introduction
women in southern africa
South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) are very much in the news these days. Efforts are being made to effect a transition from white minority to black majority governments in Namibia and Zimbabwe. There are wars of national liberation going on, political summit meetings, United Nations resolutions, economic sanctions and boycotts. The year 1978 has been proclaimed as International Anti-Apartheid Year by the United Nations. Southern Africa is in struggle and international attention is focused on it.
Women in Southern Africa are caught up in all of this: victims of the oppressive apartheid regimes, bearing enormous hardships, resisting, struggling. Looking at their incredibly difficult situation, we have asked: What is the situation of women in Southern Africa? What are our sisters in Southern Africa saying and doing? How can we, women around the world, show our solidarity with our sisters living and struggling under apartheid?
When the Sub-unit on Women in Church and Society of the World Council of Churches asked us to produce an issue of the ISIS International Bulletin on women in Southern Africa, we welcomed the opportunity to find answers to these questions. We contacted women from Southern Africa and we searched through mountains of material from support and solidarity groups, the United Nations, liberation movements and others. We were not surprised to find that only a small proportion of this material was on or by women. Once again, women, although they bear the brunt of oppression, are often neglected, ignored, invisible — the oppressed of the oppressed - their voices stifled or unheard. We did find women speaking out, however. Strong, defiant voices, unbroken in spite of the immense hardships and oppression of their lives. Their description of what millions of women are suffering every day in Southern Africa is devastating.
While all of the non-white majority of Southern Africa is oppressed by the racist system of apartheid, women suffer from it in very particular ways and often have to bear the brunt of the hardships imposed by apartheid. Here, as elsewhere, women suffer double or triple oppression, victims of sexism as well as racism and class oppression.
Women in Southern Africa are in a particularly difficult situation not only because of apartheid oppression but because they are in the midst of liberation wars. Will the national liberation struggles benefit women equally as men? Will they overcome sexism and discrimination against women? How are women involved in the liberation movements? How are they resisting and struggling?
Through the voices of women, we have tried to give a picture of what it means to be a non-white woman in Southern Africa today: how apartheid affects women in their day to day lives, in the daily struggle to feed and provide shelter for themselves and their children, in giving birth and trying to keep their babies from dying, in their homes, in their places of work, under the pass laws, under the brutal separation of family members from each other, the forced removal of people from the place they have lived for years to so-called homelands they have never seen and where they do not know anyone. The hardships and obstacles these women must overcome merely to survive are enormous.
Yet these women are not merely surviving; they are resisting and struggling in many different ways: in protests and defiance, in quietly undermining the workings of the system, in organizing and helping themselves and others to overcome hardships, in participating in the liberation movements, in taking up arms. As in Viet Nam, Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau, women in Southern Africa are actively fighting the oppressive regimes. In so doing, they are also forcing the walls of inequality and sexism to crumble. But many women also see that there is still much to be done, even within the liberation movements. And lest we get too romantic a picture of the guerrilla heroine, other voices remind us of the terrible additional hardships imposed on women by war.
We have very little in this bulletin about white women in Southern Africa: first because non-white and especially black women are in the vast majority and suffer far greater oppression under apartheid and, second, because we have very little information. We do know that some organizations of white women such as the Black Sash (in recent years open also to non-white women) have protested apartheid and aided non-white women in various ways. But we have few details. The apartheid regimes use racism to separate people of the same class from each other, of course, and women from women. We do not know to what extent women have succeeded in breaking these imposed barriers and joining in solidarity. We would welcome any information on this.
Things are moving very rapidly in Southern Africa today and we have not tried to give an up to the minute picture of events, or even an analysis of the current political situation. There is much information available on this today which you can find in the daily press or, better yet, in publications of support and solidarity groups, liberation movements and the United Nations. We have provided extensive resource listings of these publications.
When we asked the question: How can we, women around the world, show our solidarity with women in Southern Africa, we received clear answers - support the liberation movements, work to disengage the financial involvement of other countries in Southern Africa, and help make the voices of women in Southern Africa heard. We have included in this bulletin, therefore, information on foreign investments in Southern Africa and on campaigns and boycotts against these investments. We have included information and appeals from liberation movements. We hope this bulletin is an act of solidarity in helping to give a voice to women in Southern Africa and we hope others will contribute to making womens' voices heard whenever and wherever Southern Africa is under discussion. As one woman from Zimbabwe has written us: women must "make sure that they share the cake of freedom with those who hold the guns and who sign the Agreement papers on their behalf. The women can best do this by being assisted to articulate their situational experience and problems with the explicit intention to act so that they can start making plans and taking responsibility for their actions towards their own solutions. The women are to be their own liberators along with the men."
Marilee Karl
Remember all our women in the jails Now you have touched the women.
Remember all our women in campaigns You have struck a rock.
Remember all our women over many fighting years You have dislodged a boulder.
Remember all our women for their triumphs,and for their tears You will be crushed.
(from "Women's Day Song") (Song sung on 9 August 1956, South African Women's Day when 20,000 Black women refused to carry passes)
Over the past decade the apartheid regime of South Africa has become of great concern to many groups around the world. The decision taken by the United Nations Security Council on an arms embargo against South Africa is indicative of the seriousness of the situation. Church groups and other action groups have been actively involved in disseminating information on South Africa, and in exposing investments of the multinational corporations who continue to make their huge profits from the cheap slave labour of the black peoples of South Africa.
While the political and legal form of apartheid is generally known, its substance and specific effects on people are less familiar. The banning in October 1977 of the 19 organisations which were responsible for the conscientisation of the masses, welfare work and political activities of various kinds heralded the beginning of even greater repression. Amongst these organisations was a Black Women's Federation which was established so that the women could have an organ through which they could act.
The important question in the articles presented in this Issue is one with a particular dimension : the life and experience of a large sector of the black population , namely the women. In spite of extensive documentation on the issue of South Africa , very little has been written about women - especially the black women who carry many burdens and suffer discrimination because of colour, and who are the worst victims of poverty, disease and ignorance. In some cases women are still kept down by traditional attitudes and roles. Yet they are still the people who give the moral fibre and emotional stability to the black community. In some cases they are the breadwinners.
In their own particular way they contribute to the struggle. Unlike many of the Western women's groups, the black women of South Africa see their struggle in a larger context of human liberation rather than liberation of women as against others. The black South African woman has no right to vote, is not involved in decision-making about issues which affect her directly, owns no land and has to carry a pass. She is subjected to all the apartheid laws which affect men and children. This makes her situation very different from that of a white woman who enjoys all the political rights because of the colour of her skin, which determines the class to which she belongs. 
It is evident that the priority of a black woman is the struggle for the liberation of the Black peoples from the yoke of apartheid. The struggle for women's liberation has to be seen in the total context of the struggle for the liberation of the Black peoples. Yet it is an essential element in this struggle.
Brigalia Bam
Sub-Unit on Women in Church and Society
World Council of Churches