by Tsehai Berhane-Selassie

Gertrude Shope, a South African anti-apartheid activist for more than thirty years, heads the women's section of the African National Congress. The following interview with Shope was conducted by a member of the Spare-Rib collective in London and published in Spare-Rib, February 1986. Spare-Rib is located at 27 Clerkenwell Close, London EC1 England.

"Everybody's Future"

As I was growing up I witnessed excessive situations into which people were being forced. I saw victims of starvation foraging for food from the dustbins, people suffered from homelessness and segregation in transport and living quarters. I saw passes being brought into practice, and the so-called "Bantu" (black African) education being forced on our schools and youngsters. Children refused to accept the syllabus and went on strike, mothers supported them. Church peoples, especially Methodists supported the strikes; especially mothers and teachers found shelter for the striking pupils there. I also witnessed the forced removal of people from what white people considered as "black spots" lands required by them for their own purposes.

In the early fifties. I used to live in Pimba as a teacher. Women leaders were teaching us defiance campaigns, relating my experiences, the new laws and the way these things were wrong. Teachers and pupils who protested were expelled, and I resented that. As a sign of protest, I resigned from my teaching position, along with others. The crunch of the issue was the so-called "Bantu" education. We judged it was damaging to our children"s minds. We could also see that the pupils were being prepared for subordinate positions in life. As women, we felt the ill effects of the system more than most: as mothers, wives, sisters and daughters, we decided to fight for everybody's future.

Women Mobilizing Women

I found myself another job, teaching domestic science to Africans at the Department of Occupational Training, Coronation Hospital, in Johannesburg. Most of the pupils were women and youths. Gradually I got involved in women's voluntary activities, learning to mobilize and organize. From then on I was deeply involved in politics.

In the mid-fifties our main activity was organizing defiance campaigns supporting the wives and families of the men and women who were arrested during such defiance campaigns as strikes by teachers and pupils. We felt that as women, we were in a position to give moral and some material support. We supported women, and generally people whose relatives were in detention. We also contributed such small things as fruits or anything that our children were able to eat. Naturally we had some women who were not earning salaries, but who had to look after their families without support from their arrested husbands: these were our main support receiving groups.

We started to work from the urban areas, and it started with the realization that women would have to be involved if the struggle was to be effective. The ANC leadership accepted the principle of basing the struggle on women's involvement. So when leaders such as Lilian Ngoga and Bertha Mashaba were arrested, women began to be directly involved. More women began refusing taking out passes, and they began to be arrested in their thousands. For us this meant feeding and supporting them and their relatives, a large number of people. Thousands also withdrew their children from school. This was 1954; it was then that women laid out their demands for a better South Africa.

On April 17. 1954. the National Federation of South African Women was founded. It was a response to the felt need of a national body to continue the work of defiance of the apartheid laws. The women's organization is now built into the Freedom Charter.

Humans as Fertilizers

People who were arrested were forced to dig potatoes with their own fingers: they were not given breaks, wore sack clothes, and were beaten, sometimes to death. People died on the potato farms, and the tractors later ploughed their bodies into the soil where more potatoes were to grow. That was the central reason why women of the National Federation of South African Women (FSAW) organized the potato boycott — no potato eating. Some of the campaign involved buying chips and throwing them back into the faces of the vendors. In August 1956. 2().(KM) women marched on Pretoria and presented their demands to the Prime Minister. Many were arrested. They were tried for treason, in a trial that lasted four years and a half. White lawyers helped gain their eventual release.

The following year I was elected as chairperson of the women's unit of Western Jabava. branch of the FSAW. I travelled a lot. addressing groups in Transvaal. The president of the FSAW was Albertina Sisulu [released on Friday, December 13. 1985). We divided the area into zones, and set to identifying the needs of individual relatives of arrested people. We also organized women to go and visit those imprisoned in Robin Island. At least once a year food was sent to the most needy families of the prisoners; FSAW organized food parcels. We started to draw up a list of volunteers from July, getting commitments from contributors. Wc set up competition prizes for the areas from which the most collection came. The women's committee divided the parcels between zones, distributing them to the families of the banned and banished.

Women's Contribution

To organize ourselves better, we held regional meetings every year, and national meetings every three years.

Our open activity continued until 1960 when the ANC was banned. By then however we had evolved means of looking after dependants nation-wide. The movement had been established.

There were three major contribution that women made:

1. The more oppressive the laws were, the more we showed that we could be effective in defying them, and the easier it.was for us to see what they were up to.

2. After the demonstration in Pretoria in 1956. the pass laws were removed.. 

3. Women put up a fight in the labor front.

In domestic employment and in all types of work where women worked, they were employed for a pittance. Employers were seeking to clamp down on their reproductive capacity — on their role as mothers. They forced on them contraception and sterilization. Depo Provera was first tried out on South African women, without them knowing about it. When the U.S. had already rejected the use of it, Depo Provera was dumped on us. Apart from women being forced to use it, they were also made to pay for it. It was not available through the family planning clinics. If women got pregnant they would be dismissed from employment. The South African government called it a check on population explosion. Employers injected women with contraceptives saying they were giving them medicine to make them feel strong. The effect was disastrous; among other things families broke up as husbands for example did not know why women were not producing children.

After the ANC was banned, and we were going around the world attending seminars and meetings when we could, we raised the objections to Depo Provera with the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF); we campaigned in other parts of Africa, pointing out that it was an African population campaign. In 1983 the IPPF suspended South Africa from membership: but we want South Africa to be expelled altogether.

Life in Exile

Personally I was forced to go in exile in 1966, when I was already the chairperson of the Transvaal branch of FSAW. I left through Botswana, leaving my children with my mother and sister; by 1967 I found myself in Zambia, and joined my husband who had already had to go there in 1967.  Later I went to Tanzania, where I worked as a secretary in the Florence Moposa center for women. In 1972 I was elected as chief representative of the ANC mission in Zambia. In 1981, when the first Conference of South African women was held outside South Africa, the ANC decided that I join the executive committee and I then became the head of the Women's Section.

The Women's Section has taken a lot of initiatives to help the movement. It always responds to the conditions in which South Africans find themselves. For example when thousands of Africans had to flee the country, we were stuck with the problem of providing homes for them, thus being dependent only on young mothers, sometimes getting help from their equally young fathers. A large number of children were born in Tanzania. The Tanzanian government allowed space for a school where the mothers would leave their children at the Charlotte Maxeke Children's Center. Later we also began the Kate Malala Maternity Home where expectant mothers can stay. It has units for giving adult education for some of the mothers; some women do work at the center as well. The children also have a day care center attached to these two places. That is why the ANC initiated campaigns to raise sacks of napkins and such small things which we do not want Tanzania to bother about on our behalf. We raise help in these items in various ways. For instance we declared 1984 as the Year of Women, and in 1981 we had declared August 9 as the day of solidarity with South African women, and we use both for raising consciousness about the needs of these three centers as well as the needs of South African women in general.

The Women's Unit is also formally assisted by the ANC through its links and contacts in the Organization of African Unity. We submit various projects to bodies such as the African Training and Research Center for Women and we get assistance from them from time to time. Even United Nations organizations such as UNESCO and FAO give us some of the funds we require to look after ourselves. The UNHCR and UNICEF also provide support for childcare facilities and such like. As the struggle continues children also come pouring across the South African border. We take them to Tanzania where we put them on the reorientation program. The international organizations have been useful for that reason.

Feminism and the ANC

While male chauvinism is universal, colonialism and the exploitation of male and females by white settlers has made sexism worse among African men in South Africa. One thing that intensified the inequality was the employment conditions: men found that they were better equipped than women for living the life of struggle and survival. As the suppression intensified women found that they were being forced to participate directly in the struggle whether or not they have the economic means to do so. In fact only when women participated was our success assured. As our leader Albert Letulu said. "When women take up arms the success of the revolution is assured."

The oppression has opened the minds of our men; they have come to realize that women are doing things with or without them. That has helped them to see how powerful women are. When men took part in defiance struggles, women gave them material and moral support. This involvement of women and the recognition by the men is reflected in the structure of the ANC organization. There are some women in the high commands of the army. We also have women representing the ANC as leaders at the ANC mission abroad as in Cuba, France and Zambia. In the latest coalition of the forces in South Africa there arc two men and one women at the top positions. Perhaps there are not as many women as we would wish, but there are enough women to illustrate that the struggle has emancipated both men and women as far as the relationship between men and women go. Our equality with men is built into the Charter of Freedom and there is no way we are going back to the kitchens, as in cases where women were put down after independence.

The other additional factor for our confidence is that the women are being provoked where it hurts them most. In the latest uprisings for example children are the ones bearing the brunt, and mothers are the closest to that. The women of South Africa are becoming more militant as a result. It is not an equality that is being pushed by a party line from above. Women also know what they want out of the struggle, that their struggle is not without a purpose. Women are taking up arms because of specific reasons and experiences of everyday life such as the assassination of Mrs. Mudanewa and the three cadres, which flared up the women of Masseru to take up arms in self-defense.

Young women who are married and are carrying children are not immobilized by their children. They have worked out a system of combining the struggle with their lives. The mothers know that the milk and the cereals produced in the country is not for them. That is why we send out appeals from time to time for milk and cereals. The whole production at the expense of the African dignity; labor is geared towards export, and at the most feeding the white minority in the country. The women know that, and they fight back from that knowledge. Their position within the resistance is based on that knowledge and bitter experience. So they are not going to give up their rights that easily.

The women who resist come from the garment factories which exploit their wage labor; they come from the grape growing areas where women are given grape vines and food instead of wages; from the wine factories where children are employed and are paid in wine, so that they turn alcoholic. People who write on South Africa have talked about beer brewers and the problems of men who drink. I should point out to you that that is the least of our problems. As far as drunkness goes, the tot-system where the children arc paid in kind — as in wine — is the root cause of the problem. Women know that. Women also know that they are no longer a cattle herding people, as the whites have taken it all, and the South Africans now do not own cattle and do not drink milk. Nor are they allowed on their lands where they can grow cereals to feed themselves. The whole social fabric has been destroyed, and women know that. They feel it most and they are the ones who are in the vanguard of ascertaining the survival of the Africans in the country. 

The diamonds and mineral wealth of South Africa does not mean a thing to us. What matters to us more is the dignity and the human life which we want to lead in our country without being subjected to service either the minerals or the other pleasantries of the white minority. It [the diamond] does not mean anything to us.

For more information, contact the African National Congress Women's Secretarial, P.O. Box31791, Lusaka, Zambia.