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Women and Nationalism in South Africa

Women and Nationalism in South Africa

T R A N S I T ION Position

"NO LONGER IN A FUTURE HEAVEN": WOMEN AND IN

Anne McClintock

All are gendered, all are invented, and all are dangerous. are not the natural flowering into time of the organic essence of a people, borne unscathed through the ages. Rather, as Ernest Gellner observes, nationalism "invents nations where they do not exist." Most modern nations, despite their appeal to an august and immemorial past, are for the most part very recent inventions. thus argues that nations are best understood as "imagined communities," systems of rep- resentations whereby people come to imagine a shared experience of identification with an extended community. Nonetheless, nations are not simply phantasmagoria of . The term "imagined" carries in its train connotations of fiction and make-believe, moonshine and chimera. The term "invented community," by contrast, refuses the conservative faith in essence and nature, while at the same time conveying more powerfully the implications of labor and creative ingenuity, technology and institutional power. Nations are elaborate social practicesenacted through time, laboriously fabricated through the media and the printing press, in schools, churches, the myriad forms of popular culture, in trade unions and funerals, protest marches and uprisings. Nationalism both invents and performs social difference, enacting it ritualistically in Olympic extravaganzas, mass rallies and military displays, flag waving and costumery, and becoming thereby constitutive of people's identities. The green, black, and gold flag of the African National Congress, or a Pal- estinian kafiyeh, may be bits of colored cloth, but there is nothing fictive about their power to conjure up the loyalties of life and death, or to provoke the 's expert machinery of wrath. For this reason, nationalisms are dangerous, not, as Eric Hobsbawm would have it, in the sense that they should be opposed, but rather in the sense that they represent relations to political power and to the technologies of violence. Nationalisms are con- tested systems of representation enacted of national is male. The needs through social institutions, and legitimiz- of the are identified with the needs, ing, or limiting, people's access to the frustrations, and aspirations of men. As in rights and resources of the nation-state: the translated (not original) title of Fanon's land and water, political and economic famous essay "Algeria Unveiled," women power, children, food and housing, the are construed as the "bearers of the na- technologies of violence. Nations are sit- tion," its boundary and symbolic limit, uations under constant contest. but lack a nationality of their own. In such All nationalisms, moreover, are gen- instances, women serve to represent the dered. "When you own a big chunk of the limits of national difference between men. bloody Third World, the babies just come Excluded as national citizens, women are with the scenery," as the Chrissie Hynde subsumed only symbolically into the na- song goes. In the chronicles of male na- tional body politic. Thus male political tionalism, women, too, are all too often power is heavily dependent on a natural- figured as mere scenic backdrops to the ized, and none too "accidental," ideology big-brass business of masculine armies and of difference. Nationalism is con- uprisings. Theorists of nationalism (Fanon stituted from the very beginning as a gen- notably excepted) have seldom felt moved dered discourse, and cannot be understood to explore how nationalisms are at every without a theory of gender power. minute implicated in gender power. No Nira Yuval Davis and Flora Anthias nationalism in the world has granted have suggested that women's relation to women and men the same privileged ac- nationalism has taken at least five major cess to the resources of the nation-state. So forms. Women serve far, all nationalisms are dependent on * as biological reproducers of national powerful constructions of gender differ- groups (the biological of the peo- ence. ple) George Santayana, for one, gives voice * as symbols and signifiers of national to a well-established male view: "Our na- difference in male discourse ("Singapore tionalism is like our relationship to , you're a great way to fly") women: too implicated in our moral na- * as transmitters and producers of the ture to be changed honorably, and too cultural narratives themselves (mothers, accidental to be worth changing." For teachers, writers, playwrights, artists) Santayana political agency is straight- * as reproducers of the boundaries of forwardly male, and the male citizen the nation (by accepting or refusing sexual stands in the same symbolic relation to the intercourse or marriage with prescribed nation as a stands to a , po- groups of men) litical power thus depending on a prior * as active participants in national construction of gender power. Santa- movements: in armies, congresses, trade yana's sentence could never be said by a union activism, community organiza- woman, because, quite simply, the "our" tions.

WOMEN AND NATIONALISM 105 Nations do not have transhistorical ef- tip of Africa. Only upon the discovery of fects. There is no one single nationalism, diamonds and gold were the Union Jack nor one privileged narrative of the nation, and the redcoats shipped out with any real to borrow Homi Bhabha's phrase. In sense of imperial mission. Very quickly, South Africa, certainly, women's relations mining needs for cheap labor and a cen- to the competing national narratives and tralized state collided with traditional struggles have taken a number of intricate farming interests, and out of these contra- and changing historical shapes, contests in dictions, in the conflict for control over which women are themselves deeply in- African land and labor, exploded the volved, and which have profound impli- bloody Anglo-Boer war of 1899-1902. cations for the future of a transformed Violently improvised in the shocked af- South Africa. In what follows, I wish to termath of the war, Afrikaner nationalism explore some of the varying ways in which was a doctrine of crisis. After their defeat women have been implicated in the com- by the British, the bloodied remnants of peting nationhoods, both within Afri- the scattered Boer communities had to kaans as well as . forge a new counter-culture if they were to survive in the emergent capitalist state. Afrikaner Nationalism and Gender The invention of this counter-culture had The men all goodfor nothingand hardlyany a clear class component. When the Boer women at all. -Jane Austen generals and the British capitalists swore Contrary to the legends of white inven- blood brotherhood in the Union of 1910, tion, Afrikaner nationalism did not begin the raggle-taggle legion of"poor whites" with the scraping of Dutch keels on the with little or no prospects, the modest Cape shores in 1652. Afrikanerdom, far clerks and shopkeepers, the small farmers from being the timeless emanation of a and poor teachers, the intellectuals and pe- monolithic "Afrikaner volk," is of very tite bourgeoisie, all precarious in the new recent origin. The major themes of the state, began to identify themselves as the "national" saga (divine sanction and man- vanguard of a new Afrikanerdom, the ifest destiny, cultural brotherhood and ra- chosen emissaries of the national volk. cial distinction, patriarchalpower, entitle- To begin with, had no ment to the lands, and a single, unifying monolithic identity, no common historic language) are invented traditions. Afri- purpose, and no single unifying language. kanerdom is not the mysterious manifes- They were a disunited, scattered people, tation of a divine plan unfolding through speaking a medley of High Dutch and local the centuries and flowering into history dialects. The dialects, blended with smat- with the , or the ancestral gees terings of the slave, Nguni, and (spirit) inherent in every Boer. Rather, it languages, were scorned as the kombuistaal was forged very recently in the crucible of (kitchen language) of house servants, colonial contradiction. slaves, and women. But in the early de- Until the i86os, Britain was indifferent cades of the twentieth century, as Isabel to its unpromising colony at the southern Hofmeyr has brilliantly shown, an elabo-

106 TRANSITION NUMBER 51 rate labor of "regeneration" was under- name: the Broederbond(the brotherhood). taken, as the despised hotnotstaalwas re- Henceforth, Afrikaner nationalism would vamped, purged of its rural, "degenerate" be synonymous with white male interests, associations, and elevated to the status of white male aspirations, and white male the august tongue of the politics. people. Two decades later, in 1938, an epic ex- The new, invented community of the travaganza of invented tradition inflamed volk required the conscious creation of a Afrikanerdom into a delirium of nation- single print language, a popular press, and alist passion. Dubbed the Tweede Trek a literate populace. At the same time, the (Second Trek), or the Eeufees(Centenary), invention of tradition required a class of the event celebrated the ' first mu- cultural brokers and image makers to do tinous Great Trek away from British laws the inventing. The "language movement" and the effrontery of slave emancipation, of the early twentieth century, in the flurry and commemorated the Boer massacre of of poems, magazines, newspapers, novels, the Zulus at the . and countless cultural events, provided Nine replicas of Voortrekker wagons were just such a movement, fashioning the built. Each was named after a male Voor- myriad Boer vernaculars into a single trekker hero. No wagon was named after identifiable Afrikaans language. an adult woman, but one was called, ge- At the same time, the invention of Af- nerically, Vrou en Moeder (Wife and rikaner tradition had a clear gender com- Mother). This wagon, creaking across the ponent. In 1918 Afrikaans was legally rec- country, symbolized woman's relation to ognized as a third language. The same the nation as indirect, mediated through year, a small, clandestine clique of Afri- her social relation to men, her national kaans men launched a secret society, with identity lying in her unpaid services, the mission of capturing the loyalties of through husband and family, to the volk. dispirited Afrikaners and fostering white Each wagon became the microcosm of male business power. There, in the magic, colonial society at large: the whip- inner circle of Afrikanerdom's new intel- wielding white patriarch prancing on ligentsia, with vows of secrecy and initi- horseback, black servants toiling along- ation ceremonies in dark, sequestered side, mother and children ensconced in the rooms, doctrine was spawned. wagon-the women's starched white bon- As Allistair Sparks has observed, the tiny nets signifying the purity of the race, the white brotherhood swiftly became the decorous surrenderof their sexuality to the think tank of the Afrikaner Nationalist patriarch, and the invisibility of female la- movement, burgeoning into a country- bor. The wagons rumbled along different wide political mafia that has exerted im- routes from to , mense power over all aspects of Nation- sparking along the way an orgy of national alist policy and cultural life. The gender pageantry, and engulfing the country in a bias of the society, as of the rest of Afri- four-month spectacle of invented tradi- kanerdom, is neatly summed up in its tion. Along the route, white men grew

WOMEN AND NATIONALISM 107 beards and white women donned the an- torches, patriotic songs, incendiary cestral bonnets. Huge crowds gathered to speeches, costumes, and crowd manage- greet the wagons. As the trekkers passed ment. More than anything, the Eeufees re- through the towns, babies were named af- vealed the extent to which nationalism is ter trekker heroes, as were roads and pub- a symbolic performanceof invented com- lic buildings. Not a few were baptized munity, staged by political interests, and with the improbable but popular favorite: enacted by designated cultural actors. In Eeufesia (Centeneria). The affair climaxed reality, the Eeufees was a calculated and in Pretoria in a spectacular Third Reich self-conscious effort by the Broederbond marathon led by thousands of Afrikaner to paper over the myriad regional, gender, Boy Scouts bearing flaming torches. and class tensions that threatened them. As The first point about the Tweede Trek a fetishistic displacement of difference, it is that it invented nationalist traditions and succeeded famously, for the success of the celebrated unity where none before ex- Tweede Trek in mobilizing a sense of isted, creating the illusion of a collective white Afrikaner collectivity was a major identity through the political staging of vi- reason, though certainly not the only one, carious spectacle.The second point is that for the Nationalists' triumphant sweep to the Nationalists learned the trick from the power in I948. Nazis. The Tweede Trek was pure Indeed, the degree to which the Eeufees Nuremberg, as Allister Sparks notes. Hit- papered over fatal divisions within the ler is said to have sent a spy to South Africa white populace became most manifest in to sniff out sympathizers, of which there I988, during the height of the state of was no shortage. The Broederbond ar- emergency, when no less than two com- ranged for a few promising Afrikaner stu- peting Treks set out to reenact the reen- dents to spend some time in German actment, each sponsored by two bitterly universities-the same men, as it hap- rivalrous white nationalist parties. pened, who were destined to become the From the outset, as the Eeufees bore foremost architects of apartheid ideology. witness, Afrikaner nationalism was de- One of these men, Piet Meyer, baptized pendent not only on powerful construc- his son Izan-Nazi spelled backwards. tions of racial difference, but also on pow- As Sparks shows, these men returned erful constructions of gender difference. A to South Africa inspired not only by the gendered division of national creation pre- Nazi creed of Blut und Boden, but a new vailed, whereby men were seen to embody style: the politics of symbol and cultural the political and economic agency of the persuasion. In our time, the experience of volk, while women were the (unpaid)keep- national collectivity is preeminently ers of tradition and the volk's moral and through spectacle. By anyone's standards, spiritual mission. This gendered division the Eeufees was a triumph of image of labor is summed up in the imperial gos- management, complete with all the Third pel of the family and the presiding icon of Reich symbolic regalia of flags, flaming the volksmoeder(the mother of the nation).

108 TRANSITION NUMBER 51 The idea of the volksmoeder is a changing, tial and replaced by the figure of the la- dynamic ideology rife with paradox, un- menting mother with babe in arms. The der constant contest by men and women, monument enshrined Afrikaner woman- and adapted constantly to the changing hood as neither militant nor political, but context of African resistance. as suffering, stoical, and self-sacrificial. Women's disempowerment was figured The Invention of the Volksmoeder: not as expressive of the politics of gender Mum's The Word difference, stemming from colonial wom- At the beginning of the Great Trek, so the en's ambiguous relation to imperial dom- story goes, Susanna Smit, the hefty wife of ination, but as emblematic of national (that Reverend Erasmus Smit, threatened to is, male) disempowerment. By portraying cross the mountains barefoot rather than the Afrikaner nation symbolically as a genuflect to the perfidious Union Jack. weeping woman, the mighty male embar- Late-nineteenth-century narratives are rassment of military defeat could be over- scattered with references to the burly, looked, and the memory of women's vital whip-wielding Boer women, who efforts during the war washed away in im- dragged wagons over mountains and ages of feminine tears and maternal loss. knew more about inspanning oxen and The icon of the volksmoeder is para- breeding horses than embroidery anglaise. doxical. On the one hand, it recognizes the Indeed, the Anglo-Boer war (which was power of (white) motherhood; on the really a war over African land and labor) other hand, it contains that power within was in many respects waged as a war on an iconography of domestic service. By Boer women. In an effort to break Boer defining women as victims, their activism resistance, the British herded thousands of could be overlooked and their disempow- women and children into frightful concen- erment ratified. As Elsabe Brink notes in tration camps and then torched the farms a fine essay, a massive march of Afrikaner and lands. In these appalling places, 25,000 women to parliament in 1915 was sym- women and children perished of hunger, bolically reinterpreted, not as a political desolation, and disease. event, but as a quintessentially feminine Yet after the Anglo-Boer war, the po- surrender to the imperatives of romantic litical power of the fierce Boer women was love: "Love called, love obeyed." muted and transformed. In 1913, three The exaltation of the volksmoeder also years after Union, the Vrouemonument had economic and class motives. After the (Women's Monument) was erected in war, South Africa began rapidly to indus- homage to the female victims of the war. trialize, and white working-class women In a circular enclosure, women stand were drawn into the factories in large weeping with their children. In the ico- numbers, discovering a taste for indepen- nography of the monument, women's dence, and ceasing to reck their father's martial role as fighters and farmers was rod. As in Victorian Britain, a revamped purged of its indecorously militant poten- ideology of motherhood was invoked to

WOMEN AND NATIONALISM 109 usher women back into the home, and important for two reasons. Erasing Afri- thereby back into unwaged service to fa- kaner women's historic agency also erases thers, husbands, and sons. their historic complicity in the annals of In the early decades of the century, as apartheid. White women were not the Hofmeyer shows, women played a crucial weeping bystanders of apartheid history, role in the invention of Afrikanerdom. but were active participants in the inven- The family household was seen as the last tion of Afrikaner identity. As such they bastion beyond British control, and the were complicit in deploying the power of cultural power of Afrikaner motherhood motherhood in the exercise and legitima- was mobilized in the service of white na- tion of white domination. White women tion building. Afrikaans was a language werejealously and brutally denied any for- fashioned very profoundly by women's la- mal political power, but were compen- bors, within the economy of the domestic sated by their limited authority in the household. "Not for nothing," as Hof- household. Clutching this small power, meyer notes, "was it called the 'mother they became complicit in the that tongue.' " Women were crucial in the con- suffuses Afrikaner nationalism. This is a struction of a distinctive Afrikaner culture. major reason why black South African As readers of Huisgenoot,the most widely women are justly suspicious of any easy circulated magazine in South Africa, assumption of universal, essential sister- women began the enormous task of trans- hood. White women are both colonized forming virtually every aspect of daily life and colonizers, ambiguously complicit in into the ciphers of the Afrikaner spirit. the history of African dispossession. Certain foods became Afrikaans foods, Afrikaner women's relation to nation- alism is thus complex. In their major, cul- The idea of turally defined role as biological mothers, "motherhood" in women literally reproduce the citizens of the white nation. In I96I, for example, all Afrikanernationalism white women were exhorted to do their was not a concept national duty and "Have a Baby for Re- on public Day." Women also reproduce the imposed willy-nilly cultural and symbolic boundaries of white hapless, inertwomen "nationhood"-standing discreetly at the elbows of white male power, as unpaid certain clothes became Afrikaans clothes, wives of army colonels, cabinet ministers, certain types of furniture became Afri- and police, or as activists in the home, kaans furniture. schools, and churches. At the same time, The idea of "motherhood" in Afri- men draw deeply on figures of gender dif- kaner nationalism was not a concept im- ference to police the boundaries of racial posed willy-nilly on hapless, inert and class difference. Finally, and in limited women. Rather, motherhood is a political numbers, white women have become for- concept, under constant contest. This is mal political participants in defense of

110 TRANSITION NUMBER 51 white power, in public forums, in conser- national units on the basis of language and vative women's organizations, in an aux- culture." iliary capacity within the army, or carry- The Group Areas Act controls owner- ing arms as citizens on farms along the ship, use of land, and residence in terms of borders. Nevertheless, even here women's a labyrinthine network of population clas- potential military power is muted and con- sification. The key to the current system is tained within an infantilized and sexual- the Population Act of I95o, which lays ized ideology of the family, summed up in down three basic definitions, black, col- the nickname "Botha's Babes," for ored, and white. A black is a "person who women who serve within the South Af- is, or is generally accepted as, a member of rican Defense Force. Finally, however, any aboriginal race or of Africa." So- one cannot forget the few renegades who called "coloreds," as Martin West shows, have militantly crossed into the forbidden are defined negatively, as a residual cate- territory of anti-apartheid activism: in gory: "a person who is not a White person , the Mass Democratic Move- or a Black." However, the definition of a ment and the ANC. white person is, as Boberg puts it, "less than crystal clear." A white person is "a person who (a) in appearance obviously is Nation, Citizenship, and the Marriage a white person, and who is not generally Relation accepted as a Coloured person; or (b) is A man and a woman are one and he is the generally accepted as a White person and one. is not in appearanceobviously not a white Verwoerd's cold dream of post-1948 person." Chinese, Indians, and Asiatics apartheid was to reinvent South Africa as belong in a "national home" outside South a constellation of separate independent Af- Africa. rican "nations," scattered around the cen- The tortured logic of the classification, tral white "nation." Each "nation" would and its constant emendations, makes a have its own distinct culture and language, mockery of Prime Minister Botha's trum- each its own set of traditions and customs, peting claim in I98I: "The acceptance of and each "nation" would be assigned a multinationalism, the recognition of mi- separate territory and political system. norities, the existence of various cultures, The originality of the move was that it ideas and traditions is not an ideology, it graced the with the status of is a reality. We did not create it, we ex- "proto-nations," casting over the perience it." But the borders of the Ban- wretched partition of the land the false tustans, and the hodgepodge of racial clas- glamor of independent "nation" building. sifications used to buttress them, do not According to the grand proclamation of reflect any cultural reality, but rather in- the Promotion of Black Self-Government vent tradition. The borders are Act (46 of I959): "the Black peoples of the carved with clumsy artifice over immense do not constitute a social variation. The Xhosas, for example, homogenous people, but form separate are supposedly one "nation," yet are

WOMEN AND NATIONALISM 111 allocated to two distinct "nation states," to the Group Areas Act, as Martin West the and the . Other con- reminds us, if people marry across their tradictions abound. Under apartheid in racial groups "a white partner, male or fe- South Africa the legal definition of citizen- male, takes the classification of the other ship has become a nightmarish concoction partner, whether black or colored." Thus of imprecision, vagary, invention, and a white man would become instantly clas- sham, crosshatched by self-contradiction. sified as a black man. Whereas if a "col- Citizenship is the legal representation ored" woman and a black man marry, the of a person's relationship to the rights and woman takes the man's classification. resources of the nation-state. But the pu- Thus the black group excludes all black tatively universalist concept of citizenship women with colored partners. And the becomes radically unstable when seen colored group excludes all colored women from the position of women. Obedient to with black partners. Thus a white woman the inimitable logic that "a man and his may be classified white in terms of the wife are one, and he is the one," women Population Registration Act (by descent), in post- Britain and yet classified black in terms of the Group were not incorporated into the Areas Act if her husband is black. At the nation-state as citizens, but only indi- same time, as soon as a black woman mar- rectly, through men, as dependent mem- ries, she may be endorsed out of the place bers of the family in private and public of her birth, as in the case of Mrs. Msini, law. The Napoleonic Code was the first and banished to the Bantustan of her hus- modern statute to decree that the wife's na- band, becoming in an instant, in one of the tionality should follow her husband's, an stunning oxymorons of South African life, example other European countries briskly a "foreign native." followed. A woman's political relation to Mr. Harlan Msini, for example, is a the nation is thus submerged in a socialre- crippled African factory worker who re- lation to a man through marriage. Citizen- sides in Paarl in the Cape province. His ship in the nation is mediated by the mar- wife, Mrs. Lena Msini, however, is not riage relation. legally entitled to live with her husband, Rycroft has noted that "exactly what since, on marrying, she became at once the sort of citizenship a person enjoys in South wife of a "disqualified person" - a disqual- Africa hinges precisely on racial classifica- ified person being a person who has not tion." Yet this is only partially true, for he earned the right of permanent residence by neglects to mention that the sort of "cit- serving ten years in continuous employ- izenship" a black woman enjoys is medi- ment with the same employer. Since her ated through the marital relation. For relation to the national rights of residence black women, citizenship depends not and work is entirely mediated through the only on the labyrinthine tangle of racial marriage relation, Mrs. Msini was told she classifications, but also on powerful con- could live legally with her husband only structions of gender difference. According when he had qualified. Summarily ban-

112 TRANSITION NUMBER 51 ished from Paarl, Mrs. Msini set out for was available, and since housing had been the bleak Dortrecht location in the eastern deliberately frozen, this became impossi- Cape, where she had been born, to wait. ble. In 1952 came the first real attempt to In July 1970, when Mr. Msini became bring women to heel. The Native Laws a "qualified" person, the headman at Dor- Amendment Act gave the state the power trecht sent Mrs. Msini to live with her hus- to evict anyone defined as "undesirable." band at Paarl. At a stroke, falling now un- In the late I95os it became illegal to recruit der the tutelage of her husband, she women in the reserves as migrant work- forfeited her right to live in Dortrecht, the ers. In 1964 the noose was tightened again. place of her birth. Yet in Paarl, at the whim The Bantu Laws Amendment Act now de- of the local bureaucracy, she received only creed that a woman could only live with a "temporary permit," and this permit her husband if his entry had been legal. In was not renewed. In November Mrs. following years even wives and daughters Msini was charged with living illegally in of entrenched residents were denied ad- the area. She was ordered out of Paarl and mission. Because the woman's legal status banished once more to Dortrecht. In Dor- is entirely dependent on the man's, if he trecht, however, she was given only a dies, or if the marriage breaks up, she may temporary permit. This soon expired and lose her lease as well as permission to stay was not renewed. In short, Mrs. Msini had in the area. entered the impossible nowhere-land of A woman who marries under custom- permanent illegality inhabited by thou- ary law is seen as a perpetual minor under sands of South Africa's "displaced peo- the guardianship of her husband. Any ple." As the "superfluous appendage" of money she earns belongs by law to her her husband's labor, in the notorious of- husband's household; she cannot enter ficial terminology, there is not one inch of into a contract for loan of livestock; she her native South African soil on which she cannot sue or be sued, or have custody can legally tread. over her children. She has no legal right to In South Africa black women live un- protest rape or domestic battery. Under der three legal systems: , the Natal Code, all women, married or native law, and European law, and their single, are denied all legal rights. A lives are dominated by three fundamental woman can own no property, except im- legal dimensions: influx control law, fam- mediate personal possessions; she cannot ily law, and labor law. In the thirties laws bring any legal action to court; she cannot were passed which forbade a woman entry marry under customary law without her into a town unless she was certified as the father's, or nearest male guardian's, per- wife of a man who had been working in mission. Marriage, for the vast majority of that area continuously for two years. In black women in South Africa, is thus a le- 1937 the noose was tightened. The wife or gal and political catastrophe, yet marriage daughter of a legal resident could be cer- is virtually the only means for a woman to tified only if she could prove that housing have access to housing or residence rights.

WOMEN AND NATIONALISM 113 These nightmarish anomalies have re- most broken, parched, and devastated cently become the center of a national de- wastelands in the country. bate within the Mass Democratic Move- At the outset the ANC, like Afrikaner ment and the ANC on women's status nationalism, had a specific class compo- within a transformed South Africa. nent. Drawn from the tiny urban intelli- gentsia and petite bourgeoisie, its mem- Women and African Nationalism bers were mostly mission-educated No longer in a future heaven teachers and clerks, small businessmen and African nationalism has roughly the same traders, the kind of men whom Fanon de- historic vintage as Afrikaner nationalism. scribed as "dusted over with colonial cul- Forged in the crucible of imperial thug- ture." They were deeply influenced by gery, mining , and a dizzyingly Gandhi's nonviolent philosophy, by the rapid industrialization, African national- moderate policies of Booker T. Washing- ism was, like its Afrikaner counterpart, the ton, and by their white mission friends and product of conscious reinvention, the en- liberals in parliament, who counseled re- actmentof a new political collectivity by straint, patience, moderation. They were specific cultural and political agents. But urban, anti-tribal, and assimilationist, de- its racial and gender components were manding full civic participation in the very different, and African nationalism great British empire, rather than confron- would describe an entirely distinct trajec- tation and radical change. They were also tory across the century. solidly male. In I9IO the Union of South Africa was While the language of the ANC was the formed, uniting the four warring prov- inclusive language of national unity, the inces under a single legislature. Yet at the Congress was in fact male, exclusive, and "national" convention, not a single black hierarchical, ranked by an upper house of South African was present. In I912 Afri- chiefs (which protected traditional patri- can men began to arrive in Bloemfontein archal authority through descent), a lower from all over South Africa to protest a house of elected representatives (all male), Union in which no black person had a and an executive (all male). Indians and so- voice. At this gathering, the South African called "coloreds" were excluded from full Natives National Congress was launched, membership. Women could join as "aux- soon to become the African National Con- iliary members" but were denied formal gress. For Africans the Union was an act political representation, as well as the of profound betrayal. A color bar banished power to vote. Africans from skilled labor, and the fran- In 1913 the white state saw fit to impose chise was denied to all but a handful. The passes on women in an effort to preempt infamous Land Act (1913), soon to follow, their migration to the cities. In outraged condemned all black South Africans- response, hundreds of women marched seventy-eight percent of the popula- mutinously on Bloemfontein to fling back tion-to a meager thirteen percent of the their passes, and for their temerity met the

114 TRANSITION NUMBER 51 full brunt of state wrath in a barrage of zation. It is all-embracing." Yet even at arrests, imprisonment, and hard labor. this point, the ANC was largely urban From this climate of militancy, the Bantu based, and women's role within the move- Women's League of the African National ment remained subordinate and auxiliary, Congress was launched in 1918, drawing confined to building a nation for their hus- by and large on the tiny educated, Chris- bands and children. tian elite. Thus women's first tentative in- During the turbulent fifties, however, clusion into African nationalism stemmed the ANC Women's League thrived. This less from the invitation of men than from was the decade of the , their own politicization in resisting the vi- the , the Congress Alli- olence of state decree. At this time, how- ance, and the Federation of South African ever, women's potential militancy was Women. In I956 thousands of women muted, and their political agency domes- marched on Pretoria to once more protest ticated, by the language of female service passes for women, and the Women's and subordination. Women's volunteer Charter was formed, calling for land re- work was approved insofar as it served the distribution, for worker benefits and interests of the (male) "nation," and wo- union rights, housing and food subsidies, men's political identity was figured as the abolition of child labor, universal ed- merely supportive and auxiliary. As Pres- ucation, the right to vote, and equal rights ident Seme said: "No national movement with men in property, marriage, and child can be strong unless the women volunteers custody. It is seldom noted, however, that come forward and offer their services to this charter preceded the Freedom Char- the nation." After the Second World War, ter, and inspired much of its substance. however, the ANC adopted a new con- Until this time, short shrift was given stitution in recognition of the need to ex- to women's empowerment in its own pand the movement and organize a mass right. But in 1955 declared base. At women's own insistence, the women's emancipation a national priority ANC granted women full membership and a precondition for victory. "We know and voting rights in I943. It had taken that we cannot win liberation or build a thirty-one years. strong movement without the participa- In 1944 the Youth League was formed, tion of the women." He insisted that the and from its ranks arose men like Nelson Women's League was no longer a mere ap- Mandela, , and Oliver pendage to the ANC, and he broke taboo Tambo, who called impatiently for Con- ground by deploring the "outmoded cus- gress to become a full national movement. toms" that hobble women, and broached Unlike Afrikaner nationalism, the lan- the vexed issue of domestic labor, urging guage of African nationalism at this time fellow Congressmen to relieve women "in became racially inclusive: "African nation- their many family and household burdens alism transcends the narrow limits im- so that women may be given an oppor- posed by any particular sectional organi- tunity of being politically active."

WOMEN AND NATIONALISM 115 Within African nationalism, as in its ideology of motherhood with an increas- Afrikaans counterpart, women's political ingly insurrectionary cast, identifying agency is couched in the presiding ideol- themselves more and more as the "moth- ogy of motherhood. Winnie Mandela has ers of revolution." To be a black mother long been hailed as "Mother of the Na- in South Africa is to routinely face tear-gas tion" (Mummie, for short), and Miriam and shambok attacks, police dogs and wa- Makeba, the singer, is reverently ad- ter cannon, bullets and torture. "Black dressed as "Ma Africa." Yet as Gaitskell mothers have to live with the agony of and Unterhalter have argued, the ideology having to bury their children every day" of the "mother of the nation" differs in (ANC document, 1987). Paradoxically, some important respects from the iconog- the sheer randomness of attacks by the raphy of the volksmoeder in Afrikaner na- South African Defense Force on homes tionalism. and children has brought the war irrevo- Motherhood is, again, less the univer- cably into the lives of most women, deeply sal and biological quintessence of woman- and widely politicizing those who might hood than it is a social category under otherwise have remained aloof. Women constant contest. African women have organize increasingly as the militant pro- embraced, transmuted, and transformed tectors of their communities and activist the ideology in a variety of ways, working children, and as a consequence the image strategically within traditional ideology to of the militant mother, the revolutionary justify untraditional public militancy. An and political mother, began to enter offi- anti-pass pamphlet of the I95os couched cial ANC rhetoric. As one ANC docu- women's indecorously insurgent defiance ment declared in 1987: "The mothers of within the decorous language of domestic the nation, the womenfolk as a whole are duty: "As wives and mothers we condemn the titans of our struggle." the and all that they imply." The custodians of apartheid are experts Unlike Afrikaans women, moreover, Af- at anger, and the police are skilled at ex- rican women appealed to a racially inclu- ploiting the specific vulnerabilities of sive image of motherhood in their cam- women as a means of political terror. The paigns to fashion a nonracial alliance with burden of parental guilt falls more cruelly white women. A Federation of South Af- on women activists than on men. All too rican Women pamphlet of 1958 exhorted often, women detainees under interroga- white women: "In the name of humanity, tion are tormented by the police who de- can you as a woman, as a mother, tolerate ride them as failed mothers, reminding this?" In 1986 appealed them of helpless and unattended children impatiently to white women: "A mother at home, accusing them of"loose morals, " is a mother, black or white. Stand up and and playing on the wracking social con- be counted with other women." tradictions in the women's lives between Over the decades, African women na- the vocation of parenthood and the voca- tionalists, unlike their Afrikaans counter- tion of activism. Even , assas- parts, have transformed and infused the sinated by letter bomb for her anti-

116 TRANSITION NUMBER 51 apartheid activism, was accused of being a of defiance have been mirrored on a na- bad mother for ending up in detention, an tional scale in rents and bus boycotts, or- unthinkable accusation to level against a ganized squatter camps, strikes, anti-rape man. protests, and community activism of myr- In the black communities, "mother- iad kinds. Even under the state of emer- hood" involves far greater community gency, women have everywhere enlarged sharing and responsibility than in the their militancy, insisting not only on their white communities, and the concept of right to political agency, but also on their "mother" extends far beyond immediate right of access to the technologies of vi- biological motherhood to aunts and olence. On August 9, 1985, the twenty- grandmothers, cousins and paid child-care ninth anniversary of South African Wom- providers. On the other hand, exalting an's Day, the ANC's Women's Section women for their maternal power alone has called on women to "take up arms against calamitous consequences, erasing and un- the enemy. In the past we have used ru- dermining the multifarious other forms of dimentary homemade weapons like petrol women's work, which come to be figured bombs. Now is the time that we use mod- as temporary departures from women's ern weapons." manifestly maternal destiny, and are hence Black women's relation to nationalism undervalued and underpaid. In a recent in- has thus significantly shifted over the terview with Speak, an African women's years. At the outset, women were denied magazine, leaders of the ANC Women's formal representation;then their volunteer Section warned of the very real danger of work was put at the service of the national exclusively glamorizing the profession of revolution, still largely male. Gradually, motherhood: "We must not assume that as a result of women's own insurrections, every woman is a wife or mother, or that the need for women's full participation in she intends to be a wife or mother. This is the national liberation movement was a weakness. It arises from our tradition." granted, but women's emancipation was Exalting motherhood makes it very hard still figured as the handmaiden of the na- for women to stay single, to choose not to tional revolution. Only recently has wo- have children, to come out as lesbian or men's empowerment been recognized in bisexual. The heterosexual family within its own right, distinct from the national, the sanction of matrimony acquires the in- democratic, and socialist revolution. Only evitability of destiny, and women are seen recently has women's empowerment not as independent members of the na- come to be seen as a separate, independent, tional community, but as wives responsi- and indispensable element of the full social ble to the nation through their service to transformation of the nation. individual men. In the absence of alterna- tives, as one woman put it, the prestige of as motherhood becomes "a beast of burden For many decades, African women have prestige indeed." been loath to talk of women's emancipa- Since the seventies, women's local rites tion outside the terms of the national

WOMEN AND NATIONALISM 117 liberation movement. In I979, Mavis versal sisterhood in suffering. Many em- Nhlapo, representative of the ANC wo- ployed black women in South Africa are men's secretariat, insisted: "In our society domestic workers, and for these women, women have never made a call for the rec- ferrying between plush suburbs and the ognition of their rights as women, but al- desolate townships, the terms of white lib- ways put the aspirations of the whole Af- eral feminism had scant relevance and ap- rican and other oppressed people of our peal. At this time, moreover, women's country first." Again in 1981, when position within the nationalistic move- Nhlapo was asked about sexual politics ment was still precarious, and women and male domination, she said: "this is sec- could ill afford to antagonize men so em- ondary to the primary goal of the strug- battled and already so reluctant to surren- gle." The ANC delegation to the Nairobi der whatever patriarchal power they still Conference on Women in 1985 concurred: enjoyed. In recent years, however, dramatic "Itwould be suicidal for changes have been wrought in the South us to adopt feminist African discourse on feminism, stemming largely from women's enhanced visibility ideas. Ourenemy is the within the Mass Democratic Movement. system and we cannot On September 23, 1989, women gathered exhaust our on by the thousands in the streets of Pretoria, energies braving razor wire, water cannons, police women's issues" cordons and batons. Helicopters hovered overhead and police squads put the city "It would be suicidal for us to adopt fem- under siege. Earlier that year, a huge new inist ideas. Our enemy is the system and alliance of women's organizations had we cannot exhaust our energies on wom- formed. WAR (Women against Repres- en's issues." Yet if pass laws, influx con- sion) united a broad spectrum of women trol, the lack of housing, food, and land, from a host of organizations, including the the torture of children, the murder of Federation of Transvaal Women, the Na- women and men are not women's issues, tal Organisation of Women, the Black what are? Sash, and a medley of student, worker, During the sixties and seventies, black and church organizations. April I990 saw women were understandably wary of the a protest march of more than three thou- middle-class feminism that was sputtering sand people, mostly women, organized by fitfully to life in the white universities, cit- COSATU women to protest the Labor ies, and suburbs. All women do not ex- Relations Amendment Act. One of the perience apartheid in the same way, and placards called: "Women come out of the African women raisedjustifiably skeptical kitchen!" "We are the traffic officers of the eyebrows at a white feminism that future," yelled a female marshal. In Feb- vaunted itself as giving tongue to a uni- ruary I990, women took one of the few

118 TRANSITION NUMBER 51 anti-rape marches in the country through the emancipation of women is not a by- the streets of . product of a struggle for democracy, na- In recent years a transformed African tional liberation or . It has to be discourse on feminism has emerged, in addressed within our own organisation, which black women demand the right to the mass democratic movement and in the fashion the terms of feminism to meet society as a whole." The document calls their own needs and situations. In 1987 for "a real understanding of gender op- Sister Bernard Ncube, for one, saw the pression," admits that "the prevalence of Christian feminist movement as melding patriarchalattitudes" permeates the ANC both Christianity and feminism for local itself, and calls for a wide range of policies needs: "The feminist movement is work- to eliminate "gender-oppression now and ing for the political, economic and social in the future." The document is unprec- equality of men and women, boys and edented in placing South African women's girls in every area of life. The Christian resistance in an international context and feminist movement frames this process on in granting feminism independent histor- the biblical understanding of God as in- ical agency. It declares, into the bargain, corporating masculine and feminine that all "laws, customs, traditions and equally in 'One Person.' " At a seminar practices which discriminate against entitled "Feminism and National Libera- women shall be held to be unconstitu- tion," convened by the Women's Section tional. " If the ANC remains faithful to this of the ANC in in I989, a repre- document, virtually all existing practices sentative from the South African Youth in South African legal, political, and social Congress (SAYCO) exclaimed: "How life will be rendered unconstitutional. good it feels that feminism is finally ac- A few months later, on June 17, I990, cepted as a legitimate school of thought in the women leadership of the ANC Wo- our struggles and is not seen as a foreign men's Section, recently returned home ideology." At the seminar, the women from exile, gathered jubilantly at Jabulani agreed on the need to ensure that commit- Stadium. In an interview with Speak, the ment to be more than rhe- ANC women called for a National Com- torical, on transforming labor and gender mission of Women and insisted on the imbalances within the household, on dis- strategic validity of the terms "non- mantling traditions that shackle women, sexism" and "feminism": "Feminism has on forming separate women's organiza- been misinterpreted in most Third World tions without their becoming infantilized countries .. there is nothing wrong with as "nursery schools or ghettos." feminism. It is as progressive or reaction- On May 2, I990, the National Execu- ary as nationalism. Nationalism can be re- tive of the ANC issued a historic "State- actionary or progressive. We have not got ment on the Emancipation of Women," rid of the term nationalism. And with fem- which forthrightly proclaimed: "The ex- inism it is the same." Rather, feminism perience of other societies has shown that should be tailored to meet local needs and

WOMEN AND NATIONALISM 119 concerns: "We have tried to use feminism puts the interests and needs of privileged to suit our conditions." A few months women in imperialist countries above the later, on August 9, I990, a national, non- local needs of disempowered women and racial organization of women was men, when it operates within the terms of launched. imperial power, borrowing from patriar- Yet very real uncertainties for women chal privilege. Certainly, the relatiqn be- remain. So far, theoretical and strategic tween feminism and nationalism has in- analyses of South Africa's gender imbal- volved a double repression. If theories of ances have not run deep. There has been nationalism have tended to ignore gender little strategic rethinking of how, in par- as a category constitutive of nationalism ticular, to transform labor relations in the itself, so too have some feminist tenden- household, and women are still not given cies (largely white and middle-class) ig- the same political visibility as men. The nored race and class as categories consti- majority of South African women re- tutive of gender. mained penned up in rural desolation, In the last decade, women of color have working for parlous wages, if at all, in do- been vehement in challenging privileged mestic service or as farm workers, bent feminists whose racial and class power double in field and factory, bent double seems invisible to them. Hazel Carby, for again in the household. one, issued her famous call to white At a recent Congress of South African women to listen, the Egyptian feminist El Trade Unions (COSATU) convention, Sa'adawi accused certain Western women trade union women called for attention to of "maternalism," and Marnea Lazreg, sexual harassment in the unions, but their the Algerian feminist, warned Western demand was brusquely flicked aside by feminists to be wary of the borrowed, im- male unionists as a decadent symptom of perialist power of academic interpretation. "bourgeois imperialist feminism." Les- Some nationalist women have chosen to bian and gay activists have been similarly use the term womanist as a replacement condemned as supporting lifestyles that forfeministwith its Western undertones. In are no more than invidious imports of em- an important article, Chandra Mohanty pire. The charge is a familiar one, flung has decried the appropriation of the strug- frequently at the heads of nationalist fem- gles of women of color by hegemonic inists (both women and men) and at other white women's movements, specifically mutinous groups to quell demands that are through the production of the category not subservient to the interests of the na- "Third World woman" as a singular, tionalist elite. monolithic, and paradigmatically victim- There is not only one feminism, nor is ized subject. She argues brilliantly that there only one . Feminism is not "assumptions of privilege and ethnocen- transhistorical, any more than nationalism tric universality on the one hand, and in- is. History reveals myriad , and adequate self-consciousness about the ef- all take very different shapes in different fect of western scholarship on the 'third contexts. Feminism is imperialist when it world' in the context of a world system

120 TRANSITION NUMBER 51 dominated by the west, on the other, char- danger that, paradoxically, Western, acterize a sizable extent of western feminist white feminism will remain hegemonic, work on women in the third world." for the simple reason that such women Denouncing all feminisms as imperial- have comparatively privileged access to ist has calamitous results for women in na- publishing, the international media, edu- tional liberation movements, erasing from cation, and money. A good deal of this memory the long history of women's re- feminism may well be inappropriate to sistance to local and imperialist patriar- women living under very different situa- chies. As Kumari Jayawardena notes, tions. Instead, women of color are calling "movements for women's emancipation for the right to fashion feminism to suit and feminism flourished in several non- their own worlds, while also learning European countries" well before Western from the strategies of other nationalist feminism emerged. Women's myriad in- women and women of color. As the Al- digenous revolts are thereby annulled or gerian feminist Marie Aimee Helie-Lucas dismissed as the phantasmagoric evanes- puts it: "Now that we start supporting cence of white women's agitations-an each other from within the Third World, imperialist and infantilizing notion indeed. within the , etc. ... it be- "Feminism," Jayawardena argues, "was comes increasingly difficult to limit our not imposed on the Third World by the action to an imitation of the west. ... In- West, but rather historical circumstances side our countries, and even within the produced important material and ideolog- women's groups, we leave ourselves less ical changes that affected women." open to nationalist justifications for being Many women's mutinies around the silent." The singular contribution of world predated Western feminism or oc- curred without any contact with Western All too frequently,male feminists. In South Africa there is evidence nationalistscondemn of women resisting the plunder of their la- bor and sexuality in forced marriages be- feminismas divisive, fore the ravages of had made biddingwomen to hold itself felt. The historic women's anti-pass their until after march in the I950s, to take one example tongues from many, took place beyond the influ- the revolution ence of Western feminism, which was then floundering in the doldrums. Women re- nationalist feminism has been its insistence sist not because feminism has been surrep- on relating the feminist struggle to other titiously ferried in from abroad, but be- liberation movements. cause the contradictions in their own All too frequently, male nationalists historical circumstances compel them to condemn feminism as divisive, bidding do so. women to hold their tongues until after the Moreover, if all feminism is derided as revolution is over. Yet feminism is a po- a pathology of the West, there is a very real litical refusal of gender conflict, not its

WOMEN AND NATIONALISM 121 cause. To insist on silence about gender where has a national or socialist revolution conflict when it already exists is to cover brought a full feminist revolution in its over, and thereby ratify, women's disem- train. In many nationalist or socialist re- powerment. The identification and refusal gimes, women's concerns are at best paid of rape and domestic battery are not lip service, at worst greeted with hilarity. divisive-rape and battery are. The refusal If women have come to do men's work, of economic disadvantage is not divisive- men have not come to share women's economic disadvantage is. work. In societies like Nicaragua and To ask women to wait until after the Cuba, very real efforts have been made to revolution serves merely as a strategic tac- transform women's lives and works. Both tic to defer women's demands. Not only countries have written into law the equal does it conceal the fact that nationalisms sharing of housework and have invented are from the outset constituted in gender ingenious tactics such as radio announce- power, but, as the lessons of international ments during mealtimes urging men to history portend, women who are not em- help. But in the absence of sustained cam- powered to organize during the struggle paigns, education, and organized change, will not be empowered to organize after the weight of male self-interest and tradi- the struggle. If nationalism is not deeply tion proves overwhelming. In South Ye- informed, and transformed, by an analysis men and China, women were able to mo- of gender power, the nation-state will re- bilize for change insofar as they helped main a repository of male hopes, male as- spread the political base of the party, swell pirations, and male privilege. the labor force, and march against with- All too often, the doors of tradition are ered family elites and warlord regimes. In slammed in women's faces. Yet traditions the process, the nose of traditional patri- are not the sacrosanct and timeless essences archy was bloodied, and dramatic changes of a people; they are social inventions often for women were won. But nowhere has of very recent origin-both the outcome feminism in its own right been allowed to and the record of political contests and be more than a maidservant to national- power. In a nationalist revolution, both ism. Most nationalisms have been singu- women and men should be empowered to larly unenthusiastic about granting gender decide which traditions are outmoded, conflict as fundamental a role in history as which should be transformed, and which class or race conflict, and feminism for its should be preserved. own sake has either been scoffed at or un- Around the world the Women's De- ceremoniously squelched. cade has been the decade of hopes deferred. Frantz Fanon's prescient warnings Nationalists frequently argue that colo- against the pitfalls of the national con- nialism or capitalism has been women's sciousness are nowhere more urgent than ruin, with patriarchy merely as a nasty sec- now in South Africa. For Fanon, nation- ond cousin destined to wither away when alism gives vital expression to a popular the real villain finally expires. Yet no- memory of shared suffering and shared re-

122 TRANSITION NUMBER 51 fusal. At the same time, he is fully aware heaven," to borrow Fanon's phrase. But of the attendant risks of concealing, and the current situation gives sober poi- thereby exacerbating, the very real contra- gnancy, especially for women, to the lines dictions within the strategic collectivity of from Pontecorvo's famous film on the Al- nationalism-conflicts of class, gender, gerian national war of liberation, The Bat- ethnicity, regional and generational differ- tle of Algiers: "It is difficult to start a rev- ence. Nationalism contains the very real olution, more difficult to sustain it. But it's risk of projecting the denial of difference later, when we've won, that the real dif- onto a conveniently abstracted "collective ficulties will begin." will." Yet insisting on a single politics of identity (nationalism, feminism, interna- SOURCES tionalism, socialism) cannot guarantee po- litical correctness, nor is there one privi- Anderson, B. ImaginedCommunities. Reflections on the and Nationalism. London: national a Origin Spread of Verso, leged "subjectivity." Moreover, I983. Western, Hegelian discourse that traffics Davies, M., ed. Third World/SecondSex, 2. Lon- don: Zed, 1987. in the abstract Center and Periphery is no Enloe, C. Bananas,Beaches, and Bases: Making Fem- longer adequate to the current interna- inist Sense of InternationalPolitics. Berkeley: University of California tional distribution of power. Rather, I Press, 1990. Hobsbawm, E. Nations and Nationalismfrom 1780. would draw on Audre Lorde's evocation Cambridge University Press, 1990. of the multiple, contradictory construc- Hofmeyer, I. Building a Nation from Words: Af- rikaans Literature, and Ethnic well as on Homi Language, Identity, tions of subjectivity, as 1902-1924. In The Politics of Race, Class, and Nation- Bhabha's notion of a "hybrid," multiple alism in 20th Century South Africa, S. Marks and S. eds. London: crisscrossed Trapido, Longman, 1987. political identity, by myriad Jayawardena, K. Feminism and Nationalism in the differences and loyalties. Third World.London: Zed, 1986. and E. Unterhalter. We the Indeed, the ANC's democratic com- Kimble, J., Opened Road for You, You Must Go Forward: ANC Wom- mitments offer a model of political agency en's Struggles 1912-1982. Feminist Review, October that refuses any racially exclusive defini- 12, 1982. O'Meara, D. Volkskapitalisme:Class, Capital, and tion of the citizen, allowing for the mo- Ideology in the Development of Afrikaner Nationalism, bilization of a variety of political agents. 1934-1948. Johannesberg: Raven Press, 1983. van Diepen, M. The National Questionin South Af- The narrowness of a vanguard party is off- rica. London: Zed, 1988. set by an appeal to a collective, democratic Walker, C., ed. Womenand Genderin SouthernAf- rica to 1945. Town: David of action. The national trans- Cape Philip, 1990. community Yuval-Davis, N., and F. Anthias, eds. Women- formation is "no longer in a future Nation-State. London: Macmillan, 1989.

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