South Africa’s younger democracy was a end result of years of sweat, blood and revolution towards the apartheid regime. Within the early Nineteen Sixties, after many years of “non-violence” as a coverage of resistance, the African Nationwide Congress (ANC) and Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) fashioned army wings to take the struggle to the apartheid regime.
Primarily based on the residing file and common discourse, it will be straightforward to imagine that the battle towards apartheid was virtually totally the area of males. However girls performed a vital function – one which is simply actually coming to gentle as we speak.
In her e-book Guerrillas and Combative Mothers, political and worldwide research tutorial Siphokazi Magadla makes use of life historical past interviews to supply firsthand insights into girls’s participation within the armed battle towards apartheid in South Africa from 1961 till 1994. She additionally examines the feel of their lives within the new South Africa after demobilisation.
Magadla interviewed girls who fought with the ANC’s army wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK); the PAC’s army wing, the Azanian Folks’s Liberation Military (Apla), previously often known as Poqo; and the paramilitary self-defence items in black city residential areas.
As a sociologist excited by gender and sexuality, I used to be eager to learn this e-book for the gendered experiences of liberation struggles. I learn it alongside other studies about women in southern African liberation wars.
A lot of the prevalent discourse about girls’s wartime participation tends to centre on one query: why do revolutions and wars fail girls? This discourse tends to, for instance, closely study girls’s experiences of sexual violence and victimisation in wars. It excludes their company and contribution to wars.
However Magadla’s e-book, in addition to the feminist analyses I learn to enhance it, widens the lens. She needs to know why girls joined the armed battle. How did girls use or play with femininity and womanhood to optimise army effectiveness? How can girls’s participation broaden our understanding of fight past direct bodily preventing? And, lastly, how do girls view their involvement within the revolutions that outcome?
Broadening the definition of fight
Some could argue that the ladies profiled by Magadla weren’t combatants. Few of them engaged in direct fight; that’s, bodily preventing on the battlefront. However the writer urges us to widen the definition of fight.
Citing the South African political activist and tutorial Raymond Suttner, Magadla argues that apartheid was a struggle with no battlefront. As an alternative it occupied all corners of society. It was fought in houses, colleges and church buildings. Ladies guerrillas put themselves in danger in numerous methods and relied on artistic approaches to get near potential targets.
Thandi Modise, who has served in South Africa’s parliament since 1994 and is presently the minister of defence and army veterans, is likely one of the girls profiled within the e-book. She tells of carrying a purse from which protruded a pair of knitting needles – a completely peculiar, nonthreatening sight – whereas she noticed potential army targets.
On the uncommon events that girls’s wartime participation is recognised within the wider discourse, they are typically proven as armed revolutionaries who’re, concurrently, feminist icons. Photos abound of those girls troopers toting AK47s, able to shoot, or carrying rifles – and infants on their backs.
Magadla weaves in accounts all through the e-book to disrupt this common narrative. In any case, it doubtlessly erases these girls who carried neither AK47s nor infants on their backs through the struggle for liberation. Some girls hid bullets inside tampons to carry into the nation for the struggle whereas others carried explosives of their purses. Some spent countless hours watching and testing for potential risks and weaknesses within the apartheid army’s defences.
One instance is Nondwe Mankahla, who, whereas working as a distributor for the New Age newspaper, concurrently couriered bomb tools for political activists Govan Mbeki and Raymond Mhlaba.
Troopers, not ‘she troopers’
All through the e-book, Magadla refuses to pigeonhole the members. She recognises that their experiences range and analyses how the ladies of MK negotiated its tradition of patriarchy in a approach that highlights the ladies’s company with out romanticising their struggles.
Ladies in MK had been often known as “flowers of the nation” or as umzana (a small residence) of the organisation. A number of the girls discovered the labels, umzana specifically, endearing. Others felt that they diminished girls’s roles. Equally, they resisted qualifiers similar to “she comrades” and “she troopers”.
However they didn’t need to erase their femininity. Some elements of the patriarchal tradition labored to the benefit of girls each contained in the organisation and of their encounters with the apartheid safety police throughout operations. Ladies combatants might simply manipulate their femininity to defy the guerrilla picture contained in government propaganda.
In the course of the Nineteen Eighties MK staged Operation Vula, a mission to carry exiled leaders again into the nation. Busisiwe Jacqueline ‘Totsie’ Memela efficiently smuggled anti-apartheid activists Mac Maharaj and Siphiwe Nyanda into South Africa from Swaziland (Eswatini). Magadla attributes her success to a mixture of her army coaching and dynamic use of femininity: Memela dressed as a Swati girl whereas observing the border across the clock.
A piece of theorising
Guerrillas and Combative Moms is greater than only a challenge to call the ladies who devoted their lives to liberating South Africa. It additionally presents other ways of theorising. It raises an fascinating methodological query about seeing the bounds of verbal language and the utility of silence when dealing with traumatic events. How will we analyse silence when the individuals’s wounds haven’t healed and subsequently their lips stay sealed?
Nevertheless, whereas Magadla’s argument is subtle, the language does not “sweat”, to quote Toni Morrison. It stays easy and accessible to all audiences.
Thoko Sipungu, Lecturer in Sociology, Rhodes College
