At a Glance
The ANC Women's League and the Challenge of Exile Organisation
The challenge of maintaining the ANC Women's League as an organisational entity in exile — across multiple African countries, with limited resources, separated from the communities the League was supposed to serve, and operating within the broader structures of the ANC's external mission under Oliver Tambo's leadership — was one that required both organisational skill and sustained personal commitment. The external mission's primary focus was on maintaining the ANC's international presence, building the diplomatic relationships that eventually produced the global anti-apartheid movement, managing the movement's military training and personnel, and sustaining the political and ideological coherence of a banned organisation across multiple decades.
Within this framework, the Women's League occupied a position that required constant advocacy to maintain. The ANC's exile leadership was predominantly male, and the tendency in male-dominated liberation movements to treat women's liberation as a secondary question — to be addressed after the primary political goals had been achieved — was a persistent pressure that the Women's League had to resist. Shope's presidency was partly about the straightforward work of maintaining the League's organisational existence and developing its political programme, and partly about the political work of ensuring that women's rights remained a visible commitment within the ANC's broader platform rather than being quietly subordinated to the more immediately urgent demands of the armed struggle and the constitutional negotiations.
The arguments she made — that women's liberation was integral to the liberation struggle, that non-sexism belonged alongside non-racialism as a foundational principle of the post-apartheid order, that the ANC's constitutional commitments had to explicitly address the conditions of women rather than leaving them to be addressed by a general commitment to equality — were arguments that the Women's League had been making since its founding, and that required sustained advocacy because the tendency to defer was constant and came from within the movement as well as from outside it.
The ANC Constitutional Guidelines and the Formal Commitment to Non-Sexism
One of the most important outcomes of the Women's League's sustained advocacy in the exile period was the inclusion of explicit non-sexism commitments alongside non-racialism in the ANC's Constitutional Guidelines of 1988 — the document that Albie Sachs and others drafted as the framework for the post-apartheid constitutional order. The Guidelines' statement that the post-apartheid South Africa would be a non-racial and non-sexist democracy was not a formulation that appeared automatically or without political effort. It was the product of sustained pressure from the Women's League and from the women activists across the ANC's exile structures who had been arguing for this inclusion.
Shope's leadership of the Women's League during the period when this advocacy was most important — the years from 1981 to the late 1980s when the ANC was developing the constitutional framework that would guide the transition negotiations — meant that she was directly involved in the political work that produced this outcome. The formal commitment to non-sexism in the 1988 Guidelines became the foundation for the post-apartheid Constitution's strong gender equality provisions and for the ANC's subsequent adoption of gender quotas for its leadership structures.
These institutional commitments have been imperfectly realised — the post-apartheid South Africa's high rates of gender-based violence, its persistent gender pay gaps, and the structural conditions that continue to subordinate women's opportunities to men's are evidence of how far the constitutional commitments remain from substantive equality. But the formal framework that makes those commitments possible — the constitutional provisions, the legislative structures, the Women's League organisations that continue to advocate for their implementation — was built partly through the sustained advocacy that Shope and her Women's League colleagues conducted through the exile years.
Return, the NEC, and the Parliamentary Career
Shope returned to South Africa in 1990, after more than two decades in exile, to a political environment that had been transformed by the internal resistance of the UDF years and by the international pressure that the anti-apartheid movement had built. She was elected to the ANC's National Executive Committee at the organisation's first post-unbanning conference — a formal institutional recognition of the work she had done in exile and of her standing within the ANC's leadership structures.
Her subsequent parliamentary career after 1994 brought her formal representation in the democratic South Africa that the liberation movement had helped to create — a recognition that her decades of work warranted, and that arrived at an age when she had already given most of what she had to give to the cause. She remained active in ANC structures and in the Women's League's work for several years after the transition, contributing the authority of her experience and the perspective of someone who had maintained the Women's League's commitments through the most difficult years of its exile existence.
Legacy
Gertrude Shope's legacy is partly the legacy of the Women's League's exile period — the decades of organisational work in difficult conditions that maintained the League's existence and developed its political programme in ways that shaped the post-apartheid commitments to gender equality. It is also the legacy of the sustained advocacy within the ANC's male-dominated exile structures that produced the formal commitment to non-sexism that the Constitutional Guidelines of 1988 and the post-apartheid Constitution embodied.
She died in 2019 at ninety-four, having outlived the liberation struggle by a quarter century and having lived to see both the formal constitutional commitments to gender equality that her work had helped produce and the persistent gap between those commitments and their full realisation. The gap is the unfinished business of her life's work, and closing it is the most appropriate tribute to what she spent those nine decades doing.