Busy Looking Busy

The ANC Women’s League had some big meeting this week where Comrade Angie Motshekga reminded all the gals that their main role was to wait for men to give them permission to run for the top job in the land.

Of course spokespeople were quick to spin her lame self-loathing nonsense statement as something which it was not, but the Women’s League has already been shown to be nothing but another structure to placate the ambitious female cadres who jostle for position in the higher, rarified reaches of the ANC tree. At best it is that, at worst it’s just another noisy antechamber to the real political purpose of the party – finding jobs for people who could never get jobs outside of politics.

The Women’s League should be less concerned with securing half the offices in politics and more concerned with the fact that women in South Africa are treated by men as objects and chattel. They should be concerned with rape, the fact that men make ‘their’ women breeding machines that churn out babies without so much as a hope of consent, with adultery and cheating and a disgraceful lack of respect and parity that ‘cultural practices’ hand down to women.

The Women’s League look for press opportunities and sing songs and meet with lists of demands but do only these cosmetic things. They make not a peep when it comes to polygamy, to the plight of single-mothers in rural communities who raise children without any interest, let alone help, from the fathers of these children. The Women’s League, just like the now-defunct Youth League and dwindling Unions are there only to provide a bloc of votes at election time. When there aren’t any elections, they are patted on the head and ignored, like the second-rate, ‘weaker’ sex, also-rans they really are in the eyes of their masters.

The real women of South Africa just do what they have always done – they hike up their skirts, roll up their sleeves and raise the next generation, usually without men. If we don’t change this from the bottom up, and not the top-down, we have some gall calling ourselves civilized.