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Nelspoort, a small town that got its status in 1999. Since 1924, Nelspoort was designed as a hospital
run by the health department of the government.
These sixteen women, whose birth dates range from the early 1920s to 1980s, thus wrote their
own vision of the city’s history. According to the project’s organizers, this approach “revealed a
dynamic of change and of empowerment for both the participants and the facilitators themselves.” It
seems that these rural women have at least won the time and space to reflect on their lives and
share their experiences with others, through writing and disseminating their totally new production.
In addition, the unemployment caused by the disappearance of the hospital has refocused its
inhabitants on new claims as the right to communal land in order to cultivate, brought to the
Ministry of Agriculture, and on new priorities, including securing livelihoods, fighting against AIDS,
and highlighting gender equality. Today, these books are available in schools and libraries, and this
model of initiatives is reproduced in other languages throughout the entire country.
In “Chris Hani Baragwaneth Hospital” Hospital in Soweto, Johannesburg, the NGO ACCT (Aids Care
and Counseling Training), which was established in 1992, provides psychological support and care for
HIV patients and communities affected by the AIDS virus. Patients are mostly women, and according
to the organizers they “must reclaim their identity [...] and go out of male domination.”
Sessions of psychological support welcome women for an hour or more, and women are meant to
talk about their illness, isolate responsibilities, and discover the intimate and even taboo, namely
sexuality. The organization offers other activities, including a workshop of tablecloths and napkins,
another one of bowls, pulp and beadwork production: bracelets, ribbons, and pins. Each pin or anti‐
AIDS lapel has sells for 10 Rands, half of which goes to the woman who made it.
On a weekly basis, the center also receives pregnant women with and without HIV, and offers
them a meal. These activities, that seem to refer women to their traditional roles, create a contrary
dynamic, the sick feeling “personalized”, “existing”, two states which it is difficult to imagine the
importance in a country where HIV has been ignored, have felt treated as “animals” by their
“revolutionary” government for many years. 7
Moreover, all these women participate in writing workshops, where they write down their daily
lives, their sexual relationships, talk about their pregnancies, and their relationships with their
babies, in the hope that the child who will grow up will have access to the story of his mother’s and
his or her own story. Each personal story is then shared, discussed explicitly, before being archived
and becoming a public good. All women can see them as often as they wish. They manage the room,
the place where these stories are stored, by themselves. This activity takes all its political value,
questioning the individuation – in the existentialist sense – of the “cases” and the failure to be taken
into account at the national level.
Methodologies for the standpoint theory
The sessions of women’s stories of these two organizations will now be presented. They are held
outdoors or indoors and meet whenever a dozen women, faithful or new, speaking in their own
language – there are eleven official and ten ethnic groups in South Africa – and sometimes having
English as a common language. The duration of these meetings varies and the frequency is adapted
to the availability of the women who are talking. These women, rural or urban, express throughout
different sessions, fix the “episodes” of their lives before and after apartheid.
Violence is more or less omnipresent. [“We were moved every day. I do not know where I will be
tomorrow with my kids. My husband was gone. So I always had a loan package. Now it’s the same.”
“My husband is dying. I’m sad. I do not want to live. [...] Last week I stopped to see him at the
hospital. I no longer want. [...] I met a man. It pleases me. We meet. I like him. We make love. I didn’t
tell my husband ... ” “I come here to express my anger against the government, which treats us like
dogs, animals. I’m 26 and I want to have children. At least three. I want to heal. I come here to be