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THIS LAND IS HER LAND:

South Africa’s Rural Women’s Movement

by Sizani Ngubane

Director,

Rural Women’s Movement      

KwaZulu Natal, South Africa

e-mail:   sanele@sn.apc.org

 

Editor’s note:  The RWM is currently facing transition to an independent non-profit organization and is in critical need of funding.  Adequate resources will enable them to expand their research, train women in Legal representation, and launch a diversity of programs. Where women Have rights, everyone benefits.  For more information, please contact Ms. Ngubane. -  GF   

 

 

For almost all the members of the South Africa’s Rural Women’s Movement (RWM),  land offers a means of alleviating poverty, generating income, and paying for their children's education.  In the research I conducted in 1998, uses of land identified by women included vegetable gardens (for subsistence and income generating), grazing, infrastructure (roads, water, electricity), residential, and growing thatching grass, grass for making mats, etc.

 

Independent Rights of Rural Women

 

The most painful part is that to this day women are having difficulty accessing land in their own rights as women.  They do not have independent rights to land; these rights are still attached to their spouses.  On a farm, if her spouse has a misunderstanding with the farm owner, for instance in a bar over the weekend, and the farm owner decides to evict him, his children and his spouse get evicted too.

 

 Women are not recognized as independent farm tenants.  If a woman’s spouse dies on a farm, the farm owner gives her 12 months notice to move out of his farm no matter how long she has been living there.

 

Customary Inheritance Laws

 

Inheritance laws still give unequal succession rights to a girl and boy children.  The girl child is not allowed to inherit because it is assumed that when she gets married she will have access to her spouse's land and will take her family's wealth to her new spouse's family.

 

The RWM knows the constitution guarantees the rights of women, but this does not work in practice in rural areas.  The constitution has done nothing to protect women from the discriminatory effects of customary law with regard to inheritance.  The courts still say that "black law and custom" applies to all customary law marriages before 2000.  In the courts, this has been interpreted to mean that men inherit everything.  Even the Appeal Court case of Mrs. Mthembu in 1998 reinforced male inheritance, which is also supported by the magistrate's courts and the customary courts.  Time and again, widows and daughters lose their homes upon the death of their spouses and fathers, even when they are the people who maintained the homes.

 

Women in Decision Making

 

Take a look at who works the land and who makes decisions.  It is estimated that more than 80% of all agricultural work in Africa is done by women.    While some women have a preponderant role in food cultivation and processing, their contribution remains invisible, and the value of their labor is not recognized.

Text Box: … more than 80% of all agricultural work in Africa is done by women.  

Women's participation in land reform processes has not been on an equal basis with men.  It is not easy for rural women to have access to processes of political decision-making.  Many of the legal entities and committees that have been established in the land restitution and redistribution are still male dominated.

 

In situations where women do have access to their spouse's land, they lack decision - making power.  In one of the communities we work with, there is a woman whose plants were uprooted by her spouse because he wanted her to plant potatoes for him to sell to his neighbors in place of the mielies she had planted for her kitchen.  The income he was generating was spent mostly on liquor and other things and not for the family needs.

 

Women's needs and aspirations are hardly represented in most community structures.  The role of women in the establishment and planning of the projects is very minimal.  In most planning processes, community structures do not take the issue of gender equity into consideration.

 

In November 1999, I convened a rural women's workshop on Woman and Land for 250 rural women, the majority of whom represented community based organizations (CBOs) in the province.  Another aim was for me to present to the workshop the research findings on the women's organizations status quo I conducted in preparation for the establishment of the RWM.  At this workshop, the keynote speaker, a Commissioner for the Commission on Gender Equality, clearly portrayed difficulties experienced by rural women.  She highlighted the lack of consultation, in spite of women's knowledge of the dynamics of land ownership.  Disregard of women's experiences was cited as a major concern which needs to be addressed.

 

She argued that women are not a homogenous group and care should be taken about whose rights we refer to when talk about women's right to land: which land we refer to, whether it is farm land, tribal land or urban land.  She argued that these are critical issues which need to be addressed by policy-makers as women and men bring different views in each of these contexts of land ownership and access.

 

Culture and Customs

 

The RWM sees the claims of culture and family to be the primary obstacle to the establishment of women's human rights.  Over the past decades, in many areas women's human rights - their personal liberty and their fundamental freedoms - are constantly and overtly denied.  The rationale given most often for this denial of human rights to half the population is preservation of family and culture.

 

Also, as a result of the legacy of colonialism, apartheid, racial laws that still exist, the abuse of "customary law" and the chaotic state of land administration, rural women still suffer severe discrimination with regard to land and property rights and with regard to the inheritance of land and property:

 

            family after the death of her spouse, especially when the woman has no sons.

 

All of these problems are “justified” as customs or through customary law.  They cause great suffering and poverty for women, and deprive them of their dignity and equality.  Women who have no security of tenure are vulnerable to violence and abuse.

 

Text Box: Strong cultures are never static. They maintain themselves only by incorporating and adapting to change. The RWM is saying that because the claims of culture and family are a primary obstacle to establishment of women's human rights, the challenge for the South African community, including government, individual citizen, and NGOs, CBOs, is to recognize that, protecting rights of women within families, as well as within society, is not inimical to family life or to cultural integrity.  RWM is saying the family life and societies are strengthened when the capacity of all family members to function between themselves is fully developed.   Strong cultures are never static.  They maintain themselves only by incorporating and adapting to change.

 

Making Rural Women Heard

 

The only effective way to build confidence, spread information and lift the blanket of silence that covers these issues and relegates them to the status of “private family problems” is through grassroots mobilization and networking between rural women.  It is only at the level of village networks that women can provide one another with the practical support that is necessary to enable them to sustain legal cases and other challenges to discriminatory practices. 

 

Developing Strategies to Deal with Challenges

The strategies that the women have already developed go far beyond the legal challenges to discriminatory laws.  They include building confidence and mutual support, strategies to secure child support grants for orphans and poor children, confronting prosecutors and magistrates who refuse to deal with cases of abuse and dispossession, forming structures to liaise with different government departments (health, land, welfare) and liaising with sympathetic contacts in the Justice Department about how to draw up wills, register customary marriages, and secure support and inheritance rights for so-called illegitimate children and children of polygamous marriages. 

In our efforts to address the above obstacles/challenges, the RWM conducts a series of workshops for rural women focusing on:

 

 

 

Accomplishments of the RWM

 

RWM has created a space for rural women to speak for themselves.  In the past, NGOs and urban women’s organizations were speaking on their behalf.  Their husbands would not allow them to attend meetings.  Even if the husband were not at the meeting, women were not allowed to speak in public meetings.   For example, if a woman attended a meeting while her Text Box: RWM has created a space for rural women to speak for themselves. husband were working in one of the big cities, other men would inform him when he came back home during the festive season or during Easter holidays.  In the past, women would be battered in December for attending a meeting in January.

 

Community structures were made up of more than 99% men and women’s needs and interests were not integrated into the community planning. The rural women’s voice was not heard – but today there has been a shift in terms of representation of women.  Rural women are now represented in the traditional authorities, although a lot of work remains to be done.  Rural women are addressing portfolio committees in parliament and helping the portfolio committees to shape the laws and policies in a way that would be user-friendly to women, rural women in particular.

 

Since the inception of RWM, three women have been able to resist arranged marriages with their brother-in-laws after the deaths of their husbands.  Traditionally, a marriage for the widow with her husband’s brother can be arranged by senior members of the family, the rationale being that the widow and the children could still have a male person in the family to provide for them.  The assumption is that the widow will not able to provide for the children; indeed, in some areas, women are still not allowed to find a job in town.

 

RWM has helped some of the women establish income-generating projects.  South Africa has approximately 50% unemployment rate.    In some communities, all members of the family are unemployed and the whole family is dependant on the income generated by the women’s projects.

 

Most recently, the RWM actively participated in the consultation process of the Draft Communal Land Rights Bill and the Draft Traditional Leadership and Governance Framework Bill.  RWM was the only rural women’s movement in the whole country to participate in the consultation process of these bills.

 

Moving Forward

 A great deal of work around the problems /challenges facing women in relation to customary inheritance law, land and property rights, rural women’s participation in policy making has already been initiated.   However, continued work is restricted by lack of budgets to hold workshops of women in far-flung rural areas.  The groups and organizations affiliated with the RWM would greatly benefit from the opportunity to link up with one another and to workshop strategies around these barriers.

The RWM also aims to link the embryonic women’s networks to established NGOs and to provide linkages with statutory institutions such as the Gender Commission and the Human Rights Commission.

For this to happen, women’s groups need resources to enable them to hold and travel to meetings, travel between districts and possibly between provinces, and generally revive the process of interaction and mutual support between groups that characterize the RWM.

At this stage, a key opportunity exists to consolidate and expand rural women’s groups and networks.  There is enthusiasm and energy amongst rural women, and among some rural women members of parliament to support the process.  Without strong women’s networks of mutual support, the problems currently facing rural women cannot be effectively exposed, let alone addressed.

 

3/16/04