On Becoming and Being a Woman Theologian in South Africa: In Conversation with Denise Ackerman
Bastienne Klein
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What got you interested in women’s issues and inspired you to become a theologian? [1]
Purely by chance I went to a women's bible study group with a friend of mine who drank too much, smoked too much and whose life was not in order. I couldn't imagine what she was doing there. I became fascinated, because I discovered a group of women who really had nothing in common other than the book that they were studying together.
For two years I sat in this bible study group asking all the questions somebody who had not committed herself in any way to a religious affiliation, would ask. Questions such as: What about the 'heathens'; what about suffering in the world? Then I reached a difficult period in my own life and decided to give faith a try. I was a typically reluctant convert who said, "God, if you are what they say you are, show me".
A few years later my friend Elfriede Bremer and I were invited to talk on a SABC radio programme for women about what we were doing in the bible studies. In response to our two talks we got huge bags of mail from women all over southern Africa, Malawi, the then Rhodesia, Botswana and Lesotho, saying, "We want to do this, tell us how". In six weeks we wrote a little "How to" guide. My friend had R200,00 in her savings account, and we used it to print the guide and for fifty cents we sent it to all those who had written us letters. When my spouse Laurie came home one day and saw us receiving money from the public, he said, "What on earth are you doing? You can't take money from the public. You better form a non-profit making company" and that's precisely what we did.
We became known as "Groepsbybelstudie". Without a single day's theological training, the two of us started to write bible study guides. We started with one on the first three chapters of Mark, and after we'd finished it we thought we should just have it checked out. We phoned up Pretoria University and asked, "Who is your best New Testament scholar?" They gave us a name and we went to see the professor who was extremely kind, who took our manuscript, made a few changes and encouraged us to go on. One of the funny parts of the story is that this man was an architect of apartheid's theology and none of us knew it. He couldn't have been more charming to us! I can't remember how many guides we produced eventually but they were widely used and we found it all very absorbing.
Then the day came when my youngest child was ready to go to nursery school, and I said to Elfriede, "You know, I think I'll go and do a diploma in theology. At least one of us needs to be more theologically respectable for this work". I went to UNISA and spoke to a Professor I knew there and he asked, "Why do you want to do this?" I told him that I thought that one day I'd like to write something about what happens when a group of women gather around a table to read the scriptures together. I was (and still am) fascinated by the dynamics of small group bible studies, and thirty-seven years later I am still at it. He said, well if you do that, then you should do a thesis one day. In the end he convinced me to do a degree in theology. I got hooked and here I am four degrees later and still hooked. I fell into it just like that.
When did you consciously realise that you were a woman/feminist theologian?
It started with our contextually rooted need for liberation. My awareness was nurtured by liberation theology. I first read Gustavo Guitérrez, Leonardo Boff, Juan Segundo, Johann Baptist Metz, James Cone and others. I read some contemporary South Africans such as Simon Maimela, Alan Boesak, Takatso Mofokeng and Basil Moore. I had been a member of the Christian Institute where I had first made contact with black consciousness and the theological thinking it stimulated. In my third year of studies, I found Mary Daly's The Church and the Second Sex in the UNISA library. I was riveted. Soon afterwards I read Letty Russell's Human Liberation from a Feminist Perspective. I had an epiphany. Then I knew, that's where I'm going, that's what it's about! I realized that I could not think and talk about human liberation if it was separate from women's liberation.
Soon the contradictions, demands, even the absurdities of our situation showed me that true freedom is all-encompassing. To liberate people to live a life of dignity that affirms their worth is very difficult in situations of oppression, discrimination and poverty. Take the latter. Living in total poverty without the prospect of a job breaks down people's self-respect and their belief in themselves. Liberation for them means liberation from the daily grind of trying to survive. Liberation also means respecting human rights and that includes women's rights, children's rights, and respect for our environment. The early feminist cry that the personal is the political, and the political is personal, seems true to me. Our experiences of life are not split into different spheres. What happens in the workplace affects what happens at home and vice versa. So I decided that I wanted to work in the sphere of women's liberation.
In 1984 I gave a paper at a theological conference at UNISA on women's ministries, which was probably one of the first papers on women's liberation theology in South Africa. Well, the walls didn't come tumbling down! The paper was based on my reading of 1 Corinthians12. It seemed clear to me that first, the Holy Spirit cannot be dictated to; second, the Spirit gives gifts as God wills; third, every single baptised person is given at least one gift for the good of the community,
i.e. the Church and lastly, we must use these gifts. Among the gifts are the gifts to preach, teach, pastor, lead, administer and so on. At that time the question of women's ordination was contentious. I simply could not understand that it could be denied to those women who felt called to serve the church in this way. I have never had this calling but I joined the fight for the recognition of women's ministries because I believed - and I still do - that this is what God wills. Changes began to happen in the Protestant churches. At the same time I could see my Catholic women friends despairing of their calling to the priesthood ever being recognized.
I then finished my master's thesis on the question of women and ministries. From my understanding of 1 Corinthians 12, I tried to refute the objections to women's ordination - objections based on women's nature, the headship of men, the arguments from culture and tradition and the in persona Christi argument, namely that only men could stand in the 'shoes' of Christ when administering the sacraments. Not surprisingly I was still interested in the role of women in our context when I got to my doctoral studies.
I was aware at that time that Felicity Edwards had also written on the feminine face of God and that she had been involved in a more women-centred approach to religion. But there weren't many other women in academic theology at the time other than Sister Henry Keane and Christina Landman who were teaching at UNISA.
It is sad that women meet with some of their most painful experiences of alienation in the very communities that purport to believe that we are all created equal in the image of God. The church has a long way to go in dealing with gender issues and their effects on people and ministry. Women's liberation is an ongoing struggle and is deeply connected to the liberation of men as well. No man can be liberated as long as women are not. Just as some whites joined the struggle for liberation from racist oppression, men must join women in the struggle against discrimination, abuse and violation. It is about their humanity as much as it is about ours. Solidarity is what we ask for.
In my own life I've had to face how hard it is to be on the side of the oppressors. I did not in my heart ever believe in apartheid, I never belonged to a racist political party or voted for one; nonetheless, I bear a responsibility for apartheid. Most of life has been spent living under white minority rule perpetrated by my own people
- I am half Afrikaner. Members of my family supported apartheid policies. I know something of the cost of standing up against one's own people while also being accountable to those people in the white community who felt like I did. As a member of the perpetrating group, I also had to be accountable to those communities who suffered. It was both simple and fraught. I have always felt that I have to write from out of my own context. I want to be open to dialogue with those whose views are different to mine, I do not want to fear change and I must always be alert to the experiences of those communities to whom my work is accountable.
I'm saddened when I hear a lack of interest in women's liberation among some of the younger generation of women. They don't realise how much was achieved for them by the older generation that has enabled them to be what and where they are today. They also haven't done sufficient social analysis to understand how much more still has to happen before we can have a truly egalitarian society.
How did this understanding lead to your doctoral work on the praxis of the Black Sash women's organisation? Isn't this a rather secular organisation for a Christian theologian to write on?
Yes, it is. Thank heavens for it. Let me explain. I was writing within the discipline of practical theology. I became very interested in what is known technically as the communicative praxis of theology. [2] I was and still am interested in what our praxis communicates in terms of our faith.
In the 1980's the waves of oppression became more violent as one state of emergency followed the other. I knew the Black Sash, but never thought of writing about them. I was trying to find groups of Christian women from my own community of accountability who were resisting what was basically unjust, discriminatory, unloving — a system in which people's humanity was being desecrated. I wanted to write about women's communicative praxis for justice in the church but could not find an organised group of women who were standing up and saying "No!" to oppression. One day I realised that the Black Sash, this white and mostly middle class organization of which I was a member, had since 1955 never let up on seeking justice for the many people who came to their advice offices. So I thought - instead of writing a thesis on what the church is communicating, let me write something on what the church should be hearing. I asked myself, what are the women of the Black Sash doing that can communicate liberating praxis to the church? Are their practices consonant in any way with what is expected of us as those who look forward to the coming of God's reign on earth?
The Black Sash had a clear goal: to do justice, to affirm human rights. The movement began as a protest against what was called the rape of the constitution. In 1955 a bill was introduced to alter the composition of the senate of the Union parliament and the election of its members. The ultimate purpose was to remove the coloured people from the common voters roll. This produced enormous protest. The Sash women collected 94 680 signatures in two petitions protesting the Senate bill. They trekked up to the Pretoria Union Buildings where they camped for the night to protest against the Senate Bill. They held vigils outside parliament, but in February 1956 the bill was passed. At its height, the Black Sash had ten to fifteen thousand members. After the battle was lost, their membership shrank. From 1957 on a faithful core group of some six to seven hundred members remained. Jean Sinclair, president and stalwart of the Sash said at the time: "We must make friends with failure". For the next forty years they never gave up.
Although they worked within the law, the women of the Black Sash found a myriad of ways through their advice offices in which to help men and women with everything from pensions, to child support, to caring for the families of prisoners, to meeting the returned prisoners. They continued to protest every piece of discriminatory legislation as it appeared. They stood in public places holding posters with pithy slogans. Through their magazine SASH they informed the public about what was going on in those repressive years. They placed a tremendously high premium on communicating their challenge to apartheid. They monitored proceedings in parliament and the courts and they formed alliances with other organs of civil society opposed to apartheid. Because they were mostly white, they had a greater freedom to do what they did. Yet they developed a profound understanding of how apartheid affected the lives of black women. I found the question of solidarity very interesting. How did privileged middle class whites show solidarity with oppressed black people? The Sash understood solidarity as commitment to actions for human rights and liberation. This involved struggle and it involved risk. Their advice offices were bombed, some members were imprisoned and others banned. They stood in front of bulldozers when they came to raze shacks. They put their bodies on the line. They spent hours and hours and hours in advice offices in cramped, hot little places, going about the work that had to be done. Their praxis communicated to me that they cared about human rights and the inherent worth of people. This suggested an underlying anthropology that values people's dignity, people's rights and freedom.
This, it seemed to me, is what the Christian faith should be about. We can have the finest theologies in the world, the most rigorous systematic belief systems and dogmas, from here to the Vatican and back. But they mean nothing if they remain in the realm of theological theory and do not translate into the practices of people of faith. What we do about what we believe is the ultimate test of the veracity of our beliefs. We are called to be present and active in this world. We are, in some or other awesome way, the tools with which God is accomplishing what must be done in this world. Thus Christian practices are both normative and theological. That's why I use the word praxis, because it means a practice that has been informed by theory, that has been reflected on.
It's also a response.
Yes. Christian practices must address fundamental human needs and conditions. They have everything to do with temporality, with the body, with language, with relationships, with mortality. To me, this is what the life of Christ was about.
Would you say that the response of the Sash then was a religious response?
Yes, but not consciously so. They were a totally secular organisation that would never have called themselves religious. As part of the empirical research for my thesis, I interviewed 52 Black Sash women of completely different backgrounds and ages. What emerged out of this research were a common vision and a common dedication to actions for a just society based on human rights. They embraced the ideas of justice, charity, freedom and equality. These values are consonant with those known as the values of the reign of God.
We all wrestle with the glaring gap between our belief systems and our actions. I certainly do. I know what I believe and yet I am capable of doing something that is not compatible with what I believe. As people of faith, we struggle to live between the tension of what we believe and what we do about what we believe. For instance, how is it that the church, that believes that a diversity of gifts are given to all — for some to preach, for some to teach — has for so long denied women the pulpit? What does it mean that it is considered acceptable for women to go to far off places as missionaries, but not to be ordained back home? There's a total gap here.
Every day the Black Sash saw the dignity of people smashed. You can be a human rights campaigner without having any religion at all. For many it was simply a case of common decency and justice. Under apartheid people lost this vision of a humane society in which human rights function. And we know that there are many places in the world where this is still the case. We must never cease to be vigilant.
Some of the leaders in the Sash were known to be involved in denominational religious activity. Did they ever bring their faith to bear at all on the movement?
There were women of faith among the initiators and leaders in the Black Sash: Jean Sinclair, Sheena Duncan, Mary Burton and Margaret Nash, to mention a few. There were also Jewish women of faith, whom I got to know in the advice offices in Johannesburg.
Their faith may well have motivated them to do what they did. Apartheid was patently unjust and uncaring. But the Sash was openly "undenominational", as it said in its foundation documents, quite a quirky way to describe the fact that they were a secular organisation. It meant they were open to people of all persuasions — faith, no faith, and different kinds of faith. They stuck absolutely rigorously to their secular basis and remained true to the fact that their prime interest was the alleviation of the suffering of black people. Anybody who was interested in working for that was welcome to join and be part of the Sash.
Once we had a democratic government, the Black Sash saw this chapter of its history coming to an end. It ceased to exist as a voluntary organisation and instead the Black Sash Trust was formed to carry on with the advice offices. They're still an interesting voice, but they no longer occupy the place that they did formerly. They stepped aside knowing that a new era had begun. Before, as part of the dominant repressive group, whites had a particular responsibility of working for justice. That was now over. After his release from prison, in his first address to the people of South Africa, Nelson Mandela called the black Sash together with NUSAS, "the conscience of the white nation".
In South Africa, this kind of theologising by and about women is singular. To what do you attribute the paucity of theological response from women in South Africa in the last century?
Women's theological responses were as scarce as the proverbial fairies teeth. I can think of two specific instances where the ideology of being female surfaced, but they were not specifically theological. The first were the women's organizations in the churches who guarded women's interest in different ways, but who did not develop specific theological responses.
Here I think of the Manyanos in the Methodist Church who harnessed African women's zeal for evangelisation, prayer and fundraising, but they did so around an ideological understanding of women primarily as mothers. This meant that women's chastity, marital fidelity and domestic responsibility were highly valued, as role models for younger women.
It's interesting that these women's groups ran parallel to what was going on in the mainline church, where the male cleric was the preacher, teacher, administrator and authority. These women's groups offered a space for women to express themselves and to do so in ways that happened, in the end, to be ideologically safe for the men, because it kept the women separate, busy pursing their ideal of motherhood. I don't want to denigrate being a mother; I am a mother myself. I'm talking about it as an ideological move that had consequences for women's struggles.
Something else that interests me is the role religious women played in situations of adversity. They are the lamenters. They lead their congregations in wailing, mourning and lamenting, an area into which men did not enter. There are seeds of subversion in the lament of the women. It comes all the way from ancient times, from Homer, from Jeremiah and the psalms, and it's interesting that it is a powerful phenomenon in the Manyanos as well. [3]
I suspect that if one were to investigate what goes on in the African Indigenous Churches, you would discover similar phenomena there; the women prophesy, heal and lament, as well as fund raise and they are central to pastoral care.
The second instance in which I think an ideology of women was powerful, was in the Volksmoeder image. The Volksmoeder literally means the "mother of the nation". This is an expression that those of us who speak more English than Afrikaans are used to hearing in connection with Albertina Sisulu or Winnie Mandela who have both been called mothers of the nation. But it as an ideal that was common parlance amongst Afrikaners. The ideal of the Volksmoeder came to prominence, I think, at the time of the Boer republics, and it was tremendously strengthened by the Anglo-Boer (South African) war, in which women played a significant role. This ideal describes women as resilient, self-reliant, showing physical courage, a love of freedom, often self-sacrificing, and at the same time admired for their domesticity and integrity. The defiance of the Boer women in encounters with British troops is well documented. The Volksmoeder was a powerful person, standing behind her fighting man, or holding the fort in his absence on commando. Ultimately, many of them were sent off to the concentration camps with their children, where some 27 000 of them perished.
I don't want to detract from the courage and tenacity of these women but the ideology of the Volksmoeder served the male cause well. In the history of the Volksmoeder ideology there were also the odd dissident voices. Marie du Toit, who was the sister of the poet Totius (J.S. du Toit), wrote a book called "Vrouen en Feminis" ("Women and Feminist") around about the 1920s. She was sceptical, questioning this idealised version of Afrikaner womanhood.
In the 1920s, there were crop failures and increasing poverty on the farms, which led to a growing community of impoverished white people moving to the cities, particularly in the Rand area (modern day Gauteng). Then came the stock market crash in 1929, and what was known as the Great Depression. The "poor white problem" became a South African reality. [4] It was an interesting time in which prominent Afrikaner women were vocal in the trade unions; women like Betty du Toit, Anna Scheepers and Katy Viljoen. They worked in factories and played a role in the early days of trade unionism.
Would they have been church going women?
Unfortunately I don't know. My sense is that they probably carried quite a lot of the traditional upbringing of a Dutch Reformed background. Some of them were members of the Communist party as well.
This Volksmoeder idea remained a very powerful concept in the middle-class Afrikaner women, right up into the 1990's as far as I'm concerned. She is not called a Volksmoeder anymore — that's become rather unfashionable — but it still applies where the woman's sphere of influence is restricted to the domestic sphere, and her role in life is to support her man, and so on.
But it wasn't necessarily linked to a theological ideal?
I don't think so. I believe that the black women Manyanos and the white women Afrikaners, the mothers of the nation, the black mother, the Afrikaner mother, were both strongly motivated by religious and theological themes. That led directly, I think, to the clampdown of the Afrikaner nationalists on black women, because they understood very well that the black women's role was a powerful one, even as they understood the black women not so much as productive, but as reproductive.
It was the Black women's power to organise in contexts such as the Federation of South African Women that they feared. They organised the anti-pass campaigns, the struggles that began in the fifties when the Native Laws Amendment Act was passed into law in about 1952. [5] Then came the defiance campaigns, and we see how a diverse group of women became prominent organizers of resistance: Bertha Mkhize, Fatima Meer, Amina Cachalia, Ray Alexander, Hilda Bernstein, Lilian Ngoyi, who was powerful in the march to the Union buildings in 1956, along with Florence Matimola.
After all the vigour and energy poured out between the 1950s to the 1970s, things died down, probably because of a combination of the repressive laws that were coming out one after the other, and the fact that life became a struggle simply to survive. For Black women to become involved became more difficult and dangerous.
What is it like for potential Afrikaner women theologians today?
At Stellenbosch University there are a few women in the classes that I teach. Quite a lot of women have trouble getting a calling, a "beroep", into the Dutch Reformed Church. Communities don't easily call women. This shows that there's a huge residue of the particular ideology about what a woman should be and do. She is still not seen as a theological thinker, or a person of authority in the church; that is for men. There are exceptions. Today women are ordained in all the mainline churches, except of course among the Catholics, the largest church in Christendom. It's a male empire! It's extraordinary that in the twenty-first century this is still the case.
The paucity of women theologians is essentially due to the fact that there's lack of recognition, and problems about procuring jobs. People are scrambling around today because of affirmative action pressures, wanting to appoint women to jobs in society generally. Women get appointed more easily in the secular world than in the church.
I wonder about the women theologians for this century. I look back on the dearth of women doing theology as one of the saddest parts of my whole professional life. I mourn the fact that I haven't been able to be party to producing more qualified women theologians. Some of those that were promising found the going too tough. It has often been a lonely road. Only God's grace, the support of sympathetic male colleagues and my membership of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians have kept me going. Would it have been different if I had been in the church? I don't know. As I said, I have never felt a calling to be ordained. I have treasured my status as a lay woman academic theologian.
Recently I went to a conference in Sweden run by the Nordic Society of Ethicists. The entire agenda was devoted to feminist ethics and half the papers were given by men. It was wonderful; they were taking women's theology seriously. The women would give papers on ethics and the men responded, and vice versa; the dialogue was lively and constructive. We have nothing like that here.
Why?
We are still in the tokenism mode. If a conference programme needs window dressing (for the benefit of funders?) invite Elna Mouton, or Annalet van Schalkwyk, or Tzili Reisenberger or Denise Ackermann. If the conference is about the church, ask a woman to address the overused topic "Women in the church". In my view women's place in the church is today more a male problem than mine. So why are men not giving papers on the paucity of women in ministry or the academy? Why are they not devoting their theology to the ethical issues that are raised by gender discrimination? Why are they not in dialogue with women scholars on issues of common interest? There are many very highly respected feminist theologians, Biblical scholars and church historians in the world today with whom they might dialogue. I think the problem is also deeper than gender. We are simply very bad at living with difference. We find those who are "other" that is "other than ourselves", threatening and we resolve this by ignoring or by dominating them, making them over into our images, or alienating and abandoning them. We seem to be facing a profound inability to be inclusive, where power is valued over vulnerability, where barriers are kept alive when faith in Jesus calls us to break them down and where cultural sensitivities have priority over the call of gospel.
Do you think it is easier, in a post-modern context, to look at Biblical issues theoretically, whereas in South Africa we're dealing with poverty, with a difficult context, much more directly?
Here I have two thoughts. The first is that I have been involved since 1991 in the Circle for Concerned African Women Theologians. The Circle has one abiding principle: It is constituted in order to help women in Africa write theology and get it published. I ran the Circle in Cape Town until July last year. We have published one book already and we are working on a second. It is not easy to get women to believe that they can write theology. Our Circle is an interfaith circle, with Muslims, Jews and Christians. That has given me enormous satisfaction. Because we come from different contexts, we bring our different flavours to our efforts to write theology. We are at present concentrating on HIV and AIDS and violence against women. Poverty is never far off when we discuss these themes. There is nothing too theoretical about our discussions. Our awareness of our context keeps us focused on the reality of life in South Africa.
My second thought refers back to the younger generation of women. In terms of postmodern discourse, all of us writing theology today use certain categories of post-modernism. We may be divided on how we use them, but they are part of most of our writing. I cannot, for instance, write without considering the question of difference, which I find absolutely essential to what I do. I have never embraced a meta-narrative for the whole world, so that difference and the lack of a meta-narrative are very important to me. However, when it comes to the question of subjectivity, I'm not prepared to give up my own subjectivity and embrace some kind of free floating, fragmented reality. I've struggled too hard for the affirmation of myself as a worthy subject. I find myself parting company with some of the more radical post-modernists in feminist theology today whom I have come across at meetings in Europe and North America. I do think that feminist theory provides a rich source and a stimulating dialogue partner for feminist theology. In my view, feminist theorists have done more interesting work over the last nine years than feminist theologians. Feminist theologians who have dared to be in dialogue with feminist theorists have benefited enormously from such an encounter.
Still, when I go to Europe to hear feminist theologians, I listen up to a point with fascination, and then I find myself withdrawing from the conversation. Their interest in Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Cixous, is fascinating. I have read some of this material, and I find bits of it useful. In the end, what falls through the cracks for me is the vital question of liberation. Their circumstances are vastly different from ours. They are not confronted daily with the effects of poverty. They're not living under the sword of HIV and AIDS in the way that we are here. They do not have to live in a situation where people have been so disempowered by lack of education for so long that an enormous amount of upliftment is still necessary for liberation.
We live in a very patriarchal society in South Africa, despite our very enlightened constitution. Despite thirty percent of parliamentarians being women and an openness to gender at least in political rhetoric, there is still a lot of work to be done in terms of people's attitudes. I realise I'm not European. The demands for liberation in its broadest and its deepest sense are so pertinent, in such crunching ways, everyday. This is not true for my European counterparts.
To stay in the realm of theory makes it much easier to avoid the reality of praxis. I cannot separate theory from praxis. For me, what I believe and what I do about what I believe, are inseparable. In my theology, what I believe and what I theorise about has to find feet in praxis. If you separate the two, all you end up with is an intellectual armchair enterprise, and I'm not interested in that at all.
For example, I find the metaphor of the body of Christ an interesting and useful one for the church universal. Today the church has AIDS. Jesus Christ as head of the Body of Christ has AIDS. If one member of the body suffers we all suffer. Today about 600 people are dying every day. There are growing numbers of orphaned children living in dire poverty. How can I do theology in a thoroughly post-modern vein surrounded by the reality of suffering and death? What is the meaning of the Eucharist in a situation of death and dying? I could theologise about its meaning. I also know what it means in practice. What is the meaning of Christian traditional teaching on human sexuality in terms of our sexual practices here and now in the midst of an HIV and AIDS pandemic? What is the meaning of the body, when bodies are infected daily, and are dying, suffering, and abused?
For me, liberation has to be all encompassing and profound, and it has everything to do with theological theory and theological praxis. Christ's ministry was not just sermons and teachings; it was a praxis of healing, a praxis of caring, a praxis of being with those who were marginalised, and ultimately a praxis of dying, because that was what was demanded of him. It was an iconoclastic praxis. The gospel is pretty radical and it does not let us off the hook. I've never understood theory first and then practice. If anything came first, it was the practice. People got together, worshipped, and then started to think further about what they were worshipping, what was needed to become an initiate, and how you were to understand the word of God in the preaching and teaching of the church.
To go right back to where I started: The women in the Manyanos who had an idea of what it meant to be a mother, a person, a woman of integrity in a community, tried to live that out. If there was somebody in need, they would collect funds and they would help this person. That's charity at work. An utterly Christian act. The Volksmoeder, within the ideological understanding of what that meant, was for a while also a woman who understood that resisting the imperialism of the British, supporting the fighting men, and being prepared to suffer in the camps, required courage. What a pity that it turned afterwards into support for Afrikaner Nationalism in its most narrow sense. It became very exclusive.
The Black Sash's theories on human rights, that is their theological anthropology, informed their acts. Their actions were shaped by the needs they saw and their resolve to deal with them. Their daily meeting with people's needs in the advice offices, shaped their work. It was theory to praxis and praxis to theory, all the time. What disturbs me about some white male theology is that it's extraordinarily theoretical and divorced from praxis, and it turns easily into an intellectual ivory tower exercise. I ask myself, "What does this mean for people's struggles to be fully human?" If we as theologians are in some small way trying to be tools for God in this world, we can't only be so through our theological theories. Our theories have to stand the test of practice. That's why I'm a practical theologian.
In conclusion, is there one event between 1900 and 1994 that makes your heart sing, which makes you feel that 'this is where women were at their strongest'?
I think there are two things that come to mind in the South African context. The one is definitely the 1956 march to the Union buildings in Pretoria to protest against the pass laws — 'you strike the women you strike the rock'. I was aware that something profoundly significant had happened.
The second is a picture of Sheena Duncan at a meeting in the 1980's in Johannesburg during the second state of emergency. Stories were being told. She sat and listened. People were very despondent, saying, "How can we possibly go on?" She listened for a long time and then, in her booming voice, she said slowly and emphatically: "We will just simply go on, we will just simply go on". It was electrifying. I thought, that is exactly what God is asking us to do, just to go on, living within that moral vision which we ought to have as Christian people.
Author
Bastienne Klein is a writer and researcher working with RICSA at the University of Cape Town <mbk@mweb.co.za>
Footnotes
[1] See also Denise M. Ackermann. "To my mother: on Being a Theologian and Not a Dominee" in After the Locusts: Letters from a Landscape of Faith. (Grand Rapids Michigan, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003) pp 23-63. Other books edited by Ackermann include Women Hold Up the Sky, with Jonathan Draper and Emma Mashinini, Liberating Practices, with Riet Bons-Storm and Claiming Our Footprints with Eliza Getman, Judith Kotzé and Judy Tobler.
[2] Using the term communicative praxis in the sense of Jürgen Habermas, the German Philosopher
[3] See also Denise Ackermann, "Lamenting Tragedy from 'The Other Side' ", in Sameness and Difference: Problems and Potentials in South African Civil Society, James R. Cochrane and Bastienne Klein (Eds.) The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, USA, 2000.
[4] The first major study on poverty in South Africa, funded by the Carnegie Foundation, focused on this issue; it did not consider the poverty of those who were not white at all. A second study funded by the same foundation in the 1980s finally did. - Editor's note
[5] This law allowed black women to be in urban areas for only up to 72 hours without permission.