Nongovernmental Organizations, "Grassroots," and the Politics of Virtue

Abstract

n the course of conducting fieldwork in 1993-94 in Durban, South Africa, I attended a training workshop for Zenzele field-workers.' Zenzele was a black women's organization that focused on educating and uplifting black women living in rural and urban KwaZulu and Natal.2 There we were told a story of women's transnational cooperation that struck me as surprisingly reminiscent of colonial relations between European and "native" women. On June 29, 1994, Lyndsay Hacket-Pain, then vice president of the Associated Country Women of the World (ACWW), addressed a gathering of ACWW affiliate organizations the Federation of Women's Institutes (FWI) of Natal and Zululand and the Natal and KwaZulu Zenzele Women's Association (Zenzele). Hacket-Pain, from the head office in London, had been traveling around South Africa visiting various ACWW affiliate organizations and the projects they had undertaken. A