The role of women in society is undoubtedly the most debated, and probably diversely understood, aspect of socio-political co-existence in South Africa. Apart from how the woman citizen is recognised and protected by and in law, the woman as a person still has a long walk to her proverbial complete freedom. In these role, citizen woman, and woman as a person, the true voice of women, generally loudly silent, is still overwhelmed by the inconvenient institutional truths leading society.
In our days as young student activists against apartheid colonialism, we always knew and advocated the fact that women suffered from the triple oppressions of race, class and gender. In this construct of oppressions which women were subjected to, we recognised their added burden of having to continue with their other struggles beyond the settlement of the race and class struggles. Theirs would be a continuum whose end was not as near.
As we got the democratic breakthrough in 1994, we knew that when society embarks on a constitution driven struggle of correcting its apartheid past, women would in earnest begin a gender equality revolution that might create antagonist relations with their fellow comrades. The preponderant patriarchy that manifest itself or disguised itself in forms of culture and convention meant that the freedoms that came with broader human equality might attract inconvenient other freedoms defined in the male space as normal.
It is these freedoms and their ritualisation, including humourisation of ... through comedy and caricature that need attention. The almost second nature-like habits of males to navigate what is rejected by women through jokes, folklore, comedy and chauvinistic proverbs has in the process developed into a background of permanence by some males about women.
The education obligations of society over gender stereotypes are perpetually undermined by the co-existence grammar which facilitates all other textual and syntaxual expectations of the dominant narrative on and about women.
It is in this context that I wish to locate the post on the ages of women in Tanzania and those in South Africa. In the post, South African women leaders, whose histories and contributions to ending to crimes against humanity, are depicted as old and tired, with a caption suggesting the need to expire them from an otherwise no-age-as-a-criteria occupation of politics.
The depicting these women, clearly with an intent to make them a sample of some broad context, a generalisation of some sort might have been established. Whomever is the generator of the post, both its art form and introduction onto the BPI platform, has unwittingly announced the possibility of belonging to that fraction of humanity which for centuries has made other fractions the objects of contempt and exploitation.
As a platform we should, and through practice, warn our context of the dangers of still refusing to act in ways necessary to halt the women othering trend. True, there was a time when many, particularly men folk, had the right to claim ignorance, but this refusal to dislodge from othering women gimmicks has been accompanied with full awareness of the discontent it always generates.
It is my submission that this kind of recklessness would have been functionally impossible without institutional sexism, even if only latent. It would have been impossible without patriarchy, without all the potent tools on offer that allow the powerful to discount the lives of the less powerful.
Othering on any basis is a stereotype carrying the potential of becoming a loose canon with destructive consequences. The boxing-in of women on the basis of age has, and in South Africa, already shown its inherent risk of being a genocide attracting act. We have seen how 'women' of an older age group were discriminated against, purely on the basis of being suspected of being witches.
The pictures of older 'women leaders' in the ANC, that were making rounds on social media, and found access onto our platform trough one of us, are in themselves an affront to the values the BPI stands for. No amount of blanket amnesty or apology should stifle discussion of the picture-on-our-platform, and the picture for the many messages it carry. As we rescue ourselves from association with the caricature in the pictures, we should rescue those amongst us who might have not realised the depth of affront this could generate, if allowed to prevail.
In the BPI platform we have Ministers and Deputy Ministers, including former ones. Interestingly and/or by grace, one of the women leaders on the picture is a long serving member of the BPI platform. An aspect that might have generated a preference by admin to rush-close the discourse on the correctness or otherwise of the post. We should also know that the quality of our posts and discussions have thus far defined us as a particular cut amongst the rest. Our decorum and posting behaviour should be circumcised towards that reality.
As I read the post, in shame and confusion, seeing what it could generate as a discourse on woman's day, and despite my obvious regard for the blind spot the one who posted did not see in his generally life-long struggle to be clean and sweet, I realised that admin was indeed correct to send the blanket apology. Yet, I still think, and purely because It doesn’t take a declaration, or an invasion, to start a war, but all it takes is an ‘us’ and a ‘them.’
To the above effect, I would request that this matter be opened for total ventilation by us. As for me, I condemn the post.
Good Morning
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