Women's Organizations and Democracy in South Africa: Contesting Authority

3. The ANC in Exile: Challenging the Role of Women in National Liberation

The 1980s were “radical years”1 not only for the internal resistance movement that I discussed in chapter 2 but also for the African National Congress (ANC) in exile. New debates about women’s role in politics took place within the movement, with women activists in the ANC Women’s Section and guerrillas in Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK, Spear of the Nation, the ANC’s military wing) demanding internal transformations that would recognize their right to an equal role in political struggle. Although the ANC had long acknowledged the desirability of mobilizing women for national liberation, in the 1980s women activists began to raise the issue of what, specifically, national liberation would deliver to women. Influenced by the resurgence of women’s organizations inside South Africa, as well as by the international women’s movement, they argued not only that the liberation of women could not be separated from national liberation but that it was an integral part of how liberation itself was defined. 85 Chapter 3 The ANC in Exile Challenging the Role of Women in National Liberation This chapter is concerned with when and how these arguments were made, the reception of women’s demands by the ANC leadership, and, more broadly, with the relationship between gender equality and national liberation. The ANC, as Raymond Suttner has argued, is an organization with multiple traditions and arenas of operation. This chapter addresses debates within one arena, the ANC in exile, seeking both to expand the understanding of the nature of the movement in exile as well as to explore the organizational changes that made the ANC’s extraordinary commitment to gender equality possible. Maxine Molyneux’s notion of “directed collective action,” defined as the situation in which the “authority and initiative clearly come from outside and stand above the collectivity itself,”2 provides a framework within which to explore the relationship between struggles for gender equality and national liberation. While directed collective action may successfully draw women into political participation, the goals of the women’s organizations “do not specifically concern women other than as instruments for the realisation of the higher authority’s goals; and/or even if they do concern women, control and direction of the agenda does not lie with them as an identifiable social force.”3 Nevertheless, Molyneux suggests that there may be “considerable fluidity in a given historical context; in one situation there may be a movement from direction to greater autonomy as the collective actors acquire more political resources and influence over the political process.”4 In the ANC the authority and initiative for women’s political activities were formally held by the National Executive Committee (NEC). However, women activists within the movement increasingly challenged this situation. I seek to explore in this chapter the (incomplete) process of movement from directed action toward autonomy . In particular, I am concerned with uncovering how women in the ANC were able to acquire increased resources and influence, and in what ways they sought to use these advantages to enhance both struggles for gender equality and the agenda for substantive democracy. This chapter outlines three categories of influence on the increasing assertion of women’s interests within the ANC. The first relates to internal organizational experiences: internal culture, debates about the power and status of women’s structures within the ANC, and changes in the composition of the movement’s membership. The second relates to the theoretical debates that flowed from attempts to find a role for women in national liberation , including the extent to which the Women’s Section could have autonomy in relation to the ANC. The third influence was ANC women’s exposure to and interaction with international feminist debates and with women’s organizations in postindependence African countries. These in- fluences intersected to reshape the ANC and lay a basis for new practices and discourses of gender equality and democracy. 86 The ANC in Exile The Position of Women’s Structures in ANC in Exile As I argued in chapter 1, for most of the twentieth century women were second-class members of the ANC. Although the organization made significant moves to articulate new political roles for women during the 1950s, these developments were halted by the proscription of political movements in 1960. In the 1960s Ruth Mompati, based in Morogoro, Tanzania, headed “women’s affairs”for the ANC External Mission...