Pregs Govender
a feminist human rights activist, author, former African National Congress (ANC) Member.
Pregs Govender (born 15 February 1960) is a South African human rights activist, author, and politician. Brought up in a political family she was taking action against apartheid by the age of 14. She became a teacher in Durban joining unions and the ANC. In 1994 she entered the first South African Democratic parliament where she argued for women's rights including the laws permitting abortions.
Quotes
edit- When I wrote Love and Courage, the Story of Insubordination, I was not just telling the story of some isolated individual operating in a bubble. It was really about my learning about the power of love and how to connect, to draw courage and be insubordinate, to injustice and to systems of injustice
- [1] Pregs on her book Love and courage
- My father used to say the person who writes the story shapes our consciousness. So it’s not just about whose stories get told, but it’s about if you are writing the story yourself, if it’s your story, if it’s your experience, the power of that is enormous. Because our stories have been written for us and they’ve been re-written. And many times we’ve been written out.
- When we were fighting against apartheid, we recognised it wasn’t just a racist state. It was a racist, capitalist and patriarchal state. And we have to understand that. So how do we actually fight against that? How do we change that
- It’s really people who exploit the earth and humanity with fairly little consequence and then set themselves up as the people with the solution or who will fund the solutions
- Power Systems work to fragment us. They fragment us as individual beings. And they set up these hierarchies – the hierarchy of the body, mind, heart, spirit; hierarchies of race, colour, and gender, and they set up these divisions within and between us
- That’s how Power Systems work. They set up divisions between us. One of the most powerful things is reclaiming that connection
- In Conversation with anti-apartheid activist Pregs Govender,7 August 2022,by Yewande Omotoso
- Share [your] personal intergenerational stories of [your] forebears who had defied race, culture, gender and power
- In our country, as in all others, rape and sexual assault have been interwoven into wars of patriarchal conquest and colonisation, genocide, slavery, apartheid and capitalism. Religious texts justify violence against women and children
- God is male – male is god’ is deeply embedded in the human psyche. Those taught to be subordinate are female and those taught to expect subordination are male. The world order mirrors apartheid and has deepened inequality and poverty. Economic, military and religious fundamentalism have increased vulnerability to misogyny, and rape and sexual abuse will affect an estimated one billion women and girls over their lifetimes
- This is where depression regularly ends in suicide and there is no place to run for women, girls, transgendered and gender non-conforming people
- Reclaiming our dignity through insubordinate leadership,02 August 2019,Story Helen Swingler
- The impending destruction of humanity and our planet, presented by climate scientists, does not penetrate the thick wall of denial and inaction, with devastating consequences for people who are poor, especially women
- I want to incite insubordination against this in each of us. Like you, I have felt the fear and hate of subordination land on my skin, course through my blood, unsettle my nerves… its paralysis, impotent rage and helplessness
- There is wisdom in the everyday beauty of fragile complex beings grappling with contradiction
- We can reclaim ourselves by recognising that love is intrinsic to our being. From it we can invoke the courage to dance with our fear
- Reclaiming our dignity through insubordinate leadership,02 August 2019,Story Helen Swingler
- Some people said that apartheid disappeared after removing the signs that said ‘non-Europeans’ … but the structural institutional roots of it remained. When we begin to get insubordinate, we begin to get to the roots of things. Oppressive systems thrive in our subordination
- It’s about harnessing the power we all have within us and begin to practise moving that power. It’s about seeing the dignity in others and [seeing how] the quality of what we create together becomes substantially different
- Without seeing the dignity in those who bear the brunt of gender-based violence, the result will be a narrow focus on the criminal justice system and not the root causes of the problem, and how we have to address this to change the reality of our own country and our world
- From love we can invoke the courage to dance with our fear. Inherent dignity is our individual and collective birth right that underpins substantive rights. When we forget our birth right, as we often do, we can look in the mirror of ourselves, of each other, or let the rising sun remind us of the radiance we were born with
- Reclaiming our dignity through insubordinate leadership,02 August 2019,Story Helen Swingler
