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.
CHAPTER 4
Meeting Alice Walker
Along with millions of readers across the world, I have spent a significant amount of my reading life poring over Alice Walker’s words in the last two decades. Although I was to fall in love with many other Black women writers in that time, hers was the first book by a Blackwoman I had ever read. The discovery in her work that I still return to has been echoed as much in the thousands of university students I have taught as it has in conversations with writers. It changes you to see yourself reflected for the first time in what you read. There were no plays, novels, short stories or poems by Blackwomen in my literary syllabus until my Honours year.
By the time I encountered Walker for the first time, almost by accident, I had been taught written literature in isiXhosa, isiZulu, English and Afrikaans. I had read individual essays by Blackwomen, usually in magazines. I remember an article in a woman’s magazine, Femina, I think it was, that meant so much to me I must have read it a hundred times. I could not photocopy it, nor could I tear the page out; and, since the borrowed copy was a magazine no longer on the shelves, I could not buy it. It was an article by Lizeka Mda whose impact I will never forget.
So, my hunger for words by a Blackwoman on the page was real. I had known that I was meant to have a writing life since I was eight years old, and perhaps I needed an adult version of myself to affirm that dream. I loved the magazine Tribute and bought every issue I could after I left home, starting with Maud Motanyane’s column, even when she moved to France for a year and wrote from there in ways I may have been too young to fully appreciate. Then I would read the rest of the magazine – cover to cover until well into my adulthood, through its various changes, until it folded. But until Walker, I had never held an entire book by a Blackwoman in my hand.
And so, even as an avid reader since primary school, I encountered Alice Walker outside the curriculum. I was registered in two literature departments at a leading university, and given what I now know about the volumes of Black women’s writing, I can only shake my head. My own joy at discovering Walker as an undergraduate and my unapologetic admiration for her courage were part of the baggage I walked in with as she granted me an interview in September 2010.
Alice Walker was in South Africa as a guest of the Steve Biko Foundation, making her the second woman, after Mamphela Ramphele, to deliver the annual Biko lecture at my alma mater, the University of Cape Town, on Friday 9 September 2010.
As we wait for her – because I am so nervously excited I walk across Bertha Street from the University of the Witwatersrand campus on which I teach, to the Steve Biko Foundation offices in Braamfontein Centre twenty minutes earlier than I need to – the woman sent to photograph Alice Walker irritates me by questioning why there is so much fuss about her. She reveals herself unfavourably when it becomes clear that she is unaware of who Alice Walker is. I wonder out loud why this is who was allocated this brief by the paper.
But soon, Alice Walker arrives, while I have stepped out for another comfort break. When I walk back into the room, she is sitting behind a table next to her partner, with Nkosinathi Biko from the Steve Biko Foundation, whom I know from our UCT days, and the wonderful Obenewa Amponsah who ensured I was granted this interview. I walk straight to Alice Walker, breathless, and extend my hand in introduction.
“My name is Pumla Dineo Gqola, a womanist and a professor of literature”, and hope I do not sound too rehearsed. She understands what I am saying with my words, with my spirit and with my body.
She is physically smaller in person than I had imagined, sports a short afro and a purple shawl hugs her hip. In my head, she is larger than life, and I talk to her constantly.
In response to my question about what this trip means to her, she speaks about her layered connection to South Africa. She had been active in anti-apartheid politics as part of her lifelong activism against racist violence and any form of injustice. But she also feels deep love and comradeship with both Winnie and Nelson Mandela. “I’ve always wanted to visit South Africa and have been arrested for it before. In fact, it was my pleasure and honour to be arrested with Maya Angelou.”
Walker spoke of having been there with Winnie when she was banished to Brandfort, with her children, a place thought to be the middle of nowhere. “Many of us in the US suffered with her. I grew up in Georgia and so have a deep understanding of what it takes to be a soldier.”
Later on the same day, speaking at ‘An evening with Alice Walker’, she elaborates on this connection, declaring “it is unusual for me to speak at a place where one of my most important teachers is also admired: Fidel Castro”. The crowd roars and claps its approval. There is mutual recognition between Walker and the people who came to hear her read when she mentions Myanmar activist and author, Aung San Suu Kyi, who at the time is in her fifteenth year under house arrest, the brave Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and Bolivian socialist president Evo Morales. The latter two are mentioned as part of a global shift away from the politics of imperialist mineral and land grab. The former affirms the importance of love for humanity in radical politics, like Biko’s own legacy.
Walker is no stranger to criticism. The mixed responses to her third and best known novel, The Color Purple, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, partly illustrate this. In the United States, she was severely lambasted for shining a light on the misogyny that also exists in Black families, accused of judging Blackmen unfairly, and later for allowing a white director to be at the helm of the film adaptation of the same novel. It was inconvenient for many of these critics to pay attention to the manner in which the novel is really about the possibility of human transformation from violence to chosen gentleness, as well as from subjection to a life well lived. Interestingly, she would also later receive criticism for precisely this portrayal of the possibility