Passers-by at Helen Joseph Street, formerly Church Street, where street vendors offer easy access to a wide range of goods and services. A woman vendor, identified as Nomalizo, says women in the country continued to be subjected to life at the bottom of the food chain. Picture: Thobile Mathonsi
WHAT is there to celebrate when all it is about the fierce fight for survival, is what a group of street vendors on the streets of Pretoria asked during Women's Day on Friday.
Speaking during the day when the world celebrated what it was to be a woman, a day set aside by the United Nations for all countries to recognise how far women have come, their achievements without regard to divisions, whether national, ethnic, linguistic, cultural, economic or political, they said they lived in constant survival mode.
“Yes we understand that some women are not where the majority was at some point in the history of womankind, but still, now and this year, so many of us are stuck in a place that is so hard that we wonder what there is to celebrate,” said one hawker, who preferred to be called Nomalizo, as she juggled a toddler in between offering her wares to passers-by.
She and a group of other women said women in the country continued to be subjected to life at the bottom of the food chain.
“We are the parents left to fend for children when men decide they have had enough, when men decide they have no money we hustle while society allows them to sit back....what then can we celebrate,” Mamiki Ndlangisa chirped in, to agreement from other women who said this was not all they were subjected to, just for being women.
This was the country and the world praised each other for seeing the day which has assumed a new global dimension for women in developed and developing countries alike.
“The growing international women's movement, which has been strengthened by four global United Nations women's conferences, has helped make the commemoration a rallying point to build support for women's rights and participation in the political and economic arenas,” the UN said in its message to women worldwide.
They invited everyone to learn about the history of women’s rights and the UN's contribution to the cause, but, what was there to celebrate, or to learn from, some asked, when their struggle was as bad – or worse that that, of the women who came before them.
Questioning the celebratory messages, conferences and congratulatory messages the women in positions of economic and societal positions were in, Nomalizo asked: “Who cares that we suffer every day, that we live in constant fear of either being hijacked, victimised, killed, us and our children raped, or just depending on men who have shown not to care about us.”
She and the other women said no one cared about them: “They do not even buy from us even as we sit outside their offices and line the streets on which they walk,” 20 year-old Rudzani Mashabela from Mamelodi said.
She had dropped out of school, she said, and abandoned what was a promising future when her father lost his job. She was in Grade 9, doing well in science and maths, she said. “But my father, when he stopped working, left the burden to care for us to our mother and grandmother. He left for Johannesburg and never came back, because he could.”
She said when the father left her mother, who was unemployed, and who had grown up without her own father after he left for the proverbial City of Gold, was left with five children to look after.
“My grandmother, who had suffered a similar fate, took us in...the long-suffering old lady taught my mother tricks to make money, just so that we had something to eat every day,” the young lady said.
And it was a vicious cycle, added another, who stood at a nearby traffic light begging for coins from passing motorists. “I left Zimbabwe because my brothers were more important than us girls. Life was hard, and I realised that a life away from home was better than what my mother, her mother, and other women before them, had seen.”
And indeed it was a vicious cycle, said Sindisiwe Mtsweni, whose church offered food to the needy of the inner Pretoria CBD every Wednesday and Sunday. Saying there were men and boys who had nothing, just like their female counterparts, it was more the women who were on the streets because they had nowhere else to be.
“Their stories are harrowing, sad, they live on the streets right under the noses of the government, of the Department of Women and Children, of state organs run by women. ”This is besides that they and women across the country are always on the lookout for male criminals, rapists, kidnappers.“
She said women in South Africa were scared to drive alone - day or night, they feared walking alone to work. “As we speak we women are worried even when we leave our children with fathers, uncles, and even brothers.” Women, Mtsweni said, were not even safe in the church.
And this, she said, was due to a government which turned a blind eye to the ills below the veil of glowing achievements, education and positions. “If just once, they went to the ground, like we do, to check on the ordinary people on the street, just so legislation would accommodate women more, so that the justice system would understand exactly what patriarchy was when it was not fighting for positions, the country would be in a position to celebrate the day,” Mtsweni said.
ntando.makhubu@inl.co.za