Agenda: Empowering women for gender equity: 100th issue

Women in particular have increasingly realised that constitutionalism, on which this democracy is based, is no safeguard against patriarchy. The underlying democratic values of “human dignity, equality and freedom” implying a more equitable dispensation for women, ring hollow in a context of continuing high levels of violence and abuse against women and girl children in particular and persistent inequalities. For the majority, mainly poor black women who occupy the urban and rural margins of South Africa, endemic poverty and neglect in critical areas such as health, education, land and housing, and employment, to name a few examples, are the horrible residuum of the apartheid past that haunts their ‘democratic’ present. New laws in the pipeline, such as the Traditional Courts Bill, which re-invoke the oppressive power of traditional institutions over women, threaten the ‘gains’ represented by the equality provisions of the Constitution, and the extensive ‘gender machinery’ to safeguard women’s rights.
AFM asserts that central to democracy is the power of ‘voice’, the freedom to express and use it in written, spoken and other forms, to make audible and visible suppressed voices and, more significantly, the human beings who own these. Voice is critical to shape, influence, challenge and define power and its mediation collectively in the quest for transformation towards an egalitarian and humane society. This perception of voice, in relation to women in South Africa, and the many barriers that inhibited its expression, was certainly part of the feminist pulse that inspired the creation of Agenda in the mid-1980s. The 1980s were a time of frenetic political activism in South Africa that foreshadowed the negotiations process which would lead to a ‘new’ South Africa. Agenda was formed in a climate to resist silence, marginalisation and erasure.
Agenda was one of many alternate publications that flourished at this time, providing platforms for debates and the exchange of information that shaped the politics of this era. Together with Speak, another women’s publication, it was uniquely and unabashedly feminist at a time when anti-racism and anti-classism were pitched as the defining features of ‘the struggle’. The intersection of race and class with gender (and later with other forms of discrimination) and its impact on creating unequal power relations between men and women, was dismissed as reactionary by mainly male ‘revolutionaries’.
The founders of Agenda (hats off as we salute them!) were steadfast. The post-liberation experiences of women activists in other political struggles conducted in Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, who were relegated to the back benches or the political wilderness on the attainment of political independence, were illuminating for them. Agenda supported the feminist decision not to rely on male-dominated liberation politics for ‘women’s equality’ in whatever new political dispensation that would come into being. Rather, we wanted to contribute to the debates of the time, impacting on political outcomes, by asserting the voices of women on prevailing issues. As boldly expressed in our founding mission statement, Agenda would be: “… as a feminist project… committed to giving women a forum, a voice and skills to articulate their needs and interests towards transforming unequal gender relations in South Africa.” Further, it aimed to “question and challenge current understandings of gender relations and how these are practised”. In particular, it aimed to “contribute to the capacity of women to organise themselves, reflect on their experiences” and most importantly “to write about this”.
Another significant feature of our organisation is that while our founding mission foregrounded the South African context, our wingspan has evolved to continental coverage. To this end, over our 28 years of publishing we have moved beyond our South African borders, embracing the fact that we are part of the continent of Africa (as our African Feminisms trilogies attest to) as well as of a very fluid international women’s movement. Thus Agenda has been a meeting place for feminists of varying persuasions – black, socialist, African, Marxist, and eco-feminists to name a few, as well as those whose self-definition is a combination of several intersectional and multifaceted identities! Equally, we have featured womanists, gender activists, and women’s rights activists who have shunned the title feminist, defining their activism on their own terms.

ISBN: 1013-0950
Publisher: Unisa Press
Edition: 100th issue
Year of Publication: 2014 Volume 28.2