Читать книгу Reflecting Rogue - Pumla Dineo Gqola - Страница 9

Every August, millions of South Africans move collectively in a carefully choreographed dance called Women’s Month. For almost five dizzying weeks, women are praised, patriarchy decried and women’s gains celebrated. There are awards ceremonies, gala dinners and public service announcements. Inspired by the courageous coordinated efforts of savvy women who organised the march to the Union Buildings to protest against the extension of passes to African women in 1956, each August we recall their names and marvel at their achievements. We catch our collective breath to take stock of how far we have come, and to reflect on how rocky the ground beneath our feet remains. Sometimes we re-enact the march as spectacular and miraculous; stirred by how twenty-thousand women could organise across class, geographic and race barriers such a feat at a time before cellphones and social media.

Even as we marvel at the women led by Sophia Williams-de Bruyn, Rahima Moosa, Lilian Ngoyi and Helen Joseph, we pretend they represent a moment, rather than sophisticated movement building. History has airbrushed the other successful women’s marches that predated 9 August 1956 out of view. Women’s world-changing collective political organising is inconvenient to national history. Yet, the memory of this march stands as a reminder of this legacy of intergenerational, bold women’s activism and power to galvanise against a powerful apartheid state in ways not easy to explain or co-opt into a masculine narrative of heroic nationalism that would usher in a new dispensation.

Today, and increasingly these days, I find myself turning to June Jordan, Jamaican-American feminist, essayist, activist. I re-read her poem first read in 1978, and first published in 1980 titled ‘Poem for South African women’. It is in that poem that she declared “we are the ones we have been waiting for” as her closing line.

The poem is about the power of bold, collective imagination, which stands defiantly in the larger context of individual fear, personal shadows and need for clarity. In it, Jordan writes the women’s collective action as a way to overcome individual limitation, and to band together to make a new earth. Quite literally, in the third to sixth lines, the women’s thousands of feet “pound the fallow land/into new dust that/rising like a marvellous pollen will be/fertile”. In the stanza that follows, what these women create through their “ferocious affirmation/of all peaceable and loving amplitude” is certainty for a different future that has become “irreversible” by the end of the third stanza. The fourth and final stanzas read:

And who will join this standing up

and the ones who stood without sweet company

will sing and sing

back into the mountains and

if necessary

even under the sea

we are the ones we have been waiting for.

In this poem, then, June Jordan projects forwards the enormous impact this march will continue to have, even as she is aware that it did not technically succeed in stopping the extension of Pass Laws to African women under apartheid. The optimism, celebration and commemoration in the poem, then, are not about the immediate success of the direct course of action. Rather, when the women’s action changes the world, this gestures to the many other successes we continue to reap from the collective action of those women more than sixty years ago.

It seems impossible to imagine that under such repressive times and surveillance, women could organise repeatedly and refine a model of organising that worked to mobilise across class, race, geography, religion, transgress the boundaries of who was directly affected and who not, and in coordinated action speak in one voice. In Jordan’s poem and for many of us, the march was not about glossing over differences. Nor was it about transcending differences. Those women activists knew the value of working in different organisations – church, union, organisational, social – and many came from sites that were not non-racial or multi-racial. Some of them came from organisations that had a single class, or were only Black or only white women’s organisations. Some came from black, Indian and coloured only groupings. They understood something profound about organisation and movement building, how to render some political action important. They also understood – in varied and sometimes oppositional ways – how crucial it is to organise in women-only radical action.

These are important actions and lessons that remain with us. Even when we do not fully grasp how profound that moment’s symbolism is, it is no accident that at a time when so much of historic South African women’s radical activist work has been erased, denied, obfuscated, maligned and pushed out of public memory, this march will not be erased. Even in the tamest representation of how it was possible to organise tens of thousands of women to the Union Buildings, it stands as “ferocious affirmation” well into the future.

Finally, Jordan’s poem importantly reminds her reader/listener of those who would not join these women, and asks questions about who will join and stand apart from the future these women created. She reminds us that women’s action is easy to celebrate retrospectively for those who have no real interest in creating a world friendly to women, a world fully owned by all.

This final line “we are the ones we have been waiting for” reminds us that women have to change the world through audacious action, and that we have it in us. It is a line that has been echoed across the works and movements of various African and African-world political movements since then. The award-winning African American women’s musical sensation Sweet Honey in the Rock turned the phrase into a song, Alice Walker turned it into a book title, the radical Blackwomen who founded Blackwash turned it into a slogan for a new movement, even if that same phrase was later sometimes used patriarchally against them. That poem was inspired by the women who marched on the Union Buildings on 9 August 1956; Jordan names it a commemoration of these women’s political work. It is a hopeful poem, and one that serves now as a reminder not just of June Jordan’s genius, but also to us as women living in South Africa today of the women we come from, live in the midst of, and offers an important vision of ourselves and who we can be. As a South African woman and feminist, I have no doubt that we are up against some more tough times. The backlash continues to mutate more virulently than ever and we need to keep up with the business of crafting and recrafting new feminist strategies and tools. We cannot ever rest on our laurels. The high levels of violence against women, queers and gender non-conforming people, all of which are categories that leak into each other, are real; the intimate femicide, rape, routine sexual harassment are clear evidence. The increasingly brazen, spectacular violent masculinities in public political and popular culture remind us constantly how far away we are from a country in which gender is not used as a weapon to terrorise and annihilate.

While we have clear ideas of the work women in different groupings did in order to make the historic march possible, we are often at a loss as to what a new women’s movement might look like. Many are pointing to this frustration when they repeatedly declare that the women’s movement in South Africa is dead. They have a very set idea of what such a movement should do – take to the streets in the kinds of numbers that trade unions can marshal and shut down cities for a day, organise in the manner of the Women’s March.

I am ambivalent about South African Women’s Month because I wish there was less to complain and worry about, less to work against as far as the state of gender in the nation. I wish that one August we would actually be able to have a real celebration of how far we have come. I look forward to the August when we will not have to contend with doublespeak from those in elected positions of power, when the legal justice system will not be a huge violent patriarchal matrix, when violent masculinities will no longer hold us hostage, when little girls, boys and children of all genders will not be bludgeoned into submission to the regimes of heteropatriarchy.

Discussing the phenomenon of August in post-apartheid South Africa with a few feminist friends and sisters again each year, we spend some time on the usual irritations. Each August, there is a high demand for speakers on women specifically and gender more broadly in order to be in line with what matters; feminists and gender activists are suddenly A-listers since everybody gets invitations to more events that s/he/they can get to; commissions to write, speak, workshop and sit on committees abound; and phones ring non-stop in an attempt to rent-a-feminist for every institution’s themed programme.

However, annually, even as we laugh at the farce of it all and the paradox of how important this month and marking is, we pause after we have made all the jokes about rounding up all the country’s feminists and disappearing, going into hiding for the month. It is wonderful that the 1956 March demands and retains memory even in a very patriarchal nationalist narrative, marked by a day and an entire month. I love knowing that more often than not smart women are featured as experts on a range of topics on more radio and television shows than not, that intelligent women are everywhere, whether I agree with them or not. It makes me hopeful for what a truly free future looks like. It brings me joy to remember that Prof Fatima Meer, activist, feminist, intellectual was born in this month even if she has since transitioned to the ancestral realm.

It also brings me joy to remember that in August 2012 it was a celebratory march led by the African National Congress Women’s League (ANCWL) that was disrupted by members of the 1in9 Campaign declaring “no cause for celebration”. This moment of confrontation between different generations of women activists was an important reminder that the battle is not won. When so many women live in perpetual fear, and have little recourse in state institutions against that fear, we do need to temper our celebration. And the seasoned activists of the ANCWL recognised the importance of marking the moment of silence demanded by the younger feminists in purple shirts. Even if this acquiescence was tacit acknowledgement of their own duplicity with the strengthening of an increasingly patriarchally violent ruling party and government.

In 2016, however, the self-induced women’s month love-fest was punctured by an inconvenient reminder that could not be brushed aside. On 6 August, at the Independent Electoral Commission’s ceremony to announce results and declare the elections free, fair and peaceful, four women stood up and insisted that we reflect on how democracy fails women. Clad in black, they stood in front of the presidential podium, holding up placards, one of which implored us to #RememberKhwezi. Simamkele Dlakavu, Tinyiko Shikwambane, Naledi Chirwa and Amanda Mavuso reminded us that it had been ten years since the Jacob Zuma rape trial that introduced the word and garment “khanga” into everyday South African parlance.

When Pregs Govender posted on her Facebook page the four women’s placards against a background of the four leaders of the 1956 march, what she communicated visually was unambiguous. Pregs Govender’s own record as a unionist, anti-apartheid feminist activist, and as the only member of parliament to have voted against her party, against the nuclear deal, marks her as a Blackwoman who does not bow down to party discipline at all cost. As this edited image travelled – Shikwambane in front of Moosa holding two placards with “I am 1 in 3” and “#”, Mavuso in front of Ngoyi holding up “10 yrs later”, Chirwa’s hands held up “Khanga”, and Dlakavu’s sign was “Remember Khwezi” as she stood in front of the only surviving leader of the 1956 March, Sophia Williams-de Bruyn. The black and white background of the leaders of the 1956 march, holding pages with petitions signed by tens of thousands of women, introduced a specific reading of the 2016 women’s protest.

Whereas the Women’s March is on the official annual calendar, it is associated with the ruling party in the post-apartheid public. This is why it is so easy to associate women’s collective organising as belonging legitimately to the ANCWL before all other women’s formations. The four leaders of the historic march enter the narrative as a reminder that women’s activism sits uncomfortably with heroic nationalism. The giant image of the 1956 leaders stood as legitimation, offering a reading of #RememberKhwezi protestors as located in a long tradition of women’s radical organising in their own name.

In the minutes, days and weeks that followed, the question of legitimacy was everywhere in discussions of the #RememberKhwezi protest. The successful link with the 1956 leaders had to be expanded by some and contested by others. Some activists who see themselves as the legitimate heiresses of the 1956 tradition of women’s radical organising exploded in rage against the 2016 protesters. “These young women are cheapening rape and the experience of survivors of violence,” they claimed. It did not matter that some of them had publicly come out as rape survivors themselves. They were accused of illegitimate and disrespectful action, of simultaneous political opportunism and political immaturity and being the pawns of the politically powerful men who lead the Economic Freedom Fighters political party. It was inconceivable that women could act in their own name, even to some of the most powerful governing women who saw the protest as disrespecting the President.

Yet, in Govender’s visual sign, the image of the 1956 women’s march leaders stood as giants authorising the protest by the 2016 women protesters. In the photographic background were thousands more women. They replaced Jacob Zuma in the image, deflecting his centrality, and inviting a reading of Shikwambane, Mavuso, Chirwa and Dlakavu, as the heiresses and actors in a long line of women’s radical action. Soon, Fezeka Kuzwayo, the woman named Khwezi in 2006 by the 1in9 Campaign, a feminist formation established to support her in her court case against Jacob Zuma, was again on everyone’s lips. April 2016 marked ten years since the awful spectacle of her brutalisation because she had laid a charge of rape against the man who would be the president in 2016. In April 2006, Jacob Zuma was acquitted of raping Fezekile Kuzwayo at the end of a trial that authorised misogynist brutality on a scale that should have been impossible in a democratic South Africa.

In television interviews the day after, Kwezilomso Mbandazayo and Mpumi Mathabela, feminist leaders from the 1in9 Campaign, expressed their unqualified support of the 2016 protest, and informed the public that Khwezi had received their protest as recognition and as support from fellow feminists. A week later, in an evening radio interview, the only surviving member of the four from the 1956 Women’s March, Sophia Williams-de Bruyn, spoke of the necessary courage of the four protesters, the validity of their concern and stated that she saw no contradiction between her action in 1956 and theirs in 2016.

It is true that the protesters are EFF members but this does not reduce them to EFF opportunists. Rather than the positions of Jacob Zuma and EFF leader Julius Malema, we should pay attention to what these feminists’ actions said.

First, the four activists walked to the front in black while their party in red left the Results Operations Centre. They could have asked their comrades to join them, or acted in concert with them. It means something that they chose not to. What bodies adorn and perform in political action matters. Rather, they chose to walk up, dressed in black, a colour that would not immediately associate them with any particular party. It must have been obvious to them that being dressed in their organisation’s red would immediately work against them. It would reduce their important political action to the business of legitimacy and masculine power. To those hostile to the Economic Freedom Fighters, these women would be read as disruptive, undisciplined and badly behaved. The disapproval would trump any validity their message might have. After all, these same adjectives are used against the increasingly effective strategies used by EFF parliamentarians to delegitimise the governing party’s majority in the legislature.

Second, Dlakavu, Shikwambane, Mavuso and Chirwa chose a key moment in the performance of democracy to remind us of what else this year marks. It was the South African public they were in conversation with. They chose to neither interrupt nor threaten President Zuma. Indeed, he was unaware of what was unfolding until the commotion alerted him. He was not the addressee. What they disrupted was the hypocrisy at the heart of the rainbow nation.

Importantly, as their action suggests, the hypocrisy was that of the electorate and voting public. Another round of free and fair elections are hailed as cause for celebrating the successes of the new dispensation. They are part of the pomp and ceremony of freedom and a country that works democratically. However, for these women the farce of democracy relies on the unacknowledged or trivialised scourge of gender-based violence. Shikwambane’s “I am 1 in 3” is a stark reminder of the ever-presence of sexual assault, written in red like the blood the silenced/airbrushed victims and survivors bleed. They were reminding those in that hall as well as millions more watching in live broadcasts of the underbelly of this celebration. Nationalism is violent. There may be successful elections but women are still unfree and when Khwezi – Fezekile Kuzwayo, who also went by Fezeka – stood up, she was battered and exiled. Having pushed her out of view – and most South Africans were unaware that she had long returned – what Wambui Mwangi has elsewhere called “misogynist male interpreters and patriarchal narratives” tidied her out. These women, unlike many of their peers who sat with their political parties and celebrated the violence of narrative and the successes of an election, refused to be complicit with the erasure of women’s daily realities in a democratic South Africa. “10 yrs later”, Mavuso’s sign reminded us, the patriarchal nationalists had returned to business as usual. Like the 1in9 banners, they insisted that there was no cause for celebration.

And while their EFF membership made them prime targets for accusations of hypocrisy given Malema’s own 2006 rape apologist comments against Khwezi, seeing these women as only EFF pawns requires that we not take them seriously, that we airbrush everything in their lives except that which we can use against them. Malema was not part of their protest. They made this decision. To re-insert him as a way to dismiss them is violence. It requires that we embrace the very hypocrisy they challenge. Feminists located in other political parties like the Democratic Alliance, the African National Congress or the United Democratic Movement do not have to apologise as long as they toe the party line and can accept as supreme law the discipline of the organisational hierarchy.

Chirwa’s sign read “Khanga”, gesturing ambiguously. On the one hand, a khanga is an item of clothing African women wear daily and unspectacularly in many parts of the continent, that has sociality, aesthetic cultures and a politics much written about in East Africa. This item was used to belittle Khwezi/Fezeka as undressed during the court case. That demands repetition. Fezeka dressed herself like many East and Southern African women do and had this used against her. On the other, “I am Khanga” was the poem Kuzwayo wrote, published in 2008. In it, she writes:

I wrap myself around the curvaceous bodies of women all over Africa

I am the perfect nightdress on those hot African nights

The ideal attire for household chores

I secure babies happily on their mother’s backs

Am the perfect gift for new bride and new mother alike

Armed with proverbs, I am vehicle for communication between women

I exist for the comfort and convenience of a woman

But no no no make no mistake …

I am not here to please a man

And I certainly am not a seductress

Please don’t use me as an excuse to rape

Don’t hide behind me when you choose to abuse

You see

That’s what he said, my Malume

The man who called himself daddy’s best friend

Shared a cell with him on Island for ten whole years

He said I wanted it

That my khanga said it

That with it I lured him to my bed

That with it I want you is what it said

But what about the NO I uttered with my mouth

Not once but twice

And the please no I said with my body

What about the tear that ran down my face as I lay stiff with shock

In what sick world is that sex

In what sick world is that consent

In the same world where the rapist becomes the victim

The same world where I become the bitch that must burn

The same world where I am forced into exile because I spoke out?

This is NOT my world

I reject that world

My world is a world where fathers protect and don’t rape

My world is a world where a woman can speak out

Without fear for her safety

My world is a world where no one, but no one is above the law

My world is a world where sex is pleasurable not painful

“Khanga” on a placard implored the witnessing public to remember that women’s bodies belong to themselves in a just world. The poem – Fezeka’s own words – was in that room that night, hauntingly reminding us that “This is NOT my world/I reject that world”. The world rejected in the poem is a patriarchally violent one in which men have legitimacy and nothing women do for themselves and in their own name matters. Ironically, in the responses by the leading women of the governing party, centring two patriarchal men – Zuma and Malema – is re-creating that world, even as the four women in front of them tried to unmake it, reminding us of the urgency of crafting the kind of world that can belong to women.

Many of us located in religious, educational, corporate or political institutions do not merely function as pawns of the patriarchal men in leadership and management. Their association does not inform every living breathing experience of women. This too is a reminder contained in the poem, and echoed in the #RememberKhwezi protest. Therefore, understanding these women as pawns requires the deliberate phallic re-insertion of men who are not in the frame of reference and minimising what the women’s choices and bodies communicate. It also undermines the complicated layered lives that human beings live.

The #RememberKhwezi protesters are EFF members. They are also much more that offers no contradiction to their chosen protest action in August 2016. Two of the protesters were at the Results Operations Centre with press passes. One of them publishes regular opinion pieces in print media and has an occasional column for a major weekly newspaper. Reading her columns and public essays leaves no doubt about her ongoing commitment to Black women’s activist traditions, narratives and uplift. Her community work in education and firing up the imagination of children in marginal communities predates the existence of the EFF. Returning constantly to questioning power in ways that are innovative and incisive, Dlakavu’s decision to form part of #RememberKhwezi makes perfect sense.

A second hosts her own radio show on a university campus, and has previously co-hosted a women’s talk show on national television with three women, two of whom are prominent feminist media powerhouses. Again, here is a woman whose radio show constantly probes the intersections of legal institutions and transforming societal power. Shikwambane’s legal degree intersects with her media experience to probe especially the ways in which women’s lives can matter differently.

One of the #RememberKhwezi protesters was a founder member of #TransformWits; she has worked closely with different parts of the student movement, including #RhodesMustFall and the #RUReferenceList.

Mavuso’s and Chirwa’s positions as student leaders on university campuses often requires that they be the unpopular voice negotiating urgent political concerns and getting stereotyped as frightening man-haters. For Mavuso, feminist politics and self-identification are constantly in need of defence, even (and especially) within party culture.

All four protesting women were key members of #FeesMustFall and #EndOutsourcing. All four of them were either senior or postgraduate students at a leading South African university at the time of the protest. One of them is a member of the 1in9 Campaign, the organisation founded to support Khwezi in her 2006 court case.

The complexity that makes up the substance of women’s lives is all inconvenient when we do not want to listen to the anger, experiences and voices of women. In Johannesburg, there had been a 1in9 public event to mark ten years since the end of the rape trial a few weeks before the #RememberKhwezi event exploded onto national news. There had been minimal media coverage of the event. The 1in9 march to commemorate the day of Fezeka’s rape in November 2016, a few weeks after her death, was met with equal silence.

There was minimal media coverage of the University of Fort Hare students who marched down Oxford Street on 9 August 2016 carrying placards that shouted “My body is not an object to be analysed nor owned” and “You may look away but you can never again say you did not know”. They, too, had chosen a strategic day to challenge South African gender power. But the media had turned away, in the main.

These are just a handful of examples of women organising and engaged in protest action across the country. Their visibility or invisibility is a function of where we sit, our reliance on media pathways and our investment in an increasingly untenable notion of what feminist movement looks like.

Reducing women to mere pawns is looking away. Pretending women cannot choose political actions is looking away and refusing to listen. However, the Fort Hare students, like 1in9 members who insist that there is “no cause for celebration”, like #RUReferenceList and #RapeAtAzania and the #RememberKhwezi protestors echo the placard that says we cannot feign ignorance.

Dlakavu, Shikwambane, Mavuso and Chirwa are part of a groundswell of unapologetic feminist activism across our country, most of whom are not even EFF members. In concert, they are changing the face of what a feminist or women’s movement looks like. They are impatient and they are tired. They speak in their own names and in defence of women.

Finally, this was a very important moment, one that demands that we all listen differently. These actions, whether in the public glare, or subjected to averted gaze, invite us to think about gender in relation to nationalism and to confront questions about what is wrong with separating them rhetorically. We need to constantly puncture the farce of the patriarchal narrative’s lies that women are free in South Africa.

The #RememberKhwezi protest, like less visible protests in similar vein, was not about simply transgressing the boundaries of respectability, and/or embarrassing Zuma so much as exposing the generalised hypocrisy necessary for the performance of a patriarchally violent nation. Another clear example of this hypocrisy lies in the wide celebration of women’s leadership and visibility in the new students’ movement while ignoring the messy parts of the activism espoused by student activists. In other words, while there was obsessive attention paid to how many women’s bodies could be seen in #FeesMustFall, as well as screening footage of student leaders like Nompendulo Mkhatshwa and Shaeera Kalla on a loop, with very few exceptions, the texture of the issues activists faced was less important than the content and complications that came with radical political action. In other words, while soundbites from Kalla’s fiery speeches and Nompendulo’s headwrapped defiant body were circulated as evidence of women taking charge and ushering in a new order, the constant harassment of Mkhatshwa and thirteen bullets in Kalla’s back were too complicated a narrative and therefore needed airbrushing out.

The hypervisibility of radical student action on the one hand, and the refusal to engage with the brutality with which the state and public institutions dealt with them on the other hand was the reality for Fallists of all genders. What differed for women is the manner in which they were both held up as visually iconic as individuals and not engaged substantially. This ambivalence to women activists and women’s activism is an older trope in South Africa’s political sphere. This doublespeak is part of the hypocrisy the #RememberKhwezi protesters brought home. Doublespeak on gender talk rests on the refusal to engage the substance of women’s radical political action by averting the gaze in search of a women’s movement or re-centring men in avoidance of conversations that question the violence of heroic nationalism.

Having said that, the fact that so many hanker after a women’s movement that looks a certain way, and therefore often have to confront the repeated question of whether a woman’s movement is dead in South Africa is important. It reminds us, as Shireen Hassim’s work has insisted for three decades, that we need an autonomous women’s movement. Hassim’s work constantly shows that the work of building and recognising this movement is not easy work. It is neither recuperative nor repetitive, but requires risk and new generative epistemes in order to make sense of what is unfolding in front of us. This recurring question reveals ongoing anxieties about the state of gender in our nation, and reveals more than a mere desire for a resolution.

It is only possible to answer yes to this question if we anticipate the large numbers of women taking to the streets I mentioned earlier, as well as the visible formation of mass-based organisations. This is a reasonable expectation, since claiming public space is a strategy much loved by all movements of the left, whether we have in mind the stripping in naked protest historically by Kenyan women’s movements that has become so beloved of Fallist feminists in South Africa, the women’s marches that culminated in the 1956 March to the Union Buildings, or reclaim the night and anti-patriarchal marches across the world.

While women’s marches seldom attract the numbers that they once seemed to, and there are no attempts to come up with something akin to a Women’s National Coalition, this decrying of a dying or dead women’s movement is selectively attentive to history. When it is made, people forget why the Women’s National Coalition worked, and how hard it was to ensure that it achieved its successes, choosing to focus in their nostalgia on the power of women from different political homes working together. They also eliminate the existence of formations like the Natal Organisation of Women and other similar province-based women’s formations, or the specific processes that saw them weakened. Return is not simply possible. Nor has a singular approach ever advanced radical struggle.

There are many reasons why we do not see tens of thousands of women taking to the streets on a regular basis. Organising women in this way and to do so regularly continues to be a challenge in a context where the efficacy of such marches is under scrutiny. And in a context where women’s public action simply receives muted or no coverage, we are asking the wrong questions if we expect such activism to find us in the comfort of our living rooms.

Feminist poet Audre Lorde is often quoted as warning against the use of the master’s tool to topple hegemony. Marching against the state, where many seasoned women activists themselves are located, using tools that those in power now have intimate knowledge of can be as ironic as it is ineffective. This is part of the disillusionment with old forms and strategies associated with the anti-apartheid struggle. Feminist organisations like the 1in9 Campaign have long pointed this out. Fallist student activists understand the need for different kinds of formations, intimately working across old student organisations rather than within them.

Many of the older forms of women’s movement organising were premised on a very clear relationship to the state, whether as enemy or potential partner. Such orientation no longer works in the current dispensation. This is not to say that there are no women’s organisations that see the state as the enemy – indeed the more vocal ones occupy this position – given the free reign of violent masculinities in the political organisation of the nation as well as the ongoing brutalisation of sexual violence survivors within the legal justice system.

At the same time, many in the women’s movement are part of the state, or invest in models of patient collaboration with the state. They are linked to this taming of subversive political language in which the successes of the current democracy have also been premised on directly weakening an autonomous women’s movement. They have led to a more fractured women’s movement than we have ever seen before. But they have also led to more vantage points from feminists than ever before. There have been significant gains in women’s power and location since 1994, so we pretend to be perpetual outsiders at our own peril.

While there are various organisations and formations of women who organise for varied ends, they often do so separately, and unless you know or work with them, some of this action receives no media coverage. When they work outside of alliances and coalitions they are rendered invisible.

There is no question that the Rural Women’s Movement and 1in9 Campaign, for example, do important work. Yet, many discussions of the South African women’s movement often become obsessive reflections on the ANC Women’s League – or expectations from women within the larger ruling party’s ranks. While this may be well-intentioned, it also renders other spaces within the women’s movement less visible.

It also reveals a hankering after a certain historic model of women’s organising that has worked well to get the legislative framework we boast. However, it is clearer with each turn that those tools can get us no further than we are. The #RememberKhwezi protest is evidence of the urgency of new directions to re-energise women’s movement. All four of those women are constantly engaged in feminist work, yet that moment generated more public contestation than the hard work they do in different organisations and institutions daily, and at great cost.

There is no question that feminist activism needs to be reenergised, and that we need to constantly evaluate the ways in which our strategies make it possible for us to be out of the frame. #RememberKhwezi is in the spirit of the many marches by the 1in9 Campaign and student feminist action like #RUReferenceList, Silent Protest, #RapeAtAzania and many other forms of action feminists organise regularly across the country. However, the reason it remains in the public imagination is due to these four feminists’ savvy in how to protest in ways the nation could not avert its eyes from. It was a significant leap of the imagination, including questioning many of the tools that are as dear to activists in the women’s movement as they are to other members of the left in South Africa.

The challenges are different. The enemy is more elusive if we need to think of what we fight as that which resides in a discernible enemy. However, there is no dearth of feminist activism, women’s activism, in contemporary South Africa. It is simply that many are asking the wrong questions, looking for the wrong form – a form of feminist activism that will not help us shape the kind of society we need to create.