Unsung heroines and violence for the land: narratives of elderly women farmers’ experiences in South Africa and Zimbabwe

Authors: Chipuriro, R.M. and Batisai, K.

Journal: Agenda

Volume: 32

Issue: 4

Pages: 54-64

eISSN: 2158-978X

ISSN: 1013-0950

DOI: 10.1080/10130950.2018.1535081

Abstract:

Scholarly evidence from African flag-democracies reveals that although women were central to the liberation struggle, narratives of their participation and contribution let alone the violence they suffered on their bodies during the fight for land are invisible from post-independence discourses. In Zimbabwe, female freedom fighters were reduced to sexual objects who merely went to war to perform ‘reed dance’ for the male freedom fighters. Subsequently, the negative labelling limited women’s chances post-independence and even deterred them from enjoying the fruits of the land they fought hard for. This negativity, in many African contexts where women struggled for democracy, not only trivialises their contribution but renders invisible their bodies from the land they fought for. Although women’s contribution to democracy in South Africa is acknowledged through the annual celebration of the August 9 1956 women’s march to the Union Buildings, the commemoration does not do justice to individual women’s contribution to the land as well as their struggles on and for the land. Their contribution is often ‘celebrated’ and negotiated through men and as a result, women suffer the effects of a gendered and hierarchised patriarchal structure which reads their relationship to and struggle for the land through their sexual and reproductive bodies. Building on the gendered realities of unsung heroines who fought for land, this article pursues the theme ‘women for land’ through elderly women farmers’ narratives of violence on the land in South Africa and Zimbabwe. The article theorises that as the elderly women’s violent experiences on the land are heard, they cease to be mere (sexual and reproductive) bodies that deserve to be violated and emerge as voices that re-value previously uncelebrated women who fought on and for the land. These empirical voices simultaneously insert the unsung heroines’ long forgotten experiences into the historical land struggle narrative and contemporary land rights framework that seeks to make visible and audible the violent gendered patriarchal effects women suffer on, for and through the land in South Africa, Zimbabwe and beyond.

Source: Scopus