Anne Klein Women's Award 2017: Speech by Barbara Unmüßig

Dear guests,
Dear Nomarussia Bonase,

A warm welcome to the 6th annual Anne Klein Women’s Award ceremony.

Anne Klein established this wonderful award, and every year around her birthday on March 2, we gather here once again to celebrate not only the current award recipient but also Anne herself.

Through this award, Anne Klein sought to inspire women, even after her death, to fight for their rights and against discrimination and violence. Anne Klein was a pioneer for human rights, equality, and sexual self-determination, and she masterfully combined grassroots activism with institutionalized women’s policy. The Heinrich Böll Foundation is very grateful to Anne Klein for her generous donation.

Our goal is to cooperate politically with all award recipients beyond the scope of the award itself. We’ve been very successful in this regard.

Last year, we honored Gisela Burckhardt and her colleagues at FEMNET e.V. for their tireless commitment to women’s and workers’ rights in the global textile industry, particularly in South and Southeast Asia. Working conditions in the textile industry in India are generally catastrophic, and especially so for working and expectant mothers. That is why one of our priorities is to improve childcare in the factories and to enshrine maternity protection laws. What we have long taken for granted is still a distant reality in India, Bangladesh, or Cambodia.

FEMNET e.V. and Gisela Burckhardt have been collaborating for some time with the Indian organization Cividep in Bangalore, southern India. And since February 1 of this year, through our office in Delhi, we have also been supporting Cividep on a project-by-project basis in its work to improve labor rights and living conditions for female textile workers. Here, courageous and professional women are at work, fighting side by side with female textile workers and union members for better labor rights and living conditions.

This is very much in the spirit of Anne Klein: the award makes a difference—in very concrete ways, it encourages, generates public and political recognition, and offers protection to courageous women’s rights activists.

Dear Nomarussia, you are such a courageous human rights and women’s rights activist—Anne wanted to support women like you. The Anne Klein Prize is a sign of solidarity and appreciation for your many years of work to ensure that the injustices of the apartheid regime are not forgotten and to fight for redress.

I still clearly remember the recordings from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) that made their way around the world in 1996. Together with an exemplary constitution and the first democratic elections in 1994, it was this peaceful process of coming to terms with the past that cemented the international reputation of South Africa’s young democracy. But anyone traveling to South Africa today—more than 20 years later—can see that the wounds inflicted by apartheid are far from healed. The striking social divide and spatial segregation between the cities and the vast townships in mostly inhospitable areas outside the cities persist.

Their residents not only spend a large portion of their already meager salaries on transportation, but must also fight day after day for services such as water, electricity, and decent sanitation facilities. Unequal access to education and healthcare remains a massive problem, even more than 20 years after the end of apartheid. Added to this are the emotional scars of a society that remains deeply divided.

This is the backdrop against which Nomarussia Bonase has dedicated her life to the struggle for dignified living conditions for the victims and survivors of the apartheid regime in South Africa. Some South Africans—especially those who, consciously or unconsciously, benefited from the racist system—would prefer to draw a line under the past. “Why don’t we focus on current problems and look ahead?” they ask. In doing so, they forget—or consciously repress—that coming to terms with the past lays the groundwork for shaping the future.

Although most South Africans continue to believe in the vision of a united, reconciled nation, the majority also believes that this cannot be achieved as long as those who were historically disadvantaged remain poor. Corruption at all levels of government and the systematic erosion of democratic institutions are currently preventing living conditions in South Africa from visibly improving. The anger and disappointment over this are driving thousands of South Africans into the streets.

The massive student unrest of the past two years has brought South Africa back into the headlines. Under the banners “Rhodes must fall” and “Fees must fall,” black students in particular are demanding comprehensive cultural decolonization and an end to the social and economic exclusion of the black population. Strikes, vandalism, and the brutal response by state security forces have paralyzed the universities for months and cost the state millions.

Nomarussia isn’t surprised by this. She says, “If we don’t know how the foundation was built, we won’t understand why the walls are crumbling today.” In her activism, she repeatedly refers to the “unfinished business” of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former chair of the Commission, coined this term when he publicly criticized political failures in 2014: Neither were the reparations proposed by the Commission paid to victims of human rights violations, nor was a bill to tax high-income earners implemented. Most political crimes not covered by the amnesty went unpunished.

Desmond Tutu’s personal assessment sounds bitter: “The Commission made it possible, in a wonderful way, for the horror of apartheid to be told. I believe that truth plays a central role in any healing process. For if you want to forgive, you must know whom you are forgiving and why. Healing, however, is a process. How we deal with the truth after it comes to light defines the success of this process. On this point, we have tragically failed. By not fully following the Commission’s recommendations, the government has compromised not only the Commission’s contribution but the process itself.”

This is precisely where the work ofthe “Khulumani Support Group”—Nomarussia’s political home—comes in. The organization calls for the commission’s full name to be taken seriously. After all, it includes not only the word “truth” but also “reconciliation.” However, this has not yet been fully realized. According to the 104,000 victims of human rights violations under apartheid who are organized under the umbrella of Khulumani, reconciliation is not possible without justice. Most of them belong to the older generations and still live in precarious conditions on the margins of society. They are demanding comprehensive reparations that also include health and education measures for affected families and communities.

As national coordinator, Nomarussia Bonase advocates in particular for a feminist perspective. She repeatedly questions the gender blindness of the truth and reconciliation process. Women were heard by the commission primarily as the surviving relatives of men—as mothers and wives. Injustices experienced specifically by women, such as sexual violence that their mothers endured firsthand and that was deliberately used as a political weapon, were not part of the process of coming to terms with the past. In the few cases where women testified publicly, the process usually traumatized them rather than healing them. Feminists agree that the violent past also plays a role in the fact that South Africa today has shockingly high rates of violence against women.

However, Khulumani primarily made headlines through legal actions against international companies that contributed to the infrastructure of apartheid. Companies such as General Motors, Ford Motors, IBM, Daimler, and Rheinmetall were the focus of these efforts. They supplied specialized security vehicles that the army used to crush protests, or developed computer systems designed to control the population. Khulumani was, incidentally, inspired by the lawsuits filed by Holocaust survivors.

However, their initiative went completely against the grain of the South African government under Thabo Mbeki. The government relied on foreign direct investment for the country’s development and accused Khulumani of scaring off investors. Even though the government at the time did everything in its power to prevent these lawsuits—and although some cases were lost—Khulumani succeeded in raising public awareness of the responsibility of international actors. Through its courageous stance toward its own government, Khulumani also assumed an enormously important role in civil society within the country.

The organization’s main work, however, takes place at the grassroots level, in the country’s so-called townships—for example, by providing counseling, practical support, and mobilization to survivors who refuse to be forgotten but do not wish to be seen as supplicants; rather, they view themselves as active citizens in a democracy.

Khulumani’s work does not stop with the victims of apartheid. It sees the persistence of old patterns in state violence against workers who live and work in precarious conditions. When, in 2012, South African police shot and killed 34 striking miners at a platinum mine near Marikana, outside Johannesburg, operated by the company Lonmin, Khulumani and Nomarussia personally stood in solidarity with the workers and their families. It was Nomarussia who advocated for the Marikana Commission of Inquiry, led by Judge Farlam, to hear the testimonies of the widows. She also traveled with these women to Germany and spoke in April 2016 at the annual shareholders’ meeting of BASF, one of Lonmin’s major platinum customers.

Khulumani’s commitment to connecting the past with the present is also evident in its actions against xenophobia. Since May 2008, social frustration in South African townships has repeatedly erupted into serious acts of violence against African migrants. Khulumani supports these communities and addresses the underlying political problem at the national level: structural marginalization and political corruption, which further exacerbate the desperate situation of many people.

Nomarussia, therefore, advocates for highly topical issues. Not only South Africa but also the global situation shows us that the intertwining of racism, discrimination against women, violence, and economic exploitation is by no means a thing of the past.

History proves her right: the national discourse in South Africa has changed. It has become more radical and more impatient regarding the pace of social transformation. Too many issues have been swept under the rug for too long. Nomarussia has always fought against this.

Together with other trailblazers from the townships and rural areas, Nomarussia not only speaks on behalf of communities but is deeply rooted within them. These women are not content merely to have paved the way for the new South Africa. Today, they are defending the hard-won democracy. Nevertheless—or perhaps precisely because of this—they far too rarely receive the recognition they deserve. We wish to bestow this recognition upon Nomarussia with the Anne Klein Women’s Award.

Dear Nomarussia, the jury of the Anne Klein Women’s Prize is deeply impressed by you, your commitment, and your work. Anne Klein wanted to support women like you.

You can be assured of our admiration—for your very concrete efforts to protect women, for recognizing gender-based violence as part of apartheid, for fighting impunity, for seeking redress, and above all for promoting reconciliation by naming injustice. You say: “I will continue this work until the day I die. We will make South Africa a better country.” We sincerely hope that you can continue on your path with a cheerful spirit and alongside many fellow activists. You have us by your side. May the Anne Klein Prize and our solidarity continue to inspire and encourage you in your work.

Thank you very much!