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Political
Power: The Challenges of Sexuality, Patriarchy and Globalization
in Africa
Patricia
McFadden
February
2001
http://www.wworld.org/programs/regions/africa/patricia_mcfadden2.htm
Paper delivered
at a seminar hosted by the Mauritius Women's Movement (MLF) and
the Workers Education Association (LPT), Port Louis, Mauritius,
February 2001.
Let me share
with you some of the reasons why I think this moment—this time we
are living in—is special, because these ponderings provide the context
of my reflections on how power intersects with the notions of sexuality,
patriarchy and globalization—the subject of our conversation this
evening.
The specialness
of this moment lies in its being the culmination of many long and
difficult struggles, especially within Southern Africa, for dignity
and peace. Each and every one of us is the custodian of a sacred
memory, drawn from the long battle to free ourselves from colonization,
racism, bigotry, backward feudal practices and conventions as well
as the so-called 'civilizing' agendas of capitalist modernity as
they have unfolded, often with great pain and heart rendering loss,
these past five hundred years. This moment brings together all the
energies and desires that we have whispered quietly or shouted out
in great anger across the landscapes of this place we call home.
Many times we have found ourselves at the place of great mourning—as
did those enslaved foreparents who threw themselves off the great
heights of the mountain rather than return to the indignity and
denigration of enslavement—a choice they had to make given their
knowledge of the monster that pursued them to that end; and it is
at those times of great challenge that we have to step back, take
a deep breadth and pause in order to be able to review the past
so that we might understand the present and through that craft a
new and different future. And this moment gives us the opportunity
to do exactly that.
Most significantly
and in a very intimate way, this is a moment which is finally of
our own making; a time that has come out of the imperative to be
Africans in our own ways; an opportunity which we have crafted and
nurtured through an unfailing belief and conviction in our ability
to change our worlds/our lives/our futures as women; as workers;
as citizens of our national and continental spaces and increasingly
as citizens of the world.
So this evening,
I want to lean back and reflect upon what it means for those of
us who believe in freedom to accept the challenges which patriarchal
privilege and exclusion present, and I would like to use three key
issues—the notions of the political as personal and inclusive; integrity
and personhood; and rights and citizenship—to open up the terrain
of discourse in the hope that this short sojourn will take us one
step closer to a resolution of the century old problems of injustice
and oppression in all our societies.
I will first
of all assume that this audience does not require my re-statement
of the consequences of globalisation in economic and political terms
because the evidence is clear for all of us to resist—the threats
to basic services like health, education, affordable transportation
and shelter, access to dignified and safe employment and the guarantee
of our rights as citizens without exception. Therefore, I will refer
to the notion of globalisation as an ongoing context made up of
historically recognizable forces that are once again attempting
to restructure the world in order to maintain hegemonic systems
of exploitation and privilege.
However, this
is only one side of the notion of globalisation. I think that we
need to explore another, often less recognized side of how our world
is changing or has changed—that of the emergence of international
coalitions and movements of resistance around the lives of women
and poor people. These are the coalitions to defend the eco-systems
and environments that have sustained our livelihoods and very ability
to exist as a species; the movements for the rights of people who
move and or are coercively moved around the globe in search of political
and economic security, fleeing religious fundamentalist persecution,
or simply exploring the immenseness of this planet. There are also
movements, almost a century old, to resist the militarization of
the world and the ever-present threat of nuclear destruction which
knows no boundaries; these are movements which have made the issue
of peace central to our understanding of what globalisation means
for all of us in a much more diverse and less defeatist way.
This is my context—to
locate some of what I think are the most pressing issues facing
us as Africans within a context of modernity that requires that
we envision a new and different future, even as we remember the
lessons and mistakes of the past.
Power and
Democracy as Historically Exclusionary Practices
Throughout
the human narrative in all but very exceptional cases, which are
rare and often romanticized, power and notions of freedom and justice
have remained deeply class based and androcentric, reflective of
the opinions and interests of ruling class men, regardless of their
colour or location in spatial terms. And even when such systems
aspired to be inclusive and socially expansive, they remained essentially
exclusionary and patronizing of those who had been constructed as
Other in relation to power as the most critical resource in that
society. Across our world we struggled for what appeared to be collective
visions of freedom and justice, and while it is critical to acknowledge
the opportunities that nationalist liberation struggles and anti-colonial
resistance provided to those groups in our societies which had been
up till then excluded from the public, for example women, we must
also critically evaluate the implications of nationalism as an ideology
which is fundamentally sexist and exclusionary of women, particularly
during the neo-colonial period. However, the very notion of the
public space emerges as an expression of the development and existence
of surplus pegged largely on the unpaid labour of women in the home
and the unremunerated labour of enslaved communities in the wider
society.
It is within
this milieu of exchange that new relationships of property and power
rise which are institutionalized in new structures that over time
become known as the public—a space and a concept which reflects
the new relations of production and civic interaction. It is here
that the state and the key institutions of the society are located
and dominated by men as a gender and as the owners of wealth—both
material and social. Juxtaposed to the public space where men are
'free' to roam, always of course in relation to their status, the
notion of the private arises out of the definition of women as the
private property of males, located in male headed households. Even
to date, women cannot form a family on their own, as a legal entity
in all our societies. They have to marry men in order to create
a legally and socially recognized unit called the family. Through
rituals and practices that have become euphemistically understood
as 'cultural' and 'traditional', women's capacities and abilities
to labour and to reproduce are institutionalized in the patriarchal
family as the private property of their fathers and husbands. It
is at this interface between human creativity and the existence
of surplus that the most crucial relationships of power and control
become embedded, especially in relation to women.
Over time, women,
like poor men and the young, became excluded from the resources
that were located in the public, and a dualistic system of rules
and regulations were formulated which have kept women largely in
the private—working long hours without remuneration for their labour—which
is one of the main reasons why women remain the poorest people in
the world, and like the slaves, women have been excluded from the
rights and civic entitlements that emerged out of the various struggles
enacted in the public. Therefore, while it is important to show
the linkages between gender and poverty across the female/male divide,
it is even more important to recognize that poor men have always
had access to the public sphere where they are able to engage in
struggles for fairness and economic and social justice, while women
have remained largely tied to the private sphere where they continue
to be treated as the slaves of men in the heterosexual family, even
in the families of those men who struggle against economic enslavement.
In all our societies
across this continent, men have colluded to keep women out of the
public sphere where rights and entitlements are located (we know
that there are no rights in the family, only privileges and benevolent
gestures and much violation, exclusion and death), and even as we
laud the struggles against colonization, we often shy away from
the acknowledgement that most black men colluded with the colonial
state in the exclusion of black women from the cities and those
sites where the possibility of becoming free was located. To date,
even after almost fifty years of independence, all African governments
have retained the vicious socio-legal and coercive practices that
exclude and suppress women and female children, which characterized
feudal African societies and were further refined by the colonial
state with the assistance of privileged African men. The present
re-institutionalisation of traditional courts and traditional statuses
in the political and legal systems of a country like South Africa
speaks most tragically to this ongoing collusion between men of
different classes and colours to exclude women from the democratic
institutions and practices we have fought so courageously to build.
The maintenance
of the public/private divide through claims of cultural authenticity
and the need to hold onto so-called 'traditions'—which we all know
are basically practices and value systems that privilege men in
the home and in the key institutions of our societies—has inhibited
the greater participation of women in the transformation of Africa
to the present day. Notions of what is political and public are
still fundamentally tied to the claim that what women know and do
is best suited to the production of use values for household consumption
and the reproduction of the species. Even in societies where women
have excelled as professionals and knowledge producers, they are
faced with a continuous backlash, often premised on fundamentalist
beliefs that so easily mobilize communities to participate in the
undemocratic exclusion of women from their rights. One has only
to look at the issue of taboos around the sexuality of women and
how these taboos are perpetuated through fundamentalist claims that
are centuries old and viciously misogynist—allowing, for example,
women to be raped and violated by claiming that women bring such
violation upon themselves through the ways in which they dress and
by the very nature of their female bodies as 'unclean' and 'sexually
dangerous.'
In all our societies
we find the blatant justification of the victimization of women
by men in key positions—within the judiciary, in organized religion,
within families, and in social and cultural organizations, which
deploy ancient patriarchal myths of exclusion and privatization
to defend impunity. By impunity I mean the deliberate, socially
sanctioned violation of rules and systems of human conduct that
are the collective possession of a society, and which have been
designated as the markers of human dignity. The notions of integrity
and personhood lie at the core of human dignity and decency, and
we all learn these from the moment we enter a human space. Every
human being is born with the inalienable right to physical, emotional
and sexual integrity, and the nurturing process in all our societies
recognizes the importance of not only protecting the integrity of
another human being, particularly while they are young and vulnerable,
but is also anchored on the transmission of these notions to the
individual as untouchable and inalienable rights. This is why we
abhor slavery and fight to the death to remain free.
Yet the very
people who understand the centrality of human integrity as a civic
right are often those who engage in and support practices and so-called
'customary laws' that violate and undermine the physical, emotional
and sexual integrity of women and girls—in the name of culture and
male supremacy. In my opinion, and through my work as a radical
feminist who is totally uncompromising on the rights and entitlements
of women wherever they live, this impunity, which lies at the heart
of violation and social injustice in all our societies, is embedded
in the privatization of women within the key social and political,
religious and cultural institutions across this continent and the
world at large.
Therefore it
is critical to understand that in as much as the private/public
divide, which has facilitated the construction of power in essentially
class and masculinist terms within most of our societies, continues
to be challenged and resisted by women's and other social movements,
the major difficulty in making the political inclusive of everyone
lies in the persistent exclusion of women as citizens of our societies.
Unless we are able to see the interconnectedness of impunity as
it is culturally, politically, economically, religiously and legally
framed and sanctioned we cannot begin to respond effectively to
the imperative of restructuring our societies in sustainable and
democratic ways.
We have to see
the culturalized expressions of impunity (through female genital
mutilation, male child preferences, unfair eating practices, incest,
witch-hunting women, especially older women and widows, child marriages
and coerced marriages, and feminized altruism) in order to debunk
them and declare them criminal offenses against citizens in each
and every instance. Only in this way can we begin to replace them
with new democratic, life-enhancing cultural notions and practices.
We have to reject
outright (and not try to reform) those legal systems that are partial
and often blatantly patriarchal: for example, the persistence of
notions of male conjugal rights; refusals to recognize marital rape
as a crime; allowance of polygamy and rampant sexual mobility; notions
of paternity which define children as the property of the man rather
than emphasizing the responsibilities and obligations of parenting
in democratic family relationships; inheritance practices that allow
men to inherit women as a form of property/as slaves of male controlled
families; and a myriad of injustices that are allowed to circulate
and reproduce themselves through the often deliberate misrepresentation
and/or insistence by judicial officers that women cannot be considered
persons in the ways that men are.
We must critique
the exclusionary economic practices (which globalization is reinforcing
and extending to every aspect of human life) that are deepening
the immiseration of women and young people through a rhetoric of
dog-eats-dog; dangerous claims which have become normative and naturalized
as the only reality possible. How unthinkable that we could be living
in a world where the narrow, sectarian claims of a voraciously greedy
class could assume such public hegemony and go so largely unchallenged
even by those who know that it is a blatant lie.
We have to make
the personal political by transforming the meaning of politics from
its current definition as men contesting power by any means—including
and especially through the making of war and the use of our resources
at the expense of millions across this continent, while its citizens
become refugees; non-persons in flight, without any rights or securities.
We have to change it to a notion and practice of politics that guarantees
the rights and securities of all citizens, all the time. We have
seen over and over these past decades a worsening situation in numerous
African countries, as the African petite bourgeoisie finds itself
less and less able to accumulate competitively with the ruling classes
of the North. Africa has remained 'economically marginal' in the
capitalist global system, even as we know that for centuries our
resources and knowledge have fueled the 'development' of Northern
societies and continue to be crucial to the maintenance of their
current notions of democracy.
However, for
the African petite bourgeoisie, the crisis of reproduction has been
intensified by the concentration of wealth globally in the hands
of a smaller and smaller number of Trans-National Corporations that
are poised to take over the state in the North as they have done
to a large extent in Africa and in the rest of the South. The Multilateral
Agreement on Investments agenda was precisely about that—making
capitalist privilege the ultimate priority in every sense of the
word and deed. We also know that in the history of human existence,
war has always been a means of class accumulation by those elements
that occupy the state—a patriarchal state that ensures the privilege
and supremacist ideologies and systems of a small group over the
rights and entitlements of the vast majority. Today we can see the
coincidence of globalized class interests with those of an African
ruling class in almost every African theater of war. The generals
are consolidating their class statuses by looting national treasuries
and extending the arenas of war and destruction across national
and regional boundaries. A re-structuring of the relationships within
and among the ruling factions that occupy and use the African patriarchal
state is clearly visible when we look at the ongoing devastation
of the Congo and the parties involved in that debacle. Sierra Leone,
Eritrea, Ethiopia, Angola, Rwanda, Burundi, Algeria, Sudan, Liberia,
Nigeria, etc, etc—war has become the everyday tragedy of this the
most beautiful and unquestionably most bountiful continent on earth.
That is why
the normalization of war through the militarization of our societies
and regions, under the guise of so-called pan-Africanist rhetoric,
is totally unacceptable and must be exposed for what it really is—the
plunder and accumulative rampaging of gangs of middle-class bandits
who openly defy the demands of the people for accountability and
democratic responsibility. At this point in time, we have to fight
to retain the very language of anti-imperialist resistance and to
keep the memory of enslavement and colonization alive because it
belongs to us all—always—until our worlds are no longer determined
by racism, classism, sexism, fundamentalisms and pernicious forms
of sectarianism and communalism. Certain groups of Africans are
deploying a collective memory in the justification of an openly
militaristic class project that is costing the lives of millions
of Africans and has laid waste to great swaths of this continent.
This nationalist opportunism must be exposed and the rights and
security of the African citizen must become the most important priority
of all. We can no longer allow selfish class interests to dominate
and destroy a continent that belongs to us all.
We have to find
the courage to go beyond the hypocritical rhetoric of regional integration
that in actual fact only facilitates for greater accumulation by
both national and global capitalist forces, at the expense of the
basic human and social rights that African working people have fought
so courageously to attain. For me, the interface between class,
gender and racist/communalist interests is the site where the most
critical and most productive contestation has to take place. We
need to understand the phenomenon of globalisation, in its multifarious
forms, as a re-structuring of the old, hegemonic relationships of
economic and political power, which are mobilizing technology, new
notions of space and communication, and the political lapse in radical
politics to make up for whatever was lost to them during de-colonization
and liberation struggles across the world.
Women's Politics
as the Source of a Sustainable Alternative Political Vision
As
a feminist, I draw my intellectual and political resources from
the struggles of women on this continent—land and sea—and from the
pursuit of rights by women globally. For centuries women have fought
private and public battles to make the world safer for themselves
and for those with whom they live, and it is this fundamentally
inclusive epistemology that informs women's politics across the
ideological and political divide within what we call the Women's
Movement. This is where one of the most critical political resources
to a different future lies, and I would like conclude my presentation
by indicating some of these political gems that are so often unseen
or even misunderstood by so many progressive men in the workers'
and youth movement in particular.
Firstly and
most fundamentally, women's struggles against patriarchy have made
visible the intersectionality of all known forms of exclusion and
oppression—racism, class exploitation, sexism and chauvinism, paternalism,
ableism, and heterosexism. By rejecting all these expressions of
injustice, women have brought together in a social movement for
rights the totality of issues that underpin patriarchy as an ideology
and a system of privilege for the few over the interests of the
majority. Women's struggles have, for the first time in the human
narrative, made visible the interconnectedness of all systems of
injustice in ways which neither the struggles of workers or of poor
people in general have done.
Secondly, by
raising the essential issues of integrity and personhood, women's
politics has challenged the bifurcated nature of notions of justice
and equality at every level of their societies, rupturing the public/private
divide which still keeps millions of women the world over outside
those civic resources and spaces where rights are embedded and secured.
As we know, the notion of rights is intimately linked with the demand
for the social, economic, political and legal recognition of human
value by those whose labour and reproductive capacities were appropriated
and exploited by the ruling class. Men who laboured without pay
came together to collectively demand the right to paid work and
the recognition of their labour as valuable. It is in the valorization
of human labour that the right to a dignified life becomes possible,
and through a publicly recognized engagement with the market and
the demand that profit making not be allowed to keep the worker
enslaved to the owners of capital, workers have been able to win
the rights that define them as a class in all our societies.
Through the
demand that women's rights must become human rights, women have
drawn from the struggles by workers and colonized people and are
insisting that the notion of human rights itself is partial and
unsustainable unless and until it encompasses fully (without a single
cultural compromise) the total rights of women to physical, emotional,
sexual and social integrity as complete persons in all their societies.
The demand for integrity and personhood lies at the core of women's
sexual and reproductive rights and this campaign has been most instrumental
in taking women's unmet sexual and reproductive needs out of the
private where they were considered 'domestic matters' and locating
them in the public, making them a political and policy issue and
requiring that the state and the major institutions of the society
not only recognize these rights as legitimate and inalienable, but
also provide the material and infrastructural resources to sustain
them. The extension of these rights to all women in all our societies
remains a major challenge which globalisation as a retrogressive
process is making even more difficult. In response to the specific
impacts of globalisation in this regard, women have formed global
coalitions around the issues of sexual and reproductive rights and
health, meeting in various international conferences (Beijing, Nairobi,
Mexico, and at the level of the UN and the Economic Commission for
Africa) to insist that states not only ratify the conventions and
international instruments that women have formulated, without reservation
clauses, but also that states, as the assumed custodians of citizens
rights and entitlements, must undertake to implement such policies
in order to safeguard the sexual and reproductive rights of women
in totality.
This has met
with a tremendous backlash, the use of so-called cultural appropriateness
and slogans of authentication that seek to fragment women's rights
through the claim that sexual and reproductive rights are 'western'
and 'un-African'. Of course we know that when women demand their
rights they become inauthentic and un-African and that is exactly
what we aim to do. We will subvert the archaic notions of what is
African as we insist on becoming modern and free; and we will re-define
and re-structure relationships of power and control, surveillance
and exclusion as we claim our democratic rights to be citizens in
the fullest ways. Therefore, African men can moan as much as they
want—while they remain locked in backward notions of what is African
and practice western modernity in every other way but towards Africa
women. We will not be stopped by patriarchal claims and threats.
In reality,
however, these claims and threats often become translated into life-taking
expressions of the backlash, and the vilification of women's rights
activists and women who claim their rights is real and requires
the urgent response of all progressive men in our societies. This
is not a matter only for women to resolve, because fundamentally
it is about old systems of male privilege which all men benefit
from in one way or another. Therefore no man is exempt from the
political responsibility of fighting for the sexual and reproductive
freedoms of women; for women's integrity and personhood and for
our right to be total citizens in both the public and private spheres.
But, in addition to recognizing and defending all women's rights,
men have to begin the process of moving themselves to a new gendered
and male identity by interrogating their location within patriarchal
society as men. How could it be that male comrades spend their lives
critiquing and resisting capitalism and fundamentalisms of every
kind, except those that construct them as males in deeply essential
ways? At the core of masculinity lies heterosexism and male systems
of privilege that underpin impunity and supremacy—even if not used
by individual males in their relationships with women.
As a radical
feminist I know and understand patriarchy in its most intimate and
most pernicious forms, and almost never allow anyone to oppress
me in any way. (Sometimes I am not sufficiently vigilant and do
find myself in situations where I have been excluded and victimized
in some way. However, I deal with that immediately—it is a promise
I made to myself long ago and to which I am committed.) But feminist
and women activists never assume that because we are able to defend
ourselves we do not need to restructure the societies we live in
so that all women can access their freedom and the rights that we
have begun to exercise. Progressive men have to do the political
work of transforming maleness and masculinity. It is not enough
to be a good man—you have to be a revolutionary man so that women
do not have to do this work for men, which we cannot do anyway.
Everyone has to free her/himself as we all know.
Finally, the
Women's Movement is without doubt one of the most vibrant and most
sustainable movements globally, and through the creation of national,
regional and global coalitions and networks, women have begun to
change the world in very significant ways. In Africa, women's demands
for justice, peace and equality have shaken the foundations of old
patriarchal assumptions about what is normal and acceptable. Women
have begun to change the character of the public through educational
and professional achievement and contestation. We are changing the
meaning of science and knowledge by challenging the old dogmas and
paradigms that excluded our experiences and opinions. At the level
of the law the changes have been astounding and absolutely marvelous—in
most African societies impunity no longer rages as an absolute force,
although it remains a key challenge in the transformation of those
areas where women's lives are most undemocratically and most dangerously
affected. Politically, women are challenging the state and its hegemony
over the meaning of citizenship; women are questioning the assumption
that the state is the best protector of common property, and in
countries like Zimbabwe, where a neo-colonial state simply took
over from the colonial state in terms of being the 'middle-man'
in relation to the land as a common resource, women are demanding
that the state step aside and let the citizens relate directly to
the land as a critical economic and socio-legal resource. The same
is happening here in Mauritius and in many countries on the continent.
By changing
their relationships with the state and with males in both the intimate
and public spheres, women are becoming post-colonial in new and
exciting ways. In my opinion, the challenge and disruption of old
patriarchal relationships that constructed women as private or communal
property and men as the natural heirs of all power in our societies
speaks to the emergence of a 'post-colonial' consciousness among
women (and among poor men who are challenging the neo-colonial state
from where they are located as workers and peasants and homeless/landless
persons) which will form the core of a sustainable anti-golbalisation
strategy in the future. In addition to understanding how capitalism
and neo-imperialism work at the levels of macro-economic strategies,
cultural and technological hegemony, the military-industrial complex
and the use of guns, human trafficking and drugs, we also need to
focus on our own political traditions and the resources being generated
by our social movements at the national, regional and global levels.
While we have to understand how the World Trade Organization and
General Agreement on Tariffs & Trade work to extend and intensify
capitalist exploitation and human misery, and remain vigilant about
the resurrection and pernicious implementation of the Multilateral
Agreement on Investments agenda, we also have to put more energy
into the re-formulation of our capacities to think, mobilize and
transform ourselves and our societies in ways which will finally
rid us of the scourge of human-invented systems of greed and inequality.
After all, globalisation is just a fancy term to describe patriarchyi
in its most nefarious form.
*Patricia
McFadden is a well-known African feminist, born in Swaziland. She
was women's policy coordinator for the Southern Africa Regional
Institute for Policy Studies (SARIPS) in Harare, and is currently
on a Ford Foundation fellowship to the Five Colleges Women's Studies
Center at Mount Holyoke, where she is writing a book on feminism
and nationalism.
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