Abstract
The rise of nationalisms throughout the twentieth century presents a constellation of discourses in which the notion of “woman” has undergone phases of mobilisation and dismissal depending on the stage of national consciousness reached. The brochures of the National Women’s Monument, written to augment the reasons for the monument’s erection, reveal the problematics of Afrikaner nationalism and gender. In this paper, tentative parallels are drawn between Afrikaner nationalism and the new emergent African nationalism in South Africa in which the issues of women and nationalism are considered to be products of the same discourse despite increasing rights accruing to women generally.
Highlights
A few kilometres outside Bloemfontein a traveller will find the National Women’s Monument
In 1989 Gaitskell and Unterhalter (1989) examined the question o f mothers o f the nation by making a comparative analysis o f nation, race and motherhood in Afrikaner nationalism and the African National Congress (ANC). They felt that the mothers o f the nation affected by these different nationalisms were funda mentally different on the grounds o f widely divergent positions in current South African society on the basis of racial, cultural, economic, ethnic and political variables
In this article I have used three texts which were intended to commemorate women in order to illustrate how one particular nationalism has manufactured, abandoned and buried the women intended to bring it to fruition in the first place
Summary
A few kilometres outside Bloemfontein a traveller will find the National Women’s Monument. In 1989 Gaitskell and Unterhalter (1989) examined the question o f mothers o f the nation by making a comparative analysis o f nation, race and motherhood in Afrikaner nationalism and the African National Congress (ANC) They felt that the mothers o f the nation affected by these different nationalisms were funda mentally different on the grounds o f widely divergent positions in current South African society on the basis of racial, cultural, economic, ethnic and political variables. Looking at it from a discursive point o f view, there are significant parallels and many rhetorical convergences as far as mobilising women for a cause are concerned. The rhetoric that has sedimented over the NWM is one place where one can begin to identify and sort out the discourses of war, conflict and peace, power and nationalism
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