womanistthots

Signs of unease in South Sudan

2012-02-04T15:02:00.003+03:00

And its precious oil resource is at the heart of it. There was a vivid expression of this in the sight of Southern Sudanese lined up along the streets of Juba town early this week to welcome President Salva Kiir Mayardit upon his return from the AU summit in Addis Ababa. Significantly, this was the first summit Kiir attended as representative head of state of the newly independent country, and therefore the first at which he had the opportunity to present in a speech to his contemporaries, the position of South Sudan, now a sovereign state, on a number of issues. Arguably the most significant of these is the question of oil wealth sharing and the current crisis facing Sudan and South Sudan. His speech reiterated South Sudan’s desire to avoid war at all costs, touching on the principle of ‘peaceful coexistence’ and the need for ‘reasonable and fair commercial engagement’ between the two countries. But this desire is probably only ostensible, if public displays (of anything) can reliably be used as a yardstick. Back on the streets, quite aside from the obvious message that those in charge appeared to be putting across by actively blocking off a major road and holding up most traffic into town for up to six hours, it was nonetheless the sheer, unmitigated display of power and military presence when the president finally arrived and was escorted from the airport that quite stirred. The sight of tens upon tens of heavy 4x4s (the standard means for most South Sudanese elites) and military vehicles mounted with heavy machine guns, seemed almost like a declaration of war. Or a declaration against any notion that one might have regarding South Sudan’s willingness to remain docile on a question over which it remained in conflict for more than two decades. To insiders, the provocation made by Sudan cannot be ignored, and this show of ‘solidarity’ with the president on the stand he had adopted at the collapsed Addis talks – that the country’s wealth, borders and security would be protected as all costs – was necessary. Jubilant citizens carried banners announcing that “South Sudan is not a province of Sudan”, and “South Sudan’s oil belongs to its people!” These tended to evoke sympathy: it is not this country’s doing that Khartoum brazenly continues to edge back on its obligations under the oil-sharing agreement. Neither does it help that most of the oil infrastructure lies on the territory of Sudan. South Sudan has faulted Sudan’s unilateral decision to enact a bill to levy a fee of $32.2 dollars per barrel of oil that passes through their territory, accusing it of diverting and confiscating the oil by force while negotiations were taking place to determine a fair fee. South Sudan considers this a violation of their sovereignty, and has taken the decision to cease oil production indefinitely. Despite the governments assurances to the contrary, this is a move which if let to stand, is bound to hurt both countries severely, and almost certainly open up South Sudan, already feeling the weight of a growing humanitarian crisis due to violence in Jonglei state, to the vagaries of foreign aid dependence. South Sudan’s oil, that which Alex de Waal has termed as its doomsday machine, continues to bind this country’s historical trajectory inextricably to a story told through perpetual cycles of war.

Quote

2011-12-07T17:01:00.001+03:00

"Books reveal your true self, guide you to what you will become, and illuminate your world just like the sun lights your day. There are two truths in this world, the first is God which is a permanent truth, and the second; the world, is temporary. We came to this life to read the second truth in order to understand the first, and those who do not know are the ones who do not read."

- Khalil Ashour-

Egyptians shall not be cheated out of their revolution

2011-11-22T10:40:00.009+03:00

I visited Cairo a couple of weeks ago. To those who enquired, my impression of the Revolutionary Tahrir Square was that I thought it felt too sanitised. I could not explain it beyond this English word that refers, among other meanings, to the act of ‘making something more acceptable by removing unpleasant or offensive features from it’. In that beautiful large space, at the time laid bare, manicured and too tidy, something seemed absent. I could not help feeling that the masses crawling around it in the evening traffic and on foot should instead have been surging into it. Some of my companions walked into the empty square and made soundless protest gestures, much to the amusement of the motorists and pedestrians, some of whom I could have sworn looked on almost longingly. As if they knew that time was running out within which to reclaim and immortalize this historic space that the post-Mubarak military regime sought to erase from their consciousness. Well, Egypt has again imploded, with violent protests taking place in Tahrir Square over the past few days. The people are demanding postponement of legislative elections which they are certain will be a sham amidst the violence and negotiations. They have rejected the façade of a military-led transition to civilian rule, and are angry at the slow pace at which reforms have been conducted, if at all. The people are aware of Egypt’s geo-political significance in the region, and are suspicious and resistant to external intervention on their behalf. The Military Council’s ostensible resignation left the people unperturbed; they want an end to military dictatorship. Period. Protestors have been killed in the clashes, but Egyptians will not accept anything less, nor should they. My other impression of Cairo, of a great city drowning in abject poverty drives me to hope that this time victory shall truly be of the people, who no doubt recall a time when visitors left only with the memory of its architectural splendor.

Wangari Maathai embodied the Doable

2011-10-02T12:57:00.004+03:00

Deeply moved by her passing, I have been searching for the right words with which to eulogise Prof. Wangari Maathai. I realise now that part of my inertia came from that place in all of us that in seeking greatness, or great ways to express things, also constantly settles for the shortest, loudest, most effective, ‘right’ way to do so. We seek greatness not in the depths of the more seemingly mundane acts of everyday life, depths that are often not always visible to us, and certainly not to public scrutiny. We are conditioned to find greatness in the most vocally explained, justified and visible areas of our public selves. We have eschewed the private and the silenced, and with it any critical self-reflexivity and introspection that accompanies a slow, honest, conversation with oneself. We scorn grace and meditative states of being, the only spaces really where ego does not thrive and cannot survive; the only spaces within ourselves where we are able to ask the difficult questions, no matter that the answers rarely appear immediately. That existential space of lack – lack of immediate solutions to our livelihood requirements, intellectual cravings, spiritual contentment, material needs and wants – is paradoxically also the space in which the human being is most connected to the self, to nature, and to the Earth. It is the level of acceptance at which one realises that we are not constantly in control of that which provides for our wants and needs. It is the point at which one may acknowledge, however remotely, the presence of a greater force than the self, a force that is always at work to help us achieve our perfect lives. I think that Wangari Maathai’s greatness lies in her having recognised and acknowledged the existence of this space very early in her life, and occupied it with an amazing grace that shone through for all those that could, to see. She was an icon in many ways, and to me, shall remain a living force and symbolic representation of the notion that ‘everything we love can be saved’. She taught us to live in ways that sanctify and honour the simplest and most basic part of our being, that part of us which notices and acknowledges Nature and the natural in the everyday. This part is accessible to every human being regardless.

In memory of Biko

2011-09-12T21:46:00.015+03:00

Thirty four years to this day Bantu Steve Biko’s life was brutally snatched by apartheid’s dark forces. In 31 full years this proud African had ingrained an indelible legacy through the founding of a black student organisation and created a national ‘black consciousness’ movement whose aim was to combat racism and the South African apartheid government. That the white racist supremacist government invested so much brutal force and resource in subverting the actions of one man, the generation and movement behind him spoke to the powerful truth of his claims. He was banned in 1973, a ruling that prohibited him from speaking in public, writing for publication and from any travel. Yet even then, Biko’s thought and message, particularly in relation to the necessary conscientization and emancipation of black people could not be extinguished.

It is difficult to reconcile feminism with nationalist liberation discourses; black feminist thought with patriarchal, heteronormative notions of race and class resistance; feminism with the black consciousness movement. In the eyes of black females, sexism and misogyny overshadowed progressive political teachings on black liberation. The one often stifled and silenced the voice of the other, and feminism struggled to retain its voice through critical theorizations of these schisms, albeit in ways that seemed ready to sever the bonds rather than rescue them. Looking for rapprochement between Biko’s black consciousness and black feminism may thus entail a temporary rejection of feminism’s seeming irreconcilability to totalizing discourses of a distinctly classed and racialised being, and necessitate the re-reading of black liberation discourses from the point of view of African humanism, which draws closer to ideas espoused in African womanist thought.

For Biko spoke to more than just the black man when he rejected the notion of magnanimity as a gateway to power, urging acceptance of the fact that no group, however benevolent, can ever hand power to the vanquished on a plate. He summed it up thus: ‘the system concedes nothing without demand, for it formulates its very method of operation on the basis that the ignorant will learn to know, the child will grow into an adult and therefore demands will begin to be made. It gears itself to resist demands in whatever way it sees fit.’ This realisation, that the power to demand those things that we deem necessary to exist as free and complete human beings belongs to each one of us is one of the most powerful notions upon which black feminism and womanism in particular gained force; through which they carved their way out of a predominantly racist white supremacist discourse, and began to theorise subalternity and difference.

I have wishfully argued this point in relation to another revolutionary African nationalist, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Patrice Lumumba: nationalist leaders in many African countries in their struggles for independence were more inclined to give voice to issues deemed at the time to be crucial for unity and state formation, among which the liberation of women was rarely a priority. The language and articulation of these issues often betrayed a startling androcentrism. Yet there are signs that his thinking might have evolved: Steve Biko – husband, father, lover, comrade, friend – might have re-visited some of his earlier writings in gendered response to the current urgency to recognise women’s role alongside men in struggles for social justice in South Africa and across the continent. The current resurgence of interest in his works may also create a critical climate where his writings and life might be reassessed from a feminist standpoint.

In death as in life, the potency of Biko's thought remains as much a source of anxiety to those that resist change as it inspires those that long for equality and freedom.

Be Drunk

2011-08-22T17:14:00.005+03:00

One should always be drunk.
That’s all there is to it; its the only way.
Not to feel the horrible burden of Time
That breaks your back and bends you to the earth,
You should be continually drunk.

Drunk with what?

With passion, with anger, with outrage or with justice, as you please.
But get drunk.

And if sometimes you should happen to awake,
On the stairs of a palace, on the green grass of a ditch,
in the dreary solitude of your own room,

and find your drunkenness is ebbing or has vanished,

Ask the wind and the wave, ask star, bird, or clock, ask everything that

flies, everything that moans, everything that flows, everything that sings,
everything that speaks,

Ask them the time; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird and the

clock will all reply:

“It is Time to get drunk! If you are not to be the martyred slaves of Time,

be drunk, be perpetually drunk!
With passion, with anger, with outrage or with justice, as you please”.

Sylvia Tamale’s adaptation of the poem ‘Be Drunk’ by Charles Baudelaire

Africa badly needs a new intellectual radicalism

2011-08-02T18:24:00.002+03:00

A small but critical mass of intellectuals in Africa and the African Diaspora are slowly re-submitting to the reality of the need for the kind of philosophical radicalism that pierced the colonial, imperialist logic and delivered political independence for many during the sixties. The urgency of cultural and economic discontent in present day Africa demands complete mental reinsertion into the destructive political and economic psyche out of which we are interpellated. We have allowed distance to settle between critical thought around the compelled state of majority of our lives and the optimism of a freely imagined and experienced state of being. We have ensured that for us, the ‘urgency of now’ has taken the form purely of economic greed, couched as need. We have allowed selfishness to masquerade as individuality; substituted deep introspection into one’s living conditions in relation to others (which might beget a sense of shared humanity), for a reductive individualism whose corrupt moral basis each day produces self-centred cynical individuals. We are in this cynical form reproduced through our bankrupt economies, media, universities, social circles and institutions of worship. We are too blinded by grandiose notions of where the road is leading us to critically examine where it is we stand at present in relation to critical issues of class, of race, of sexuality, of ethnicity, of religion, of disability, of gender. More in the immediate, we have forgotten to look back to really see those that are walking a step behind us. Or wait with those that have ceased motion altogether. Those, ironically, might be the people slowed by a reflective philosophical interrogation of the road thus far travelled, those overwhelmed by the weight of all that needs to be done as we move forward. Those are the people that are everyday sacrificed for speaking out, vilified by reactionary media, political parties, intellectual spaces and by very compliant societies. Africa badly needs a new radicalism. The great Western intellectual, existential hegemonic traditions we so admire are slowly giving way to Eastern hegemonic ones as the global order shifts. In a continent that still knows so little about its own great traditions, this transition can only push it further away from itself. Those that speak of a yet unexplored great African philosophical tradition are ordinarily humiliated into abandoning what is conservatively considered to be naive utopia, for, it is argued, ‘which aspect of our lives remains undiluted or unaltered’ in the wake of globalisation everything? Yet those Africans that have something to offer in the direction of a liberating consciousness must remain unperturbed, and reclaim a state of being in which our collective humanity actually matters.

Remembering Tajudeen: ‘Taking Pan-Africanism to the People’

2011-05-25T12:11:00.005+03:00

For me and countless others, Africa Liberation Day will always compel reflection on the legacy of a great African, Dr. Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, who joined his ancestors on this day two years ago. In one of his famous postcards Tajudeen wrote:

“It is now widely recognized that Pan-Africanism needs to leave the confines of conferences and executive mansions of our leaders and become part and parcel of all our lives, building from below upwards...the heads of state want a union of states, while what we want is a union of peoples. If people are at the centre of the agenda many of the contradictions and anxieties the leaders are obsessed with can be confronted together instead of dealing with them individually.”

I am reminded of the ‘revolutionary moments’ in Tunisia and Egypt. Unlike in the past when the party spoke for the people, and the leaders took over the party and eventually stopped speaking for the people, this time the people, full of mistrust and anger, decided to speak for themselves. They organised themselves into groups, and formed networks with similar interests: women, youth, traders, lawyers, doctors and labourers collectively decided enough was enough. They were able to articulate amongst themselves a transformative agenda and validate their search for human dignity. This should not have come as a surprise – they had been on this path for a long time, but the leadership, too deeply steeped in a system that values corporations more than it does human beings, had no way of anticipating the powerful motion that was changing the histories of these countries. It was a force built on a deep self-awareness and consciousness of where the people stand under the current crisis of capitalism, a crisis that actually requires us to lose our humanity. It was a force wonderfully unmarked by the limitations of class, age, race, gender, sexuality or ethnicity. In other words, it was the sort of force that holds the promise of a ‘more perfect union’ between Africans. Tajudeen often (romantically) evoked the image of market women in East and West Africa freely selling their wares across borders on a daily basis. His own mother, he always reminded us, was also a market woman. He would jokingly give this as an example of real Pan-Africanism, although he was always serious when he questioned why visitors from the West had an easier time passing through African borders than Africans themselves had visiting other African countries! These attitudes of repression and alienation we express against one another are the same ones that cultivate hatred, bigotry and violence. Perhaps on this Africa Day we ought to reflect on the forms of power that are turning us against one another when it is a militarised political and bankrupt economic system that we should be resisting.

Freedom

2011-03-03T15:13:00.003+03:00

I have always been drawn to the liberal ideal of freedom. I prize freedom above most things in my daily existence, but am confronted each day by the inherently contradictory societal norms from which this notion seeks to emerge. My considered thinking here stems from an entirely existential base. The cost of foregoing freedom is extremely high, and the price of gaining it even higher. Freedom, that notion that entails being able to do what one wants without anyone circumscribing this ability is so encumbered by the caveats to which life compels our choices as to become vacuous, even meaningless at the worst of times. In a political environment in which those that lack voice are nonetheless told that they can express themselves freely, the resultant force or reaction is invariably violent or resistant – freedom without real voice contradicts and attacks itself. In societies where the structural injustice of economic inequality is minimised in favour of a hard work/effort/merit mantra, the apportioned rights to freedom inevitably breeds a class unto itself that is distinct from the institutions that should define rights and duties, and influence life’s opportunities. This is the class that wields real economic and political power, and to which the (un)natural order confers or transfers indeterminate control over the freedoms of those at the receiving end of unjustly hierarchical societies. This lack of space to express oneself is held in place by the powerful institution of Patriarchy, by poverty-inducing economic policies, and bankrupt political dispensations which falsely claim the democratic ability to guarantee freedom. The notion of freedom is in addition seemingly so contradictory to another notion to which I apply myself wholeheartedly – of love. While freedom implies an unfettered, unconditional and unconditioned expression of love, love of itself ostensibly demands a selflessness and openness that eats at the heart of what freedom should entail. The sober expression of one seems to qualify almost entirely the meaning and ability to achieve the other. The journey though which one experiences freedom at its fullest is slow, at times painful, at other times liberating; its major contradiction being that it is so contingent upon resolving such numerous tensions as to make it almost entirely doctrinaire.

Are the North African revolutions too distant?

2011-02-14T13:28:00.018+03:00

A comment in the Mail & Guardian (February 4-10) asked whether it was “too much to hope that Africans choose to treat the Egyptian and Tunisian protests, with all their peril and potential, as our own?” The riots that began in Tunisia in mid-December 2010 spread across North Africa and parts of the Arab peninsula, touching Algiers, Northern Sudan, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Bahrain. It finally, decisively, settled in Egypt. Even though the real struggle to overturn the old order in these countries is only just beginning, the drawn-out and disgraceful fall of Hosni Mubarak and Zine el Abidine Ben Ali surprised only those that did not believe in the sheer will and power of the masses to displace, to destabilise, to demobilise, and to dramatize oppression where it exists. The Tunisian revolution, and Mubarak’s fall in particular, has excited elitist geo-political propaganda seeking to regenerate old Islamist fundamentalist fears. These reservations are not altogether unfounded. The Muslim Brotherhood has in the past repressed workers unions, and stands as a threat to the liberties of all secularists and in particular, women. These unsavoury possibilities should, however, not stand in the way of sober politics that would seek to restore justice and prosperity on the side of the people. If the North African and part-Arab peninsula revolutions do not alter mindsets attuned to equating Arabism and political Islam to terrorism, then nothing will. A people that have for years been portrayed as anti-democratic have given fresh meaning to the idea, demonstrating that the desire for Freedom, and not a penchant for violence, has been a core driving force behind Islamic discontent. Ironically, both the repressive Arab states and Islamist fundamentalists have shared a similar logic regarding their powers to mobilize the masses, capitalising on this discontent in pursuit of their own interests. These massive uprisings of the people thus shook the ground beneath both of these entities. For Sub-Saharan Africa, whose joyous reactions to the revolutions have been deliberately muted in the media by more ‘strategic’ voices in the West, these events can and should mark a shift in relations and attitudes. An illusion of separateness permeates Pan-African ideology – the illusion of a difference in cultures, temperament, interests, goals and most importantly, history between countries of the North and South of the Sahara. It has been part of a neo-colonial arrangement that presses upon people the strange idea of skin colour as a determinant of race, class and ethnicity. It is an arrangement that has irreparably divided and cost thousands of lives for decades in countries like the Sudan. The classes that benefit from this sort of confusion are similar across the continent, the same classes to which those that are being toppled out of power belonged. All of Africa today is strengthened by the actions in the North and is coalesced around the truth that the issues that fuelled those revolutions – poverty, unemployment, police and state brutality, corruption – are the same deep-seated crimes against which most progressive Africans are up in arms at present. Even as we own and celebrate these brave acts of defiance, let us not forget its economic and political roots: the desperate anger at a system that unwittingly martyred one young man in Tunisia, and changed the world.

Lumumba's ideal and the symbolism of his life

2011-02-10T18:47:00.002+03:00

Quote

2010-12-01T18:11:00.004+03:00

"...Surely the earth can be saved by all the people who insist on love."

- Alice Walker -

These statements insult a good number of us

2010-11-30T13:10:00.004+03:00

I share the disappointment of many who do not see the humour in these statements attributed to Kenya’s Prime Minister. The man must be congratulating himself for his political smarts, aimed partly, as a friend of mine observes, at conning the conservative vote. I take particular issue with his not so subtle appropriation of women’s sexuality as being purely for reproduction. His reduction of homosexuality to a sex ratio is also quite meaningless. For me and others that are concerned about the ways in which society structures sexual violence around political, social and economic forces, the statistical discovery of a nearly 1:1 male to female ration in the recent census is analytical deadwood in this regard. I mean, so what? Does he mean to say that if there were fewer men in the country women would be proportionately less inclined to intimate partner violence? Does he mean to say that a proportionate distribution of numbers among the sexes disinclines or deters sexual, violent offenders, or erases the need for instituting state protective measures (legal, administrative and otherwise) to deter violence against women – implying one gender as the protector/provider/overseer of women’s well being, including their sexual and reproductive choices? In his highly sexualized binary logic, he seems to imply that gay men have therefore the least claim to protection. He obviously thinks of masculinity as the immutable force underlining all choices regarding sexuality. His heteronormative assumptions equating political, cultural, economic and social relations to a male vs. female, gay vs. straight self-correcting binary expose that fact that he believes that resolving sexual violence and hate crime is a purely social/societal function and not any business of politics or the state. The PM is a powerful figure in the nation’s cultural imagination, and his voluntary functioning (on the negative) as a mouthpiece of the ideological state apparatus, and reproduction of these dangerous stereotypes must be challenged by all those who value liberty and freedom. We might think that he takes aim only at homosexuals in society, and even laugh along with him, but quite soon ‘we’ too shall be the last ‘other’ for whom none shall be left to speak.

Who witnesses: who’s culpable?

2010-11-23T12:36:00.001+03:00

Early in November a 15 year old primary school girl was gang raped in a Johannesburg primary school compound by three 14 – 16 year old boys from her own school, who also filmed the act and later claimed that the ‘sex’ was consensual. The wider school community (some fellow students and teachers), and the justice system seemed to agree. The case was at first thrown out of court on grounds of ‘insufficient evidence’, and later recalled, citing culpability of all four ‘actors’ involved. My incredulity at both these judgements is accompanied by a simple, nagging question: was the rape of this young girl deliberately enabled? These young men, by filming the act, obviously intended for (the) wide viewership and attention it drew. It was not intended as an anonymous inconspicuous act. In fact the most disturbing fact about this crime is its eerie resonance with the idea of gang rape, as with wartime rape, both of which are firmly grounded upon the need for ‘witnessing’. The completeness of the act is not in its perpetration, but in the accompanying power that derives not just from the immediate nod of fellow perpetrators, but by its enforced consumption by a wider readership, listenership and viewership, all of which these three young men managed to achieve through this apparently playful recording of the girl’s ordeal. Media Monitoring Africa has condemned here the callous coverage of this incident carried across a number of media outlets, print and visual, and stressed the particular carelessness of one media house that repeatedly aired ‘interviews’ with the victim soon after her rape ordeal, rightly pointing out the risk of repeatedly traumatising her. What, however, they fail to highlight is the complicity of the media in the pervasiveness and perpetration of sexism and sexual violence in South African society today. It is a complex issue, which on the one hand demands foregrounding – as a security issue, as a health issue, as a citizenship issue, and one might add, a moral issue. On the other hand it foregrounds the double-pronged, delicate question of witnessing – who can subjectively own, or earn the right to witness and therefore speak on behalf of victims of rape? Who in a society that is powered top-down by a patriarchal, sexist, heteronormative culture retains the right (of office, of position, of location) to speak for those members of society most vulnerable to rape? Who indeed, even with all the progressive legislation, a functioning justice system, and a police force now fashioned as a ‘service’, regains the honest right to speak and act on behalf of the next victim? It is not that I do not think that society should, and is expressing its concern in ways that are visible to all who care about the idea of human rights and the carriage of justice. It is rather that I do not see how state and (civil) society can continue to claim fulfilling this duty while at the same time presuming, without any meaningful engagement with the facts, each other’s awareness of the other’s culpability. The media should be trying the state and its organs for this act, not the three juveniles, and certainly not the victim.

We Are Stronger Through Our Diversity, And In Spite of Our Imperfections

2010-10-26T18:13:00.002+03:00

I found myself involuntarily reflecting on a conversation that resulted in the grinding accusation (of duplicitousness) aimed at the chosen lifestyles of women who self-identify as feminists. I thought this lumping generalization simply offensive. For feminists, as with anyone that willfully chooses to politicize their identity, the scrutiny often begins from an impossibly purist calibration that henceforth inflects upon one the fearsome burden of living up to norms manufactured within the very structures from which one is interpellated, and from which one seeks to disentangle. ‘Feminism’ is not some finishing school that generates ‘perfect’ women or a conveyor belt that churns out finished products. Rather, we as differently subjugated women, as activists, immerse ourselves in different strands of feminisms, and it is these diverse streams that we seek to refine and sharpen in the process of formulating a deeper understanding of the oppression of women entrenched in social, political, cultural and economic structures, processes and institutions. It is then the apportioned, yet inter-connected and perpetual attempts at engaging with this unjustness as relates to women (and men), and not merely the mechanisms through which we seek this understanding (necessarily predicated upon a way of life), that grounds feminism as an ongoing, dynamic, and self-regenerating theoretical process through which those that self-identify as such are able to extend their desire towards achieving a less imperfect existence for themselves and for those for whom they claim to speak. So whether Radical, Eco, Liberal, Queer, Socialist, Marxist, Cultural, Chicana, African, Third World or Womanist, feminists diversely self-identify as such based by necessity on a discomfort with our existential perceptions and locations in relation to laid down orthodoxies, which we seek to re-present and renegotiate through alternative prisms. That we are enabled to retrench the givens, and feed alternative ways of knowing oppression into the wider cosmic of theories that order our lives, is what unites us under Feminism, and not any claim to a higher moral composition.

Quote

2010-09-30T11:28:00.003+03:00

“What happens to revolutionaries when they get into power? They have stayed so long in power that they have all forgotten their previous jobs, values and visions. From heralding “fundamental change” they have become apostles of “no change”. They have become reactionaries, tired revolutionaries exhausting the country they claim they have liberated. The challenge now facing Ugandans is similar to what is facing Zimbabweans, Ethiopians, Eritreans and other post-liberation societies: how to liberate themselves from their liberators. The liberators have become establishment reactionaries blocking future changes. They are no longer changing the system because they are the system. The burden of change is now squarely on the shoulders of another generation. They are no longer part of the solution but very central to the problem...They cannot remember not being in power and cannot contemplate not being in power, whatever the citizens may think”.
- Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem (1961-2009)

1325 - Ten Years and Counting

2010-09-10T14:19:00.004+03:00

You can support this cause here.

Discount the myth of every 'Muslim as Terrorist'

2010-08-17T13:11:00.012+03:00

Today in Eastern Africa and the Horn, our countries are not any less protected against the terrorist threat than is America, as the US and the West continue to drive their geo-political interests in the region. The Kampala bombings on the night of the World Cup finals are the latest testament to this fact. East Africa is a rapidly growing economic region, one that is becoming increasingly integrated into the global economy and the greater Indian Ocean basin. Globalization appears to be imposing congruence of securitization upon states in a manner that defies the logic behind state sovereignty. Somalia remains in a state of chaos, with the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) having very little control and presenting no real alternative to the internal radical elements that have so far maintained more widespread ideological dominance over the people. Neighbouring Sudan is at risk of separation, an outcome it is feared might re-establish proxy blocks in the region. These factors effectively mean that Islamist militants will have potential bases from which to attack other countries they perceive to be acting against their interests. Creating the impression of America as being more insecure now due to movement away from past policies that sought to mitigate the terrorist threat unilaterally is dishonest, considering the fact that few fundamental shifts (from the previous administration's) have been noted with regards to the Obama administration's state security architecture. If we continue to deny every Muslim their rights (referring in this instance to the Ground Zero mosque debate) based on a dishonestly calculated fear of their desired world dominance, then the whole world, including Muslims, will have every reason to fear, and continue to destroy one another.

A New Dawn

2010-08-06T13:50:00.003+03:00

Kenya’s two decade search for a Constitution that would uphold the sovereignty of its people has finally paid off. The real challenges, however, lie ahead as the country moves into the real (character-revealing) work of modifying institutions, dominant social traditions and orthodoxies that would hamper the process, or if we can achieve it, promote the actualisation and realisation of social and political change. This article, by Yash Ghai and Jill Cottrell Ghai, offers an all-encompassing glimpse into the unfamiliar road that the nation has yet to travel to realise in its entirety, the promise of this new dawn.

Africa Liberation Day - Remembering Tajudeen

2010-05-25T01:13:00.014+03:00

On this day 47 years ago (ALD, founded in 1958, has since 1963 been observed on 25th May) thirty one heads of newly independent African states set on course the actualization of the ideological notion of African unity, reinvention of Africa’s principle mechanisms of integration and co-operation towards greater economic, political, social, ethical, spiritual and cultural self-realization.

On this day one year ago, symbolically, Africa lost one of its shiniest jewels – Dr. Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem. In simplest terms, many remember him as a good African, and a great African. He managed both wittingly and unwittingly to demonstrate what these two dispositions meant. He articulated clearly and with conviction a vision of a continent that could be free of the illusion of an independence choked by staggering corruption and looting, violence, huge economic inequalities, political marginalization, negative, politicized ethnicity and Patriarchy.

He spoke the truth boldly to power, and infected all around him with the uncomplicated belief that something invaluable lay in the collective conscientization of Africans everywhere to re-embark on building a future that is founded upon the desirable states of equality, sovereignty, justice, unity, freedom, and most of all, dignity and pride in our being. He taught us that these ideals were not at all far-fetched or dreamy idealism.

Today, standing alongside Taju’s contemporaries, a whole generation of hopeful young Africans and Africanists pause and reflect on the significance of his life, and of the Pan-African ideal – its relevance in the present times and its contributions to date. Gramsci’s ‘pessimism of the mind’ abounds, yet so does an unrelenting optimism and enthusiasm for the possibilities that a united Africa stand for. Now more than ever, a growing consciousness of the need to entrench democracy, coupled with remarkable economic stabilization in many countries, marked reduction in new civilian conflicts over the past two decades and an increasingly bold electorate across the continent gives me confidence that Africa’s time is now.

Bringing Attention to Refugee Warehousing

2010-04-22T14:47:00.003+03:00

The continued practice of warehousing refugees, more than a decade and a half after it was first documented is disturbing. Warehousing is described here as ‘the practice of keeping refugees in protracted situations of restricted mobility, enforced idleness and dependency – their lives on indefinite hold – in violation of their basic rights under the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. Egregious cases are characterized by indefinite physical confinement in camps. Encamped or not, refugees are warehoused when they are deprived of the freedom to pursue normal lives’. Considering the fact that majority of the world’s refugees are women, young people and children, whole other dimensions must be dealt with in regards to gender dynamics and impacts on development.

Numerous researchers, including this blogger, have over the years documented the existence, nature and prevalence of refugee warehousing in both Dadaab – Kenya’s largest refugee camp – and Kakuma refugee camp in Northern Kenya. This has been amid threats, denials and outright hostility from the UNHCR and other organisations concerned with refugees in the camps. Over the years it has become extremely difficult for researchers to gain official permission to carry out empirical studies on refugee issues in, let alone access, the camps, due obviously to the threat that this poses to the integrity of those ostensibly protecting and administering to refugees.

In the face of such suppression, and outrageous treatment of refugees in both camps, the discontent and demand for rights and just treatment has received a new lease of life, in the no doubt unforeseen form of dissenting voices increasingly emanating from the refugees themselves, who through journalistic campaigns among Kakuma refugees and public petitions are speaking up and speaking out against what they rightly perceive as an abrogation of their rights and lives in ways that deny the legitimacy of their claims as individuals and groups disenfranchised by political and economic upheavals not of their own doing. It is a refreshing expression of will and agency harnessed by a wide concerned community of supporters across the continent, shifting back to those ‘for whom others have spoken’ for far too long.

The continued warehousing of refugees everywhere is wrong. In Africa in particular, it is a denial of the fact that as long as the continent remains captive of ruthless capitalism and neo-liberal interests at the expense of the seeming minority that succumb to land, mineral, water, and other resource-related and strategic conflicts sustained in the name of globalization then disproportionate sections of populations in some countries shall remain vulnerable to displacement.

It also means that as long as the UNHCR and state parties continue to pander to the above interests and draw out so-called ‘durable solutions’ to encampment, then pressure from refugees to do something is only going to become stronger. Do the voices of refugees matter? My view is that they do. To the extent that organisations such as UNHCR are expected to present as evidence of execution of their mandate a global reduction in the number of refugees in general, in developing countries that have signed up to it, they are particularly under pressure to show the concomitant benefits of democratization, which automatically encompasses refugees within borders of countries that have signed up to the refugee convention and other human rights conventions, as Kenya has. Refugees count, as should their quest to live normal lives in the face of indefinite exile.

What a great way to begin the week!

2010-03-22T15:19:00.001+03:00

"This is what change looks like".

President Barack Obama (on the Congress victory of the healthcare reform bill)

What Would Taju Have Said?

2010-03-17T10:32:00.011+03:00

I wonder what my (now spiritual) father Tajudeen Abdul Raheem would have said about the recent senseless killing of women and children in Jos in Nigeria.

He would have wondered the capacity of kin to turn against one another at a time when Africans could no longer afford to mould into the barbaric impressions that have always diluted our claims and demands toward the real oppressor(s).

He would have lamented the irony of taking bread off our own tables as he always believed so much in the centrality of African women in the ordering of communities and organising the economies of societies. A feminist himself, and friend to many feminists, he never assumed the availability of women’s labour, or automatically appropriated their reproductive roles, but rather retained a strict pragmatism towards what he witnessed and understood as the oppression of women. Tajudeen believed without a doubt that the watershed of our collective struggles depended upon the dignity with which we treated women in our society.

He would have once again lambasted the political elite in Nigeria that he had steadily criticized for decades and had grown weary of – yet never failing in the belief that they could be made to do things differently. He would have invoked their shame, theirs and the economic oligarchs who sought refuge in senseless divide and rule plundering schemes that keeps this continent permanently with begging-bowl in hand.

He certainly would have questioned the central leadership of Nigeria which seems to have taken a sabbatical along with its ailing president, testament once more that the struggling majority in Nigeria, as in Kenya, and most other African countries, were never as important as the handful that kept their countries ‘running’. Though the violence in Plateau State is an internal security issue, Nigeria as a nation is not, and Tajudeen would have once again pointed at the African Union, that organ to whose (trans)formation he was so instrumental in lobbying for, and challenged it to vocalize its support for these African people.

Finally I think Tajudeen would have called these killing in bold terms ‘negrophobia’, which is what he insisted the May 2008 killings of Africans by fellow Africans in South Africa was. He bled each time we turned on one another, was livid each time our political and economic elites pandered to imperialist forces that remained invisible to the naked eye of the masses but whose wars were played out through these same masses.

Taju longed for a “happier Africa”. His heart would break today, seeing what was happening in his home country. But always the eternal optimist, he would nonetheless have urged us to keep up the good fight, in his signature phrase to “Organise! (and) not agonize!”

The spirit of Tajudeen lives, as Prof. Horace Campbell invokes, and once again reminds us here.

Quote

2008-09-15T11:48:00.000+03:00

Men never do evil so cheerfully and completely as when they do it from religious convictions.
Pascal - Author

The Bigotry of State and Religion

2008-08-16T11:40:00.001+03:00

I am incensed by the female(!) gynecologist in Khartoum who recently informed my friend that she could not, would not administer to her the “intrusive” pap smear test because my friend was not married, and was (therefore) presumptively a virgin. My friend, a 35 year old radical feminist activist Muslim woman, whose liberal roots have allowed her to live through the marriages of younger siblings, and sanctify a higher education over the institution of marriage, which in states like Sudan confers and equally denies even the most basic of human rights to its female citizenry, may for no rational reason at all continue to wallow in poor health or God forbid, die from the now very treatable and preventable cervical cancer precisely because she is Muslim, single and female, and has in the meantime made the conscious choice to pursue a life beyond that which her state and religion imagines as legitimating women’s claims to anything.

I am incensed by a state that refuses to accede to a woman’s right to privacy. I am incensed by a citizenry that has mortgaged its humaneness for a false safety net anchored in religion, and riddled with self-righteousness. I am disgusted by a system that decides when a woman is religious, pure and worthy of preservation, or when the woman fails the test of the veil and abdicates her right to mental and bodily integrity. I am puzzled by a system that prizes misplaced notions of women’s bodily purity and integrity in virginity, while at the same time opening up these same bodies to a public scrutiny and ambush through circumcision (Northern Sudan has among the highest rates on the continent) and promiscuity, which is what the polygamy that Islam sanctions really is. I am overwhelmed by the thought that we live in a world in which the alchemy of our lives has been reduced to the whims of a few bigots that can rough up religious texts when it pleases them to reaffirm to women the fallacy that their bodies are mere chattels.

My friend shall get the necessary tests done – she is privileged with access to medical care outside of her oppressive borders. It is the plight and helplessness of the ordinary woman in Khartoum that shall have me incensed long after my friend is well. These are the women on whose behalf we must remain vigilant and speak.

Locating Arab Refugee Women

2008-04-22T11:45:00.002+03:00

Arab refugee women now find themselves awkwardly placed between two major feminisms that remain in constant conflict – conservative and secular Muslim feminism on the one hand, and Western feminism on the other. At the same time they find themselves in an uncomfortable position, inconspicuous and silenced in the former group, and cautiously embraced by the latter. This status quo can be attributed to Arab refugee women’s politicization process that is largely motivated by a barrage of Western humanitarian aid rhetoric, international media attention, strategic engagement by Western feminists and other interested groups, and subject to protection under international treaties that makes them part of a larger rights-endowed community of the world’s refugees presumed to be immune from direct political backlash; yet it is for these same reasons that they stand depoliticized, desensitized and disavowed from their original struggles as Arab women. This bifurcation lends credence to questions about whether Arab refugee women’s political identity as such becomes more significant for the women’s movement(s) than their identity merely as Arab women. Arab refugee women’s geo-political location within these two feminisms creates an important role for them in discourse exploring the possibilities of rapprochement between the two movements. Using feminist political theory and ethnography, the aim of this (eventual) paper would be to locate Arab refugee women both in Muslim and in global feminisms, extrapolating from their identity formation conditioned by life in refugee settlements; what is the relevance of Arab refugee women within this paradigm of conflict and transition; does their politicization process create for them a more objective framework for agency in Arab women’s struggles, or does it render them pariahs, too polarizing for gainful engagement alongside their counterparts? What is the impact and implication of Western feminist interest in Arab refugee women, and finally, what is the significance of Arab refugee women’s perceived engagement with both sides in deciding the cohesiveness of global women’s movement?

I reflect on these questions here.

Institutionalizing Women's Sexual Oppression & the Economics of Violent Conflict

2008-04-09T15:16:00.000+03:00

The systematic dehumanization of women and patriarchal domination over their bodies at the hands of state security forces, militia and civilian populations during violent conflict is nothing short of institutionalized sexual fascism – a radical shift in the absolute dynamics of warfare from its base ideology as a mass struggle for economic, political and social liberation on behalf of a whole collective, to a highly politicized and contextualized struggle fundamentally anchored upon the control and dominance over women’s sexuality. Situating violent conflict on women’s bodies not only endorses the androcentric, zero-sum notion of war as fought on behalf of the next group (women), but also reduces the welfare state to a machinery that legitimates, rather than dismantles, gender and class oppression. Underlying the perpetuation of physical and sexual violence on women’s bodies is the increasing perception of women as a non-benign class, threateningly representing the dominant economic classes – the fact of women’s proletariat relevance as producers and reproducers at household level only reinforces this notion. I argue here that a positive correlation exists between women’s economic empowerment and their sexual oppression, in the process interrogating the complexities and dynamics of feminist anti-war activism: does sexual fundamentalism against women find its roots in the sustained feminist diatribe against the Establishment? Do the dialectics between social welfare and economic development present any real movement towards women’s empowerment, or is it a highly sexualized trade-off for women’s fundamental human rights? To what extent do women’s experiences with sexual violence during violent conflict influence and symbolize an ideological shift towards feminized wars? Do the material conditions of women during armed conflict determine or influence ideological phenomena such as politics, religion, morality, ethics, customs and even law? And as such, what is the efficacy of the women’s movement in representing these issues to the state when seeking redress?

Redefining African Women's Political Agenda

2007-10-06T04:15:00.000+03:00

The political disenfranchisement that African women currently suffer belies the reality of millions of (African) women at that grassroots, from which female leadership has always been driven. The point is to justify the pragmatism and sensibility in gauging African women’s leadership, not from a purely institutional political point of view that is anyway deeply affected by patriarchal prejudices, but from a politicized analysis of their social and economic agency.

Colonial history suggests that African women in many countries failed to capitalize upon the political clout they held prior to occupation, or on their politicization as actors in independence struggles. The colonial establishments did not ignore African women; they did not even know they existed! Successive independence governments have upheld this gender-blindness, with little support for female candidature, little support for affirmative action & other equity-based legislation, instead co-opting women into political office, abetting disfavourable campaign environments, and employing myriad other seemingly benign exclusionary tactics. The resulting self-effacement into which female candidates are forced is used as further proof of their ‘inability’ or ‘inappropriateness’ for high political office.

Economically, the growth and prominence of micro finance is the greatest testament to women’s proactive capacities; exclusively driven from the grassroots, overwhelmingly so by women, microfinance placed poor women firmly on the round table as important (economic) actors, and even though there still exist numerous cultural and social challenges that restrict women’s control over these resources, there are communal and institutional mechanisms developing everywhere on the continent to counter this.

Women’s role as social leaders is far less recognized or acknowledged. But in Africa, a continent fraught with disaster and celebration in equal measure, women’s reproductive roles as mothers, wives, daughters, church members, group members, mediators, among others, before the act embodies in them the definition of rainmaker, literally. Though rarely remunerated, Africa women nonetheless joyously celebrate this power to influence social/cultural life in society.

African women’s political struggles have never been distinctly definitive to women, but rather merged in with those wider goals of nation-building, democracy and political stability; it had always been assumed that women would benefit politically just as much from these grand goals. In contrast, African women’s economic, social & cultural objectives have always been definitively ours – distinctly oriented towards the identified needs of women. It is thus, around these issues that a clear agenda for women’s political identity ought to be pursued. Reason being women’s activism in economic and social spheres is political activism. It is a political movement, as it goes beyond dealing with personal ethics, but also engages women’s interaction with the wider collective. It is from these grassroots bases that African women’s political agenda ought to be defined.

Religious Fundamentalisms

2007-06-19T15:25:00.001+03:00

One of the greater challenges globalization poses for any institution is the constant need to reinvent itself, find a platform upon which to remain visible and relevant. As far as religious extremism is concerned, increasingly that platform has become the sight from which women; women’s rights, women’s personal and political spaces, are targeted and denied and abused. There are those who deny the suggestion of religious fundamentalism being in one sense a revivalism, yet what really is taking place is a reinvention of the age old ‘wicked woman’ portrayal of women; there never was a breaking from the Eighteenth Century patriarchal domination of the Church, but a period from which women re-emerged a greater threat to the established ‘order’, and as far as this order is concerned, needing new ways to redeem.

That women are the most obvious targets of present day religious fundamentalism is not a question; ranging from right-wing fundamentalism within Christianity, to the amalgamation of religion and state in Islam, and fundamentalisms identified in all other major religions, including Judaism, Hinduism, Sufism, Buddhism, Mormonism and even Zoroastrianism, it is only the degree to which women’s rights have been abrogated that still gives voice to apologists within any of these religions…most still deny women the same religious privileges and authority it accords men; most impose greater ‘moral’ burdens on women than they do on men; most seek to promote unquestioning submission of wives to their husbands; most seek to deny women their reproductive freedom; most seek to deny women the full rights of self determination, dignity and self respect that they accord to men; many accept or promote the treatment of women as property or a commodity and publicly humiliate women who violate the prohibitions that apply only to women.

Rather the important question is why is it that present day religious fundamentalisms target women so wholesomely? Dialogue on the conflict between religious fundamentalism and women’s rights is often stymied by an ‘all or nothing’ approach: fundamentalists claim an absolute religious freedom, while some feminists dismiss religion entirely as being so imbued with patriarchy as to be eternally opposed to women’s rights – a stance that inclines these women towards naturalism, a world view or method that makes God, or Spirit irrelevant and unnecessary to explaining the workings of nature, human beings and society.

Religious fundamentalists correctly sense that naturalism (represented in some feminisms) is the biggest threat there is to a strong version of their faith. Where patriarchy and male domination of religion in the past shared a platform with God, ‘however we perceive of Him’, present day religious fundamentalists demand absolutely that we define Him only as they do; we are two different people looking for Him in two different places, and the room for rapprochement is now just a tiny little space.

This conflict between religious fundamentalists and feminists ignores the experiences of religious women who suffer under fundamentalism and fight to resist it, perceiving themselves to be at once religious and feminist. These more moderate of women are also the major target of religious zealots, and the first and foremost whom the women’s movement must consider in terms of developing a strategy to challenge the negative impacts on religious fundamentalism on women’s rights.

Religious fundamentalism is problematic, and nothing short of fundamentalism from the women’s movement is going to turn these people around. Sylvia Tamale urges us to always be drunk; we must get ‘drunk’, drunk in our activism, in much the same way that these religious fundamentalists are drunk in their righteousness; quite literally radicalizing (the movement’s) own engagement with religion. My bet is that the counter-offensive of millions of ‘drunk’ women is more than any self-righteous zealot wants to counter, publicly or otherwise. Whole communities must also be empowered to tackle the reasons underlying their vulnerability towards religious fundamentalism

Motherhood & Feminism

2007-05-03T11:29:00.000+03:00

Feminists have steadfastly declined to lend their voice to the struggle to protect children - at the core of this refusal is the truth that women's rights are human rights - universal, inalienable and indivisible. Thus, it goes, expecting women to continually shoulder the burden or backlash, and responsibility for child labour, child sexual abuse, child trafficking, etc.., is to ask them to put their own needs aside, to shakle them to that load of guilt from which they seek to emancipate themselves, and most significantly, to force them to compromise the complete enjoyment of their own rights, as human beings and as women, to admit to a subordinate importance of their own rights as against those of other groups in society, in essence to alienate them from their claims as women.

But is it really possible for feminism to hold on to this stance, even when real life portrays the contrary? One way to try to answer this is in the first instance to place motherhood in purely biological light, and see women solely in their birthing function, possessing the womb, bearers of new life. Children come into the world, and the women who bear them may or may not automatically connect with them. It is this fact that lends significance to motherhood - the desire and ability of a woman to bond with a child, to nurture them, watch them grow, protect them. As in any other area in life in which skill and specialization is required, motherhood seen in this sense implies that some women may be good at it, others excel in it, while others may just never get it.

For the women who decide to be good at it, motherhood can be a pure joy - just watch them at it, just read what they say about it. For the women who decide to serve in this way, their time on earth can be extremely rewarding. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., "recognize that he who is greatest among you, shall be a servant". Not all of us can be famous, not all of us have the wealth or the flamboyance to make us famous, but we can all serve, and therefore we can all be great.

There are many great women in the world, who have achieved greatness in motherhood, by serving their children, protecting them from harm, nurturing them, and thus serving the greater needs of society; providing it with disciplined, respectful, hardworking, law-abiding, morally upright, trustworthy and helpful children.

What feminism continues to do by refusing to merge women's issues with those of children is to take away from these great women, to confine them to a 'space with no name', a space in which the only people left to valorize them is our menfolk, often with qualification; and without question their children, who are at once man/woman/child, and thus not a cohesive support group in the sense that say women, are. We as feminists therefore deny ourselves the support of just the most significant group of women - women as mothers - the ones whose achievements and capabilities are safer to, and so are (more) readily acknowledged by the larger society.

This may not be the kind of recognition we ultimately seek, but it is a leverage we cannot afford to sidestep.

Quote

2007-03-19T16:30:00.000+03:00

"But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep".

Robert Frost.

Indigenous Knowledge Can Bring Change for Women

2007-03-03T16:57:00.000+03:00

Defined simply as local community knowledge, traditions and values, there’s little argument today about the potential for indigenous knowledge to achieve and sustain autonomous development for Africa across the span of human experience, including history, linguistics, art, economics, as well as technical expertise in the fields of medicine, agriculture, and natural resource conservation.

One of the biggest challenges facing the African women’s movement today is the ways in which to express herself, believably, amidst accusations of imitating Western feminism, and its own struggle to define an agenda distinct from the latter’s, to break away from the universalizing and essentialist concepts of feminism as espoused by Western European and North American feminists, and challenged concomitantly to emerge with material, knowledge, facts sufficiently concrete to convince the skeptics that African feminism possesses a basis strong enough to be identified as an powerful ideological movement in itself.

This basis could well be that which is already known, which has been empirically studied and numerously documented by feminists, African or otherwise, about the leverage that was possessed by African women in pre-colonial societies.

One such analysis is the work of Ifi Amadiume, who in “Male Daughters, Female Husbands – Gender & Politics in an African Society” celebrates powerful and self-generated struggles by African women. In it she challenges gender constructions, meticulously describing how cultural flexibility within the traditional political and social institutions of the Igbo people (Eastern Nigeria) allowed women acquire ‘masculine’ status and titles, enriched their reproductive roles with privilege and respect, and also enabled them play productive and communal roles that were traditionally the preserve of men. The book makes for extremely interesting reading, often times amusing.

A lot more has been written within the ideological context of African women’s political, social and economic ‘rise and fall’, and the result has been a piling of hard fact, myth and theory that is badly in need of sorting out. One problem with the wholesale assumption of women’s helplessness and eternal poverty is the wiping out of the (historical) fact of women’s positive participation in traditional society. The literature suggests that the rejection, subjugation and suspicion surrounding women’s struggles for empowerment today were barely discernable in the past. I therefore see one of the foremost responsibilities of African feminists as being an epistemological engagement of the available literature, a prescriptive analysis of these traditional mechanisms within current contexts of economic competition, gender subjectivities and social upheaval.

Indigenous knowledge has potential to suggest powerful development intervention particularly in the social and political spheres of women’s lives and struggles.

MacKinnon on Rape....

2007-02-01T14:08:00.000+03:00

“The point of defining rape as “violence not sex”, or “violence against women” has been to separate sexuality from gender in order to affirm sex (heterosexuality) while rejecting violence (rape). The problem remains what it has always been: telling the difference.

The convergence of sexuality with violence, long used at law to deny the reality of women’s violation, is recognized by rape survivors, with a difference: where the legal system has seen the intercourse in rape, victims see the rape in intercourse. The uncoerced context for sexual expression becomes as elusive as the physical acts come to feel indistinguishable.

Instead of asking, what is the violation of rape, what if we ask, what is the non-violation of intercourse? To tell what is wrong with rape, explain what is right about sex. If this, in turn, is difficult, the difficulty is as instructive as the difficulty men have in telling the difference when women see one.

Perhaps the wrong of rape has proven so difficult to articulate because the unquestionable starting point has been that rape is definable as distinct from intercourse, when for women it is difficult to distinguish them under conditions of male dominance”.

Mackinnon, C. (1987) Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State – Towards Feminist Jurisprudence

Not for a Five-Month Old, it Doesn't

2007-01-28T14:42:00.000+03:00

Nothing in the Sexual Offence Bill (2006) provides for the crazed sexual violation of voiceless, helpless months-old victims of rape, at least not in the way of acknowledging the futility of laws whose potential for redress have nothing whatsoever to do with the victim. I am referring to the numerous profiled cases of defilement of infants in Kenya, the most recent one a five-month old infant defiled by her father within the private confines of their home with such intensity that left her renal tract severely damaged, and her private parts in need of reconstructive surgery.

Any law that claims to defend these infants, potential victims of incest/defilement, must reach them before their attackers do, period. It is not enough that the law provides for the life sentencing of a male or female found guilty of incest towards a child under the age of 14 years – this merely rearranges the social order, either placing this child under the care of another adult male/female, or in foster care, where such a threat may be even more pronounced. It also does not do any service to the psychological development of the child – studies show child victims of sexual abuse prone to a lifetime of forgetfulness triggered by blocking out the original trauma, disrupted social/family lives, dysfunctional sexuality, and disruptive sexual attitudes and behaviour, propensity for pedophilia, violence, drug abuse, crime…list is endless. My point? Legal redress, however necessary, may in the face of youth, be too little, too late. Children need to be placed out of temptation’s way, and their own homes ought to be a refuge, not a sentence.

I don’t pretend to answer the how, yet stress that the S.O.B does not (yet should) provide for the events and circumstances within the infant’s home, surrounding their daily lives, that could potentially rob her of her safety. The role of the courts could be extended, or perfected, beyond simply making information about convicted pedophiles publicly available, but further coming up with mechanisms to disseminate this info at community, even household level. In this sense, fact is the Bill hardly makes fuss about a statistic that is repeatedly thrown in our face by the media each and every time a new case of defilement is reported – that overwhelmingly the tormentors of these little girls, and no doubt less publicly, boys, are known to them, and are charged, whether by societal or parental obligation, to protect and nurture them.

The Bill certainly does not provide for the rape trial of a five-month old baby. How, when the burden of proof still lies with the victim?? I am sure that the sight of her bandaged, shattered little body breaks even the one who dares question her role in her rape, yet what recourse is available to her when the law (however figuratively) still pits her against her attacker, who in the 'courtroom' is capable of speech and most certainly blatant lies in the wake of fear?

We cannot congratulate ourselves and pretend that this Bill protects the most vulnerable members of our society. It doesn’t even begin to contemplate the utter nightmare that might henceforth be the world of these children.

Love Me or Leave Me

2006-11-20T16:47:00.001+03:00

Jack Straw’s pronouncement about his unease with the (full) veil might be old news, but what he effectively did, literally taking the issue of veiling away from the exclusive domain of ‘women’s (empowerment) issues’, and turning it into one big messy public debate, was bring new and interesting dimensions for discourse – he did in a sense, distribute this discussion among linguists, psychologists, sociologists, feminists (one more time), politicians, religions & cultures...among the every day people on the street; made us all ask, ‘just what is this all about?’

But I’m not mad at him. Quite the contrary, I was relieved. Relieved from the onerous task of having to construct my thoughts and issues about the niqab around and within the confines of women’s domination and oppression. Relieved because it gave me permission to explore the myriad other possible ways to answer the one question I ask myself each and every time I am confronted by a completely veiled woman: What is it that makes a woman so asexual as to leave the expression of herself, her womanhood and her sexuality to a black, drab head-to-toe covering?

I have found that when one considers a woman’s free will to cover herself, then the arguments about dominant male control become submerged somewhere along the way; and when one considers the day to day tasks, work and activism that these veiled women are able to accomplish, despite the veil, and their own arguments about it protecting them from distractions and bias, then the fixation upon the veil’s subjugative qualities becomes difficult to justify; and when one considers that the debate around the veil has thus far been easy to dismiss as just ‘Western feminist rhetoric’, then it becomes necessary to find new ways to explain that thing about it that bothers us so much.

The niqab is to me about women’s choices of self expression – the world has shown a tolerance for abstract, deceitful, even absurd means of communication. Women’s oppression cannot be summed up in the way that they dress and to me, the veil’s powerful message lies in the fact that each day another young girl makes the choice to confront and communicate with her world from a completely different ground than the rest of us. It might be her way of telling the world to negotiate itself around her or go to hell. And who then, in this sense, does this veil oppress?

'Quote'

2006-10-29T21:24:00.000+03:00

Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign. Anatole France

MiGHT yet WiN THiS

2006-10-18T15:32:00.000+03:00

I’ve watched with interest the outrage, and certainly relate with dilemmas posed by media critics, children’s organizations and activists about the issue of child adoptions in Africa, in light of Madonna’s quest to adopt a Malawian baby boy.

It is a dialectical problem though, and rather than overly problematize the issue at the expense of genuinely needy children, the situation could be made to work for the children - the publicity thirsty stars could be made to work for the African child...

Adoption restrictions placed on non-UK citizens notwithstanding, there is nothing in the current anti-trafficking laws to actually stop or illegalize the adoption. And in the absence of concrete legal provisions it is fairly complex to discern ‘genuine’ parties from potential and/or active child traffickers.

Again I must add that the noisemaking NGOs are not exactly innocent - some of them are the reason Madonna/Jolie have such unchecked access to African children in the first place!

Anyway;

i. The celebrities could be held to accountability by showing previous records of social action (charities, donations, activism) and genuine non-media centric interest in the plight of African children; in short a solid track record of interest in poverty alleviation on the continent. Under this criterion, Madonna would (arguably) qualify - as I understand from media reports she is already involved with some charities in Malawi. The exponential gains that may be made from just one hundred 'A-listers' scrambling for our children under this kind of accountability approach are worth considering.

ii. Engage local community members, particularly parents and guardians in continuous dialogue regarding their wishes about their children’s well being and future - such clarity cannot hurt, particularly in a continent ridden with uncertainties of war, famine and HIV/AIDS. I see the reaction of the boy’s father as rather drastically concocted under pressure from the interest groups. Granted that there may have been some deceit in getting him to sign the adoption papers grounded on the belief of a Christian upbringing for his boy, but is a different religion really the worst thing that can happen to a child whose father admittedly couldn’t look after him (and had given him away anyway?) And besides, Madonna’s track record - children’s books, own kids, (forget the videos!) far from depicts her as an unfit mother.

Creating an interface, engaging the community, could be educative to both potential adopters and current care-givers; such dialogue as we witness now over the fate of this one child is in my opinion unnecessary, face-saving ploys, rather than a genuine desire to solve the problem, or indeed generate standards for similar future undertakings.

iii. Lastly, looking for a conspiracy theory in every single case of adoption does not help the fight against trafficking, let alone its victims, and is almost akin with throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The reality of Africa today is that millions of homeless children defy the logic that external assistance can only best serve neo-liberal interests - these children need cheaper ARVs, they need food, they need clothes, schools and playing fields, they need role models, and most of all they need love.

Lets cut Madonna some slack, if you stay as optimistic as I am you’ll see that this journey might yet be worthwhile.

OurWorld

2006-10-17T23:00:00.000+03:00

MiGHT yet WiN THiS…

I’ve watched with interest the outrage, and can relate with the dilemmas posed by media critics, children’s organizations and activists about the issue of child adoptions in Africa, in light of Madonna’s quest to adopt a Malawian baby boy.

It is a dialectical problem though, and rather than overly problematize the issue at the expense of genuinely needy children, the situation could be made to work for the children - the publicity thirsty stars could be made to work for the African child...

Adoption restrictions placed on non-UK citizens notwithstanding, there is nothing in the current anti-trafficking laws to actually stop or illegalize such an adoption. And in the absence of concrete legal provisions it is fairly complex to discern ‘genuine’ parties from potential and/or active child traffickers.
Again I must add that the noisemaking NGOs are not exactly innocent - some of them are the reason Madonna/Jolie have such unchecked access to African children in the first place!

Anyway;

i. The celebrities could be held to accountability by showing previous records of social action (charities, donations, activism) and genuine non-media centric interest in the plight of African children; in short a solid track record of interest in poverty alleviation on the continent. Under this criterion, Madonna would (arguably) qualify - as I understand from media reports she is already involved with some charities in Malawi. The exponential gains that may be made from just one hundred 'A-listers' scrambling for our children under this kind of accountability approach are worth considering.

ii. Engage local community members, particularly parents and guardians in continuous dialogue regarding their wishes about their children’s well being and future - such clarity cannot hurt, particularly in a continent ridden with uncertainties of war, famine and HIV/AIDS. I see the reaction of the boy’s father as rather drastically concocted under pressure from the interest groups. Granted that there may have been some deceit in getting him to sign the adoption papers grounded on the belief of a Christian upbringing for his boy, but is a different religion really the worst thing that can happen to a child whose father admittedly couldn’t look after him (and had given him away anyway)? And besides, Madonna’s track record - children’s books, own kids, (forget the videos!) far from depicts her as an unfit mother.

Creating an interface, engaging the community, should be educative to both potential adopters and current care-givers; such dialogue as we witness now over the fate of this one child is in my opinion unnecessary, and borne of ignorance and guilt, rather than a genuine desire to solve the problem, or indeed generate standards for similar future undertakings.

iii. Lastly, finding a conspiracy theory in every single case of adoption does not help the fight against trafficking, let alone its victims, and is almost akin with throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The reality of Africa today is that millions of homeless children defy the logic that external assistance can only best serve neo-liberal interests - these children need cheaper ARVs, they need food, they need clothes, schools and playing fields, they need role models, and most of all they need love.
Lets cut Madonna some slack, if you stay as optimistic as I am you’ll see that this journey might yet be worthwhile.

EnterMyWorld

2006-10-13T21:28:00.001+03:00

This page is dedicated to the memory of Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, who's own journey brought me closer to understanding the phenomenal promise that the womanist spirit holds for the African continent.

Lyn