OBITUARY | Rhoda Kadalie fought for women’s rights and against state incompetence

Rhoda Kadalie, who has died in Los Angeles of lung cancer at the age of 68, was a fiercely outspoken, feisty and fearless political commentator and human rights activist, and one of SA’s earliest and most formidable champions of gender equity.

She established the first gender equity unit on the continent.

She began agitating for the rights of women while an anthropology lecturer at the University of the Western Cape in the 1970s and 1980s, when all attention was focused on the struggle against racism and apartheid.

Her message that the struggle for women’s rights was just as important was ridiculed or angrily rejected.

The whole culture at UWC, as at all campuses in SA, was hugely patriarchal and deeply entrenched.

There were no women members of Senate. Today the gender split is about 50/50. There was no paid maternity leave, no housing allowances for women staff members, no medical aid, no childcare facilities, no preschool and no sexual harassment policy, though sexual harassment on campus was rife and almost taken for granted.

She almost single-handedly over many years, and against considerable pushback from those who believed that the only struggle that mattered was against racism and apartheid, changed that.

When she finally got the go-ahead to set up the gender equity unit, she was told she could have an office. She insisted on an entire building, which, with support from vice-chancellor Jakes Gerwel, she got. The unit opened its doors in 1993 and became a haven for women who were being abused and sexually harassed, not least lesbians whose rights she was also one of the first in the country to champion.

Kadalie became their confidant. Her efforts led to UWC being one of the first universities in SA to adopt a policy on sexual harassment and establish a tribunal where sexual violence and harassment cases were heard, offenders suspended and professors disciplined.

It was thanks to her that more women senior lecturers and professors began being appointed.

Scholarships for postgraduate study abroad were almost the exclusive preserve of males. Kadalie bucked the trend when she was awarded a scholarship to study for a master's degree in women and gender studies at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.

When she got back she established the women and gender studies programme at UWC, which some 20 years later awarded her an honorary doctorate for her promotion of women’s rights.

She began agitating for the rights of women while an anthropology lecturer at the University of the Western Cape in the 1970s and 1980s, when all attention was focused on the struggle against racism and apartheid.

She participated in discussions about the inclusion of women’s rights in SA’s new constitution.

She ran the gender equity unit until president Nelson Mandela appointed her as a commissioner to SA’s first Human Rights Commission in 1995.

She was “very excited” that human rights would be taken seriously for the first time in the country’s history and wasted no time investigating the abuse of farm workers, violations of the rights of schoolchildren and routine racism in the ambulance service.

But her hopes were soon dashed. The commission didn’t follow through on these investigations. She thought it wasn’t independent enough of government and not proactive enough in implementing its mandate.

She was frustrated that while many at the HRC agreed with her, “their gravy-train salaries” silenced those unhappy with the HRC’s leadership. In 1997 she decided the government was reneging on its commitment to human rights and quit, making her reasons very, and typically, public.

She was similarly disillusioned after being appointed to the land claims commission in 1994. She was put in charge of the District Six land claims unit to deal with some 2,000 unprocessed claims. This was close to her heart because many people, including her own extended family, had been forcibly removed from District Six. Again she was full of hope.

But a year later not a cent of a promised R1.7m budget for her nine-member unit crowded into a supposedly temporary room had materialised. There was no money for pens and no computers. When some did arrive they had no software or were broken.

She set about raising money from USAID for computer programs, so they could start processing land claims. The LCC told her she wasn’t allowed to raise money from sources outside government and demanded that she pay over the money she had raised into their central budget. Soon afterwards she quit.

Typically, she wasn’t quiet about her reasons. Four years later the District Six claims process was a shambles. She said the claims could have been resolved by then but she’d never seen so much incompetence or waste of time and money. Efficiency in government required, at the very least, the presence in their offices of senior managers and people who answered the phone, she said.

In 2001 her belief in the ANC government she’d fought for and expected so much of hit a new low. She called on then health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang to resign over her failure to address the HIV/Aids crisis which was killing hundreds every day.

Four years later the District Six claims process was a shambles. She said the claims could have been resolved by then but she’d never seen so much incompetence or waste of time and money.

She’d suspended her intellect to support president Thabo Mbeki’s “incomprehensible”, “shocking and irresponsible” views on HIV/Aids.

Kadalie believed that in any civilised democracy, the public would have demanded his head.

She excoriated the cabinet’s silent complicity. She said the government’s failure to prioritise Aids stemmed from a refusal to recognise the “rampant, uncontrolled sexuality” of South African men which was the product of “a deeply chauvinist, patriarchal culture”.

Kadalie believed one of the biggest threats to democracy in SA was the failure of public figures in government and business to criticise the government openly because, in the case of whites, they were terrified of being labelled racists, and because they didn’t want to jeopardise their chances of getting cushy jobs or contracts.

Even though she’d studied the post-liberation experience as a feminist academic, she said she’d told herself that what happened in other liberated countries would not easily happen in SA because of its checks and balances, fine constitution, independent judiciary and vibrant civil society.

But, she warned 20 years ago, “we are better at erecting a façade than an actual democracy, and behind the façade the rot is spreading”.

She predicted that growing disillusionment with the ANC would see people increasingly abstain from voting rather than strengthening the opposition, which would be bad for democracy.

“What we on the left have not learnt is the need for the development of institutional opposition. It is time South Africans learnt to vote against corruption and for good governance and effective delivery.”

Kadalie was born in District Six in Cape Town on September 22 1953. Her grandfather was Malawian-born Clements Kadalie, who as the leader of southern Africa’s first major black trade union, the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union, is regarded as the father of SA’s black trade union movement.

Her father, evangelical minister Fenner Kadalie, used to say she was a chip off the old block because of her fierce and outspoken activism.

The family moved to “white” Mowbray when Fenner, who worked in the Cape Town City council’s cleansing department, was promoted to oversee the Mowbray municipal wash houses.

When Kadalie was in matric they were forcibly removed to Athlone on the Cape Flats after a Nationalist government minister saw her brothers playing football in the street with some white children.

Though brought up as the only girl (her sister was 16 years younger) with seven brothers, her family never thought she should have a lesser education because she was a girl, and she went to Harold Cressy, renowned for its high academic standards.

In the early 1970s she went to UWC, where she studied English and anthropology, which politicised her and in which she lectured at UWC for 21 years.

She said the government's failure to prioritise Aids stemmed from a refusal to recognise the ‘rampant, uncontrolled sexuality’ of South African men which was the product of ‘a deeply chauvinist, patriarchal culture’.

Kadalie attributed much of what went wrong after 1994 to the baleful influence of the ANC exiles.

In a piece published in The Guardian in 2010, she said prison had saved Mandela from “the mess of liberation”.

“He had none of the paranoia, vengefulness and entitlement that subsequent administrations”, led by the “exilers”, came to “epitomise”, she wrote.

Kadalie was politically incorrect and argumentative almost as a matter of principle. She always spoke her mind completely unconstrained by the controversy and unpopularity this would, and usually did, provoke. She didn’t mind how many friends, colleagues and former “struggle” comrades she alienated along the way, and there were many.

Being her friend was always hard work, and never more so than after her emigration to the US several years ago to be with her daughter Julia and three grandchildren, where she became an unapologetic supporter of Donald Trump.

She hated political correctness and identity politics, which she felt had prevented SA democracy from achieving its potential. She loved that Trump gave them both the middle finger.

She also loathed snobs and smugly self-righteous establishment figures epitomised by the Clintons. She saw in Trump someone brash and outspoken enough to take on the wokist tide, and she identified with that.

Her (remaining) friends in SA took some comfort from the news that she enjoyed watching senator Bernie Sanders take aim at Hillary Clinton, and cheered when businesswoman Carly Fiorina called Trump out for his sexist rhetoric.