TRC Final Report

Volume 5

Chapter 9

Subsection 34

Building a democracy where men and women can be at home

124 Ms Thenjiwe Mtintso said at the hearing on women in Johannesburg:

Chairperson, as the [Commission] wraps up its formal part of the work, as it publishes its report and as it breathes a sigh of relief for a job well done, we must know that the job continues. The mammoth task that still lies ahead is the continuous and consistent struggle for justice and protection of human rights, especially gender justice and gender rights.

The frightening statistics of violence against women and children which has reached, in my own view, Chairperson, genocide levels, have to be addressed. We cannot hope that there is going to be yet another [Commission] to address that, because in these sessions we’re backward looking. We’ve got to take the process forward; we’ve got to look in the now and the future.

We have just come out of this war. Part of the violence against women and children is because of that war. But part of that is the operation of patriarchy itself, because when male control and authority is in any way challenged or threatened, as it is being challenged and threatened every day in our country, it turns itself to the most violent forms. And with women and children, their bodies being used as, once again, the terrain of anger and struggle.

Democracy, reconciliation and nation-building remain threatened so long as patriarchy in all its forms and all the forms of patriarchy, Chairperson, are violent forms of patriarchy. They are actually a violation of human rights. We cannot limit human rights to what is in the Act. Gender inequality and gender injustice is a violation of human rights. It does not necessarily mean that we must have the hearings, but it means we must have the process of eradicating that.

As we today look back in our gruesome past, we must realise that our present and future remain in jeopardy, despite the good work of the [Commission], if the violence against women and children is allowed to continue.

The South African society needs to be mobilised in the same manner that it was mobilised against apartheid. In the same manner that we won that war against apartheid. Why are we not mobilising and engage in that war against violence against women and children? Why is the nation continuing as if nothing is happening? Why are these massacres allowed to happen? Why is this genocide? Why are we allowing it? Why is it being made a role of women?

It is not the role of Government alone. It is the role of this society, because if we do not do that, one year, two years down the line, we will have to have that Truth and Reconciliation Commission once again for us to come back and retell the stories that we suffered under democracy, Chairperson.

Within our own homes, the domestic violence in our own homes, the violence in our streets, the violence in the work place, the violence that’s permeating all of our society. Most of the time what is being highlighted, are the hijackings. I am not undermining this. I am not undermining the deaths. Look at the wall down Wits.¹⁴ That wall! Look at the faces! Ninety-nine per cent – I went there and looked and registered – 99 per cent are faces of men; where are the women who have been killed? Where are the women who have been raped? Where are the women who are getting battered in their own families? They are not in that wall. Why are they not in that wall?

Is that your work, Chairperson, as we build reconciliation? Because I get angry when I pass that wall. I get angry that the women’s own suffering is not being recognised by this country. I get angry because the [Commission] is silent about that. Because it is happening now. It is not happening in the days of apartheid, it is happening now.

125 This is an extract from the submission by Dr Sheila Meintjes, on behalf of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies, at the same hearing:

I think that what the [Commission] has done has been to open up … a process which may well just be the tip of the iceberg. We call for further efforts and opportunities to be made for women to speak out. It might take ten or twenty or thirty or even forty years for women to acknowledge their experiences as it did for the women in South East Asia or for the victims of the holocaust to acknowledge sexual abuse by Nazi camp commanders.

126 The following extract deals with the role of women in a particular church, but can also be seen as a clear challenge for all South Africans to pay more than lip service to the constitutional ideal of a society where men and women can participate fully, where human rights are respected:

Ms Joyce Seroke: Bishop Michael, I would like to, through you, commend the CPSA [Church of the Province of Southern Africa] for coming to grips at last after a long and painful process of accepting women as priests in the church, but I would like to know what is the church doing to empower those women for meaningful participation with in the church?

Bishop Michael Nuttall: Chairperson, as you will know this is a fairly recent development within the life of our church. It goes back to 1992. Perhaps we should have made that decision long before but, like so many other churches in this respect throughout the world, we have been on a journey and all of us have had to come to a profound change of mind when we’ve come to the point of accepting women clergy should be as free to operate within the life of our church as men clergy. So, we’ve only been involved in this for the past five years. We now have something like twenty-three women clergy out of 120 within the diocese which I’m part of … but there’s still a very long way to go, and part of that long way to go is the need for the mindset to change because so many of us across the board, this is not a white or black phenomenon, but across the board, so many of us, particularly those of us who are male, but not only men, have got to make a major inner adjustment to this new reality within the life of our church. But as I said just now, I think that a new liberating process is underway for men and women alike in this process.