Apartheid Impact on African Women - Essay Example

Life was so hard but challenging during those times that several documentaries and writings about the time have been made. Such would be the film "South Africa Belongs to us" which focuses on the plight of five women mainly on a wife left in the homelands, a nurse at a family planning clinic, a hospital cleaner who lives in a single-sex hotel, a leader of a squatter's camp and a domestic servant. The black servant in a house owned by whites cannot spend quality time with her children. Thus, separation did not just happen among people with different skin colors but among the members of their race, specifically with their own bloodlines.

The same with other female migrant workers who were sort of imprisoned in their workplace as they were not allowed to visit their families. Through apartheid, women during that episode experienced misery while they were away with their loved ones, while some stood as single mothers because of the classification. One of the effects of apartheid then was the destruction of the black family and the existence of displaced families. There is this one woman who lives in one of the unproductive homelands with her more than a dozen children, because she was not allowed to be with her husband who was forced to live in Johannesburg for twenty years.

Despite all these, the film depicts of women's battle cry to defy racism. Winnie Mandela, the former wife of Nelson Mandela and one of the women leaders who were interviewed in the movie, symbolizes women power. Among those who also bravely talked in front of the camera were Numisi Kjuzwayo, a young leader of the prohibited Black Consciousness Movement which was against apartheid and Fatimah Meer, an activist. All of these women never stopped opposing the apartheid system no matter what risked their life.

A lot of what has done then contributes to what South Africa is at present, that it really belongs to its people. Another film, "Girls Apart" done in the year 1987, shows an interview with two sixteen year old girls, Sylvia who is from Soweto, a town of blackmen, the other is Siska, a rich white girl Johannesburg. Each told the story of their lives in South 3Africa during the apartheid period, showing how their worlds were apart and that their lives were led according to their skin color. In the film, a picture of apartheid was demonstrated through the contrasts in the lives of the girls.

Another documented story about the happenings in South Africa during the apartheid period is illustrated in the book "Not Either An Experimented Doll, The Separate Worlds of Three South African Women". The story is told through the exchange of letters between an Englishwoman named Mabel Palmer and a disturbed teenage girl Lily Moya, who wrote the book herself which was then edited by Shula Marks. Lily, an orphan, looks to Mabel as a mother she never had, pleading to let her go to school in her college.

Mabel, on the other hand, gave in to her wish. In fact, she has contributed a lot to the education of South African women. There was this one time when she went out into the winter cold without a jacket just to pay Lily's matriculation. Here in this book, it seeks to show that during the apartheid period, there were still white people who had good hearts to blacks, although Mabel Palmer had a little limitation in her relationship with Lily for fear of the dictations of racial discrimination rules.

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