Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - September 1, 2002
Prega Govender

At a National Women's Day meeting in Durban last month, those who gathered to celebrate the spirit of sisterhood and solidarity were moved to tears by the story of 52-year-old Rita Bantjies.

Many were also moved to anger, and the old slogan "An injury to one is an injury to all" reverberated with new meaning.

Why tears? Why anger? In 1994, August 9 was officially recognised as National Women's Day in tribute to the thousands of women who marched against apartheid in 1956.

In our new democracy, 30% of MPs are women. We have eight women Cabinet ministers. Three of the four presiding officers of Parliament are women. SA has one of the world's most progressive Constitutions in the world, encapsulating substantive equality, bodily integrity and socioeconomic rights. Legislation promotes women's rights in areas as diverse as land, water, health, education, employment and the criminal justice system.

Thanks to labour legislation that compels business to employ women at all levels (which gives an advantage to firms tendering for lucrative government contracts), there has been a dramatic increase in the number of women in boardrooms since 1994.

Far-reaching commitments have been made to ensure a gender-responsive Budget ( 1998-99) and to decrease military expenditure and reallocate it to women's empowerment (post-Beijing Cabinet commitment 1996) have been given.

This is all cause for celebration, not for sadness or anger. So why did Rita Bantjies's story evoke these responses?

In 1989 Bantjies was a powerful leader. As chairman of the Natal region of the SA Clothing and Textile Workers' Union, which had the largest female membership in the country, she initiated creative and effective demonstrations in the campaign against strip-searching. This was a routine practice in many factories, with workers subjected to what was tantamount to an internal examination by security guards.

In protest, workers at Bantjies's factory refused to leave the factory floor at home time one day. Instead, they demanded that management come to them. When management arrived, workers "showed them our backsides and our breasts", shouting to the bosses to dare to search them. Management turned and fled - and immediately stopped strip-searching.

It was an important victory but there were struggles ahead that would be harder to win.

With its entry into the global market, SA began implementing the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs at a rate that saw the textile industry shed thousands of jobs. This, combined with some unscrupulous factory owners' ways of maintaining profit margins, saw many joining the ranks of the unemployed. In 1999, Bantjies was retrenched.

She used her package to join a government housing scheme, moving from Lamontville, a township strong in its resistance to apartheid.

As a member of the United Democratic Front, Bantjies participated in bus boycotts and protests against rent increases. She was a member of the Natal Organisation of Women, whose first chairman, Victoria Mxenge, was assassinated in front of her family as she got out of a car.

Getting her own house meant leaving this community forged in daily struggle. It means living in Verulam, kilometres out of Durban.

Going to look for work costs money for transport she often does not have.

The house is not yet plastered and she is yet to complete the roof.

In 1998, Aids claimed the life of Bantjies's youngest daughter, Moira, 25.

Tragedy struck again in 1999 with the death in a car accident of her second daughter, Rosemond. Her oldest daughter, Pretty, is now ill with HIV/Aids.

Bantjies receives a disability grant of R600. With it she makes daily choices of "tablets for my daughter or food for myself and her. My dream was to live in security and comfort, not in fear of poverty and this virus.

We shouldn't have to choose between drugs and nutrition. Not only the rich must survive Aids," she says

The convening of the World Summit is an opportunity to identify and use the power we have as a community beyond borders. International solidarity was a powerful force against apartheid. Today it is needed urgently in a unipolar world order in which the poor are getting poorer and the divide between the rich and the poor is ever widening.

In forums such as the summit, the "institutions of global governance" - the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation - are often described as mere puppets of the G8 and their multinational corporations.

We do not have to collude with a system that puts profits before people (whether in health or military expenditure).

South Africa defeated the multinational pharmaceutical industry in the Constitutional Court case the industry mounted against the Medicines Act.

That Act paves the way for SA to use the lessons of Brazil, another country in the South with a very similar Gini coefficient, a measure of inequality.

In the early 1990s, Brazil was, by all accounts, heading for a devastating Aids crisis. In 1995, it took a decision to provide free Aids drugs to all who needed them. It has since halved its mortality rate and cut Aids-related hospital admissions by 85%.

In an attempt to protect the profits of its multinational corporations, the US tried to bring a case against Brazil at the World Trade Organisation, which it subsequently had to withdraw.

The arms deal in which South Africa engaged at an initial cost of R28-billion is now estimated to be costing more than R50-billion.

In 1995, the Minister of Intelligence, Joe Nhlanhla, argued: "There is no foreseeable external military threat as far as SA is concerned. A realistic threat analysis may thus allow a democratic state to reallocate resources from security to socioeconomic development."

The US sets the trend in an increasingly militarised world by almost doubling its 2000 budget of R280-billion. The reason given is September 11.

None of those directly implicated was Afghan. Most were Saudis, none of whom has been brought to justice. Between October and December, an average of 62 innocent people were killed every day in the bombings against Afghanistan.

The continuum of violence is all too obvious in the endemic, brutal rape of women and children that is part of countries at war and in the aftermath of war.

We cannot accept that human life is so easily devalued. All life is valuable, not just some life.

At a summit where efforts are being made to put people and our planet above profits, what will be the impact of Bantjies's voice, which echoes that of so many millions of other women?

She could tell us how we have to take care of each other and of our world.

Bantjies is a voluntary HIV/Aids counsellor giving other families and individuals strength and hope. Today, as I write this, she tells me about the flowers she received as a gift on Women's Day. They are dying. She pulls out the dead bits and retains those which are still alive.

She laughs and says to me: "You know you have to make your own happiness.

Otherwise you won't survive. Even if you have nothing. Even if others think you are a nothing. You have to pinch the happiness where you can, my friend."

Her laugh echoes on the phone, the laugh of a life uncrushed, of a spirit still strong.

Govender is a former ANC MP and a women's rights activist. She is the author of the influential report "How best can SA address the impact of HIV/Aids on women and girls?" She resigned from Parliament this year.

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