“Traditional Culture” vs. Fight for Women’s Liberation

(Young Spartacus pages)

We publish remarks by Karen Cole and Jon Brule made during the discussion at the Spartacus Youth Club’s November 27 class on South Africa. Comrade Karen’s intervention sparked a debate with a young South African woman of Zulu origin who decried “cultural dispossession” and argued, “On the question of polygamy and some of the traditional aspects of our culture, the problem has a lot to do with dispossession of land, which has affected our ability to practice our culture the way we used to.” She asserted that “traditionally” women asked their husbands for co-wives to help with the housework. She said people get married “in order to build nations, and to look out after national interests,” adding, “We have to be careful not to mix Western ideas about what it is about culture.” Comrade Jon responded to her arguments in his summary remarks. The transcripts were excerpted and edited for publication.

Karen: The woman question is key to socialist revolution in South Africa. In South Africa, women are specially oppressed. It is common for black women to be forced to be married and men forced to pay a bride price, which is called lobola. There is polygamy, both African traditional polygamy and Muslim polygamy. There is child abduction for marriage. There is female genital mutilation. And the migrant labor system itself was a system where women were left back in the most arid, terrible places that no one else wanted, while the men migrated to the mines.

Black women in this country have nothing. They are the slaves of the slaves. The nationalists have no program for them, no solution for liberating these women or the men. In South Africa you have this very democratic Constitution drafted in 1994. It’s very, very democratic on paper but it means nothing for women in impoverished areas where there are no hospitals, no doctors, no roads, no electricity, or no running water. The Constitution is just fine words that mean nothing for the material conditions of women.

The only way that can change is through socialist revolution to overthrow the capitalist system and institute a planned economy based on human need, not on private property. That’s why we fight for a revolutionary party in South Africa, here in the U.S., in Egypt as well. Everywhere you look in the world, the struggles for the emancipation of the oppressed cannot begin to be addressed without fighting for a planned economy where workers rule.

Jon: I wanted to address the comments by the young woman who spoke. I have some differences with what she said. We are not cultural relativists when it comes to the treatment of women. There are traditions and there are traditions. One of the really horrifying things that happened in South Africa is that the life expectancy there has plummeted by about ten years. This is largely due to the fact that HIV and AIDS are so widespread in that county. The previous ANC president of South Africa did not believe there was a connection between the HIV virus and AIDS. Therefore the regime recommended traditional herbal remedies. The result was quite predictable. There is not a “Western” way of treating HIV or AIDS; there is a scientific way of treating it, whether it is in the West or in Africa.

Similarly with these traditions. I think you really understate how these “traditions” victimize women. Lobola, which is otherwise known as bride price, is common in many countries in the world. It is something that we oppose. What it means is that in order for a woman to get married, the husband has to pay. It used to be cattle, now it is generally cash. That is not something that is in the interests of women. When you buy a bride, then she belongs to the husband—that is the trade-off here. It leads to bad things.

Ditto with some of these other questions. Polygamy can mean different things in different societies. But when it’s something that’s used as a coercive element, as it often is in backward societies where the women don’t have a choice, it is not a good thing. If people want to read more, we have a good deal of material on the woman question in South Africa, including the fact—and this is borne out by many statistics—that women are increasingly the victims of a high level of personal violence and rape in that society.

So liberation of women is a fundamental task of a proletarian revolution, just as it was in backward, peasant-dominated Russia where they had to deal with all sorts of similar crap. This is important. I talked about AIDS. Gays and lesbian women who campaigned for decent treatment for AIDS in South Africa were lynched in their communities. I hope people read the material we have on the woman question in South Africa.