Dr. Rozena Maart: Addressing gender from Cape Town to Canada

EN FRANÇAIS

INTERVIEW AND PHOTOS BY HEATHER MACDONALD
GV CONTRIBUTOR

GUELPH, ON - As a native to Cape Town, South Africa, Dr. Rozena Maart witnessed various forms of oppression growing up, leading her and four other women to create the first black feminist organization in South Africa, Women Against Repression. She took that monumental step in her life and the lives of many South African women in 1986 and a year later was nominated as Woman of the Year. Maart moved on as a writer and won The Journey Prize: Best Short Fiction in Canada in 1992.

Currently living in Guelph, Maart was a sociology professor at the University of Guelph. She met and engaged with many students over the years, regarding their development trips overseas, often discussing how to better understand their own identity and their relation to the rest of the world.

On February 8, Maart delivered the opening keynote speech at the Gender Equality & Education Symposium hosted by WUSC Guelph. She took some time over lunch to talk to Governance Village about her personal accomplishments and the shifting world of gender equality.

Why did you choose to come here today and what is it that inspires the work that you do?

I think why I chose to come here today comes primarily from when I taught here a couple of years ago. I also live in Guelph and I've done a lot of workshops with the Guelph Resource Centre for Gender Empowerment and Diversity. It used to be called the Women's Centre [but] people wanted to move away from the centre that was just for women and open it up for transgender people and all of that.

I've spoken at events at the university organized by different groups to talk more about some of the things that they felt were not covered in the curriculum but which they had felt they gained from my talk. In other words, when you're going as a person doing development work, a lot of the students are learning about development in terms of the economic aspects, stuff around globalization and stuff around the social and political issues around transnationalism and leaving the [country] having theory but not understanding that they are going as an agent of their transnationalism and developing an awareness of how you should approach a community whether it's rural or urban when you go to do development work. So for me it was about that.

I think for WUSC organizing this, it is important for them to highlight gender to recognize that the focus is not only the elimination of gender inequality but also to work with issues like what goes on in other countries when it comes to inequality, how to understand it, how to examine gender inequality, what it means. I think people's own participation is all to kind of broaden the discussion because I think my knowledge and the experience I've had working with students not only in my profession as a professor in the past but also as somebody who lives here and does all kinds of work is that students have often said to me is that they've gone and they just did not know what to expect. So, I think it's important that WUSC has put the Symposium on. I think it's important that they continue to do the work that they do and I think it was important for me to be part of that and recognize that.

What was it that got you involved in the women's movement or more specifically, gender inequality issues?

I think what happens is that when you grow up in a society where things are so divided in terms of what is racism and colonialism and somehow gender isn't spoken about in that context, I think people from my generation, women from my generation, spoke out against those kinds of narrow minorities. Liberation should not be prioritized, this is first and that is second and gender was always seen as something that would happen afterwards.

So, myself included, in 1986, we started the first black feminist organization in Cape Town. We got a lot of hassles and a lot of flack from many people in the anti-apartheid movement. You don't worry about stuff like that because at the time and still today, South Africa has among, if not, the highest rate of violence against women in the world so one of the things that I say is that we can lobby and we can fight for gender equality if it means that our voices are going to be heard in terms of changing legislation. There's only so much one can do because one can legislate against anything but you cannot legislate attitude, y'know?

So it's addressing gender inequality on all levels. It's not just looking at it in terms of the disparity between what men do and what women do but it's addressing it on all levels. Women Against Repression was started now almost 23 years ago and that work is still continuing in many different forms in many different organizations in South Africa, focusing on gender and transgender and sexuality issues and of course doing HIV and AIDS education but it's also more widespread now and people don't feel like they have to ask, "please, can we do this kind of activism," it's just a widespread, accepted thing that this is what happens in order for us to live in a society that's more humane, that recognizes that women have the right to certain kinds of access.

You were speaking about how in 1986 you started the organization but then a year later, you were nominated for Woman of the Year. What does that mean to you?

I was 24; I was very young. It seems young now but at the time it didn't feel like that. I think it was to me, more of a nomination for feminism and for black feminism because I think for women in national liberation movements around the world, where it's always treated that if you demand something that the male leadership has not recognized as a demand, then you're either being bourgeois or you're taking on white-people-issues. Like, "oh that's such a white thing, feminism" and it's rubbish! I think for me it was like a vote for feminism that made it just the fact that we spoke of all kinds of things that the male leadership did not address in the anti-apartheid struggle for national liberation. Those men in those leadership positions did not make that an issue.

Looking back on everything that you've worked on, what would you say is your greatest achievement?

I think it's the violence against women work. I think protest-politics still remains the most important because it's a kind of education that shows people we should not be silent. I always say when people ask me what I like the most, I say I like to talk and write and think and imagine and put on performances through my writing, through drama about things that I'm not allowed to say. Why say things that you're allowed to say? Because it's the things that you're not allowed to say that makes the most impact. We all come from communities where there are secrets whether the secret is sexual abuse or whether it's racism and why keep the secret? Why not share it? Why not open it up? So I still today think protest-politics is one of the most important aspects of my life.

You talked a lot this morning about being aware of your identity and the people around you. You mentioned that you are "Christian by baptism, Muslim by culture and Hindu by heritage," what does that mean for you and how does that play into your personal identity?

 It plays into my identity in ways that, as I said, I consider myself black because I think history and experience gives you an identity. I think if you were born in England, you wouldn't call yourself Canadian. I have a friend in Winnipeg, she was born in Nigeria, both her parents are English, she has a Nigerian passport and she said it was very hard for her to come here because she couldn't say she was Nigerian to anybody because she felt it in terms of citizenship, not in terms of culture. She grew up with British culture and she had a Nigerian passport. She had never had a British passport in her life so I think experience allows us to call ourselves all kinds of things and especially when that experience forces us to.

When I was growing up, we didn't have passports, our identity documents said "coloured" but it was only when I was 13 or 14 that I got to know of Steve Biko and what it meant to call oneself black. It was like an act of defiance to use the term and to take it on positively, not like a curse or an insult. Also, if we think black wasn't just about the colour of the shoes or the colour of your skin, it was a way to sort of recognize that you had to fight through all of the other labels to use.

I think it's like what people in the States have done or what queer people have done; they've taken the word "queer" to use it positively and for people like Steve Biko to say this is not just about skin, this is about your mind, this is about divide and conquer tactics. So what I meant by the [statement] was that I didn't know my father when I was born, my mother and my father had split up so she lived in a Christian household. My grandmother was Hindu but I was baptized a Christian, my grandfather's sister was Muslim. So, we had to have a halal house. Our neighbours were Muslims so I learned to cook next door. Also, the Cape Malay culture in Cape Town, it's very, very present because the word "malay" is a Muslim word but Cape Malay comes from the Malaysians, people who brought Muslims from Malaysia during the times of rebellion in the 1700s and then brought into Cape Town and so that's very strong, very prominent. It's woven into the food, the culture, history. Then of course, my grandmother is Hindu but of course she was also converted and I think that's part of my heritage.

I think that with the way Canadians are raised, you don't have to classify yourself in any other way than to say, "I'm Canadian" so if you don't have to then you don't and sometimes through that process, people lose a sense of their history. They just don't know because they've never had to think about it.

You mentioned that the UN is estimating a goal completely eliminating gender inequality by 2015. Do you think that it's reasonable to put a number on that or do you think it's possible to reach that goal?

Well, I don't think anything is impossible. I think that part of what you see in history is that people thought for so long that many things are impossible and it's not. There are lots of advantages to putting a number on it because for example when organizations have a five-year plan or a seven-year plan, I think it's important for people to know that they're working towards something whereas I think perhaps if you didn't have a date, there wouldn't be a kind of urgency, you see what I mean?

I mean let's face it, so many people have said that they would have never thought an African-American would be the president of the United States but of course to most people he's African not African-American because you know how people are saying, "oh he's like us, he's one of us" kind of thing. I think I recognize the need for them to put a date on it and I recognize the need for people to have effective planning to say "This is our goal; this is what we're going to do in year one, this is what we're going to do in year two" because I think we need that kind of urgency to say "enough is enough". You know, by 2005 we want to be here, by 2010 we want to be here, by 2015 this is what we want to accomplish. I think that these are areas in which those [goals] are necessary.

How do you go about doing that though? How do you change the attitudes that people have had engrained in their heads for so many years?

You change your way of saying change. You don't say "change"; you say "grow" because people don't want to change. Most people that you know, men, women, lovers, boyfriends, friends, mothers, fathers, uncles, everyone has to change. We only allow change in a political sense when we say we need to work towards equitable change or social change but when you're talking to people on a day-to-day basis; they don't want to know that you think you need to change them.

I think if we recognize that we grow, that we are all still learning - I say this all the time, I learn from younger people more than I learn from my own age category. I think that if we recognize that learning and education and growth are crucial to any form of development and that's the thing that I was saying.

One day it sort of dawned on me, I was in a workshop and these students were quite comfortable saying that this was the first time they were having a workshop by a black woman and I'm fine with that, I mean, I call myself black but when I asked them, "what makes you white?" they couldn't answer me, they never thought about it. They were really uncomfortable. "I don't know; I'd have to think about that." Because it's not something most people think about. If they do, it's with shame or with guilt like they don't want to be associated with all the negative aspects that my identity has brought them, in other words, issues of racism or colonialism. I said to them, "Nobody would ever suggest that you identify with anything like that."

It's like, I sometimes hear horrible things being said about women. I don't take it personally. I would say something to the person but I know that that is coming from a place where for men to make those kinds of comments, is an indication of their insecurity half the time but in terms of these kinds of issues, when we ask ourselves and sometimes when people are being asked by me, they will tell me afterwards, "y'know, that really threw me off; I wasn't expecting it," because I think Canadians have lots of privileges and part of that privilege is almost not having to examine yourselves and not having to examine your own history.

In closing, is there anything else you'd like to add that we haven't talked about already?

I think the other thing also, that came out in the talk earlier is that we often forget that gender also means men. One of the things I was saying early on in my talk is that we're living in an era where notions of gender have expanded. There are many parts now, especially in South Africa where people are doing work around transgender, identities that focus on how this is only about women, it's not. Gender is not only about women, it's about recognizing that men and women need to look very critically at either how we perpetuate our own impression or ways in which we need to identify strategies to work towards that elimination.

Too often people spend their time with global protestations but there's no plan of political action, and that's what we need. We can have as many global protestations as we like. If those global protestations are not accompanied by a plan of political action, they're lost and this is why I think that 2005 and 2015 mark[s are] so important, not because I think that if we haven't reached that goal, I'm going to be so disappointed, no, because I think we need to understand the urgency when it comes to oppression in the same way that people are now understanding the urgency when it comes to the environment.

We can't just accumulate plastic bags and pretend there's nothing wrong with it. The minute you pick something up, you need to ask, "Where is it going to go?" So I think that the fact that they are developing strategies to look at particular years of this is where we are, this is where we're going; it's very important.