Stop vilifying black women leaders

WE WRITE this piece as a trio of concerned black women feminist scholars who refuse to stand by in the sight of gender injustice and profanity directed at women at our institutions of higher learning.

In a previous article, the misogynistic violence faced by women executives was highlighted. Sociological and political analysis aptly illustrates how black women are undermined in multiple avenues of social life including in their leadership roles within various social institutions.

In illustrating our argument we would like to zoom in on Unisa’s current Principal and Vice-Chancellor, Professor Puleng LenkaBula, who assumed her responsibilities last year.

Since taking office she has been the subject of a plethora of public attacks. She has been at the receiving end of endless allegations and slander, much of it ventilated on media platforms. A similar phenomenon of this “attackon-arrival” tactics has been observed with other women leaders such as Professor Mamokgethi Phakeng at UCT; Yoliswa Makhasi at the Department of Public Service And Administration; Sara Mosoetsa at the NIHSS and many others. This is possibly aggravated and enabled by the widening phenomenon of “brown bag journalism” in South Africa’s media.

We do acknowledge that as leaders of public institutions, women leaders need to be subjected to public scrutiny whenever they are found wanting in their decisions and actions. However, what we have witnessed shows that this is not the case, time and again they are vilified without evidence.

Some of the internal letters and statements that ended up circulating on multiple social media platforms are a case in point. In some of these communiques, LenkaBula is referred to as someone with “slay queen tendencies”; “a media darling” and so on and so forth.

Wikipedia defines the term slay queen as, “A young gold digger who is active on social media and pretends to afford a lavish, partying lifestyle”. According to Crizelda Kekana, the notion of the slay queen has parallels to the blesser/blessee phenomenon of the mid-1990s. We therefore ask: Is this a productive way of defining the first woman (black woman) Vice Chancellor of the biggest university in the Southern Hemisphere? What are we saying to our daughters and all other emerging black women scholars about role modelling?

In her book Bare: the cradle of the Hockey Club, Jackie Phamotse chronicles her experiences of being a slay queen and upon a closer look, one realises that the slay queen phenomenon is linked to a particular femininity that might not align with what LenkaBula embodies.

It is this misogynistic and gendered language that we as women scholars will not tolerate within the social and intellectual spaces where we exist with others. Unisa positions itself as an “African university shaping futures” and we believe that it should live up to its own vision and mandate. What kind of African futures are we shaping if we continue to dehumanise, denigrate, defame, malign one another as colleagues? Have our colleagues forgotten that we are an educational institution entrusted with shaping the futures of students?

No wonder Unisa’s official Twitter is marred by slurs and insults in comparison to other universities. Could it be that our students learn this profanity from those who are entrusted to lead, teach and educate them? This is a worrying pattern that is escalating day by day within our university.

This internal cry is clearly illustrated in how the attack on LenkaBula lacks the political and intellectual care needed to build a university and a South Africa that values its people. We need to start engaging and refrain from insults if we are going to see the changes we are calling for.