The personal is political the connected African women voices
good morning everyone
i want people to know what influences me
and has shaped the woman that i
currently am today
for throughout history we have seen how
when a woman dares to speak her truth
and to push back against the violence
she experiences
she is often villainized she has turned
into an outcast
and at the very least no one even dares
to care
what does it mean to be a young black
woman living in post-apartheid south
africa
well i reflect on two women’s life
experiences who have both gone through
some form of systemic gender-based
violence which
has been influenced by their
socio-economic class position
their abilities and of course race and
gender
political stalwart and anti-apartheid
activist
mamawi nimati gizella mandela was born
in 1936
and lived most of her life fighting
against
the apartheid system she spent most of
her life fighting for
not only the liberation for women but
that of the broader black
south african population this system was
a system that characterized
the livelihoods of black families black
communities
to violence and subjected them to
violence and
only really to further the colonialists
selfish endeavors
because of mamma winnie’s politics and
how she rose against the system of
violence
she was labeled an instigator and a
wayward charlatan
by the men of the liberation movement
the term wayward now means somebody who
is headstrong
and is difficult to control and indeed
umami possessed these traits
mama windy fort alongside within the
liberation movement
resorted to costing her an outcast
because in their view
she was becoming too difficult to
control you see mamawini’s politics
was making her act out of place in the
man’s club
this is a woman who has literally bled
in defiance against a system that deemed
black people’s lives worthless and
powerless
this is a woman who even questioned the
liberation movement’s objectives and how
we were addressing the issue of
socioeconomic emancipation in a society
that was growing fundamentally
capitalist
umamawini was a beacon of hope to many
black communities
and a key figure who kept the fire
burning in our quest
for freedom the next story is the story
of the woman who raised me and played a
vital
vital role in the becoming of my adult
years
noma choni gloria yankee who is my
grandmother
but she but i won’t speak much about
that
and she was born in the year 1956
and spent most of her life um you know
raising me
and fainting for her family i want to
reflect
at a specific point in her life in the
1970s
just shortly after the birth of her
daughter who is my birth mother
she was arrested in berea johannesburg
which back then was
a predominantly white community now you
see back in the apartheid era
black people had to carry with them pass
books which allowed them to be
in white communities for work purposes
alone
one fateful evening umamil went to the
stores and she returned back home
and she hadn’t even she didn’t take her
past book with her
and on one fateful evening that fateful
evening she she came across
two white uh male officers who stopped
her
who asked her for her passbook which was
also called a dumpass back then
um and you know they proceeded to harass
her they arrested her and they held her
custody overnight at the hilbrow police
station
with her baby on her back for simply not
carrying
her passbook the next reflection
or the next story of course is my story
i was born
in 1997 and i was raised by my
grandmother
in renberg which is also another
predominantly white suburban community
where she proceeded to work as a
domestic worker
for nearly 38 years of her life finding
for me
finding for herself and for extended
family members
i completed my matric my metric year and
i enrolled as a first year university
student
in 2015 at rhodes university and
in the first four months of me being a
student at rhodes university
i then became a victim i felt victim to
sexual violence
or to be more specific rape i was
i was drugged on a night out by two
young adult men
they dragged me i was vi i i and and i
and i was violated and humiliated by
these men
and what was even further difficult is
the fact that i still had to continue
my journey and navigate my journey as a
student at rose
and for those who can know who can i
have been to the rhodes university
campus can attest to how small that
campus is so it is virtually impossible
to escape this reality where i had to
bump into these men almost every day
of my life i suffered unimaginable
trauma from this this ordeal
and i still do today but the reason why
i’m sharing this story is in hopes that
other
young african women who have faced and
gone through similar challenges
like mine can know that there is no
shame
in speaking out against the various or
speaking up
rather about the various ordeals that we
have survived
at the hands of toxic masculinity and
patriarchal violence
i carried this burden of being raped
with me throughout my academic career
was
trying to make sense of why this
happened to me
it almost felt like a sense of shame
that i was carrying and
i was blaming myself with you know and i
had this guilt that perhaps it was
something i could have done
better in ensuring my safety and and you
know maybe
i could have avoided being violated in
the manner that i was
on the 17th of april 2016
in my second year as a student a list of
11
names of former and current male
students at rhodes university
circulated on social media under the tag
hashtag
ru reference list this list did not
allude to anything
nor did it even state that these men
were perpetrators of any form of
violence
what it did do instead is that it
unmasked the very nature of what we
believed what we
experienced and referred to as a
perpetual rape
culture crisis on the campus and it
broke the silence that we were subjected
to as the survivors
of gender-based violence for the first
time ever
i found myself being able to speak out
and to own my story and my truth
that hashtag i referenced the social
media post
sparked a movement that erupted across
the university campus for the weeks that
followed you see what happened was that
the women
and also members of the lgbtqi community
at rhodes
stood together in solidarity and we rose
against
the system and we fought back against
the system of of of
institutionalized patriarchal violence
and
really this violence put us in a
position where we were we were exposed
to further re-victimization
those 11 names of those 11 men rather
were men who already known within our
community as students
who had been accused of being
perpetrators of gender-based violence
but they weren’t the only ones and it
wasn’t just the 11 men that we were
protesting against
we were standing up in defiance against
a whole system of patriarchal dominance
and its lack of care and regard for the
livelihood
for the women on the campus as well as
you know
the allies as well i was heavily
involved in this movement
to a point where i was identified by the
university’s management
as being a leader of the protest action
i don’t think i was a leader
i think and i believe that i was just a
survivor
who was fighting in her personal
capacity for some form of justice
and for my story to be heard in 2017 and
my third year
the university then leveled various
charges against me
and a disciplinary hearing was
instituted
to punish me for my alleged involvement
in the protest action
in november 2017 in the middle of my
final year exams
where i would have graduated and been
the first person
in my family to attain a university
degree
i was given a lifetime exclusion from
rhodes university
and further labeled an instigator by a
an instigator who led what the
university calls a vigilante movement
all of this because we just simply said
no
and we’re pushing back against the
violence and it’s interesting to mention
that in contrast to what i’ve gone
through what had happened is that
those men and the men even after my stay
at the institution have proceeded to
graduate
um and you know become people who have
been
who are now employed in the system my
chances at ever returning at
higher education have been made small
and my dreams as a black woman have been
deterred because
i am a woman who dared to challenge the
status quo
it’s because of the norms the beliefs
and the various institutions that have a
strong hold in our society
patriarchy um has influence you know the
stronghold in us
in our society that women’s experiences
have been deemed unimportant and
virtually impossible to believe
because patriarchy decides for us on the
justice we deserve
for being raped for being murdered
abused and even economically excluded
all these experiences are not personal
they are very much political
and they shape what black african women
continue to experience
as systemic violence to be a black woman
living in south africa means you are at
risk at experiencing violence that is
racialized that is sexist and all
because it’s become so engraved
within our ways of being there’s a huge
desensitization that exists to the lived
experiences that we go
through and the daily violations of our
constitutional
rights i am fighting back and hopefully
my story
can set a precedent for other young
african women’s experiences to be heard
and given justice having been
influenced by all that is around me and
the history that i’ve encountered
i’ve come to learn the value in speaking
out and speaking up
about my journey and how rather we
should as women
use our experiences as instruments of
change
in our society we need to join the women
that have come before us
who have influenced our contribution to
society in our lives as we know it
in the legacy of resistance to fight and
push back against systemic patriarchal
violence
in all of the spaces we occupy as
painful as it is
reflecting on my journey as a former
student at rhodes
and even on the lives of the two women
umami mati guzela mandela
who was a was the first black woman a
social worker turned political activist
and leader
who had her legacy towards her last
years her life
tarnished because black men and just men
in general could not allow a woman
to bask in the power that she is and
donation
who arrived in johannesburg as a rural
young woman
turned domestic worker to offend not
only for
her her family but for myself at the
mercy of
white people is to show you that the
personal lived experience cannot be
separated from
the political and one citizenship and
that it is important for us to
understand the dynamics of our society
that contribute and expose black women
african women
to the various violations we go through
now i cannot be afraid nor can i and i
cannot be afraid to speak my truth and
to own it
nor can i be afraid to hold the system
accountable and to demand
for beta i believe that by owning our
stories
archiving them in whatever way is
possible and passing down this knowledge
pertaining to better understanding what
shapes our experiences as african women
is very integral to shaping the just
equitable and violent free society that
we envision and desire and deserve
i would like other young women to join
me as we share our experiences and ideas
with the world because they do matter
our stories beyond the statistics beyond
the data
are powerful political tools and
instruments of change
that should be used towards fostering
the socio-economic change and the
political change
that we want not only for ourselves but
for future young generations of women
and girls to follow thank you