South African women resist apartheid's triple oppression The recent wave of arrests in South Africa, beginning on February 16, are clearly aimed at dismantling the leadership apparatus of the United Democratic Front (UDF) which is growing in strength and influence. Among the 18 leading members arrested, six will be charged with high treason ( an offence punishatie by the death penalty). One of the six is Ms Albertina Sisulu, one of three chairpersons of the UDF. Ms Sisulu's husband is a leader of the African National Congress (ANC) currently serving life imprisonment. The role of Ms Sisulu and other women like her shows the growing participation of women within the fight against apartheid and the
In this dehumanizing system, all suffer. But the women undergo a triple oppression. Beyond the subjection to savage white racism and to exploitation as workers (one out of every three Black workers in South Africa is a woman), women suffer special discrimination.
They are denied even the limited legal rights of South African men. The South African Bantu Administration Act No 38, of 1927, as amended, reads: " Bantu (South African Black) woman who is a partner in a customary union and who is living with a husband, shall be deemed to be a minor and her husband shall be deemed to be her guardian."
Under the Urban Areas Act, the only people permitted to live in the urban areas are those who can prove either that they were born there, that they have lived there for 15 years, or that they have worked for the same employer for ten especially difficult conditions under conducted. Nancy GRUBER
Thandi Modise has been in prison in South Africa since October 1979. The 21-year-old guerilla fighter was accused of propagating the aims of a banned organization, the African National Congress (ANC); of possessing a machine gun and explosives; and of conspiring to commit arson and sabotage. She was sentenced to an eight year term under the Terrorism Act.
Thandi was five months pregnant when she was arrested. During detention she was repeatedly beaten, denied prenatal care, and kept in solitary confinement. At the time of her sentencing in November 1980, her baby daughter was eight months old.
Mamphela Ramphele was placed under a banning order in April 1977, after having been arrested and detained for 139 days under the Internal Security Act. Dr Ramphele, at the age of 27, was a leader in the development of medical facilities alternative to those available under apartheid. At the time of her arrest she was superintendent of the Zanempilo Health Centre near King Williams Town. The which, for them as women, this is
Under the pernicious apartheid plan, the huge majority of South Africans must live in these areas that comprise only 13% of the land surtace or the country, while the remaining 87% is controlled by the 4.6 million whites.
Apartheid has been constructed on a series of laws enacted by the Nationalist government since 1950. First came the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, followed by the Immorality Act, which made any sexual contact between two people of different races a felony. The Bantu Education Act ended Black access to white universities. The Population Registration Act required the registration of all South Africans by race.
Finally, the Group Areas Act and the Urban Areas Act, by eliminating the right of any but whites to own property, by dictating that people of each racial group must live in separate communities, and by prohibiting most Blacks from living in urban areas, created the vicious and inhuman circle in which Black South Africans are trapped today.
years. The cruelest effect of this act has been the near-total destruction of family life in South Africa.
Most women cannot live or work in the urban areas where their husbands are employed. Either they are exiled in the "homelands" , where they bear the complete responsibility for bringing up the children and see their husbands only once a year. Or, since families cannot survive on the wages paid to male workers, the women must go to work in the most menial and worst-paying jobs. With no childcare available, children must be sent to live with friends or relatives in the bantustans. And the separation of the family is complete.
Most Black women can find jobs only in domestic service or agriculture, although the number of women in industry has grown in recent years as they are being used to replace men at lower wages. Of the 175,000 (1981 statistics) female members of the Trade Union Congress of South Africa, the vast majority work in the garment industry, where in 1979, they were paid one-fifth less than the minimum wage.
The Garment Workers' Union, however, which is female dominated and led, center had been established to provide essential health services to rural areas of the Ciskei bantusan.
Mamphela worked with the Zimele Trust to aid released political prisoners and collaborated with Steve Biko, the young Black nationalist who was killed in detention in September 1977. This, in addition to her humanitarian work in the clinic itself, brought down the wrath of the South African government.
In April 1977 she was banished to Lenyenye township, a remote village over 600 miles from King Williams Town. Under her banning order she may not leave it even to visit two medical outstations in the countryside or to take patients to the hospital in nearby Tzaneen.
Yet she continues with her medical work among the most oppressed of the African population - those who have been forcibly transported to the bantu-
Life in Soweto (D.R.)
stans, the so-called "homelands" for a
21 million Blacks.
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International Viewpoint 25 March 1985
has long been in the forefront of the LATN AMERICAstruggle for racial equality within the union. As long ago as 1944, the union won a Supreme Court ruling that meant that Black women were entitled to the same wages and conditions as whites working in the industry.
The Trade Union Congress has also been working to improve the lot of women workers, calling for an end to discrimitatory wage rates, for maternity leaves, and for childcare centers.
Although Thandi Modise and Mamphela Ramphele are representative of a new strain of activism among the women of South Africa, they have inherited a struggle which began more than seventy years ago. In 1913 a group of women launched a massive anti-apartheid demonstration that served as the model for later demonstrations.
five years later with the help or the Five years later with the help of the African National Congress, the Bantu Women's League was founded and then replaced in 1936 by the National Council for African Women. In 1943 the ANC Women's League was established with the goal of educating and mobilizing women of all racial groups into the struggle.
The Federation of South African Women was created in 1954 out of the Women's League and other smaller organizations, with the stated aim of "struggling for removal of all laws, regulations, conventions and customs that discriminate against us as women."
Then on August 9, 1956, the spirit of resistance among Black South African women erupted in a demonstration -20,000 strong - of women from all over South Africa. The national march was organized to protest the extension to women of the hated pass laws. These laws require all African men to carry an identification document at all times and to produce it on demand, on pain of arrest.
The women converged on the government buildings in Pretoria, demanding to see the prime minister. Hundreds of thousands of signatures on petitions were left in his office. After a silent vigil of thirty minutes, the women's voices resounded through the city in an old Zulu refrain: "Now you have touched the women, you have struck a rock, you have dislodged a boulder, you will be crushed."
The valiant resistance of the South African women has grown since that August 9 (the day now celebrated as South African Women's Day, despite continuing imprisonments and bannings. In 1981 at least 15 women political prisoners were known to be serving sentences. They are subjected to harsh treatment, solitary confinement, censorship of all reading materials - complete isolation from the outside world • and each other.
In the face of such ruthless repression, however, the raised clenched fists of the women and their cry of "Amandla" (Power) is changing the South African political landscape. International Viewpoint 25 March 1985