TRC Final Report

Volume 4

Chapter 10

Subsection 4

■ GENDERED ROLES AND SOCIALISATION

21 While a person’s sex is determined by biology, gender is a social construct. It is determined by the relationships between women and men and by the roles they play. One of the more important divisions in terms of gender analysis is that between the public and private spheres. Men are more commonly ‘active’ in roles in the public sphere, while women predominate in roles in the private sphere. Politics as usually understood pertains primarily to the public sphere. The public-private distinction played itself out in the Commission hearings to the extent that women were often constructed – and constructed themselves — as wives, mothers, sisters and daughters of the active (mainly male) players on the public political stage.

22 In some cases, it was clear that men actively prevented women from engaging in politics. In one of the general hearings, Ms Ncediwe Euphamia Mfeti remarked: “We are not allowed to ask our husbands about politics in my culture”. Her observation was confirmed by nods and laughter in the audience. African National Congress (ANC) veteran Mr Govan Mbeki testified that:

The police were looking for meetings. So when you left you did not tell your wife where you were going, and when you returned … they were asleep and your food was on the stove… Women created problems for the (liberation) movement because they wanted to know.5

23 Ms Sheila Masote, daughter of Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) leader Mr Zeph Mothopeng, said that they had a similar policy that: women should stay at home, should not participate. It was all by way of trying to say when we go out to jail, when we go out and be killed, you look after the children… The husbands wouldn't share much.

24 The statistics on Commission evidence bear out the differential engagement of women and men in ‘active’ politics. Very early in the process, anthropologist Fiona Ross analysed the 204 testimonies that she heard presented during the first five weeks of Commission hearings. She found that close on six of every ten deponents were women, but that over three-quarters of the women’s testimonies and 88 per cent of the men’s testimonies were about abuses to men. Only 17 per cent of the women’s testimonies and 5 per cent of the men’s were about abuses to women, with the remainder about abuses to women and men. Ross found that 25 per cent of all cases involved women speaking about their sons, 11 per cent were women speaking about their spouses and 8 per cent were women speaking about their brothers. Only 4 per cent of the cases involved men speaking about sons, and 0 per cent of the cases involved men speaking about either spouses or sisters.

25 Commenting on these figures, Beth Goldblatt writes that they:

reflect the reality that women were less of a direct threat to the apartheid state and were thus less often the victims of murder, abduction and torture. This was due to the nature of the society which was, and is, structured along traditional patriarchal lines. Men were expected to engage with the state in active struggle while women were denied ‘active citizenship’ because of their location within the private sphere.⁶

26 To the extent that people came to the Commission hoping for compensation, the figures could also reflect the fact that men who were killed or otherwise incapacitated were more likely than women to have been primary breadwinners upon whom whole families were dependent.

27 Other figures provide some support for Goldblatt’s assertions. In 1986/7, for example, it was estimated that only 12 per cent of all state of emergency detainees were women. In the Sharpville massacre of March 1960, at the beginning of the period covered by the Commission, fifty-one men were killed, compared to eight women and ten children. Within the armed forces, women accounted for a small minority during the 1960s and 1970s. By the early 1990s, women still accounted for only 14 per cent of the Permanent Force of the South African Defence Force (SADF) and approximately 20 per cent of Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) cadres. Moving away from politics, official figures show that only 13 per cent of all those convicted of crimes between July 1995 and June 1996 were women.