T Didiza: Limpopo Women’s Dayduring Women’s Month

8 August 2006

The Premier of Limpopo, Mr Sello Moloto
All the Members of the Executive Council present
Members of the Limpopo Provincial Legislature
The Regional General Manager of SABC, Mr Victor Ravhuanzwo
and all other SABC senior officials
Government officials in attendance
Distinguished guests
Ladies and gentlemen

It gives me a pleasure to be amongst you, in this, my maiden visit to the
glorious province of Limpopo, since my appointment as the Minister of Public
Works. The location of Mapungubwe and Thulamela historical sites, Limpopo
Province is always an inspiration, perhaps a compelling reason for us to
revisit our history with the purpose of rediscovering it. Many remarkable
events of historic proportions have happened here, in this northern corner of
our country and we believe they are laden with historical significance, which
if fully probed and established, will require us to further question our
conventional notion of South Africa’s modern history.

I want to thank the civil society, including the media, for their support in
our first ever National Construction Week Campaign which we celebrated from 27
July to 3 August 2006. The aim of the campaign was to create awareness among
South Africans about the role and importance of the construction industry in
our reconstruction and development. For our youth, we encourage them to
consider taking up a career in this industry. Career options, which are wide
and varied, include disciplines such as engineering, architecture, quantity
surveying, landscape architecture, property valuation and construction project
management.

Institutions that shape our perceptions of the world such as the SABC are
important in formulating our culture. Since time immemorial, the people used
art to express themselves while at the same time they were influenced by art
forms in defining their identity. And the likes of the South African
Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) and other media play a role in defining our
culture, ourselves and our struggle.

Given their power, media institutions are critical in shaping how we view
the world around us. The representation of race and gender relations in the
media can go a long way towards bettering the treatment of women in our
society. In this Age of Hope, when women are within reach of many
opportunities, the media should be pushing the repositioning of the role of
women in society, both as a content and the context. Over a long time, media
had used women as objects of desire in their content. Portrayed either as
beauty queens or docile housewives, women’s role in society was defined for
them. Innocent advertisements for households products stopped being innocent as
women were portrayed mostly as uncritical consumers of these items which were
made, marketed and recommended by men.

Most media houses lacked women in their corridors of power. Except as on-air
presenters, it was rare to come across women board members, senior managers and
other executives. Thanks to the winds of change that have been sweeping through
our sub-continent in the past twelve years, the status quo is changing and
women are taking up rightful positions in our boardrooms and other corridors of
powers. In this regard we like to congratulate SABC for braving the storm and
appointing fifty percent of women to the Group Executive.

This is symptomatic of the trend that we have been noticing in the media
industry with women moving into decision-making positions.

These achievements and many others would not be possible without the
foundations that were laid by our foremothers in the history of our struggle.
In rewriting our history, we need to locate the influence of matriarchs such as
Mantatise, Mkabayi ka Jama and Modjadji among others and the role they played
in planting incipient seeds of revolt against oppression and unfair systems of
patriarchy. Many were the rulers and regents who reared future leaders and
bequeathed courage and bravery to our struggles for freedom.

With the formations of the South African Native Congress in 1912 which later
became the African National Congress, the consciousness for people’s freedoms
had been laid. When the white government under the Union of South Africa
enacted the first in the series of Native Land Acts in 1913, the women among
other groups took to the streets in protest against what they perceived to be
encroachment to their right to land. This was the beginning of the solidifying
of women’s struggles in South Africa. Other episodes in our history including
the Defiance Campaigns of the 50’s and 60’s began to see the increasing
involvement and participation of women, culminating with the historic women’s
march to Pretoria on 9 August 1956. On that occasion, women lamented the effect
that the pass laws were going to have on stable families and declared:

“We want to tell you what the pass would mean to an African woman, and we
want you to know that whether you call it a reference book, an identity book,
or by any other disguising name, to us it is a PASS. And it means just
this:

* that homes will be broken up when women are arrested under pass laws
* that children will be left uncared for, helpless, and mothers will be torn
from their babies for failure to produce a pass
* that women and young girls will be exposed to humiliation and degradation at
the hands of pass-searching policemen
* that women will lose their right to move freely from one place to another

In the name of the women of South Africa, we say to you, each of us,
African, European, Indian, Coloured, that we are opposed to the pass
system.”

This streak would prevail even in the dark days, following the banning of
the legitimate vehicles for people to express their political sentiments.
Stalwarts such as Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Albertina Sisulu, Helen Joseph and
others kept the flame of women resilience burning bright despite the repressive
machinery of the apartheid government. Often women would, away from glaring eye
of media, continue to wage daily battles on the social front, taking scraps
that apartheid threw at them and turning those into positive fuel for
nation-building, community development and moral regeneration.

In recognition of this contribution, women development issues dominated the
agenda at the Kempton Park World Trade Centre talks designed to shape the
political and social milieu of new South Africa. Today South Africa prides
itself with being among the top ten countries in the world that have more women
representation (33 percent) in their legislature. Five out of nine of our
provincial heads are women. In the private sector the rate has been slow but
steady and many women have moved into commanding positions, all in the name of
development

The Deputy Vice Chancellor of the University of Witwatersrand, a woman and a
scholar of note, Dr Belinda Bozzoli, once remarked that modern South African
history teaches us nothing but the unfolding of the Afrikaner Volk and the
subjectification of blacks.

In order to justify the present under apartheid, historians, largely
Afrikaans historians, began to look back at the past, in history, to find
justifications for the existence of apartheid. In this they were assisted by
theologians such as Dr D.F. Malan, the proponent of apartheid, who dissected
the Bible to find the rationale for separate development and racial
segregation. Our true history was and a version of history began to appear in
our schools which celebrated Afrikaner military conquests over the natives, and
like in the American Western movies, began to give impression of the natives
invading the private space of settlers with the intention to dispossess the
settlers of their all, including land.

The lesson from this experience is that history tends to favour those who
write it. If women in Africa and everywhere else were to record their history,
their role in reconstruction, development and civilisation, would be different.
Women would cease to be mere victims of men’s acts of aggression, often seen on
television and other media, with babies on their back and bundles of meagre
possessions on their heads fleeing civil wars and other man–made disasters. If
women were to write about their involvement in nation-building, community
development, moral regeneration and education, the world’s perception of women
would change.

This is not at all intended to discredit men. However, we dare suggest that
history about women not written by women is unlikely to be understanding and
appreciative of women’s struggle and other emotions as they toil side by side
with their men folk to build a future for the nation. According to the history
we read, which coincidentally is written by men, the text is punctuated by
wars, military exploits and other acts of aggression so much that we have come
to think of men as capable of nothing but aggression. The current images of war
in Darfur and Lebanon do not better our perception of the destructiveness of
men’s involvement with history.

We all know the story of a young boy who kept on disturbing his priest
father as he sat preparing a sermon for the next day. Wanting to find something
to preoccupy him, the father took a picture of the map of the world, tore it
into small pieces and asked the boy to reconstruct it. Within a few minutes the
boy, much to the father’s disbelief, had put the whole map together.
Astonishingly the father asked the boy: “but how did you manage that?” The boy
answered:” well it was easy, there was a picture of a man’s face on the other
aside, so all I had to do was to fix the man’s face and the world followed
suit”.

In 1955 when the democrats lined up the streets of Kliptown to adopt a
Charter of human freedoms, women were part of that movement. A year later,
women wrote their history when they put words into action. Women of South
Africa, - both black and white, old and young, rural and urban, educated and
illiterate, - literally marched onto Pretoria to warn one Prime Minister
Strijdom not to tamper with the rock upon which humanity is founded. “You
struck the woman, you struck the rock and you would die”, they warned Strijdom.
Indeed Hans Strijdom died thereafter.

On the fiftieth anniversary of women’s historic march, we gather here in
Limpopo, the house of Mapungubwe and Thulamela, to demand that let our history
be rewritten to accurately reflect the struggles of women and girl children,
who daily toil to lay concrete foundations upon which human virtues are built
in this Age of Hope. On this occasion, we salute the women of Limpopo from
Tshipise Nzhelele (pronounced Njelele) to Elandskraal who in 1998, with the
small help of government’s Public Works Programme and Eskom funding, took a
barren landscape and turned it into a productive machinery to feed themselves
and the nation. We hail the women of Ga- Ramokgopa, Botokwa, who under the
Community Based Public Works Programme, never hesitated to take opportunities
available, no matter how limited, to improve theirs and the lives of the
community. These and the women of Elandskraal took the hand of government in a
partnership, to till the land, plant food and build infrastructure and join in
the struggle to turn-back the tide of poverty. This is indicative of the
struggle of women throughout South Africa who on daily basis work to make this
country a better place.

Limpopo Province boasts some of the most progressive and influential women
in the country, and as we celebrate women’s day we need to recognise and honour
these women. The likes of world-renowned artist Noria Mabasa whose works have
been showcased around the world and who tomorrow one of her art works which
depicts the women’s march that occurred in 1956 will be unveiled by our
president at the Union buildings. We have woman like Bheka Ntsanwisi - the
Shoprite–Checkers woman of the year 2005/06 - who embodies the true meaning of
women and is an inspiration to many. Bheka, like the heroines that marched to
the Union buildings facing the adverse challenges of that of being a woman and
black, does not fear challenges that face her. Although she’s living with colon
cancer she still has this renewed strength to help other people, extending a
hand of compassion like a mother should. This is what we need to celebrate as
woman and encourage each other in the different activities that we are involved
in.

This province is also blessed with the monarchy of queens, who rule over the
Balobedu people, the rain queen Modjadji. It just goes to show that, even
before we could dream of it, this province was already ahead in terms of the
emancipation of women.

And there are many more, which I might not be able to mention by name from
this province who has contributed extensively to the struggle and emancipation
of woman. The likes of Deputy Minister of Environmental Affairs Rejoice
Mabudafhasi, who also hails from Limpopo.

I like to thank the organisers for their invitation and wish all the women a
successful life. The struggles of the 1956 calibre and others before have laid
a basis for the emancipation of women and enabled us today to sing in unison
the songs of freedom. From this freedom, let there spring eternal prosperity
for the nation and its future generations regardless of gender.

I thank you.

Issued by: Department of Public Works
8 August 2006