Abstract
Scholarly evidence from African flag-democracies reveals that although women were central to the
liberation struggle, narratives of their participation and contribution let alone the violence they suffered
on their bodies during the fight for land were invisible from post-independence discourses. In Zimbabwe,
female freedom fighters were reduced to sexual objects who merely went to war to perform ‘reed dance’
for the male freedom fighters. Subsequently, the negative labelling limited women’s chances postindependence
and even deterred them from enjoying the fruits of the land they fought hard for.
Scholarship equally reveals that society to this day believes that women who actively pursue politics in
Botswana transgress culture and socially acceptable behaviour. This negativity, in many African
contexts where women struggled for democracy, not only trivialises their contribution but invisibilizes
their bodies from the land they fought for. Although women’s contribution to democracy in South Africa
is acknowledged through the annual celebration of the August 9 1956 women’s march to the Union
Buildings, the commemoration does not do justice to individual women’s contribution to the land as well
as their struggles on and for the land. Their contribution to the land is often ‘celebrated’ and negotiated
through men and as a result, women suffer the effects of a gendered and hierarchized patriarchal
structure which reads their relationship to and struggle for the land through their sexual and reproductive
bodies. Building on the gendered realities of unsung heroines who fought for land, this article pursues
the theme ‘women for land’ through elderly women farmers’ narratives of violence on the land in South
Africa and Zimbabwe. The article theorises that as the elderly women’s violent experiences on the land
are heard, they not only cease to be mere (sexual and reproductive) bodies that deserve to be violated
but they emerge as voices that re-value previously uncelebrated women who fought for the land. These
empirical voices simultaneously insert the unsung heroines’ long forgotten experiences into the
historical land struggle narrative and contemporary land rights framework that seeks to redress the
violent gendered patriarchal effects that women suffer on, for and through the land in South Africa,
Zimbabwe and beyond.