1) Historical and political challenges for women’s rights work in South Africa
Many of the challenges experienced by women AIDS activists in ascending to leadership positions within their organizations, and in effectively exercising authority there, are not unique to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working on AIDS. Indeed, South African women in civil society and politics more generally face these challenges. The post-apartheid proportional representation system has led to more women entering the government. But once in government, women have not always put forward feminist agendas, as a demonstration of party loyalty is usually the highest priority for ambitious female politicians who desire to advance their careers. Therefore, women in government are often disconnected from feminists in civil society, and the latter have few effective channels by which to influence their counterparts in the country’s legislature, executive branch and civil service. In addition, women leaders in AIDS-related organizations are often not taken seriously as spokepeople, which diminishes their political authority.
South Africa has a racially and culturally diverse population. This fact has always acted as a brake on the development of a sustainable, powerful, broad-based, multiracial women’s movement since at least the early twentieth century. Forging feminist solidarities has proven particularly difficult because women in the country have historically experienced sexism differently depending on their racial and cultural backgrounds (Bozzoli 1983). During the apartheid period, racial privilege insulated white women from many aspects of sexism such as unpaid domestic labor, because they relied on the services of poorly paid black domestic workers to undertake such work (Bozzoli 1983). Nationalism, as by both Afrikaners and Africans, has long been a driving force in South African political life. In this context, the political allegiances of many South African women have historically cohered around their racial identity and nationalist political agendas perceived as serving the interests of their race (Walker 1991). Even when South African women have been involved in work promoting gender equality, they have not described themselves as being “feminist,” a concept popularly derided being as a Western import (Walker 1991; Britton and Fish 2009).
Similarly, postcolonial feminists have noted that women of different races do not have identical interests, and that transracial (and transnational) feminist political solidarities have to be consciously constructed through constant dialogue about women’s different experiences of oppression (Davis 1981; Mohanty 2003). In a postcolonial context, there are additional representational challenges in creating space for the voices of subaltern women to emerge in writing (Spivak 1988). These challenges are not, however, insuperable, and I try here to allow some of the voices of women AIDS activists, from a variety of racial groups, to emerge.
The South African women’s movement achieved many significant gains in the period of the country’s transition to democracy and in the early post-apartheid period under the government of Nelson Mandela. In the transition era, the multiparty Women’s National Coalition (WNC) did vital work to ensure that women were represented at a relatively senior level in the different parties’ negotiating teams (Hassim 2006). In the post-apartheid era, South Africa adopted a proportional representation system. In this context, women’s representation in Parliament increased as a result of lobbying by the African National Congress Women’s League (ANCWL) for the implementation of a gender-quota system in the construction of the parties’ lists (Hassim 2006). The inclusion of the gender-related clauses in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights; legislative reform around domestic violence, sexual assault and abortion; and the creation of the Commission for Gender Equality, have all been admirable. But these laws have often been inadequately implemented, and there is much room for improvement in the socioeconomic status of the country’s women.
Shireen Hassim has argued that with the shift of many women activists into government after 1994, the women’s movement has become broken into issue-based movements such as securing access to safe abortions and preventing violence against women (2006). She also noted that in the post-apartheid era, there has been a significant disconnect between women in civil society and those in government (Hassim 2006). There are women politicians in government who have proven responsive to feminist demands, such as Pregs Govender, but it is a glaring irony that it was a female minister of health—Manto Tshabalala Msimang—who for many years resisted government provision of the antiretrovirals so many women desperately needed, and her department that delayed implementation of the antiretroviral rollout.
In relation to South African AIDS activism, Ida Susser has lamented “the repeated disappearance of women’s experiences from research and public discussion” (2009: 217). As Susser notes, the erasure of women’s social experiences and agency in the public discourse about AIDS is paradoxical in a context where much of the data about the epidemic comes from women being “counted, monitored and tested,” especially at antenatal clinics (2009: 217). Women’s experience of “voicelessness” and their difficulties in effectively challenging the established patriarchal “rules of the game” are far from unique to AIDS activism. Denise Walsh has pointed out that the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) only elected Connie September as its first female national officer in 1993 (2009). Moreover, in 1997 the unions rejected the recommendation made by the Commission on the Future of the Unions, which September headed, that 50 percent of union leadership positions be set aside for women. Instead, the unions opted for a gender-training program to promote women in the unions’ ranks and a declaration of union solidarity on gender equality (Walsh 2009: 60).
Walsh has gone on to convincingly make the case that the extent to which women meaningful participate in civil society can be assessed using three criteria: access, voice, and whether women can contest the sexism in an organization’s rules and everyday practices (2009: 48). If we use these criteria to assess women’s participation in AIDS activism, it is clear that many challenges remain to gaining gender equality within the movements that focus on addressing the epidemic.
