Rea Bua: HerStory –Erasure is Violence – 16 Days of Activism
| Published date | 10 December 2021 |
| Publication title | Mail & Guardian: Web Edition Articles (Johannesburg, South Africa) |
The campaign comprised a social media campaign, five short documentaries, five opinion pieces, two commissioned poems, and a day of critical dialogues and discussion highlighting the "forgotten women" who laboured within the caring professions and who sought to remove obstacles to poverty, racial discrimination, education and to health care; but whose contribution to the attainment of a more just and equitable society goes unacknowledged.
The ReaBua Critical Dialogues took place in Cape Town on 22 September, which marked the culmination of a campaign that began on 9 August, Women's Day and included Heritage Day and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela's 85th birthday, as critical milestones in the celebration of women's contribution to the liberation, heritage and health equity of South Africa.
Tekano commissioned five feminist thought leaders to reflect on the themes of The Rea Bua Critical Dialogues: Herstory: Race, Gender and the Political Economy of Health Care in South Africa. Additionally, Tekano Life-Long Fellows were commissioned to write Op Eds as part of the ReaBua 16 Days of Activism for No Violence against Women and Children Campaign 2021.
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A map to the ancestors we wish to be
Curating a conversation about health equity on the canvas of women's storytelling as resistance is a fundamentally feminist act, writes Nolwazi Tusini
On the day of her funeral on 14 April 2018, just as Winnie Madikizela-Mandela's body was being prepared to leave a packed Orlando stadium for her final resting place, the sky heaved in mourning and the rain came down to take a hero home, defying the sun and cotton-candy clouds that had watched over the funeral proceedings thus far.
Moments before, Thandiswa Mazwai sang her iconic anthem Nizalwa Ngobani in tribute. Near the end of her poignant rendition, Mazwai chanted "Madikizela! Madikizela!" in a haunting high note that sounded like a heart breaking. Mazwai sang her tribute as if to stop time, as if to will the heavens to crack open so God Herself could come down and embrace Mam' Winnie. And then it rained. Blessings.
The grief over Mam' Winnie's death was intimate for hundreds of thousands of us across the world, and it was held buoyant by a visceral rage expressed by her daughter Zenani Mandela-Dlamini at her mother's funeral, when she said: "And to those who've vilified my mother through books, on social media and speeches, don't for a minute think we've forgotten. The pain you inflicted on her lives on in us."
And so began the work of re-inscribing Madikizela-Mandela into history "with care", as author Sisonke Msimang describes it. Thousands of women across South Africa responded to Mazwai's challenge in Nizalwa Ngobani: "Are the beautiful ones really dead?" with: "She did not die, she multiplied."
Three years later in September 2021, Tekano, under the leadership of feminist Chief Executive, Lebo Ramofoko, continued this work with the inaugural ReaBua Critical Dialogues, an event commemorating Winnie Madikizela-Mandela's 85th birthday by using her legacy as the context to interrogate justice and health equity in South Africa.
Thandiswa Mazwai sings her iconic and moving anthem, Nizalwa Ngobani, in tribute to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, at the ReaBua Critical Dialogues
The dialogues were held in a space adorned in the words of great leaders, including Lillian Ngoyi, Sophie Williams De Bruyn, Charlotte Maxeke, Helen Joseph, Albertina Sisulu and Mam' Winnie herself. The venue was bursting at the (Covid-compliant) seams with the bodies of the brilliant black women who are part of their legacy — artists, activists, academics and health professionals.
The ReaBua Critical Dialogues centered Winnie Madikizela-Mandela's life and work as a social worker as a lens through which to explore the unseen but critical connections between health and social justice. These themes were further explored through five short films, two commissioned poems and themed panel discussions that unpacked these intersections.
The Dialogues began with a screening of a short film on the life of feminist writer, Lauretta Ngcobo, Lauretta: And they did not die, directed by Zikethiwe Ngcobo. In it, Lauretta Ngcobo asks: "Iphi inkaba yakho" (where is your navel?), starkly bringing to the center what poet, Nayiraah Waheed, calls "my first country" — the parents whose bodies are the sacred place that holds a human life, and yet are relegated to the margins in the telling of the story of humanity.
Historically, and even today, maternity has been weaponised against women to disarm us of intellectual and political value and ingenuity. Yet, for many women who are mothers, it is the well from which they draw to change the world.
Ngcobo references this in Lauretta, when she speaks about fleeing to exile because she did want to raise her children in the violence of the apartheid state and wanted them to "grow up in peace".
This is echoed by Winne Madikizela-Mandela in her memoir 491 Days, in which she recounts coming out of prison and finding her children: "Lean and covered in malnutrition sores… And then they wonder why I am like I am. And they have the nerve to say, 'Oh Madiba is such a peaceful person, you know. We wonder how he had such a wife, who is so violent?' ," writes Madikizela-Mandela.
Women like Madikizela-Mandela upend and reconfigure the notion of a maternity that is utilised to disarm them while it brutalises them; they use it as fuel for revolutionary action.
We are all born of bodies that are (violently) thrust into womanhood and its often harsh realities. When people ask "Iphi inkaba yakho" what they are asking is: where are you from? Where is the home, where is the physical thing that connects you to your mother, and where your lineage is buried?
It is a powerful question, because first, it assumes a belonging, that you are of a place and of a people which affirms your humanity. Second, because it constructs this humanity around a matrilineal lineage — which, in Dr Athambile Masola's words, is "always precarious and disappearing", because of deliberate patriarchal action. And because of what historian Zikhona Valela calls "(self) erasure as a matter of survival".
It was by racist patriarchal design that Madikizela-Mandela, a medical social worker, was banished to Brandfort, but, perhaps, also by divine design. Because what made her an effective and beloved leader was her extraordinary ability to connect with people in a way that made you feel not only that she knew and shared your struggle and pain, but also that this mattered because you matter. Madikizela-Mandela's presence at funerals, raising a fist in defiance, but also comforting grieving families, was testament to this.
This aspect of Madikizela-Mandela becomes visible in the work that she did during her exile in Brandfort, which is the subject of two short films commissioned by Tekano as part of the ReaBua Dialogues: Winnie The Banishment, directed by Palesa Sibiya and Twiggy Matiwana, and Altared States: Brandfort, directed by Lesedi Mogoatlhe and Yumna Martin. Each film was screened at the beginning of each panel.
In the panel, titled Social Work As Resistance – Brandfort, which followed the screening of Altered States: Brandfort, journalist and feminist writer Gail Smith pointed out that when the apartheid government brutally uprooted Madikizela-Mandela from her home and community in Soweto and dumped her in Brandfort in an attempt to re-enact the violent isolation she had been subjected to during her solitary confinement, they were in fact placing her at the very heart of her purpose and at the centre of what made her powerful — a forgotten community in need.
In Winnie: The Banishment, Mam' Nora Moahloli, one of Madikizela-Mandela's closest friends and allies in Brandfort, speaks movingly about how Mam' Winnie was able to integrate herself into a community that had been warned and even threatened to keep their distance from her.
Once in Brandfort, Madikizela-Mandela mobilised her access to resources to build a clinic, a créche and an orphanage, among other things. She did this by tapping into black women's age-old tradition of organising and caring for their communities — a revolution that is often ignored — and working with the Manyano women from the local churches. It is not insignificant that the black women's associations within churches are known as uManyano, an isXhosa word which speaks to uniting (and building) under a common purpose and vision.
The church and Christianity were undoubtedly critical tools of the colonial project to not just dispossess, but render black people inhuman. That black women were able to create structures within this structure to organise around work that affirmed the humanity of black communities speaks to the transformative and sacred power of the gathering and collaboration of black women, historically and today.
When Mazwai sings, "I still remember a time when Sundays would seem everlasting, so very long … if I knew what I know now I would have stayed all day" in Revelation, she is speaking to the quiet revolution of black women in churches.
Madikizela-Mandela recognised this revolution and leveraged it to do the labour at the heart of social work, which social worker and panelist Keitumetse Moutloatse described as "capacitating our people to [create] an equitable and just society [for themselves]".
Mouhloatse's description of social work, a profession which began as the apartheid government's response to the "poor white problem" of the depression of the 1930s, is profound because it conceptualises health as fundamentally a matter of agency, a question of freedom...
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