critical commentary

I was raised in the Eastern Cape by activist parents, between villages and townships no more than two hours from Hamburg. Like other black South Africans, my parents and their forebears endured successive waves of colonial oppression and decades of apartheid discrimination and dispossession. Yet, at family gatherings we frequently comment on how many people in this part of the Eastern Cape continue to live under the same ‘occupation’ conditions of extreme inequality, corruption and poverty as our disenfranchised forebears.

Over the decades since 1994, I have witnessed the demise of communities and lives once lit up by hope at the end of apartheid. Our province’s townships and villages, having hardly recovered from the welts and scars of the apartheid regime’s violence, have faced existential threats of increasing crime, poverty, disease, and a continually deteriorating infrastructure. The township I grew up in looks far worse than it did in the early years of democracy. I have witnessed relatives launched into poverty, and entire families I know of remain unemployed. Many of the children I grew up with have met violent, untimely deaths. As a journalist I am therefore keenly aware that the economic struggles of many South Africans are not merely a news story, but an ever-present and felt reality. I am also aware that black women in these communities, marginalised on multiple levels, bear the brunt of this.

The Women’s Charter Tapestries of the Keiskamma Art Project in Hamburg, Eastern Cape are a potent reminder that acts of resistance are still mandatory for survival in a country where governance has failed on so many levels and where patriarchal norms continue to deprive and disempower—especially rural—women. While women now have greater freedoms under the law, the majority of women’s lives have changed very little. The Women’s Charter Tapestries address this directly, explicitly referencing the wording of the Women’s Charter adopted by the political lobby group FEDSAW (Federation of South African Women) in 1954. It is helpful at this point to give some historical context.

Under the apartheid regime, black South Africans’ freedom of movement and access to health care, education and public services were severely curtailed by discriminatory laws and policies. The notorious Pass Law Act of 1952, requiring black South Africans over the age of 16 to carry a pass book (known as a dompas) was initially intended to curtail the movements of African men in the cities. Women were typically restricted to rural areas, where they were expected to carry out subsistence farming and look after their families, reliant on the meagre wages of their absent husbands. But, as conditions of hardship forced more and more women to migrate to urban areas, the apartheid government imposed the pass laws on African women too, making them direct targets of racist legislation for the first time.

On 17 April 1954, two years after the Pass Laws Act was promulgated, some 146 delegates representing organisations and women of all races and from all over South Africa, gathered to launch what would be known as the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW). Among FEDSAW’s many acts of resistance, perhaps the best known is the anti-pass protest of 9 August 1956, when some 20 000 women of all races marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria (the largest such gathering of women at the time) to protest against the compulsory carrying of passes by black women. One of a series of anti-pass law protests, the 1956 Women’s March was a powerful demonstration of women’s refusal to be silenced or intimidated by unjust laws. It is in recognition of this that post-apartheid South Africa observes Women’s Day on 9 August every year.

During the inaugural FEDSAW conference in the autumn of 1954, spear-headed by anti-apartheid activist Lillian Ngoyi, the delegates had adopted a manifesto known as the Women’s Charter. While a decade after its founding FEDSAW had ceased to exist, owing to increasing pressure in the form of violence, murder, arrests and bans by the apartheid state, the 1954 Women’s Charter remains a potent reminder of South African women’s rights:

We declare the following aims:

This organisation is formed for the purpose of uniting women in common action for the removal of all political, legal, economic and social disabilities. We shall strive for women to obtain:

• The right to vote and to be elected to all State bodies, without restriction or discrimination.
• The right to full opportunities for employment with equal pay and possibilities of promotion in all spheres of work.
• Equal rights with men in relation to property, marriage and children, and for the removal of all laws and customs that deny women such equal rights.
• For the development of every child through free compulsory education for all; for the protection of mother and child through maternity homes, welfare clinics, creches and nursery schools, in countryside and towns; through proper homes for all, and through the provision of water, light, transport, sanitation, and other amenities of modern civilisation.
• For the removal of all laws that restrict free movement, that prevent or hinder the right of free association and activity in democratic organisations, and the right to participate in the work of these organisations.
• To build and strengthen women's sections in the National Liberatory movements, the organisation of women in trade unions, and through the peoples' varied organisation.
• To cooperate with all other organisations that have similar aims in South Africa as well as throughout the world.
• To strive for permanent peace throughout the world.[1]

Just over a year later, much of what they had written was incorporated into and informed the Freedom Charter, adopted in Kliptown on 26 June 1955 at the Congress of the People, a non-racial alliance of various anti-apartheid movements. FEDSAW’s ideas on the equality of women, as outlined comprehensively in the Women’s Charter and later the Freedom Charter, would go on to inform the rights enshrined in the Constitution of democratic South Africa.

Fast forward some 62 years to the seemingly idyllic seaside village of Hamburg, Eastern Cape. The infamous pass laws have long gone, and the land and its people are no longer occupied by the forces of the apartheid government. Still, clearly evident here is the post-apartheid government’s failure to improve the lives of the majority of its citizens. Social ills have been further compounded by the health and economic impacts of Covid-19 and HIV/AIDS, especially when South African citizens were denied access to life-saving ARVs under Thabo Mbeki’s presidency. There is also evidence of the impact of systemic corruption, filtering down from the grand corruption of ‘State Capture’ during Jacob Zuma’s tenure as president. As a result, the women of the Keiskamma Art Project face challenges eerily similar to those mentioned by the women who formulated the Women’s Charter in 1954—challenges brought about by living conditions no less bearable for being in a post-apartheid context, in which discrimination is no longer institutionalised.

Their Women’s Charter Tapestries (2016), twelve stitched hessian discs exploring themes of women’s emancipation (originally designed for a planned Women’s Museum of Living History in Tshwane) reproduce selected clauses from the 1954 Charter and bring back to life the historic 1956 Women’s March to the Union Buildings. The work was inspired by and honours a group of elderly women in the Hamburg community who had in 1956 participated in a march to Peddie in solidarity with the women’s brave acts of resistance in Pretoria. Yet the piece is not only a memorial. By referencing clauses from the Women’s Charters of 1956 and 1994, and adding clauses with relevance to their own lives in 2016, the artists foreground how little has changed for many black women in South Africa.

Their vivid embroidered depictions of contemporary rural life reflect hardships as profound today as they were six decades before. While there are other Keiskamma Art Project artworks that speak to the history of constant struggle and resistance over the past three centuries, such as the iconic Keiskamma Tapestry, the Democracy Tapestry and the Biko Tapestry, the Women’s Charter Tapestries show not a narrative trajectory but a circularity, a repetition, a failure to achieve the hopeful visions of 1954 and 1994. Suspended in the oval atrium of the historic Women’s Jail at Constitution Hill, Johannesburg during the Keiskamma Art Project retrospective exhibition Umaf’ evuka, nje ngenyanga / Dying and rising, as the moon does (September 2022 to March 2023), the individual tapestries appeared to mirror and circle one another. By contrast, the linear format of the Keiskamma Tapestry and Democracy Tapestry in the adjacent wings of the Women’s Jail suggested a more hopeful narrative of progress.

Phrases recalling the content of the 1956 Charter are painstakingly stitched into the artwork, for example: ‘Women’s lot, we share the cares of our menfolk,’ ‘Removal of all laws that discriminate against us as women,’ ‘A single society, we join hands with our men to remove social evils,’ and ‘Need for education, emancipation.’ There is also stitched text overtly referencing the 1994 Women’s Charter: ‘As women citizens of South Africa we are here to claim our rights,’ ‘Recognition of work at home,’ ‘Recognition of our work in the community,’ and ‘We claim full and equal participation.’ The phrases sewn into the pieces in ‘Present and hope for the future’ emerged from discussions around what still needs to be achieved for women to feel equal and have dignity. These include, ‘Keep girl children in school, choice of family planning, housing for all, freedom to choose, keep our children safe,’ ‘Stop abuse of women and children, houses for women and children, free tertiary education, improved education, employment for women,’ and, more optimistically, ‘We are strong, we have won, we stand together to face the future.’

As they made their case for women’s rights, the women who authored the original Women’s Charter in 1954 wrote in a subsection titled, ‘Women’s Lot’:

We women share with our menfolk the cares and anxieties imposed by poverty and its evils. As wives and mothers, it falls upon us to make small wages stretch a long way. It is we who feel the cries of our children when they are hungry and sick. It is our lot to keep and care for the homes that are too small, broken and dirty to be kept clean. We know the burden of looking after children and land when our husbands are away in the mines, on the farms, and in the towns earning our daily bread.

We know what it is to keep family life going in pondokkies and shanties, or in overcrowded one-room apartments. We know the bitterness of children taken to lawless ways, of daughters becoming unmarried mothers whilst still at school, of boys and girls growing up without education, training or jobs at a living wage.

The Keiskamma artists’ Women’s Lot, we share the cares of our menfolk is a direct reference to the seminal 1954 Women’s Charter. Here the artists capture scenes from their daily lives in Hamburg, showing women in the community looking after children, cooking, cleaning and fetching water, while the men are off in the cities as migrant labourers. Through this juxtaposition of past and present the work commemorates the struggles of the women who led the way in the 1950s and at the same time cries out against the grave injustices that persist, told by those who bear the burden to this day. The artwork is an indictment of our present society, as well as a living document of historic acts of resistance that have shaped, and continue to shape, post-apartheid South Africa.

During 2022, the Keiskamma Art Project held a workshop attended by artists who had been with the project since its beginnings as well as younger members who had joined in later years. It was an opportunity for the women to reflect on their personal histories in relation to the country’s colonial, apartheid and post-apartheid history. They spoke of the positive changes that have come with the advent of a democratic South Africa, noting the increased educational opportunities for women no longer limited by family responsibilities. They talked of the comparative domestic burden for their mothers’ and grandmothers’ generation, who were wholly dependent on their husbands financially. These women had to bear many children (up to 15 in one artist’s account), while also having to carry water from rivers and do the housekeeping, cooking, gardening and other physically intensive chores.

Yet, while their experiences reflected a number of improved social conditions and opportunities, for many women here and elsewhere in South Africa, much remains the same. Although the end of apartheid brought with it increased access to school-level education for black people across the country, millions of young people, especially girls and women, still struggle to access quality education. Many have to drop out of school to look after impoverished families. For those able to make it to matric, the cost of tertiary education often makes it impossible to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to pursue life as skilled professionals. This effectively sentences these matriculants to life on the overcrowded and underpaid unskilled labour market, if they are even lucky enough to find work. Those who have the good fortune to graduate from tertiary institutions are faced with the country’s staggering unemployment rate, which continues to climb above 40 percent for young people.

This has a devastating impact on the lives of the country’s black women. Like the women who formulated the Women’s Charter in 1954, many of the Hamburg artists are intimately familiar with ‘the bitterness of children taken to lawless ways, of daughters becoming unmarried mothers whilst still at school, of boys and girls growing up without education, training or jobs at a living wage.’ A number of them have recounted suffering physical and emotional abuse at the hands of fathers, boyfriends and husbands on whom they were financially dependent. Often, these women were at the time unemployed and dependent on partners who turned around and weaponised their dependence against them. Their lived experiences reflect the experiences of countless South Africans, the majority of whom do not have a voice or creative outlet to ensure that their existence is validated and their stories heard in a society that often renders its poor voiceless.

Inequality remains entrenched in South African society, and circumstances are often just as difficult for women now as they were in 1954, almost 70 years ago. While much has changed, much remains the same. The harsh reality of life for many South Africans, and women in particular, calls for continued acts of resistance. This is why the remarkable stitched stories of the Women’s Charter Tapestries transcend their status as works of art, to be contemplated on gallery walls. The tapestries are living documents, testimony not only to the artists’ lived realities, but to the harsh lives of many of their fellow South Africa’s citizens. They are works of protest compelled by the same sense of injustice as the 1954 gathering that launched FEDSAW and the 1956 Women’s March, and represent an important contribution to the country’s history of resistance. A luta continua.

[1] Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW), The Women’s Charter, pamphlet, 17 April 1954. A later two-page typescript of the document was digitised by SAHA (South African History Archive) in 2011 and included among downloadable copies of primary sources for the SAHA virtual exhibition Women hold up half the sky: commemorating women in the struggle.