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femicide in the world (Jewkes and alii, 2009), corrective rape of lesbians but also an increasing rate of
AIDS prevalence among women 1 , their impoverishment, and increased emergency situations.
These inequalities also express through and very specifically, by excessive masculinism 2 ; they
became a public policy since the Zuma presidency in 2009. This bias is coupled with a claimed
traditionalism, 3 which reflects a defensive position taken by most of the ANC’s leaders. In fact, the
South African State, wishing to play its role of African model, outbids on epistemic violence (Spivak,
2009). Its leaders affect competition between States they undergo, particularly on feminist
organizations that demonstrate the pitfalls of gender institutionalization, of the gap between
legislation and reality in terms of equality. These organizations represent a threat to the
government’s populist rhetoric.
Moreover, the institutionalization of gender, crossed with that of ICTs, which aims to assist
African women to fight against the so‐called “gender digital divide”, participated to make the
women’s organizations topics of struggles invisible. 4 The expressions and knowledge of South African
women cannot be highlighted.
Gender subalternity factor
In Africa, over the past fifteen years, the messages of international organizations as regards
gender have converged to “we must educate and support African women to fight against poverty.” In
South Africa, in particular, this requires their integration into the global labor market (De Clercq,
2004). This means it is considered necessary that South African women integrate imported and
homogeneous knowledge, which is created by executives of international institutions. This
homogenization is, in fact, Western and universal.
Though globalization promotes Westernization of thoughts and that makes women from the
grassroots subaltern: these women are not considered as actors of development, nor as carriers of
their own knowledge. 5
Resistance: Disseminating knowledge in resistance
With these results, its has been decides to look in interviews and participating observations
(conducted in 2000, 2002, and between 2006 and 2008), at what could illustrate some tracks of
resistance offered by South African feminists or women’s organizations. Among the many South
African women’s movements, many fall knowingly “on the ground.” Many of them crystallize around
issues of memory together with the assistance of excluded people or those affected by HIV. These
three tracks – memory, support for excluded people and those affected by HIV – are all characteristic
of the transition of the country’s transition, a period stigmatized by three simultaneously difficult and
unique situations: a racist and apartheid regime and a deadly plague, AIDS, combined with an
economy radically oriented toward a neo‐liberal system. 6 In South Africa, where democracy has only
existed for the past 18 years, it is not uncommon to hear people express their fear of losing the
memory of the “victims” of colonialism and apartheid and today of liberalism, fear that is very
expressed in society, as well as the need for justice.
Within these movements, two experiments has been chosen, then analyzed to illustrate the
problematic. For over ten years, the organization Southern Cape Land Committee (SCLC) has been
facilitating – outside its traditional areas of intervention largely related to issues of land reform and
land ownership – the writing and publication of stories of South African women, under the term
“women’s stories.” The first book that has been published, entitled “Memory of women”, was
launched in November 1999, and reveals the personal stories of six women from different
communities in the region of the Western Cape. In 2002, SCLC reiterated the campaign by launching
a second book written by sixteen women in their own language, all of the same community,
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