On Sunday, Jestina Mukoko, Executive Director of the Zimbabwe Peace Project, was 'released’ from prison. Her defense attorney and fabulous feminist human and women’s rights attorney Beatrice Mtetwa, among others, greeted her. Yes, it’s springtime in Zimbabwe, as in Zimbabwe Spring … except that it’s not. Friday was International Women’s Day, #IWD2013. To honor that, the Zimbabwean government organized a fake flight and a fake hunt. The government claimed that Jestina Mukoko was on the run. By all accounts, she wasn’t. The government put out an all points bulletin on Jestina Mukoko, organized a full-scale media appeal, pleading with 'citizens’ to 'notify the authorities’ if she was spotted. Not knowing that she was a 'fugitive’, Mukoko walked into the police station and turned herself in, if that’s the right phrase. And she was held in police custody and interrogated for two days. Jestina Mukoko is no stranger to Zimbabwean prisons. In 2008, she was held and tortured in prison. She has since sued the government for having tortured her. The Zimbabwean Supreme Court ordered a permanent stay of execution. As the weekend’s events show, 'permanent’ is a fluid concept. Some fear the 'return to terror’, while others hope for something called healing. Others in the media note the use of the media to persecute Jestina Mukoko. Of course, they mean 'the other media’. So … happy International Women’s Day, Zimbabwe! Meanwhile, once again Jestina Mukoko is described as 'released.’ Released? Really?

The Kenyan people have voted. The Kenyan elections have come and not quite gone. The foreign press offered its readers a veritable smorgasbord of dreadfully decontextualized representations, and now that the actual polling has passed, you can just about taste the collective disappointment at the absence of spectacular violence. As the local Kenyan press noted, the reporting was shameful, the reporters were infested with clichés. The results are coming in, and it doesn’t look like Martha Karua, the steely women’s rights activist and advocate, won the Presidency, but then she wasn’t meant to. At least not this go-round.  On the other hand, her campaign helped put the issue of women in electoral politics, from local to national, not so much on the front burner as at least in the house. More formal attention was paid to the ways in which women candidates, and party members more generally, suffered discrimination and coercion. Contrary to much of the foreign coverage of the elections, this attention didn’t come out of some panic that began in the 2007 post-election violence, but rather from women’s organizing histories. Longstanding groups such as ACORD Kenya, the Rural Women Peace Link, the Coalition on Violence Against Women, and so many others, have been working tirelessly, every single day, for years. And they continue to do so. So Martha Karua didn’t win the Presidency, but Mary Wambui won the Othaya parliamentary seat. Alice Wambui Ng’ang’a "scooped" the election and became the first woman MP elected to represent the new Thika constituency. Cecily Mbarire seems ready to break a seesaw curse by being the first in thirty years to be re-elected from Runyenjes. But those who rely on the international press are still left wondering if Kenya is more than an election. Here’s one very partial contextual sliver of a response. Remember the violence? Not the election violence. The food riots of 2008. When the price of food in Kenya, as around the world, doubled in less than 12 months, Kenyan women joined their sisters around the world and led the nation into extended food uprisings. As Njoki Njoroge Njehu, of the Daughters of Mumbi Global Resource Centre, recently noted: "Corporations were speculating on food and made a lot of money. But it was done at the expense of ordinary people in Kenya, in Mexico, in Argentina and other places where there were food riots." That’s the story. Ordinary women everywhere always lead food riots and uprisings. In Kenya recently as in so many other places, “poverty … in most cases wears a feminine face.” Why are women at the center of Kenyan movements for social transformation? One reason is that the last decades in Kenya have seen an intensification of the immiseration of women: “wage employment away from home, forced or voluntary migrations or resettlements, changing decision making patterns in the political and socio-economic settings; reconstructed family and household structures; child rearing habits and the recycling of geriatric parenting; escalating rates of young widowhood; increase in family conflicts; breakage and general lack in socio-cultural-support-systems due to urbanization; social risks as manifested in increased illnesses … due to the ravages of HIV/AIDS. It is indeed a vicious cycle.” A vicious cycle, and familiar. As Naomi L. Shitemi explains, it’s “modern life.” Women have been organizing to address and transform “modern life” in Kenya. For example, for decades, women struggled to develop some sort of national approach to land tenure, and now there is a Kenya National Land Policy that has problems, certainly in implementation, but also provides a framework. There’s the work of Wangari Maathai and all the women who made her work possible and concrete. There’s the work that was begun in Nairobi, in 1988, in response to the 1978 Alma-Ata Declaration of Health for All. In 1988, women from around the world met in Nairobi and launched the Safe Motherhood movement, and it has been growing, and learning, and growing some more ever since. In Kenya, and around the world. As Kenyan women’s and public health advocate and activist, and professor, Miriam Were noted, “We need not wait for findings from some mysterious research.”

We’ve blogged here about what’s been wrong about the coverage of the murder of the relatively unknown model Reeva Steenkamp by her boyfriend, Olympic athlete Oscar Pistorius. A ratings bonanza, coverage has ranged from frivolous to the ridiculous. The “international community” “rediscovering” that South Africa is dangerous, violent, even paranoid; or the media’s eagerness to demonstrate the 'typicality’ of Pistorius. (See TO Molefe’s post from yesterday.) Reeva Steenkamp’s value is as statistic and as corpse, and not much else. (See Linda Stupart’s post here yesterday too.) But has the media gotten anything right?  What does the event 'highlight’? On the bright side, Pistorius’ oh so brief imprisonment highlights the plight of South Africa’s disabled prisoners. It would be good if the world, and even more if South Africans at large, paid more attention to the conditions in South Africa’s prisons. Meanwhile, locally, some have noted that the treatment of the Steenkamp case “highlight(s) the police's general bungling of gender violence cases.” Pistorius’ fixation, as some have called it, with guns “highlights the violence at the heart of South Africa, a country that suffers more than 15,000 murders every year … The truth is this: guns are us.” The murder of Reeva Steenkamp “sheds light on the humongous problem of domestic violence, in particular femicide, which is murder of an intimate partner. There are so many cases that happen on a daily bases that don't even get reported because so many of them that have been reported have just been thrown out of court. The numbers are astounding. And so people get discouraged. They don't -- they don't report those cases, because there's just no real justice for women at this point.” Not every reporter has fallen for the highlight hype nor does every reporter recognize South Africa in the international descriptions, nor, by the way, in Pistorius’ self serving statements in court. For example, Globe and Mail reporter Geoffrey York noted,

Even in the most dangerous cities, gun-wielding paranoia is not nearly as common as outsiders believe… Studies suggest that 12 per cent of South Africans own guns. It’s a relatively high percentage by global standards. But it still means that the vast majority of South Africans prefer not to have guns in their houses – mostly for safety reasons, since they realize how often guns can be stolen, misused, or accidentally fired.

And as development blogger Tom Murphy noted, homicide is actually down in South Africa. Furthermore, violent crimes tend to occur in areas with high unemployment and low income (as Molefe made the case here too), while property crimes tend to occur in areas of, well, property. This pattern is true for most of the world, and it suggests that those who live in wealthy areas have reason to protect their property, but not with lethal force. Adriaan Basson, assistant editor editor at South African City Press, noted in Rapport newspaper (City Press and Rapport are part of the same company, so cross-post) that eight out of ten murder victims are killed by someone they know. Who’s at risk? Women: “guns play a significant role in violence against women in South Africa, most notably in the killing of intimate partners.” So, it’s Reeva Steenkamp who’s typical, whose life and death should highlight something. That of course hasn’t happened. But there’s still some bad stuff. This sludge stew all came together the night of the murder, in an interview on PBS with Michael Sokolove, a New York Times reporter who had written an earlier, long profile of Pistorius. Here’s part of what he said:

Oscar liked his guns. Oscar felt under threat, and South Africa is a place that apartheid is over, but there’s a terrible chasm between rich and poor, income equality, and people with money, people with homes, tend to live behind walls, behind barbed wire, behind gates with guns. And this is not a pretty thing. It is somewhat understandable, but I think Oscar’s paranoia, if that’s what it was, was not uncommon to his class in South Africa … I think that perhaps even more than our own violent society and our own gun-soaked society, South Africa society is on a hair trigger. And I think it’s fair to say… that Oscar was on high alert. Oscar was on a hair trigger. Oscar had a paranoia about who might be coming into his house … I didn’t see malice from Oscar. I didn’t see him as a violent person. I did see him as a man of action, coiled, and on a hair trigger. And that has its own dangers.

So, that’s the story. The paranoia of the White master class explains violence. The hair trigger does what hair triggers do. High alert is high alert; 'we’ are in a Code Red. And the facts be damned. What matters are the impressions, on the one hand, and the perception of malice. Because, as we know, the perpetrators of domestic violence, as of sexual violence more generally, are always recognizable. Aren’t they?

As of March 1 this year, the new base salary for farm workers in South Africa will be R105 a day (about US$11 per day). That’s a 52% pay raise, which sounds impressive until you realize that means currently the base salary is R69 a day (US$7.70 per day). This raise comes after a prolonged, and unprotected, strike by farm workers last year, a strike that put the small Western Cape farming town, De Doorns on the map ... again. The raise will lead to many, and perhaps endless, debates on inputs and consequences. Will the pay raise result in job losses? Will the farmers use the rise in minimum salary as an excuse to fire and evict farm workers and farm dwellers? Given farmers’ retaliatory dismissals and evictions after the strike, it looks likely. How will the salary increase affect inequality? What is inequality, exactly? Here’s what is clear: the lives of black and coloured farm workers (there are hardly any white farm workers) and their families who live and work on the farms in the bountiful and lush Western Cape of South Africa is impossibly hard. And the hardest hit, every single day and across the span of a life, are women. Women farm workers, women farm dwellers. Women are paid less than men. Women, sometimes doing exactly the same work as men for exactly the same period of time, are classified, by their employers and by the State, as 'seasonal’ and 'temporary’. Women are denied access to positions that might allow for any advancement. The Western Cape has the highest rates of alcohol abuse accompanied by extraordinary levels of gender-based violence, and trauma, in its farm working communities. The "dop" system of payment (basically paying workers with alcohol) in wine lives on, only in a slightly different guise. What does not change is that at the end of the day, the target of the physical and structural violence is women. Along with rampant TB, occupational health hazards, such as pesticide, target women as well. Women seldom receive legally mandated protective clothing and equipment. Farm workers live on farms. They often live next to sprayed crops, and so their homes become hot spots for respiratory ailments, skin lesions, and worse. And for the children, of course, it’s worse. All of this then redounds to women’s 'reproductive labor’ obligations. Meanwhile, most farm worker households buy their food from company stores, on the farm. Guess what? The prices for food are higher than they are in the cities. In the midst of plenty, food insecurity, hunger, starvation abound, as does a vicious cycle of indebtedness. All of this crystallizes, again, in violence against women. As Colette Solomon, acting director of Women on Farms, noted, “It's an immoral perversion that people who are producing food are the ones who don't have food, and who's children go to school hungry … It's invisible hunger and almost normalized." The hunger is not invisible. The women farm workers and farm dwellers are not invisible, either. Rather, they aren’t deemed worth commenting on. Women farm workers and farm dwellers appear, more often than not unnamed, in article after article on the farm workers’ strike. They are the specter that haunts the Boland. The BBC has known for quite a while that life is hard for women farmworkers in the Western Cape. In 2008, it devoted an entire show to South African women farmworkers: “Change is slow -- especially for black women who make up the largest number of farm workers on the vineyards.” A 2011 Human Rights Watch report on the fruit and wine industries of the Western Cape declared that the face of the abused farm worker is a woman’s face. Along with inferior treatment, women workers didn’t receive employment contracts in their own name. Pregnant women were refused employment, and so many hide their pregnancies in order to get a job. For women farm dwellers, it’s worse. They have no rights to housing or anything, which means they have to stay with their partners, in often abusive situations. And of course, the State gives absolutely no gender specific training to labor inspectors or any other functionaries who might attend to farm workers’ lives. That’s left to the ngo’s, underfunded, understaffed, over-worked, and, at some level, without real power to effect transformative change, much less provide the necessary social services at a mass level. For women, the conditions of farm labor and farm dwelling are an ever intensifying, ever increasing, ever-expanding toxic stew of vulnerability. Women farm workers and women farm dwellers know this, and have been organizing. Denia Jansen, a women’s organizer with the Mawubuye Land Rights Movement, has been organizing women farmworkers and women farm dwellers. Women like Sarah Claasen and Wendy Pekeur and thousands of others have worked tirelessly organizing Sikhula Sonke, a women-led trade union social movement that, along with Commercial, Stevedoring, Agricultural and Allied Workers Union (CSAAWU), is the home for most farm workers, and farm dwellers, in the Western Cape. The story of women farm workers and farm dwellers is not a story of abjection nor of individual heroines engaged in tragic, and implicitly impossible, combat. It’s a story of everyday struggle in which women workers know what’s what and don’t like it, and work to change it for the better. Every day. So when you read the stories of farm workers (and when you don’t read the stories of farm dwellers) and when you read the debates about inequality in the farmlands of South Africa, ask, “Where are the women in this?” They’re there, organizing.

Why do they call it the Home Office, when that agency dedicates its resources to expelling, incarcerating, and generally despising precisely those who need help? What kind of home is that, anyway? In 2004, Roseline Akhalu was one of 23 people to win a Ford Foundation scholarship to study in England. That would be enough to celebrate in itself, but Akhalu’s story is one of extraordinary pain and perseverance. Five years earlier, she and her husband were working in Benin City, Nigeria. Her husband was a nurse, and Roseline Akhalu worked for the local government. They didn’t earn much but they got by. Until March 1999, when her husband was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The couple was told that they must go to South Africa, or India, for care, but the costs of such a venture were prohibitive. And so Roseline Akhalu watched her husband die because there was no money. Now a widow, and a widow without a child, Akhalu confronted a hostile future. After her in-laws took pretty much everything, Roseline Akhalu set about the work of making a life for herself. She worked, she studied, she applied for a masters’ scholarship, and she succeeded. Akhalu went to Leeds University, to study Development Studies. She joined a local church; she tended her gardens, saving tomatoes that were otherwise destined to die; she worked with young girls in the area. She planned to return to Nigeria and establish an NGO to work with young girls. It was all planned. Until she was diagnosed with kidney failure. That was 2004, a few months after arriving. In 2005, Akhalu was put on regular dialysis. In 2009, she had a successful kidney transplant, but the transplant meant that for the rest of her life Roseline Akhalu would need hospital check-ups and immunosuppressant drugs. In Nigeria, those drugs would be impossibly costly. Her attorney informed the government of her change in status, that due to unforeseen circumstances Roseline Akhalu, who had never planned on staying in the United Kingdom, now found that, in order to live, she had to stay. And so began Roseline Akhalu’s journey into the uncanny unheimlich of the Home Office, where home means prison or exile, and nothing says “compassion” like humiliation, degradation and persecution. Once a month, Akhalu showed up, in Leeds, at the United Kingdom Border Agency Reporting Office. Then, in March of 2012, without explanation, she was detained and immediately packed off, by Reliance 'escorts’, to the notorious Yarl’s Wood, where she was treated like everyone’s treated at Yarl’s Wood, and especially women…disgustingly. So far this is business as usual. Here’s where it gets interesting. In May, Akhalu was released from detention. In September, the Home Office refused her appeal. In November, a judge overturned the Home Office decision. The judge declared that, since Akhalu had established a private life of value to her, to members of the Church, and to a wider community, removing her would violate her right to a private and family life protected by Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The judge noted that Akhalu had done absolutely nothing illegal. She had come to the United Kingdom legally and was diagnosed while legally in the country. Most chillingly, perhaps, the judge agreed that to send Roseline Akhalu back to Nigeria was a swift death sentence. Given the health care system and costs in Nigeria, she would be dead within four weeks. Nigerian and English doctors agreed. On December 14, the Home Office appealed the decision. That’s right. They’re pursuing a case against Roseline Akhalu, despite all the evidence and mounting pressure from all sides. Why? Because that’s what the Home Office does. Want an example? In 2008, Ama Sumani, a 43-year old Ghanaian woman, was lying in hospital in Cardiff, in Wales, receiving kidney dialysis for malignant myeloma. That was until the good old boys showed up and hauled her out and then shipped her off to Ghana, where she died soon after. The Lancet put it neatly: “The UK has committed an atrocious barbarism.” That was January 19, 2008. Five years later, almost to the day…the atrocity continues.

Starting two years ago, the Thomson Reuters Foundation launched TrustLaw, “a global hub for free legal assistance and news and information on good governance and women’s rights.” One of the major parts of TrustLaw is TrustLaw Women. Monday’s TrustLaw Women ran, as its major piece, a curious squib under the headline, “Five things you didn’t know about women’s status in 'traditional’ Africa.” I know. The heart sinks at “you”, sinks further at “didn’t know”, and then plunges to unfathomable depths at the invocation of "'traditional' Africa.” And while some will exclaim that the square quotes around 'traditional’ suggest irony, that’s not enough. The five “things” are elderly women peacemakers and negotiators; women rulers and heads of states; women warriors and soldiers ("including Queen Amina"); women legislators and adjudicators of both State and Market; and, finally, independent women who had access to easy and cheap divorce. The article’s author Alex Whiting mentions, in passing, that colonialism and Christianity opposed these various forms of women’s formal autonomy and power. It would be too easy to lambast the piece for its 'traditional’ Western National Geographic golly-gee tone, especially in the absence of any news hook for the piece, other than to inform 'us’, 'you’, that African women did stuff … once. And some still do. But there’s something else going on, a missed opportunity. Whiting relies on four sources for her 'things’: UNESCO documents from 2003, another one from 2005; an on-line 'historical museum’; and a scholarly journal article from 1972. Scholars, analysts, activists, artists and just plain folk have been sharing this information for decades. But apparently only with one another. So, thanks to Alex Whiting for pointing out the silence and the noise concerning “women in 'traditional’ Africa.” What the TrustLaw article misses, however, is the action agenda of its own sources. Almost each piece Whiting references argues, urgently, that the structures of women’s power are not ephemera we can only see in the mists of some African Brigadoon. Women have struggled to preserve and adapt those structures. They are here, now. Not knowing that 'thing’ is not due to a lack of resources, but rather to a political economy of violent exclusion. For example, in one of the pieces, the authors Kimani Njogu and Elizabeth Orchardson-Mazrui ask, “Can culture contribute to women’s empowerment?” Their answer is yes. While their immediate focus is the Great Lakes region, their point is broader. Sustainable development and 'progress’ can only occur as part of “working through communities instead of against them.” "'Traditional’ African women” are not bereft of either knowledge or power. Their empowerment cannot begin by denying them their history, including their very present forms of power and knowledge. That’s not about 'traditional’ women, and it’s not about 'modern’ women. That’s about 'you’ and the “things you don’t know.”

Political springs, as in social movements that topple and/or transform political regimes, occur when the youth of a nation get on the move. And that may be what happened in Nairobi this past Monday. A harbinger of spring. 

Four hundred or so young women marched, shouted, hooted, danced, chanted, filled the streets of Nairobi. They carried a banner that read, “50% of all positions allocated to women should be reserved for women under 35 years. Give women an opportunity for fair representation through nomination rules of political parties.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KolTr96_4nM The women wore purple to symbolize their demands for fair and balanced appointments. They were a rolling democratic action. They were … a purple zebra. As Youth Agenda has explained, “Young women (Purple) in appointive and elective positions in political parties should appear as many times as the white on a zebra...#purplezebra”. The #purplezebra emerges from many sources. The new, improved Constitution of Kenya (pdf) provides more rights and protections to women, children and youth, both defined as vulnerable citizens. In particular, the Bill of Rights of Kenya’s recently passed Constitution specifies the State’s responsibilities to women, children, youth, minorities and marginalized groups, and elders. The Constitution also mandates that no gender will have more than 2/3 of elected or appointed positions. This does not limit women to 1/3 but rather ensures that at least 1/3 of elected and appointed positions will be women. It’s a definite step forward, which of course relies on implementation. The young women of Kenya have looked at the results thus far, and kept their eyes on the prize. In a country in which 70 percent of the population is 35 years or younger, age matters. Or at least it should. And Kenya is that country right now, and all predictions and projections suggest that it will continue to become younger and younger again. This means, for women like Susan Kariuki, Chief Executive Officer of Youth Agenda, the group that brought the women who came from all political parties and structures together, the women in office must be from the 70%, the 35-and-under super majority. This means that restrictions, such as fees, must take into account the high levels of unemployment and underemployment of young women and address them accordingly. This means that the Parliamentarians as well as the appointed officials are on notice: don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall, there’s a purple zebra coming to do more than rattle your walls. #purplezebra on Twitter.

Last Thursday, Zimbabwe’s Supreme Court unanimously “chastised” state security agents for torturing Jestina Mukoko, national director of the Zimbabwe Peace Project, four years ago. They came at dawn, December 3, 2008. Armed men broke into the house of Jestina Mukoko, the only surviving parent of a teenage child who watched, helplessly. They took her, in unmarked cars, and held her incommunicado for 21 days. During that time, they beat her feet with rubber truncheons. They dumped her into solitary confinement. They forced her to kneel on gravel, to endure searing pain. They questioned her about the whereabouts of her son. As Mukoko explains, “Psychological torture was the order of the day.” Under duress, the abductors, which is to say the State, handed Jestina Mukoko over to … the State. Where she was again imprisoned, in the notorious Chikurubi Maximum Detention Centre, after having spent time in police cells that had already been deemed “unfit for human habitation.”

Mukoko told this story in May to the Oslo Freedom Forum in a panel titled “Spotlight on Repression: A glimpse into some of the world’s least known and most repressive regimes." Her talk is entitled “In Mugabe’s Crosshairs.” Where does that torture begin? As Mukoko notes, at the outset of her talk, she was denied her freedom for 89 days in prison, but she has been denied her freedom for far longer than that. Where does the torture begin? At the house invasion? The abduction? The disappearance? The beatings? The kneeling on gravel? The nights with drunken captors taunting and threatening her? The police cell? The prison? The mandated weekly visits to the police, while awaiting trial? It also begins in the globally constructed status of “least known”. Four years ago, when Jestina Mukoko was abducted, and then for the three months of her ordeal, she was in the news. Zimbabwe was in the news. Then Mukoko was released, and her story was relegated to the conference halls of human rights organizations. And so Zimbabwe, somehow magically, receded into the Brigadoon fog at the season’s end. Except that Zimbabwe did not go away. Jestina Mukoko was not the only person abducted that year. Among the 20 or so abducted, at the same time, by 'State security agents', there was Nigel Mutemagawu, two years old. He was taken with his parents and held incommunicado. He was beaten and then left without medical attention. All of those cases are still pending. That means, as Mukoko explains, that they must drag themselves, every Friday, to the police station to verify their whereabouts: “I know how traumatic that is.” Jestina Mukoko and so many others are still kicking in Zimbabwe. She’s suing the government for torture. She continues to document violations and to give voice to those who suffer atrocity. She, and many others, continue to work for the project that is peace. Where does the torture end?

On Thursday, July 26, the Michael Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town had an opening: Mo(u)rning. Photographic and other works by Zanele Muholi. Muholi had lost much of her work a couple months earlier in a more than suspicious burglary, and so the exhibition was a meditation on mourning, the processes of receiving and releasing the dead and the lost, and morning, the processes of a new day, of another new day. Those who know Muholi’s work will not be surprised to hear the exhibition was brilliant. Rooms upon rooms of portraiture, of lived experience, of love. Video installation merged with photography merged with graffiti and poetry. One wall held, or exposed, Makhosazana Xaba’s poem, “For Eudy”:

For Eudy I mentioned her name the other day but blank stares returned my gaze while all I could see was: The open field in Tornado Open hatred on the field. I thought I could explain but the rising anger blocked my throat cause all I was thinking was: This tornado of crimes is not coming to an end. Did anyone read a manifesto that has plans to stop hate crimes? Which party can we trust to bring this tornado of crimes to an end, an end we’ve been demanding?

How should we pen that cross and put the paper in its place while we remember painfully that the open field in Tornado is forever marked by her blood? Name me one politician who can stand up and talk about the urgency to stop these crimes, one who can be counted, to call them what they are.  Name me one. Go, celebrate Freedom Day, while we gather and stand on this open field in Tornado shouting for the world to hear: Crimes of hatred must stop!

The next wall had the following scrawl: Somber? Grim? Hopeless? No. The night of the opening, the space among the pictures, the testimonies, and the videos was a space of celebration, of hugs and winks and laughter and more hugs, a space of joy. When the communities of local Black lesbians and their friends came together, the event created the joyous space. It was an opening. For one night, in South Africa, the work of mourning is the work of morning.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5J-i1U6PXQ This week, the World Bank issued a report, South Africa Economic Update: Inequality of Opportunity. The report accurately and unsurprisingly details the depth of inequality in the new South Africa. For some, this report, and even more inequality itself, proves that “the spirit of Verwoerd still haunts” the nation. For others, the report details a present day threat to the future, a future that should be one of growth. For others, it’s something of a mix of national and global. A global sluggish economy takes a special form in a nation marked, perhaps constituted, by “a yawning gap between the nation’s richest and poorest citizens”. Everywhere the reports comment on the persistence and roots of this inequality. Rightly so. As some note, the report itself identifies the subjects of the inequality: “In addition to being young and living in certain locations, being a woman and non-white still matters, increasing the likelihood of being unemployed or underemployed significantly (over and above any impact of these attributes on education).policy—one of the rare policy goals on which a political consensus is easier to achieve.” Elsewhere, the report suggests, “Whether a person is born a boy or a girl, black or white, in a township or leafy suburb, to an educated and well-off parent or otherwise should not be relevant to reaching his or her full potential: ideally, only the person’s effort, innate talent, choices in life, and, to an extent, sheer luck, would be the influencing forces. This is at the core of the equality of opportunity principle, which provides a powerful platform for the formulation of social and economic policy—one of the rare policy goals on which a political consensus is easier to achieve.” As far as the report goes, it’s fine. The data seems more or less reasonable and in line with many other reports on inequality in South Africa. The history, however, has one glaring omission. The World Bank itself. Nowhere in a report on the roots and persistence of inequality in South Africa is there any discussion of the role that the World Bank, the IMF, and other powerful multinational agencies played in the development of South African economic policies, from Kempton Park to Mangaung and beyond. If this report suggests that South Africa is still haunted by the spirit of Verwoerd, it also suggests, by omission, other specters must be named as well, starting with the authors of the so-called Washington Consensus. * About the video. As Equal Education members and supporters from across South Africa gathered at the movement's first national congress in Johannesburg last week, the question of what it means to be an "equaliser" was front and center. In the video, five learners [from Khayelitsha] from Equal Education's Social Activism and Documentary Filmmaking workshop reflect on their experiences as equalisers. This was also their first time producing, filming and editing interviews. [The learners were trained by students from The New School—Palika Makam, Jordan Clark and Carlos Cagin—who are in South Africa for two months supervised by AIAC's Sean Jacobs.]

July 4. U.S. Day of Independence. What’s more 'American’ than … Chevron Corporation? It’s pretty much always in the top 5 of U.S. based corporations. It’s deeply involved with everything having anything to do with energy or power. Oil, gas, geothermal. You name it, Chevron’s there, but not like a good neighbor. It’s got history, well over a century of environmental 'intrusions’. And its corporate logo is red, white and blue. If Africa’s a country, the USA is a red white and blue multinational corporation. So, let’s celebrate Chevron. Or better, let’s celebrate the Nigerian women who shut it down for a couple weeks, ten years ago, July 2002. At that time, a few hundred unarmed Itsekiri women, mostly mothers and grandmothers, occupied the Chevron Oil Tank Farm in Escravos. Their weapon? Their threat? Nudity. That threat of stripping themselves naked shut down the multi-billion dollar plant for eleven days. As Sokari Ekine explained, “The mere threat of it would send people running. These are mature women and for mothers and grandmothers to threaten to strip is the most powerful thing they can do. It's a very, very strong weapon. Chevron is American, but they have Nigerian men working for them, and women are held in particular esteem in Nigeria – and if a woman of 40 or 70 takes her clothes off a man is just going to freeze." The men froze. And so did the oil for a while. And then there were 'negotiations’. Emem Okon is a feminist activist organizer in the Niger Delta, who has consistently pushed and prodded Chevron. She founded the Kebetkache Women & Development Centre, in Nigeria, and is a key member in the global True Cost of Chevron network. She is more than a thorn in the side of Chevron. She’s a bomb in the lap and a stake through the heart. Emem Okon is the feminist face of petro-sexual emancipatory politics. Here’s how Emem Okon sees the 'negotiations’ that followed:

There were negotiations. But the reason the women took over the oil tank farm was that Chevron and other oil companies is fond of negotiating with only the men, because the community leadership comprises of only the men and the male youths. So because Chevron was not listening to the women and not paying attention to the concerns and interests of the women, the women decided to mobilize and organize, and took over the oil tank farm, because they wanted to get the attention of Chevron. They stopped production on the oil tank farm for 11 days, and they insisted that Chevron management staff should come down to Burutu community to discuss with them. But by the time Chevron decided to come and discuss and negotiate with the women, the process was taken over by the men. The state government sent representatives, the traditional rulers sent representatives, and it was only two women that was part of the negotiation.

Chevron makes it a policy of not listening to the women, and in particular not listening to strong activist women, like Emem Okon. In May 2010, Okon, as a legal proxy holder, tried to attend the Chevron’s shareholders meeting in Houston. She wanted to speak to the shareholders Chevron’s devastating environmental impact in the Delta. She was barred. So were sixteen other community representatives from around the world. Five members of the True Cost of Chevron coalition were arrested. This year, Chevron let Emem Okon speak – for a whole two minutes. In two minutes, Emem Okon had enough time to state the obvious. Chevron lies in its reports from the Niger Delta. Chevron’s activities in the Niger Delta – poisoning the water, ruining the land, devastating the local economies – directly attack women: women as fisher-folk and as farmers, women as mothers, women as community members, women as women: “The women of the Niger Delta call on Chevron and every other oil company to leave the Niger Delta oil under the ground. Stop destroying our environment. Let our oil be." The women of the Niger Delta are calling. They have had enough of Chevron’s charity, violence, exploitation and duplicity. Want to celebrate independence this year? Support Emem Okon and the women of the Niger Delta. * Photo Credit: Jonathan McIntosh

The women of Sudan have had enough. On the evening of June 16, 2012, women dormitory residents at the University of Khartoum said, Enough is Enough. Girifna. We are disgusted; we have had enough. In response to an announcement of astronomically increased meal and transportation prices, the women students staged a protest. A few male students joined in, and together they moved off-campus. Then the police attacked the students, raided the dorms, and, reportedly, beat and harassed women dorm residents. News spread, and the campus exploded. And the police again invaded. And then…something happened. Something that feels different. Some say these are anti-austerity protests or food protests or anti-regime protests. But those have happened before. Others however call them Sudan Revolts or Sudan Spring. Some dare call them the Sudanese Revolution. Whatever they are, just remember, they began with 200 young women getting up, walking out, and chanting, Enough is enough. Ya basta! And now, ten days later, Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir is described as 'defiant.’ That’s quite a statement, when the head of State, with all his armed forces and 'informal’ security forces is mighty enough to stand up, defiant, against women and girls who, as happened in Bahri last Thursday, have gone to the intersections of town, opened up folding chairs, sat down, and chanted for lower prices, more dignity, and a better government. Defiant, indeed. What started as a protest by a small group of women escalated, by the following Friday, into a sandstorm, which has continued to today. That includes protests, crackdowns, arrests and disappearances, State violence. And the women keep on keeping on. As Fatma Emam notes, as she shares a photo [above] of women in Bahri blocking the road:

women do not make sandwiches women make revolutions women make dreams come true

Whatever you call it, this wave of protests, this revolt, this revolution, this sandstorm, women, young women, set the spark.