Dr Tebogo Mashifana and Lebogang Seale
In her book, Nervous Conditions, Zimbabwean author and film-maker Tsitsi Dangarembga tells a fascinating but disturbing story about a family’s festivities to welcome a relative who has recently completed his studies in England.
A cavalcade of motor vehicles announces the arrival of Babamukuru, and his family at his relatives’ village. Almost the entire clan has come out to welcome Babamukuru from his hometown, where he is the headmaster at a missionary school.
Amid the revelries, a girl, Tambudzai, describes how she and her female peers have been left the task of making sure the uncle and the other elders are fed.
“I had a special task. I had to carry the water dish in which people would wash their hands I knelt and rose and knelt and rose in front of my male relatives in descending order of seniority, and lastly in front of my grandmothers and aunts offering them the water-dish and towel.”
The setting might be in the 1960s when Zimbabwe was under white colonial rule, but its message rings true today, because of the enduring gender discrimination and toxic masculinity in South Africa and elsewhere.
Tambudzai’s toil is a stark reminder of the struggles that many girls and women in rural areas endure despite the arrival of democracy in 1994.
If you were, for instance, to describe the image of Tambudzai going through such paces to some rural, or even urban folks, their responses would reveal the prevailing toxic masculinity: she is being initiated into womanhood or marriage and/or she would make an ideal wife.
It is no coincidence that later in the book, Tambudzai’s pleas to go to school are summarily dismissed by her father, who demands of her: “Can you cook books and feed them to your husband? Learn to cook and clean. Grow vegetables.”
This is hardly surprising. The stereotypes of femaleness are so deep- seated that they have become the defining “virtues” of what it means to be a true woman.
This is not a new phenomenon, but what is concerning is how rural women and girls are perennially overlooked in the national narrative for female emancipation.
Look at the avalanche of social media posts about Women’s Day. The day was reduced to platitudes heaped on women according to their physical beauty and/or their motherly or wifely duties, rather than their contribution to social and economic development.
Just as predictably, the mainstream media was complicit in allowing social media to set the news agenda, going with the flow.
There were no stories of women crashing through glass ceilings, working in the deepest levels of mines or working on farms. There was no narrative of the plight of those single-handedly raising families in grinding poverty.
The voices of women queuing for ages before trickle-fed communal taps were conspicuous by their absence, as were those of the women fated to walk kilometres fetching firewood because they cannot afford to use the electricity for cooking.
As Dangarembga puts it in Nervous Conditions, “this business of womanhood is a heavy burden (because) when there are sacrifices to be made, (women) are the one(s) who have to make them”.
It is not that urban women are immune to the perils of gender-based violence and exploitation in their workplaces, homes and public spaces.
The façade of the posh homes in the upmarket suburbs muffles the screams of women at the hands of their intimate partners. Behind those high walls is a woman and/or girl child living in fear of physical, sexual, emotional and psychological abuse.
But it is the rural women and girls who are in the front line of poverty, deprivation and domestic abuse.
In a misogynistic, patriarchal society such as ours, they are the most discriminated and abused because they are less conscientised about their human rights, particularly regarding sexuality and reproduction.
More often than not these decisions are imposed upon them, to the detriment of their health, economic and social well-being. They are at a higher risk of sexual harassment and gender-based violence with little access to justice and redress.
It is time for the government and everyone else who claims solidarity with women and their rights to stop the grandstanding and walk the talk.
Empowering women is as critical to their well-being as it is to their families, their communities and the economy as a whole - and the best, perhaps only, way is to invest in quality education so that this generation and the ones that come afterwards are finally emancipated in word and deed.
Dr Mashifana is a senior lecturer in chemical engineering technology at the University of Johannesburg and Seale is the senior manager, strategic communications, at the same university.