Lydia Ngwenya

Trade unionist Lydia Ngwenya, returning to her rural roots, created the Rural Women's Movement to develop gender consciousness among women, men and youth and to advance issues critical to very poor rural women, including land and water ownership and access, housing, and participation in village decision-making bodies.

Lydia conceived the idea to organize a national rural women's structure while a field worker at the Transvaal Rural Action Committee, a rural development service organization that provides legal, organizational, and publicity assistance to communities facing forced removal from their land. Lydia gradually developed an approach that organizes rural women around both practical and strategic gender issues.
Lydia begins by creating a separate context for rural women to discuss, question and tackle deeply sensitive issues of gender and power in rural African communities. Through consciousness raising and early collective work and successes, Lydia builds a liberating sense of empowerment among rural women. As they begin to assert themselves, she helps them succeed in community struggles, each success enhancing the women's capacity to assert their own identities, needs and potentials. Lydia works to strengthen women both individually and in their alliances, both with one another and with young people and other possible allies.
Lydia's most critical impact has been to win a seat at the decision-making table for rural women -- in the family and in the previously all male village kgotlas (councils). Having a voice at these levels fosters skill-building, self-confidence, and expectations that makes the next step, winning a national voice, almost inevitable. It also leads directly to greater access to resources and economic opportunity - and therefore to securely based independence.

Traditional patriarchy, apartheid and their economic consequences have severely constrained South African women's development. The consequences are particularly grim for the 71 percent of all African women living in the villages. They must work endlessly in and outside their households -- and do so with little status or power, facing severe physical constraints, and with little social or emotional support. They experience physical, economic, cultural and psychological demands so great that they have not been able to organize or speak out.
Living conditions are particularly harsh in the five Bantustan territories located in the Transvaal. Acute poverty and the migrant labor system have left 59 percent of the households headed by women. They must do the men's traditional share of the work as well as their own and are left isolated on a labor-intensive, time-consuming treadmill. Nonetheless, even though most men are typically absent from the community for months at a time, political and community affairs have remained strictly a male domain.
In most of the area's rural communities, women have not come together in mutual support activities. In much of the Northern Transvaal, they are, moreover, inhibited by superstitions. The few forms of female organization that do exist in most rural communities are either stokvels (burial societies) or manyanos (church women's clubs). In Lydia's words: "The biggest barriers to organizing women is their feeling of isolation from each other and mutual suspicion. The dominant ethos is self-preservation and fear of dis-closure. Women experience great shame about their problems; the fact that their husband has a girlfriend in Johannesburg, their teenage daughter is pregnant or that they cannot afford to pay school fees."

Lydia's approach begins one step before appealing to the women's common oppression and encouraging them to organize. She starts instead by helping them to identify the shared nature of the problems in their lives and to stop viewing their difficulties as unique and due to their individual weaknesses.
Lydia first became involved with these rural communities when they were facing forced removal. (The apartheid government systematically sought to remove "black spots" in the rich "white" farm regions. Longtime black residents would be packed off to the already overcrowded, desperately poor Bantustans.) However, as she helped the community face this crisis, her special sensitivity to the women's condition and her extraordinary capability for organizing led her on the the task of social transformation within the community.
When she started work and called a community meeting to discuss the removal crisis, women were only distant observers -- in fact they had to sit separately from the men.
Lydia sought authorization from the kgotla to meet separately with the women to discuss specifically how the crisis affected them. Her argument was at once pragmatic and visionary: the kgotla would be a more effective force with the entire community's support. It particularly needed the women, as they dealt with and were harassed by the authorities day in and day out (since most of the men were away working in the mines or the cities). In so doing, Lydia demonstrated respect for the traditional structures even as she challenged their assumptions that women had no political opinions or ideas.
Gradually, in community after community, Lydia persuaded the kgotalas to invite women to join. In doing so, she often worked out an alliance with the young people who, before her intervention, had also been excluded. Lydia also works with women to organize saving clubs. This gave them higher standing in the community and, for the first time, the power that comes from controlling resources.
Recently Lydia brought sixteen of her women's groups, representing various peoples, together and created a national structure, the Rural Women's Movement. The Movement addresses issues ranging from practical needs such as water and housing, to social and gender issues such as power relations in the household. Other areas include women's rights to land, access to educational resources, child labor, women's legal status, reproductive and health issues, and social welfare. The Movement will also conduct research, liaise with and provide training and assistance to other rural development organizations in order to increase their capacity to work with gender issues. Lydia is working hard to build this genuinely grassroots Movement in order to effectively increase women's economic independence and their participation in decision-making at all levels.

Lydia grew up in rural Northern Transvaal. She first worked as a nurse in her home area and later moved to Alexandra Township in Johannesburg to work as an assembly line worker. Her urban and rural work experiences and her life as both a married woman and single mother have contributed to her commitment to improving the lives of rural women.
As an assembly line worker, Lydia became a founding member of the Transport and General Workers Union. She initiated organization and union policy regarding female night shift workers, and she pioneered the FOSATU women's forum. She was also a shop steward and the only women's organizer with the Metal and Allied Workers' Union. The strength of the union today and the fact that many of those she trained have risen to senior positions in the union are testimonies to her determination and ability to develop leadership, structure, and organization.