Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family1

Anne McClintock

All nationalismsare gendered,all are invented,snd all are dangerous- dangerous,not in EricHobsbawm's sense as havingto be opposed,but in the sense of representing relations to political power and to the technologiesof violence.Nationalism, as ErnestGellner notes, invents nationswhere they donot exist, andmost modern nations, despite their appeal to an august and immemorialpast, are of recent invention (Gellner,1964). Benedict Anderson warns, however, that Gellnertends to assimilate 'invention'to 'falsity' rather than to 'imagining'and 'creation'.Anderson, by contrast,views nationsas 'imaginedcommuni- ties' in the sense that they are systems of cultural representation wherebypeople come to imagine a shared experienceof identification with an extendedcommunity (Anderson, 1991: 6). As such, nations are not simply phantasmagoriaof the mind, but are historicaland insti- tutional practices through which social differenceis invented and performed.Nationalism becomes, as a result, radicallyconstitutive of people'sidentities, throughsocial contests that are frequentlyviolent and always gendered.But if the invented nature of nationalismhas found wide theoreticalcurrency, explorations of the genderingof the nationalimaginary have been conspicuouslypaltry. All nations dependon powerfulconstructions of gender.Despite nationalisms'ideological investment in the idea of popular unity, nations have historicallyamounted to the sanctionedinstitutionaliz- ationof genderdifference. No nationin the worldgives womenand men the same accessto the rights and resourcesof the nation-state.Rather than expressingthe floweringinto time of the organic essence of a timeless people, nations are contested systems of cultural represen- tation that limit and legitimizepeoples' access to the resourcesof the nation-state.Yet with the notable exceptionof Frantz Fanon, male theorists have seldom felt moved to explore how nationalism is

FemInIstReuiew No 44, Summer 1993 62 FeministReview

implicatedin gender power.As a result, as CynthiaEnloe remarks, nationalismshave Ctypicallysprung from masculinized memory, mascu- linizedhumiliation and masculinizedhope' (Enloe, 1989: 44). GeorgeSantayana, for one, gives voice to a well-establishedmale view:COur nationalism is like ourrelationship to women:too implicated in our moral nature to be changed honourably,and too accidental to be worth changing'.Santayana's sentence could not be said by a woman, for his Cour'of national agency is male, and his male citizen stands in the same symbolicrelation to the nation as a man stands to a woman.Not only are the needs of the nationhere identified with the frustrationsand aspirationsof men, but the representationof male national power depends on the prior constructionof gender difference. For Gellner,the very definitionof nationhoodrests on the male recognitionof identity:CMen are of the same nation if and only if they recognizeeach other as beingfromthe samenation.' (Gellner, 1964) For Etienne Balibar, such recognitionaligns itself inevitably with the notionof a Crace'structured about the transmissionof male powerand property:CUltimately the nationmust align itself, spirituallyas well as physicallyor carnally,with the C4race",the C4patrimony"to be protected fromall degradation'(Balibar, 1991, my emphasis).Even Fanon, who at other momentsknew better, writes 'Thelook that the native turns on the settlertown is a lookof lust . . . to sit at the settler'stable, to sleep in the settler's bed, with his wife if possible. The colonizedman is an enviousman' (Fanon, 1963: 30). ForFanon, both colonizer and colonized are hereunthinkingly male, and the manichaeanagon of decolonization is wagedover the territorialityof female,domestic space. All too often in male nationalisms,gender differencebetween women and men serves to symbolicallydefine the limits of national differenceand power between men. Excludedfrom direct action as nationalcitizens, women are subsumedsymbolically into the national bodypolitic as its boundaryand metaphoric limit: CSingapore girl, you're a great way to fly.' Womenare typically construedas the symbolic bearers of the nation, but are denied any direct relation to national agency.As Elleke Boehmernotes in her fine essay, the Cmotherland'of male nationalismmay thus Cnotsignifbr C4home" and C4source"to women' (Boehmer,1991: 5). Boehmernotes that the male rolein the nationalist scenariois typicallyCmetonymic', that is, men are contiguouswith each other and with the national whole. Women,by contrast,appear cin a metaphoricor symbolic role' (Boehmer, 1991:6). In an important intervention,Nira Yuval-Davisand Floya Anthias thus identify five major ways in which women have been implicated in nationalism (Yuval-Davisand Anthias, 1989: 7): * as biologicalreproducers of the membersof nationalcollectivities * as reproducersof the boundariesof nationalgroups (through restric- tions on sexualor maritalrelations) * as activetransmitters and producersof the nationalculture Nationand Family 63 s as symbolicsignifiers of nationaldifference * as activeparticipants in nationalstruggles Nationalismis thus constitutedfrom the very beginningas a gendered discourse,and cannotbe understoodwithout a theoryof genderpower. Nonethe less, theoriesof nationalism reveal a doubledisavowal. If male theoristsare typicallyindifferent to the genderingof nations,feminist analyses of nationalismhave been lamentablyfew and far between. Whitefeminists, in particular,have been slowto recognizenationalism as a feminist issue. In much Western,socialist feminism, as Yuval- Davis andAnthias point out, <[i]ssuesof ethnicityand nationalityhave tendedto be ignored.' A feminist theory of nationalismmight be strategicallyfourfold: investigating the gendered formationof sanctioned male theories; bringinginto historicalvisibility women's active culturaland political participationin nationalformations; bringing nationalist institutions into criticalrelation with othersocial structures and institutions,while at the sametime payingscrupulous attention to the structuresof racial, ethnic and class power that continue to bedevil privilegedforms of temlmsm.^ * ^

The national family of man A paradoxlies at the heart of most national narratives.Nations are frequentlyfigured through the iconographyof familial and domestic space. The term Cnation'derives from Cnatio':to be born.We speak of nationsas Cmotherlands'and Cfatherlands'.Foreigners Cadopt' countries that are not their native homes,and are Cnaturalized'into the national family. We talk of the Family of Nations, of Chomelands'and Cnative' lands. In Britain, immigrationmatters are dealt with at the Home Office;in the United States, the Presidentand his wife are called the First Family. Winnie Mandelawas, until her recent fall from grace, honouredas SouthAfrica's CMother of the Nation'.In this way, nations are symbolicallyfigured as domestiogenealogies.Yet, at the same time, sincethe midnineteenth century in the West,Cthe family' itself has been figuredas the antithesisof history. The familytrope is importantin at least two ways.First, the family offers a Cnatural'figure for sanctioning social hierarchy within a putativeorganic unity of interests.Second, it offersa Cnatural'trope for figuringhistorical time. After 1859 and the adventof socialDarwinism, Britain'semergent national narrative took increasing shape around the image of the evolutionaryFamily of Man. The Cfamily'offered an indispensablemetaphoric figure by whichhierarchical (and, one might add,often contradictory) social distinctions could be shapedinto a single historicalgenesis narrative.Yet a curiousparadox emerges. The family as a metaphoroffered a single genesis narrativefor national history, while, at the same time, the family as an institutionbecame voided of history.As the nineteenthcentury drew on, the familyas an institution 64 FeministReview

was figured as existing, by natural decree, beyond the commodity market,beyond politics, and beyondhistory proper.(Davidoff, L. and Hall, C, 1987)The familythus became,at one and the same time, both the organizingfigure for national history, as well as its antithesis. EdwardSaid has pointedto a transitionin the late Victorianupper middleclass froma cultureof'filiation' (familial relations) to a cultureof 'affiliation'(non-familial relations). Said arguesthat a perceivedcrisis in the late Victorianupper-middle-class family took on the aspect of a pervasive cultural affliction.The decay of filiation was, he argues, typicallyattended by a secondmoment - the turn to a compensatory orderof affiliation,which might variously be an institution,a vision, a credo,or a vocation.While retaining the powerfuldistinction between filiationand affiliation,I wish to complicatethe linear thrust of Said's story.In the courseof the nineteenthcentury, the socialfunction of the great service families (whichhad been invested in filiative rituals of patrilinealrank and subordination) became displaced on to the national bureaucracy.So, too, the filiativeimage ofthe familywas projectedon to emergingaffiliative institutions as their shadowy,naturalized form. Thus, I argue,the filiativeorder did not disappear:rather it flourished as a metaphoricafter-image, reinvented within the new ordersof the nation-state, the industrial bureaucracy,and imperial capitalism. Increasingly,filiation took an imperialshape, as the culturalinvention of the evolutionaryFamily of Manwas projectedboth on to the national metropolisand the colonialbureaucracy as its natural, legitimizing shape. The significanceof the familytrope was twofold.First, the family offeredan indispensablefigure for sanctioning social hierarchy within a putativeorganic unity of interests.Since the subordinationof womanto man,and child to adult,was deemeda naturalfact, other forms of social hierarchy could be depicted in familial terms to guarantee social differenceas a categoryof nature.The familyimage was thus drawnon to figure hierarchywithin unity as an 'organic'element of historical progress,and therebybecame indispensable for legitimizingexclusion andhierarchy within non-familial (affiliative) social formations such as nationalism,liberal individualismand imperialism.The metaphoric depictionof social hierarchyas natural and familial - the 'national family',the global 'familyof nations',the colonyas a 'familyof black childrenruled over by a white father'- thus dependedon the prior naturalizingof the social subordinationof womenand childrenwithin the domesticsphere. Secondly,the family offeredan indispensabletrope for figuring whatwas oftenviolent, historical change as natural,organic time. Since childrenCnaturally' progress into adults,projecting the familyimage on to nationaland imperial CProgress' enabled what was oftenmurderously violentchange to be legitimizedas the progressiveunfolding of natural decree.National or imperial intervention could be figuredas an organic, non-revolutionaryprogression that naturally contained hierarchy within unity:paternal fathers ruling benignly over immature children. Nationand Family 65

The evolutionaryfamily thus captured,in one potenttrope, the idea of sociald7scontinuity (hierarchy through space) and temporaldisconti- nuity(hierarchy across time) as a natural,organic continuity. The idea of the Familyof Manbecame invaluable in its capacityto give state and imperialintervention the alibiof nature. As Fanon eloquentlydescribes it in 'Algeriaunveiled', imperial interventionfrequently took shape as a domesticrescue drama. 'Around the family life of the Algerian,the occupierpiled up a whole mass of judgements. . . thus attemptingtoconfine the Algerianwithin a circleof guilt? (Fanon, 1965:38). The dream of the 'total domesticationof Algeriansociety' came to haunt colonialauthority, and the domesti- cated,female body became the terrainover whichthe militarycontest was fought. . . n mocern Europe, citizenship is the legal representationof a person'srelationship to the rightsand resources of the nation-state.But the putatively universalist concept of national citizenship becomes unstable when seen from the position of women. In post-French RevolutionEurope, women were not incorporateddirectly into the nation-stateas citizens,but onlyindirectly through men, as dependent membersof the family in private and publiclaw. The CodeNapoleon was the firstmodern statute to decreethat the wife'snationality should follow her husband's,an example other Europeancountries briskly followed.A woman'spoliticalrelation to the nationwas submergedas a socialrelation to a man throughmarriage. For women,citizenship in the nationwas mediatedby the marriagerelation within the family.

The gendering of nation time A numberof criticshave followedTom Nairn in namingthe nation'the modernJanus' (Nairn, 1977). For Nairn, the nation takes shape as a contradictoryfigure of time: one face gazing back into the primordial mists of the past, the other into an infinite future. Deniz Kandiyoti expresses the temporal contradictionwith clarity: 4[Nationalism] presents itself both as a modernproject that melts and transforms traditionalattachments in favourof new identitiesand as a reflectionof authentic cultural values culled from the depths of a presumed communalpast' [Kandiyoti, 1992). Bhabha, following Nairn and Ander- son, writes:sNations, like narratives,lose their originsin the myths of time and only fully realize their horizonsin the mind'seye' (Bhabha, 1991:1). Bhabha and Andersonborrow here on Walter Benjamin's crucialinsight into the temporalparadox of modernity.For Benjamin, a centralfeature of nineteenthcentury industrial capitalism was the 'use of archaic images to identify what was historically new about the "nature"of commodities'(Buck-Morss, 1989: 67). In Benjamin'sinsight, the mappingof'Progress' depends on systematicallyinventing images of 'archaic'time to identifywhat is historically'new' about enlightened, nationalprogress. Anderson can thus ask:'Supposing "antiquity" were, 66 FeministReview

at a certainhistorical juncture, the necessaryconsequence of "novelty?' (Anderson,1991: xiv). Whatis less often noticed,however, is that the temporalanomaly within nationalism- veering betweennostalgia for the past, and the impatient,progressive sloughing offof the past - is typicallyresolved by figuringthe contradictionas a 'natural'division of gender.Women are representedas the atavistic and authentic'body' of nationaltradition (inert, backward-looking,and natural),embodying nationalism's con- servative principle of continuity. Men, by contrast, represent the progressiveagent of nationalmodernity (forward-thrusting, potent and historic),embodying nationalism's progressive, or revolutionaryprin- ciple of discontinuity.Nationalism's anomalous relation to timeis thus managedas a naturalrelation to gender. Johannes Fabian's important meditation on time and anthro- pology,IEme and the Other(1983), shows how, followingDarwin, the socialevolutionists broke the holdof biblical chronology (chronicle time) by secularizingtime and placing it at the disposal of the empirical, imperialproject (chronological time). In orderto do this, Fabianpoints out, 'they spatialized time'. With the publicationof The Origin of Species,Charles Darwin bestowed on the developingglobal project of empiricisma decisivedimension - secularTime as the agentof a unified worldhistory. The axis of timewas projectedon to the axis of space,and historybecame global. Now not only natural space,but also historical time, couldbe collectedand mappedon to a global,taxonomic science of the surface.Most importantly, history, especially national and imperial history,took on the characterof a spectacle. The exemplaryfigure for spatializingtime was the Family Tree. The socialevolutionists took the ancientimage of the divine,cosmologi- cal Tree and secularizedit as a natural genealogyof global,imperial history. In the secularizedTree of Time, three principles emerge. Mappedagainst the global Tree, the world'sdiscontinuous 'nations' appear to be marshalledwithin a single, hierarchicalEuropean ur- narrative. Second, history is imaged as naturally teleological, an organicprocess of upwardgrowth, with the Europeannation as the apogeeof progress.Third, inconvenient discontinuities are rankedand subordinatedinto a hierarchicalstructure of branchingtime - the differentialprogress of'racially' different nations mappedagainst the tree's self-evidentboughs, with 'lessernations' destined, by nature,to perchon its lowerbranches. Time,however, was thus not onlysecularized, it was domesticated, a point Fabian, for one, does not address. Social evolutionismand anthropologygave to national politics a concept of natural time as familial. In the image of the FamilyTree, evolutionary'progress' was representedas a seriesof anatomicallydistinct 'family' types, organized into a linearprocession. Violent national and imperial change thus took on the characterof an evolvingspectacle, under the organizingrubric of the family. The merging of the 'racial'evolutionary Tree and the 'gendered'Family into the Family Tree of Man providedscientific Nationand Family 67 racismwith a simultaneouslygendered and racial image through which it couldpopularize the idea of imperialProgress. Britain'semerging national narrativegendered time by figuring women(like the colonizedand the workingclass) as inherentlyatavistic - the conservativerepository of the national archaic.Women, it was argued, did not inhabit history proper, but existed, like colonized peoples,in a permanentlyanterior time within the modernnation, as anachronistichumans, childlike, irrational and regressive- the living archiveof the nationalarchaic. White, middle-class men, by contrast, were seen to embodythe forward-thrustingagency of national 'pro- gress'.Thus the figureofthe nationalFamily of Man reveals a persistent paradox.National 'Progress'(conventionally, the invented domainof male, public space) was figured as familial, while the family itself (conventionally,the domainof private, female space) was figuredas beyondhistory. With these theoreticalremarks in mind,I wish now to turn to the paradoxicalrelation between the inventedconstructions of familyand nation, as they havetaken shapewithin South Africa in both black and white women's contradictoryrelations to the competing nationalgenealogies. Onecan safelysay, at this point,that thereis no singlenarrative of the nation. Differentgenders, classes, ethnicities and generationsdo not identifywith, or experiencethe myriadnational formations in the sameway; nationalisms are invented, performed and consumed in ways that do not follow a universal blueprint. At the very least, the breathtakingEurocentricism of Hobsbawm'sdismissal of ThirdWorld nationalismswarrants sustained criticism.In a gesture of sweeping condescension,Hobsbawm nominates Europe as nationalism's'original home',while 'all the anti-imperialmovements of any significance'are unceremoniouslydumped into three categories:mimicry of Europe, anti-Westernxenophobia, and the 'naturalhigh spiritsof martialtribes' (Hobsbawm,1990: 151). A feministinvestigation of nationaldifference might, by contrast,take into accountthe dynamicsocial and historic contexts of national struggles, their strategic mobilizingof popular forces, their myriad,varied trajectories,and their relation to other social institutions.We might do well to developa more theoretically complex,and strategicallysubtle genealogy of nationalisms.In South Africa, certainly,the competingAfrikaner and Africannationalisms have had bothdistinct and overlappingtrajectories, with very different consequencesfor women.

Afrikaner nationalism and gender Until the 1860s,Britain had scantinterest in its unpromisingcolony at the southerntip of Africa.Only upon the discoveryof diamonds(1867) and gold(1886) were the UnionJack andthe redcoatsshipped out with any real sense of imperialmission. But very quickly,mining needs for cheap labourand a centralizedstate collidedwith traditionalfarming 68 FeministReview

interests,and out of these contradictions,in the conflictfor control over Africanland and labour,exploded the Anglo-BoerWar of 1899-1902. Afrikanernationalism was a doctrineof crisis.After their defeatby the British, the bloodiedremnants of the scatteredBoer communities had to forge a new counter-cultureif they were to survive in the emergent capitalist state. From the outset, the invention of this counter-culturehad a clear class component.When the Boer generals and the British capitalists swore blood-brotherhoodin the Union of 1910, the rag-taglegion of'poor whites' with little or no prospects,the modestclerks and shopkeepers,the small farmersand poorteachers, the intellectualsand petite bourgeoisie,all precariousin the new state, beganto identifythemselves as the vanguardof a new Afrikanerdom, the chosen emissaries of the national volk (Moodie,1975; O'Meara, 1983). To beginwith, however,Afrikaners had no monolithicidentity, no commonhistoric purpose, and no singleunifying language. They were a disunited,scattered people, speaking a medleyof High Dutchand local dialects,with smatteringsof the slave,Nguni and Khoisanlanguages - scorned as the 'kombuistaal'(kitchen-language) of house-servants, slaves and women.Afrikaners therefore had, quite literally,to invent themselves. The new, invented communityof the volk requiredthe consciouscreation of a single print-language,a popularpress and a literatepopulace. At the sametime, the inventionoftradition required a class of cultural brokersand image-makersto do the inventing.The 'languagemovement' of the early twentieth century,in the flurry of poems,magazines, newspapers, novels and countlesscultural events, providedjust sucha movement,fashioning the myriadBoer vernaculars into a singleidentifiable Afrikaans language. In the earlydecades of the twentiethcentury, as IsabelHofmeyr has brilliantlyshown, an elabor- ate labourof'regeneration' was undertaken,as the despised'Hotnot- staal' ('Hottentot'slanguage') was revampedand purgedof its rural, "degenerate"associations, and elevated to the status of the august 'mothertongue' of the Afrikaanspeople (Hofmeyr, 1987: 97). In 1918, Afrikaanswas legallyrecognized as a language. At the same time, the inventionof Afrikanertradition had a clear gendercomponent. In 1918,a small,clandestine clique of Afrikaans men launcheda secret society, with the express mission of capturingthe loyalties of dispiritedAfrikaners and fosteringwhite male business power. The tiny white brotherhoodswiftly burgeonedinto a secret, country-widemafia that cameto exertenormous power over all aspects of Nationalistpolicy (Moodie,1975; O'Meara,1983). The genderbias of the society,as of Afrikanerdomas a whole,is neatly summedup in its name: the Broederbond(the brotherhood).Henceforth, Afrikaner nationalismwould be synonymouswith white male interests, white male aspirationsand white male politics.Indeed, in a recent effortto shore up its waning power, the Broederbondis currently debating whetherto admitso-called 'Coloured' Afrikaans speaking men into the brotherhood.All womenwill, however,continue to be barred. Nationand Family 69

In the voluminousAfrikaner historiography, the historyof the volk is organizedaround a male nationalnarrative figured as an imperial journeyinto emptylands. The journey proceeds forwards in geographi- cal space,but backwardsin racial andgender time, to whatis figuredas a prehistoriczone of linguistic, racial and gender 'degeneration'.The mythof the 'emptyland' is simultaneouslythe mythof the 'virginland' - effectinga doubleerasure. Within the colonialnarrative, to be 'virgin'is to be empty of desire,voided of sexual agency,and passivelyawaiting the thrusting, male inseminationof Europeanmilitary history, lan- guageand 'reason'. The feminizing of'virgin' colonial lands also effects a territorialappropriation, for if the land is virgin,Africans cannot claim aboriginalterritorial rights, and the white male patrimonycan be violentlyassured. At the heart of the continent, an historic agon is staged, as 'degenerate'Africans 'falsely' claim entitlementto the land.A divinely organizedmilitary conflict baptizes the nationin a male birthingritual, which grants to white men the patrimonyof land and history. The nation emerges as the progenyof male history throughthe motorof military might. At the centre of this imperial gospel, stands the contradictoryfigure of the volksmoeder,the motherof the nation. The centralemblem of Afrikaanshistoriography is the GreatTrek, and each trek is figuredas a familypresided over by a single, epic male patriarch.In 1938, two decadesafter the recognitionof Afrikaansas a language, an epic extravaganzaof invented traditionenflamed Afri- kanerdominto a deliriumof nationalistpassion. Dubbedthe Tweede Trek(Second Trek), or the Eeufees(Centenary), the eventcelebrated the Boers'first mutinous Great Trek in 1838away from British laws andthe effronteryof slave emancipation.The Centenaryalso commemorated the Boer massacre of the Zulus at the Battle of Blood River. Nine replicas of Voortrekkerwagons were built - the reinventionof the archaicto sanctionmodernity. Each wagon was literallybaptized, and named after a male Voortrekkerhero. No wagonwas named after an adult woman.One was, however,called generically,Vrou en Moeder (wifeand mother). This wagon,creaking across the country,symbolized woman'srelation to the nationas indirect,mediated through her social relationto men, her nationalidentity lying in her unpaidservices and sacrifices,through husband and family, to the uolk.Each wagon became the microcosmof colonial society at large: the whip-wieldingwhite patriarch prancing on horseback,black servants toiling alongside, white mother and childrensequestered in the wagon - the women's starchedwhite bonnetssignifying the purityof the race, the decorous surrenderoftheir sexuality to the patriarch,and the invisibilityof white femalelabour. The wagons rumbledalong differentroutes from Cape Town to Pretoria,sparking along the way an orgy of national pageantry,and engulfingthe countryin a four-monthspectacle of inventedtradition. Alongthe way, white men grew beardsand white womendonned the ancestralbonnets. Huge crowdsgathered to greet the wagons.As the 70 FeministReview

Womenas BoundaryMarkers of theAfrikaans Nation

trekkerspassed throughthe towns, babies were named after trekker heroes,as wereroads and public buildings. Not a fewgirls were baptized with the improbablebut popularfavourite: Eeufesia (Centeneria). The affair climaxedin Pretoriain a spectacularmarathon, with explicit ThirdReich overtones, led by thousandsof Afrikanerboy scouts bearing flaemingtorches. The first point about the TweedeTrek is that it invented white nationalist traditions and celebratedunity where none had existed before,creating the illusionof a collectiveidentity through the political stagingof vicariousspectacle. The secondpoint is that the Nationalists adoptedthis ploy fromthe Nazis. The TweedeTrek was inspirednot only by the Nazi creedof Blut und Boden,but a newpolitical style: the Nurembergpolitics of fetish symboland culturalpersuasion. In our time, I suggest, national collectivityis experiencedpre- eminentlythrough spectacle. Here I departfrom Anderson, who sees nationalismas emergingprimarily from the Gutenbergtechnology of printcapitalism. Anderson neglects the factthat printcapital has, until recently,been accessibleto a relativelysmall literate elite. One could argue that the singularpower of nationalismhas been its capacityto organizea sense of popular,collective unity through the managementof mass nationalcommodity spectacle. In this respect,nationalism inhabits the realmoffetishism. Despite Nationand Family 71 the commitmentof Europeannationalism (following Hegel) to the idea of the nation-stateas the embodimentof rationalProgress, nationalism has been experiencedand transmittedprimarily through fetishism- preciselythe culturalform that the Enlightenmentdenigrated as the antithesis of'Reason'.More often than not, nationalismtakes shape throughthe visible,ritual organization offetish objects:flags, uniforms, airplanelogos, maps, anthems,national flowers, national cuisines and architectures,as well as throughthe organizationof collectivefetish spectacle- in team sports,military displays, mass rallies, the myriad formsof popularculture, and so on. Far frombeing purely sexual icons, fetishes embodycrises in social value, which are projectedon to and embodiedin impassionedobjects.2 Considerable work remains to be doneon the waysin whichwomen consume, refuse or negotiate the male fetish ritualsof nationalspectacle. The EeuSeeswas, by anyone's standards, a triumph of image management,complete with the spectacularregalia of flags, flaming torches, patriotic songs, incendiary speeches, costumes and crowd management.More than anything,the EeuSeesrevealed the extent to which nationalismis a symbolicperformance of invented community: the Eeafeeswas a calculatedand self-consciouseffort by the Broeder- bondto paperover the myriadregional, gender and class tensionsthat threatenedthem. As a fetishistic displacementof difference,it suc- ceeded famously,for the success of the TweedeTrek in mobilizinga sense of white Afrikaner collectivity was a major reason, though certainlynot the only one, for the Nationalists'triumphant sweep to powerin 1948.3 Fromthe outset, as the Eeafeesbore witness, Afrikanernational- ism was dependent not only on powerful constructionsof racial difference,but also on powerfulconstructions of gender difference.A gendereddierision of national creationprevailed, whereby men were seen to embodythe politicaland economicagency of the volk, while womenwere the (unpaid)keepers of traditionand the volk'smoral and spiritualmission. This gendereddivision of labouris summedup in the colonialgospel of the family,and the presidingicon of the volksmoeder (the motherofthe nation).The volksmoeder, however, is less a biological fact than a socialcategory. Nor is it an ideologyimposed willy-nilly on hapless femalevictims. Rather, it is a changing,dynamic ideology rife with paradox,under constant contest by men and women,and adapted constantlyto the pressures arising from Africanresistance and the conflictbetween Afrikaner colonialists and British imperialists.

The invention of the volksmoeder: mum's the word The Anglo-BoerWar (fundamentallya war over African land and labour)was in many respectswaged as a war on Boer women.In an effortto breakBoer resistance, the Britishtorched the farmsand lands, andherded thousands of womenand children into concentrationcamps, 72 FeministReview

where 25,000 womenand childrenperished of hunger,desolation and disease.Yet, after the Anglo-BoerWar, the politicalpower of the fierce Boer womenwas muted and transformed.In 1913, three years after Union, the Vrouemonument(Women's Monument) was erected in homageto the femalevictims of the war.The monument took the formof a circular,domestic enclosure, where women stand weepingwith their children. Here, women's martial role as fighters and farmers was purgedof its indecorouslymilitant potential, and replacedby the figure of the lamentingmother with babein arms.The monumentenshrined Afrikanerwomanhood as neithermilitant nor political, but as suffering, stoicaland self-sacrificial (Brink, 1990). Women's disempowerment was figurednot as expressiveof the politicsof genderdifference, stemming fromcolonial women's ambiguous relation to imperialdomination, but as emblematicof national(that is, male)disempowerment. By portray- ing the Afrikanernation symbolically as a weepingwoman, the mighty male embarrassmentof military defeat could be overlooked,and the memoryof women'svital effortsduring the war washedaway in images of femininetears and maternalloss. The icon of the volksmoederis paradoxical.On the one hand, it recognizesthe powerof (white)motherhood; on the other hand, it is a retrospectiveiconography of gendercontainment, containing women's mutinouspower within an iconographyof domesticservice. Defined as weeping victims of Africanmenace, white women'sactivism is over- lookedand their disempowermentthereby ratified. Indeed,in the early decadesof this century, as Hofmeyrshows, women played a crucial role in the invention of Afrikanerdom.The family householdwas seen as the last bastionbeyond British control, and the culturalpower of Afrikanermotherhood was mobilizedin the serviceof white nation-building.Afrikaans was a languagefashioned veryprofoundly by women'slabours, within the economyof the domestic household.'Not for nothing' as Hofmeyrnotes, 'was it calledthe "mother tongue".' (1987) In Afrikanernationalism, motherhood is a politicalconcept under constant contest. It is importantto emphasizethis for two reasons. Erasing Afrikanerwomen's historic agency also erases their historic complicityin the annals of apartheid.White women were not the weeping bystanders of apartheid history, but active, if decidedly disempowered,participants in the inventionof Afrikaneridentity. As such they were complicitin deployingthe powerof motherhoodin the exerciseand legitimationof white domination.Certainly, white women werejealously and brutallydenied any formalpolitical power, but were compensatedby theirlimited authority in the household.Clutching this small power, they became complicit in the racism that suffuses Afrikanernationalism. For this reason, black South Africanwomen have been justly suspicious of any easy assumptionof a universal, essential sisterhoodin suSering.White women are both colonizedand colonizers,ambiguously implicated in the history of African dispos- session. Nationand Family 73

Gender and the ANC: 'No longer in a future heaven' Africannationalism has roughlythe samehistoric vintage as Afrikaner nationalism. Forged in the crucible of imperial thuggery, mining capitalismand rapid industrialization, African nationalism was, like its Afrikanercounterpart, the productof consciousreinvention, the enact- ment of a new political collectivityby specificcultural and political agents. But its racialand gendercomponents were very different,and Africannationalism would describeits own distinct trajectoryacross the century. In 1910 the Union of South Africawas formed,uniting the four squabblingprovinces under a single legislature.Yet at the 'national' convention,not a single blackSouth African was present.For Africans the Union was an act of profoundbetrayal. A colour bar banished Africansfrom skilled labour,and the franchisewas deniedto all but a handful.And so, in 1912,African men descendedon Bloemfonteinfrom all overSouth Africa to protesta Unionin whichno blackperson had a voice.At this gathering,the SouthAfrican Natives NationalCongress was launched,soon to becomethe AfricanNational Congress. At the outset, the ANC,like Afrikanernationalism, had a narrow class base. Drawn from the tiny urban intelligentsia and petite bourgeoisie,its memberswere mostly mission-educatedteachers and clerks, small businessmenand traders,the kind of men whomFanon describedas 'dusted over with colonial culture'. They were urban, anti-tribaland assimilationist,demanding full civicparticipation in the great British Empire,rather than confrontationand radical change. Theywere also solidlymale (Lodge,1991). For the first thirty years of the ANC, black women'srelation to nationalism was structuredaround a contradiction:their exclusion from full politicalmembership within the ANC contrastedwith their increasinggrass-roots activism. As Frene Ginwala(1990) has argued, women'sresistance was shapedfrom below. While the languageof the ANCwas the inclusive languageof nationalunity, the Congresswas in fact exclusive and hierarchical,ranked by an upper house of chiefs (whichprotected traditional patriarchal authority through descent), a lowerhouse of electedrepresentatives (all male), and an executive(all male). Indians and so-called 'coloureds'were excluded from full membership.Wives of male memberscould join as 'auxiliarymembers', but were deniedformal political representation, as well as the powerto vote. Theirsubordinate, service role to nationalismwas summedup in the draft constitution of the SANNC (later the ANC), which saw women'spolitical role within nationalismas mediatedby the marriage relation,and as replicatingwives' domestic roles within marriage:'All the wives of the members ... shall ipso facto become auxiliary members.... It shall be the duty of all auxiliarymembers to provide suitableshelter and entertainmentfor delegatesto the Congress.' In 1913 the white state saw fit to imposepasses on womenin an effortto pre-empttheir migrationto the cities. In outragedresponse, 74 FeministReview

hundredsof womenmarched mutinously on Bloemfonteinto flingback their passes,and for their temerity met the full bruntof state wrathin a barrageof arrests,imprisonment and hard labour. Women's insurgence alarmedboth the state and not a few Africanmen. None the less, the climate of militancygave birth to the Bantu Women'sLeague of the AfricanNational Congress,which was launchedin 1918, drawingby and large, but not solely, on the tiny, educated,Christian elite. Thus fromthe outset, women'sorganized participation in Africannational- ism stemmed less from the invitation of men, than from their own politicizationin resisting the violence of state decree. At this time, however,women's potential militancy was muted, and their political agencydomesticated by the lanFage of familial service and subordi- nation.Women's volunteer work was approvedin so far as it servedthe interests of the (male) 'nation',and women's political identity was figuredas merelysupportive and auxiliary. As PresidentSeme said:'No national movementcan be strongunless the womenvolunteers come forward and offer their services to the nation.'4At women's own insistence,the ANCgranted women full membershipand votingrights in 1943. It had taken thirty-oneyears. None the less, women'snational mission was still trivialized and domesticated,defined as providing 'suitableshelter and entertainmentfor members or delegates.'5 After the Urban Areas Act of 1937, which severely curtailed women'smovements, new insistence began to be voiced for a more militant and explicitly political national women'sorganization: 'We womencan no longerremain in the backgroundor concernourselves onlywith domesticand sports affairs. The time has arrivedfor women to enterthe politicalfield and standshoulder to shoulderwith their menin the struggle.'(Mpama,1937) In 1943,the ANCdecided that a Women's Leaguebe formed,yet tensionswould persist between women's calls for greaterautonomy, and men'sanxieties about losing control. Duringthe turbulentfifties, however,the ANC Women'sLeague thrived.This was the decadeof the DefianceCampaign, the Freedom Charter,the CongressAlliance, and the Federationof South African Women.In 1956thousands of womenmarched on Pretoriato oncemore protest against passes for women, and the Women'sCharter was formed,calling for land redistribution,for workerbenefits and union rights, housing and food subsidies, the abolition of child labour, universal education,the right to vote, and equal rights with men in property,marriage and childcustody. It is seldomnoted, however, that this charterpreceded the FreedomCharter, and inspiredmuch of its substance. Within African nationalism, as in its Afrikaans counterpart, women'spolitical agency has been couchedin the presidingideology of motherhood.Winnie Mandela has long been hailed as 'Motherof the Nation',and Miriam Makeba, the singer,is reverentlyaddressed as 'Ma Africa'.6Motherhood, however, is less the universal and biological quintessenceof womanhood,than it is a socialcategory under constant contest.African women have embraced,transmuted and transformed Nationand Family 75

VOICEOF WOMEN

3rd Qual:er

1980

YEAR OF T}fE t}fARTER

A quaeerly maWa2ine d the ANC(St W¢ncen'sS§etion the - L ideologyin a variety of ways, working ditionalideology to strategicallywithin tra- justify untraditional public militancy. Afrikaanswomen, moreover, Unlike African women appealed to a racially inclusiveimage of motherhoodin their racialalliance campaignsto fashion a non- with white women. A Federation of Womenpamphlet of 1958 South African exhorted white women: CInthe name humanity,can you as a woman,as a of Albertina mother,tolerate this?' In 1986 Sisulu appealedimpatiently to white mother,black or white. women:CA mother is a Standup and be countedwith other Over the decades,African women.' kaans women nationalists,unlike their Afri- counterparts,have transformedand motherhoodwith an infused the ideology of increasingly insurrectionarycast, themselvesmore and more as identifying the Cmothersof revolution'.Since the seventies,women's local rites of defiance nationalscale in have been mirroredon a rents and bus boycotts,organized strikes,anti-rape protests, squatter camps, and communityactinsm of myriad Evenunder the State of Emergency, kinds their womenhave everywhereenlarged militancy,insisting not only on their alsoon their rightto politicalagency, but rightof accessto the technologiesof Blackwomen's nolence.7 relationto nationalismhas thus undergone canthistorical changes over the signifi- years. At the outset, women were 76 Feminist Review

deniedformal representation, then their volunteerwork was put at the service of the national revolution,still largely male. Gradually,as a result of women'sown insurrections,the need for women'sfull partici- pation in the national liberationmovement was granted, but their emancipationwas still figuredas the handmaidenof national revol- ution. Onlyrecently has women'sempowerment been recognizedin its own right, distinct from the national, democraticand socialist revol- ution.None the less, the degreeto whichthis rhetoricalrecognition will findpolitical and institutionalform remains to be seen.

Feminism and nationalism For many decades,African women have been loath to talk of women's emancipationoutside the terms of the nationalliberation movement.8 During the sixties and seventies, black womenwere understandably waryof the middle-classfeminism that was sputteringfitfully to life in the white universitiesand suburbs.African women raisedjustifiably scepticaleyebrows at a white feminismthat vaunted itself as giving tongueto a universalsisterhood in suffering.At the sametime, women's position within the nationalist movementwas still precarious,and womencould ill affordto antagonizemen so embattled,and alreadyso reluctantto surrenderwhatever patriarchal power they still enjoyed. In recent years, however, a transformedAfrican discourse on feminism has emerged, with black women demandingthe right to fashionthe terms of nationalistfeminism to meet their own needs and situations.9On 2 May 1990, the NationalExecutive of the ANCissued an historic cstatementon the Emancipationof Women',which forth- rightlyproclaimed: CThe experience of othersocieties has shownthat the emancipationof womenis not a by-productof a strugglefor democracy, nationalliberation or socialism.It has to be addressedwithin our own organization,the mass democraticmovement and in the society as a whole.' The document is unprecedentedin placing South African women'sresistance in an internationalcontext, in grantingfeminism independenthistoric agency, and in declaring,into the bargain,that all Claws,customs, traditions and practiceswhich discriminateagainst womenshall be heldto be unconstitutional.'If the ANCremains faithful to this document,nrtually all existingpractises in SouthAfrica's legal, politicaland sociallife will be renderedunconstitutional. A few months later, on 17 June 1990, the leadershipof the ANC Women'sSection, recently returned to SouthAfrica from exile, insisted on the strategic validity of the term 'feminism':CFeminism has been misinterpretedin most thirdworld countries . . . thereis nothingwrong with feminism. It is as progressiveor reactionaryas nationalism. Nationalismcan be reactionaryor progressive.We have not got rid of the term nationalism.And with feminism it is the same.' Rather, feminismshould be tailoredto meet localneeds and concerns. Yet very real uncertaintiesfor womenremain. So far, theoretical Nationand Family 77 and strategicanalyses of SouthAfrica's gender imbalances have not run deep.There has been little strategicrethinking of how,in particular,to transformlabour relations within the household,and womenare not given the same political visibility as men. At a recent COSATU (Congressof South African Trade Unions) convention,trade union womencalled for attention to sexualharassment in the unions,but their demandwas brusquelyflicked aside by male unionists as a decadent symptomof Cbourgeoisimperialist feminism'. Lesbian and gay activists have been similarly condemnedas supportinglifestyles that are no morethan invidiousimports of empire. There is not only one feminism, nor is there one patriarchy. Feminism, like nationalism,is not transhistorical.Feminism is im- perialistwhen it puts the interests and needs of privilegedwomen in imperialistcountries above the localneeds of disempoweredwomen and men,borrowing from patriarchal privilege. In the last decade,women of colourhave been vehementin challengingprivileged feminists whose racialand class powerseems invisibleto them. In an importantarticle, ChandraTalpade Mohanty (Mohanty, 1991) challengesthe appropri- ation of women of colour'sstruggles by white women, specifically throughthe use of the categoryCThird World Woman' as a singular, monolithic,and paradigmaticallyvictimized subject. Denouncingall feminisms as imperialist, however,erases from memorythe longhistories of women'sresistance to localand imperialist patriarchies.As Kumari Jayawardenanotes (Jayawardena,1986), manywomen's mutinies around the worldpredated Western feminism, or occurredwithout any contactwith Western feminists. Moreover, if all feminismsare deridedas a pathologyof the West, there is a very real dangerthat Western,white feminists will remain hegemonic,for the simplereason that suchwomen have comparativelyprivileged access to publishing,the internationalmedia, education and money.A gooddeal of this feminismmay well be inappropriateto womenliving undervery differentsituations. Instead, women of colourare callingfor the rightto fashionfeminism to suit their ownworlds. The singularcontribution of nationalist feminism has been its insistence on relating feminist strugglesto otherliberation movements. All too frequently,male nationalistshave condemnedfeminism as divisive,bidding women hold their tongues until after the revolution. Yet feminismis a politicalresponse to genderconflict, not its cause.To insist on silenceabout gender conflict when it alreadyexists, is to cover over, and therebyratify, women'sdisempowerment. To ask womento wait until after the revolution,serves merely as a strategic tactic to deferwomen's demands. Not onlydoes it concealthe fact that national- isms arefrom the outsetconstituted in genderpower, but, as the lessons of internationalhistory portend,women who are not empoweredto organizeduring the strugglewill not be empoweredto organizeafter the struggle. If nationalismis not transformedby an analysis of gender power,the nation-statewill remain a repositoryof male hopes, male aspirationsand male privilege. 78 FeministReview

All too often,the doorsof traditionare slammedin women'sfaces. Yet traditions are both the outcomeand the recordof past political contests, as well as the sites of present contest. In a nationalist revolution,both women and men shouldbe empoweredto decidewhich traditions are outmoded,which should be transformed,and which shouldbe preserved.Male nationalistsfrequently argue that colonial- ism or capitalismhas been women'sruin, with patriarchymerely a nasty second cousin destined to wither away when the real villain finally expires. Yet nowhere has a national or socialist revolution broughta full feminist revolutionin its train. In many nationalistor socialist countrieswomen's concerns are at best paid lip service, at worstgreeted with hilarity.If womenhave cometo do men'swork, men havenot cometo sharewomen's work. Nowhere has feminismin its own right been allowedto be morethan the maidservantto nationalism.A crucialquestion remains for progressive nationalism: can the iconogra- phy of the familybe retainedas the figurefor national unity, or must an alternative,radical iconography be developed? Frantz Fanon's prescient warnings against the pitfalls of the nationalconsciousness were never moreurgent than now. For Fanon, nationalism gives ntal expression to popular memory and is stra- tegically essential for mobilizingthe national populace.At the same time, no one was more aware than Fanon of the attendant risks of projecting a fetishistic denial of difference on to a conveniently abstractedCcollective will'. In South Africa,to borrowFanon's phrase, nationaltransformation is Cnolonger in a futureheaven'. Yet the current situationgives soberpoignancy, especially for women, to the lines from Pontecorvo'sfamous film on the Algeriannational war of liberation,The Battle of Algiers: 'It is difficultto start a revolution,more difficultto sustain it. But it's later, when we'vewon, that the real difficultieswill begin.'

Notes

Anne McClintockis an associate professor at Columbia University, where she teaches gender and cultural studies. She is currently researching nationalism and gender in South Africa on an SSRC-MacArthurInternational Peace and Security Fellowship. Her book Maids,Maps and Mines:Gender and Imperial- ism is coming out in 1993.

1 Parts of this paper appeared in 'No Longer in a Future Heaven', (1991) TRANSITION51,10623. 2 I critique the Freudian/Lacaniantheory of fetishism in 'The return of female fetishism and the fiction of the phallus', in New FormationsSpring 1992. I expand on the fetishistic nature of national spectacle in my book, Maids, Mapsand Mines:Gender and Imperialism(forthcoming, 1993). 3 Indeed, the degree to which the Eeufeespapered over fatal divisions within the white populace,became most manifest in 1988, when during the height of the State of Emergency, no less than two competing Treks set out to re-enact Nationand Family 79

the re-enactment,each sponsoredby two bitterlyrivalrous white nationalist parties. 4 As Ginwalanotes: 'A pattern had beenestablished of grassrootsmobilization andparticipation by women, while dealing with the authoritiesat the localor nationallevel was to remainthe provinceof men.'90: 5 Constitution,1919. 6 As Gaitskelland Unterhalter (1989) have argued,the ideologyofthe 'Mother of the Nation'differs in someimportant respects from the iconographyof the volksmoederin Afrikanernationalism. 7 On 9 August1985, the 29th anniversaryof SouthAfrican Women's Day, the ANC'sWomen's Section called on womento 'takeup armsagainst the enemy. In the past we haveused rudimentary homemade weapons like petrolbombs. Nowis the time that we use modernweapons.' 8 TheANC delegation to the NairobiConference on Women in 1985declared: 'It wouldbe suicidalfor us to adoptfeminist ideas. Our enemy is the systemand we cannotexhaust our energies on women'sissues.' 9 At a seminarentitled 'Feminism and NationalLiberation', convened by the Womens Section of the ANC in Londonin 1989, a representativefrom SAYCO(South African Youth Congress) exclaimed: 'How good it feels that feminismis finallyaccepted as a legitimateschool of thoughtin ourstruggles andis not seen as a foreignideology.'

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