Women’s intimate experience in the ANC in exile ranged wildly from sexual violence to egalitarian freedom, writes Nomalanga Mkhize. It is Women's Month and I can no longer bear the thought of trotting out the well-worn debates on gender representivity and the effectiveness of 50-50 quotas.The trouble with postcolonial African states is that gender questions are dealt with through the language of bureaucratic policyspeak and sloganeering about women as "pillars" and "backbones" of the nation. In reality, in postcolonial African states, various alliances of conservatives will use everything from indigenous traditions to religion and even English Victorianism to argue for why women must not wear miniskirts or pants, why gays must disappear - in general, why everyone must be well behaved unless they are isoka, a heterosexual man loved by many women.story_article_left1"Women's empowerment" discourse is misused not just by politicians, but also by us, the citizenry, who engage in meaningless debates on radio and elsewhere without actually asking ourselves how we contribute to entrenched conservatism.Dealing with questions of gender equality in the postcolonial context means looking at our everyday cultures.To speak of advancements for women, we must think of the physical experience of the "body" that each person lives in, as the Human Sciences Research Council's Professor Thenjiwe Meyiwa and other gender activists remind us.Anti-colonial movements came to adopt progressive resolutions about the position of women, largely because women pushed the issue, not because all men accepted that gender equality was a necessary precondition for Black emancipation.In public, the struggle against apartheid is commemorated through collective memories of courage and triumph. But tucked away in the personal memories and memoirs are experiences of what activists did with bodies and what was done to their bodies.For some these are memories of yearning, pleasure, desire and intimate bonding in a community of revolutionary idealists. For others there are memories of rape, violence, torture and betrayal. Indeed, for many there are likely experiences of both kinds of physical experience, rendering memories of activist life somewhat ambivalent.Growing up as a child of activists in the ANC, at some point in my life I became quite aware of the messy, crisscrossing intimate and romantic entanglements that existed between many of the struggle "aunties" and "uncles" in my parents' political circles. It was like everybody had been with everybody, had children with other people's partners and everybody was OK with this.story_article_right2I was always secretly intrigued by how fluidly and easily it seemed these intersecting intimate relationships were handled by activists. Admittedly, as a child I was hardly privy to much of the personal dysfunction, anxiety and depression that I would come to see in many of them later on.However, there was in the midst of the struggle a "subculture" of the sexual egalitarianism that flourished in the ANC and was an important dimension of its history.John*, a personal friend and former ANC activist and member of Umkhonto weSizwe, shared with me the story of how he met one of his lovers at a trade union workshop. Her marriage to a prominent leader in the movement had broken down and John himself had a partner. He described how the activist community created very strong bonds of trust in a context of anxiety, fear and danger."You are kind of set apart from others anyway," John said. "You are trying to create a new society. This doesn't mean that you have no morals. There was no pretence at love, but we are working together, we are acting together. It was a counterculture that was coming out of the anti-colonial struggles."No one said, 'We are 'breaking down society so let's f**k', but the fact that you were breaking things down led you down that way. It was doing things with people who did not have to hide anything from you, and you were hiding things from everyone else, including your parents."I was not entirely sure if my ideas of this sexual liberalism among ANC activists were just romantic ideas of sex and revolutions.story_article_left3John cautioned: "I think there's a danger in painting a rosy picture, but women had a hell of a lot of freedom. The women I met in the struggle were not unliberated women. You can't say they became liberated in the struggle, it was a part of their personalities, and I do not mean the Western 'women's lib' sense of the word."Some women were freer and held much more power than they would have outside of the ANC."He said his comrade lover in the trade union had ended her marriage because of abuse. Abusive relationships among activists were common. For as much as there was the kind of sexually egalitarian counterculture, there were also male activists who viewed women's bodies as an entitlement.Stories of rape and other forms of sexual violence experienced by activists either within the movement or through torture have been slow to emerge. Equally difficult to uncover are forms of sexual domination that took place with consent.Even today, one of the more difficult aspects of grappling with gender equality in post-apartheid South Africa is that the ANC, at the helm of government, struggles to deal with sexual dynamics and power plays between its own members, some of whom have new power and status.Of course, nobody really talks about these things, or how even seemingly consensual sex in the movement today is framed by conditions of social and material inequality. In the end, it is easier to talk statistics and gender numbers and throw about a few slogans, while not grappling with the very substance of how equality can only be realised when it reaches our most intimate physical space.*Not his real name.Mkhize is a history lecturer at Rhodes University..