Co-developing Local Feminist “Conceptual Vocabularies” While Strengthening Activism Through Critical Consciousness Raising with South Africa’s Mine and Farm Women

ABSTRACT

This article is a reflection on five feminist schools, popular education platforms, convened between 2017 and 2019 with two women’s groups organising in the platinum mines in Marikana, North West and commercial farms in uMgungundlovu in Kwa Zulu-Natal in South Africa. The first part of the article looks at the background to the feminist schools and reflects on the composition of the groups, the self-selection of participants who attended the feminist schools, the co-development of a flexible curriculum and the non-hierachical dialogical learning methodology employed. The second part hones in on the use of local languages and how they enriched our conversations and encouraged full participation. Here we also highlight some of the translation challenges we experienced when dialoguing and drawing from concepts central in feminist theory, analysis and critique, e.g. patriarchy, power, gender. To resolve the challenges, direct translations did not work; we thus used multiple local concepts, and layered these with local expressions that the women felt were close proximates. We argue in this paper that to strengthen activist movements there is a need to think through our “pedagogy of mobilisation” and to co-develop local feminist registers and grammars and “conceptual vocabularies”. We thus make a case for the development and refinement of indigenous feminist theories/concepts that are locally grounded but outward-looking, drawing from and in conversation with local languages, realities and activists. We hope this paper adds to debates on feminist popular education and pedagogical questions in feminist activism.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminist pedagogy
• local conceptual vocabularies
• feminist schools
• flexible curriculum
• local languages
• movement building
• popular education

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity programme (AFRE) and The Feminist LABS, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES), Mozambique for financial support. Thanks also to Charmaine Pereira and David Cooper for reading earlier versions of this paper and to Xolisa Guzula for our informal exchanges around some of these concepts in isiXhosa.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The definition of ‘women-only’ was open and inclusive and welcomed those who were gender non-conforming and queer. Only the uMgungundlovu group had gender non-conforming people.

2 The workers in Marikana were demanding a living wage of R12,500 and the massacre left 34 of them dead, 78 seriously injured and over 270 arrested, tortured and charged with the murder of their colleagues using an arcane law from the apartheid era (Benya 2015b).

3 In South Africa the population is divided into four major historically based apartheid racial categories: Africans, Coloured, Indians and Whites. African refers to the indigenous black African population; Coloured is the population group comprising mainly the indigenous Khoi and San people, descendants of enslaved people brought from the Dutch East Indies, as well as those who are racially mixed; Indian refers to people of Indian/Asian descent; and White to the descendants of settlers from Europe. Africans, Indians/Asian and Coloured people are collectively known as black people.

4 We use pseudonyms throughout the paper.

5 Women organising separately has a long history in South African activist spaces, see Hassim 2006; Seidman 1993; Mkhize 2012; Albertyn 1994.

6 Some Qina Mbokodo women did not join the feminist schools mainly because they were working and could not get days off and others had no child care.

7 SANCO is a civic society organisation of residents who live in economically deprived communities in South Africa. It emerged nationally in the 1980s and continues to play a key role in townships and informal settlements, with some arguing that while it is central in deepening democracy, it has also acted as a gatekeeper and monopolised resources (Heller and Ntlokonkulu 2001).

8 While these initiatives all focus on popular/political worker education, some of them stress the role of worker experience as opposed to conceptual-based theory.

9 Our definition of extractivism draws from Pereira and Tsikata’s (2021: 14), who define extractivism in this current juncture in Africa as the “accumulation of wealth through the extraction of a broad range of natural and human resources from colonial and ex-colonies … and the exportation of this wealth to the centres of global capital”. While we use this definition, we are also aware of criticisms that have been label against its expansive use. For more on this see Szeman and Wenzel (2021).

10 One woman demonstrated how one takes off their shoes in ways that intimidates the ‘enemy’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Asanda-Jonas Benya

Asanda Benya is a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cape Town. Her work focuses on the intersection of gender, class and race. She has published in labour and feminist journals in areas of women in mining, gender and the extractive industries, labour and social movements, and social and economic justice. She is currently working on a book project based on her ethnographic study on women underground miners.

Sithandiwe Yeni

Stha Yeni is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape. Her areas of research include land reform, small-scale agriculture, gendered nature of rural livelihoods and notions of belonging among former labour tenants. She has 15 years’ work experience in civil society organisations, working around land and agrarian transformation in South Africa including Surplus People Project, Oxfam South Africa and Land Accountability Research Centre at the University of Cape Town.