In the steam room: 3 May 2011: Steamed and single but not rising to the top


The one thing you learn in the steam room, without the help of a teacher (an outdated word I know, but one which to my mind carries some sense of warmth and  responsibility, unlike educator which in South Africa, offers a cold and fictional professionalism- but that’s a whole other story), is that hot air rises. So if you are sitting on the top level, things can get awfully hot up there, an experience which can evoke untold overused metaphors of how hot it gets at the top. In linguistic kindness, I shall refrain. Few of us venture up there and when we do we tend to descend rapidly. So some weeks ago I was listening to a lecture (no not in the steam room, in the Senate Hall, a very prestigious place where everyone is dressed to the hilt so unlike the steam room) about African women and leadership. It was a brilliant piece of research, exceptionally researched and creatively presented. There were few surprises: there is very limited research in this area and that a minimal number of African women occupy positions of leadership and that these are primarily in the service sector.  And then the presenter threw in a seemingly small tidbit that perhaps I have intuitively known for some time: the majority of those women who do make it to leadership positions are either single or divorced. But having it said out loud to a huge hall full of people seemed to accord to it a sense of reality that I have hitherto avoided. Simply it meant that women who wanted to be executives had to make a choice: family or CEO? I have yet to read a story fictional or otherwise of a CEO breast feeding, taking kids to school, or even having husband and kids in the family portrait on the desk.  Nope, seems like this is not a possibility. Nor does it exist even in the realms of fiction or fairytale. Which means it is not even something we can create in our imagination. Nope, have not even dreamt this. So should we be bodacious and write our own “I have a dream…” story? Yep, I think so.

But then a few days later I was assaulted by another presentation which told me that 56% of South African households are single parent families, of course the majority of these are women headed households and that 79% of single parent homes are among African people and that more than half these families live in poverty. Ok so we have a huge number of single women, but they are going nowhere near the top. They would be lucky if they could simply keep their heads above the quagmire of unemployment, abuse and poverty. In the midst of all this bleakness I heard we are devising a Gender Equality Bill that may seek to enforce gender quotas with respect to positions of power in government and private companies. So how does this Bill live alongside the cultural anachronism of polygamy, the apparent reality that single women have a better chance of a successful career, that even if she is single and competent, the chance of being in leadership is small, that if she is married and has children, she can forget it, and the figures that show a huge number of South African women are bringing up their children without fathers. The mind boggles and the heart sinks!

In the hazy steam room I feel the heat but am bogged down by so many clammy forces that keep me from rising. There are many dreams we have yet to dream.

(Image Credit: David Guglielmo / Moneyweb)

In the steam room: not the cricket thing to do

This may be surprising but the topic of sport can easily raise the temperature in the steam room.

Yep, we talk about sport in there and it’s usually when one of two extremes happen: we won or we lost. Imagine that!!  There’s not much focus on amazing agility or magical manoeuvres. It’s all about whether our team did us proud or not. And the code of sport is not really of consequence. But this Sunday things got a bit hazy in there. Yep we beat India in the cricket match when there seemed little hope of winning. But the glory of this victory was clouded by the previous loss against England.

As I watched wicket after wicket fall in the SA vs England game, my other fallen hero, Hansie Cronje, then captain of the South Africa cricket team and who had confessed to match fixing and taking bribes, came to mind. In the glory days after apartheid I believed he was the role model of sportsmanship, of integrity and doing the right thing on the sports field. But then my hero went up in flames when his crooked ways came to light, this being followed by his plane crashing against a mountain.  Talk about divine justice. Sadly the apologies and explanations of being led by the devil did not heal my broken heart. And making a movie about it all seemed like just another get rich ploy.

Today our newspapers are filled with stories of struggle heroes and comrades getting sickeningly rich through tenders to build national highways and collecting tolls. On the one hand we cannot build roads at the expense of the national treasury. We are not a socialist state and we have to live in the real world.  And of course we cannot become a ‘welfare’ state. Let’s forget for a moment that the state is  the main source of sheltered employment (those endless circles of de ja vu are driving me batty). Someone must pay for the roads. Forever. On the other hand let’s nationalise the mines. After all we professed socialism. Mmmmm impending implosions?? And for whom do these bells now toll?

So we girls added more lavender to the steam, waddled over to our bits of colourful towels, and found momentary solace in the professed peacemaking of lavender. Somehow Cosmo seemed more plausible than anything in the real world at this moment.

 

In the steam room: Born in the you of SA

Some may call this past week in South Africa a turning point. I won’t. Because I think we are probably embarking on our fourth or fifth concentric circle now. It’s so dizzying and I have lost count. Racial identities and identifiers twirl in a myriad of hues in this rainbow nation.  So while leading political figures point accusing fingers and shout you are colored, you are black, but not quite, you are a gangster, you are a racist, I am left reeling and wondering who I am.

Some years ago it was all crystal clear. I knew that I was a South African fighting the evil of apartheid. Although I ate curry and rice and spoke Tamil, I knew I was not Indian. Some weeks ago I was sitting in the steam room and was trying to chill out by adopting a meditation pose, closing my eyes and desperately trying to ‘smile with my liver’ as Julia Roberts advised in ‘Eat, pray love’, I sensed a small movement to my right. Not assuming this to be any kind of political positioning I was mildly taken aback when a strong and delectable Indian accent accosted me with the words: “Are you from India”.

True, I was wearing bangles. True I had a Lutchmi red string on my hand. True I had a coloring that could be construed to be originating somewhere in India (nobody in my family actually knows where and this has not unduly disturbed us, nor has it been of any interest to us). I was quick to say no I was not and that I was (I think) fourth generation South African. It turns out of course that my detractor was indeed Indian, no less than the wife of the deputy ambassador to South Africa, a lively and wonderfully engaging woman who was fun to talk with.  She was quick to apologize for the assumption that I was Indian (perhaps the steam room did not quite warm up the chill in my reply) and said she had noticed my bangles and thought that I may have been from Indian. Good diplomatic training. Given that we are all sitting around naked in the steam room, bangles could probably pass for one of the few legitimate items we could focus on, without crossing any borders, imaginary or otherwise. We laughed about family, about her mother the strong and powerful women in her life, her own determination that one child was enough, her love of having her own job despite being a ‘diplomatic wife’. I secretly chastised my own preconceptions that expected from her a bride like shyness found only in Bollywood movies. And so a friendship was born. We exchanged advice on where to buy good fresh fish, how to survive Pretoria and promised each other that we were going to knocks the socks off the other in the next cricket season. I was proudly South African.

This week as I read the vitriolic attacks among leading political figures I find no place to belong. In the accusing voice of “you” reverberating though my country, while masculine and political posturing signal ever increasing battle lines, I wonder who ‘we’ are. There is no longer an ‘us’.  What is the legacy I hand over to my amazing daughters?