A Gendered Approach to the Yu Chi Chan Club and National Liberation Front during South Africa's Transition to Armed Struggle

Allison Drew

doi:10.1017/s002085902100047x

Abstract

AbstractSouth Africa's anti-apartheid struggle reflected an ideal of heroic masculinity that ignored and depreciated women as active political agents. This has contributed to a post-apartheid social order that accepts formal gender equality but that perpetuates gender inequality by discounting women's experiences. This article examines the little-known and short-lived Yu Chi Chan Club (YCCC) and National Liberation Front (NLF). Tiny Cape Peninsula-based breakaways from the Non-European Unity Movement – an African National Congress rival – the YCCC and NLF were exceptional amongst early 1960s underground groups in their systematic attempts to theorize guerrilla struggle and assess its applicability to South African conditions and, in the NLF's case, to build a cell structure through political education. Although the NLF's idealized notion of revolutionary life was premised on an abstract individual with traits then associated with public and vocal male activists, nonetheless women participated as equal abstract individuals. The NLF's relatively horizontal cell structure, small cell size, and lack of hierarchy made participation easier for both women and men, allowing women to operate equally within the political space. From their gendered upbringing and early experiences in hierarchical organizations to their brief experience of equality within the YCCC and NLF, the women were then forced into a prison system with an extremely rigid and unequal gender divide. Subjected to the state's regendering project, the political space available to the NLF's women prisoners shrank far more than it did for their male comrades, whose prison experiences became the measure of anti-apartheid politics.

Highlights

Following Elizabeth van der Heyden’s release from a South African prison in, after ten years for conspiracy to overthrow the state, veteran antiapartheid campaigner Helen Suzman asked her what Robben Island prison had been like
Subjected to the state’s regendering project, the political space available to the National Liberation Front (NLF)’s women prisoners shrank far more than it did for their male comrades, whose prison experiences became the measure of anti-apartheid politics
Most studies of the South African left during the early armed struggle years, focused on the African National Congress (ANC) and its allies, have neglected gender

Summary

Allison Drew

Following Elizabeth van der Heyden’s release from a South African prison in , after ten years for conspiracy to overthrow the state, veteran antiapartheid campaigner Helen Suzman asked her what Robben Island prison had been like. Cape Peninsula breakaways from the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) – an ANC rival – the YCCC and NLF were exceptional amongst early s underground groups in their systematic attempts to theorize guerrilla struggle and assess its applicability to South Africa and, in the NLF’s case, to build a cell structure through political education. The NEUM’s anti-Stalinist leaders had no comparable international links, they had contacts with the small, fragmented Fourth International aligned with exiled Soviet dissident Leon Trotsky They encouraged radical education through lectures and discussions outside formal teaching institutions and, in , launched the New Era Fellowship (NEF) to provide an intellectual space for black University of Cape Town (UCT) students excluded from the university’s non-academic spaces.

STUDENT POLITICS AND POLITICAL FAMILIES

THE MOVE TO UNDERGROUND POLITICS

NLF ACTIVITIES

BUILDING A NETWORK