South African women resist apartheid's triple oppression

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Thandi Modise has been in prison in South Africa since October 1979. The 21-year-old guerrilla fighter was accused of propagating the aims of a banned organization, the African National Congress (ANC); of possessing a machine gun and explosives; and of conspiring to commit arson and sabotage. She was sentenced to an eight-year term under the Terrorism Act.

Thandi was five months pregnant when she was arrested. During detention she was repeatedly beaten, denied pre-natal care, and kept in solitary confinement. At the time of her sentencing in November 1980, her baby daughter was eight months old.

Mamphela Ramphele was placed under a banning order in April 1977, after having been arrested and detained for 139 days under the Internal Security Act. Dr. Ramphele, at the age of 27, was a leader in the development of medical facilities alternative to those available under apartheid. At the time of her arrest she was superintendent of the Zanempilo Health Centre near King Williams Town. The center had been established to provide essential health services to rural areas of the Ciskei bantustan.

Mamphela worked with the Zimele Trust to aid released political prisoners and collaborated with Steve Biko, the young Black nationalist who was killed in detention in September 1977. This, in addition to her humanitarian work in the clinic itself, brought down the wrath of the South African government.

In April 1977 she was banished to Lenyenye township, a remote village Catholics (continued from page 7: “SociAlist ActoN FORUM International Women's Day”) women or girls or of their licentious behavior."

These nuns are an important acquisition to the struggle for women's rights as they broaden and deepen the debate, forcing open a discussion on how people make responsible choices.

It is also important to remember that the struggle for women's rights occurs within the framework of a particular economic climate. The attack on women is not limited to the single issue of abortion rights. The attack on women parallels the attack on working people, on Blacks, Hispanics, students, gays, the disabled, the elderly.

It is a broadside fight to reverse the 8 SOCIALIST ACTION over 600 miles from King Williams Town. Under her banning order she may not leave it even to visit two medical outstations in the countryside or to take patients to the hospital in nearby Tzaneen.

Yet she continues with her medical work among the most oppressed of the African population-those who have been forcibly transported to the bantustans, the so-called "homelands" for 21 million Blacks.

The structure of apartheid Under the pernicious apartheid plan, the huge majority of South Africans must live in these areas that comprise only 13 percent of the land surface of the country, while the remaining 87 percent is controlled by the 4.6 million whites.

Apartheid has been constructed on a series of laws enacted by the Nationalist government since 1950. First came the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, followed by the Immorality Act, which made any sexual contact between two people of different races a felony. The Bantu Education Act ended Black access to white universities. The Population Registration Act required the registration of all South Africans by race.

Finally, the Group Areas Act and the Urban Areas Act, by eliminating the right of any but whites to own property, by dictating that people of each racial from living in urban areas, created the vicious and inhuman circle in which Black South Africans are trapped today.

In this dehumanizing system, all suffer. But the women undergo a triple oppression. Beyond the subjection to gains of the 1960s and 70s, to reverse the Vietnam syndrome, to drive down the living standards of working people and the poor, to pulverize and atomize the American people, to teach them they must accept their fate. The fanatical rhetoric of the right wing is the perfect rhetoric for the ruling-class austerity drive.

President Ronald Reagan's address to the anti-abortion rally held Jan. 22 in Washington, D.C., symbolizes this fact. But unlike the crusade that drove women from their jobs in industry after World War II under the mask of the feminine mystique, today's campaign against women will not succeed. And it is a more violent campaign precisely because it is linked more cruelly to the crisis of capitalism itself.

MARCH 1985 savage white racism and to exploitation as workers (one out of every three Black workers in South Africa is a woman), women suffer special discrimination.

They are denied even the limited legal rights of South African men. The South African Bantu Administration Act No. 38, of 1927, as amended, reads: " •..a Bantu (South African Black) woman who is a partner in a customary union and who is living with husband, shall be deemed to be a minor and her husband shall be deemed to be her guardian."

Under the Urban Areas Act, the only people permitted to live in the urban areas are those who can prove either that they were born there, that they have lived there for 15 years, or that they have worked for the same employer for 10 years. The cruelest effect of this act has been the near-total destruction of family life in South Africa.

Most women cannot live or work in the urban areas where their husbands are employed. Either they are exiled in the "homelands, where they bear the complete responsibility for bringing up the children and see their husbands only once a year. Or, since families cannot survive on the wages paid to male workers, the women must go to work in the most menial and worst-paying jobs. With no childcare available, children must be sent to live with friends or relatives in the bantustans. And the separation of the family is complete.

Most Black women can find jobs only in domestic service or agriculture, although the number of women in industry has grown in recent years as they are being used to replace men at lower wages. Of the 175,000 (1981 statistics) female members of the Trade Union Congress of South Africa, the vast majority work in the garment industry, where in 1979, they were paid one-fifth less than the minimum wage.

The Garment Workers' Union, however, which is female dominated and led, has long been in the forefront of the struggle for racial equality within the union. As long ago as 1944, the union won a Supreme Court ruling that meant that Black women were entitled to the same wages and conditions as whites working in the industry.

The Trade Union Congress has also been working to improve the lot of women workers, calling for an end to discriminatory wage rates, for maternity leaves, and for childcare centers.

Although Thandi Modise and Mamplays in the background.

brain to receive the information."

Meyer and others explain that the nerve-cell impulse to travel from sensors in the brain back to develop in the fetus until at least 24 weeks.

with a stick, it responds too."

narration.

grounded in fact." —MICHAEL SCHREIBER phela Ramphele are representative of a new strain of activism among the women of South Africa, they have inherited a struggle which began more than 70 years ago. In 1913 a group of women launched a massive anti-apartheid demonstration that served as the model for later demonstrations.

Five years later, with the help of the African National Congress, the Bantu Women's League was founded and then replaced in 1936 by the National Council for African Women. In 1943 the ANC Women's League was established with the goal of educating and mobilizing women of all racial groups into the struggle.

The Federation of South African Women was created in 1954 out of the Women's League and other smaller organizations, with the stated aim of "struggling for removal of all laws, regulations, conventions, and customs that discriminate against us as women."

Then on Aug. 9, 1956, the spirit of resistance among Black South African women erupted in a demonstration20,000 strong-of women from all over South Africa. The national march was organized to protest the extension to women of the hated pass laws. These laws require all African men to carry an identification document at all times and to produce it on demand, on pain of arrest.

The women converged on the government buildings in Pretoria, demanding to see the prime minister. Hundreds of thousands of signatures on petitions were left in his office. After a silent vigil of 30 minutes, the women's voices resounded through the city in an old Zulu refrain: "Now you have touched the women, you have struck a rock, you have dislodged a boulder, you will be crushed."

The valiant resistance of the South African women has grown since that Aug. 9 (the day now celebrated as South African Women's Day), despite continuing imprisonments and bannings. In 1981 at least 15 women political prisoners were known to be serving sentences. They are subjected to harsh treatment, solitary confinement, censorship of all reading materials-complete isolation from the outside world and each other.

In the face of such ruthless repression, however, the raised clenched fists of the women and their, cry of "Amandla!" (Power) is changing the South African political landscape.

high-trequency instruments of ominous music pathways that enable an the muscle do not begin to

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Nicaraguan women:

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group must live in separate communi- ties, and by prohibiting most Blacks