BY SARAH EMILY DUFF

Earlier this month, Britain’s Observer newspaper devoted a special edition to female politicians’ experiences of sexism. It included a series of interviews with a collection of high profile women mayors, MPs and ministers from all over the world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they all described depressingly similar experiences of routine sexism and discrimination: ranging from catcalls and bullying in parliament, and being patronised and ignored by male colleagues, to threats of violence and rape. Lindiwe Mazibuko, the leader of the opposition in South Africa’s National Assembly, commented that much of the criticism of her appearance is “designed to make [her] feel small” – to remind her that women have no right to occupy the public sphere.

This was, in some ways, the theme of a recent roundtable discussion held at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) called “The trouble with being female in politics”. Inspired by an article of the same title by the Daily Maverick’s Rebecca Davis, the evening was devoted to an analysis of recent media coverage of South African women politicians, particularly in the light of the collapsed merger between the Democratic Alliance, led by Helen Zille, and Mamphela Ramphele’s Agang.

In front of a room packed to capacity, Davis, the writer and now writing fellow at WiSER Khadija Patel, and the broadcaster and philosopher Eusebius McKaiser, interrogated the, often bizarre, ways in which women are portrayed by South Africa’s media. Davis opened with the point that the coverage of the DA/Agang debacle has been profoundly gendered: unlike similar reporting on the ongoing COPE fiasco, Zille and Ramphele’s falling-out has been depicted as arising from the fact that they are women. Ramphele’s apparent egotism, sexual history, and age have all been deemed relevant to analyses of her political career. The prurient focus on the kiss between the two women at the press conference announcing the launch, drew attention away from a serious (attempted) shift in the South African political landscape.

Yet, as both Patel and McKaiser added, it is impossible to ignore how race has also shaped descriptions of both Zille and Ramphele. The latter has emerged far worse from the spat, being depicted as untrustworthy, selfish, and fickle. (This, though, as Patel noted, has also been the product of Zille’s savvy use of social media, which has, possibly as a result of lazy reporting, set the tone for some of the coverage of the merger.) As McKaiser commented, we have to pay attention to the intersections between gender, class, and race in the ways in which discrimination functions – without, though, ignoring the particularities of the experience of sexism or homophobia, for instance. There is, he argued, no hierarchy of prejudice.

Part of the dismantling of structural inequality, he noted, is in the recognition of individuals’ agency to challenge the status quo: to speak out against the use of sexist language; to refuse to be complicit in the ways in which men and women are forced into gendered roles. These comments are particularly relevant in the light of a second furore over gender and violence, which erupted shortly after the DA/Agang collapse: David Bullard and Jeremy Gordin’s bullying of journalist and activist Michelle Solomon on Twitter and PolitcsWeb over her decision not to report her rape. Women who challenged their misogyny were subjected to torrents of abuse online. This, too, is part of a wider refusal to accept women’s presence in public spaces: heckling female pedestrians or sending rape threats to Twitter users are manifestations of the same view that women should remain firmly at home. The accusation that women who challenge the status quo are “angry” or too “emotional” to debate rationally is another form of silencing. We need to be angry in public, argued McKaiser, until everyone realises that it’s all right to be angry in public.

These are topics and debates that are neither particularly new, nor, indeed, specific to South Africa. But I would argue that events such as this one at WiSER, are absolutely vital for keeping conversations about sexism in public life going. After weeks of sustained misogynistic abuse and attack, we need to be able to gather to regroup and rethink our strategies.

Moreover, there is something unique about the coverage of South Africa’s female politicians, for all the fact that they receive the same kind of criticism and bullying as their international counterparts. Not only are around half of our MPs and cabinet ministers female, but many women occupy exceptionally powerful positions within our political system. Indeed, there are very, very few countries in the world where two women are in a position to redefine part of the political landscape – and this despite, as Davis and Sarah Nuttall suggested, neither Zille nor Ramphele’s obvious interest in furthering other women’s political careers, nor the DA’s fairly ambivalent stance on feminist issues. It is possible that the virulence of the coverage of South African women in politics is produced by their very visibility: the more they speak – the more they appear in public – the more sexist the reporting and commentary.

It is also worth remembering that South Africa’s liberal laws on abortion, and the constitution’s enshrinement of gender equality, are partly the products of (some elements of) the anti-apartheid movement’s commitment to feminism. This is not to deny – at all – the sexism and abuse to which many women were subjected in the movement. From the early 1980s onwards, the leadership of the ANC recognised that women’s struggles were men’s struggles too. In 1985 Oliver Tambo argued that, “South Africa would not be free so long as women were oppressed”.

My point is that demanding that media coverage of women politicians not be sexist is neither trivial – a secondary concern to whatever people consider to be more important issues – nor without precedent. Reminding the ruling party of its fairly long commitment to gender equality, and keeping up a sustained criticism of the language used – by both men and women – to describe women politicians, are two ways of refusing to accept women’s silencing.