Deepening Bonds and Building Power Among South African Women Activists
Stha Yeni’18 leads a session with women activists from Marikana and Mgungundlovu. (Stha Yeni)
Each August since 1994, South Africa has celebrated Women's Month. It’s a time dedicated to honouring the women leaders and changemakers who have transformed our world for the greater good.
While August was chosen to mark the historic 1956 Women's March, which saw 20,000 women march on the seat of government, the month is also a tribute to the full breadth of the legacy of women's activism in South Africa. Women in rural South Africa are among this cadre of changemakers, including those who fought to end unfair food and commodities pricing in the 1920s.
Contemporary women in rural South Africa continue to champion calls for infrastructural change, employment access, an end to gender-based violence and more.
During their fellowship year, Senior Fellows Sithandiwe "Stha" Yeni'18 and Asanda Benya'18 created Feminist Schools to support the work of some of today’s women activists. The schools were women-only spaces designed to connect activists who live and work in and around mines in Marikana to activists who live and work in and around white-owned farms in uMgungundlovu.
As Stha shares in the Q and A below, myriad infrastructural and social barriers kept these groups of women apart before the intervention of the feminist schools. Yet, their struggles are remarkably similar. Stha walks us through the historical and present-day realities of those struggles and reflects on how the space she and Asanda created with these changemakers allowed them to build solidarity and shared language about their struggles.
Modupeola Oyebolu: How did the Feminist Schools project emerge?
Stha Yeni: When Asanda and I joined AFRE, we talked about strengthening activism in South Africa by bringing together women who wouldn't ordinarily meet but who are facing challenges with similar root causes. We thought it would be great to connect the women activists we had each worked with—women working in and around mines in Marikana and women living and working on white-owned farms in Mgungundlovu. It just happened that the women activists were already thinking about something similar. They wanted women-only spaces to debrief on their change efforts, and we thought we could support this initiative.
MO: What's the broader historical context in which the women from Marikana and Mgungundlovu were organising?
SY: In South Africa, we have an economy that is built on land dispossession and the subjugation of Black people. Black women who live on today's white-owned farms come from a generation of Black farmers who were dispossessed of their land to make way for mining and commercial agriculture. Those industries require cheap labour, which was provided by Black South Africans and Black people from neighbouring countries in the region.
Over time, Black people were removed from their means of production and forced into wage labour, earning very low wages that could hardly sustain them. Today, we can see this legacy in the poverty rate amongst Black people, which is the highest in the country.
Many people in South Africa were hopeful that, with our democratic government, land reform would be central, people would get their land back, and people would get skills and resources to create job opportunities, particularly in rural areas. But we're not seeing that. Instead, we're seeing more and more big companies taking over. We have a state that is very pro-rich class.
And it is women who bear the burden of this crisis. When you speak to unemployed youth for instance, and you ask, "Who's taking care of you?" they'll say, "oh it's my grandmother," "oh it's my mother," "oh it's my aunt." Women are taking care of everyone in a situation where everything is precarious.
MO: Why was it difficult for the women activists to connect before the Feminist Schools?
SY: Because many activists live in rural areas, organising can be fragmented and isolated. Farms especially tend to be very secluded because life on farms has historically been built to separate people. It's even difficult to meet with people living on a farm next door.
There are also issues with infrastructure. To move from farm A to farm B, you have to wait for a lift, which can take up to three hours.
And because many women activists also have familial responsibilities, there isn't even enough time to meet to discuss their concerns. Some of them shared that even to go to meetings to discuss water access, their partners or husbands would ask, "Where are you going? Why is this meeting at night?"
MO: What were the Feminist School sessions like? What did the women activists and you do in the space together?
SY: In structuring the Feminist Schools, we were influenced by ideas in popular education where learning goes both ways between teacher and student. Asanda and I aimed to learn from the women activists as much as they were learning from us. We developed the curriculum with them based on an initial conversation where we itemised the questions we wanted to answer together. Then we designed a series of 3-day sessions, spread over several months.
MO: It sounds like you and Asanda were helping to set the framework for the space for the activists to engage.
SY: Yes, yes! We would just facilitate the sessions and serve as guides, ensuring that we were clear about the objectives of each day, but everything was very participatory. We relied on the activists' experiences and on their understanding. They drew from their lives to make sense of things like land dispossession. And were able to contextualise these stories more broadly by offering historical context. We talked about why the economy is set up in a way that puts Black women like themselves at a disadvantage. We talked about why feminism is important, why organising is important, and what can we learn from other countries or from other communities that have faced similar problems.
We conducted the sessions in our local languages too, which was an advantage and a challenge at the same time. Asanda and I were educated in English, so we use a lot of concepts that are quite loaded like patriarchy, power, racial inequality. These are big concepts, but we don't often explain them because we're usually at universities or at conferences with colleagues. But when we were in a room with activists who don't speak English, we had to think on our feet about how to explain these concepts. We learned a lot about translation and the politics of language in the process.
MO: In addition to these insights about language and translation, what else came out of the sessions?
SY: For these activists, simply the space to reflect and put the dots together was valuable. Because of their existing work, they had all these questions like, "Why do these things happen? Why must we always fight, even for a basic thing like water?" And they noted that it's not everyone who's fighting; it's particular people who are always fighting. In the case of South Africa, it's Black people who are always fighting for basic things.
It was refreshing for them to unpack and make sense of these questions, to better understand their context.
They also shared that they enjoyed just being away from home. [Sessions were three-day weekends]. It felt like they were out on holiday, being away for three days; with friends, with no men demanding their time; with things like showers, the kinds of basic things they don't usually enjoy, because they're poor, they are black, because they're women. So the schools were also quite therapeutic for them.
MO: You are currently working toward a Ph.D. Could you talk about your current research? Is it at all connected to this past work on the Feminist Schools?
SY: My current work is connected. I'm looking at Black people who were forcibly displaced from their land in the mid 1900s up until the 1990s but have gotten it back. I'm asking, "What does it mean to have land back in terms of livelihoods and belonging in a country that is still anti-Black even though the faces of those in power are Black?” what does belonging mean for people who have land but no government support? What does it mean to belong whe, at every turn the structures in place remind you of the past, of oppression, of marginalization, of theft, of violence and of state sponsored death, displacement and dispossession of generations of your family? I'm considering these questions from a gender and generational perspective. I'm interested in social reproduction and in the central role of land in people's lives, particularly in Black women's lives in contemporary South Africa.
MO: Is there any reflection you would share with other racial equity leaders based on your work on the feminist schools or your current research?
SY: I think we must always go back to history. And I've learned over the years that we must read it in particular ways. In South Africa, for example, white scholars have had the opportunity to be historians and write history. So, we must read with that awareness and against the grain. The challenge then is to re-write our people’s history from their perspective and that project needs to be taken up by a critical mass so that we see the side of history that has been buried under the very sanitized one we read and have access to.
I've been doing life histories [a kind of oral history interview] with people who experienced forced removals in my current research and their experiences of violence haven’t been fully captured, which is why you hear people defending the previous apartheid government and you see our current government being so uncommitted to real transformation and justice.
The way that they tell history is different from the way some books tell history. When I listen to an 80-year-old woman who watched her house burn down, I get something that a history book would not have explained. It's a reminder that the narratives books emphasize vary based on the author—their state of mind, their emotions, their identities, including their race and position.
I think the challenge and opportunity for those of us who will write books for the next generation is to ensure that we reflect this experience and knowledge that we've been lucky to receive from the stories of people who lived through key historical moments.
MO: What does a liberated future look like to you? Do you see sparks of that liberated future emerging in your work or in your field?
SY: Part of a liberated future is the return of land to Black women and reparations for the many years of economic deprivation and loss of education opportunities due to white subjugation. I do see sparks of that future emerging, especially in areas where Black women have occupied land and demanded the provision of basic services such as water. However, there is still a long way to go.
MO: Where do you draw inspiration to continue the work of combating anti-Black racism and building new, more expansive futures?
SY: I am inspired by Black women who are on the margins, yet they carry on fighting and will not stop.
Update March 29 2023: In 2022, Stha and Asanda published a research paper reflecting on the feminist schools, including the self-selection of participants, co-development of a flexible curriculum and non-hierarchical dialogical learning methodology. They also reflect on how grounding the schools in local languages enriched the experience and encouraged full participation. “We thus make a case for the development and refinement of indigenous feminist theories/concepts that are locally grounded but outward-looking, drawing from and in conversation with local languages, realities and activists,” they write. Read more.