Hearing Difficult Stories from Justice and Women, South Africa

By: Jenny Bell, Director, Justice and Women

This article appeared originally in the JOHAP (Joint Oxfam HIV/AIDS Program) Link Newsletter, Vol. 1, issue 4, June 2009. It has been adapted for the Gender at Work website.

Framing the article, Jenny wrote an e-mail to Gender at Work saying, "the approach comes from our participation in the Gender at Work process, and our participation has helped us 'see' a way of working with deep culture."

The best way to describe how we at Justice and Women (JAW) approach thinking about gender is through an analogy: Imagine that you are playing the childhood game of “pick-up sticks” – you have shaken the box and emptied the sticks onto the table. Now the real work begins: some sticks are easy – they’re on the edge, independent of others, and you are able to pick them up without moving the surrounding sticks. The majority, however, fall locked in a seemingly impenetrable mass, and you have to strategically assess a few things: how each stick lies in relation to the others, how moving one stick might move another, how to decide which stick to pick up first and which to leave for last.

The game is one of trial and error – there are small victories but also the danger that next time you might unintentionally set off an avalanche, which could logjam the game even further.

The game involves risk; it requires patience as well as the utmost belief that change is possible, that the game can end.

Addressing inequitable gender power relations is the focus of our “game.” It is our work and our passion and we are under no illusions about it: this work is extremely risky and it takes time. We use an approach which seeks to help communities lay out their own “pick-up sticks”, to see the total picture, as it were, to understand the inter-relationships between all the powers on the table, and to grapple with the complexity that gender change imposes on all.

True gender equity requires a reassessment of power, the sources of power, how to access power, how to manage it, how to use it in a new way – a way in which all are heard, where space is given to all, where there are no winners or losers, where there is enough power to go around if used differently.

The following seeks to give you a brief insight into how we at Justice and Women work with gender-power issues. A story from one of our staff meetings serves as the example. All our staff meetings start with a debriefing space where we encourage ourselves to truly listen to one another because we believe that if we are not heard ourselves, how can we in turn listen and hear others?

A staff member was feeling incredibly burdened by a family problem. A sister, who had been married following traditional Zulu custom where lobola had been paid, had moved away to join her husband’s homestead. The marriage was not happy as the husband was abusive, and the sister had come home many times to seek support from her family. Each time, her family had advised her to return to her husband. At the heart of their concern was the fact that they did not want to return the lobola cattle, which would be required if the marriage ended. The sister returned to her husband and, finally, because she could take no further abuse, she left – her family did not know where. She left her children with her husband’s family.

The staff member’s family now faced the following problem: the sister had died and the family had been contacted to come and fetch her body for burial, but they could not do this. In terms of Zulu custom, the sister was no longer part of her family, she was a member of her husband’s family and as such she could only be buried on the husband’s family homestead. The sister’s family had tried to contact the husband’s family, only to find that they had left the area after a recent wave of violence, and no one knew their whereabouts. The sister’s family felt “stuck.” They could not bring her body home for burial as this would anger the ancestors, and the sister’s family could not afford to pay the damages required to legitimise that action, even if they could find the husband’s family.

A discussion followed where another staff member confirmed that her neighbour had had a similar problem. “They resolved it by burying the person in the Melmoth municipal grave yard, but they are still unhappy about it - it does not feel right.”

“This is a human rights issue,” another colleague asserted. “How so?” another questioned. “Well, by paying lobola, that woman lost all her rights – no one listened to her when she came and asked for help about the abuse she was experiencing, she had no power to change her situation, and when she did exercise her power, see where it left her, even in death she has no rights or respect – no one will bury her.” Another mused, “I’m getting married soon... It is frightening to realise that you have to think even about death when you get married. What if my husband is abusive – this could also happen to me.” Another, the paralegal in the group, commented, “I wonder if that is why you read so many stories about bodies not being claimed from mortuaries – I wonder, if one looked into this, whether you would find that which seems like uncaring behaviour by families not claiming dead bodies is really families being stuck, just like this one, by custom, and really not knowing what to do. We need to speak about this in the community.”

The staff member did not get any immediate solution to the family’s problem, but despite the lack of solution, was grateful for the space given to talk, and was relieved to hear that other families faced similar
issues. The guilt about the sister was a heavy burden to carry; it had diminished the staff member’s sense of his humanity.

Another example, drawn from our work in communities, provides the following insight from an elderly male Induna, a participant in a community conversation (the term we have come to call speaking spaces): “When women know that their husbands are HIV positive and their husbands won’t use condoms, it’s like we’re feeding women rat poison, and they have to eat it, because if they don’t they will get hurt; and they eat and they know that what they are eating is killing them.” A deep silence followed.

This conversation, too, did not resolve the issue. But it did lead participants to start questioning issues, such as why men were not listening. What made it so difficult for them to do this, why did men hurt women, why did women go on ‘eating’ even when they knew that something was not good for them?

These questions, we feel, are an essential part to any gender-change process. They are not questions that are easy to answer, and often the questions themselves give rise to feelings of deep discomfort, for they force one to reflect on one’s own life, attitudes, practice, and sense of humanity. Creating these speaking spaces requires care and compassion. One has to create a space where people feel cared for, where people feel protected and loved, where there is no judgment, but where there is a challenge – where the gendered contradictions are highlighted, for this is what we feel keeps the momentum of gender change alive.

This is the terrain in which we at Justice and Women work, and the examples given above are some ways in which we work with gender issues. Do people want these processes? Yes, at this stage. We often get feedback where people thank us for helping them put across their views, helping them to break the silence about issues, thanking us for the love which they felt. This, too, is the complexity of doing gender work at the community level – it’s not abstract, and it touches on life and death issues.

Shifting gender and power relationships, like the pick-up-sticks game, is fundamentally destabilizing and frightening on many levels – personal, family, culture. Gender work is therefore delicate, and you have to constantly provide people with both a sense of safety and a sense of hope – that change is possible, and although it’s hard work and demands courage, it’s worth the effort. So, our mission is to help people have spaces to experience power with, rather than power over, to feel deep caring and connection. For us, this is what the world might look like if there were true gender equity.