‘We won't fuck for houses‘

On 12 July 1990, South African police entered Dobsonville in Soweto, intending to raze to the ground sixty shacks, illegally erected on a strip of land dividing a high cost residential development. A mining company owned the land. The women who had built the shacks led a protest trying to stop the removals. The police arrived in casspirs and bulldozers, armed with teargas, dogs and guns. Sheila Meintjes, a South African feminist academic, interviewed participants in the protest, in the months following its end. I rely on her account in what follows. She writes:

Their main slogan was ‘we won't fuck for houses’. The protest took place in the dying days of apartheid. It received particular attention because the women took off their clothes challenging their status as ‘social and sexual dependents’ (Meintjes 2007: 348). The press were on hand – having been invited by the protesters – to record the attempted destruction. In the twenty-four hours which followed, images of the protest were broadcast across the world. Meintjes notes that every aspect of this action was politically charged and deliberately planned. The occupation was a deliberate strategy to draw attention to the plight of the homeless in North Soweto, Johannesburg. The period before the police action saw peaceful protests, negotiations with the local council and the exploitation of legal loopholes to prevent the destruction. The naked protest was not merely a public spectacle, although the women were well aware that this act would excite outrage and fascination from the gathered media. Rather, the act lampooned the fact that women were offered housing, in exchange for sex with a prominent local councillor.