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The human rights of African women in the 21st century
Patricia McFadden, Pambazuka News 176
September 30, 2004

Pat McFadden is a feminist activist and writer currently based in the US.

One of the most profoundly amazing features of human society is the manner in which we have created - often through difficult and protracted struggles amongst ourselves, notions and practices of inclusion and acceptability, as well as brutal rituals and systems of exclusion and denigration. The human narrative is rife with battles over the ownership of wealth and identity; over the occupancy of space and the control over the physical and creative capacities of some groups or individuals by others. We have differentiated amongst ourselves on the basis of colour and race; gender; location; sexual orientation; ability and; social class. All of these markers have fractured and or cemented into seemingly impenetrable and unchangeable social and cultural notions of who is considered human and who can or cannot belong to the heavily mediated and qualified ways.

All social groups and communities in the world have travelled the path of struggle and resistance against different forms of exclusion and impunity. And each group and the individuals who constitute it, have had to find the courage and the desire to imagine themselves 'outside' the bounded notions and enclosures that their respective societies have tried to lock them into. Working people; people with disabilities; black people, female people; people with a non-heterosexual orientation; and numerous other social groups have had to resist exclusion in order to initiate the process of becoming part of their societies. For example, working people have over the millennia struggled and demanded to be remunerated for their labour, and for as long as they fought as
individuals, trapped in a fundamentally unequal relationship to those who controlled and owned the means through which human life is sustained, they did not have a snow-balls chance in hell of succeeding.

However, when they finally recognized that collective agency is the most powerful resource available to those who are faced with discrimination and exploitation, the journey towards a changing relationship with their societies, and those who wielded power was initiated. And, most crucially, this journey entailed stepping outside the boundaries of the privatized locations within which human labour could and had been ruthlessly exploited, largely through the manipulation of individual vulnerabilities, fears and insecurities. The crucial change occurred when the struggles of working people became both public and political - and their demands and interests were located within the public domain. This led to the phenomenon of Rights as Entitlements to become a historical fact that had to be reckoned with, acknowledged and respected - albeit still with the caveat that the struggle to ensure and improve, exercise and protect those rights remains a central priority of all worker's movements and organizations universally.

Black people have taken a very similar journey through the human historical - especially during the past half millennium; bought and sold with impunity, commodified in ways that are unimaginable but real in the living memory of millions of Africans around the world, immortalized in the blatantly inhuman practices of enslavement and barbaric cruelty on all the continents of the earth. And whilst the struggle against racist exclusion and supremacist impunity continues to rage on the African continent and in the diaspora, the transition from enslavement to recognition that Africans are human and persons occurs also when we collectively, persistently and with incorrigible resilience, struggle against the violation of our integrity and personhood as individuals with a collective identity and agency.

Why have I used such a detailed preface to arrive at the issue of the rights of African women today? There are many reasons, but for purposes of this short discussion, I would like to draw attention to two aspects or commonalities among these three social categories of human beings who have had to 'earn' the right to be recognized, and sometimes treated as human beings - and more recently as citizens of the societies they live in.

First of all, it is important to draw attention to the historical significances and commonalities between the struggles of working people, black people and women. We must look at these groups within a context and time period where neo-liberalism is trying to depoliticize and appropriate the legacies of each group in the academy, through post-structuralist and post-modernist claims and dismissive rhetoric, and through scrutiny, censorship and the sanitization of political debates at the policy levels in both state and civil society groups everywhere.

Secondly, while the struggles against exploitation, racism and sexism have been waged at different moments and in varied arenas over centuries of time, it is in the lives and on the bodies of black women - of African women - that these three crucial social differentiators play themselves out in the most dramatic and in-human ways.

Much has been written, said, declared and pronounced with regard to the human rights of women - globally and within Africa, much of which is admirable and often quoted. Therefore, while the statement in Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that proclaims "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards each other in a spirit of brotherhood" flew in the face of colonial and apartheid reality, in addition to being overtly and unabashedly sexist and exclusionary in its language and content - it did mark an interesting moment in the ideological and moral shift within the West as well as globally.

Without a doubt, since 1948 women all over the world have become visible and vocal in ways that were unthinkable only a few decades ago. In 1993, through the crafting of the Vienna Declaration, women from all walks of life across the globe insisted on the recognition and adoption of an international protocol that stated categorically that "The Human Rights of women and the girl-child are an inalienable and indivisible part of Universal Human Rights" (Article 18). With hind-sight, it is clear that we have come a long way within human society; from a place where we were booty and bounty - things to be bought sold, exchanged and used - to currently standing at the cusp of a vibrant, modern identity; an identity that has become one of the most distinctive features of the progress in all our societies. Our conviction in ourselves and the determination to change our communities, families, societies, nations - the world, have become the flags that governments and often quietly resentful males of all classes, ages, colours and social statuses nonetheless proclaim as collective social achievements.

However, beyond the Conventions and Declarations lies the reality that much of what is understood as women's human rights are still basically rhetorical and inaccessible to the majority of African women. There are undoubtedly instances where small minorities of middle class women who have the knowledge, resources, mobility and courage to demand access, are able to exercise such rights in situations that affect their private and public lives. But for the vast majority of African women, rights are barely a dream; especially for those women who are located in the deeply feudal, privatized spaces of the countryside, or in the slums and ghettos on the margins of the cities and towns, or in the desolate vulnerability of so-called refugee camps - places where misogynist violation and impunity rampage across the lives and bodies of women and their children with a vengeance almost impossible to imagine or bear. Here, in these places of ruin and destruction, of incredible pain and waste of human life and worth - awaits the critical challenge to the claim that African women have human rights that are real and reachable.

That is why I would like to interrogate and juxtapose, even if only briefly, the claims of the current notion of Human Rights, in its liberal, universalistic, all-inclusive rhetorical construction, against an analysis of women's oppression and social exclusion from the category of 'human-ness'. 'Human-ness' centers the notions of bodily/physical integrity, autonomy, dignity and personhood vis-a vis the prevailing and dominant systems and practices of patriarchal supremacy, impunity, sexism and the private ownership of women as 'things' - as social goods that are born, bred, socialized and used by males, everywhere.

The fact of the matter is that Rights are the social outcomes of struggles and political engagements not only with the state, but with those institutions and structures within patriarchal societies that have institutionalized and preserved - and which protect and perpetuate the privileges and prerogatives - of maleness and male power. In every African country, the state, core patriarchal institutions and individuals across all the social divides, actively and deliberately collude and perpetuate practices and cultural myths that facilitate for or directly violate the human-ness of women and female children.

And the patriarchal, heterosexual family is the earliest and most resistant site of male control over the female body and its capabilities. In Africa, one need only look at the relationships of authority, control, surveillance and violation that men exercise over women and female children in particular, as their 'right' as the man who owns a family (or even as a brother or uncle) to see the connections between the denial of women's human-ness and personhood, and the perpetuation and institutionalization of male privilege in all the societies of the continent.

In these privatized spaces of families and rural areas where often the most basic infrastructure through which individuals could begin to acquire a consciousness of entitlement and a sense of being 'righted' simply do not exist, millions of women and female children survive in almost pre-historic conditions. The state remains a distant arbiter of tensions and conflict among males, often intervening only to intensify the crises of social and political reproduction in a particular location - in places like Darfur at the present time - and women and their families become trapped in the age-old struggles between males over the control of critical resources - both material and ideological, with disastrous consequences. In situations such as these, it becomes crystal clear that in spite of the fine sounding rhetoric and the claims by neo-colonial African states that they recognize and respect the rights of women (and poor men), the reality is actually radically different.

Millions of women become trapped in restricted social situations where they remain the private property of both their male counterparts as well as the controlling state; outside the reach of any social reforms and legal protections that the African women's Movement may have been able to put in place at the level of the state. Thus, women's lives are regulated and determined mainly through social status laws and conventions that keep them isolated and unable to transform themselves into autonomous citizens in their own right as human beings. And when crisis erupts in these fragile, desolate places they call home, they are the first to experience the wrath and impunity of being without a personhood or and identity that is respected and protected by the state and other social institutions.

The images of African women, desperately clutching their infants - in flight - without any rights and protections and unable to demand the accountability of the state and of the males whose jingoism and greed feed the chaos and destruction that rages around them and on their bodies; in their lives, often for decades - these images remind us in tragically poignant ways, that the reality between a pompous declaration that 'all are equal as human beings before the global and national state' are lies and hypocritical drivel.

None of the African states have made substantive efforts to translate the actual content of the CEDAW or Beijing Platform for Action protocols into reality at the national and local levels, and in spite of their claims that they recognize women as equal citizens in the recently adopted 'Women Charter' that forms part of the African Charter on Human and People's Rights, they all still fail the most fundamental test of such claims: when crises erupt on the continent, not a single African state has taken a stand in the African Union or in regional structures like the SADC to protect and defend the integrity and dignity of those citizens who cannot jet-off to a safe haven in France or London.

The atrocities that continue to be committed, with unmitigated impunity upon the lives of millions of women, children, elderly and disabled people in the DRC, Côte d'Ivoire, Sudan, and in other so-called hot spots on the continent, are testimony to the emptiness that accompanies the UN declarations about rights and dignity for most Africans.

At the crux of the matter is the blatant fact that the neo-colonial state does not consider the people under its domain either as citizens or human beings deserving of the most basic human dignities and respect. For over five decades, cliques of black men have ruthlessly used the state to position themselves as rulers over the very people they promised a life with pride as Africans. Each time I fly South African airways and I hear the expression " proudly South African" it makes me feel sick to the stomach because it's so opportunistically a mobilization of people's nationalist instincts towards to the consolidation of a national project that is basically about enabling a small group of black men to accumulate and rule, these days, in cahoots with an even greedier hoard of white males whose true colours we know only too well - they basked in the privilege provided by apartheid and now they are roaming across the continent, driven by an unquenchable appetite for profit and material wealth whose ruthlessness has laid waste the lives of millions of Africans across the southern African region over the past three centuries. And they seem unstoppable now, what with the connivance of hungry and eager black counterparts in all the countries of the continent that have been waiting to realise themselves as a true capitalist class.

Next to the interests and needs of an emerging ruling class to acquire the long-desired status of owners of immense wealth and power, what chance does the demand of a poor, rural woman have; who never had the chance to learn how to read and write - and know that she was born 'equal and free' - and whose life, and that of all her foremothers has been essentially an endless struggle to survive? ZERO - without the commitment and dedication of individuals who have the wherewithal to make the kinds of demands and put the kinds of pressure on the state that will enable each and every person in all our societies to enter into a direct relationship with the state - through the provision of access to the most essential activities and practices that underpin a modern social system.

As far as I am concerned, and I have said this repeatedly over the years, we have to become modern as Africans. We have to re-position ourselves in relation to the modernist project in ways that reject the European hegemonization of modernity as a moment through which they plundered the rest of the world and then exported their deeply flawed versions of life and 'being in the world' as Edward Said would say - insisting that we imitate them and replicate their economic, social, cultural and political values - often without question. And while the anti-colonial, anti-imperialist struggles have marked the 20th century as a century of resistance - in terms of the rights of women, black people, people of the South, etc - we still have not broken free of the ideological fatuousness of liberal rhetoric, particularly when it comes to issues of Rights and notions of democracy and citizenship.

Democracy, rights and citizenship remain deeply entrenched in discourses and systems of property ownership and privilege, defined largely by the experiences and world-views of white males, and emulated almost to perfection by most black men in and out of the state across the continent and the world. That is why so little has been done to change the character of politics and political practice in all our societies. Instead, we see an 'appropriate' version of colonial politics everywhere, which continues to exclude the people from the practice of politics and the definition of identity, even as it rallies the working poor in aid of the nationalist agendas of emerging ruling classes whose hegemony is threatened by persistent racist alliances on and off the continent. The case of Zimbabwe is most instructive in this regard. While cliques of men both in and outside of the state jockey for the control of the Zimbabwean state and it's vast wealth, the people of Zimbabwe have been thrust into a quagmire of destitution and shameful neglect.

Not withstanding the courage and commitment of activists in all sectors of the African civil society, particularly in those societies that are wrecked by war, blatant plunder of resources, a rampaging HIV/AIDS crisis, drought, famine, and the collapse of the health, transport and educational infrastructures - whose demise was triggered mainly by the implementation of Structural Adjustment Policies across the continent throughout the 1980s and 1990s - the issues of Human Rights for women continue to pose an extraordinarily difficult challenge to all who strive to transform our continent.

Let me use another example of how the intersection between the private and the public divide underpins this seeming inability even of highly conscious activists, to shift the rights issue to a level where the lives of women and of their communities begin to change in real and sustainable ways.

In my feminist opinion and understanding of the reasons why Women Rights, whether they be reproductive, sexual, health, economic, personal and social rights, present such a dilemma to most activists - female and male in the African civil society - is that we have not begun to make the personal political.

What does this mean, especially for women's rights activists and scholars? Basically, it means that we have to re-conceptualize the meaning and practical exercise of rights for women in relation to several core notions that determine how women can embrace their rights and use them. In order to become autonomous individuals who understand their ability to craft new identities, they need to position themselves in direct relationships with the state and those institutions and structures/systems that have facilitated and or sanctioned their subordination and exclusion in the private (families and heterosexual relationships) and in the public (in educational, legal, juridical, economic, political, religious and other civil terms) spheres.

Unless we make every aspect of women's and girls' lives a political issue, we cannot initiate the process that will enable females in our society to enjoy lives of dignity and safety. It was not until the women's Movement demanded and insisted that the violation of women in the private sphere is a criminal offence and that the state had an obligation and responsibility to defend and protect each and every citizen from impunity and abuse, that what we now call 'domestic violence' became a public, political, legal issue. While demands and changes that women have made in their respective societies around the continent are highly contested and often meet with backlash from reactionary, vengeful males who feel threatened and resentful towards women who can no longer be treated as chattels and 'things' - the change has begun, and it is unstoppable.

However, unless we make the connections with those issues that still facilitate the violation and degradation of female bodies in most of our societies, we will not be able to strengthen those values, processes, procedures, call them what you will - that have to underpin the journey that each woman and female child must embark upon to become a person, with a sexual and physical integrity that is respected and celebrated, and with the assurance that her identity as a citizen will be protected and safe-guarded regardless of what happens in her society/in her personal world.

The most pernicious and persistent of such socially sanctioned violations is the blatantly misogynistic practice of female genital mutilation - which I insist must be named for what it is - a brutal practice that constructs the female body as being in need of 'cleansing' from it's 'femaleness' in order to be made accessible and 'desirable' to males who demand that the practice be performed. This blatant violation of female bodily integrity is not only backward and barbaric it is also frighteningly pervasive and persistent across huge swathes of the continent - paraded in the garb of cultural authentication and respectability. And women who themselves have been violated, continue to be not only the gate-keepers and custodians of this violation, but also the cultural defenders of one of the most deeply embedded expressions of patriarchal misogyny in our societies.

In certain academic and policy circles in the North as well as on the continent, feminist definition of such practices as mutilation, have been attacked as 'exaggerated' and anti-cultural. In some of the literature, we are warned that such 'strong' language only serves to frighten men away from change, and or that what is happening to millions of women and girls across our continent is really 'excision' or 'genital cutting' - a form of surgery which enables women to 'belong' to their communities and which is basically harmless and no deserving of such 'western feminist vitriol'.

I still do not know how to respond to such hypocrisy and callousness, even after three decades of mobilizing every single passionate cell in my body to resist what is without a doubt one of the clearest expressions of human violation known in the human narrative (next to foot binding and the commission of sati). But if one steps back from the emotional surge that such a violation invariably elicits in anyone who has any sensibility about the sacredness of human worth, it becomes clear that this brutal and reprehensible practice reflects in a dramatic and tragic manner, how deeply entwined the core of patriarchal violence/impunity and privilege/power are - and how they are etched in the construction of woman-hood and on the physical bodies of women (even as they are girls and children).

It is in these practices, which are embedded and woven into the 'cultural' fabric of our societies, and which provide such fiercely-guarded authenticators of our identities as women and or as Africans - that the real challenges to the meanings and validity of Rights for women lies. And the complicity of state and government officials in the perpetuation of such violations - either by passing laws that are ineffective and or difficult to implement, or by continuing to treat such matters as 'private' - is a major backlash against the struggle by women for Rights as real and lived possibilities.

The same analysis can be made of lobola or so-called bride-price. Across the class spectrum in Africa one finds endless excuses and explanations for the revival or continuance of this ancient expression of one of the earliest forms of human commodification. It is through this construction of the female body as an exchange value in relation to other things - like cattle or goats, or salt or gold - that we see the first expressions of market exchange - within family relationships.

Beneath the declarations of love (which in feudal and in many present day societies, which I will not describe a modern although they exist in this modern moment) were considered superfluous and unnecessary, after all it was the families that were marrying - not the couple, we are often told by the gurus of African history, flowed the earliest expressions of male greed and callousness - the buying and selling of women, disguised as a social, bonding ritual, that would supposedly bring joy, satisfaction and stability to the couple and the community within which they lived.

Over time, the exchange process moved beyond the family as an institution, and became the dominant arbiter of what we call the public as a space where institutions and systems that are central to the consolidation and exercise of power are located. Male control of the public space ensured the institutionalization of privilege and power and the accumulation of wealth, and the concomitant domestication of women and their socialization and 'branding' as privatized beings, is a common phenomenon across the African continent and beyond. The notions of the public and the private are not European inventions or expressions of 'westernism' as some women activists would like to argue. The phenomenon of the public/private divide emerges side by side with the rise of classes and social differentiation in all societies, and African societies are no exception. All one has to do is read history without a nationalist bias, and the ways in which feudalism structured gender relations within all the major social formation on the continent long before colonial occupation bears this out very clearly.

The privatization of women as 'things' that are owned and controlled by males, and the ownership of children - something that most Africans accept as normal and unproblematic - became the basis for the exclusion of women and children, which overtime became the foundation of male authority and power in all societies. When modernized Africans 'go home' to the rural areas - which many millions do all the time -they figuratively step back into feudal spaces and literally perform the same practices and gestures that have characterized rural life for many centuries. It's euphemistically called 'tradition' and 'culture', and it did exist before the white man came.

It is within this context of patriarchal supremacy that the struggle for women's rights is rooted, and whose origins we need to understand. When a man rapes and mauls his baby daughter, and defiantly tells the doctor who is trying to save the child's life that 'It's mine, I can do whatever I want with it'; when a young man rapes a woman and arrogantly declares that 'She asked for it' by inviting him into her room at 2am in the morning; when the soldiers of the occupying army mutilate and desecrate the bodies of women and children of all ages 'because we are conquerors and these are the spoils of war'; and when a husband rapes and murders the woman he should be loving and protecting because ' the bitch smiled at another man on the bus' - then we understand how the ancient yet persistent practices and prejudices that nurture and encourage male dominance and female subordination lie at the root of the anger, violence, hatred and misogynistic behaviour of males everywhere in the world.

These for me are the most fundamental issues facing Africans when it comes to the meaning and definition of Rights as both social and political resources which we can define and use in positioning ourselves as citizens - in the public as a common space, a space that is available to each and every one of us on the basis of our membership in our societies; and in the shaping and ownership of a relationship with the state and the most powerful institutions and structures in our societies as we contest and define the experience of becoming and being citizens.

We have to separate, both conceptually and legally, those practices and systems that conflate the bodies and lives of women into ancient notions of private property, such as the exclusion of women from the ownership and use of property. Instead, women need to re-position themselves within communities and in relation to the state as autonomous individuals with an identity of their own, and the integrity and dignity of a human being who is 'born free and equal'.

This is a deeply cultural, emotional yet critical challenge for all Africans who work as catalyst of change on and off the continent. We cannot expect to make real and sustainable progress in transforming our societies/continent without doing the difficult but necessary political conceptual and practical work of re-defining what personhood and human integrity mean to us as Africans, especially when these notions are applied to African women, who in the main do not own or control property and wealth, but who feed, care for, nurture, support and sustain the bulk of our social existence, and have done so for millennia. The definition of 'things' that are material and can be owned and privatized has to be separated from the worth and value of a human being, a person, and we cannot continue to practice so-called cultural rituals and rites that reify women into property - regardless of whether it has assumed a 'cultural form' over the centuries.

We are creative, imaginative, life-loving people in so many ways, and we need to draw on these strengths and positive capacities - and craft new cultural signifiers; new distinguishing markers that will set us apart from others and enable us to express our uniqueness in modern African ways.

Rights have to be understood and experienced not only as rhetorical devices in the articulation of demands and particular interests by classes or social categories of people within a society. Much more than that, they have to become the expression of an interactive, negotiated, flexible and mutually respective relationship between individuals - in this case women as individual persons - and the state, which is the dominant social and political player in the lives of Africans at the present time, regardless of whether we accept the existence of the state or not.

Humans invent and create states as mechanisms through which the tensions between and among groups and classes of people can be discussed, managed, negotiated and hopefully resolved. We create states so that they can manage and distribute, in the most equitable manner, those critical resources that our societies are endowed with, on behalf of those who cannot compete with others - for reasons related either to class, age, gender, and or other exclusionary systems that emerge in societies that are socially and economically differentiated.

Therefore, for all the reasons that historians, social scientists, and philosophers have ponder upon and debated for millennia, the state must always be made accountable and responsible to the people, regardless of who the people are. This is a fundamental premise for the existence of the state. And the protection of women's physical, sexual, and bodily integrity as citizens of our societies is neither negotiable nor open to any kind of compromise. The integrity and wholeness of women's bodies; their right to a life with dignity and protection is a responsibility that the state cannot and must not be allowed to compromise as an accommodation of some backward notion of cultural authenticity or African-ness. The Right of women and girls to integrity in all its aspects is fundamental to making rights real for women everywhere.

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