Creating spaces for action. ANC-women politicians' views on bridewealth and gender-related power

Sammanfattning: The first aim of this work has been to analyse and understand the ways in which a group of ANC-women politicians reason about bridewealth/lobola – an institution about which they express differing views, in particular about whether or not it is oppressive to women. The main body of the empirical material is based on 27 interviews conducted in South Africa in the period 1996-1998. One finding of the study is that there are explicit defining discourses on lobola as well as more implicitly expressed understandings. The explicit discourses make a distinction between ’good lobola’ – which is expressed in a family-related discourse as ’a bond between families’ – and ’bad lobola’ which is expressed in, for instance, an economic discourse about ’the purchase of women’. The family-related discourse is interpreted as part of a discursive strategy to create spaces for action with respect to relations of gender-related power. (Re)definitions of lobola may be used not only to counter men’s abuse of monetary lobola but also to counter ’traditional’ gender meanings associated with lobola. Furthermore, explicit discourses on lobola are interpreted as a ‘political discourse’ which is formed both in relation to pragmatic ‘political realities’ but also in relation to hegemonic Western discourses. The political discourse on lobola in connection with ‘African identity’ constitutes a discursive strategy to provide discursive space in order for ’Africans’ to be able to (re)interpret a cherished but also controversial institution. A second aim of the study has been of a self-reflexive character. It consitutes a critique of a ‘doing gender’ theoretical perspective as well as an attempt to transcend the ‘actor/structure dichotomy’ in sociological analysis.