ANC positions on gender, 1994–2004

Abstract

In this article I focus on two central tensions around gender. In the first place there exists a tension between the broad, sometimes vague commitments to women's liberation that are rooted in the ANC's history as a national liberation movement and the specific policy directions that it adopts as a party in government. In the former strand there is an emphasis on radical structural change and an overturn of the systemic legacies of apartheid. In the latter, the party's focus on the creation of a black middle class and its failure thus far to deal with the economic marginalization of women make addressing structural inequalities difficult. In order to unpack the first tension, I trace the conflicting meanings of national liberation within the party. Attempts to accommodate this tension are reflected in the way gender as an issue becomes a concern to be addressed through developmentalism, in such a way that the radical or substantive content, which was a feature of the liberation struggle, is lost. In the process, gender concerns have been delinked from feminist concerns. The transfer of gender to development leads us into the second tension in ANC thinking around gender. The ANC's projection of itself as a modernizing force is reflected in gender concerns which locate gender in development, with consequences for what is possible in terms of substantive gender change. This position, though, is often contradicted by the presence within the party of socially conservative and traditional discourses of gender, for whom gender equality is often little more than a rhetorical commitment. In the article I examine why this is so. Cutting across both of these tensions and finding space as a result of them are the party's achievements with respect to gender equality. Both historically and in comparison with other developing countries, the ANC has done more to champion issues of gender equality than any other former national liberation movement. I argue that this track record could have been better. In the final section of this article I examine the history of gender activism in the party over the last 11 years, in order to examine the constraints to further gains.

‘Rape is a huge issue in this country’: Discursive constructions of the rape crisis in South Africa

“…Thus I would argue that, small sample size notwithstanding, the findings of the research presented in this article may indicate something of what is more widely said and imagined of rape in South Africa. Indeed some aspects of the findings are already established in feminist literature, in particular the popular tendency in South Africa for the rapist to be imagined as black (Erlank, 2005; Moffett, 2006; Posel, 2005) and the more general hegemony of stranger-danger representations (Estrich, 1987).…”

“…Indeed with local headlines such as ‘SA: NATION OF RAPISTS’ ( The Sun , 25 October 2006) – which I saw on a Cape Town billboard while en route to interview one of the women in this study – rape inhabits a particularly fraught, contested and politicised discursive terrain. The white-dominated press has tended to racialise rape as a black issue, suggesting that it ‘represents a generic act on the part of black men’ (Erlank, 2005: 205; also Bonnes, 2011; Posel, 2005). Moffett (2006) contends that such assumptions shape popular talk, too.…”

Paradigm Busters or Poor Cousins?

“…Women achieved a 27.7% representation in the first democratically elected parliament in South Africa (Walsh, 2006). The African National Congress (ANC) was able to consolidate these gains and secure significant political and legal advances within the first 5 years of its rule in terms of women's rights, constitutional equality, and reproductive rights, perhaps more than any other liberation movement (Albertyn, 1994;Erlank, 2005).…”

Uneasy relations

“…Although space does not allow a full development of this point, in part this can be explained historically. In terms of its organizational culture, the ANC continues to be hostage to its past as a nationalist movement, strongly influenced by Marxist-Leninism (Johnson 2003) and long suspicious of feminism, individualism and western liberalism (Erlank 2005;Hassim 2006a;Walker 1991). Its preferred sociology constructs South Africa as an uneasy agglomeration of distinct social groups that are defined primarily in terms of common-sense constructions of 'race'.…”