Grahamstown can teach South Africans the necessity of working together, says Nomboniso Gasa, a researcher, writer, activist and analyst of politics, gender and cultural issues, who spoke to Grocott’s Mail about her views on Rhodes University’s Anti-Sex Crimes Week.
Grahamstown can teach South Africans the necessity of working together, says Nomboniso Gasa, a researcher, writer, activist and analyst of politics, gender and cultural issues, who spoke to Grocott’s Mail about her views on Rhodes University’s Anti-Sex Crimes Week.
“We can use this university town’s size and history to show other South Africans that transformation is possible because if we can begin things small, we can have citizen-owned transformation," she said.
“It is necessary to create spaces for campaigns such as 1 in 9 because it is important that we do not withdraw behind high walls,” Gasa said, sitting in front of a steaming polystyrene cup of Milo at a table inside Rhodes University’s Day Kaif.
She commended the students who have signed up for the silent day-long protest as she said that remaining silent is very difficult.
“It is a very interesting protest. Silence is often imposed on people but, in this protest, it is chosen – which makes it almost like a retreat.”
She paused to glance into the sun’s glare. “It would be most interesting if the Vice-Chancellor was to tape his mouth too.”
However, she is concerned about the lack of interest in the campaign among the students. She had walked past a group of women students and inquired whether they would be taking part in the anti-sex crimes protests.
She was shocked to discover that they said it was unimportant because it was not for marks.
“University, for me, had a huge impact on shaping my views that were beyond grades,” Gasa said.
She believes that it is important that students do not miss the access to knowledge which is more than how students perform academically.
“University was a politically, intellectually and personally rewarding time for me, it was the most free of my years and it was where I met many of my best friends and although we were studying for different degrees, we would all ideologically reflect on politics, law and society,” she said.
But Gasa’s interest in politics began long before her university years. Chewing on a Wilson’s toffee (a sweet from her childhood years) she explained that her political awareness started in her childhood home in the rural village, Sabalele in the Eastern Cape.
Although she said that she lived in a typical rural household, the gender politics in her immediate family were unconventional compared to other households in the village.
“When someone from the village wanted to borrow something from us, my dad would always say that he had to consult his wife first, and this was quite disturbing for people,” Gasa said.
She described how when she was about seven years old she felt insecure that her family was not the same as other families. “I told my dad that he should smack my mom just so that people could see that he was in control,” she said.
But her understanding of gender roles and political liberation developed in the next few years.
At the age of 14, her political activism began in a school protest against unfair treatment.
She recounts how after the holidays, she was called into the principal’s office and was arrested by two or three policemen. She was detained without trial.
Her parents did not know that she had been arrested. She was forced to undress in front of male policemen.
The photograph of her grandmother, which she always kept inside her chest-pocket, was snatched from her in case she used it to kill herself.
She was beaten, thrown against a wall and her body still bears the scars and aches from the torture she suffered at the hands of those policemen.
“The thing that struck me the most when I entered the police station is that I greeted the male policemen behind the desk as ‘uncle’ because I did not know what other polite word to refer to him as,” she said.
His vicious reply, “I am not your uncle,” has stuck with her ever since. She was detained for about four months.
The police had expected that she was a terrorist seeing that her grandparents, Dorothy and Welcome Vulindlela Zihlangu were activists in Cape Town.
But the brave 14-year-old that she was did not feel like she was totally a victim. Leaning across the table, she says quietly, “I thought, you know what, f*** you, I thought, you are not getting what I have, but I think they thought that I had more information than I did.”
Her detention triggered what she calls a process of more political engagement. She became involved in women’s and students’ protests and started working underground for the ANC.
She was detained many more times. But in identifying with gender discrimination, she can identify with the injustice of other forms of discrimination because she said, “ultimately all forms of silencing intersect.”
Although as an activist, Gasa was fighting against forms of silencing, she found the silence of a damp cell just as domineering.
“I saw the loneliness of political activism, the pushing out of your community and your comfort zone, there is something about being involved in a political struggle that is not as sexy as people think, it makes you isolated and lonely,” she said.
Yet, she misses the platforms that engage people and communities. “We regain our humanity by being conscious and it is a way of integrating ourselves into society.”
