A life of refusal. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and violence in South Africa

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela is an iconic woman in South African resistance politics. Not only the wife of Nelson Mandela, she was also a member of the ANC’s armed wing and supported the use of political violence. In the mid-1980s, she was implicated in the kidnapping and murder of young boys in Soweto. At the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1997, Madikizela-Mandela denied all allegations. Her testimony highlighted a key question: can women’s political roles be explored outside of the framework of political maternalism? The article uses fragments of interviews, and a recent essay by Madikizela-Mandela in which she presents a narrative account of the impact of imprisonment and political struggle on her life, as archival sources to explore how she made sense of her political actions. The article argues that although the maternalist paradigm is most frequently used to analyse the biography of Madikizela-Mandela, she herself foregrounds her identities as soldier

Little perpetrators, witness-bearers and the young and the brave: towards a post-transitional aesthetics

The aesthetic choices characterizing work produced during the transition to democracy have been well documented. We are currently well into the second decade after the 1994 election - what then of the period referred to as the 'second transition'? Have trends consolidated, hardened, shifted, or have new 'post-transitional' trends emerged? What can be expected of the future 'born free' generation of writers and readers, since terms such as restlessness, dissonance and disjuncture are frequently used to describe the experience of constitutional democracy as it co-exists with the emerging new apartheid of poverty? Furthermore, what value is there in identifying post-transitional aesthetic trends?DHE

Women’s rights, citizenship and governance in Sub-Saharan Africa Training Institute : final technical report

Women are scarce in the research environment: with regard to gender distribution in enrollments in higher education, apart from South African institutions, the rest of the continent is characterized by male dominance. Meanwhile the trend in donor support to Africa, is promotion of gender equality as a goal in major international conventions and commitments, which translates into support for governments who meet targets for equity. Women’s Rights and Citizenship Institute aims to build capacity for feminist researchers in Africa, to train for, conceptualize and plan research projects in the field of women's rights, citizenship and governance - in an African-based programme for African researchers

Equality versus authority: Inkatha and the politics of gender in natal

Inkatha’s political programme contains contradictions. The movement presents itself as a modernising, liberalising force while simultaneously developing a conservative, precapitalist ideology to retain its rural political base. These tensions are exemplified in Inkatha’s attempts to engage women politically. Two instances are examined: the replacement of the Natal Code of Bantu Law by the KwaZulu Code, which removed the minority status of African women in law; and the efforts in the early 1980s to use the Inkatha Women’s Brigade to pacify the youth in the face of school boycotts

Women's organizations and democracy in South Africa: Contesting authority

The transition to democracy in South Africa was one of the defining events in twentieth-century political history. The South African women's movement is one of the most celebrated on the African continent. Shireen Hassim examines interactions between the two as she explores the gendered nature of liberation and regime change. Her work reveals how women's political organizations both shaped and were shaped by the broader democratic movement. Alternately asserting their political independence and giving precedence to the democratic movement as a whole, women activists proved flexible and remarkably successful in influencing policy. At the same time, their feminism was profoundly shaped by the context of democratic and nationalist ideologies. In reading the last twenty-five years of South African history through a feminist framework, Hassim offers fresh insights into the interactions between civil society, political parties, and the state. Hassim boldly confronts sensitive issues such as the tensions between autonomy and political dependency in feminists' engagement with the African National Congress (ANC) and other democratic movements, and black-white relations within women's organizations. She offers a historically informed discussion of the challenges facing feminist activists during a time of nationalist struggle and democratization

Fragile stability: state and society in democratic South Africa

This article adopts a 'state-in-society' approach in order to take account of the impact of the transition to democracy in South Africa on social groups and their engagement with the state. The article suggests that democratic consolidation involves not only building a new state but also new interfaces between state and society. We use the term 'fragile stability' to characterise the contradictory nature of South Africa's transition a decade after apartheid: society is stable in that the non-racial regime is fully accepted as legitimate, but the immense social problems which were apartheid's legacy remain a threat to social order. The article shows how state authority and capacity have been regenerated from a position of severe weakness at the time of the transition, to a situation today where it has substantial capabilities in exercising basic functions such as policing, border control and taxation. However, we argue that in many other social arenas, both stability and fragility have increased. Drawing on other articles in this special issue, we discuss the different patterns in which the contradictory combination of stability and fragility has evolved. The macro-economic situation has been both stabilising and destabilising, but different policies have been responsible for each. We suggest that single-party dominance of the political arena, the continued salience of race relations, black economic empowerment, militarism and corruption are arenas where the same social or political processes have both promoted stability and added to the potential for destabilisation. In gender relations, HIV/AIDS and land reform, stabilisation has been limited, as linkages between state and society have not been successfully established. We conclude that despite its tenuous nature, fragile stability nonetheless represents an 'equilibrium' that is likely to persist in the short- to medium-term, because the social forces and political organisations needed to move the society to a different position - either crisis or thoroughgoing consolidation - have not yet emerged

The Impossible Contract: The Political and Private Marriage of Nelson and Winnie Mandela

Winnie and Nelson Mandela had one of the most iconic political marriages in history. For most commentators, this was a one-sided marriage in which Nelson was by far the more significant actor and Winnie was the burden he had to bear. However, it is not possible to conceive of the public persona of Nelson Mandela after his imprisonment on Robben Island without also understanding Winnie’s role, not merely as upholder of the family name but also in terms of the ways in which she built an independent career out of her position as Nelson’s wife. This article reads the marriage at two levels. First, it argues that there were two actors in the marriage, both central to its narrations and both with political ideas and ambitions. Winnie Mandela was building a genealogy of heroic nationalism for herself from at least the 1960s, in parallel with that of her husband, and her rise to political status was both dependent on the marriage and at odds with its demands. Understanding Winnie as an actor, treating her own biography as seriously as that of Nelson, changes the way in which the marriage is read politically. Second, it draws on the small archive of letters between the spouses that are publicly available to show the ways in which Nelson’s benevolent, patriarchal (albeit loving and compassionate) approach to his wife contrasted with her increasing independence and political power. The separation caused by almost three decades of imprisonment had done more than impose a physical and emotional absence. Their politics, too, had taken extremely divergent paths in which she became a representative of radical politics while he was positioned as reconciliatory visionary