sempozyum_bildiri_kitabi

SOUTH AFRICA: KNOWLEDGE IN RESISTANCE
Joelle PALMIERI *
For the past fifteen years, in South Africa, the stories of black women generally living in poverty in
townships and rural areas have been collected by women’s organizations, for the purpose of
valorizing their memories. These stories create knowledge in resistance, because they are made
visible in a country where gender is institutionalized (Seidman, 1999, p. 287‐307). Indeed, in terms of
rights, South Africa’s constitution is clear, but in reality the country is the most unequal in the world,
in terms of distribution of wealth (Bhorat, Van der Westhuizen and Jacobs, 2009, p. 8) coupled with
an environment of entrenched violence and a big prevalence of AIDS, situations which women are
feeling the effects every day.
The aim of this article is to examine, in South Africa, the relationship between gender, knowledge
and resistance in a context of globalization where one‐upmanship, excess, acceleration through
which is named “Information Society” or “Knowledge Society” are up. It is in this regard to isolate
gender epistemic inequality from economic inequalities, most often put forward, to unveil nonacademic
knowledge produced and increased by relations of subalternity (Spivak, 2009).
To this end, we will ask ourselves two sets of questions:
– How, in an exacerbated and accelerated context of gender violence, (which is also economic,
social, political, and epistemic), can women’s voices emerge? How do these voices form knowledge
in resistance?
– How is globalization reducing the space and the time for States, (between States, and
between States and their populations) and what impacts does this have in term of gender?
The answers to these questions will determine why South Africa knows today two tangled
systems of domination, coloniality (sets of domination relationships related to the expansion of
capitalism) of knowledge and patriarchy, and especially how, paradoxically, these two systems are
source of knowledge creation.
This article is the result of a research study conducted between 2002 and 2008 on the activities of
two organizations: Southern Cape Land Committee in Cape Town and the Western Cape region, and
Aids Counseling Care and Training in Chris Hani Baragwaneth Hospital in Soweto, Johannesburg.
These observations have continued by an institutional analysis and the contextualized study of the
renewal of the coloniality in Africa, which has been purchased from 2008 to 2011. Interviews
conducted as part of this research in December 2008 in Cape Town were the political impacts of ICT
uses on male and colonialitarian (related to the coloniality of power) domination with 12 women’s or
feminists organizations, research institutes working on gender and organizations focused on support
for peasants’ rights or triple therapy but not working with a gender perspective.
This article begins with brief reports on gender inequalities in South Africa. On one hand the
specificity of gender violence in the country will be stressed, and on the other hand it will be insisted
on subalternity reports related to the State masculinism, which is detrimental to the production of
own knowledge. Finally, experiences that make visible knowledge in resistance will be highlighted.
Specific gender inequalities
Despite a model constitution, severe gender inequalities exist in South Africa. Gender violence
speak out on the grounds of the women’s bodies appropriation with the highest rates of rape and
*
Laboratory Les Afriques dans le Monde - Pessac, France