Position

T R A N S I T ION

"NO
IN

LONGER
A

FUTURE

WOMEN
IN SOUTH

HEAVEN":

AND
NATIONALISM
AFRICA

Anne McClintock
All nationalisms are gendered, all are invented, and all are dangerous. Nations 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. Benedict Anderson thus
argues that nations are best understood as "imagined communities," systems of representations whereby people come to imagine a shared experience of identification with
an extended community.
Nonetheless, nations are not simply phantasmagoria of mind. 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 fabricatedthrough 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 Palestinian 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 state'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

through social institutions, and legitimizing, or limiting, people's access to the
rights and resources of the nation-state:
land and water, political and economic
power, children, food and housing, the
technologies of violence. Nations are situations under constant contest.
All nationalisms, moreover, are gendered. "When you own a big chunk of the
bloody Third World, the babiesjust come
with the scenery," as the Chrissie Hynde
song goes. In the chronicles of male nationalism, women, too, are all too often
figured as mere scenic backdrops to the
big-brass business of masculine armies and
uprisings. Theorists of nationalism (Fanon
notably excepted) have seldom felt moved
to explore how nationalisms are at every
minute implicated in gender power. No
nationalism in the world has granted
women and men the same privileged access to the resources of the nation-state. So
far, all nationalisms are dependent on
powerful constructions of gender difference.
George Santayana, for one, gives voice
to a well-established male view: "Our nationalism is like our relationship to
women: too implicated in our moral nature to be changed honorably, and too
accidental to be worth changing." For
Santayana political agency is straightforwardly male, and the male citizen
stands in the same symbolic relation to the
nation as a man stands to a woman, political power thus depending on a prior
construction of gender power. Santayana's sentence could never be said by a
woman, because, quite simply, the "our"

of national citizenship is male. The needs

of the nation are identified with the needs,
frustrations, and aspirations of men. As in
the translated (not original) title of Fanon's
famous essay "Algeria Unveiled," women
are construed as the "bearers of the nation," its boundary and symbolic limit,
but lack a nationality of their own. In such
instances, women serve to represent the
limits of national difference between men.
Excluded as national citizens, women are
subsumed only symbolically into the national body politic. Thus male political
power is heavily dependent on a naturalized, and none too "accidental," ideology
of gender difference. Nationalism is constituted from the very beginning as a gendered discourse, and cannot be understood
without a theory of gender power.
Nira Yuval Davis and Flora Anthias
have suggested that women's relation to
nationalism has taken at least five major
forms. Women serve
* as biological reproducers of national
groups (the biological mothers of the people)
* as symbols and signifiers of national
difference in male discourse ("Singapore
Girl, you're a great way to fly")
* as transmitters and producers of the
cultural narratives themselves (mothers,
teachers, writers, playwrights, artists)
* as reproducers of the boundaries of
the nation (by accepting or refusing sexual
intercourse or marriage with prescribed
groups of men)
* as active participants in national
movements: in armies, congresses, trade
union activism, community organizations.

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Nations do not have transhistorical effects. There is no one single nationalism,

nor one privileged narrative of the nation,
to borrow Homi Bhabha's phrase. In
South Africa, certainly, women's relations
to the competing national narratives and
struggles have taken a number of intricate
and changing historical shapes, contests in
which women are themselves deeply involved, and which have profound implications for the future of a transformed
South Africa. In what follows, I wish to
explore some of the varying ways in which
women have been implicated in the competing nationhoods, both within Afrikaans as well as African nationalism.
Afrikaner Nationalism and Gender
The men all goodfor nothingand hardlyany
womenat all.
-Jane Austen
to
the
Contrary
legends of white invention, Afrikaner nationalism did not begin
with the scraping of Dutch keels on the
Cape shores in 1652. Afrikanerdom, far
from being the timeless emanation of a
monolithic "Afrikaner volk," is of very
recent origin. The major themes of the
"national" saga (divine sanction and manifest destiny, cultural brotherhood and racial distinction, patriarchalpower, entitlement to the lands, and a single, unifying
language) are invented traditions. Afrikanerdom is not the mysterious manifestation of a divine plan unfolding through
the centuries and flowering into history
with the Great Trek, or the ancestral gees
(spirit) inherent in every Boer. Rather, it
was forged very recently in the crucible of
colonial contradiction.
Until the i86os, Britain was indifferent
to its unpromising colony at the southern
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tip of Africa. Only upon the discovery of

diamonds and gold were the Union Jack
and the redcoats shipped out with any real
sense of imperial mission. Very quickly,
mining needs for cheap labor and a centralized state collided with traditional
farming interests, and out of these contradictions, in the conflict for control over
African land and labor, exploded the
bloody Anglo-Boer

war of 1899-1902.

Violently improvised in the shocked aftermath of the war, Afrikaner nationalism

was a doctrine of crisis. After their defeat
by the British, the bloodied remnants of
the scattered Boer communities had to
forge a new counter-culture if they were to
survive in the emergent capitalist state.
The invention of this counter-culture had
a clear class component. When the Boer
generals and the British capitalists swore
blood brotherhood in the Union of 1910,
the raggle-taggle legion of"poor whites"
with little or no prospects, the modest
clerks and shopkeepers, the small farmers
and poor teachers, the intellectuals and petite bourgeoisie, all precarious in the new
state, began to identify themselves as the
vanguard of a new Afrikanerdom, the
chosen emissaries of the national volk.
To begin with, Afrikaners had no
monolithic identity, no common historic
purpose, and no single unifying language.
They were a disunited, scattered people,
speaking a medley of High Dutch and local
dialects. The dialects, blended with smatterings of the slave, Nguni, and Khoisan
languages, were scorned as the kombuistaal
(kitchen language) of house servants,
slaves, and women. But in the early decades of the twentieth century, as Isabel
Hofmeyr has brilliantly shown, an elabo-

rate labor of "regeneration" was undertaken, as the despised hotnotstaalwas revamped, purged of its rural, "degenerate"
associations, and elevated to the status of
the august mother tongue of the Afrikaans
people.
The new, invented community of the
volk required the conscious creation of a
single print language, a popular press, and
a literate populace. At the same time, the
invention of tradition required a class of
cultural brokers and image makers to do
the inventing. The "language movement"
of the early twentieth century, in the flurry
of poems, magazines, newspapers, novels,
and countless cultural events, provided
just such a movement, fashioning the
myriad Boer vernaculars into a single
identifiable Afrikaans language.
At the same time, the invention of Afrikaner tradition had a clear gender component. In 1918 Afrikaans was legally recognized as a third language. The same
year, a small, clandestine clique of Afrikaans men launched a secret society, with
the mission of capturing the loyalties of
dispirited Afrikaners and fostering white
male business power. There, in the magic,
inner circle of Afrikanerdom's new intelligentsia, with vows of secrecy and initiation ceremonies in dark, sequestered
rooms, apartheid doctrine was spawned.
As Allistair Sparks has observed, the tiny
white brotherhood swiftly became the
think tank of the Afrikaner Nationalist
movement, burgeoning into a countrywide political mafia that has exerted immense power over all aspects of Nationalist policy and cultural life. The gender
bias of the society, as of the rest of Afrikanerdom, is neatly summed up in its

name: the Broederbond(the brotherhood).

Henceforth, Afrikaner nationalism would
be synonymous with white male interests,
white male aspirations, and white male
politics.
Two decades later, in 1938, an epic extravaganza of invented tradition inflamed
Afrikanerdom into a delirium of nationalist passion. Dubbed the Tweede Trek
(Second Trek), or the Eeufees(Centenary),
the event celebrated the Boers' first mutinous Great Trek away from British laws
and the effrontery of slave emancipation,
and commemorated the Boer massacre of
the Zulus at the Battle of Blood River.
Nine replicas of Voortrekker wagons were
built. Each was named after a male Voortrekker hero. No wagon was named after
an adult woman, but one was called, generically, Vrou en Moeder (Wife and
Mother). This wagon, creaking across the
country, symbolized woman's relation to
the nation as indirect, mediated through
her social relation to men, her national
identity lying in her unpaid services,
through husband and family, to the volk.
Each wagon became the microcosm of
colonial society at large: the whipwielding white patriarch prancing on
horseback, black servants toiling alongside, mother and children ensconced in the
wagon-the women's starched white bonnets signifying the purity of the race, the
decorous surrenderof their sexuality to the
patriarch, and the invisibility of female labor. The wagons rumbled along different
routes from Cape Town to Pretoria,
sparking along the way an orgy of national
pageantry, and engulfing the country in a
four-month spectacle of invented tradition. Along the route, white men grew
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beards and white women donned the ancestral bonnets. Huge crowds gathered to
greet the wagons. As the trekkers passed
through the towns, babies were named after trekker heroes, as were roads and public buildings. Not a few girls were baptized
with the improbable but popular favorite:
Eeufesia (Centeneria). The affair climaxed
in Pretoria in a spectacular Third Reich
marathon led by thousands of Afrikaner
Boy Scouts bearing flaming torches.
The first point about the Tweede Trek
is that it invented nationalist traditions and
celebrated unity where none before existed, creating the illusion of a collective
identity through the political staging of vicarious spectacle.The second point is that
the Nationalists learned the trick from the
Nazis. The Tweede Trek was pure
Nuremberg, as Allister Sparks notes. Hitler is said to have sent a spy to South Africa
to sniff out sympathizers, of which there
was no shortage. The Broederbond arranged for a few promising Afrikaner students to spend some time in German
universities-the same men, as it happened, who were destined to become the
foremost architects of apartheid ideology.
One of these men, Piet Meyer, baptized
his son Izan-Nazi spelled backwards.
As Sparks shows, these men returned
to South Africa inspired not only by the
Nazi creed of Blut und Boden, but a new
style: the politics of symbol and cultural
persuasion. In our time, the experience of
national collectivity is preeminently
through spectacle. By anyone's standards,
the Eeufees was a triumph of image
management, complete with all the Third
Reich symbolic regalia of flags, flaming

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torches,

patriotic

songs, incendiary
speeches, costumes, and crowd management. More than anything, the Eeufees revealed the extent to which nationalism is
a symbolic performanceof invented community, staged by political interests, and
enacted by designated cultural actors. In
reality, the Eeufees was a calculated and
self-conscious effort by the Broederbond
to paper over the myriad regional, gender,
and class tensions that threatened them. As
a fetishistic displacement of difference, it
succeeded famously, for the success of the
Tweede Trek in mobilizing a sense of
white Afrikaner collectivity was a major
reason, though certainly not the only one,
for the Nationalists' triumphant sweep to
power in I948.
Indeed, the degree to which the Eeufees
papered over fatal divisions within the
white populace became most manifest in
I988, during the height of the state of
emergency, when no less than two competing Treks set out to reenact the reenactment, each sponsored by two bitterly
rivalrous white nationalist parties.
From the outset, as the Eeufees bore
witness, Afrikaner nationalism was dependent not only on powerful constructions of racial difference, but also on powerful constructions of gender difference. A
gendered division of national creation prevailed, whereby men were seen to embody
the political and economic agency of the
volk, while women were the (unpaid)keepers of tradition and the volk's moral and
spiritual mission. This gendered division
of labor is summed up in the imperial gospel of the family and the presiding icon of
the volksmoeder(the mother of the nation).

The idea of the volksmoeder is a changing,

dynamic ideology rife with paradox, under constant contest by men and women,
and adapted constantly to the changing
context of African resistance.
The Invention of the Volksmoeder:
Mum's The Word
At the beginning of the Great Trek, so the
story goes, Susanna Smit, the hefty wife of
Reverend Erasmus Smit, threatened to
cross the mountains barefoot rather than
genuflect to the perfidious Union Jack.
Late-nineteenth-century narratives are
scattered with references to the burly,
Boer women,
who
whip-wielding
dragged wagons over mountains and
knew more about inspanning oxen and
breeding horses than embroidery anglaise.
Indeed, the Anglo-Boer war (which was
really a war over African land and labor)
was in many respects waged as a war on
Boer women. In an effort to break Boer
resistance, the British herded thousands of
women and children into frightful concentration camps and then torched the farms
and lands. In these appalling places, 25,000
women and children perished of hunger,
desolation, and disease.
Yet after the Anglo-Boer war, the political power of the fierce Boer women was
muted and transformed. In 1913, three
years after Union, the Vrouemonument
(Women's Monument) was erected in
homage to the female victims of the war.
In a circular enclosure, women stand
weeping with their children. In the iconography of the monument, women's
martial role as fighters and farmers was
purged of its indecorously militant poten-

tial and replaced by the figure of the lamenting mother with babe in arms. The
monument enshrined Afrikaner womanhood as neither militant nor political, but
as suffering, stoical, and self-sacrificial.
Women's disempowerment was figured
not as expressive of the politics of gender
difference, stemming from colonial women's ambiguous relation to imperial domination, but as emblematic of national (that
is, male) disempowerment. By portraying
the Afrikaner nation symbolically as a
weeping woman, the mighty male embarrassment of military defeat could be overlooked, and the memory of women's vital
efforts during the war washed away in images of feminine tears and maternal loss.
The icon of the volksmoeder is paradoxical. On the one hand, it recognizes the
power of (white) motherhood; on the
other hand, it contains that power within
an iconography of domestic service. By
defining women as victims, their activism
could be overlooked and their disempowerment ratified. As Elsabe Brink notes in
a fine essay, a massive march of Afrikaner
women to parliament in 1915 was symbolically reinterpreted, not as a political
event, but as a quintessentially feminine
surrender to the imperatives of romantic
love: "Love called, love obeyed."
The exaltation of the volksmoeder also
had economic and class motives. After the
war, South Africa began rapidly to industrialize, and white working-class women
were drawn into the factories in large
numbers, discovering a taste for independence, and ceasing to reck their father's
rod. As in Victorian Britain, a revamped
ideology of motherhood was invoked to

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usher women back into the home, and

thereby back into unwaged service to fathers, husbands, and sons.
In the early decades of the century, as
Hofmeyer shows, women played a crucial
role in the invention of Afrikanerdom.
The family household was seen as the last
bastion beyond British control, and the
cultural power of Afrikaner motherhood
was mobilized in the service of white nation building. Afrikaans was a language
fashioned very profoundly by women's labors, within the economy of the domestic
household. "Not for nothing," as Hofmeyer notes, "was it called the 'mother
tongue.' " Women were crucialin the construction of a distinctive Afrikaner culture.
As readers of Huisgenoot,the most widely
circulated magazine in South Africa,
women began the enormous task of transforming virtually every aspect of daily life
into the ciphers of the Afrikaner spirit.
Certain foods became Afrikaans foods,

The idea of
"motherhood" in

Afrikanernationalism
was not a concept
imposed willy-nillyon
hapless, inertwomen
certain clothes became Afrikaans clothes,
certain types of furniture became Afrikaans furniture.
The idea of "motherhood" in Afrikaner nationalism was not a concept imposed willy-nilly on hapless, inert
women. Rather, motherhood is a political
concept, under constant contest. This is
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important for two reasons. Erasing Afrikaner women's historic agency also erases
their historic complicity in the annals of
apartheid. White women were not the
weeping bystanders of apartheid history,
but were active participants in the invention of Afrikaner identity. As such they
were complicit in deploying the power of
motherhood in the exercise and legitimation of white domination. White women
werejealously and brutally denied any formal political power, but were compensated by their limited authority in the
household. Clutching this small power,
they became complicit in the racism that
suffuses Afrikaner nationalism. This is a
major reason why black South African
women are justly suspicious of any easy
assumption of universal, essential sisterhood. White women are both colonized
and colonizers, ambiguously complicit in
the history of African dispossession.
Afrikaner women's relation to nationalism is thus complex. In their major, culturally defined role as biological mothers,
women literally reproduce the citizens of
the white nation. In I96I, for example, all
white women were exhorted to do their
national duty and "Have a Baby for Republic Day." Women also reproduce the
cultural and symbolic boundaries of white
"nationhood"-standing discreetly at the
elbows of white male power, as unpaid
wives of army colonels, cabinet ministers,
and police, or as activists in the home,
schools, and churches. At the same time,
men draw deeply on figures of gender difference to police the boundaries of racial
and class difference. Finally, and in limited
numbers, white women have become formal political participants in defense of

white power, in public forums, in conservative women's organizations, in an auxiliary capacity within the army, or carrying arms as citizens on farms along the
borders. Nevertheless, even here women's
potential military power is muted and contained within an infantilized and sexualized ideology of the family, summed up in
the nickname "Botha's Babes," for
women who serve within the South African Defense Force. Finally, however,
one cannot forget the few renegades who
have militantly crossed into the forbidden
territory of anti-apartheid activism: in
Black Sash, the Mass Democratic Movement and the ANC.

Nation, Citizenship, and the Marriage

Relation
A man and a womanare one and he is the
one.

Verwoerd's cold dream of post-1948

apartheid was to reinvent South Africa as
a constellation of separateindependent African "nations," scattered around the central white "nation." Each "nation" would
have its own distinct culture and language,
each its own set of traditions and customs,
and each "nation" would be assigned a
separate territory and political system.
The originality of the move was that it
graced the Bantustans with the status of
the
"proto-nations,"
casting over
wretched partition of the land the false
glamor of independent "nation" building.
According to the grand proclamation of
the Promotion of Black Self-Government
Act (46 of I959): "the Black peoples of the
Union of South Africa do not constitute a
homogenous people, but form separate

national units on the basis of language and

culture."
The Group Areas Act controls ownership, use of land, and residence in terms of
a labyrinthine network of population classification. The key to the current system is
the Population Act of I95o, which lays
down three basic definitions, black, colored, and white. A black is a "person who
is, or is generally accepted as, a member of
any aboriginal race or tribe of Africa." Socalled "coloreds," as Martin West shows,
are defined negatively, as a residual category: "a person who is not a White person
or a Black." However, the definition of a
white person is, as Boberg puts it, "less
than crystal clear." A white person is "a
person who (a) in appearanceobviously is
a white person, and who is not generally
accepted as a Coloured person; or (b) is
generally accepted as a White person and
is not in appearanceobviously not a white
person." Chinese, Indians, and Asiatics
belong in a "national home" outside South
Africa.
The tortured logic of the classification,
and its constant emendations, makes a
mockery of Prime Minister Botha's trumpeting claim in I98I: "The acceptance of
multinationalism, the recognition of minorities, the existence of various cultures,
ideas and traditions is not an ideology, it
is a reality. We did not create it, we experience it." But the borders of the Bantustans, and the hodgepodge of racial classifications used to buttress them, do not
reflect any cultural reality, but rather invent tradition. The Bantustan borders are
carved with clumsy artifice over immense
social variation. The Xhosas, for example,
are supposedly one "nation," yet are
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allocated to two distinct "nation states,"

the Ciskei and the Transkei. Other contradictions abound. Under apartheid in
South Africa the legal definition of citizenship has become a nightmarish concoction
of imprecision, vagary, invention, and
sham, crosshatched by self-contradiction.
Citizenship is the legal representation
of a person's relationship to the rights and
resources of the nation-state. But the putatively universalist concept of citizenship
becomes radically unstable when seen
from the position of women. Obedient to
the inimitable logic that "a man and his
wife are one, and he is the one," women
in post-French Revolution Britain and
Europe were not incorporated into the
nation-state as citizens, but only indirectly, through men, as dependent members of the family in private and public
law. The Napoleonic Code was the first
modern statute to decree that the wife's nationality should follow her husband's, an
example other European countries briskly
followed. A woman's political relation to
the nation is thus submerged in a socialrelation to a man through marriage. Citizenship in the nation is mediated by the marriage relation.
Rycroft has noted that "exactly what
sort of citizenship a person enjoys in South
Africa hinges precisely on racial classification." Yet this is only partially true, for he
neglects to mention that the sort of "citizenship" a black woman enjoys is mediated through the marital relation. For
black women, citizenship depends not
only on the labyrinthine tangle of racial
classifications, but also on powerful constructions of gender difference. According

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to the Group Areas Act, as Martin West

reminds us, if people marry across their
racial groups "a white partner, male or female, takes the classification of the other
partner, whether black or colored." Thus
a white man would become instantly classified as a black man. Whereas if a "colored" woman and a black man marry, the
woman takes the man's classification.
Thus the black group excludes all black
women with colored partners. And the
colored group excludes all colored women
with black partners. Thus a white woman
may be classified white in terms of the
Population Registration Act (by descent),
yet classified black in terms of the Group
Areas Act if her husband is black. At the
same time, as soon as a black woman marries, she may be endorsed out of the place
of her birth, as in the case of Mrs. Msini,
and banished to the Bantustan of her husband, becoming in an instant, in one of the
stunning oxymorons of South African life,
a "foreign native."
Mr. Harlan Msini, for example, is a
crippled African factory worker who resides in Paarl in the Cape province. His
wife, Mrs. Lena Msini, however, is not
legally entitled to live with her husband,
since, on marrying, she became at once the
wife of a "disqualified person" - a disqualified person being a person who has not
earned the right of permanent residence by
serving ten years in continuous employment with the same employer. Since her
relation to the national rights of residence
and work is entirely mediated through the
marriage relation, Mrs. Msini was told she
could live legally with her husband only
when he had qualified. Summarily ban-

ished from Paarl, Mrs. Msini set out for

the bleak Dortrecht location in the eastern
Cape, where she had been born, to wait.
In July 1970, when Mr. Msini became

a "qualified" person, the headman at Dortrecht sent Mrs. Msini to live with her husband at Paarl. At a stroke, falling now under the tutelage of her husband, she
forfeited her right to live in Dortrecht, the
place of her birth. Yet in Paarl, at the whim
of the local bureaucracy, she received only
a "temporary permit," and this permit
was not renewed. In November Mrs.
Msini was charged with living illegally in
the area. She was ordered out of Paarl and
banished once more to Dortrecht. In Dortrecht, however, she was given only a
temporary permit. This soon expired and
was not renewed. In short, Mrs. Msini had
entered the impossible nowhere-land of
permanent illegality inhabited by thousands of South Africa's "displaced people." As the "superfluous appendage" of
her husband's labor, in the notorious official terminology, there is not one inch of
her native South African soil on which she
can legally tread.
In South Africa black women live under three legal systems: customary law,
native law, and European law, and their
lives are dominated by three fundamental
legal dimensions: influx control law, family law, and labor law. In the thirties laws
were passed which forbade a woman entry
into a town unless she was certified as the
wife of a man who had been working in
that area continuously for two years. In
1937 the noose was tightened. The wife or
daughter of a legal resident could be certified only if she could prove that housing

was available, and since housing had been

deliberately frozen, this became impossible. In 1952 came the first real attempt to
bring women to heel. The Native Laws
Amendment Act gave the state the power
to evict anyone defined as "undesirable."
In the late I95os it became illegal to recruit
women in the reserves as migrant workers. In 1964 the noose was tightened again.
The Bantu Laws Amendment Act now decreed that a woman could only live with
her husband if his entry had been legal. In
following years even wives and daughters
of entrenched residents were denied admission. Because the woman's legal status
is entirely dependent on the man's, if he
dies, or if the marriage breaks up, she may
lose her lease as well as permission to stay
in the area.
A woman who marries under customary law is seen as a perpetual minor under
the guardianship of her husband. Any
money she earns belongs by law to her
husband's household; she cannot enter
into a contract for loan of livestock; she
cannot sue or be sued, or have custody
over her children. She has no legal right to
protest rape or domestic battery. Under
the Natal Code, all women, married or
single, are denied all legal rights. A
woman can own no property, except immediate personal possessions; she cannot
bring any legal action to court; she cannot
marry under customary law without her
father's, or nearest male guardian's, permission. Marriage, for the vast majority of
black women in South Africa, is thus a legal and political catastrophe, yet marriage
is virtually the only means for a woman to
have access to housing or residence rights.

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These nightmarish anomalies have recently become the center of a national debate within the Mass Democratic Movement and the ANC on women's status
within a transformed South Africa.
Women and African Nationalism
No longerin a future heaven
African nationalism has roughly the same
historic vintage as Afrikaner nationalism.
Forged in the crucible of imperial thuggery, mining capitalism, and a dizzyingly
rapid industrialization, African nationalism was, like its Afrikaner counterpart, the
product of conscious reinvention, the enactmentof a new political collectivity by
specific cultural and political agents. But
its racial and gender components were
very different, and African nationalism
would describe an entirely distinct trajectory across the century.
In I9IO the Union of South Africa was
formed, uniting the four warring provinces under a single legislature. Yet at the
"national" convention, not a single black
South African was present. In I912 African men began to arrive in Bloemfontein
from all over South Africa to protest a
Union in which no black person had a
voice. At this gathering, the South African
Natives National Congress was launched,
soon to become the African National Congress. For Africans the Union was an act
of profound betrayal. A color bar banished
Africans from skilled labor, and the franchise was denied to all but a handful. The
infamous Land Act (1913), soon to follow,
condemned all black South Africansseventy-eight percent of the population-to a meager thirteen percent of the

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most broken, parched, and devastated

wastelands in the country.
At the outset the ANC, like Afrikaner
nationalism, had a specific class component. Drawn from the tiny urban intelligentsia and petite bourgeoisie, its members were mostly mission-educated
teachers and clerks, small businessmen and
traders, the kind of men whom Fanon described as "dusted over with colonial culture." They were deeply influenced by
Gandhi's nonviolent philosophy, by the
moderate policies of Booker T. Washington, and by their white mission friends and
liberals in parliament, who counseled restraint, patience, moderation. They were
urban, anti-tribal, and assimilationist, demanding full civic participation in the
great British empire, rather than confrontation and radical change. They were also
solidly male.
While the language of the ANC was the
inclusive language of national unity, the
Congress was in fact male, exclusive, and
hierarchical, ranked by an upper house of
chiefs (which protected traditional patriarchal authority through descent), a lower
house of elected representatives (all male),
and an executive (all male). Indians and socalled "coloreds" were excluded from full
membership. Women could join as "auxiliary members" but were denied formal
political representation, as well as the
power to vote.
In 1913 the white state saw fit to impose
passes on women in an effort to preempt
their migration to the cities. In outraged
response, hundreds of women marched
mutinously on Bloemfontein to fling back
their passes, and for their temerity met the

full brunt of state wrath in a barrage of

arrests, imprisonment, and hard labor.
From this climate of militancy, the Bantu
Women's League of the African National
Congress was launched in 1918, drawing
by and large on the tiny educated, Christian elite. Thus women's first tentative inclusion into African nationalism stemmed
less from the invitation of men than from
their own politicization in resisting the violence of state decree. At this time, however, women's potential militancy was
muted, and their political agency domesticated, by the language of female service
and subordination. Women's volunteer
work was approved insofar as it served the
interests of the (male) "nation," and women's political identity was figured as
merely supportive and auxiliary. As President Seme said: "No national movement
can be strong unless the women volunteers
come forward and offer their services to
the nation." After the Second World War,
however, the ANC adopted a new constitution in recognition of the need to expand the movement and organize a mass
base. At women's own insistence, the
ANC granted women full membership
and voting rights in I943. It had taken
thirty-one years.
In 1944 the Youth League was formed,
and from its ranks arose men like Nelson
Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and Oliver
Tambo, who called impatiently for Congress to become a full national movement.
Unlike Afrikaner nationalism, the language of African nationalism at this time
became racially inclusive: "African nationalism transcends the narrow limits imposed by any particular sectional organi-

zation. It is all-embracing." Yet even at

this point, the ANC was largely urban
based, and women's role within the movement remained subordinate and auxiliary,
confined to building a nation for their husbands and children.
During the turbulent fifties, however,
the ANC Women's League thrived. This
was the decade of the Defiance Campaign,
the Freedom Charter, the Congress Alliance, and the Federation of South African
Women. In I956 thousands of women
marched on Pretoria to once more protest
passes for women, and the Women's
Charter was formed, calling for land redistribution, for worker benefits and
union rights, housing and food subsidies,
the abolition of child labor, universal education, the right to vote, and equal rights
with men in property, marriage, and child
custody. It is seldom noted, however, that
this charter preceded the Freedom Charter, and inspired much of its substance.
Until this time, short shrift was given
to women's empowerment in its own
right. But in 1955 Oliver Tambo declared
women's emancipation a national priority
and a precondition for victory. "We know
that we cannot win liberation or build a
strong movement without the participation of the women." He insisted that the
Women's League was no longer a mere appendage to the ANC, and he broke taboo
ground by deploring the "outmoded customs" that hobble women, and broached
the vexed issue of domestic labor, urging
fellow Congressmen to relieve women "in
their many family and household burdens
so that women may be given an opportunity of being politically active."

WOMEN AND NATIONALISM

115

Within African nationalism, as in its

Afrikaans counterpart, women's political
agency is couched in the presiding ideology of motherhood. Winnie Mandela has
long been hailed as "Mother of the Nation" (Mummie, for short), and Miriam
Makeba, the singer, is reverently addressed as "Ma Africa." Yet as Gaitskell
and Unterhalter have argued, the ideology
of the "mother of the nation" differs in
some important respects from the iconography of the volksmoeder in Afrikaner nationalism.
Motherhood is, again, less the universal and biological quintessence of womanhood than it is a social category under
constant contest. African women have
embraced, transmuted, and transformed
the ideology in a variety of ways, working
strategically within traditional ideology to
justify untraditional public militancy. An
anti-pass pamphlet of the I95os

couched

women's indecorously insurgent defiance

within the decorous language of domestic
duty: "As wives and mothers we condemn
the pass laws and all that they imply."
Unlike Afrikaans women, moreover, African women appealed to a racially inclusive image of motherhood in their campaigns to fashion a nonracial alliance with
white women. A Federation of South African Women pamphlet of 1958 exhorted
white women: "In the name of humanity,
can you as a woman, as a mother, tolerate

this?" In 1986 Albertina Sisulu appealed

impatiently to white women: "A mother
is a mother, black or white. Stand up and
be counted with other women."
Over the decades, African women nationalists, unlike their Afrikaans counterparts, have transformed and infused the
116

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ideology of motherhood with an increasingly insurrectionary cast, identifying

themselves more and more as the "mothers of revolution." To be a black mother
in South Africa is to routinely face tear-gas
and shambok attacks, police dogs and water cannon, bullets and torture. "Black
mothers have to live with the agony of
having to bury their children every day"
(ANC document, 1987). Paradoxically,
the sheer randomness of attacks by the
South African Defense Force on homes
and children has brought the war irrevocably into the lives of most women, deeply
and widely politicizing those who might
otherwise have remained aloof. Women
organize increasingly as the militant protectors of their communities and activist
children, and as a consequence the image
of the militant mother, the revolutionary
and political mother, began to enter official ANC rhetoric. As one ANC document declared in 1987: "The mothers of
the nation, the womenfolk as a whole are
the titans of our struggle."
The custodians of apartheid are experts
at anger, and the police are skilled at exploiting the specific vulnerabilities of
women as a means of political terror. The
burden of parental guilt falls more cruelly
on women activists than on men. All too
often, women detainees under interrogation are tormented by the police who deride them as failed mothers, reminding
them of helpless and unattended children
at home, accusing them of"loose morals, "
and playing on the wracking social contradictions in the women's lives between
the vocation of parenthood and the vocation of activism. Even Ruth First, assassinated by letter bomb for her anti-

apartheid activism, was accused of being a

bad mother for ending up in detention, an
unthinkable accusation to level against a
man.
In the black communities, "motherhood" involves far greater community
sharing and responsibility than in the
white communities, and the concept of
"mother" extends far beyond immediate
biological motherhood to aunts and
grandmothers, cousins and paid child-care
providers. On the other hand, exalting
women for their maternal power alone has
calamitous consequences, erasing and undermining the multifarious other forms of
women's work, which come to be figured
as temporary departures from women's
manifestly maternal destiny, and are hence
undervalued and underpaid. In a recent interview with Speak, an African women's
magazine, leaders of the ANC Women's
Section warned of the very real danger of
exclusively glamorizing the profession of
motherhood: "We must not assume that
every woman is a wife or mother, or that
she intends to be a wife or mother. This is
a weakness. It arises from our tradition."
Exalting motherhood makes it very hard
for women to stay single, to choose not to
have children, to come out as lesbian or
bisexual. The heterosexual family within
the sanction of matrimony acquires the inevitability of destiny, and women are seen
not as independent members of the national community, but as wives responsible to the nation through their service to
individual men. In the absence of alternatives, as one woman put it, the prestige of
motherhood becomes "a beast of burden
prestige indeed."
Since the seventies, women's local rites

of defiance have been mirrored on a national scale in rents and bus boycotts, organized squatter camps, strikes, anti-rape
protests, and community activism of myriad kinds. Even under the state of emergency, women have everywhere enlarged
their militancy, insisting not only on their
right to political agency, but also on their
right of access to the technologies of violence. On August 9, 1985, the twentyninth anniversary of South African Woman's Day, the ANC's Women's Section
called on women to "take up arms against
the enemy. In the past we have used rudimentary homemade weapons like petrol
bombs. Now is the time that we use modern weapons."
Black women's relation to nationalism
has thus significantly shifted over the
years. At the outset, women were denied
formal representation;then their volunteer
work was put at the service of the national
revolution, still largely male. Gradually,
as a result of women's own insurrections,
the need for women's full participation in
the national liberation movement was
granted, but women's emancipation was
still figured as the handmaiden of the national revolution. Only recently has women's empowerment been recognized in
its own right, distinct from the national,
democratic, and socialist revolution. Only
recently has women's empowerment
come to be seen as a separate, independent,
and indispensable element of the full social
transformation of the nation.
Feminism as Imperialism
For many decades, African women have
been loath to talk of women's emancipation outside the terms of the national
WOMEN

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117

liberation

movement.

In I979,

Mavis

Nhlapo, representative of the ANC women's secretariat, insisted: "In our society
women have never made a call for the recognition of their rights as women, but always put the aspirations of the whole African and other oppressed people of our
country first." Again in 1981, when
Nhlapo was asked about sexual politics
and male domination, she said: "this is secondary to the primary goal of the struggle." The ANC delegation to the Nairobi
Conference on Women in 1985 concurred:

"Itwould be suicidal for

us to adopt feminist
ideas. Ourenemy is the
system and we cannot
exhaust our energies on
women's issues"
"It would be suicidal for us to adopt feminist ideas. Our enemy is the system and
we cannot exhaust our energies on women's issues." Yet if pass laws, influx control, the lack of housing, food, and land,
the torture of children, the murder of
women and men are not women's issues,
what are?
During the sixties and seventies, black
women were understandably wary of the
middle-class feminism that was sputtering
fitfully to life in the white universities, cities, and suburbs. All women do not experience apartheid in the same way, and
African women raisedjustifiably skeptical
eyebrows at a white feminism that
vaunted itself as giving tongue to a uni-

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versal sisterhood in suffering. Many employed black women in South Africa are
domestic workers, and for these women,
ferrying between plush suburbs and the
desolate townships, the terms of white liberal feminism had scant relevance and appeal. At this time, moreover, women's
position within the nationalistic movement was still precarious, and women
could ill afford to antagonize men so embattled and already so reluctant to surrender whatever patriarchal power they still
enjoyed.
In recent years, however, dramatic
changes have been wrought in the South
African discourse on feminism, stemming
largely from women's enhanced visibility
within the Mass Democratic Movement.
On September 23, 1989, women gathered
by the thousands in the streets of Pretoria,
braving razor wire, water cannons, police
cordons and batons. Helicopters hovered
overhead and police squads put the city
under siege. Earlier that year, a huge new
alliance of women's organizations had
formed. WAR (Women against Repression) united a broad spectrum of women
from a host of organizations, including the
Federation of Transvaal Women, the Natal Organisation of Women, the Black
Sash, and a medley of student, worker,
and church organizations. April I990 saw
a protest march of more than three thousand people, mostly women, organized by
COSATU women to protest the Labor
Relations Amendment Act. One of the
placards called: "Women come out of the
kitchen!" "We are the traffic officers of the
future," yelled a female marshal. In February I990, women took one of the few

anti-rape marches in the country through

the streets of Soweto.
In recent years a transformed African
discourse on feminism has emerged, in
which black women demand the right to
fashion the terms of feminism to meet
their own needs and situations. In 1987
Sister Bernard Ncube, for one, saw the
Christian feminist movement as melding
both Christianity and feminism for local
needs: "The feminist movement is working for the political, economic and social
equality of men and women, boys and
girls in every area of life. The Christian
feminist movement frames this process on
the biblical understanding of God as incorporating masculine and feminine
equally in 'One Person.' " At a seminar
entitled "Feminism and National Liberation," convened by the Women's Section
of the ANC in London in I989, a representative from the South African Youth
Congress (SAYCO) exclaimed: "How
good it feels that feminism is finally accepted as a legitimate school of thought in
our struggles and is not seen as a foreign
ideology." At the seminar, the women
agreed on the need to ensure that commitment to gender equality be more than rhetorical, on transforming labor and gender
imbalances within the household, on dismantling traditions that shackle women,
on forming separate women's organizations without their becoming infantilized
as "nursery schools or ghettos."
On May 2, I990, the National Executive of the ANC issued a historic "Statement on the Emancipation of Women,"
which forthrightly proclaimed: "The experience of other societies has shown that

the emancipation of women is not a byproduct of a struggle for democracy, national liberation or socialism. It has to be
addressed within our own organisation,
the mass democratic movement and in the
society as a whole." The document calls
for "a real understanding of gender oppression," admits that "the prevalence of
patriarchalattitudes" permeates the ANC
itself, and calls for a wide range of policies
to eliminate "gender-oppression now and
in the future." The document is unprecedented in placing South African women's
resistance in an international context and
in granting feminism independent historical agency. It declares, into the bargain,
that all "laws, customs, traditions and
practices which discriminate against
women shall be held to be unconstitutional. " If the ANC remains faithful to this
document, virtually all existing practices
in South African legal, political, and social
life will be rendered unconstitutional.
A few months later, on June 17, I990,
the women leadership of the ANC Women's Section, recently returned home
from exile, gathered jubilantly at Jabulani
Stadium. In an interview with Speak, the
ANC women called for a National Commission of Women and insisted on the
strategic validity of the terms "nonsexism" and "feminism": "Feminism has
been misinterpreted in most Third World
countries .. there is nothing wrong with
feminism. It is as progressive or reactionary as nationalism. Nationalism can be reactionary or progressive. We have not got
rid of the term nationalism. And with feminism it is the same." Rather, feminism
should be tailored to meet local needs and

WOMEN

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119

concerns: "We have tried to use feminism

to suit our conditions." A few months
later, on August 9, I990, a national, nonracial organization of women was
launched.
Yet very real uncertainties for women
remain. So far, theoretical and strategic
analyses of South Africa's gender imbalances have not run deep. There has been
little strategic rethinking of how, in particular, to transform labor relations in the
household, and women are still not given
the same political visibility as men. The
majority of South African women remained penned up in rural desolation,
working for parlous wages, if at all, in domestic service or as farm workers, bent
double in field and factory, bent double
again in the household.
At a recent Congress of South African
Trade Unions (COSATU) convention,
trade union women called for attention to
sexual harassment in the unions, but their
demand was brusquely flicked aside by
male unionists as a decadent symptom of
"bourgeois imperialist feminism." Lesbian and gay activists have been similarly
condemned as supporting lifestyles that
are no more than invidious imports of empire. The charge is a familiar one, flung
frequently at the heads of nationalist feminists (both women and men) and at other
mutinous groups to quell demands that are
not subservient to the interests of the nationalist elite.
There is not only one feminism, nor is
there only one patriarchy. Feminism is not
transhistorical, any more than nationalism
is. History reveals myriad feminisms, and
all take very different shapes in different
contexts. Feminism is imperialist when it
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puts the interests and needs of privileged

women in imperialist countries above the
local needs of disempowered women and
men, when it operates within the terms of
imperial power, borrowing from patriarchal privilege. Certainly, the relatiqn between feminism and nationalism has involved a double repression. If theories of
nationalism have tended to ignore gender
as a category constitutive of nationalism
itself, so too have some feminist tendencies (largely white and middle-class) ignored race and class as categories constitutive of gender.
In the last decade, women of color have
been vehement in challenging privileged
feminists whose racial and class power
seems invisible to them. Hazel Carby, for
one, issued her famous call to white
women to listen, the Egyptian feminist El
Sa'adawi accused certain Western women
of "maternalism," and Marnea Lazreg,
the Algerian feminist, warned Western
feminists to be wary of the borrowed, imperialist power of academic interpretation.
Some nationalist women have chosen to
use the term womanist as a replacement
forfeministwith its Western undertones. In
an important article, Chandra Mohanty
has decried the appropriation of the struggles of women of color by hegemonic
white women's movements, specifically
through the production of the category
"Third World woman" as a singular,
monolithic, and paradigmatically victimized subject. She argues brilliantly that
"assumptions of privilege and ethnocentric universality on the one hand, and inadequate self-consciousness about the effect of western scholarship on the 'third
world' in the context of a world system

dominated by the west, on the other, characterize a sizable extent of western feminist
work on women in the third world."
Denouncing all feminisms as imperialist has calamitous results for women in national liberation movements, erasing from
memory the long history of women's resistance to local and imperialist patriarchies. As Kumari Jayawardena notes,
"movements for women's emancipation
and feminism flourished in several nonEuropean countries" well before Western
feminism emerged. Women's myriad indigenous revolts are thereby annulled or
dismissed as the phantasmagoric evanescence of white women's agitations-an
imperialist and infantilizing notion indeed.
"Feminism," Jayawardena argues, "was
not imposed on the Third World by the
West, but rather historical circumstances
produced important material and ideological changes that affected women."
Many women's mutinies around the
world predated Western feminism or occurred without any contact with Western
feminists. In South Africa there is evidence
of women resisting the plunder of their labor and sexuality in forced marriages before the ravages of colonialism had made
itself felt. The historic women's anti-pass
march in the I950s, to take one example

from many, took place beyond the influence of Western feminism, which was then
floundering in the doldrums. Women resist not because feminism has been surreptitiously ferried in from abroad, but because the contradictions in their own
historical circumstances compel them to
do so.

Moreover, if all feminism is derided as

a pathology of the West, there is a very real

danger that, paradoxically, Western,

white feminism will remain hegemonic,
for the simple reason that such women
have comparatively privileged access to
publishing, the international media, education, and money. A good deal of this
feminism may well be inappropriate to
women living under very different situations. Instead, women of color are calling
for the right to fashion feminism to suit
their own worlds, while also learning
from the strategies of other nationalist
women and women of color. As the Algerian feminist Marie Aimee Helie-Lucas
puts it: "Now that we start supporting
each other from within the Third World,
within the Muslim world, etc. ... it becomes increasingly difficult to limit our
action to an imitation of the west. ... Inside our countries, and even within the
women's groups, we leave ourselves less
open to nationalist justifications for being
silent." The singular contribution of

All too frequently,male

nationalistscondemn
feminismas divisive,
biddingwomen to hold
their tongues untilafter
the revolution
nationalist feminism has been its insistence
on relating the feminist struggle to other
liberation movements.
All too frequently, male nationalists
condemn feminism as divisive, bidding
women to hold their tongues until after the
revolution is over. Yet feminism is a political refusal of gender conflict, not its
WOMEN

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121

cause. To insist on silence about gender

conflict when it already exists is to cover
over, and thereby ratify, women's disempowerment. The identification and refusal
of rape and domestic battery are not
divisive-rape and battery are. The refusal
of economic disadvantage is not divisiveeconomic disadvantage is.
To ask women to wait until after the
revolution serves merely as a strategic tactic to defer women's demands. Not only
does it conceal the fact that nationalisms
are from the outset constituted in gender
power, but, as the lessons of international
history portend, women who are not empowered to organize during the struggle
will not be empowered to organize after
the struggle. If nationalism is not deeply
informed, and transformed, by an analysis
of gender power, the nation-state will remain a repository of male hopes, male aspirations, and male privilege.
All too often, the doors of tradition are
slammed in women's faces. Yet traditions
arenot the sacrosanct and timeless essences
of a people; they are social inventions often
of very recent origin-both the outcome
and the record of political contests and
power. In a nationalist revolution, both
women and men should be empowered to
decide which traditions are outmoded,
which should be transformed, and which
should be preserved.
Around the world the Women's Decade has been the decade of hopes deferred.
Nationalists frequently argue that colonialism or capitalism has been women's
ruin, with patriarchymerely as a nasty second cousin destined to wither away when
the real villain finally expires. Yet no-

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51

where has a national or socialist revolution

brought a full feminist revolution in its
train. In many nationalist or socialist regimes, women's concerns are at best paid
lip service, at worst greeted with hilarity.
If women have come to do men's work,
men have not come to share women's
work. In societies like Nicaragua and
Cuba, very real efforts have been made to
transform women's lives and works. Both
countries have written into law the equal
sharing of housework and have invented
ingenious tactics such as radio announcements during mealtimes urging men to
help. But in the absence of sustained campaigns, education, and organized change,
the weight of male self-interest and tradition proves overwhelming. In South Yemen and China, women were able to mobilize for change insofar as they helped
spread the political base of the party, swell
the labor force, and march against withered family elites and warlord regimes. In
the process, the nose of traditional patriarchy was bloodied, and dramatic changes
for women were won. But nowhere has
feminism in its own right been allowed to
be more than a maidservant to nationalism. Most nationalisms have been singularly unenthusiastic about granting gender
conflict as fundamental a role in history as
class or race conflict, and feminism for its
own sake has either been scoffed at or unceremoniously squelched.
Frantz Fanon's prescient warnings
against the pitfalls of the national consciousness are nowhere more urgent than
now in South Africa. For Fanon, nationalism gives vital expression to a popular
memory of shared suffering and shared re-

fusal. At the same time, he is fully aware

of the attendant risks of concealing, and
thereby exacerbating, the very real contradictions within the strategic collectivity of
nationalism-conflicts of class, gender,
ethnicity, regional and generational difference. Nationalism contains the very real
risk of projecting the denial of difference
onto a conveniently abstracted "collective
will." Yet insisting on a single politics of
identity (nationalism, feminism, internationalism, socialism) cannot guarantee political correctness, nor is there one privileged national "subjectivity." Moreover, a
Western, Hegelian discourse that traffics
in the abstract Center and Periphery is no
longer adequate to the current international distribution of power. Rather, I
would draw on Audre Lorde's evocation
of the multiple, contradictory constructions of subjectivity, as well as on Homi
Bhabha's notion of a "hybrid," multiple
political identity, crisscrossed by myriad
differences and loyalties.
Indeed, the ANC's democratic commitments offer a model of political agency
that refuses any racially exclusive definition of the citizen, allowing for the mobilization of a variety of political agents.
The narrowness of a vanguard party is offset by an appeal to a collective, democratic
community of action. The national transformation is "no longer in a future

heaven," to borrow Fanon's phrase. But

the current situation gives sober poignancy, especially for women, to the lines
from Pontecorvo's famous film on the Algerian national war of liberation, The Battle of Algiers: "It is difficult to start a revolution, more difficult to sustain it. But it's
later, when we've won, that the real difficulties will begin."

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