By Phemelo Motseokae
Click Here to Register for our 9 August Women’s Day Zoom Meeting starting at 18H00
The following article is published as part of the June-August 2023 issue of uManyano lwaBasebenzi.
Young people in South Africa are grappling with multiple crises. Insufficient funding for education, from day care to higher education, denies many quality learning and training opportunities. Over eight million young people are not in work, education or training. This reality forces young women, in particular, into caregiving roles, into exploitation by “blessers”, into the informal economy, into dependence on men. Consequently, women’s value is reduced to sexual objectification, domestic responsibilities and reproductive ability. This all feeds into the devaluing of women and fuels men’s violence against women or gender-based violence (GBV).
The minority of GBV cases that are reported to the police has a shockingly low conviction rate of only 4-8%. Even more disheartening is the rising track record of policemen revictimising rape victims. In a recent example from Ekurhuleni, a constable was found guilty of raping a woman while accompanying her home after she went to report a rape case. On top of this, the lack of services and support for GBV victims leaves many back in the hands of their abusers, homeless or as traumatised dysfunctional people.
Over the last years, women’s anger and despair against this misogynist (woman-hating) violence has burst to the surface in a new feminist radicalisation, with the big TotalShutdown protests in 2018 and 2019 standing out. But many women were left even more demoralised by government response and limitations of NGOs – if anything the violence against women and children increased with the pandemic. How can we liberate women and men from a system that breeds violence, inequality and oppression? First, let’s examine what has already been tried and found wanting.
Women’s struggle played an important part in the working class defeat of Apartheid. Boosted by these struggles, the ANC Women’s League (ANCWL) grew with a noble goal to fight racism and sexist oppression. Despite the league’s influence within the ANC and the government, they have fallen short. Putting women in power has not transformed the conditions of working class women. While there are now black women and men as ministers, CEOs, managers, and “the most progressive Constitution in the world” grants women and LGBTQI+ people equal rights, women, especially black African and working class women, remain second class citizens – more work, less pay, more care work, inferior health care, more restrictions, less freedom.
The league has supported the neoliberal policies that have meant austerity in housing, education, and health care, leaving many women and single mothers without homes, unable to provide for their children’s needs, without jobs or severely underpaid in exploitative industries. The ANCWL hasn’t and won’t change the fact that daily around 115 women report being raped (2022 – and only one in nine rapes are reported), that the police are reluctant to take on GBV cases and there is little to nonexistent support for victims. How could it, when it has failed to hold perpetrators of GBV, such as Jacob Zuma, in their own ranks accountable?
Instead of dealing with the root causes of violence against women, they promote calls for chemical castration and the death penalty for perpetrators, promoting the dangerous myth that rape and femicide can be ended by targeting some “bad apples”. Ending the sexual capacity or lives of the few convicted perpetrators will only make things worse as it hides the real problem – rape, and GBV ranging from verbal harassment to murder, is about power, about enforcing the control and division that has been integral to capitalism and all class societies since their inception.
The ANCWL will be remembered for its failure to have any positive impact on young women today, part of the political degeneracy that has engulfed the whole ANC as it has failed to deliver on its promise of freedom and a better life for all – due to its devotion to the capitalist system.This is a warning also to newer women’s organisations and to all who struggle against any form of oppression. We need to get away from corporate “girl boss” feminism, which aims to empower a select few women while stifling the majority. Struggles need to be anchored in an understanding of patriarchy – the systematic subordination of women as a group – and how it is interwoven with contemporary capitalism. WASP’s programme for liberation is guided by an understanding that you cannot break one without also crushing the other – and it is the diverse and united working class that holds the power to do it.
It is high time to take the struggles against GBV, femicide and women’s oppression as a whole back to the streets, workplaces and schools. Schools are anything but shielded from society’s problems and can be a powerful place of struggle. When girls are more likely to be raped than to matriculate, a fightback culture clearly needs to be invigorated! One of the things to fight for is a curriculum and society that teaches the youth the truth about the state of the world and teaches young people to engage in matters that affect them. This includes proper sex education and sensitivity training programmes at all levels to fight GBV, to counter the toxic conditioning that is the default today. Young people are full of fervour and with grassroots organising guided by marxist-feminist ideas they can channel their anger in transformative actions for social change.
Communities must form independent networks of struggle, linking civil organisations fighting GBV with schools, student organisations and worker organisations. Workers, via trade unions or other organisations for struggle, have the decisive power to turn society around. We have seen glimpses of this in feminist strikes against sexual harassment (e.g by NUMSA in 2019). The bosses benefit in many ways from women’s oppression – equal pay, massively improved working conditions, work for all, fully paid parental leave, and free childcare close to work or home are key demands of a feminist struggle.
We need a joint working class movement made up of democratically elected socialist feminist committees in blocks/streets, workplaces, schools and campuses, to prevent and act against all forms of GBV and discrimination. The movement must make radical demands on the government; for a basic income grant of at least R8500, free quality LGBTQ-inclusive reproductive health, free quality housing for all, including learners and students. These and other demands like removing any perpetrators and promoters of sexism from police stations, for sensitivity training for police and specialised courts, could be accelerated with more pressure from below.
In 2019, pressured by the mass TotalShutdown protests, President Ramaphosa held a summit on GBV and femicide with hundreds of activists who spelled out the brutal reality, out of which a national strategy “for a South Africa free from GBV” was created. He also pledged R1,6 Billion to fight GBV and launched an “emergency response action plan” to combat GBV within six months. It’s been four years with no program in sight. Last year, Sihle Sibisi, founder of Kwanele Foundation, gave a passionate speech about the lack of government funds and support. This frustration on part of civil society organisations and NGOs is understandable. The truth is that funding struggles to achieve real change requires a united front that has its roots deep within the working masses. In the face of heightened struggle and political clarity, workers, tuckshop owners, farmers etc, would provide the best they can and share resources in creative ways, making the movement independent from the capitalist class. When the movement immerses itself deep in the workplaces, working class youth and communities, it will never have “too much on its plate” to tackle any issue. To achieve this an advanced political consciousness is needed.
The TotalShutdown and the 2019 Presidential Summit that shed light on the brutal state of affairs were steps forward. But despite his tears and his promises, Ramaphosa heads a state that is really there to manage and protect the interests of the big business owners – and their system is based on exploitation of humans and nature, and fundamentally bound up with women’s oppression at the root.
No matter how much goodwill, how many elaborate plans and policies, that boat will not be fundamentally rocked until capitalist class society is done away with by the whole working class in struggle. Legal and other reforms can be pushed through, but as soon as the struggle subsides, the danger is that they are overturned, and all along genuine equality is undermined by the material conditions that permit violence against women, oppression and exploitation. These can and must be set back by a movement that is armed with a bold socialist programme.
Ultimately the working class, through actions like marches, strikes, occupations, with grassroots organisation as outlined above and united in a mass revolutionary party that sharply poses the socialist alternative to the current rotten establishment, has the power to take all key sectors of the economy under real working class ownership and control, so that the wealth of the mines, farms, banks and industry can be channelled directly to the needs of the people – including addressing the GBV epidemic – instead of the profits of the few.
