Millions of young women in South Africa, and around the world, have been feeling devalued for a long time. They are often denied a proper education or livelihood as they are easily told to stay home from school or not to work to assist the family by attending to very important family needs like caring for babies, elderly or disabled relatives. Young girls who meet this fate are in fact engaged in unpaid carework. This burden of care is one that follows most women throughout their lives, always having to squeeze in their dreams while our male counterparts, brothers, husbands, sons are free to pursue their dreams through school and work - yes even when the work is hard labour. Many young women become wives, caring for their own parents and the parents of their partners including at times other elderly uncles and aunts. The opportunity to engage in the world and to discover oneself, and ones passion has too often escaped women and as we can see this begins at an early age.
The message is that women have particular functions and roles in society and these do not include the pursuit of excellence in arts, industry, community leadership or intellect. Boys can go to school, boys can go out in the world and make their mark, boys can sow wild oats. Women are often undervalued as unpaid caregivers and for the purposes of sexual reproduction and as prey for sexual predators. In the process of this devaluing of girls and women, the voices of girls and women are silenced.
In more recent years, some of us have been able to escape this path although, we often find ourselves proceeding against the odds and when we excel, we may be damned for it. Remember when our beloved sister Caster Semenya performed so well, some saw fit to declare that she is not a woman, the arrogance of that situation deserves 1000 blogs.
One of the most significant implications of the gendered nature of society is that it gives men, even the hard labourer man, some economic independence and many women economic dependence. Our girls and young women witness and live this experience of patriarchy. They see that mothers stay with abusive husbands or partners because they do not have any money of their own. They see mothers who look the other way when their boyfriends are sleeping with their daughters because they "take care of us". Our young women, when found busy with sugar daddies are strongly criticised, ostracised and made to feel small yet we fail to understand what has led them to see this as an option to economic independence. They see their future reflected in the lives of their mothers and wonder is that my future too? They are trying to avoid that future and sadly, they are repeating the cycle.
Daily little girls, young women, mature women are being raped, trafficked, sexually exploited and murdered in our country and as a society we continue to uphold the values of a patriarchal society. We support institutions that continue to uphold the colonialist notions that some people are superior to others, and consider that white, male, heterosexual, european standard as supreme and right. So as I find myself being neither white, nor male, nor european, I guess I am wrong and less important on 3 strikes? Of course not, yet the world is telling us this. Our higher education institutions hardly reflect the rightness of all humanity whether black/pink/green, female/queer/homo/trans/a/sexual, african/indigenous. Our higher education institutions continue to reinforce the gendered nature of society as it produces the captains of industry, advisers to political leaders and knowledgeable elite who do very little to change the lived experience of women and so continue to perpetuate a problem, whereas one expects higher education to be about finding solutions to the challenges faced by society.
We need to ask what it is that we do to contribute to the idea that girls and women do matter?
Let's start to raise our sons and daughters differently, let's check white privilege when it raises it's head, let's invite queer-homo-hetero-trans-sexuality into our homes and embrace it all, let's accept our child, sister, brother for who they are. Let's shine our Africanness, let's share the carework and let's tell and show our daughters that we love them and keep them safe! Then we will start to change the world!
