Crazy for Democracy by Temma Kaplan

Author:Temma Kaplan [Kaplan, Temma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Feminism & Feminist Theory, Sociology, General, Women's Studies
ISBN: 9781134719259
Google: -_hYCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-01-08T06:00:58+00:00

6

“We sleep on our own graves”:

Women at Crossroads

REGINA NTONGANA, a field representative for the Surplus People Project (SPP), sits behind her small desk with its red plastic cylindrical pencil holder and compartments for clips and notes. Wearing red socks, brown moccasins, a brown cotton skirt, a pale green sweater, and a woolen cap against the indoor chill of the rainy July winter in Cape Town, South Africa, she wouldn’t be taken for a victim or a political philosopher. Nor would she ever think in those terms. But as a squatter, she became a grassroots activist working for the rights of other homeless women.

Regina Ntongana, known as “Ma,” learned about activism from her mother, a domestic worker who belonged to the African National Congress. Ma was born in 1939 on the outskirts of Cape Town, near Elsie’s River, a mixed community of blacks and the people the government called “Coloureds.” She lived with her grandmother in Beaufort West, a railroad junction in the hot, dry, or tundra-like northern Cape, and had a conflicted relationship with her mother. Ma recalls misunderstanding why her mother was always engaged in struggle, constantly demanding her rights. Ntongana’s mother told Regina that if she didn’t understand, didn’t feel the need for dignity, nothing would explain it. Ma, however, does not attribute her own fierce commitment to justice to her mother, but to her pain. “I gave me over to my people—how we are suffering.”1

Her anguish came from apartheid, a political system upholding the fiction that white settlers had created South Africa from a wilderness, and that people of color, particularly black Africans, had no rights to interfere with the way whites ran their country.2 By dividing people along arbitrary color lines and by keeping groups separate spatially as well as legally until customs of racism prevailed, the government established its authority over every aspect of life. “Influx-control” laws, imposing passes that governed employment and residence rights in the cities, formed one of the foundations for apartheid. In effect in different and increasingly vicious forms between the 1890s and 1986, these laws shaped South African society by establishing a nefarious urban housing policy that also discriminated against women.3

Apartheid, the systematic legal separation of the races in South Africa, effectively began with the Black Urban Areas Act of 1945. This law prohibited the mobility of all people of color and precluded them from moving where they wished, making women particularly vulnerable. In order to qualify for the privilege of living in the cities, people of color had “to produce proof that they were born [in the city] and [had] lived [in the city] all their lives.” The second category of people who qualified were “contract workers who [had] worked continuously for one employer in the area for at least 10 years or for more than one employer for at least 15 years.” The third grouping consisted of “wives and unmarried sons and daughters, under the age of 18, of those who qualified for the first two categories.” The

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