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Intersectionality of womanhood unpacked in UFS Women’s Month webinar

01 September 2020 | Story Nonsindiso Qwabe | Photo Supplied

The intersectionality between politics, feminism, and social justice was unpacked extensively in the Student Affairs Women’s Month Webinar that took place on 25 August 2020. This was the second in a series initiated by the Qwaqwa Campus Student Affairs. Director of Student Affairs, Nicole Morris, said the webinars were initiated to encourage difficult conversations around womanhood in South Africa.

UFS Vice-Rector Institutional Change, Student Affairs, and Engaged Scholarship, Prof Puleng LenkaBula, and renowned businesswoman and media mogul, Carol Bouwer, were featured in the second instalment. Together they unpacked the dynamics of being a woman in modern-day South Africa in the face of the scourge of violence against women and children, as well as the transformation and greater representation of women in both positions and institutions of power.

Challenge the systems

Setting the tone, Prof LenkaBula said society as a collective needed to come together to challenge systems that oppress, mute, silence, and make it impossible for women to become dignified and contribute fully to the society we live in.

“If we are to promote social justice, feminism, ethics, and gendered analysis, we have to ensure that we constantly challenge, rethink, and think again around issues that we feel are withholding women from being fully themselves.”

Bouwer and Prof LenkaBula said the nation is constantly diverted to other issues that are shifting the focus from amplifying voices for the protection of women and children, hence no real change has taken place.

“As someone who began working during the birth of our freedom in 1994, I think back to the elation that we felt at the creation of the constitution. There was so much jubilation about it, but we exported that excitement to the world and talked about what we had attained without practising it here.”

“We continue to create systems and amazing documents as a nation, yet we do not implement the very things that will lead to a point where discussions such as these do not need to take place,” Bouwer said.

Bouwer said the COVID-19 pandemic showed that South Africa had the necessary resources to prioritise gender-based violence, but those in power chose not to.

“As we speak today, gender-based violence has become a national crisis. We talk about the intersectionality between politics, feminism, and social justice against the confluence of the opposite happening. With what happened when the COVID-19 pandemic was declared a national disaster, we’ve realised that we do have the wherewithal to mobilise for action in this nation, and it is the one thing we have not seen our leaders do,” she said.

Part-time feminism will not help

Prof LenkaBula said rethinking feminism was needed to move away from definitions of anti-manhood in order to promote feminist ideals that would benefit the nation as a whole.

“As a feminist, I want to promote the idea that feminists are not promoting the defamation or marginalisation of men or stripping them of their dignity. We are saying that as men and women, no matter our gender or sexuality, we can work together to ensure that we all live with dignity, we all are equal, and we all express our talents, and are able to utilise opportunities that are available to us in fair ways.”

Alluding to this, Bouwer said she hoped to see part-time feminism done away with in the rebuilding of society after the pandemic. “Coming out of this pandemic, may our feminism be transformed by everything that is currently happening. There is a huge injection of pathos happening right now and I hope that it is not a fad like everything else that has happened in South Africa, but that it becomes something that we really embody as we go back to whatever normal is going to look like,” she said.

Qwaqwa Campus SRC Secretary General, Nelisiwe Masango, said the Division of Student Affairs planned the Women’s Month Webinars to discuss topics on issues that affect women directly.

“These programmes are quite insightful and uplifting. They especially encourage young women to see that the revolution is there, it is real, and it is practical. It gives meaning to continue advocating for better and safe spaces for women. Many times, spaces of contestation are male dominated and therefore women have to be empowered to contest these spaces. These engagements must be ongoing or continuous so that we all understand the issues we are affected by and advocate for a better society.”

News Archive

Researcher finds ways to serve justice efficiently

2016-01-07

Prof Monwabisi Ralarala tackled the serving of justice from a linguistic viewpoint.
Photo: Supplied

In 2012, local and international media was saturated with reports of the Eugène Terre’Blanche murder trial. At the judgment, Judge John Horn read a lengthy extensive document, of which three pages were dedicated to voicing his concern about how police officers distort statements in the process of translation. Considering the fact that statements are the entry points to the criminal justice system, Prof Monwabisi Ralarala’s attention was drawn to the negative impact such distortion had insofar as the administration of justice was concerned. Of the three PhD degrees conferred by the University of the Free State (UFS) Faculty of Humanities at the 2015 Summer Graduation, one was in Language Practice with Prof Ralarala’s name on it.

Prof Ralarala’s research interests in language rights, forensic linguistics, and translation studies led him to use the Terre’Blanche trial as the basis for his second PhD case study titled: Implications and explications of police translation of complainants' sworn statements: evidence lost in translation. The doctoral dissertation focused on police stations in the Xhosa-speaking community of Khayelitsha in Cape Town.

Language and the law

When the victim of a crime approaches the South African Police Services (SAPS), the requirements are that a sworn statement be taken. However, as a prerequisite, the narration needs to be translated into English. “The process unfolds in this manner: the complainant or the person laying the charges speaks in a language that they understand, and then the police officers translate that information into English because English is still the de facto language of record,” explained Prof Ralarala.

In the process of translation, the original narrative is lost, and so is some of the evidence. “They [the statements] have to be packaged in a certain way, in the form of a summary. As a police officer, you have to discard all the original narrative and create another narrative which is in English,” added the Associate Professor and Institutional Language Coordinator at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology.

Evidence is the basis of any court case and, when it is translated by police officers who do not hold the credentials of professional translators, a problem inevitably arises.

Because police officers are not trained in translation, “Some of the statements are filled with distortions, changing of information all together. In some cases, one would come across a case which was initially an assault but then - through the change and transformation, re-narration, retelling of the story by someone else - it becomes a case of attempted murder.”

Considering that a statement determines a suspect’s fate, it becomes all the more important to ensure that accuracy is upheld.

His internal and external supervisors, Prof Kobus Marais and Prof Russel Kaschula from the UFS and Rhodes University respectively stated that his PhD work has been hailed as a gem by international scholars. “According to one international assessor, he has made an exceptional contribution to the humanities and social sciences in general and to the fields of linguistics and translation studies in particular.”

Reshaping the landscape

According to Prof Ralarala, there are huge gaps in the translated versions of statements which create a problem when a ruling is made. Some of the recommendations put forward in his dissertation to bridge that gap are:

• to review the language policy insofar as the criminal justice system is concerned. The languages we speak are official and constitutionally embraced, and they hold the same status as English, hence they need to be used in criminal justice processes;
• to revisit the constitution and review if the provisions made for the Nguni languages are implemented;
• to supplement paper and pen with technology such as tape recorders. Statements can be revisited in cases where a controversy arises;
• to deploy professional translators and interpreters at police stations;
• to design a manual for police officers which contains all the techniques on how a statement should be taken.
• to enforce constitutional provisions in order to reinforce the language implementation plan in as far as African languages are concerned .

These recommendations serve to undo or eliminate any perceived injustices perpetuated and institutionalised by current linguistic and formal practices in South Africa's criminal justice system.

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