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Opinionista

At 95, Gertrude Shope remains committed to a non-sexist and non-racial society

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Naledi Pandor is the South African Minister of International Relations and Cooperation.

Gertrude Shope, who turned 95 this month, is a humble yet firm leader who has been fearless in pursuit of justice for the vulnerable and equality for women and girls.

This is a tribute to a life well-lived, dedicated to our anti-apartheid icon, Mma Gertrude Shope, who turned 95 on 15 August. The month of August is celebrated as Women’s Month in South Africa. It is a time to honour and highlight the enormous courage and contribution of women to the Struggle against apartheid and to acknowledge their self-sacrifice, commitment and high political ideals.

Mma Shope belongs to a rare breed of women whose impact on the political progress of our country is yet to be fully appreciated. This is a leader who has pursued the vision of freedom set out by her political movement, the African National Congress (ANC), and her country, South Africa, with such distinction that her narrative is almost mythic.

Her political activism within the historical agency of the ANC emanated from shared values and objectives with the latter political formation, not only about what was wrong in the society into which she was born, but also about how to correct such wrongs through re-envisioning a united, democratic, non-racial, non-sexist and just society.

Mma Shope fully deserves the tribute we present today. She is a humble yet firm leader who has been fearless in pursuit of justice for the vulnerable and equality for women and girls.

Her self-effacing modesty masks a never-say-die spirit. It is a spirit that defied the odds, sustained her fight for liberation and animated her contribution to the blossoming freedom and democracy that flourished after April 1994.

A warrior against gender oppression, a warrior against racial oppression and a warrior against the oppression of workers, Mma Shope lived a life in the service of all that was ideally lovely in the domain of human experience.

During her lifetime, she has carried out these exacting roles with exemplary fortitude and rare commitment.

Equipped with a perceptive mind, she developed a sharpened grasp of the multi-dimensional nature of oppression, ably dissecting the underlying nexus between racial, gender and class oppression that shaped South Africa’s history, defined our very notion of being human and bequeathed to us the baneful legacy that continues to toxify post-apartheid political imagery.   

Very early on in our history when the reigning social mystifications legitimated gender inequality even within what was supposed to be progressive liberation politics, Mma Shope refused to concede ground. She knew that gender was a social construct, knew no colour, and was maintained by legitimising mythology which served entrenched patriarchal interests.

In this sense, she is among the pioneers who not only fought against the sociopolitical practice of gender erasure, but also posited both the possibility and desirability of gender equality as a presupposition of the very definition of the idea of freedom. She, therefore, resolved to break down the invidious social mould that sought to define women as perpetual underlings.

Her prosecution of the liberation Struggle was in turn shaped by this macro-understanding of the historical architecture of South Africa’s oppression.

Few are women and men who have served the noble cause of liberation of humankind for 66-odd years with such impeccable dedication, both within and outside their country of birth, without ever putting a single foot wrong.

She continued to be an avid exponent of gender agenda and workers’ rights during her exile travails, during which she lived all over the world, including Prague, Botswana, Tanzania, Czechoslovakia, Zambia and Nigeria.

Her deep impulses for gender equality took her struggles all over the world, including the Nairobi Women’s Meeting to which she led the ANC delegation. This deeper understanding of the intersection of oppression enabled her to work for the World Federation of Trade Unions, allowing her to develop an acute international perspective of the workers’ exploitation.

A product of this turbulent history, she has emerged from it a well-rounded revolutionary, who would continue to enrich the human experience after the watershed April 1994 democratic breakthrough. As a Parliamentarian, she served the democratic government with honour, while championing the cause of gender equality by heading up the ANC Women’s League between 1991 and 1993.

Even in retirement, Mma Shope exudes an air of majesty and dignity as a sage of the age, belonging to the same illustrious historical galaxy of revolutionaries that includes Charlotte Maxeke, Ruth First, Fatima Meer, Helen Joseph, Sophia de Bruyn, Ruth Mompati, Lillian Ngoyi and many more.

We thank Mma Shope for all that she has been, done and said for the oppressed people of the world, be they workers, black people or women.  This Women’s Month, we thank her as women for insisting on our visibility on the agenda of history.  

When the definitive history of the nobility of the Struggle against the oppression of humanity by another is finally committed to paper, the name Gertrude Ntiti Shope will enjoy pride of place in it. DM

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