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The ANC Women's League will convene in a National General Council (NGC) from Friday, 30 March. The National Executive Committee of the ANC will have an opportunity to address the opening session of the NGC to convey the best wishes of all members of our movement, as well as its own. Nevertheless, I am also privileged to have the opportunity of the publication of this edition of ANC TODAY to wish the NGC of the ANC Women's League success.
In the Report of its August 2003 4th National Conference, the Women's League said: "The delegates from all provinces, young and old, businesswomen, churchwomen, veterans, women activists, National Executive Committee Members, branches, invited guests, COSAS, SASCO and Alliance Partners (COSATU, SACP and SANCO), participated and constructively contributed to the objectives of the conference...
"The conference called for unity. Delegates were urged to put aside differences amongst women and conduct thorough discussions on challenges facing the Women's League. This would ensure that the Women's League carries out its strategic task of mobilising women behind the vision of the African National Congress and creating a united, non-sexist, non-racial and democratic and a prosperous South Africa."
Like the National Conference, the NGC will be made up of delegates "from all provinces, young and old, businesswomen, churchwomen, veterans, women activists, National Executive Committee Members, branches, invited guests, COSAS, SASCO and Alliance Partners (COSATU, SACP and SANCO)."
Among other things, it will be called upon to make an honest assessment of how far the League has succeeded to carry out "its strategic task of mobilising women behind the vision of the African National Congress and creating a united, non-sexist, non-racial and democratic and a prosperous South Africa." Accordingly, it will have to consider what the League needs to do next to accelerate the advance towards the achievement of the goals set by the 4th National Conference.
WOMEN'S VANGUARD
It is not possible to overestimate the importance of the NGC of the Women's League with regard to the strategic objectives of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR), relating to the emancipation of women and gender equality, and the building of a non-racial and prosperous society. This is for the simple reason that present at the NGC will be the vanguard contingent of the women of our country, and therefore an important component part of the cadre of leaders that leads and must lead our country through its process of social transformation.
This is the successor advance guard to the heroic women of our country who marched on the Union Buildings on 9 August 1956. Then, in their Petition to the apartheid Prime Minister, entitled, "The Demand of the Women of South Africa for the Withdrawal of Passes for Women and the Repeal of the Pass Laws", the women said:
"We, the women of South Africa, have come here today. We represent and we speak on behalf of hundreds of thousands of women who could not be with us. But all over the country, at this moment, women are watching and thinking of us. Their hearts are with us. We are women from every part of South Africa. We are women of every race; we come from the cities and the towns, from the reserves and the villages. We come as women united in our purpose to save the African women from the degradation of passes...
"We shall not rest until ALL pass laws and all forms of permits restricting our freedom have been abolished. We shall not rest until we have won for our children their fundamental rights of freedom, justice, and security."
The fighting women of our country kept their word. Continuing to act in unity, and as a visible contingent of, and an integral part of the liberation movement, in time they saved the African women from the degradation of passes. In time they won for their children their fundamental rights to freedom, justice and security.
The Women's League is committed to "the strategic task of mobilising women behind the vision of the African National Congress and creating a united, non-sexist, non-racial and democratic and a prosperous South Africa". The NGC will have to make a frank assessment of how far the Women's League has succeeded to carry out this strategic task - the obligation to mobilise our country's women so that, like the women who marched on the Union Buildings, they too act in unity, as a visible contingent of, and an integral part of the liberation movement, to save all the women of our country from the degradation of gender oppression and discrimination, poverty and underdevelopment.
The Women's League exists as an organised formation of our movement precisely to carry out the strategic task of the mobilisation of the women of our country to represent themselves in the struggle to create a society defined by the true emancipation of women. It lives because the women of our country accept it as the vehicle that will ensure their visibility among the forces engaged in struggle to give birth to the new society that defines the very content of the NDR.
The motto of the important component part of the national movement for true democracy, Disabled People South Africa (DPSA), is "nothing about us without us". From its foundation, and as clearly enunciated by the 1956 Women's March, our country's progressive women's movement has been inspired by the same vision that informs the actions of the fellow South Africans with disabilities - nothing about women without the women!
Our democratic revolution - the NDR and therefore the ANC itself - must of necessity address the central issue of the emancipation of women. Nevertheless, for us to achieve success in this regard, the women of our country must not serve merely as objects of history, unorganised and unseen beneficiaries of progressive change, but as subjects, conscious makers of history - their own liberators.
Acting in concert with the rest of our movement, the women of our country must help themselves and us to defeat the invisibility of women that constitutes a critical factor in the conspiracy of historical and current circumstances that make for gender oppression and discrimination.
INVISIBLE WOMAN
In 1940, driven solely by commercial considerations, one of the US (Hollywood) film studios released a film entitled "Invisible Woman". Whatever the intellectual origins of this film, its very title drew attention to the fact that patriarchal society sustained itself by ensuring the invisibility of women, perpetuating the notion that only the male of the species has the divine right and ability to determine the destiny of all humanity.
Accordingly, to struggle for the emancipation of women must surely mean, also, that our movement must strive for the visibility of women as makers of history, including their own. It must signify that to fight for gender equality is to fight for the permanent emergence of women from the shadows, creating the situation that once and for all, they are seen and heard as part of the inalienable motive forces for fundamental social change - no longer the "Invisible Woman".
Necessarily, therefore, one of the strategic tasks of the ANC Women's League is to ensure that the women of our country should never again become the "Invisible Woman". This gives special significance to the challenge that will confront the NGC of the Women's League, honestly to assess the progress the League has made to mobilise the masses of the women of our country into a conscious and organised struggle for the emancipation of women and the realisation of the other objectives of the NDR.
In this regard, the League must take pride in the fact that consistently, since 1994, the women have constituted the majority of the electorate that has consciously voted to mandate the ANC to serve as our country's ruling political formation.
It is only by this means, of women's involvement in the transformation project, as the new masses that have broken ranks with the old, that the democratic revolution will end the invisibility of women, which unacceptable invisibility can only be transformed into its opposite when the women act together as an organised force, as did the women who marched on the Union Buildings in 1956.
One of the best known poems of the African American woman poet, Maya Angelou, is entitled "Phenomenal Woman". The poem, an outstanding and triumphant celebration of femininity, and a defiant assertion of the invincibility of women, says:
Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I'm telling lies.
I say,
It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.
I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It's the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.
Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can't touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them
They say they still can't see.
I say,
It's in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.
Now you understand
Just why my head's not bowed.
I don't shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It's in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
the palm of my hand,
The need of my care,
'Cause I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.
Another woman poet who, in many ways, belonged to a world radically different from the world of Maya Angelou, Anna Akhmatova of Soviet Russia, also sang of the imperative for all of us to celebrate women as visible expressions of our common humanity, whatever our common historical fate. In her poem, "Lot's Wife", based on the dramatic story in the Biblical Book of Genesis, of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, she said:
And the just man trailed God's shining agent,
over a black mountain, in his giant track,
while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:
"It's not too late, you can still look back
at the red towers of your native Sodom,
the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows set in the tall house
where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed."
A single glance: a sudden dart of pain
stitching her eyes before she made a sound...
Her body flaked into transparent salt,
and her swift legs rooted to the ground.
Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem
too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I never will deny her,
who suffered death because she chose to turn.
Lest everything I have said comes across as but an inanimate representation of some of the pain which women, not men, have to bear, a cold and general summation denuded of the throb of personal pain intensely felt, I summon the words of another woman African American poet, Gwendolyn Brooks, as she spoke of a mother's agony in "The Mother", grieving that she had to terminate a pregnancy.
Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get...
I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed
children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,
and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?--
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.
Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.
DEFINING THE AGENDA
The 2003 4th National Conference of the ANC Women's League adopted many important resolutions. These covered such issues as the status of the national Women's Movement and the role of the League in this regard, building the Women's League as an organisation representative of the most politically and socially advanced women of South Africa, deepening a national culture of human and women's rights, economic development and women's empowerment, social transformation, consolidating the leading position of the ANC in the transformation process, and building a better Africa and a world order incorporating gender equality.
Earlier women revolutionaries, such as the famous Bolshevik, Rosa Luxemburg, spoke and wrote of women, and organised women, to ensure that they act as a visible component part of the revolutionary movement that would create a new world.
In her well known and defining 12 May 1912 speech at the Second Social Democratic Women's Rally in Stuttgart, Germany, she said:
"The political and syndical (trade union) awakening of the masses of the female proletariat during the last fifteen years has been magnificent. But it has been possible only because working women took a lively interest in the political and parliamentary struggles of their class in spite of being deprived of their rights...In all Social Democratic electoral meetings, women make up a large segment, sometimes the majority. They are always interested and passionately involved. In all districts where there is a firm Social Democratic organisation, women help with the campaign. And it is women who have done invaluable work distributing leaflets and getting subscribers to the Social Democratic press, this most important weapon in the campaign...
"The capitalist state has not been able to keep women from taking on all these duties and efforts of political life. Step by step, the state has indeed been forced to grant and guarantee them this possibility by allowing them union and assembly rights. Only the last political right is denied women: the right to vote, to decide directly on the people's representatives in legislature and administration, to be an elected member of these bodies. But here, as in all other areas of society, the motto is: 'Don't let things get started!'
"But things have been started. The present state gave in to the women of the proletariat when it admitted them to public assemblies, to political associations. And the state did not grant this voluntarily, but out of necessity, under the irresistible pressure of the rising working class... It is only the inevitable consequence, only the logical result of the movement that today millions of proletarian women call defiantly and with self-confidence: Let us have suffrage!...
"A hundred years ago, the Frenchman Charles Fourier, one of the first great prophets of socialist ideals, wrote these memorable words: In any society, the degree of female emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation. This is completely true for our present society. The current mass struggle for women's political rights is only an expression and a part of the proletariat's general struggle for liberation. In this lies its strength and its future. Because of the female proletariat, general, equal, direct suffrage for women would immensely advance and intensify the proletarian class struggle. This is why bourgeois society abhors and fears women's suffrage. And this is why we want and will achieve it. Fighting for women's suffrage, we will also hasten the coming of the hour when the present society falls in ruins under the hammer strokes of the revolutionary proletariat."
When she spoke of the then present society falling in ruins, Rosa Luxemburg was projecting the defeat of capitalism and its replacement by a socialist society. Her voice must strike a chord in the hearts and minds of the women of our country and the masses of our people as a whole because these masses, who trust the ANC Women's League as one of their leaders, are also striving "to hasten the coming of the hour when the present society, (the racist and sexist legacy of colonialism and apartheid), falls in ruins under the hammer strokes" of the revolutionary masses.
This is the only and true meaning of the resolutions adopted by the Women's League at its 4th National Conference, whose successful implementation is the only standard available to the motive forces of the NDR to judge whether they, including the Women's League, have made and are making the necessary advance towards the emancipation of women, and therefore the general emancipation of our people as a whole.
WOMEN'S HEADS UNBOWED
To achieve this historic outcome, the ANC Women's League, as well as our movement as a whole, must understand in the innermost recesses of their heart and soul what Anna Akhmatova meant when she wrote of the wife of Lot, a woman without a name, but nevertheless the mother of the next generation of humanity, with no existence except as a modulated pillar of salt -
Does she not seem
too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I never will deny her,
who suffered death because she chose to turn.
It is only when we do this, when we refuse to accept the proposition that it is possible to deny the women and consider them too insignificant for our concern, perhaps because they chose to turn, perpetuating the insult that they are but the invisible woman, that we will guarantee that the degree of female emancipation serves as the natural measure of the general emancipation.
Then will we break out of the stultified perimeter of the false consciousness of the pretty women of whom Maya Angelou spoke, to draw inspiration from the visible woman that Maya Angelou then celebrated when she said:
Now you understand
Just why my head's not bowed.
I don't shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing
It ought to make you proud.
The ANC Women's League must, in action, continue to inspire and lead all the women of our country, and not merely its members, to walk together, with their heads unbowed. Even as they assert their visibility, as did the women who marched on the Union Buildings, these mobilised women would not need to shout, or jump, or talk real loud, or dance the toyi-toyi, because they would be involved in the extremely serious, practical and complex business of the reconstruction and development of our society.
When our country sees the women passing by in their massed ranks, marching in step to expand our frontiers of human dignity, nobody will have to urge the millions that constitute our nation that what the women of our country have done, are doing, and will do, ought to make all of them proud. Then will the ANC Women's League report to itself, and therefore our movement and nation, that it has done what it had to do to consign to the irretrievable past both the image and the reality of the invisible woman.
When that happens, we will have no need to grieve that the ANC Women's League, and the ANC, might, unintentionally, have poisoned the beginnings of the breaths of our society as it battled to be born.
Thabo Mbeki
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