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Gender Researcher Seeks Answers on South African Campuses

South Africa is a dual world where privilege coexists beside deep poverty — creating serious dilemmas for young people striving to succeed. (CIDA Photos: P. Bennett and D. Barbour)

2003-07-21

In South Africa, post-secondary education is a privilege, and many students currently enroled in universities are the first in their families to reach for it. Degrees are also one of only a few tickets to upward mobility, and students endure enormous economic and personal pressures to graduate.

"Campus cultures are places in which the stakes are high," says Dr Jane Bennett, gender researcher and director of the African Gender Institute, based at the University of Cape Town.

As a result, some female students will agree to exchange sex for high marks from male lecturers. Male students consequently perceive their female counterparts to have an unfair advantage and are hostile to them. Other male students claim that instructors compete with them for girlfriends on campus — and will give male students failing grades to get them out of the way.

Gender, violence, sexuality, and education

Succeeding on campus means facing powerfully entrenched ideas tied to gender and heterosexuality, according to Bennett. She presented her research on the connections between gender violence and sexuality with respect to higher education in Africa as a guest of the Gender Ideas Forum, organized by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC).

Education is critical for Africa’s development, says Bennett. But, she adds, a deeper understanding is needed about the intersections between gender, heterosexuality, and the economic and cultural divides straddled by young men and women. She’s urging much more work be undertaken on gender equity and gender violence in a specifically African context.

Wealth and poverty

"What is increasingly becoming clear ... is the need for research that goes beyond the first-stage necessity of simply discovering the existence of sexual violence and sexual harassment on a particular campus," she says. "In contexts where globalization and poverty create the threat of unemployment and marginalization for even those with diplomas and degrees, survival may entail risky gender dynamics." Moreover, South Africa is a "dual world" of dramatic juxtapositions, where privileges of western resources coexist close beside deep poverty.

"I am interested in the visceral impact of the juxtaposition of poverty and wealth, a juxtaposition that is in many South African contexts brutally intimate, and a juxtaposition enhanced, fantastically engineered, and even celebrated by the cultural, social, and economic dynamics of globalization. I am interested in the way in which the juxtaposition of wealth and poverty creates what I would call a wild zone, through which new identities are negotiated and new dilemmas surface," Bennett says.

Examples revealed by her research include the following.

• The practice by male lecturers’ of approaching their female students for sexual relationships appears widely accepted in other universities. As well, some male students charge that lecturers who have an eye for their girlfriends have deliberately harassed and failed them.


• In a demonstration against sexual harassment, the largest group of marchers was male students — their signs, aimed at lecturers, said "Hands Off Our Women."


• Female students may accept male lecturers’ harassment and advances as the price of staying in college. Male students may limit their relationships to women from off-campus. Some lecturers assert that their female students solicit "quid pro quo" relationships with them, expecting employment, opportunities, resources, or good marks in exchange for "favours."

Looking for deeper analysis

In the last dozen years, researchers have linked gender, race, ethnicity, and nation building to the complicated gender relations on African campuses, Bennett says. However, African universities face many less theoretical challenges with respect to gender equity including low ratios of female student enrolment and institutional misogyny. Higher-level staff is overwhelmingly male, and choices of discipline seem to follow old stereotypes. Affirmative action programs to enroll more women have created resentment toward female students — and are seen as proof of misogynist ideas about women’s inferior intellectual abilities.

But, Bennett says that deeper analysis could help reveal the underpinnings of these problems and point the way to strategies for change.

Keane J. Shore is a freelance writer based in Ottawa.

For more information:

Jane Bennett, Director, African Gender Institute, University of Cape Town, Private Bag, Rondebosch, Cape Town 7701; Phone: (+27) 021 650 2970; Fax: (+27) 021 685 2142; Email: jbennett@humanities.uct.ac.za

Gender and Sustainable Development (GSD) Unit, IDRC, 250 Albert Street, PO Box 8500, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1G 3H9; Phone: (613) 236-6163 ext 2209; Fax: (613) 238-7230; Email: gsd@idrc.ca

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