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Revolutionary Struggles and Mass Sociopolitical Movements Have a History of Lumping Women's Issues Into the Category of the Wh

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Revolutionary Struggles and Mass Sociopolitical Movements Have a History of Lumping Women's Issues Into the Category of the Wh Article 10 My Spirit is not Banned: A Rhetorical Analysis of the African National Congress Women’s League (ANCWL) Megan Tomei Graduate Student School of Communication & Multimedia Studies Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida Abstract This paper is a rhetorical criticism of a speech given by Lindiwe Mabuza, an African National Congress Women’s League (ANCWL) activist, during the period when South Africa was transitioning to a triacameral parliament to include black South Africans. The (ANCWL) helped to shift South Africa to more progressive and less sexist policies regarding women. There has been extensive research on the transition of South Africa from apartheid to full democracy as well as the immense difficulty the country currently faces because of such a radical transition, but very little research addresses the most violent period leading up to the governmental transition, specifically looking at the role South African women generally, and the ANCWL specifically played in the anti- apartheid movement. This paper works as an invitation for further research on the rhetoric of the ANCWL and the importance of women’s contribution to the anti-apartheid movement. Keywords: African National Congress Women’s League (ANCWL), rhetoric, rhetorical criticism, Lindiwe Mabuza, women, patriarchy, apartheid, South Africa. 1 Revolutionary struggles and mass sociopolitical movements have a history of lumping women’s issues into the category of the whole and discarding them as insignificant and trivial. The fight for equality has always been within the context of male-dominated struggles, which have helped to impede the development of a feminist consciousness. If women continue to work within the realms of patriarchy then their issues will continue to be forgotten, ignored and trivialized. In order to break through these barriers, women must create an individual identity, as well as use rhetoric that takes their cause outside of patriarchal terms. An example of this—though not the only one—can be seen in South Africa, a country that was created with some of the most devastating segregationist policies but has now implemented legislation to protect women and has made being a “non-sexist” country part of its mission. Patriarchy and sexism are still alive and well in South Africa, just as they are in almost every other country around the world, but the African National Congress Women’s League (ANCWL) has helped to shift South Africa to more progressive and less sexist policies regarding women. There has been extensive research on the transition of South Africa from apartheid to full democracy (Alexander, 2003; Kotze, 1994; Weisse & Anthonissen, 2004) as well as the immense difficulty the country currently faces because of such a radical and dramatic transition (Hart, 2003; Nowak and Ricci, 2005; Singh, 2008; Wilson, 2001), but very little research addresses the most violent period leading up to the governmental transition, specifically looking at the role the ANCWL played in the anti-apartheid movement. The ANCWL was particularly powerful in their ability to mobilize and bring attention to their causes (Waylen, 2007). The success of their mobilization techniques was inherent to their rhetoric, which helped to both cultivate an identity that divided the struggles of black South African women from the larger anti-apartheid movement and also empowered them by reconstituting their agency through a reliance on their historical successes. The rhetoric of the ANCWL merits attention both for its ability to create an individual voice for women and to create rhetoric that diverged from its oppressors. The deficit in research is unfortunate but not detrimental to this paper; however, this paper will only analyze 2 one speech in order to work as a platform for further study of this area. This paper looks specifically at a speech given by Lindiwe Mabuza, an ANCWL activist, in 1983 when the government was making a transition to a triacameral parliament to include black South Africans. This paper works as an invitation for further research on the rhetoric of the ANCWL and the importance of their contribution to the anti-apartheid movement. The history of the Black South African psyche The creation of apartheid was relatively recent in comparison to America’s segregationist policies. By the time apartheid was officially formed in South Africa, America was six years away from legally ending its version of apartheid and declaring it unconstitutional, though the de-jure end of segregation didn’t end its de facto implementation. The segregationist policies are similar in many aspects, but there is one glaring difference: in America, African Americans were both a minority in actual numbers and in power, but in South Africa blacks were only a minority in terms of political strength. In South Africa blacks made up 87% of the country’s population. However, the country was “ruled by and for the whites who form[ed] 17% of the population” (“Women Under Apartheid”, 1981, p. 8). For such a small minority to oppress such a large physical majority the history behind South Africa’s apartheid is riddled with extreme tyranny and brutality. In order to maintain control of such a large population the government created a dehumanizing existence for blacks and undermined their legitimacy as human beings. In his groundbreaking work, Black skin, white masks, Frantz Fanon (1952, tr. 1967) argues, “The non-white population of South Africa is at an impasse. Every modern form of slavery prevents them from this scourge. In the case of the African, in particular, white society has crushed his old world without giving him a new one. It has destroyed the traditional tribal foundations of his existence and bars the road to his future after closing the road to his past” (p. 162). During the 1960s, the system of apartheid radically evolved to “Grand Apartheid” in which racial discrimination permeated all aspects of the lives of black South Africans and worked to further create white 3 hegemony. According to Henrard (2002), “the government “implemented a broad plan of social and political engineering called separate development or ‘Grand Apartheid’ which attempted to concentrate and limit African political rights to the respective ethnically defined Bantustans. Indeed ‘ethnic homeland loyalty was to replace national political aspirations in a move which the state hope[d] would defuse calls for the moral necessity for African self government within South Africa itself’” (p. 50). The psychological effects apartheid had on black South Africans cannot be stressed enough; the consequences were profound and widespread on the black South African psyche. In The psychology of apartheid, Peter Lambley (1981) asserts that colonialist policies of the South African government worked as a form of “psychological terrorism” (p. 3). Psychological studies on South Africa during apartheid have found that the segregation system inhibited healthy psychological development (Bulhan, 1993). According to Richards, Pillay, Mazodze, and Govere (2003) apartheid also led to the formation of negative identities among black South Africans “because of how the colonizers perceived them racially, culturally, ethnically, and genderwise” (p. 1). Fanon utilized similar research and extended it to have a much more personal focus. Using similar clinical studies listed above, Fanon combined this with self-analysis and social examination to better understand the true implications of such dehumanization (Bulhan, 1985). One of the many effects of oppression was the violence that it caused, which is often masked as a legitimate part of the social structure. This violence not only manifested in its most obvious forms but also in what Fanon calls “structural violence”. In situations where the hierarchy within a country’s socioeconomic structure bars individuals from social and scientific advancements within society, structural violence is evident. As Farmer (1999) asserts it is the many mechanics of society that are to blame: “neither culture nor pure individual will is at fault; rather, historically given (and often economically driven) processes and forces conspire to constrain individual agency” (p. 79). Such a desolate situation can leave individuals with no other choice but to act out violently. In A dying colonialism Fanon (1965) states that acting out in a desperate manner is “one of those laws of the psychology of colonialism” (p. 47). Indeed this is evident in South Africa’s apartheid during the 1970’s when one of the most horrifying 4 and memorable events took place: the Soweto Uprising. According to an article in Time magazine (“The Soweto Uprising: A Soul-Cry of Rage”, 1976) written a few days after the event, the night before Prime Minister Vorster flew to West Germany to meet with US Secretary of State Kissinger, …the racial tensions that seethe just beneath the surface of South African life exploded in Soweto, a ramshackle, overcrowded satellite town for blacks on the outskirts of Johannesburg. In three bitter days and nights of wild rioting and skirmishes between club-wielding, stone-throwing blacks and heavily armed police, at least 100 people were killed and more than 1,000 were injured; only a handful of the victims were white. The turmoil spread to at least seven other segregated black townships surrounding South Africa's largest industrial city. At week's end the violence subsided, although police remained on guard in Soweto and other neighboring townships. (p. 30) This event rocked South Africa to its core, not only for the ultimate and terribly brutal outcome, but for what the occurrence of such an event signified. In Black skin, white masks Fanon (1952, tr. 1967) argues blacks are “toy[s] in the white man’s hands; so, in order to shatter the hellish cycle, he explodes” (p. 140). Ironically both Fanon and the author of the Time magazine article can find no other word to best describe what occurred and this is not because of a lack of creativity on their parts but rather because no other word is so applicable in illustrating what transpired.
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