Being Mum among lesbians
by Sabine Neidhardt

Zanele Muholi’s second documentary film in two years, Being Mum (2007) unearths the many layers of experience and identity that young, black, lesbian mothers embody and negotiate as their lives unfold within their township communities of southern Johannesburg. Muholi focuses on 3 couples and 2 single mothers, one of whom is the late Buhle Msibi, who passed from us last April 1 from AIDS related TB. Buhle left this world her beautiful 8-year-old joy, Nkosana.

As I write, International Women’s Day and Human Rights Day have passed, and South Africa is coming up to marking 13 years of democracy on April 27, Freedom Day. Given that the passage of colonialism on the continent of Africa is still less than half a century old—with South Africa’s historic liberation and transition from white minority rule and apartheid toward majority rule happening only as recently as 1994—the commemorations in each of these significant annual events are about the enduring power of collective action and struggle against a variety of intersecting injustices—capitalist class-based, colonial/neocolonial, racial, patriarchal, heterosexist injustices.

Inevitably, within queer and lesbian communities around the globe, some sort of strategic political messages or actions are planned in coordination with ‘international days ’in order to highlight the rights based struggles that still need to be supported and engaged within “postcolonial” societies. After all, despite our respective localized differences in Johannesburg, Toronto, or Bangalore, our social orders are still tightly organized by heteropatriarchal and Euro/Amerocentric norms. As such, these strategic political actions are designed to capture mainstream media and non-queer, but progressive/activist attention.

However, what sometimes gets lost in these political strategies is the importance of also sitting back as a community and doing some internal housekeeping, some reflecting on how the movement/s is/are shaping and for whom they are shaping? What kind of social and political organizing lies ahead internally and within our communities, and what is it that as community leaders, activists, and members we must confront, decolonize, rebuild in order to bring another world into existence, one which will be safe for women, lesbians, the working poor, the socially and culturally disenfranchised? These are questions worth reflecting upon no matter what area of the globe we inhabit.

It is in this context, then, that Being Mum does more for us than simply offer up a glimpse of what black lesbian motherhood represents in South Africa today. Instead, the documentary invites us to reflect, to pause and ruminate, to think over the last decade of LGBTI organizing in this country. Some of the women in the film talk about the various social pressures that led them to motherhood, such as the pressures from family to produce children and grandchildren. Another speaks about her rape incident at 15, and her aunt’s pleas not to terminate the pregnancy because she herself wanted a child. One couple—professional, middle class—speaks candidly of their decision to live as life partners and to start a family together in the township.

And yet, mixed in with the stories and experiences of marginalization and exclusion, some painful acknowledgements come to the surface, which have little to do with heteropatriarchal social structures and homophobia. One mother of a young son speaks of the loneliness of not knowing other lesbian mothers. Some speak of the isolation of being a lesbian, a mother, and under/unemployed in the townships where lesbian-centred services and social spaces are non-existent. For some it is a travel time of almost 2 hours to get to Braamfontein to take advantage of the services offered by the Forum for the Empowerment of Women (FEW) or to get to Behind the Mask. And such a trip—4 hours round—does not come cheap, especially when one is not working and depending on meager government grants or other family members to support children and to survive.

Indeed, the images of life represented in the documentary reveal a cross section of class divisions among these mothers—two lovers share a one room shack with their baby; another showcase a beautiful home with two bathrooms; a sangoma allows the camera to document her sacred space where she makes a small income for her family as a traditional healer, her calling from the ancestors. Not all lesbian women—not all lesbian mothers—are forced into motherhood, but not all have the choice to care and provide their children all they may like or need.

Consequently, what the documentary exposes for us through narrative and images, are some of the shortcomings of the current focus by LGBTI communities around the globe for equality before the law and “paper” rights to the exclusion of more immediate and material struggles around publicly funded child care support for all mothers; decent social housing; universal healthcare and affordable HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment; meaningful community and government interventions into gender and sexual-based violence against women and lesbians that is steadily increasing not only in South Africa but all over the globe: jobs. And significantly, what these stories reveal, too, is the lack of support within the community itself to help alleviate the loneliness, alienation, and the constant struggle to survive.

Back in 2003 when Evert Knoessen (then director of the Lesbian and Gay Equality Project) traveled around the country mobilizing support for the Same-Sex Marriage Campaign, he estimated that the campaign at that time roughly cost ZAR 700,000, not to mention the costs in terms of the political energies, resources, and time spent by individual activists. While the efforts of our political organizers were successful, and the Civil Unions Act was passed and put into legislation this past December 1, 2006, it may behoove us all to re-examine who exactly benefits from gay marriage, or whether or not the individual freedom for gays to marry actually allows us to challenge and transform the current world into a world that has a more developed sense of collective justice, compassion, community, and solidarity in it? What could have been gained had the single issue of same-sex marriage not dominated the lesbian and gay political landscape?

While the rights based approaches to justice and equality are not unimportant in the effort to build an alternative world, the narratives related by black lesbian women who are also mothers in Being Mum suggest that the rights-based approach is limited in and of itself.
If it focuses too linearly on legal and individual gay and lesbian sexual identity and orientation issues, at the expense of the multiplicities of identities and experiences that goes into raising children in post-apartheid, post-liberation South Africa, then the realities of lesbian mothers’ lives will always be silenced within the LGBTI rights struggles and discourses, subsumed by those employed, middle class, privileged queers who can afford to purchase their gay freedoms on the open capitalist market. Rights based approaches are useful, but cannot take place outside of collective social struggles and actions. As always, our struggles as women, as lesbians, as anti-imperialist actors, the struggle continues.

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