang's grave, Gloria and Sonto had vigorously participated in the reciting of poems, singing and dancing to wish Keromang well on her journey of joining the ancestors.

This ‘softly-softly manner’, Hassim elaborates, has entailed pointing to ‘the reciprocal relations of obligation that characterise many practices that are based on the assumptions of women's neediness or vulnerability’. This observation has led gender experts to emphasise so-called ‘living law’, which is – wrongly, in Hassim's estimation – seen to be much more open to women's equality claims than is customary law (2009:71).

A unit of the National Prosecuting Authority of South Africa (NPA), the Scorpions came into operation under ex-President Thabo Mbeki in January 2001, charged with the task of investigating serious organised crime and unlawful conduct. Over the next years they became well known for their raids of houses of high-ranking ANC politicians, including – given alleged corruption in the South African Arms Deal of 1999 – that of Jacob Zuma, then deputy president. The ANC's decision to merge the Scorpions with the South African Police Service (SAPS) in June 2008, thereby greatly reducing their power, was widely criticised as a deliberate move to protect corrupt ANC officials. The unit was abolished in October 2008.

After James died, there were still a few occasions when Nyeleti referred to the not-rightness of his actions by saying he had been ‘stupid’ and ‘foolish’. At this time too, she once entertained the possibility of it having been the wife-lover's muti (witchcraft-related substances) that had lured James to her.

See Scorgie et al. (2009) for an exception. The focus of this article is on vaginal practices (intra-vaginal cleansing, drying and tightening) used by women in KwaZulu-Natal, one of the motivations for which, the authors suggest, is to ensure men's fidelity.