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Identities: Gender, Ethnicity, Race, Displacement - 'Progress' in Zimbabwe Conference
Amanda Atwood, Kubatana.net
November 08, 2010

'Progress' in Zimbabwe Conference index page

Speaker: Josephine Nhongo-Simbanegavi
Discussants: Joy Chadya, Blair Rutherford
Key Participants: Amanda Hammar, Sabelo Ndlovu, Pathisa Nyathi

Josephine Nhongo-Simbanegavi led off the discussions by presenting her paper, which provided a historical overview of state configurations of gender, race and identity in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe. She argued that the historical perspective was important, and that an examination of gender and racial identities in Rhodesia provided a valuable starting point.

In Rhodesia, race and gender were commonalities. Both white and black women were subordinated, she argued, but white women were subordinated as part of the dominate race, and also in comparison with black women, white women were more able to exercise power within households.

Lavish subsidies and domestic help give women more status even as a subordinate gender, Nhongo-Simbanegavi argued, whereas black women were the lowest, outer layer of society and were the most exploited. Inequalities between races were much wider than those between genders. The advantages of whiteness were greater than disadvantages of being a woman, and so, Nhongo-Simbanegavi argued, white women were more loyal to race than to gender. They identified themselves as white first and women secondly, and thus found it more important to keep the white race in power than to seek solidarity with women across racial divide.

Black women, according to Nhongo-Simbanegavi, were the hardest by the abuses of the Smith regime, and were the least equipped to confront it. By the liberation war period, tensions between black men and black women suggested a gender revolution could be underway. African women had no state protection and no husbands' backs to hide behind. They joined armies expecting them to be transformative - but realised the liberation organisations functioned like states in the making. Men had clout similar to that enjoyed by European men in white household in Rhodesia. Women who joined the army thus instead experienced increased dependence on men's good will - and little agency of their own as women. Women did not achieve the gains they thought they might from the liberation struggle.

In her presentation, Joy Chadya described black women as "double subordinate" in both the state and in the home - as black first, and women secondly. She said there was an absence of sisterhood across black and white women.

Blair Rutherford argued that whilst Nhongo-Simbanegavi looked at regime preservation, identity is also important for political actors. He argued that a better way to frame the argument would include an examination of hegemony - how a state's versions of progress become the common sense of the ruled. Rutherford said that hegemony isn't simply what the state says goes, it gets entangled with local attempts by the ruling party to decide who belongs and who doesn't. Who's included and who's not - race, gender, citizenship, access to resources, land, political representation. Rutherford also argued for an inclusion of reflexivity in Nhongo-Simbanegavi's paper, that is an examination of what different calls for progress are shaped by particular audiences.

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