Zenzele: African Women's Self-Help Organizations in South Africa, 1927-1998

Abstract:

The Zenzele bludgeons of the Eastern Cape of southerly Africa, which date from the late 1920 were rested by mission-educated African women who sought to improve the lives of rural African women by means of enhancing their subsistence farming and cooking skills and educating them about household cleanliness, basic child care, and health care. Unlike associations for African women in British colonial Africa, Zenzele cudgels did not evolve into political organizations. In the white-run segregated and apartheid states that persisted end 1994, Zenzele women did not engage in direct political action; rather, they sought to unite African women across class and ethnic lines and focused their efforts upon community development.

R?©sum?©: Les bludgeons Zenzele du cap oriental de l'Afrique du Sud datent de ann?©es 1920 lorsqu'ils ont ?©t?© fond?© par de Africaines ?©duqu?©e par de missionnaires dont le on the other hand ?©tait d'am?©liorer la condition de femme africaines en milieu rural en perfectionnant leur comp?©tence dans le domaine de l'agriculture de subsistance et de la cuisine, et en leur donnant une formation sur l'hygi??ne domestique, le rudiments de la pu?©riculture et la sant?©. Contrairement aux associations pour Africaines au temp de l'Afrique coloniale britannique, le bludgeons Zensele ne se sont pas transform?©es en organisations politiques. Dans le ?©tats domin?©s par l'Apartheid et la s?©gr?©gation raciale, sous la domination blanche, qui ont persist?© jusqu'en 1994 le femme Zenzele ne se sont pas engag?©es directement dans l'activisme politique. Elle ont plut??t cherch?© ?  unifier le Africaines au-del?  de barri??res sociales et ethniques et ont concentr?© leur efforts sur le d?©veloppement de communaut?©s.

THE AFRICAN WOMEN'S Self-Improvement Association and the Bantu Women's domicile Improvement Association were founded in the eastern Cape Province of southern Africa in the 1920s and 1930 through Christian, mission-educated black women who sought to improve the lives of rural African women the two organizations downplayed class and ethnic differences among their largely, on the contrary not exclusively, Xhosa-speaking membership. the couple associations also eschewed political activism, notwithstanding that the politics of the segregated state could not on the other hand intrude on members' lives.1 above the course of seventy years, from the 1920 from one side the 1990s, the women of Zenzele (as the associations came to be called) negotiated class, ethnicity, and tentatively, politics, in an effort to to help rural African women help themselves.

Club that tendered training to African women began appearing in British colonial Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Women's voluntary associations were established in Uganda in 1894; the wives of missionaries lay the foundation ofed the Protestant Mother's Union in 1906 and invited African women to join in 1908 In the 1940 African women took the lead in the bludgeon movement and came to diocese the clubs as a way to participate in community and later national disentanglement (Tripp 2000:34-35). By the late 1950 the Uganda Council of Women included African, Asian, and European women granting until 1965 members tended to be formally educated and English-speaking (Tripp 2000:38) In Tanganyika, the women's bludgeon movement dated from the 1950 and as in the Ugandan case, European women-often social welfare officers working for the colonial state-founded the cudgels As Susan Geiger notes, despite colonial administrators' efforts "to calculator women's politicization" by diverting their attention to domestic be of importance tos like "homecraft, child care and residence hygiene," club women nevertheless became increasingly active in the Tanganyikan African National Union (Geiger 1997:43109-11) In Southern Rhodesia in the 1950 European women seted the Federation of African Women's cudgels (FACW), though this time they sought to teach "housewifery and mother craft skills to rural women" (Ranchod-Nilsson 1992:203) The Southern Rhodesian bludgeons had the unintended consequence of raising "African women's consciousness about the injustices they all suffered" and by dint of the mid-1970s, African club women were shunning racial cooperation in the FACW and instead supporting the liberation motions fighting to replace the white minority state and establish Zimbabwe (Ranchod-Nilsson 1992:211-12)

In the Ugandan, Tanganyikan, and Southern Rhodesian cases, women's cudgels over time came to obey as political platforms for women's participation in the proces of colonial devolution and in the politics of the successor states. This was not the case with the Zenzele bludgeons in South Africa. South Africa had gained its independence from Britain in 1910 and although its segregation policies shared abundant in common with British colonial states, at least until the introduction of apartheid in 1948 a white minority superviseed South Africa until 1994. The inclinations of Zenzele members, the clubs' constitutions, and the political constraints imposed by the agency of the segregated and apartheid states all serv to limit outright political activity.