As multiple norths emerge in the so-called souths (and vice versa) and nongovernment organizations (NGOs) become important partners in knowledge production, it becomes imperative for feminist actors to envision new collaborative methodologies that can simultaneously resist the 'deradicalization of feminist politics' in the increasingly corporatized academy as well as in the increasingly donor-driven, professionalized, and state-identified NGO sector. Based on an extensive reading of literature on oral history and critical ethnography, this viewpoint identifies four interrelated areas where reflexive interventions by feminist collaborators working across geographical, sociopolitical and institutional borders can advance such a project: rethinking the relationships between processes and products of collaboration; more conscious interweaving of the collaborative theories and methodologies; producing knowledges that can travel across the borders of academia/NGOs/people's movements; and reimagining reciprocity in collaboration.
This article looks at contemporary activism in Crossroads, South Africa -a famous symbol of women's defiance as one of the longest-surviving squatter camps under apartheid. In 1998 the Women's Power Group staged a four-month sit-in at City Council offices, demanding accountability for undelivered housing and public services. This was one of the first and most prolonged of what have become known as the post-apartheid or neoliberal period 'new social movements'. The occupation unravelled into a year of violent conflict in the township and a subsequent Commission of Enquiry into the events. Official documents -even those that revolve around actions taken by women -focus on men acting violently. However, life histories of Women's Power Group (WPG) members tell a very different story about what women were thinking and doing. I first piece together the unfolding events through archival and oral history research. I then turn from looking at the history of struggle to looking at the struggle over history, where women's struggles were reframed in an official discourse of naive pawns of shacklords at best, and undeserving, impatient troublemakers at worst. Women's leadership was demobilised, depoliticised, and dislocated from the issues they stood up for and from the celebrated history of women's mobilising in Crossroads. The case of the Women's Power Group history points to how silences around complex processes of the demobilisation of women's movements -the reconfiguration of power that is not named or acknowledged -plays out in subsequent attempts to mobilise. The article aims to document and extend an important piece of post-apartheid history, and to spark discussion on processes of demobilisation, the significance of the gaps between multiple versions of women's protest over time, and the implications for ongoing struggles today.
This article engages the dilemmas and challenges of writing histories of the recent past, and of the political agendas of intervening in those histories in the present. This is done through producing an archive of documentation and oral histories of the Gender Education Training Network, GETNET. GETNET was a feminist political education organisation formed in South Africa in the 1990s that is best known for creating spaces of thinking and learning to strengthen action and intervention at numerous levels from 1992 to 2014. This article portrays the history and pedagogy as well as groundbreaking work of GETNET—the first gender training organisation in South Africa that attempted to make real the gains made on paper by challenging gender dynamics and institutionalised sexism in post-apartheid South Africa. It draws on the literature of activist archiving and feminist methodologies of intergenerational dialogue, aiming to (a) share some of the most radical and relevant work done in the decade after 1994 by anti-apartheid feminist activists developing what they called indigenous and regional perspectives, materials, and methodologies to expose and shift gender dynamics, and (b) to spark ideas and conversations about ways of producing activist archives that are accountable to both movements and to the future.
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