07 December 2006

On 7th December 2005 the Cabinet tasked the Department of Arts and Culture to lead the country in commemorating of the 50th anniversary of the Women’s Anti-Pass March of August 1956.

On 8th March, International Women’s Day, we unveiled a significant portion of a year-long programme of which tonight’s book launch is a significant part. We will round of the commemoration on 8th March 2007.

March 8th, International Women’s Day, was born in the struggle for equal rights waged by women during the first two decades of the twentieth century. It was inaugurated by the parties and the movements of the left. In Europe it was the Social Democratic Parties, the trade unions and the working class women’s suffrage movements that led the way. In the Americas it was the Socialist Party’s national women’s committee who first sounded the clarion call to dedicate one day to the women struggle for equality and the franchise. In 1913 the date 8th March was designated as International Women’s Day after the famous “bread and roses strike” by women workers in New England.

Ironically, here in South Africa in 1912, the administrator of the then Orange Free State sought to extend the pass laws to apply to African women.

To protest this infringement, in March 1912, the African and Coloured women of the Orange Free State sent a petition to the then Prime Minister Louis Botha, appealing for redress. Like another Prime Minister, some 40 years later, Louis Botha did not have the courage to meet the women’s delegation. Instead, the delegation of six women from Bloemfontein was directed to meet the then Minister of Native Affairs, Henry Burton, to whom they handed their petition bearing 5 000 signatures, demanding that Parliament repeal the pass law ordinances of the Orange Free State.

The government’s failure to respond sparked one of the earliest defiance campaigns in this country. Hundreds of women from Jagersfontein, Winburg and Bloemfontein were arrested in the course of that campaign. Chanting slogans and singing the women confronted the police and even engaged them in pitched battles. Faced with the determined resistance of the African women of the OFS, the administrator finally relented. In 1919 the ordinance was allowed to lapse.

It was in recognition of the central role women have played in the struggle for freedom that the democratic government declared 9th August South Africa’s Women’s Day in 1995. Government took that decision as a tribute, not only to the thousands of women who marched on that day in 1956, but also as a tribute to the pioneers of the women’s movement in this country, dating back to 1912, when Mrs Charlotte Maxeke led the way in establishing the ANC Women’s League, encouraging women to become actively involved in the struggle for freedom.

9th August, South African Women’s Day affirmed the thousands of women, of all races, who had struggled for the enfranchisement of South African women during the 1920s, only to see their struggles betrayed by the pact government of Hertzog that extended the franchise exclusively to white women. It is a tribute to the thousands of stalwarts who were at the forefront of the workingwomen’s struggles during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s that led to formation of powerful unions in later years.

The roll call is far too long for us to recall all their names. We count among them Charlotte Maxeke, that indomitable educationist and freedom fighter who after graduating from a university in the United States, founded the Wilberforce Institute in Evaton. We recall too the names of Cissy Gool and of her sisters-in-law, Janub and Amina who were amongst the leaders of the National Liberation League and the Non-European United Front of the 1930s. The names of Ray Alexander Simons, Elizabeth Mafikeng and Elizabeth Abrahams will always be associated with the struggles of women workers. We also remember the names of Mrs Amina Pahad and Mrs Khadijah Christopher, who were amongst the first volunteers to occupy the site of the 1946 Passive Resistance Campaign on Umbilo Road in Durban. We recall too the names of Lillian Ngoyi, Dora Tamana, Winifred Siqwana, Ida Mntwana, Bertha Mkhize, Florence Matomela, Raheema Moosa, Sophie Williams-De Bruyn, Helen Joseph and other stalwarts of the 1950s, who led militant women’s formations fighting for the rights of workers and the rights of women. The indomitable Mrs Annie Silinga, who till her dying day refused to carry a pass!

There are the hundreds of Women who joined the armed struggle, participating in combat and some of the most dangerous, death-defying underground activities both inside and outside South Africa. There were also the hundreds of women who passed through the prisons of apartheid as detainees and as political prisoners. There are our martyrs, amongst whom we count Ruth First and Dulcie September whose murders still remain unexplained even today.

We recall too that stalwart of liberalism in South Africa - a tradition that is regrettably being sullied by the “fight back” politics of our latter day “liberals” – Helen Suzman, whose probing questions helped expose the crimes of apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. There were also the women, who formed the Black Sash, first to protest against the disenfranchisement of the Coloured voters during the 1950s, but who later played an important role in the broad front of anti-apartheid forces that developed in the last three decades of apartheid.

The massive women’s march on Pretoria of 9th August 1956 was the culmination of months of painstaking, unglamorous organisational work. Almost 20 000 women, drawn from all racial groups, managed to reach the Union Buildings in what was one of the biggest mass demonstrations of that decade. An unknown number did not reach Pretoria because their buses were turned back, detained and were otherwise harassed by a government that was deaf to the demands of the ordinary South African.

Mrs Sophie Williams-De Bruyn, explained that despite the scepticism of many of the male leaders of the ANC, the women were determined to proceed with their march; organising from city to city, from town to town, from village to village, they succeeded in galvanising thousands. Working out of a basement in the ANC’s Johannesburg head office, they produced the leaflets, the explanatory pamphlets in a number of African languages and arranged accommodation, food and transport for the thousands of women who came on that march.

It was an impressive feat of logistical planning!

The militancy displayed by the women surpassed all expectations. In the rural areas of KwaZulu-Natal open rebellion and armed incidents took place. In the area that today is called the North West Province, there were also outbreaks of rebellious activity as opposition to the law took root. In the Limpopo Province the resistance to the pass laws merged with the resistance to the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951.

As in 1919, the White supremacist state beat a retreat, but on this occasion employed guile to obtain its objectives. An administrative measure, quietly appended to the admission regulations for a number of training courses, atomized resistance. Having attained that beachhead, the apartheid government enforced the pass laws after 1963.

The Women’s Charter, adopted by the Federation of South African Women shortly after its inauguration in 1954, demanded the full franchise for all South Africans, equality of opportunity, equal pay for equal work, equal rights to property, equality in marriage, the removal of all laws and customs that denied women equality, paid maternity leave for working mothers and free compulsory education for all children. It is a matter of pride that many of the demands in that Charter have been realised in our Constitution.

Despite this achievement, there remain a number of degrading laws affecting specifically African women, which have still to be expunged from our statute books.

Every community in this country derives from powerful, patriarchal traditions. We have witnessed public displays of some of the more disturbing aspects of the aggressive masculine behaviour these traditions have bred during the course of this year. In their defence those who engage in such behaviour invariably invoke the sanctity of cultural practices handed down over centuries. This particular defence is often raised when conservatives are resisting the demands of women and youth. “According to our traditions”, is an often heard refrain when reasoned argument fails.

While the constitution is very clear on the rights of the individual, it is less clear about the claims of cultural groups. The tension between “cultural rights” and the wider social good of a just, non-racist, non-sexist and democratic society that government is pursuing is not always readily evident. But it is a nettle that has to be grasped if we are not to betray the expectations of South African women.

It is going to be of paramount importance for us who aspire to give voice to the aspirations, hopes, and dreams of the people of our continent to be seized with these matters.

The book we are launching tonight forms part of the growing literature on subordinated classes, genders and races in society. By recounting the roles assumed by women during various periods of South African history, it directly challenges the assertions and claims of the defenders of patriarchy by demonstrating that the image of women, especially African women, as silent, non-participant by-standers in history is not only false, but a function of present day ideology in the service of particular vested interests.

If the authors have succeeded in sweeping away centuries of misrepresentation and gender type-casting, they have done us all a great service.

I warmly congratulate the authors on that achievement. I am pleased that the Department of Arts and Culture is associated with this book. Please buy it, and read it!

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