Making Southern theory? Gender researchers in South Africa

Southern theory

In 2007, Raewyn Connell produced Southern Theory, a book which offered a term for knowledge produced beyond a mainstream dominated by writers based in the North. Critiquing the canon in sociology, Connell points out that works celebrated and frequently cited were produced in the industrial, urban North. These works were taken as a universal norm. Europe’s colonial and imperial past and the consequent knowledge inequalities were ignored. As a result, theories produced by thinkers in the South were often not visible.

Connell draws on the work of Benin philosopher, Paulin Hountondji (2002), to advance her critique of Northern theory. Hountondji developed the concept of extraversion to show that European knowledge forays into the South were extractive in intent. Raw data was sourced and then returned to the metropole for analysis and theorisation. Neither local needs nor African audiences were addressed. This process embedded existing Northern concepts instead of allowing new ones to emerge. The knowledge production process was therefore controlled by Northern scholars for the primary benefit of Northern academic and research interests.

Connell argues that the ‘theoretical frameworks developed in the metropole become embedded in the intellectual work of the periphery, not by the exercise of direct control, but by the way the whole economy of knowledge is organised’ (2014: 524). To challenge this, Southern theory should reflect the context in which it is produced and contest the conditions of research that historically contributed to both knowledge and material inequalities. Its purpose should be emancipatory, contributing to the democratisation of knowledge.

Recent reviews of the new surge of interest in knowledge-making have commented that Southern theory is neither an existing nor homogeneous alternative to Northern theory. Indeed, this view refuses claims that Northern theory is homogenous or mature and whilst accepting that Northern theory exercises intellectual global hegemony notes linkages, connections and debts which are bidirectional. Using an emic approach, the Comaroffs argue that the South is not ‘a thing in or for itself’ but a relation (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012: 47). Developing southern theory will require an ‘epistemological fragmentation’ in order to recentre the south and prevent it merely from being the object of study (Nyamnjoh, 2011: 711). Another view is that it is ‘a circumstantial project under which different notions of theory are in a dispute for legitimacy’ (Rosa, 2014: 1). Southern theory is in the process of becoming rather than already existing. What binds these different approaches is widespread acknowledgement of the persistence of knowledge inequalities (Czerniewicz and Wiens, 2013; Carvalho, 2014) and a self-consciousness challenge to the status quo. A claim to Southern theory ‘is explicitly associated with alternative forms of knowledge for the social sciences’ (Rosa, 2014: 3).

I follow Connell’s use of South and North to identify geopolitical knowledge inequalities. The binaried distinction clearly has limitations. Connell argues for an understanding that does not imply a ‘sharply bounded category of states or societies’ (2007: viii), but which rather draws attention to relations of ‘authority, exclusion and inclusion, hegemony, partnership, sponsorship, appropriation’ between ‘intellectual and institutions in the metropole and those in the world periphery’ (Connell, 2007: ix). Nevertheless, the grey area that marks the edges of North and South conceals an important definitional challenge. How do we situate researchers whose work draws on Northern intellectual lineages but is located in the South and responsive to Southern knowledge imperatives? Here I draw on German anthropologist Richard Rottenburg to suggest that we can begin to understand this greyness by acknowledging the existence of a language, a metacode, which researchers across the globe agree to and use. The metacode gives them a common language even as it permits different interpretations and thus allows for both the acknowledgement of different perspectives and a collective and universal project of knowledge production.

The context of theory production has implications for reception and influence. European feminism, for example, has mostly played second fiddle to local feminist work in the United States (Davis and Evans, 2011). Gender research in the South occurs in a context where Northern theory offers readily available and canonised conceptual tools while at the same time presenting political and analytical challenges quite different from those faced by Northern colleagues. The location of the researcher will also influence choice of subject matter, approach and the research questions asked. Researchers’ engagements with feminist issues will in turn reflect these research choices, and their political engagement will have been shaped by particular life trajectories and institutions. Being consciously positioned in a web of unequal knowledge relations can be a spur to writing new theory (Keim, 2011). In the following, I show how life experiences and confrontations not limited to the formal academic arena shaped the growth of the South African theorists. In so doing, I identify the key contextual mechanisms that explain the shape and form of the theory they produced.

Feminists in South Africa

The six writers discussed in this article are part of a feminist lineage in South Africa that stretches back to novelist Olive Schreiner, whose work around the turn of the twentieth century was a strong critique not just of the subordinate position of women, but of capitalism and racism in Southern Africa (Burdett, 2013). Similar themes were reflected in the second wave of feminist writing in South Africa. Jacklyn Cock’s work on African women in domestic labour (1980), Cherryl Walker’s historical work ([1983] 1991) on the suffragette movement and Judy Kimble and Elaine Unterhalter’s work (1983) on the role of women in the anti-colonial struggle all grappled with issues of race and class which at the time received the bulk of research and activist attention as the primary vectors of oppression.

Feminist research was conducted in politically volatile circumstances where to be a researcher could be considered as associating yourself with the cause of community activists and one of the anti-apartheid liberation movements. In some cases, researchers were explicitly undertaking research to better understand the conditions on the ground as a way of analysing conditions of oppression and thus informing oppositional strategies. This work was sometimes an expression of feminist commitment and sometimes reflected dissidence and opposition to the apartheid system as a whole.

The lived experiences of my six interviewees varied widely, although in each case particular events, individuals and influences were critical in forming them as reflexive anti-apartheid subjects. Some were white and middle class and ostensibly benefitted from apartheid’s racial dispensation. Others grew up feeling the disadvantages of racial exclusion and poverty. For each, however, their personal location in the apartheid order was converted into a critical lens on gender inequality and served in many cases as a prompt to engage in activism. Conscious engagement with context served as a spur to action which fuelled the research process. The Comaroffs capture this aspect of theory making, describing it as ‘the historically contextualised, problem-driven effort to account for the production of social and cultural “facts” in the world by recourse to an imaginative methodological counterpoint between the inductive and the deductive, the concrete and the concept’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012: 48).

The audience for South African feminism included activists and academics, all of whom were energetically engaging with questions about apartheid and how it could be overthrown. South African feminists spoke generally to at least three different audiences: academic colleagues, political activists and communities (who were often the subjects of the research). In each case, they were confronted with the obvious presence of women in the struggle to end apartheid, but also differences amongst women and between men and women and violence by men against women. Their work developed a new agenda of feminist research that integrated colonial histories and their consequences into analysis and offered richly detailed case studies of gender dynamics.

Methodology

In 2013–14 I interviewed six gender scholars as part of a global knowledge research project. Its goal was to study intellectual work practices and knowledge production processes. The purpose was to understand how established and, in some cases, world-leading researchers had developed their research careers. The interview schedule paid particular attention to early influences, career choices (including publication choices, collaborations, funding) and intellectual partners and mentors. Each scholar interviewed was well known to me. Having been born in Cape Town in the mid 1950s as a white South African, I had experienced segregated schooling and had been involved in university student politics and subsequent anti-apartheid activities. I had met my interviewees as fellow lecturers and gender researchers. I selected them because they fitted the criteria of being active and established gender researchers working on and in South Africa. They span a number of disciplines but each in their own right are recognisable as major contributors to gender theory and research. I was very familiar with their writings having collaborated with some of them, taught their work to students and encountered each of them many times in academic settings. The interviews were thus deeply informed by my knowledge of their work.

Five of the interviewees are women over fifty years old who were highly aware of and had experienced apartheid as a social system. The single male interviewee was younger and had experienced apartheid as a school-going teenager in the early 1980s at the height of a period of militant and often violent protest. One of the five female interviewees had grown up outside South Africa, and another two now work and live in the UK though grew up in South Africa. All informants were politically active in their early adult years. The women scholars were active both in championing women’s rights and fighting for the overthrow of apartheid.

The process of converting context into new insights is pinioned by key markers in the life course. In analysing the interviews, I adopt a chronological and thematic approach. I start by examining how early life experiences impacted on and informed a sociological imagination, before moving to later phases and themes: education; activism and intellectual debt (theoretical and personal). The focus is on how the individual researchers made sense of their experiences and how they came to act on these experiences in the realm of knowledge-making. All the interviewees provided informed consent and subsequently agreed to be mentioned by name. They also had the opportunity to see how their views were represented in this article.

Family and childhood

Despite the stark racial divisions in South African society, experiences of childhood were not racially uniform (Burman and Reynolds, [1976] 1990). If South African whites were generally far better off in terms of material living circumstance and future prospects, it was obviously not the case that all were blind to racial inequality or exempt from forms of discrimination themselves.

Elaine Unterhalter, born in the 1950s, came from a Jewish family and was aware of anti-semitism early in her life.

I was born in Johannesburg and my parents were in some ways very close to the upper-middle class whites’ milieu but in other ways quite apart because my father and my mother were very active members of the South African Liberal Party and I think they encountered a lot of hostility from peers for standing up for issues that they believed very much in about the franchise particularly. And my mother had been a social worker and worked in Alexandra township [a small residential area in greater Johannesburg reserved for black African occupation and the scene of many protests against colonialism and later apartheid] and then later Soweto, before she became a sociologist and went to the university. So apartheid and opposition to some of its very destructive features were a very constant refrain of my childhood.

Kopano Ratele, an only child, grew up in a small village in the north west of the country. His maternal grandfather was a local chief and his childhood until the age of ten was ‘relatively secure, loving, predictable’. But then his parents split up and he went to live in a township in conditions which he describes as very tough. He lived in a shack with his mother, was often cold, and had no money. ‘[W]e’ll be so hungry some days, we didn’t have food, so we would go to funerals to get some food’. By the time Kopano got to secondary school in the early 1980s, his impoverished life circumstances and the rapidly politicising nature of life in the racially segregated township combined to open him to the heady life of student politics.

There were numerous routes to politicisation in South Africa. In these examples we see them in family life and material circumstance. Subsequently, the seeds sown were fertilised in the school setting.

Education and radicalisation

The secondary school years were very important in fostering intellectual curiosity and a penchant for critique. For Elaine Unterhalter, a childhood immersed in books gave her the intellectual tools to realise that her elite, single-sex schooling was an exercise in gender domestication. ‘[O]nly six or seven girls, I think, passed their matric or got to university out of about seventy who were in my (matriculation) year. So basically what the ethos of the school was they were bringing up young women to be the rather dumb partners of successful men in the corporate sector’. On the other hand, Elaine and some friends got together, formed a debating team and beat the elite neighbouring boys’ school, inverting the gender presumption that boys were cleverer than girls. This gender consciousness was soon to be complemented by a passionate opposition to racial inequality. Elaine studied History and English at Wits University. It was the early 1970s and the forces of opposition were becoming bolder, more organised and more radical (Moss, 2014). Elaine became an active member of National Union of South African Students, which was beginning to follow the implications of radical social analysis that was emerging among exile scholars in the UK (Legassick, 1974; Wolpe, 1974). This involved forms of activist scholarship as well as community activism that included close engagement with workers and the incipient trade union movement. Two of her history lecturers ‘absolutely blew my mind […]. putting on the table […] the issue about the connections of race and class (even though) we didn’t even have a language to talk about them’. Elaine’s years at Wits University brought together a set of political values and commitments with an intellectual training which acquainted her with a corpus of left-wing, largely Marxist and anti-colonial, work. She made sense of these in a country that was experiencing the acute effects of poverty, racial inequality and authoritarian government, and her writings reflected this.

Catherine Campbell tells a story with similarities and differences. She went to a single-sex school in Durban.

[W]e were brought up, we were girls, we were going to be top at everything. In my class everybody got A’s for matric, we all came top in Natal. Very much we were brought up to be an intellectual elite and to be leaders in politics and the professions. […] We were very, very, very feminist; right from school at an early age. Everybody’s mothers were involved in Black Sash [a liberal, anti-apartheid women’s organisation].

In a strikingly different setting, Rachel Jewkes was becoming politically conscious. Having completed her A levels in the UK, Rachel took a gap year to South Africa. She went to work on a health project in what was then the Transkei (now the Eastern Cape). ‘I really came to understand for the first time a bit about public health and about poverty and its impact, and of course about apartheid and its impact on people’s lives’. She returned to the UK and trained as a medical doctor. During this time, she joined the anti-apartheid movement, becoming one of its national Vice Chairs and running its Health Committee. Her politicisation involved an introduction to gender politics:

although coming very much from an angle of socialism, or communism, that was inspired quite heavily by the Soviet Union and the ANC line on gender was very much that women were oppressed, but we have to free everybody else before we can deal with oppression of women. So that gender wasn’t in the forefront of my work during that period.

Student experience at South Africa’s universities radicalised many young people as they encountered new and critical ideas. For my interviewees, schools, particularly for black pupils after the 1976 Soweto uprisings, also served as nurseries for radical questioning and political engagement.

Activism

Cherryl Walker is considered as one of South Africa’s founding academic feminists in the sense that her writings (Walker, 1983 [1991], 1990) constitute one of the first conscious engagements with gender to complement race and class as critical factors in understanding South Africa’s inequalities. At university, Cherryl participated in feminist campaigns against restrictive, old-fashioned ideas that still governed institutional rules but undertook research in an academic environment still largely uninterested in ‘gender’. She explains how her interest in the discipline of history morphed into activist involvement in land issues. ‘I got involved in land partly because I got fed up with university. […] I ended up at Neil Alcock’s project in KwaZulu Natal where I was for a year. So I was completely immersed, thrown into land issues in that particular context. […] dealing first-hand with particularly evictions off farms, it was happening all around, and people were coming to Neil’s project for assistance, advice’. During the 1960s and 1970s eviction of labour tenants from white farms intensified along with state removals of Africans from land deemed to be ‘in a white area’ (Surplus Peoples’ Project, 1983). Working on land issues with black communities directly threatened with eviction was volatile and dangerous and, indeed, Alcock was himself shot dead in 1983. In Cherryl’s case it meant renouncing, at least for a while, a middle class life and academic career. In the early 1990s, with the ANC unbanned, Cherryl took up a university position in Durban, exploring her interest in gender, land and ethnicity in a range of publications. Acknowledgement of her contribution as a lands activist came in 1995 when in newly democratic South Africa she was invited to become a Lands Commissioner, with the task of redressing the gross racial disparities that were a feature of the apartheid landscape.

When Elaine Unterhalter finished her degree she volunteered for service at Charles Johnson Memorial hospital in Northern KwaZulu-Natal. She describes the experience as a ‘revelation’.

I’ve never lived in a rural area, never been up close and personal with the kind of level of suffering and deprivation, because you were so cut off by living in the suburbs and not socialising with people in townships – and there are all these things about anxieties, about race and sexuality which is almost overwhelming, not obvious but is nevertheless present in a very horrible kind of conditionings that we have. And at Nqutu where there were forced removals and a huge amount of land dispossession and a lot of illnesses that were coming to the hospital were horrible. A child died more or less every night.

At the Indians-only University of Durban-Westville, Shireen, who had already been politicised at school, became involved in dangerous, underground politics in the mid 1980s. ‘[I] got involved with the ANC underground and it helped that I was a Muslim girl because it was under the radar. So at that point I got involved in that sort of group of people and my main job was to be a foil for the things that the men were doing’. In Shireen’s case Jo Beall, who subsequently became a prominent urban studies scholar, was a friend, fellow activist (and member of the ANC underground) and thesis supervisor. ‘So it was not just an intellectual influence but also a political influence. And she was my supervisor [for] the whole of my master’s until she went into exile’. Capturing how tight-knit this community was, Shireen comments on an early collectively-written book chapter (Beall et al., 1987): ‘That was a very interesting group and a very interesting involvement because half of the authors were either in jail or having babies at the time the article was written; and the other half of us didn’t quite agree with each other’.

Durban-based Catherine Campbell has similar memories of how her academic work and her political convictions and activities merged. She was a Psychology lecturer in the 1980s.

I was involved in […] Rape Crisis work and whatever [including therapy work with political detainees who had often been tortured], you didn’t really have to think anything because you were part of a community of critical scholars who were anti-apartheid, so you didn’t have to have a philosophy, that’s just what you did. And then remember all my friends were linked to political parties or trade unions.

Intellectual exploration and political activism

The link between knowledge-making and activism was close and constantly reinforced through interwoven social, intellectual, political and professional networks – what Cetina (1999) calls an epistemic culture enveloped this community of scholars. It could be seen by whom they knew and worked with, who their political comrades were and which books they read.

Elaine Unterhalter began her postgraduate studies in London. Her intellectual community was South Africanists researching and writing revisionist history, sociology, anthropology and politics, based mostly in South Africa and the UK. These were publishing what became a rival political-economy orthodoxy to the ‘liberal’ narratives associated with Monica Wilson (neé Hunter) and Leonard Thompson (1969, 1971). While there were strong debates within the new revisionism, there was also a fault line between being a scholar and being an activist. Here Elaine began to encounter opposition from those who argued that scholarship should be free of political engagement. This opposition spurred Elaine to orient her scholarship even more directly towards feminism (Unterhalter, 1991; Unterhalter et al., 1991) and to begin to take it up both in her writing and her politics (Gaitskell et al., 1983; Kimble and Unterhalter, 1983).

Shireen describes herself as ‘an activist scholar’. She reflects on how the ANC had asked her to investigate the rival Inkatha’s Women’s Brigade in order to figure out how to outflank what they saw as a conservative women’s politics that was buttressing Zulu nationalism and standing in the way of national liberation. She was a member of the Natal Organisation of Women (NOW).

We never could make inroads into organising those [African, Zulu-speaking] women in the townships; Inkatha was always there, it was always a blockage. So we didn’t quite know what to do because it was hard for us as mostly Indian activists to go in there and organise African women, we couldn’t speak the language, we stuck out like a sore thumb. So that’s what we were trying to grapple with when I started the work on Inkatha. I think what it made me see was that the social networks mattered.

Rachel had been heavily involved in anti-apartheid activism. In 1993 she married a South African and the following year completed her postgraduate medical training. She then returned to South Africa and, at the beginning of 1995, headed up the Women’s Health Division of the Centre for Epidemiological Research in Southern Africa (CERSA) in the Medical Research Council (MRC). Prior to this Rachel had worked in the ANC camp at Mazimbu, Tanzania, and encountered AIDS as a heterosexual phenomenon for the first time. Some of her male colleagues went very quickly from apparent good health to death. Yet her work in the MRC was initially focused on women. Gender was thought of as being ‘about women’.

The idea that men were part of gender was not in the frame when I began my research in South Africa. In terms of my immediate work, when I got to South Africa we started looking at teenage pregnancy and the factors associated with those teenage pregnancies. […] I sent Kate Wood who was a young volunteer from England off to go and do some interviews, and when she came back with a set we had an astonishing finding that 22 out of 24 young pregnant teenagers talked about being raped or beaten by their partners. This was a shock. […] And so that’s how we got involved in researching gender-based violence.

Making Southern theory

Cherryl Walker began her historical studies of women’s politics in South Africa at a time when the major ideological and intellectual fault line was between Marxism and Liberalism, between political economy approaches that foregrounded social class, and individualist and idealist approaches which drew on a conventional social science that was considered by its critics to be vested in a conservative status quo. Cherryl identifies two challenges to South African scholarship in this period. The one was being insular and ignoring revisionist scholarship, the other was uncritically embracing inappropriate, Northern scholarship. She points to a trajectory of scholarship that parallels radical scholarship in India. Initially closely aligned to anti-colonial struggles, subaltern studies emerged as a Marxist critique of European scholarship and the colonial gaze. But this wave was followed by postcolonial critiques which identified a dependence on modernist concepts within subaltern studies and suggested yet another way of generating fresh new, ‘independent’ perspectives (Chakrabarty, [2000] 2008).

Cherryl reflects on a critique of her Women and Resistance in South Africa (Walker, [1983] 1991), that it was a ‘kind of replicatory history putting women in’. She rejects the view that her work could have been read as a simple inclusionary project with no novel input.

I was certainly reading and thinking about [feminist issues] and I suppose to some extent also in one’s own life – so there was that feminist understanding of the person as political and these issues are meaningful in my own life and in my relationships and I was working through them as well. But there was certainly a strong commitment and a sense of rootedness in South Africa and the political struggles here, and trying to understand issues around women’s rights and conceptualise as women’s rights fitted in.

After many years of university teaching, Shireen went to study in Toronto, attending international conferences with Nancy Fraser, Linda Gordon and Carole Pateman. As she describes it, her political work became ‘translational’ – ‘quite often to audiences that had a solidarity interest in South Africa but their scholarship was about other places’. This new exposure made her ‘think much more about your society from a slight distance […]. So it helped to have people talk about welfare states because suddenly I could see that what we were building in South Africa was a kind of a welfare state and look at what that meant’. Over time, Shireen extended her work beyond South Africa, working with global collaborators, still driving a political agenda that pointed out ongoing patriarchal practices and suggesting how women in the South could collectively act to improve their situation.

Departure from ‘the North’?

Elaine Unterhalter reflects on the shifts in her scholarship associated with the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the freeing of Nelson Mandela (1990):

suddenly you’re able to talk about it [citizenship] in a new language because before that the language of that was just a Cold War language; there was a capitalist or there was a communist version of citizenship. But suddenly in the 1990s I think those become new fields of scholarship and South Africa presents this very interesting case of trying to re-write all those prefaces.

A decade later Kopano wrestled with being a black man. He muses about the nature of local feminist research and particularly about the development of masculinity work in South Africa.

So in telling the story of the development [to] the next generation about who were the people who wrote about this … where did this start? And it feels, because of the hegemony of western paradigms about who is important to read, it’s so difficult to show people that … the development of these moments in South Africa is as important to us as (in fact sometimes much more) than other developments about why people campaign.

Discussion

Growing up in South Africa, experiencing and resisting its tyrannies, provided a rich context for six scholars to develop a particular approach to gender. Whilst links between experience, political activism and intellectual choice were not uniform, each theoretical outcome reflected experiential and political engagement.

The involvement of feminist researchers in South African research shifted the debate. Before the mid 1970s, questions about society had been framed as being about race and class. Gender was largely absent from the equation. The scholars of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s theorised the gender order of South Africa, reconstituting understanding and offering the world new ideas of how gender operated in contexts of political struggle, gross inequality and cultural and historical diversity, all against the backdrop of a particular route from imperialism, colonialism to post-colonialism.

In some respects this work was a continuation of earlier traditions that challenged academic conventions and social and political inequalities. On the other hand, South Africa’s feminists were much more integrated into activist politics and community-based anti-apartheid work. Their work was self-consciously directed to non-academic audiences while at the same time drawing on and critiquing existing gender theory.

South African feminist research is heterogeneous. Generational, racial and locational differences are evident in the preference for theories, involvement in particular kinds of politics and the choice of research area. But does the collective work of South African feminists qualify as Southern theory? At the outset I noted that the definition of Southern theory is not settled. One objection to the inclusion of the South African feminists might be their use of concepts such as race, class and gender that are constituted through Northern contexts and theory. Another might be that Northern theorists are central to the work. Certainly, feminists were more inclined to borrow from progressive and anti-colonial theories emanating from the North than from those home-grown in Africa.

Richard Rottenburg’s concept of the metacode allows a response to these critiques as well as a reconciliation. In his account of development negotiations in the mythical African country of Ruritania, Rottenburg shows how different perspectives are expressed (by a development bank representative, a consultant and an organisational anthropologist) and how they miss one another, each expressing a specific approach that fails to grasp that of the other party. He argues that a metacode is necessary for these three actors to understand one another and to make meaning between them. The metacode arises out of processes of translation, ‘when an idea or a thing is carried over from one idiom to another, from one culture to another’. The processes of translation generate a form ‘that did not previously exist’ (Rottenburg, 2009: xxxi). ‘Every act of translation is inevitably also an act of performative omission and addition’ (Rottenburg, 2009: xxxi). The metacode thus provides the rules that allow scholars to talk to one another. Operationalising the metacode requires reflexivity and an agreement about the rules of the technical game (Rottenburg, 2009: 177). In heterogenous circumstances, an epistemic link (Rottenburg, 2009: 192) is required to hold different frames together and to permit a broad agreement about what has been discovered or is valid. In my case, this link could be global feminist knowledge that unites competing knowledges, dedicated to emancipation and democratic participation under an umbrella fashioned by Northern scholars.

South African feminists have a distinctive position that reflects South African circumstances and perspectives. Using Rottenburg’s concept we could theorise this as an in-between position, between North and South; one that draws on Northern intellectual lineages whilst adding its own signature. Connell’s purpose in Southern Theory was ‘to propose a new path for social theory that will help social science to serve democratic purposes on a world scale’ (2007: vii). South Africa’s feminists have, unarguably, been helping to make that road.