Dear Mbokodo: We did not march so women could carry the nation

Dear Mbokodo, if that is what they are calling you now

Something of your voice has reached me. Not the words. Seventy years carry only its shape, but enough to know you are arguing, and that some of the argument is with us.

Forgive the hand. I am writing this standing up.

We are on his steps. About 20,000 of us, they will say when they count us later, have come up this hill in our best clothes. This is something you should understand about us before anything else: we dressed.

Some are wearing the green, black and gold. Some have come in traditional dress. The Indian women are in white saris. There are babies on backs, and domestic workers have brought the children they look after. Women travelled through the night and arrived in twos and threes because even the form of our gathering is regulated.

We came carrying signatures.

He is not here.

The prime minister has refused to meet us. None of his senior officials has come in his place. So we place the bundles of signed petitions outside his office door. Our names are there, and beside them the marks of women who could not write their names. Women have crossed a country to speak to power, and power has answered with an empty room.

Silence

Then Lilian calls for silence.

For 30 minutes, thousands of women stand without speaking. No minister instructs us. No magistrate tells us when to begin or when to stop. One of our own decides what we will do with our bodies and our time.

This letter comes from inside those 30 minutes. In the silence, you can hear what power says when it refuses to speak.

We came today about a book.

They had already begun issuing them to women in Winburg. A photograph. A thumbprint. Entries concerning work and permission. A document through which the state could decide who might live in a town, who might seek work there, who might remain with her family and who could be arrested for failing to produce it on demand.

The book was not only paper. It was a way of governing.

It made the state’s question portable. You carried the demand to explain yourself in your own pocket. At any moment, a man in uniform could say produce, and you had to stop, put down what you were carrying and account for your presence.

That is the part I cannot get past. Not only the prison or the fine. The stopping.

We wanted something for our daughters that sounded small only because freedom is often made to sound small: to move across their own country without having to explain where they were going.

But the subject of one march was never the size of our politics.

Two years before this march, women from across the country gathered to write a Women’s Charter. We demanded the vote and the right to hold public office. We demanded opportunities for work and equal pay; equality in marriage, property and the guardianship of children; maternity care, clinics, crèches, decent homes, water, electricity, transport and sanitation. We demanded the removal of laws restricting movement and political organisation.

We knew that freedom could not be divided into convenient pieces. A woman could not be free in the voting queue and powerless in her marriage. She could not be equal before the law and dependent on an employer for the right to remain in the city. Citizenship was thin where water, housing, childcare and transport consumed the hours in which it had to be lived.

Still, our charter was not the final vocabulary of freedom. We wrote from the world we could see.

I do not know your name. I know only the name they have placed on you: Mbokodo. It cannot hold all of you, any more than our petition could name every freedom you would one day need.

Perhaps they use it when they want to praise you. More often, I suspect, when they need you to endure what should have been changed.

That is why I am troubled not by the fact that you remember us, but by the way they have taught you to remember us.

Every August, they dress us again. They place our faces on posters and our names on programmes. They call women to podiums to tell one another how powerful women are. Then they sing the line we left you and send you back to a country in which too much of what we demanded is still treated as a private difficulty for women to solve.

The anthem has outlived the programme.

Seventy years from where I am standing, I can see the government of your time choosing an anniversary theme: Empowered Women Empower The Nation.

It is a tidy sentence, which begins halfway through.

Tell me, Mbokodo: Who empowers you? With which resources? Through which institutions? At whose expense, and on whose time?

And why must you justify your freedom by describing what you will do for the nation once you have it?

A right to power

Of course women with power change societies. We knew that before your conference banners announced it. But freedom is not a debt a woman incurs to the nation. A woman does not have a right to power because she will spend it wisely on everybody else. She has a right to power because she is a human being and a citizen.

The slogan says nothing about who controls land, money, time, safety or public institutions. It does not ask what must be redistributed, repaired or surrendered. It presents the empowered woman as if she appeared fully formed, carrying her own ladder, and then immediately gives her the nation to carry as well.

You know this script. It may have been performed over your own life.

Stand up.

Mbokodo! Wathint’ abafazi, wathint’ imbokodo! You are the rock. You are the backbone of the nation, the mother of the nation, the heartbeat of the nation. Give her nothing and she makes supper. Give her a shack and she makes a home. Give her a dead man’s debts and she pays them. Give her a child who is not hers and she raises it. Give her a dry tap and she wakes before dawn to wait for the water truck. Give her a country that has run out of room and she will find space for one more person.

Aah, Mbokodo! Strong. Resilient. Unbreakable.

Now everybody clap, collect your gift bag, and go back to the office.

Sit down.

Do you hear what happened?

A claim on public power became a celebration of private endurance. The nation may withdraw, the institution may fail, the employer may exploit, the household may consume, and the woman will improvise. Her ability to survive the arrangement is then offered as proof that the arrangement can continue.

The woman beside me shifts the child on her back without breaking the silence. My feet have begun to ache.

We understood that freedom had to be lived somewhere: in the wage, the home, the clinic, the marriage, the journey to work and the time a woman could call her own. Those are still the places I would look.

A domestic worker may have no written contract; a care worker, a stipend rather than a living wage. For the woman whose job also provides the room in which she sleeps, naming abuse can mean losing both income and shelter. When childcare is unaffordable or a clinic queue consumes the day, somebody’s work, income and rest must give way, and too often that somebody is a woman. A widow may discover that the home in which she has spent her adult life belongs, on paper, to somebody else. Rights exist, and the cost of enforcing them can place them beyond the reach of the person who needs them.

I have watched from inside this silence, and I will not diminish what was won in order to make my argument sound more devastating. Millions stood in queues to vote. Women own property and invoke a Constitution that recognises their equality. Women sit in Parliament and run departments, provinces and institutions.

The demand for public office is among the most visibly answered on our list. But we did not ask only for the door. The room is not separate from bread and butter. It decides the wage, the water budget, the clinic, the transport system, the ownership of land and whose unpaid time will compensate when all of these fail.

Your country learned to read the demand for entry in isolation. It opened the door and called the room transformed.

I am looking at the windows of this building. When a woman enters one of those rooms in your time, what is she measured by?

Representation

Representation is a right. It is not a repair contract. Yet she is weighed by how much she repairs, absorbs and carries without complaint. The room is weighed by nothing. It is required to admit her, not to change.

When the institution fails, or when its older failures persist, the failure carries her name. Not the department’s name. Hers. Her name is then used against the next woman, and against the demand itself: we tried that, and look.

A woman in office remains responsible for what she does there. Women can reproduce patriarchal power and participate in institutional harm. Some decide that survival requires proving they are no danger to the thing they were sent there to change. That can become complicity. But their presence does not absolve the institution, and their failure does not invalidate the right of women to be there.

We did not send one woman up this hill to discover whether she was strong enough. We came as 20,000.

What stands behind the woman who enters your rooms? What can hold her when she resists, correct her when she begins to speak in the institution’s voice, and receive her when the room rejects her? Without organised power behind her, a woman enters an institution larger and older than herself. The institution calls that leadership. When she holds herself together, the country calls it strength.

Which brings me back to the book.

The passbook no longer determines whether a black woman may enter the city. I do not mistake every present injustice for that machinery returned in other clothes. But the book teaches something that remains useful: a right becomes thin when somebody else controls the conditions under which you may use it.

You may possess freedom of movement and still calculate which road you can take, at what hour and at what risk. What travels across 70 years is not the word “produce”. It is the struggle over who sets the conditions of a woman’s presence, labour, safety and belonging.

Behind me a woman coughs and stops herself. Nobody turns.

Power has found new rooms in your world, and some of them have no doors I would recognise.

A woman’s face is carried to strangers who never asked to be shown it, and she cannot call it back. I do not understand the machine. I understand what it is for.

Elsewhere, a good law stands over a clinic where nobody is willing to do what the law permits. A right is granted on paper and then quietly starved at the bedside.

Share registers and land titles

And then there are the boardrooms, where wealth is owned rather than administered. Your country counts the women in Parliament, but remains silent about the women missing from the share registers and the land titles.

Beyond that, the shapes blur. But you are not waiting at the end of our petition. Some of you are changing the terms of rooms you fought to enter. Some are leaving them. Some are building on different ground altogether.

Some are naming the man in the family. Some are naming the man in the movement, which is harder. It was difficult in our organisations too. We did not do it often enough.

Not everything you build will escape the power of the world you inherited. Not everything will endure. I cannot tell from here which will. Still, some of it is entirely yours.

And now I return to imbokodo.

In our mouths, it was a warning to power. We were telling Strijdom that women organised together were a political force the state could not dismiss. Strike at women and you would meet organised resistance. We were not issuing instructions to individual women to survive everything.

Something happened to the word as it travelled towards you. It was lifted out of an organised movement and placed upon the shoulders of a solitary woman. The warning lost its target. Mbokodo became a compliment offered to the woman who could be relied upon to absorb more.

A rock does not need wages. It does not need rest, childcare, safety or time to grieve. It does not need the state to work. It simply remains where it has been placed and bears the weight.

Perhaps this is what I most need to tell you. I am not asking you to be less strong. Strength carried us up this hill and holds thousands of us here now, saying nothing. I am asking why your strength is still accepted as payment for what you have been denied.

Do not abandon the word. Restore its direction. It was aimed upwards, at power. It was a warning, not a job description.

Our 30 minutes have almost run their course. Soon we will sing.

When you sing with us, remember the order in which things happened. The song came after the petition. It did not replace it.

Praise costs nothing, which is why it is always available.

The question is not only what women must become, but what institutions must surrender. Beside each answer, the name of whoever must give it, and the date.

We did not climb this hill to become your metaphor. We came as political people carrying a programme for freedom, asking not whether women were ready for power, but whether power was ready to yield.

The petition we left at the door is still there. It was never a script for your future.

The next one will not be ours to write.

But when you go back for an answer, do not go alone.

We did not.

— One woman among 20,000

Union Buildings, Pretoria

9 August 1956 DM