Rhoda Kadalie unflinchingly cuts to the chase with her direct
and assertive approach to gender and human rights, as well as politics in South
Africa. She has a strong anti-apartheid profile but in September 2011 resigned somewhat
controversially from the Stellenbosch University Council over the appointment
of the lesser qualified of two candidates to a senior post and the dilution of
academic excellence in the name of transformation.
She’s the granddaughter of Clements Kadalie, one of the
first black trade unionist in South Africa, an academic, anthropologist, human
rights activist, newspaper columnist and social commentator - and is admired (and
sometimes feared) for her no-nonsense and forthright attitude. She’s recently
released her first book, a compilation of her columns, appropriately titled: In your face – Passionate conversations
about people and politics.
Kadalie was born on 22 September 1953 in District Six and
grew up with seven brothers and a sister 16 years her junior in Mowbray before
her family was moved, in her final year of high school, to the “coloured” area
of Athlone, on the Cape Flats, under the Group Areas Act.
The family ran without gender stereotypical roles under a
mother who made it clear she wasn’t wiling to be anyone’s slave – which imbued
a healthy sense of gender equality and fairness in Kadalie. She learnt the
quality of assertiveness from her mother; and as the daughter of pastor,
Kadalie grew up with strong Christian values, principle among which was
respect.
After completing her studies at Harold Cressy High School she
went on to study library science and anthropology completing her arts degree at
the University of the Western Cape (UWC) where she developed an interest in
politics and women’s rights. Kadalie went on to lecture at the University of
Cape Town’s summer school, and after completing her masters at the Institute
for Social Science in the Netherlands, she returned to UWC to lecture
anthropology and went on to play a founding role in the UWC’s Office of Gender
Equity.
While bringing up her daughter, Julia, largely as a single
mother, she campaigned against the attitude the women’s rights should be
sacrificed in the name of a unified political struggle and, although labelled a
bourgeois Western feminist, continued undeterred to campaign against sexual
harassment and rape on campus.
With Kadaie’s influence as one of a group of women to campaign
for women’s rights as human rights on the UWC campus, the university was the
first campus to develop a sexual harassment policy. They also successfully
campaigned for maternity and paternity benefits for academics, equal housing
benefits – as well as push for the promotion of women in the academic
hierarchy.
Kadalie left her life as an activist academic at UWC to
take up an appointment from Nelson Mandela as a Human Rights Commissioner for
the Western and Northern Cape in 1995 but she left after three years when she
realised that people were being paid “gravy-train salaries” while cheating tax
payers as a result of inadequate leadership, control and direction.
In 1998 she headed up the district Land Claims Commission
for District Six to deal with 2,000 unprocessed land claims – an issue close to
her heart. The R1.7million budget for the first year never materialised and
Kadalie left the Commission in 1999, disappointed after being told to pay over
the funding she’d raised for her office to a central kitty.
In 1999 the University of Uppsala in Sweden awarded Kadalie
an honorary doctorate in liberal arts and she founded the Impumelelo
Innovations Award Trust in the same year. Under Kadalie’s directorship, the
non-profit Impumelelo provides financial assistance to innovative and well-run
public-private partnerships that improve the quality of life of the poor in
South Africa – with a focus on building capacity for service delivery.
Kadaie was awarded an honorary doctorate of literature
from UWC in 2007, and is a regular columnist in Die Burger and Beeld.
Apart from humanitarian work in her role as Executive
Director at Impumelelo (now known as the Impumelelo Social Innovation Centre) Kadalie
serves on the Rhodes Scholarship Committee, the University of Cape Town Council
and served on the Stellenbosch University Council prior to her resignation in
2011.
Dubbed the ANC’s internal critic she’s anti-transformation
and affirmative action if it means South Africans, especially poor South
Africans, have to suffer incompetence and lack of service delivery as a result.
Kadalie plays a tireless and vital role in keeping our
politicians honest – or at least more honest than they would be otherwise – and
deserves our thanks as a champion of equal rights for all.
