During the fight against apartheid in South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC), home party of leader Nelson Mandela, considered what a future free society would look like and how that goal should be achieved, says historian Rachel Sandwell.
ANC members weren't just focused on ending apartheid racism, "although that was obviously foundational," said Sandwell, assistant professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences. "They were also trying to define a future where men and women, Black and white, were equal and liberated to live well."
Women played a major role in these debates, according to Sandwell's new book, "National Liberation and the Political Life of Exile: Sex, Gender, and Nation in the Struggle against Apartheid." Through an analysis of women's diplomatic work and their advocacy for policies on sexual education, birth control, family life and child care, Sandwell challenges traditional narratives that have ignored or minimized women's contributions.
The College of Arts and Sciences spoke with Sandwell about the book.
Question: How was the ANC unique among activist networks in the mid- to late 20th century?
Answer: The ANC is the African continent's oldest political party. It was established in 1912, and today it is still the governing party of South Africa, after being elected as such in South Africa's first democratic election in 1994 (with Nelson Mandela as president) and again in subsequent free and fair elections. But what makes it particularly intriguing is that in its over 100 years of existence, it has transformed itself profoundly.
It began as a male-only, African-only organization, focused on formal petitions and respectable public politics. It reinvented itself in the 1940s and 1950s, through leadership of militant young men, most famously Mandela, but also through the increased public protest by Black women, who were finding themselves increasingly subject to apartheid laws restricting their freedom of movement.
From the mid-1960s until the end of the 1980s, the ANC operated as an exiled diplomatic and military organization, its members scattered across African countries and European and Eastern Bloc capital cities. This period is my focus - I look at how the ANC in exile tried to define itself as representing and including all South Africans, and I argue that women helped shape conversations around defining who South Africans were.
Q: How did motherhood figure into women's participation in the ANC?
A: Motherhood occupied a deeply ambivalent place in the ANC's work and in southern African politics more broadly.
The ANC was happy to deploy a strategic language of motherhood. Women in the movement spoke a lot about mothers, and the rights and obligations of mothers - they recognized that this was a powerful moral message that was politically effective. On the other hand, in a sort of painful paradox, many of the women who first became active in the exiled ANC had to leave their own children behind in South Africa.
When younger women began fleeing South Africa in the 1970s and joining the exiled ANC, the ANC struggled to accommodate those women who had children. I spend two chapters talking about the revolutionary but contradictory residential child care program the ANC tried to develop starting in the late 1970s.
Initially, senior ANC women optimistically tried to provide quasi-orphanages, so that young women could leave their children behind and go off and fight in the ANC's guerrilla war - which many young militant women were keen to do. However, as time dragged on and the guerrilla war made little progress, some women preferred to try to stay with their children. The ANC at times enforced separation of families, something young women (and their partners) disputed.
These debates over family life, child care, work and revolutionary dedication reveal that the ANC was transforming in this period from being just a diplomatic organization or a political party to being a state, fully responsible for its members, and a nation, defining political community and identity.
Q: What are women's lasting contributions to the ANC's political vision?
A: Women ensured that the ANC by the 1950s recognized women as full and equal members. This is striking, when we compare women's political participation and rights in other countries. Women linked the ANC to a series of progressive women's movements worldwide, gaining important recognition for the struggle against apartheid.
Although initially only small numbers of women left South Africa and joined the ANC in exile in the 1960s, those women who were in the organization held important positions. Some of them received military training. Others represented the ANC at international meetings.
In the 1970s, a new generation of younger people left South Africa and joined the ANC. It became much more gender-balanced and new women members demanded additional supports such as child care so that they could continue to work for the revolution.
Although South Africa continues to face high burdens of violence against women (and violence in general), the South African constitution is one of the strongest in the world for defining women's rights, a result of the history of women's prominent place in social and political mobilizations.
There is a tendency to assume that "feminism" and "women's rights" began in the West and radiated outwards - but the ANC challenges this assumption and enriches our understanding of global feminist history.
Kate Blackwood is a writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.
