African Renaissance Podcast
The African Renaissance Podcast hosted by Dr Mbuyiseni Ndlozi provides a stage for vital conversations with actors working to improve the lives of African people. It provides sharp analysis & critique of Africa's social, political & economic history.
African Renaissance Podcast
Episode 40 - Prof. Zine Magubane: How Class, Capitalism & Race Shaped Women's Rights
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In conversation with Prof. Zine Magubane on the history and sociology of women's struggles in South Africa, from the colonial period to the present.
The conversation examines the significance of the 1956 Women's March, the relationship between race, class and gender, and the different experiences of Black and white women under colonialism and apartheid. Prof. Magubane discusses how the apartheid system disrupted the Black family, transformed labour and household life, and shaped the conditions under which African women organised and struggled.
Okay, thank you so much for for for being with with us from Boston. Uh Boston is Massachusetts. Yes, it is. Are you are you far where are you far from the World Cup?
SPEAKER_02Uh Boston Stadium was about um without World Cup traffic, about 35 minutes away. With World Cup traffic, it was about two and a half hours away.
Dr Mbuyiseni NdloziAh did traffic was terrible. Did you pay any attention? Are you a soccer fan?
SPEAKER_02Oh well, my partner is a sports agent, a soccer agent. So I went to several games. I did not get to see South Africa because I was out of town, but I saw France Morocco. Um which was a good game. Yeah. And what else did I say? Haiti Scotland. So I saw a few games.
Dr Mbuyiseni NdloziYeah, yeah. Okay, and are you safe? Uh I mean, you are Makubani, and we know that uh the Trump administration's first campaign in the US when he took the administration ranks or the White House targeted um academics of non-American origin on the one hand, but this uh like targeting black studies, African American studies, da-da-da-da-da. Are you are you are you okay?
SPEAKER_02Uh yes, on a day-to-day, I feel perfectly safe. It's not it doesn't work on the level of you feel like fear for your life every day. It's more of a chilling effect. In the sense of one, there are less resources in terms of conferences being given, talks to be funded. So in that way, there's just less opportunities to get your work your work out there. And they've managed to do that more by squeezing universities of funds than directly saying to people you can't speak. And then, of course, the second chilling effect is you know, you're maybe less likely to write an op-ed or something like that because you don't want to become a target. And I have had friends who are sociologists who have definitely been targeted. And, you know, it can get frightening for them. So it's that kind of thing. It's not direct, it's more subtle, but you definitely feel a shift in mood. And finally, in the state of Florida, sociology is particularly under attack with Governor DeSantis, you know, declaring it a woke ideology, saying he's going after it. Yes, sociology was removed from the general education curriculum in Florida. So also America is such a federalized system, very fragmented. So sociologists working in southern schools are feeling much more threatened than people in the Northeast. So I happen to be in a state that is liberal. Yeah. So I feel less targeted. And Trump is more concerned for going after Harvard. And so he can't be bothered with Boston College, where I happen to be. He's got his sights set on Harvard.
Dr Mbuyiseni NdloziOkay. 2026 marks this important year of the women's march in 1956 in South Africa. And um, it is often an occasion to reflect about organized women's struggles. The organized organizations, uh, but all other forms of organization, uh, which we saw obviously, women marching in 1956 against past laws. I wonder if we could maybe begin this conversation in that regard with, I mean, however brief a history that takes us or that builds up, as it were, to this important moment of 1956. What is the history of organized women's uh struggles in South Africa?
SPEAKER_02Oh complicated question. The interesting thing about organized women's struggles in South Africa is to some degree women organized around what we would characterize as so-called gender issues. And as people usually understand gender issues as a kind of siloed issue, separate from issues of, for example, um class inequality. That's not really how the um South African women's struggle unfolded. That's a little bit more how the American women's struggle unfolded. But in the South African women's struggle, there was always been a strong component of organizing around class-based issues. The way in which they unfolded for women is women's particular positioning as oftentimes the people who are directly responsible for things like caring for children. Right? And so a person who got involved in the struggle would not do so abstractly, saying, I feel oppressed as a woman and I want equality. It would be much more rooted in a very, very particular material circumstance. Things like, I can't get food for my children. They're raising the rates for buses, so I can't get to work. Uh, my partner or husband has been sent to the mines. Um, and these particular set of class uh of past laws are impacting our ability or my particular ability to provide for the family. And given the migrant labor system, much of the care of the household fell on women. So oftentimes, struggles that in which women dominated, or the issues that brought them into the struggle, you might consider very household-based issues. They might even be based around a mother's ability to provide for the family. And so I think in that way, there's this sort of idea that South African women's struggles were not radical in the way that we've been trained to think what radical issues are. Or they did not necessarily articulate a strong desire to separate from the household and go out and do something in the so-called public sphere. That's not the way women's struggles unfolded. But I think the dominance of Western narratives about what a woman's struggle is about and looks like have colored how we've understood South African struggles. So I would definitely say in the period previous, leading up to the 56 Women's March, um, I would say that women's organizing was again reflective of how are things like the past laws impacting us on the household level. I mean, of course, again, there was every South African struggle has a particular every South African movement has a particular class character. So I hate to generalize about women's struggles in the abstract. It's sometimes it's better to talk about particular figures, but I don't know if I'm answering your question comprehensively.
Dr Mbuyiseni NdloziIt is an interesting uh way into the conversation because um the and I've seen in your work you emphasize apartheid as a system that particularly attacked the black family, um that targeted, as it were, as a system, the the black family, that it was about on the one hand, separating uh children and parents, uh husbands and wives, uh, but also uh the very class character of it thereof. Uh people, not just men, had to migrate from the rural areas. In some instances, actually, many instances, women too uh migrated, but the very laws treated women differently to men in how they settled in the urban centers. I wonder if you if it's an opportune moment to immediately introduce how the differences between these black women and African women in particular, um and uh feminism of white women. What would you say were the key differences, as it were, under colonization and apartheid?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. All right, I see where you're going. Well, in order to really properly appreciate the nature of the type of oppression that black South African women faced, you have to go to the period leading up to apartheid, so before 1948. In particular, how the colonial system unfolded and what its particular objectives were. The colonial system's main objective after the discovery of diamonds and gold was one, to be able to have enough labor for those mines, two, to have the labor uh delivered at the cheapest possible cost, which meant not paying anything like a family wage. It meant a single individual man living in a barracks. It also meant that the system did not wish to be responsible for people when they were not working in terms of social security of any kind. So the rural areas became the place that were supposed to administer that social welfare function. When people couldn't work, they were dumped back in those areas. When you were old, when you were sick at the end of your working life. All right. Secondly, in order to get people to go to the mines, you had to break the household as a unit of production. So again, in sort of a Western bourgeois way of thinking about a family, it's all about like love and bonds and things like that, which are of course there. But very much in the African context, the family is also a unit of production. People do not need to go to work for wages if they can provision for themselves. And women's labor was crucial for that, whether it's working in agriculture, um, preparing food stuff, whatever it is. The household is a unit of production. And that unit of production was what sociologists call a self-provisioning society. You don't need to go out and get money to buy things. The society provisions itself. Women's labor was central to that. So in order to get people into those mines, you had to break that self-provisioning society. And that meant breaking the family in a particular type of way. A colonial system, obviously, uh it unfolds on racial lines. So right there, it introduces a radically different experience for people of African descent versus Europeans. And that the unity of being a woman is immediately fractured because the two household systems diverge on very different lines. And again, the way in which the African family as a unit of production had to be broken gave a particular cast to how women were going to struggle or what liberation meant. So that is that pre-colonial period long before 1948. That starts with the frontier wars, it goes to the 1800s, it um deep even into the 1930s. Um, it takes a very, very long time to break that household as a unit of production.
Dr Mbuyiseni NdloziAnd the period that follows, which forces the circumstances of organizing in the name of the subject category called woman, um, that we now see culminating into this massive march, in what way then does that manifest, particularly uh in the urban versus rural areas?
SPEAKER_02So, given the way in which the mind wanted single men, they did not want to pay a man as though he had a family. And in fact, you only migrated as a single man, right? So, right away, that introduces a fracture along the family lines. It makes it such that one, women are immediately thrust into the labor force because the mind the minds don't pay a family wage. So immediately for a person, you know, what I like to say assigned to the category female, what it means is you are both responsible, you your struggle for equality is simultaneously always already in the workforce, right? The entire apartheid system relies on the fact that women must work. They must both work, must remain in the rural areas as this sort of cash place for people to be dumb when their working lives are over. But also, the woman's wage is absolutely necessary to supplement the family. So immediately for an African woman, a liberation struggle is both a workplace-based struggle, right? But also the kind of distortion of family life that happens in apartheid system affects relationships between men and women, between men and children, between women and their children. So the kind of traditional Western issues around what how how gender issues are defined when they're siloed off from the class issues, those issues are also playing out very much so. So it's kind of a dual-based um struggle, right? So again, the whole notion of male dominance, well, some of it is wrapped up in I'm the breadwinner. But of course, the woman is also the breadwinner. So those kind of what we might consider a typical gender-based struggle or a struggle-based um where men and women can be imagined to have separate and opposing interests. Indeed, those did play out. But again, that larger colonial and apartheid context gives a shape to the nature of the oppression and the nature of the struggle that does diverge very strongly along racial lines.
Dr Mbuyiseni NdloziUm, the we'll come back to the sort of black men and black uh woman uh having sometimes similar but also opposing interests. Because of course there is uh a proper struggle in black women, I mean black men and uh authority uh having to think of women as equal to them, as deserving of a quality. But I I want to come back to that, except in this case, I'd like you to sort of complete the explanation in relation, since I am tracing the politics of feminism in South Africa, in relation to white women's struggles, what are white women's interests and what are they, as it were, shaped by? Because one underestimates or takes for granted that women as a whole should naturally unite on the picket lines, unite against patriarchy, male power, violent masculinity and all forms of masculinity, but there is an obvious fracture here that is not just racial between whites and black women. What are the circumstances that informs white feminism as it came to be known?
SPEAKER_02Ah, well, that's interesting. You say that there's an assumption that women have interests in common. I'm skeptical about that. Um, I think one of the I think tragedies is too strong a word, but one of the problems with the way in which people think about what is a so-called woman's issue or you know, a woman's issue around which we unite, it oftentimes tends to occlude the way in which the class structure fractures experience. So even the notion of white feminism and black feminism, I always prefer the notion of bourgeois feminism because there are feminist movements that are strongly articulated to kind of a socialist-based struggle, right? And when you articulate your struggle in socialist terms, the notion of the siloing off of issues starts to look different. So I beg your patience for a moment. For example, a very contemporary issue, jumping to the future, is something like people talk about like trans issues, right? Something like gender-affirming surgery or care. In the United States, that is called a so-called cultural issue. And when it's framed like that, it's very vulnerable to attack. But if you actually say, all right, for a moment, let's suspend gender-affirming care and simply talk about, I would like to get rid of a health system that is based upon the profit motive, socialized medicine, health care for all, of all types, whether you're getting gender reassignment or getting your tooth fixed or getting your appendix out. If people are struggling around universal health care, and you say to people, well, one of the conditions of universal health care is this person might be able to get gender reaffirming surgery. Are you willing to give up your own right to get your medical needs met in order to deny this person? Most people would say, Well, no, I don't really care. So when things like are framed not as a siloed issue of a sexuality issue, and kind of placed on that broader canvas, even what is called a gender issue or a sexual issue to me shakes out very differently. Hopefully that makes sense. So when people talk about white feminism, I actually tend to talk about bourgeois feminism. A bourgeois feminism talks about issues of equality in terms of so-called equal opportunity or equal opportunity to compete in the capitalist system, or the number of women CEOs that you have, things like that, without actually questioning should we have CEOs in the first place? Right? It is a difference to say. So there's a kind of a way of a bourgeois notion of equality where we each are seeking to equally have the opportunity to exploit. So we have women CIA agents, women FBI agents. So, you know what I mean? Like an equal opportunity to be. An exploiter. That's one way of framing issues. Another way is actually taking some of those issues and thinking about them in a way that brings a class politics into it. So again, I well, recognizing that race has fractured the feminist movement, I actually think, especially in our situation of South Africa in 2026 with the US in 2026, you will find that even black women do not have a unified set of interests. We have a sharply class divided society in South Africa and the United States of America, which gives me pause in speaking sort of broadly about white women's interests and black women's interests.
Dr Mbuyiseni NdloziI see. But isn't it true, though, that the assessments of the movements leading towards democracy in South Africa often clashed precisely on racial lines that white women, Fatima Mir, for instance, writes about the ways in which or the concept she calls white women of leisure, and that this leisure, the free time to study, the free time to be pretty, the free time to be culturally explorative, rested on the labor of African women in their kitchens, but also to take care of their children, to grow white children. This is really the demand for the franchise for white women was underscored, at least from a materialist point of view, as Fatima Mir would have it, by the free labor. And this reminds me as well that some of the scholars talk about, uh, for instance, how in Second Sex of Simone de Beauvoir, the concept or the image of the woman is like this dull, fragile, uh, you know, being. But white women, that is who they are. But when it came to black women, particularly in transatlantic slavery and uh in South Africa's labor history, is that black women can take anything. They are tough, they are strong, but often also hypersexualized. These are the racial uh, you know, uh complications that make organizing women uh in in the picket lines across races difficult. I wonder if you can talk us through how these issues affected um the struggle during uh during apartheid.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. All right, so your question is one that when you answer it, time. I mean, historical sociologist, time is extremely important. So in the 50s, in the time uh the comment that you mentioned from Fatimir, during those particular times, race and racism were over-determinative of people's experiences. And so what you described is absolutely true. The very basis of the apartheid system, a huge part of it um involved the idea that no white person should sink below a certain level. So if you go to like 1930, there was a thing called the poor white study, actually sponsored by an American philanthropy, the Carnegie Corporation. And the whole thing is about white poverty, how to get rid of it, basically. And their governing ideology in that poor white study was you must lift even the lowliest white person to a certain class level. So, what that did was the ordinary struggles within the so-called white community, whether it was within the Afrikaner, within the English, Afrikaner, English, those class contradictions got muted because really what they were able to do is provide a massive social welfare program for poor whites to lift them to a certain level. And of course, that's taken out of the hide of black people. The immediate context in which men women encounter one another in South Africa is the maids and madams context. So for the period uh during the women's march, for example, really up until 1994, where people don't even have the vote, one thing is it does is it tends to reduce the impact, both organizing-wise, in people's consciousness of class differences within black communities, right? Because everybody's denied the vote. So even during apartheid, not every African woman woman was in the maids and madams context. Some were, others were nurses, some were teachers, some were Ranshabins, some, you know, Oliver Tombaugh's wife, who the he was a real estate agent. So there were always class contradictions and class differences within black communities. There never were not. But when everybody is denied the vote, that tends to be submerged somewhat, right? And again, if you said absolutely the maids and madams context is over-determinative. Um in the United States, the closest thing we have to that is the slave context, right? That the slave mistress, her entire being is funded and taken out of the hides of black people. No question. So during that time, of course, the racial divide is real, determinative, and an extremely difficult barrier to overcome struggle lies. People do have sharply opposing interests across racial lines and seemingly united interests within racial lines. There's no question about it. However, that is a very time-bound thing. I mean, what you're going to find, again, if we fast forward to South Africa of 2026, and particularly the United States of America of 2026, right? The United States of America, I mean, with South Africa, you have a black majority country and a small white minority living at leisure at that expense. In the United States of America, you have a large white population. So even in the United States of America, with all its racism, the majority of white poor people in the United States of America are white people, right? In black people, the proportions with our population, but you have an overwhelming country of white people who are not of need. What does that mean? It means if you fast forward to 2026, problems that seemed exclusive to people of African descent in the United States of America are hitting white people hard. Everything from we were told that there was a crisis of black masculinity, black and white women, black and white, black women and black men were not getting married. White people 2026, with our terrible economy and our declining empire, same problem. Marriages are at an all-time low. Men and women, white men and women are extremely fractured, right? Issues that seemed to be exclusive to black people suddenly are showing up as problems that are plaguing white communities to a great deal. Men becoming disinterested in college, all the things, all things I'm of the age where I remember where these things were depicted as problems that were particular to people of African descent in the United States. I mean, so I guess to close the loop on your question, um yes, indeed, during a particular point in time, particularly during the anti-apartheid struggle, when the struggle was to get the vote, absolutely you had a struggle where it seemed that black women had a united interest and white women had a united interest, and the difficulty of organizing race was a major fractional line. I would say a post-apartheid context introduces a different set. Um, and apartheid is so-called over, those contradictions surge to the forefront and make the idea of black women's interests a much more dicey proposition. A much less easier, less easily asserted thing about black women's interests.
Dr Mbuyiseni NdloziWe'll come back, maybe end there where where you've just ended in a moment. I wanna uh uh do two things or ask about two things um in this history. The first one is the liberation movements. The fact of their founding being male dominated, the founding of the ANC, the founding of uh uh the PAC, you name them, but uh this this idea of uh the fact that they were male dominated, and the NC in particular did not have membership for women, and then later also know women in the leadership for the longest of time anyway, um maybe over half a century of its existence, it didn't have women in the National Executive Committee. So it brings this question to me about the struggle within the Black liberation itself. What accounts for that? What accounts for sociologically, I mean, just historically perhaps? What is what would be your explanation that black women had to struggle within black organizations for recognition from men who were themselves uh commodities when you speak maybe in slave conditions, but also just um the oppressed, uh racially humiliated uh objects of racial and capitalist exploitation, that black women had to struggle for space in their organizations, but also in general, for the same recognition that seemingly white women were struggling for in what you have already framed as you know, sort of bourgeois uh feminism. But what accounts for that? And the second aspect of it, so I don't cut you off, is when the struggle became violent. Um a violent confrontation when it became war, not just in South Africa, but you would know in struggles of women in Umkondaw sees struggles of women in war. But struggles when the township politics in the 70s and the 80s tend uh to be this low uh intensity war with the self-defense units, war against uh military occupation of townships. You do get a phenomena of uh women equal participation, particularly in the youth movements. But when they become violent, uh you have a less articulation of women unless they themselves adopt a very violent masculine way of being. Uh, they they you you know the groups in Soweto of the girls uh that took on violence and hunted rapists and so on and so forth. But a sense of an internal struggle uh to the oppressed themselves and the ways they have to organize themselves against their oppressor.
SPEAKER_02Okay, good question. So I would say in the earlier part of the ANC's history, one of the reasons that women were excluded was the actual bourgeois character of that movement. I mean, if we recall, it was um, you know, lawyers, it was the um mode of struggle was primarily things like uh uh petitioning, you know what I mean? Like it was a very, very middle class-based, and even the goals of that struggle oftentimes we forget, are much more about equality within the kind of existing framework. Um what can you say? Like the earliest movements, and this is all African nationalist movements, it's not just ours. Generally, it was that small cadre of educated elites. Um, and again, it was very similar in the United States of America. Like if you look at the NAACP, those were from primarily bourgeois movements. They did not have a mass base. The type of people who dominated were that small class of professionals. That class was not one where women could ascend in that realm, whether they were white or black. So, by virtue of the nature of the movement, who was ascendant, it pushed forward people in positions that women, because of the gender politics of the time, could simply not be in. So that account and the avenues, things like you know, petitioning parliament or um send petitioning was one of their favorites. Writing letters to the editor, basically, it was a form of struggle where you went to the elite of the other race and you tried to appeal to them on moral grounds. It's wrong. Which, of course, I mean, who could dispute? It is wrong to discriminate against people, but that was not the situation facing the mass. But those movements did not have a mechanism to draw the mass in, right? So from the beginning of any African nationalist movement, the black American struggle, there all the problem of just because a system treats all of you badly does not mean you all have the same interests or that you define freedom in the same way. So when that small class of bourgeois people dominate the movement, it is also going to be very, very male. Methods of protests as well as the professional class basis. What you see is the entrance of larger numbers of women when things become mass movements. So right there, the terrain of struggle changes. It is not the appeal to the educated oppressor. Like we're all liberal men here, you should give me the vote because it fails to live up your ideals of equality, which is all true, but that's not a mass-based struggle. When you bring in a mass-based struggle, it's a mass-based struggle, meaning men and women. You're not going to be able to have a tiny group of people. When you bring in women en masse, people don't enter struggles in the abstract. No human being, I mean, again, except for maybe that very small bourgeois class, has a very abstract level. You enter for very, very specific things. The price of potatoes is too high. So people enter the struggle based upon an immediate problem that they have. Usually, within the context of struggle, you begin to understand why you don't have potatoes and then why the bus fares are so high, and why I live so far from work, and why my children can't get vaccinated. It is in the process of struggle that you develop an idea of oh, all of these things are connected. And if I target this larger thing, I'm going to be able to get my problem solved. So, but when you're bringing in people on a mass basis in mass struggle, all of the many things that divide them are going to be right there. In addition, people are horribly oppressed, which means that they're horribly traumatized. So when you talk about when movements moved into an armed phase, right? Not only has the situation people are facing become that much more oppressive that they think they have to pick up arms, the act of struggling in that way, if we may drift to the psychological realm, also I do believe um brings forth your trauma in a different kind of a way. So I think that when that mass-based struggle also moves in the direction of an armed struggle, um the fact that people are deeply traumatized by their oppression, there is no way that that is not going to come out. So I think when you talked about, you know, some of the things that happened in MK, for example. I mean, you're talking people in a guerrilla situation who are in a deeply terrifying situation, who are also deeply traumatized by what they've been through. It would be a miracle if there was not tremendous amounts of violence within the struggle at that time. I don't know any struggle that hasn't had that. And as you see, women do not kind of begin at the abstract. These men are oppressing us. It is, we are in this situation, and I find myself not only struggling against my oppressor, but I find that there is sexual coercion happening in this movement, right? And so immediately the ability of you to participate in that movement, you must address that issue. At the very same time, this person is supposed to be your comrade struggling against something else. Um yeah. So uh the thing that you point to is absolutely correct. And I think that those types of problems became sharply articulated in the 80s as the struggle took a different turn.
Dr Mbuyiseni Ndlozi30 years, I mean, this is uh South Africa's uh moment that coincides with the anniversary of 1956 is the 1996 constitutional adoption or the adoption of the new constitution, the democratic constitution is also turning fet years this year. Um and are you able to give us your assessment then of these demands of nineteen fifty six and what they politically represent? In relation to the struggle of women. What or how has South Africa performed in the liberation of a woman in the last 30 years? And maybe You mean a woman in the abstract? Women in the concrete. The women that are the women that are in 1956 that are marching, a working class women. They are women who want to be able to go to work without being asked for passes. And they are urban women. I understand that, but they are not bourgeois.
SPEAKER_02Well, I think one of the things that capitalism does as an ideological system is it insists on a separation between the economic and political realms. That somehow in the myth of capitalism, you have something called the self-regulating market with its own set of rules. It's supposed to set wages by supply and demand. It's supposed to be run without the interference of the political realm. So even when we have a notion of democracy, we very much exclude it to limit it to the political realm. Practically speaking, things like I can vote for mayor, I can't vote for how Apple distributes its profits. What the 1950s, the 56th March, and even in fact the entire history of working class struggle in South Africa and elsewhere, has always insisted on challenging this separation between the economic and the political. So the passes are a very concrete representation of this. The passes are an economic mechanism of controlling the flow of labor. Usually in a struggle, people are trying to one, get their immediate needs met. So the women might say, I don't like these passes. They're making my life impossible. Once the passes are gone, the women are going to actually recognize the passes were but a symptom of a larger problem. If I'm going to be, they don't raise my wages, they just give me an opportunity to be out here scrapping with everybody else without being asked for a pass. But they don't change my ability to get more of a surplus from the capitalist, for example. You know, it doesn't raise my wages. It doesn't do things like, should my employer pay for my health care? Maybe my employer should give me a house. Maybe the state should actually give me a house. So you realize that, oh, I've been struggling on a very narrow terrain, but that's what you've been given, right? However, going back to those struggles, if they had been like you said, if they had been able to follow an uninterrupted course, I think that it would have been arrived at, because many women did arrive at this, is we need to capture the political sphere in order to be able to have that sphere control the economic sphere. In the sense of things like, should we put the needs of human beings, people, before profits? Things like that. So those struggles, I think, are very much heading in that direction. I say this when you talk about what happens in 1996. So in 1996, I mean, people like to bash on constitutions. I think that they're extremely important. I would never say political rights are not important. But if you look at, like when Mandela came in the night, I think he came in 1990 and he spoke to whatever president we had at the time. And the first thing those American presidents are worried about is breaking the relationship to the Communist Party and getting South Africa on board of an idea that political rights mean going into a booth and pulling a lever and voting when you leave and you leave the economy to the capitalists and they make all the decisions. But in a truly like liberated society, you go into the lever and you pull it, and you not only get to vote for mayor, part of your political rights is to have that control over the economic sphere, that you are able to actually dictate what happens there. And again, put the needs of human beings before profits. We did not, we were not able to secure that in 1996. So constitutions are extremely important, but that separation between the economic and political spheres was very, very strongly entrenched.
Dr Mbuyiseni NdloziThis what you call the capitalist delusion to interpolate us as thinking these are separate spheres when in concrete they're not. I mean, when the banks collapsed in 2008, we know we could see every time capitalism experiences crisis, the state, the bourgeois state, is the last defense of these uh otherwise free and liberal markets that are able to or that are even supposed to have self-corrective measures in some magical way. But there is something else when the bourgeois revolutions themselves began to fight for this free market as part of our modern societies is the coercive machinery. This is critical in the 1994 state that white people or the colonialists wouldn't have fought for so many centuries to keep the political apparatuses out of the hands of native populations if the political apparatuses were useless. Are we not falling in the trap there? Because this is now concrete history. How is it that they fought so hard? How is it that they tried all types of tricks to keep the political apparatuses out of the hands of the black people? If when we attain them, suddenly they are not important for economic uh, for livelihoods, for the improvement and the upliftment of the living conditions. And we know in their hands that's precisely how they functioned. And we know this because even in 2008, it is the political apparatus that saves the banks, that saves multinational banks, as it were, after they crash. There's something there that I think we possibly are not being completely open about, that in 1994, what fell in the hands of the black majority is a much more serious power than we like to uh to appreciate is perhaps not the diagnosis that the black government that took over neglected its responsibility to transform society. I mean, with this background of the very significance of political apparatuses, you would know they attain one SARS. It's one of the most important coerci measures. You will pay taxes. Many countries have banned over the tax question. And South Africa's fiscal question is one of the most interesting. Just this year they collected two trillion rands. Secondly, it's the military, thirdly, it's the courts and the police. These apparatuses are important for the functionality of the very bourgeois society. Is not the honest diagnosis, the chaps that have been in charge at some point, you know, neglected or uh did not fully put into effect that these apparatuses to the transformation of the condition of uh women and their these demands that makes uh or that come to the picture in 90 in 1956. What would you say to that sort of um complication of the situation? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess it's interesting when you say like they the people who took over, I think you said something like they they failed to do what they were supposed to do, I guess. I guess um every you're always looking at a terrain of struggle, and I think in 1956, how the problem presented itself to people, they likely did not define it as one of the critical things I'm struggling over is what type of things are just are determined to fall within the realm of politics and what are determined to fall within this abstract realm called economic relations. Because even then, that I mean, it was a it was a capitalist system in South Africa as elsewhere. So even then, this idea, even though apartheid was literally an interference in the market economy, it was one of the biggest interferences. Nevertheless, this bourgeois ideology that the economy exists over there and the political realm is about rights and voting, et cetera, that ideology was operative. At the same time, the economic system flew in the face of that. All that to say is when people are struggling over a very specific issue like the past is, they're not necessarily describing that struggle to themselves as also what I'm struggling here is over where the line is drawn about what belongs in the realm of politics, what I can use my vote to change. And if indeed part of what I'm able to use my vote to is to challenge where the line is drawn and to say, yes, I get to vote on how Anglo-American uses its profits. After all, Anglo-American, I created the wealth there. You can't necessarily expect in 1956 people are thinking that way, but that's in fact where their struggle is headed, because that's what's going to be needed to solve their problem. You talked about taxation. People love to complain about taxation. The problem very much in the United States is they don't tax the people they're supposed to, which is corporations and the rich. Corporations and the rich love to get people to hate taxes. What taxes are is a redistribution of the surplus, generally to serve social needs. Corporations and the rich don't like to pay them because they should pay a fair portion of it. And corporations and the rich like to act like the benefits that they they live in their lives are created by their own initiative. They don't actually like to think that they benefit a great deal from things that are social, that the larger part, whether it's the roads or the public schools, they love to say those things are wasteful. They don't benefit anyone. The corporations at risk benefit tremendously from public goods. They don't like to pay for them. They've benefit very tremendously. They like to socialize the risk and privatize the profit. So one of the things that had, and we're still trying to find a social formation that's been able to achieve this. A social formation where truly in the hands of people's decision-making power is how the economy is run, how it's put together, what type of things the state provides. Because the banks were very happy in 2008 to run to a president that was of African descent, actually from Africa, and he was the one that gave it to the banks and told that the homeowners are too bad. You know, that is a political decision. The powers that be they give us this song in dance about, oh, that's an economic issue, that's a cultural issue, that's a social issue. These artificial barriers, like when I went back to that issue of the trans, the trans surgeries and things. I like us to challenge how we define what an issue is. When we define something as an economic issue, when we define it as a political issue. Again, when we define something as a gender issue, I think that 1956 struggle actually challenges a lot of those divisions. It actually does. What is an economic issue? What is an economic and a women's issue? What is a political issue? Um there is a way in to look at all of the things that people were struggling for and to challenge that how we did to challenge the way in which those struggles are divided up as being in separate realms.
Dr Mbuyiseni NdloziWhat then are the women issues in South Africa today? One, what you have to do. I mean I'm thinking if I'm if I have to organize.
SPEAKER_02I mean, what we have, you know, that very popular show. What's it called? The polygamist that people are watching now? The popular on Netflix. Uh isn't there a show that everyone's crazy about? I think it's called The Polygamist.
Dr Mbuyiseni NdloziYes, uh Netflix. Yes. Yes, the polygamist, indeed, on Netflix. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02I haven't seen it, but uh everyone's a show that would have made no sense in 1956 had there been televisions widely available. But what the show shows you is the situation where we are in now. The class character of those people's lives reflects a definite South African reality. Definitely. No question about it. And that woman, as depicted in that show, is poorly treated by the men in their life. There is no question about that. The what my father used to call all of the alienation of a sick and decadent capitalist society and its impact on the family is on display in that show. Everybody happens to be black, but what you are seeing there then is, you know, in the show, racism is not a major plot device. You know what I mean? It's largely a black world. But what you do definitely see is that a capitalist society alienates you from everyone. It alienates you from your fellow man, it alienates you from your spouse, it alienates everybody in that show, it is 100% alienated. And it does come out in their gender politics. The way in which people behave with one another sexually is off. It's alienating. So that woman experience in that show is not at all the experience of many, many, many women in South Africa of African descent who would be in that household working for that black woman. You know what I mean? Like, we are now in a point in South Africa where women's issues in the abstract, some women are employers of other women. You know, that that maids and madams dynamic now plays out between women of the same ancestry. Um so I think in the an advanced capitalist society where everybody has the vote, so that primary contradiction has been solved to whatever degree. The idea of women having rights in the abstract, or sorry, not rights, issues in the abstract that unite them, that these contradictions aren't going to surge forward and crack it wide open. I just don't think there's one.
Dr Mbuyiseni NdloziAnd yet there's still women formations. Uh let's let us maybe um broaden the horizon because we've been so limited to the political. Um already before 56, women were organized in the church as women. And those organizations still exist of women in the church, uh, the Methodist Church, da-da-da-da-da. That were not given to them. They've had to organize themselves within religious institutions as women, to have a voice in the running of the church, to demand this and that. Uh in any way, there are still organizations that organize around rape. South Africa is one of the most horrific places to live in as a woman from sexual violence point of view, which because of how often it occurs in the domestic, intimate, partner uh sort of terrain, makes it so difficult to organize on a public, you know, platform on and all of that. The persistency of these formations, isn't it evidence against the sort of uh proposition that it's now more difficult because of um how fracturing post-1994 to a united women's interest is?
SPEAKER_02I would say, I mean, for example, you gave the example of women organizing the church. But what if you don't go to church? Which looks like women don't. So there's that, right? And I don't know a lot about what happens in those organizations because I'm one of those women that doesn't go to church and would not like to go there to be organized. I must be perfectly honest. So right away, a church-based organizing is just not going to appeal to me at all. Um fine for people who like it, but in terms of building a mass base, the church in 2026 is not the church in 1956. Um and religion, you know, the vast, I think the majority of people in the world are not particularly religious, even though we seem to scrap about it. A great deal. You know, the world wasn't always like that. And again, coming from the American context, the black church was huge in the civil rights struggle. But if you look at African Americans today, you know, like most Americans, a lot of people don't go to church. So the church as a strong vehicle for organizing, I have questions. The issue of rape is a good one in which to talk about this way of defining what an issue is, in what silo or bucket it belongs. We often think, of course, rape is an interpersonal issue. It's a gender-based violence issue. No question. But if we step back from a moment, why do women stay? Okay, so if we're talking about the rape of which many women go through, rape by the person that they're actually like married to, like sexual violence within the family situation. Why do people not leave? Well, they don't leave is because where are you gonna go? You don't have to get a house, you need money to get to point A to B, to get all that stuff. So women stay in coercive situations and very violent situations because of the social formation in which they're in that makes it impossible to go any place. So I would say a major move against gender-based violence would be things like socialized housing and medicine. It would be not, it wouldn't solve it, but it would make a huge difference of people being able to leave an immediately abusive situation just enough to have a breathing room. Second, I don't know about the figures in South Africa, but in the United States of America, when we look at these people who are mass shooters, or we've just had this guy kill an ICE agent kill an innocent civilian in May. Both of that man's ex-wives have come forward to talk about what an abusive husband he was, how they called the police repeatedly. One of the women, right now, yesterday or two days ago, she tried to go to the judge and get his visitation, like ex whole custody. And the judge said, I don't see any compelling um danger to your child here. So what I'm saying is one, if people were one, able to get abusive domestic situations, and two, people who are abusing their wives and children or given either some sort of a therapy, something is done about that. Because again, why do people abuse people? It's complicated. But I think that would do a lot to bring down societal levels of violence. Usually people start violence at home, and we don't have a social safety net that can deal with someone in their abusive behavior when they're in, or I say just in quotes, just abusing their intimate family. Oftentimes it escalates to a larger abusive society. This has happened over and over in the United States. One of the biggest tells of a person becoming a mass shooter is a history of domestic violence. So I have to wonder if we were to begin to deal with domestic violence situations in a serious way, what would it impact on a societal level of our levels of violence? And two, what would it mean? It would mean dealing, one, being able to get a woman to get away from that situation. Two, people don't just abuse people because they're born as horrible people. I mean, there's a small percentage of people are just born hopeless. But usually there is something.
SPEAKER_00Like your president out there, he looks like he was born hopeless.
SPEAKER_02Yes. I mean, now this person was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and it's hopeless. But even if you look at him, he had a rotten childhood, but his parents could have fixed it. They could have afforded therapy. So, for you know, these people are in a terrible amount of distress that comes out as violence against the people nearest to you. And usually in a society that has ideologies about male toughness, you know, suppress your feelings, etc., a society that says it's okay to cat call women to abuse them, um, you know, to run them down, a society that tells women still your highest ambition is to get married, things of that nature. All of those things go together to make a vortex that produces these sort of things. So, you know, sort of back to your question of women organizing as women, all right. You organize, you must define your problem. You don't organize. So, our what are we organizing for? And there it gets, the devil is in the details. So, for example, the black feminist movement in the United States of America um kind of a lodestar is a movement called the Kohambe River Collective. Oftentimes when people seek to talk about a kind of a pure essence of a black woman's led movement, they talk about the Kohambe River Collective and its objectives. Well, one of the things that that collective did, because you know, part of that organizing was based here in Boston, is they started, I believe, like a women, a batted women's shelter. Okay. That's all very nice. The interesting thing is when you look at the kind of ideology of the Kohambi Women's Collective, part of what they talked about is the state has failed us, we've got to do it on our own. I kind of understand the uh where they how they got to that point. But also in many ways, I don't agree that you give up on the state and you do it on your own. So for me, my target would be I don't want a bunch of women to organize a women's shelter. Maybe they can run it, but I actually think the state has a duty to its citizens, and women are citizens. So if a woman is getting beaten up, you shouldn't have to stay there. There should be clean, free to affordable housing for you and your children to go to to get out of immediate danger. So for some women, they would think, I'm gonna raise money, I might go to an NGO, I'm gonna raise money and start an individual women's shelter. I can't trust the state. I would might define my problem very differently. So when you say like organizing as women, I always have to go to the next. What if we decided that we are organizing to do? What if we decided that our the systemic root of our problem is? We may both say women getting beaten up and raped is our problem, but we may have very different notions of the origin of that problem and how to get that problem solved.
Dr Mbuyiseni NdloziAnd that's where I why it becomes so difficult. Why can't you do both? Why can't you self-organize, be self-sufficient at the same time, uh, whilst you do that, demand uh the state to be redesigned in the image, as it were, of your form of self-organizing. I mean, this is this is classic um maxian, you know. The forms of collectives we build today uh, you know, are the skeleton for the future society. Because at the same time, there is this sense of nonetheless confidence that comes from self-organizing. Why are they exclusive? Why do they have to be separated?
SPEAKER_02Because oftentimes those forms of organizing have two very different orientations to power. And the orientation that you take to power comes about from what do you think your cards are that you can play? So generally organizing splits along. Is it an organizing around asking some entity to change? Or is it an organizing strategy of these are my cards, and if you don't do what I want, I'm gonna play my card. So again, uh, the US context, I'm slightly more familiar with on some of these organizing tactics. So during the civil rights struggle, there was sanitation workers who became heavily involved. And the sanitation workers were able to get what they wanted. You know why? Because if someone isn't picking up your garbage, it's a real inconvenience for you. Like you're really upset. Um, garbage is overflowing in the street. Your life is inconvenienced. A sanitation worker has a card to play. If you don't do what I want, you are going to be up to your neck in shit. That's different from I'm gonna put together a bunch of people and we're gonna go to the statehouse and we're gonna ask for things. So, what type of organizing allows you to make demands because of what you can threaten the other party with? Those are two very different kinds of organizing. So, while in theory the two things can go together, the one, like what the sanitation workers did, so if we can put that in a context of getting that domestic violence, what type of organizing, what type of power would a woman's based self-organizing have to have to have the strength of the sanitation workers? If you don't do this thing, your life is gonna be rotten. That's how I'm gonna bring you to the table, not do the right thing. So that's where I really struggle because generally it is the one power working people have is withdrawing their labor at very key points. That is has been that was a major push forward for the civil rights struggle in the United States of America. It was a major push struggle. I mean, we saw it in South Africa. The strikes, the boycotts, those are the sort of things that bring power to the table to be like, okay, we have to negotiate with you. I mean, in a way, Trump is seeing it with the Iranians as well. You know, there's all the public, the UN, all of this, the Iranians have shown when they played that hand of the Strait of Hermoods. You have Trump has to respond. And that's the your question to both. That is where I see that that difficulty. That self, the there are two different types of self-organizing. One of them you're asking for things, the other one, you have a significant amount of power to play. And the I think the class basis does diverge there. One, I think, is strongly rooted in working class organizing. How else are we going to be able to force people to do things?
Dr Mbuyiseni NdloziBut with something like sexual violence, could you apply that formula for us? I mean, I'm I'm thinking you're saying women's capability to go out must the state, as it were, so we've got the demand that can be legitimately made that the state has a responsibility to help women through social housing, through uh health care who are in spaces of domestic sexual abuse and just domestic abuse, physical abuse as well. What cards are there that could be like labor? I mean, uh of course of course there's labor, but it is already a unpaid labor, you know, historically to this day. But in comparison to sanitation workers, isn't precisely the option we're gonna create a shelter, but in this creating of a shelter, we are organizing, we are making visible what is in the domestic and which would often be denied or be downplayed because it's in the domestic. At the same time, we're gonna make a demand on the laws because we have organized. Here are the sheltered women who have had to get this shelter because of domestic violence. The state, the public, is now fully aware because it has been sort of exhumed from its private terrain, its private space, it's made visible and it's organized. Then, same time, not as in stages per se, but it is able then to make visible demands on um on this on the on the state. Am I stretching the logic?
SPEAKER_02No, I mean what I see there is uh look I guess you do what's available to you. You can't be utopian and demand, you know, snap your fingers and say it must be this way. But what I would my concern always is, because this is a dance that we've done before. Even the siloing out of domestic abuse victims, and as though they're the ones having the problem. I mean, of course, their problem is very cute, but then it goes down, you know, that is a very well the the more that you fragment, and I don't mean fragment a bad way, but like the the the the more specific and targeted an issue is, the less people it impacts. And also the more narrow the framing, the more readily something becomes easier to conceptualize as something to having nothing to do with you. So if I don't happen to be being beaten up in my particular household, I might say that's not my issue. Or if I'm organizing on the basis of, it's on the basis of charity, I'm doing something for somebody else who has a problem that I don't have. But when issues are made very broad, uh I mean, and uh or the terrain of struggle is much broader, with the idea in that terrain of struggle of these are some very acute issues that would be more likely to be ameliorated or addressed if his larger issue, if this larger issue were sorted, taken care of. So again, if you look, go back to like the immediate problem of someone, like the immediate thing that a person wants to do from an abuser is to get away from them. Like that is, and to me, that is very much tied to the fact of how difficult it is to get away from somebody that is abusing you when you are dependent upon them. And to the extent that how do you become less dependent on them is the number of social goods that you have. So the higher the level of social goods, the less coercive power any individual has over another individual. All of us can use those social goods. I may not be being abused, I may have a pretty good marriage. I still benefit from social goods of housing, healthcare, education, etc. The freer and the more social, the better my life is. Also, if those things are attacked, I'm more willing to get out there and struggle for that. Whereas if it's some domestic violence, I could say, why does I I can more easily say, that's not my issue. So even though it's whether you can say utopian or what have you, what long experience has shown with the NGOization of the African continent or here in the United States, how easily you know social goods were rolled back. For me, I'm coming increasingly to realize that the disarticulation of these sort of issues, even when they're in their most acute, you know what I mean? You are being raped in your home household, the most acute situation, it is not this you do yourself no favors disembedding them from larger struggles over public goods. Because the the lack of public goods is what makes that creates that vulnerability. You know, to your point about, you know, shouldn't people organize in the meantime? I'm very sympathetic to that. I would never tell people not to. But at the same time, in the town I live in, there's a coffee shop that I work at all the time, and it has a bulletin board. And that coffee shop is in a nice middle-class area with lots of nice middle class people like myself who want to help people. And on any given day, there is a walk against hunger, walk against homelessness, bike ride to raise money, and you know, to raise money for no domestic violence, which is you would never want to mock the efforts of nice, good, middle class people who want to help people. But at the same time, a bike ride cannot end homelessness. And it also disarticulates our own struggles in our town that is severely lacking public goods. It makes it seem like I'm gonna go on a bike ride on a Saturday. Homelessness has nothing to do with me. The very same time I'm part of a Facebook group for moms. At the very same time, women are talking, you know, middle class women, you know, posting their electric bill. Is everybody's electric bill so high? What's going on? Another woman talking about the car insurance for her son has gone through the roof. You know, ordinary middle class people in the United States of America, of course, the background of gas prices, are really struggling. There's a way of the disarticulation and siloing is when those women are talking about their day-to-day problems, which to them they oftentimes are going to the mother's group because they feel that they are individually failing. They're just not figuring it out. Do I budget better? Do I need an app? Do I make my kid do XY? They don't actually see enlarge your system has created that homelessness that you've just gone on the bike ride for that you feel has nothing to do with you. It has a lot to do with how difficult your day-to-day life is. You know, so like I don't, I would never want to dunk on those women or dunk on anybody. Go on the bike ride. It can't hurt. But in the long run, we've been having these bike rides and raising awareness for a really long time. You always have to have a game on the next year.
Dr Mbuyiseni NdloziProfessor Zina Makbani. When let me let me conclude the conversation then uh with uh just a snap into your upcoming, forthcoming, I don't know the correct word, uh book, Slavery, Colonialism in the History of American Sociology. Um, are you interrogating? That the American sociology is up for slavery again?
SPEAKER_02No, what I'm trying to do is to understand. And it's taking me a while to figure out what this book is about. One of the things sociologists ask themselves a lot is what gives our discipline its identity? What do we do? What is our object of inquiry? This is a particularly acute problem for something like sociology that claims to study an abstraction called society. And when you think of it, when as we are to understand academic disciplines, each one must have its own separate object of inquiry. So how is it shaken out? Is that economists get the market, historians get the past, anthropologists get the other, uh, psychologists get the psyche, and sociologists get this weird thing called society in the abstract. So one of the things that I wanted to do is to understand how did we get this strange object of inquiry? And how did we end up that the academic disciplines got sorted in the way they did? And so that whole thing I was talking about, the separation of the economic and the political, what I actually realized is sociology is a discipline that exists exactly in that space between the economic and the political. It is a discipline that is only becomes possible in a social formation that imagines the economic and political to be separated. And then you have a discipline which actually is supposed to refuse that separation by saying, how do we get the political to be able to bend the economic? And one of the things that sociology has in the United States, I want to argue, been a huge part of our disciplinary activity that we want to deny is we have always had a strong connection to social democracy. Meaning, how do you actually make the social have power over the economic? How do you make the economy operate on democratic principles? In a capitalist society, that is not a discipline that people are particularly interested in promoting. So how the slavery and the colonialism comes out of it is I want to challenge the idea that sociology, the bourgeois mythology, that it is a discipline that studies some abstraction called modernity. And I actually want to explain why the formative text in American sociology actually engaged from the very beginning with the issue of slavery. The very first book with the title, with the word sociology in its title, was a defense of slavery in the United States. Which book is there? So that's one part of it. It's called so it was called Sociology for the South. And that person imported the ideas of August Comte. And Americans don't usually explain how the ideas of August Comte and Herbert Spencer got here. We just sort of say, oh, they got there through the magic of their brilliance. But my argument I'm trying to make is they came in because France and Britain had both faced the ending of their slave empires. So French sociology, the sociology of August Compt, I am arguing, actually is strongly related to the Haitian Revolution. And he even wrote about it. The sociology of Herbert Spencer is equally yoked to the ending of slavery throughout the British Empire in 1838. And then Americans are actually interested in the ideas of Compton Spencer because of their reflections on the ending of slavery in their societies. And then just to wrap it up, slavery is a system where the economic and the political are actually fused. Like you own the laborer. The laborer is part of your capital. You absolutely know your control of the laborer is your control over their person politically. They're not a political subject. That's what allows you to own them. So the ending of slavery begins the separation of the economic and the political that I'm talking about. It is with con you now control your way your laborer through contracts, through wages. And it is actually the enslaved person where that struggle becomes so e so clear and obvious. You have people actually moving from the state of being owned to wage labor. So long story short, I believe that that conundrum is the originary point for sociology. In France, the United States, and England.
Dr Mbuyiseni NdloziHaving heard of that angle before, and uh nobody has. It's my angel. It's yours. Yeah. Professor Zinemakubani, thank you so much. Uh, and uh all the best out there. Be safe. Trump might get even crazier uh as the Iranians frustrate him. Uh just be safe and thank you so much for your time.
SPEAKER_00Thank you as well.
Dr Mbuyiseni NdloziOkay, we're gonna be cool. See that's it. Uh please don't forget to subscribe, share, and like the African Renaissance podcast. Bye, prof. Bye bye. That's it. Uh, thank you.