Moms with guns: women's political agency in anti-apartheid visual culture

African Arts, Summer, 2009 by Kim Miller

Women in MK also articulated the injustice inherent in policies that forced women--but not men--to choose between family life and political life. They asserted their right to experience both motherhood and political agency:

We seem to travel in a dead end street with marriage and babies being at the end of the street. There is not and can never be a contradiction between marriage and having babies on one hand and fighting on the other. There have been revolutions before, women have married and women have borne children during these, but women have fought. We are not and cannot be exceptions (ANC Women's Section report, cited in Hassim 2006:90).

ANC women made specific demands that resulted in fundamental changes in MK. Drawing on Anne McClintock's analysis of South African motherhood, Helen Scanlon observes that women in the ANC "infused the concept of motherhood with 'an increasingly insurrectionary cast' by demanding their right to political agency" (Scanlon 2007:66). They insisted that new mothers should be "flung back into the actively fighting ranks so that childbirth does not become the devastating route to demobilization" (Hassim 2006:90). Once prohibitions against pregnancy were lifted, the 1970s saw a dramatic increase in the number of women combatants. Women won other important material and symbolic gains. In 1981 female comrades won a major victory when the ANC Secretary-General's Office agreed to open day-care centers "to enable mothers to continue with their tasks after conceiving" (Hassim 2004:436). Symbolically, one childcare facility was named after Charlotte Maxeke, one of the first female members of the ANC, and one of the many political women who continues to receive little historical recognition for her work. (8)

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MILITARIZED MOTHERS, ANC POLICY, AND WOMEN'S POLITICAL POWER: 1980

The MK woman ... became an icon of the national liberation struggle (Hassim 2006:96).

In 1980 another depiction of militarized motherhood appeared on the cover of Voice of Women, the "key propaganda organ" of the ANC Women's Section. This was a moment of political transition for the ANC, both in terms of the focus on the military and in terms of the growing acceptance of women as comrades in the struggle (Fig. 4).

For the two militarized mothers shown here, their empowerment is augmented by the weapons they hold: in the center image, an AK-47 and in the lower image, a bayonet. Arms strong and taut, each woman grips her chosen weapon, which she seems prepared to use at any given moment. Somber and still, these soldiers are ready to fight. And yet once again, a sense of violence is offset by the quiet and peaceful presence of the sleeping children who hang on their mother's backs. In the central image, the baby's head droops down toward the ground, its face hidden from us. The weight of the child's body against the mother's back and the tightness of the cloth that wraps around them connect the two bodies together in warmth and security. Pressed against each other in such a way, they feel each other's movements: the mother steadying herself for battle, the child stirring in sleep. As in the previous image, maternity is linked to each woman's desire for social change and her willingness to act, but it is not the only focus of her activism.