Sexism deters our efforts to build a national democratic society, writes Sediko Rakolote.
The spectre of sexism continues to haunt the world. Sexism is a catalyst to other determining variables of discrimination and oppression such as class, race, religion and beliefs.
In the South African context, most victims of this primitive stereotyped behaviours are women. Sexism should be explored to understand how it relates to other forms of discrimination and contributes towards marginalisation, powerlessness, landlessness and exploitation
of women.
Sexist narratives advances women inferiority and male superiority. This should not be left unchallenged by any progressive revolutionary.
The sexist narratives must be defeated by revolutionaries through raising alternative progressive revolutionary discourse that places women and men as equal citizens.
In the 1984, January 8 statement, then ANC president OR Tambo said: “Our Struggle will be less than powerful and our national and social emancipation can never be complete if we continue to treat the women of our country as dependent minors and objects of one form of exploitation or another.
“Certainly no longer should it be that a woman's place is in the kitchen. In our beleaguered country, the woman's place is in the battlefront of struggle.”
Tambo put women equally at the front of the struggle against inequality, unemployment and poverty. Women are not dependent minors or second-class citizen
but equals.
In all its manifestations - at institutional, relational or interpersonal level, seen or not seen, covert or overt - sexism is neither morally justifiable nor politically sustainable.
It promotes an undesirable ideology that humans can be grouped into distinct groups, and assumes that due to their gender, they differ in terms of social behaviour and inherent capacities.
It sows seeds of divisions and creates artificial boundaries and disharmony among people of different genders, cultivates hatred and intolerance and thus creates a dichotomy between genders.
Under no circumstances can gender form the foundational principles for building a sense of nationhood. Sexism militates against the principles of ubuntu.
Societies should not create a vacuum for sexists to emerge and take charge.
Sexists destabilise social cohesion and can plunge any democratic order into disarray.
The Bill of Rights protects individual liberties such as the right to dignity and equality.
That means everybody is entitled to full and equal enjoyment of all rights and freedoms.
The interventions intended to push back the sexism frontiers must be heightened.
Sexism must be criminalised, gender equality must form part of the school curricula from early childhood development to higher institution of learning, a 50/50 policy must be enacted into law and there must be hefty penalties for non-compliance with any law promoting gender equality.
Sexism corrodes our democratic gains. It deters our efforts to move the historically disadvantaged from the periphery to the core and to build a national democratic society.
South Africa must be a country free from any form of discrimination and oppression.
* Rakolote is the head of the political education subcommittee in the Progressive Professionals Forum and a board member of the International Association for Public Participation in Southern- Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.
** The view expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.