Book Extract: Front-line feminism in the twenty-first century

Feminism in the twenty-first century is not for the faint of heart: it’s a blood sport, and to survive you need a tribe you’d take a bullet for to have your back. Solitary keyboard feminism has its place in the ivory towers of the world, but over the past decade, anti-gender-based-violence activists have evolved a living, breathing front-line feminism characterised by fierce women meeting the worst of state patriarchy head-on together.

To really understand the rise of what I’d call ‘front-line feminism’, let us examine the rise of Jacob Zuma, and unpack the feminist resistance to his ascendance and the reactionary tide that helped him retain power.

The Zuma odyssey began during the then-Deputy President’s rape trial in 2006. The One in Nine Campaign was formed to support the complainant Fezeka Kuzwayo against the thuggery of the African National Congress (ANC), bent on backing-up its hyper-masculine, paleo-traditionalist leader. As the trial commenced, a small group of activists, mostly friends, mostly queer, took up position across the road from thousands of vocal, violent Zuma supporters. Over the following months, that small band of purple-clad women held the line, ensuring that Fezeka knew she wasn’t alone. That simple courageous solidarity birthed a movement of young activists who knew the stakes and joined the battle anyway.

Despite writing in a different context and era, Robin Morgan wasn’t wrong back in 1970 when she said ‘sisterhood is powerful’ (in Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement). A decade after the first One in Nine Campaign protest in Johannesburg in 2006, through old-fashioned consciousness-raising, education, and radical direct action typified by the Silent Protest78 at Rhodes University and the #RUReferenceList protests, a new generation of South African feminist leaders was forged. This activism was profoundly personal, intrinsically confrontational, and based on the simple principle that solidarity with women who speak out is a game-changer.

Solidarity sounds simple: it sounds easy, and peacenik, and entirely uncontroversial. Nothing could be further from the truth. Solidarity is a radical act that confronts patriarchy’s most fundamental tenet – that women are untrustworthy; they lie, they ask for it, and when they get it, they deserve it. Solidarity is love as a political act, and it disrupts and enrages those it opposes precisely because it exposes rape as a systematic tool of oppression.

Solidarity in the context of media’s insistence that rape and incest continue to be exceptionalised becomes an act of resistance. As the media ignores most violence against women as unnewsworthy, with only the most brutal or high-profile cases making headlines, a movement based on standing with women who speak out disrupts the status quo. When the media sensationalises high-profile cases, reinforcing the myth that all rapists are monstrous violent strangers, solidarity with millions of survivors speaking out in a myriad of contexts, both public and private, is both transgressive and transformative, binding survivors and those that bear witness together.

Over the past decade, standing with survivors – believing women when we speak our truth, and creating safe spaces for women to share our violation and recovery – has created a community of people who know that violence and oppression reside in the family and in our circles of friends, and is often perpetrated by people we trust and admire.

The feminism born out of this intimate knowledge of betrayal and violence is fierce, angry, and unapologetic. It is confrontational and emotional rather than polite and reasoned, because this kind of radical solidarity comes at a cost: every survivor story you hear stays with you, haunts you, reminds you of your own violation as it forces you to hear and hold the pain of survivors, not as bland statistics, but one at a time, face-to-face.

All feminist activism is exhausting, messy work. Anti-gender-based violence activism in recent times has been downright shattering. Being confronted by the realities of patriarchy and battering oneself against its ramparts has left us all shell-shocked and broken. Feminism on the front lines looks different from the academic feminism that critiques it. We are war veterans, battling post-traumatic stress disorder, looking around, trying to fathom how ‘normal’ people go about their lives, oblivious to the war raging around them, unaware of, or unaffected by the bloodbath under way in their communities.