HOW does real change happen? This is a question that was very much on my mind when confronted with the phenomenon of single women acquiring residential sites in communal areas after 1994.
The version of “official” customary law that we inherited from apartheid decrees that only men are eligible for land rights. Yet single women were claiming and being allocated residential sites in North West, in the Eastern Cape, even in KwaZulu-Natal.
No particular law or policy intervention seemed to have sparked the changes under way. Instead they were taking place from the bottom up as firstly individual women claimed land rights and then others followed suit.
The Community Agency for Social Inquiry subsequently undertook a survey of 3000 women in three different rural areas that confirmed the trend of single women claiming and being allocated land. They also conducted a series of focus group discussions in which both women and men were asked how it was that the changes had come about.
Their answers suggest the changes are directly related to the dramatic political shifts that took place with the transition to democracy in 1994, and the far-reaching impact this had on the balance of power in rural areas.
A man from Keiskammahoek explained that women were not allocated residential sites in the past, but that “this changed after the elections and voting – that showed everyone has rights”.
In Ramatlabama an older woman explained that: “After democracy anyone could get a stand, even a young woman could go, as long as she had a pass and was independent ... But before ... even me, as an unmarried woman, I couldn’t. In my view I think it’s our constitution that changed everything because it says that everybody has a right to shelter, education ... so it’s the government that changed everything.”
A woman in Keiskammahoek described the changing balance of power within which the changes are taking place. She said men nowadays cannot get away with evicting their wives because the young women of today would have the man arrested.
The views of a man in Msinga also illustrate the impact of democracy and knowledge on processes of change at the local level, albeit more ruefully: “ is because of these democratic rights ... everyone has their own rights. tell my child what to do, she looks into my eyes, and says I must leave her alone. ...When I tell my wife that I do not understand this, she says I am abusing her daughter who also has her right to answer me. We did not know that before, we only knew that my father would have taken a sjambok and hit her hard.”
This man’s quote resonated in my head when I read that the MEC for education in the Eastern Cape Mandla Makupula had said he wished a boy who had challenged his parent’s decision to send him to initiation school had been his child.
This is because “I would have hit him on the head with a knobkerrie and he would have gone to that initiation school crying”.
Makupula also reportedly said that children are not entitled to any rights until they are over 21 years old and independent financially.
His remarks were made in the context of an event convened by the premier of the Eastern Cape at which school children demonstrated their debating skills.
He insisted that the children couldn’t have come up with the arguments they put forward in the debates on their own - that they must have been helped by adults.
One presumes the MEC’s tirade was sparked by the fact that the debating school children had referred to their rights under the constitution. Perhaps they had referred explicitly to their right to education? And that the MEC, being unable to explain away his department’s manifest failures to live up to the education standards required by the constitution, resorted to denying that any such rights exist.
What is at stake when a provincial MEC says things like this at an official function?
In my view the ramifications go far beyond education alone. The outcomes of interactions and negotiations between people are deeply influenced by the power relations that frame them. Makupula is asserting patriarchal power relations that fly in the face of the constitution’s vision of equality and dignity for all.
That vision of equality, together with our heady victory over apartheid, inspired and emboldened rural women to imagine a different future for themselves, and to claim land rights accordingly.
They did this in the confidence that government is on the side of the oppressed and the constitution is their backstop. Men, too, acceded to women’s claims, on the basis that the balance of power had shifted, and it was no longer possible to get away with beating women into submission.
Statements like these, from senior politicians, have very serious implications – particularly when government fails to distance itself from them. They bolster the derisory and gung-ho approach of untransformed patriarchs and reiterate the message that power and might trump negotiation and rights.
Most serious of all, they pull the rug out from under the feet of the less powerful in society – women and children – who in many instances assumed that government was on their side in their incremental struggles for equality and change.
Such statements indicate that they were wrong, and that, in fighting for change, ordinary people cannot assume that government will support their rights. This fundamentally changes the balance of power within which real change is negotiated at the local level.
What is at stake then, when MECs make such statements, are the processes of grassroots change that are the only way to meaningfully transform society from the bottom up.
Aninka Claassens is the director of the Rural Women’s Action-Research Programme at the Centre for Law and Society, University of Cape Town
Insight: MEC pulls rug out from under least powerful
The version of “official” customary law that we inherited from apartheid decrees that only men are eligible for land rights. Yet single women were claiming and being allocated residential sites in North West, in the Eastern Cape, even in KwaZulu-Natal.
No particular law or policy intervention seemed to have sparked the changes under way. Instead they were taking place from the bottom up as firstly individual women claimed land rights and then others followed suit.
The Community Agency for Social Inquiry subsequently undertook a survey of 3000 women in three different rural areas that confirmed the trend of single women claiming and being allocated land. They also conducted a series of focus group discussions in which both women and men were asked how it was that the changes had come about.
Their answers suggest the changes are directly related to the dramatic political shifts that took place with the transition to democracy in 1994, and the far-reaching impact this had on the balance of power in rural areas.
A man from Keiskammahoek explained that women were not allocated residential sites in the past, but that “this changed after the elections and voting – that showed everyone has rights”.
In Ramatlabama an older woman explained that: “After democracy anyone could get a stand, even a young woman could go, as long as she had a pass and was independent ... But before ... even me, as an unmarried woman, I couldn’t. In my view I think it’s our constitution that changed everything because it says that everybody has a right to shelter, education ... so it’s the government that changed everything.”
A woman in Keiskammahoek described the changing balance of power within which the changes are taking place. She said men nowadays cannot get away with evicting their wives because the young women of today would have the man arrested.
The views of a man in Msinga also illustrate the impact of democracy and knowledge on processes of change at the local level, albeit more ruefully: “ is because of these democratic rights ... everyone has their own rights. tell my child what to do, she looks into my eyes, and says I must leave her alone. ...When I tell my wife that I do not understand this, she says I am abusing her daughter who also has her right to answer me. We did not know that before, we only knew that my father would have taken a sjambok and hit her hard.”
This man’s quote resonated in my head when I read that the MEC for education in the Eastern Cape Mandla Makupula had said he wished a boy who had challenged his parent’s decision to send him to initiation school had been his child.
This is because “I would have hit him on the head with a knobkerrie and he would have gone to that initiation school crying”.
Makupula also reportedly said that children are not entitled to any rights until they are over 21 years old and independent financially.
His remarks were made in the context of an event convened by the premier of the Eastern Cape at which school children demonstrated their debating skills.
He insisted that the children couldn’t have come up with the arguments they put forward in the debates on their own - that they must have been helped by adults.
One presumes the MEC’s tirade was sparked by the fact that the debating school children had referred to their rights under the constitution. Perhaps they had referred explicitly to their right to education? And that the MEC, being unable to explain away his department’s manifest failures to live up to the education standards required by the constitution, resorted to denying that any such rights exist.
What is at stake when a provincial MEC says things like this at an official function?
In my view the ramifications go far beyond education alone. The outcomes of interactions and negotiations between people are deeply influenced by the power relations that frame them. Makupula is asserting patriarchal power relations that fly in the face of the constitution’s vision of equality and dignity for all.
That vision of equality, together with our heady victory over apartheid, inspired and emboldened rural women to imagine a different future for themselves, and to claim land rights accordingly.
They did this in the confidence that government is on the side of the oppressed and the constitution is their backstop. Men, too, acceded to women’s claims, on the basis that the balance of power had shifted, and it was no longer possible to get away with beating women into submission.
Statements like these, from senior politicians, have very serious implications – particularly when government fails to distance itself from them. They bolster the derisory and gung-ho approach of untransformed patriarchs and reiterate the message that power and might trump negotiation and rights.
Most serious of all, they pull the rug out from under the feet of the less powerful in society – women and children – who in many instances assumed that government was on their side in their incremental struggles for equality and change.
Such statements indicate that they were wrong, and that, in fighting for change, ordinary people cannot assume that government will support their rights. This fundamentally changes the balance of power within which real change is negotiated at the local level.
What is at stake then, when MECs make such statements, are the processes of grassroots change that are the only way to meaningfully transform society from the bottom up.
Aninka Claassens is the director of the Rural Women’s Action-Research Programme at the Centre for Law and Society, University of Cape Town
Would you like to comment on this article?
Register (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.
Trending Now
Latest Videos