Category Archives: NGOs
City: NGOs & Social Movements
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Two Articles on NGOs & Social Movements
This article notes that in South Africa the relationship between grassroots organisations and NGOs has often been fractious – to the point that there have been a number of rebellions against NGOs on the part of grassroots organisations. It also notes that NGOs have sometimes reacted in a plainly authoritarian manner to grassroots critiques. And, more positively, it also notes that some NGOs have developed positive and valued relationships with grassroots organisations. However it cautions that an NGO’s position on economic questions i.e. whether it is broadly liberal or socialist – offers no a priori indication of its approach to praxis. The article argues that praxis, in the sense of thinking through and working out how NGOs can relate to grassroots organisations in an enabling manner, needs to be taken seriously and that constructive discussion in this regard should be encouraged rather than suppressed.
– Richard Pithouse
Practitioners involved with or working for non-governmental organisations (NGOs) usually believe their activities are supplementary to those developed by social movement activists. Some of them even regard their organisation as somehow being part of a specific movement. In contrast to this position, activists belonging to emancipatory social movements have often (and increasingly) made criticisms against NGOs and what seems to be the ‘structural role’ of NGOs under contemporary capitalism and governmentality.
– Marcelo Lopes de Souza
The Unemployed People’s Movement will not be Participating in the So-Called ‘People’s Space’ at the BRICS Meeting in Durban
Sunday, 24 March 2013
Unemployed People’s Movement Press Statement
The Unemployed People’s Movement will not be Participating in the So-Called ‘People’s Space’ at the BRICS Meeting in Durban
The Unemployed People’s Movement will not be participating in the so-called ‘People’s Space’ at the BRICS meeting in Durban.
Our Umlazi branch received a phone call recently informing us that buses were being provided for us to send our members to the so-called ‘People’s Space’ at the Centre for Civil Society at UKZN. We were instructed to mobilise to fill the buses.
We made it clear that we will not be participating in this space. We were given no role in the process leading up to the BRICS meeting and we have been given no role in planning the so-called ‘People’s Space’ or in its management.
The experience of grassroots movements at the so-called ‘People’s Space’ at the COP17 meeting in Durban, also hosted by the Centre for Civil Society, was terrible. We were not given any role in the planning of that space. We were just bussed in. We were given inferior accommodation and food. We found that our role was just to sit and listen to overseas experts talking to us. There was a protest by the movements against the organisers of that meeting. They responded by buying us fried chicken but did not take our concerns seriously and discuss a better way forward for the future. This was one more insult.
This was not the first time that movements have been expressing their concerns about these NGO organised meetings. Movements have been raising concerns about these meetings for many years but we have either been ignored or criminalised by the NGOs and academics. We are highly aware that when grassroots movements walked out of the Social Movements Indaba meeting, also held by the Centre for Civil Society, at UKZN in 2006 they were called ‘criminals’ in the media and have been attacked by the NGOs and academics ever since. We are prepared for the same treatment.
In the days of the WSSD in Johannesburg grassroots movements had lots of supporters but were organisationally weak. All that the NGOs had to do to secure popular support was to provide buses and hand out T-shirts for movements like the Landless People’s Movement. But Movements are much stronger now in organisational terms and those days are gone.
These so-called ‘People’s Spaces’ are really NGO and academic spaces where the role of grassroots activists is just to be bussed in to listen to experts in exchange for a few crumbs for the movement leaders. The reason that we condemn this is that we subscribe to Black Consciousness. The Black Consciousness movement emerged in 1968 when black students walked out of a NUSAS meeting in Grahamstown because whites were doing all the thinking and talking while blacks were playing a passive role. Today the situation is just as bad or even worse in these so-called ‘People’s Spaces’. Therefore today we continue to walk out of spaces where we are disrespected and are only being bussed in to legitimate other people’s agendas.
Also, we experience these so called ‘reality tours’ as if we are being treated as animals in a zoo. We have made it clear that we will not be collaborating with so-called ‘reality tours’ in our communities. We insisted that a tour scheduled to take place in Umlazi today be cancelled.
The NGOs and donors are trying to control and commercialise our struggles at these international meetings. If they want to work with us in the future they will need to do so on a respectful and fully democratic basis. We want partnership and not domination and exploitation.
We discussed our position on this matter at the Democratic Left Front national steering committee meeting in Johannesburg last week.
We remain committed to the struggle against imperialism but that struggle needs to be rooted in democratic practices.
Bheki Buthelezi, Unemployed People’s Movement (KwaZulu-Natal) 072 639 9898
Ayanda Kota, Unemployed People’s Movement (Eastern Cape) 078 625 6462
City Press: Time of the signs: Feminism, by any other name
Time of the signs: Feminism, by any other name
by Nokulinda Mkhize
Our pages have been filled with news and stories of statistics regarding gender-based violence and the abuse, assault and violation of women and girls. One that received great prominence was the case of Anene Booysens.
Men in her community, who were known to her, violently assaulted and raped her. She sustained heinous injuries and later died.
This is but one example of the violent acts perpetrated against South African women every four minutes.
South Africa said “enough is enough” and from that came a variety of protests and campaigns that were aimed at raising awareness to combat violence against women.
Predominantly middle-class, suburban people participated in a variety of campaigns ranging from One Billion Rising, hooting to stop rape and wearing black to writing for publications.
However, there were also others, also predominantly middle class, who questioned the impact and relevance of campaigns that seem to be confined mostly to media discussion and social network debates.
While some argued that “something is better than nothing”, the more sceptical asked: “What’s the point of something that resonates very little with me to think about how feminism or, more broadly, ‘the struggle for women’s full liberty’ should be or is expressed in the South African context?”
I wondered how I could explain feminism to my grandmother, and whether these principles cohere with the sense of indignation she often expresses at being denied full equality and opportunities to be educated simply because she is a woman, and one born in rural South Africa under white rule
at that.
I have this internal dialogue because my brand of feminism is the result of the many worlds that are my life: a strong rural upbringing, suburban living, Western education and my calling as isangoma which ties me to ancient cosmologies.
In these many layers of my life I have found that it is often the suburban side of socialisation that believes that it has all the answers ready: the theory, the language and action plan for how we will tackle women’s oppression in South Africa.
However, when I am confronted with the lives of the women in my rural setting and even in my spiritual communion, I realise how inadequate my English-language, “book feminism” is for confronting the current context.
One complication in South Africa is that while politics and culture place women as “second” in the domestic hierarchy, many South African homes are actually female headed, either because there is simply no man present or because the primary breadwinner is a woman.
Once they have earned this income, women participate in izitokfela with other women, which means they actually furnish and build their homes, and pay for weddings and funerals among other things.
Women are constantly demonstrating economic independence and financial wizardry on incredibly small amounts of money.
They also take negative risks, borrowing from omashonisa (loan sharks) to balance the family books.
South African women are asserting, even if it’s out of sheer necessity, economic and personal independence that the culture we live in refuses to fully acknowledge.
Women are expected to be subordinate but in everyday reality, they don’t act that way.
The irony is that suburban, “awareness-raising” feminism is perhaps also not fully cognisant of how black, rural and working-class women are transmitting messages of independence.
There is a defiant personal politics that I have observed that cannot be spoken for or represented by blogging, social-media outrages, hooting against violence or “black Friday”.
What is the liberation language of the grandmother who endured a difficult and heartbreaking marriage but through it raised strong, independent girl children?
What of the woman who defies cultural and social norms by choosing to never marry or have children yet supporting and standing by her sisters and other women in her community? What is their feminist politics?
While the theorised English-language suburban feminism we have inherited has given us useful concepts that have allowed us to formulate policies, it has its limits because of the worlds it does not encompass.
I think there is something that is politically diminished about the actions and messages of South African feminism that cannot draw on the language and experiences by the majority of its women.
I am aware of the gendered aspects of our South African culture(s) that cannot easily be transformed. But there is a lot for us to draw from, and for the worlds of the “visible feminism” to fully recognise the world of the majority.
A simple example is that ubungoma is a fundamentally feminine spiritual practice, and male and female izangoma are called “gogo”.
If we suburbanites start learning in these places, there may be a way to innovate and deepen our participation in the struggle for women’s freedom
in South Africa.