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ASR FORUM ON WOMEN AND GENDER IN AFRICA: PART 1
On August 28, 2014, the Sowetan newspaper hosted a roundtable discussion titled "Initiation, Virginity Testing, Ukuthwala, Umemulo, Ukuzila: Do These Traditions Make Sense?" (Sowetan Live 2014). The group of "traditions" that the roundtable highlighted were all deeply gendered; along with male and female coming-of-age rituals and virginity testing (initiation and umemulo), the title referred to a form of irregular marriage (ukuthwala) and a set of mourning obligations that fall most heavily on widows (ukuzila). The Sowetan's presentation of this roundtable epitomizes current discussions of "tradition" or "custom" in South Africa. From the writing of the Constitution to the recent debates over the Traditional Courts Bill, public debate has fundamentally associated custom and tradition with the regulation of gender and sexuality, and assumed an opposition between these concepts and gender equality.1On one side of this debate are advocates of traditional authority such as the Council of Traditional Leaders of South Africa and the current Zulu king, Goodwill Zwelithini, for whom custom bolsters a claim to political authority. On the other side are a variety of civil society organizations--including, at times, the Women's League of the ruling African National Congress--for whom gender equality forms a core part of the nation's democratic transformation.
The South African opposition between women's rights and custom forms part of a broader continental, and indeed global, discourse. The identification of conflicts between women's rights and culture has been widely used to justify refusal to fully implement the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. Elsewhere on the African continent, custom is invoked to defend female genital cutting, another practice aimed at regulating female sexuality, or to argue against the criminalization of domestic violence. Meanwhile, as the commonly used phrase "harmful traditional practices" suggests, many gender activists identify culture as an obstacle to the realization of women's rights.
Yet in South Africa, as elsewhere, there are also ambiguities in this opposition. Many of the organizations that opposed the Traditional Courts Bill have also voiced support for a nondiscriminatory regime of customary law. Sizani Ngubani is a leader of the Rural Woman's Movement, which played a key role in opposition to the Bill....