Women's investment company Khomelela chairwoman Brenda Madumise has called for a "women's empowerment index" to measure the economic upliftment of women. Madumise's call is linked to the lack of statistics on the empowerment of women in South Africa, whereas figures for overall black economic empowerment are always available.

The latest ePoliticsSA briefing from IDASA interrogates the state of opposition politics in South Africa through the prism of electoral results, turnout and representation. It then assesses the state of the ruling, African National Congress (ANC) led, Tripartite Alliance and forwards reasons as to why a split in the alliance is unlikely in the medium term.

"The last few months have seen an unprecedented and deliberate smear campaign against the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) [in South Africa] and its members, as well as the Medicines Control Council. However, the real aim of these attacks is to reinvent HIV denialism and to undermine the treatment of people who need antiretrovirals (ARVs)," says the TAC in a briefing statement to the media.

The main purpose of the job is to provide comprehensive media coverage of the work of the AIDS Consortium via its programme delivery, political issues and challenges, policy changes and process and examples of best practice achievements within the organisation.

Employers abuse and neglect the Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S) of health workers in Municipal Clinics around the country, according to research recently released by the Municipal Services Project (MSP), the Industrial Health Research Group (IHRG) and the South African Municipal Workers Union (SAMWU). The culture of neglect of workplace health and safety impacts not only on the healthcare workers, but also contributes to a declining quality of health care that they are able to provide to the communities they serve. The findings of this collaborative participatory research project were published in: “Who Cares For Health Care Workers?: The State of Occupational Health and Safety in Municipal Health Clinics in South Africa," Municipal Services Project, Occasional Papers No. 8, January 2005. The research, carried out by a collective of SAMWU members and conducted at 38 municipal clinics over an 18-month period, reveal a culture of reactivity and minimal legal compliance. OH&S is all too often reduced to the processing of compensation claims. No proactive or preventive procedures are in place for identifying hazards, evaluating risks, preventing workplace injury and illness, and maintaining a safe workplace.

South Africa is investigating 37,000 public servants suspected of embezzling grants intended for children, the elderly and disabled, and will make major arrests soon, officials say. Social Development Minister Zola Skweyiya said corrupt officials cost the state up to 1.5 billion rand ($245 million) per year and would face the full force of the law.

Breastfeeding of babies by a non-biological caregiver with HIV is one of the most important factors associated with HIV infection in children. A study released in Cape Town this week also found that there is a potential for health-care acquired transmission of HIV in the maternity, paediatric and dental facilities in the Free State health institutions. It was revealed that besides the most obvious route of mother-to-child transmission of HIV, breastfeeding of babies by a non-biological HIV positive caregiver was the single most important factor associated with HIV infection in children.

In a country where access to justice remains elusive for many, the equality courts provide a forum for the poor and marginalised to assert their rights and seek redress. They also provide a wonderful opportunity for the judiciary — currently experiencing its own difficulties — to make a contribution to the advancement of equality and the eradication of discrimination. While court cases are essentially about facts and the law, they nevertheless serve as powerful tools of advocacy and education, and their pronouncements can begin to shape and influence social behaviour.

More than 4,000 South African teachers died of HIV/AIDS-related complications in 2004, and 12.7% of the teacher workforce in South Africa - about 45,000 people - are HIV-positive, according to a survey released by the Human Sciences Research Council, South Africa's Star reports. The survey - which was commissioned by the Education Labour Relations Council and is titled "Study of Demand and Supply of Educators in South African Public Schools" - also found that about 80% of teachers who died of HIV/AIDS-related complications were younger than 45.

The latest edition includes:
- South African public service workers in biggest strike ever - Briggs Bomba
- The apartheid wall and the vanquished bantustans: can liberation movements deliver freedom? - Claire Ceruti
- Joining the freedom march: from Mauritius to Palestine - Alain Ah-Vee
- Putting paid to financial aid: student struggles today - Prishani Naidoo
- Direct action: housing battles in post-apartheid South Africa - Martin Legassick

Gender Links is a dynamic Southern African NGO based in Johannesburg that promotes gender equality in and through the media. GL currently hosts the secretariats for the Gender and Media Southern Africa (GEMSA) Network and its South African chapter, SAGEM. GL and its networking partners seek the services of an experienced, highly motivated and committed individual to manage and promote the growth of these networks.

"The Friday ward round starts, like any other weekday round, at 7:30 and continues till 11:30. It involves a multidisciplinary team of specialists, therapists and nurses. The children are critically ill. We review each patient and plan management for the day. Our tools include mechanical devices and powerful drugs that support vital functions, and antibiotics. Our decisions have life-changing implications. The potential to do harm is enormous, the responsibility overwhelming. The buck stops with me.

After the round, team members implement the decisions, continuously monitoring changes in the patients’ conditions. Meanwhile new admissions arrive: children who have had major operations, critically ill children with medical conditions.

The afternoon round starts routinely at 4:30. On this Friday night it ended after 7 pm. I went home at 8:57 pm after updating my notes and discussing a child’s condition with her family, leaving two registrars to cover the night. Later, during the night I had 6 phone calls from the registrars to discuss patients." The latest issue of Critical Health Perspectives, produced by the People's Health Movement, examines the issue of the overtime contracts and salaries of health workers.

Last Saturday 14 people were arrested on charges of public violence after 750 people from the Kennedy Road Informal Settlement in Claire Estate blockaded Umgeni Road with burning tyres for four hours. On the following Monday, Human Rights Day, 1 200 people tried to march to the Sydenham police station to demand that either the Kennedy Road 14 be released or else the entire community be arrested because "If they are criminal then we are all criminal". The march was dispersed with dogs and tear gas. "This is clearly one of the biggest and most militant protests to have shaken Durban in the post-apartheid era. But these events are not unique to Durban. Similar revolts have occurred in cities and towns across the country in recent months," states this article from the website of the Centre for Civil Society at the University of Kwazulu Natal in South Africa.

About 1000 people marched through the streets of Johannesburg on March 19 to protest against war in all its forms. Organized by the Gauteng Anti-War Coalition, the demonstration was part of a global day of action on the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq with simultaneous demonstrations around the world. The marchers protested the continued occupation of Iraq and Palestine and the farce of US-engineered democracy in Iraq. They also pointed to the immediate responsibility of South Africans, given the estimated deployment of 10.000 South African mercenaries in Iraq.

This is how the local newspaper, The Sunday Tribune, describes the confrontation that took place this past Saturday, 19 March 2005, between the police and the Bisaser road residents: “Amid burning car and tractor tires and flaming, lice-infested mattresses, Durban police battled for more than four hours yesterday to disperse a crowd of about 750 protesting shack dwellers who had barricaded a major arterial route into Durban.” The chief issue is that land promised for the development of housing is suddenly being dug up to be developed for business use. Amongst the secondary issues (sanitation, water, electricity, health) is the question of the Bisaser road dump – which has stayed open as part of the World Bank carbon trading scam which is giving people nearby cancer.

For the past week, a historic university town in South Africa's Eastern Cape province has reverberated with some unlikely noises: the sound of rockets igniting, robots chirping and home-made cars racing. Most of all, though, it is the voices of thousands of pupils racing between venues to hear lectures, see films or peruse another installation which remind Grahamstown locals that 'Sasol SciFest' is underway. The annual science festival, the biggest in Africa, is primarily sponsored by Sasol, a South African oil, gas and chemical giant that specialises in converting coal to fuel.

The report from the Human Sciences Research Council in South Africa examines the critical factors that affect rural schooling in South Africa, focusing on the three provinces KwaZulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape and Limpopo. The report argues that the historical development, contours and consolidation of power relations between urban and rural, and within rural areas, have resulted in neither formal nor substantive equality for people living in rural areas. It states that for rural development strategies to be sustainable they need to integrate both educational issues as well as community participation.

Five South African members of parliament were convicted of fraud on Friday but were spared prison terms in one of the country's highest profile graft cases. The MPs, all members of the ruling African National Congress, were ordered to pay fines of between 40,000 rand and 80,000 rand each and received suspended sentences for their part in a 17 million rand "travelgate" scam.

Biowatch South Africa has applied for leave to appeal against the Pretoria High Court order that the organisation pay the legal costs of Monsanto South Africa (Pty) Ltd. The organisation is also applying for leave to appeal the absence of any costs order in its favour. The costs order in favour of Monsanto SA (Pty) Ltd arose out of the major victory which Biowatch South Africa achieved to gain access to information about genetically modified (GM) crops in South Africa. The Registrar of Genetic Resources was ordered to release this information by 30 April this year – a development which will at last lift the veil of secrecy which has shrouded this industry and enable the public to know how decisions are made about the growing of GM crops in South Africa.

Changes in the status of women are key features of globalization. Some analysts have even concluded that globalization is, in part, feminization. ‘The feminization of what?’ is the question. We are not going to try to answer this question here. Rather, we want to open discussion on how stories about women and globalization relate to the world of activism. What functions do these stories perform for the left? How do they constitute social movements and mask that civil society is not an ideal space; that inequities are often reproduced there?

The question of whether the changes associated with globalization have been aggregately positive or negative for women tends to be one around which activist and civil society politics is mobilized – and key assertions about where our global society is going and how it wants to get there are framed.

Digital divide notwithstanding, hours of web searching every possible combination of key words for ‘women and globalization’ essentially *revealed* that little to no progress of any meaningful kind has occurred over the last 100 years, and that women as a whole remain overwhelmingly powerless, voiceless and victims. The trade in colors, with the image of black and brown women as the “face of poverty”, is particularly robust.

But, can we trust these stories completely? The way power is organized tends to allow –even encourage - relatively well-resourced and socially privileged spokespersons (men and women of various colours) to use popular discourses about the affects of globalization on women. Discourses do things; they have effects. Or, more strongly, people say things in order to achieve things. They offer excuses, assign blame, win support, seize the moment, cast themselves in a particular light, and so on.

Women in the social movements in post-apartheid South Africa provide testimony to the fact that whilst they may form the mass base of the movement they most certainly are not well represented among the leadership ranks. The movements have garnered the support of thousands of poor black women and have through their political action challenged the state’s provision of basic services to the household and raised consciousness around the plight of poor women. Yet within the movements, a male, top heavy leadership speaks on behalf of thousands of poor black women while the added burden of moving much needed gender reform forward is one that falls primarily to women – often finding an uneven, even cold reception from leaderships accustomed to defining gender equality as secondary to class and race struggles.

That inequities are reproduced in civil society – from local to global - raises questions about a left that trades on taking up the plight of women, a left that looks to women’s experiences to legitimize movements, organizations – even activist careers. Commander Esther, Zapatista Army of National Liberation, highlights the contradictions:

“[A]s women, the rich man tries to humiliate us, but also the man who is not rich, who is poor like our husbands, our brothers, our fathers, our sons, our companions in the struggle, and those who work with us and are organized with us. So we say clearly that when women demand respect, we demand it not only from the neoliberals, but also from those who struggle against neoliberalism and say they are revolutionaries but in the home are like Bush.”

In South Africa, the social movements have traditionally been perceived to be the place where poor, black women coagulate to regain their self-respect, their dignity, their strength as a collective and their identity as women. However, this safe space of the movement continues to displace value and repeatedly uses the same oppressive forms of structure and organising. Thus, when women gain it may be merely as a component of other geometries of power, such as unions or civil society organizations - whose decision-making processes and well paid positions are overwhelmingly occupied by men. Some predict that if this were to continue then women will be compelled to reconstitute themselves as a group identity of women that will supplant class interest as the chief medium of political mobilization.

Still, not much is done within social movements to empower women to participate more effectively, so that they can be their own voices and be their own faces and agents of their own experience. For example, often the male leadership simultaneously co-opt women’s powerfully articulated demands for better municipal services while conceiving of and scripting women’s organizational roles as merely supportive. The commitment from the male leadership to the transformation of gender relations appears strategic and limited. As a result, women in the movements are feeling a greater sense of isolation and that their particular issues and their identities as women are being ignored. Ten years on now from the end of apartheid and there is a growing sense that women’s development in the movement - other than what they are able to achieve as individuals – has stalled.

If women consistently fail to escape the everyday indignities of discrimination in social movements, that those movements might unravel under the weight of their contradictions, is not surprising. Among the members of the now frayed and fragmented Concerned Citizen’s Forum [CCF], for example, it was a commonly held perception that, while women are at the forefront of the struggle and many occupy leadership positions in their local branches, there was no development of women in the CCF - other than what they are able to achieve as individuals - and there existed few mechanisms in the social movements leadership structure to encourage active participation of women. Similarly, to date in trade unions, the democratic rights that have been achieved by the unions for women members in the workplace are not paralleled by democratic rights for women within the unions. More insidiously, however, the values and beliefs encountered within the union structures have been of women as inherently subservient, whose issues carried less weight than those of the broader working class struggles.

Cutting into the question of women and the left where we have seems to suggest that one route out of the impass might be to play closer attention to what women can and have achieved (in terms of extracting themselves from their particular experience with a tangle of patriarchal norms and institutions) through acts of individual creativity and innovation. For example, a breaking down and breaking out – moving beyond what seems structurally or organizationally possible within existing hierarchical parameters – has long been the innovative strategy of black women – and a mode of power of the so-called ‘powerless’ more generally. Since their demands have perpetually been left out by feminist movements and movements for racial liberation, it is often individual creativity that has brought about the actual gains that translate into bargaining power and leverage in movements.

In this light, while there is little point to romanticizing the ruptures and border zones of the globalizing world, some analysts point to not yet well understood informal temporary zones and multi-centric functional networks nested within sprawling “scapes” where important social resistance and renewal takes place. That is, beyond totalizing rhetorics and hardened organizational hierarchies of the left there is an array of women’s insurgencies taking place. The widest array of which may be, to borrow Castell’s language, “practical feminists” (2000b: 200).

“Aren’t the struggles and organizations of women throughout the world, for their families (meaning mainly their children), their lives, their work, their shelter, their health, their dignity, feminism in practice…Under different forms, and through different paths, feminism dilutes the patriarchal dichotomy of man/woman as it manifests itself in social institutions and in social practice. So doing, feminism constructs not one but many identities, each one of which, by their autonomous existence, seizes micropowers in the world wide web of life experiences.”

Authors like Saskia Sassen have noted that in the global cities “[t]here is a large literature showing that immigrant women's regular wage work and improved access to other public realms has an impact on their gender relations: Women gain greater personal autonomy and independence while men lose ground.” It may be that we like our stories of women having new freedoms, of gaining ground, to be less messy. We have been trained to see as primary her exploitation in the capitalist labour market. But what if we change the lens from capitalism to patriarchy? And what if we set that picture afloat within a global left that doesn’t value women any more than capitalism does?

The organized left’s skepticism about women’s agency and what can be achieved without being organized tends to operate to script the work of ‘the struggle’ in service of ‘the revolution’ as nobler, more important, more immediately pressing. But the promise that women’s everyday lived indignities will simply evaporate once race and class issues are addressed relies on futurology as vague and discredited as Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Capitalism seems to trade on patriarchy, but so can the left.

We are skeptical about global discourses and politicized terrains that remain dominated by debates that frame women’s autonomy as something won on behalf of women. It renders invisible much of the day-to-day innovation and activity that individual women leverage to incrementally reinvent daily life. More insidiously it co-opts and confiscates the gains made by women in the everyday, attributing it to activists, organized civil society organizations and international development agencies, many of which primarily serve the interests of a narrow band of elite often organized along principles where men are able to move through the ranks leaving the bulk of women behind as shadow workers.

Many of the women who belong to social movements in South Africa often don’t restrict themselves to the work of the organization. Women in the Anti-Eviction Campaign in the Western Cape pointed out that it is not only evictions that they are concerned with. They work in their communities around issues of HIV, poverty, rape, drug-abuse, accessing social grants, teenage pregnancies and access to education for their children. Yet this work is not considered as a form of activism that is altering the political landscape. Rather “strategic” interests of the left are perceived as a more evolved and informed type of activism (where most of the men congregate around) and set in opposition to “practical” issues like daily survival.

With the specter of revolution denied looming intimidating, women are called to justify and rationalize the authenticity of their interests - to stop pursuing those interests and be drawn into the diversionary web of defending them. In her seminal 1985 article Spivak asked the question “Can the Subaltern Speak?” The point was not that movements for social change can somehow ‘get it right next time’ when they speak on behalf of those who have little voice in existing architectures of power. Rather, she wanted to know when and under what conditions will the subaltern speak for themselves?
As Poet Sujata Bhatt has said:

I am Indian, very brown, born in
Malabar, I speak three languages, write in
Two, dream in one. Don't write in English, they said,
English is not your mother tongue. Why not leave
Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,
Every one of you? Why not let me speak in any language I like?...

* Saranel Benjamin and J. Zoë Wilson are with the Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa, and Institute for Research and Innovation in Sustainability, York University, Canada. The authors would like to thank Amanda Alexander, Raj Patel and Richard Pithouse for their valuable comments. All errors remain the responsibility of the authors exclusively.

**NOTE TO READERS: the authors would like to invite people everywhere to send their experiences with gender equity in social movements to: [email][email protected] and [email][email protected] Accounts will be compiled, verified and made available to all respondents. Please note if you wish to remain anonymous.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

References

Benjamin, S ‘ “We are not Indians! We are the Poors!” : Investigating Race Class and Gender in Social Movements’ Development Update, Vol 5 No. 2, 2004.

Castells, M. . The Power of Identity. Great Britain: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.

Spivak. G. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, pp. 66-111, Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds. Hemel Hempstead & New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. (First printing 1988)