Feminist Review

Issue 43: Issues for Feminism

The Feminist Review Collective

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134865024
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Feminismus & feministische Theorie

In this issue each article addresses a topical and controversial theme in contemporary feminist debate: pornography, the veil, HRT, disability and the Inkatha Women's Brigade.

FAMILY, MOTHERHOOD AND ZULU NATIONALISM: THE POLITICS OF THE INKATHA WOMEN'S BRIGADE

Shireen Hassim

We feed our children with breast milk as well as attitudes and values towards the world and its people (A Mchunu, chairperson of the Inkatha Women's Brigade, 1986).

The Inkatha Women's Brigade: Zulu handmaidens?

In 1975, Inkatha Yenkululeko Yesizwe (National Cultural Liberation Movement), under the charismatic leadership of Mangosutho Buthelezi, was launched in Natal. Although it put itself forward as a national movement, its location within a bantustan (KwaZulu), its links with the administration and politics of that bantustan through its control of the KwaZulu Legislative Assembly, and its very heavy reliance on Zulu symbolism and political imagery limited the degree of its appeal outside Natal. The character of Inkatha has changed since July 1990, when the organization decided to transform itself into a political party and abandon the tag of a cultural movement.¹ The Inkatha Freedom Party presents itself now as a moderate (I would argue conservative) nonracial force in South African politics. The degree to which it will be able to take on this role successfully is a matter for another paper. Here I am concerned with the period from 1975, when a women's wing was inaugurated within Inkatha, to 1990, when Inkatha became a political party. The paper is based on archival research and interviews conducted with members of the Inkatha Women's Brigade.

The four years between 1975 and 1979 represented a period of some flexibility and flux, when Inkatha was defining its character and place within black politics. Inkatha's political fortunes waxed and waned, as Buthelezi's credibility was increasingly questioned by the ANC. Until the immediate post-Soweto period, the ANC regarded Buthelezi as an ally, his participation in the homelands being tolerated as a way of subverting the bantustan strategy from within (Maré and Hamilton, 1987; Mzala, 1988). Buthelezi's support for workers during the massive strikes in 1973 in Durban also gave him credibility in the progressive trade unions. In the wake of the Soweto uprising, however, Buthelezi's opposition to the new phenomenon of youth politics and his use of KwaZulu as an independent political base alienated him from the national liberation movement. Increasingly, a Zulu nationalism, shot through with ethnic chauvinism and authoritarianism, began to be posited in opposition to the nonracial nationalism of the ANC.

By 1979, it had become evident that Buthelezi had lost any credibility as an ally of the ANC. Buthelezi made a distinction, instead, between the ‘ANC-in-exile’ and the ‘true inheritors’ (read Inkatha) of the ‘old’ ANC, i.e., before the turn to the armed struggle in 1961. Inkatha's focus shifted directly to aggressively consolidating a base in Natal, on the basis of an appeal to ‘Zulu tradition’, authority, and a defence of capitalism. Control of the KwaZulu administrative machinery gave Inkatha a relative advantage over the ANC in securing political support, through patronage or by linking access to housing, for example, to Inkatha membership. Similarly, the movement attempted to assert ideological control by introducing an ‘Inkatha syllabus’ into KwaZulu schools. Such manipulation of the homeland machinery was always contested, however, and led Inkatha into a new set of conflicts with civic groupings, teachers and students' organizations.

In 1980, Inkatha's Central Committee made two crucial decisions. The first was to ‘introduce paramilitary approaches to the activities of Inkatha’. The second was to ‘activate formally…as one of the President's own arms of activity’ the Inkatha Women's Brigade (Sunday Express 27.7.1980). As a result of the first decision, the Emandleni-Matleng camp was set up to train a paramilitary youth corps. The second decision represented a significant shift in the role of the Women's Brigade in the politics of Inkatha and of the region.

The Inkatha Women's Brigade had already been launched, at the Inanda Seminary (an exclusive school for African girls), in May 1977. Initially, the Brigade was envisaged as a means of promoting the role of women in development. In this respect, Inkatha was at the forefront of development strategies in South Africa, introducing notions such as participatory development, women's empowerment and community development to rural people. Inkatha intersected with rural women's groups which were attempting to address practical gender needs. By associating themselves with chiefs, a powerful political force in rural areas, and by offering women resources such as water supply, Inkatha garnered significant support in rural Natal (Hassim, 1990).

The more progressive discourse of empowerment and development was, however, shot through with conservative appeals to women's maternal responsibilities, their obedience to their husbands and their commitment to the church. While the theme of the inaugural congress was ‘The Role of Women in Development’, for example, the theme of the second congress (in 1978) was ‘Work and Pray’.

The Women's Brigade's efforts at promoting development were small scale, organizing community gardens and sewing groups (which made clothes for their own families as well as uniforms for school children and church women). While a broadscale development strategy was never implemented, through its activities the Bridgade tapped into an area of African women's activities that had been neglected by other political organizations. Women's sewing and co-operative groups have a history in Natal as far back as the 1880s, when African women on mission stations were brought together to be taught the virtues of Christianity and domesticity by missionaries. These groups have continued throughout the twentieth century as forums of support and solidarity, particularly in urban areas. The Women's Brigade branches imitated the form of these groups, with similar hierarchies of deference (particularly the dominance of petty-bourgeois leadership over illiterate members) and cultural symbolism (Women's Brigade uniforms are very much like church uniforms, for example).

As a result of a mixture of genuine political appeal, familiar organizational style and coercion (through threats of withholding access to trading licences, water, housing, etc.), the Women's Brigade has managed to forge a widespread (if not powerful) organization. While bearing in mind that it is difficult to verify membership figures supplied by the organization, and the evidence of coerced membership, the Women's Brigade's numbers are nevertheless significant:

Year	Women's Brigade	Percentage of total membership
1985	392,732	34%
1987	556,060	21%
1989	464,040	27%

Perhaps a more realistic estimate of membership is closer to the numbers of women who attend the annual conferences: they may be regarded as the most active members, genuinely committed to Inkatha. These number between 8,000 and 10,000.²

Defining women's place: the uses of tradition

From 1979, Inkatha began to reach out to women as a political constituency in a direct and concerted fashion. The process by which women in Natal were drawn into the broader politics of Inkatha was, however, both uneven and contradictory. Strategic concerns about reaching out to the broad mass of women (and youth) created a very specific discourse within which Inkatha operated. This discourse may broadly be defined as: conservative, patriarchal, hierarchical, essentialist. However, these terms conceal a complex set of social and political relations within which the Inkatha discourse, like any other, attempts to define and legitimate itself. Inkatha's ability to successfully interpose and impose its own ideological constructions in Natal ultimately depends on the extent to which these constructions resonate with areas of women's actual experience.

This paper will highlight significant areas of women's experience that Inkatha has appropriated and woven into its discourse. The key areas identified are: the family/household and motherhood. Of course, Inkatha does not have exclusive purchase on these areas of African women's experience. The Federation of South African Women and the ANC have tapped similar areas in the 1950s, the United Democratic Front attempted to win over women through appeals to the defence of the family and of children in the 1980s, and since the unbanning of the ANC in February 1990 a similar discourse has been evident (Hassim, 1991). This paper is an attempt to understand the specificity of Inkatha's appeal to women in Natal in the 1980s. Despite Inkatha's reconstitution of the ideology of the family along supposedly ‘traditional’ lines, this reconstitution has been strongly influenced by the ideology of a nuclear family which derives from capitalist, Christian society.

Any attempt to understand Inkatha's construction of gender has to be located within an understanding of Inkatha's reconstitution of ‘Zulu tradition’ and its manipulation of popular conceptions of tradition for political purposes. This process has already been well documented (Maré and Hamilton 1987; Mdluli 1987; Sitas 1986). However, it is not a process unique to Inkatha or indeed South Africa, as Hobsbawm and Ranger's The Invention of Tradition testifies. In his introduction, Hobsbawm argues that traditions are ‘invented’, a process which he describes as one of ‘formalization and ritualization, characterized by reference to the past’ (1983:2). This most frequently occurs

when a rapid transformation of society weakens or destroys the social patterns for which ‘old’ traditions had been designed, producing new ones to which they were not applicable, or when such old traditions and their institutional carriers and promulgators no longer prove sufficiently adaptable and flexible, or are otherwise eliminated (4–5).

In this situation of fluidity and change, ‘the object and characteristic of “traditions”, including invented ones, is invariance, the past, real or invented, to which they refer imposes fixed (normally formalized) practices, such as repetition’ (2).

Inkatha's harking back to a Zulu past fits neatly with this characterization. The dislocation of social relations as a result of the penetration of capitalist relations, migrancy and apartheid has been extensively covered. Against this, Inkatha has attempted to forge a cohesive identity, by drawing on a popular memory of the past. Maré and Hamilton argue that

A fairly strong ethnic homogeneity, a ‘Zulu identity’, has been created in the region…this ‘identity’ has built on the history of political consolidation under Shaka north of the Tugela, and of decades of successful resistance to political domination (1987:23).

Key elements recreated in this ethnic framework are notions of ‘Zulu’ social and political relations which are put forward as unproblematic and incontestable. This occurs in a context, in the 1980s, in which political battles have torn apart communities and in which many people have expressed a feeling of political powerlessness. The creation of a romanticized past, in which the emphasis is on harmonious interrelationships and in which Zulu warriors were seen as heroic and in political control, therefore has considerable appeal.

It is Inkatha's perceived ability to straddle the ‘traditional’ world as well as the ‘modern’ world that makes it attractive to its membership. This is no less important to younger members than to older women. P., a woman in her twenties, explains the complexity and political importance of Inkatha's use of tradition:

Before I was a member I thought that Inkatha was for older people and for the uneducated, because it is so concerned with culture and tradition. People are westernized and they tend to look down on our traditions. But then I saw that even Dr Dhlomo and the Chief wear traditional clothes— they are educated and they haven't lost their culture. Old women had no problem with the traditions—they joined in great numbers because they like keeping the traditions. Even the ANC says we must go back to our roots. But the UDF don't keep the customs—they don't even have one traditional day. It's because they organise everyone—Indians, whites—so they don't know where they stand.

Younger women, however, also appear to focus more on Buthelezi's comments about the equality of men and women and they tend to get impatient with the Women's Brigade's focus on family and tradition. One young woman (twenty-four years old) claimed that the Women's Brigade was ‘conservative. Old women don't accept change, they are just concerned about their social life. But politics is also important, especially to young women’. She made a distinction between the ‘social’ Women's Brigade and the ‘political’ Youth Brigade:

There is more chance for women to do things in the Youth Brigade than in the Women's Brigade. In the Youth Brigade, women have a voice. The Women's Brigade is sometimes conservative—we are getting left behind. In the Youth Brigade we debate as comrades, not as females.

However, for both young and old women, the idea of a historical continuity between the ANC and Inkatha is appealing. Buthelezi, in his speeches, constantly claims continuity between the Zulu warriors of the past such as Shaka and Cetshwayo, and himself, as well as between the Zulu kingdom and KwaZulu. This heroic and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Copyright
• Family, Motherhood and Zulu Nationalism: The Politics of the Inkatha Women's Brigade
• Post-colonial Feminism and the Veil: Thinking the Difference
• Feminism, the Menopause and Hormone Replacement Therapy
• Feminism and Disability
• ‘What is Pornography?’: An Analysis of the Policy Statement of the Campaign Against Pornography and Censorship
• Reviews
• Letter
• Noticeboard
• Back Issues