Africa Is a Country

dan-moshenberg

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Dan Moshenberg

Dan Moshenberg founded Women In and Beyond the Global, a open access feminist forum.

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Who is Leymah Gbowee

Gbowee, an activist, is one of three Liberian women to jointly be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011. Most Western media, though, didn’t do right by her.

The "colorful" women of Karamoja

By Dan Moshenberg Somebody call Paul Gauguin. The site of exotic exploration of bare naked, happy  “backward”, “traditional”, and yet, magically, beautiful women has moved from Tahiti to Karamoja, in northeastern Uganda. According to media responses to the exhibition, “Colours of Karamoja”, held a couple of weeks ago at the MishMash Gallery, in Kampala, the women of Karamoja “radiate energy and power” with their “love of bright colours and physical adornment.” But the women of Karamoja are a bit more than a blank palette on which bright colors are splayed. A lot more, actually. The Karimojong are pastoralists. The men raise herds, mostly cattle, and raid the herds of other groups. The women and children mostly tend to the households and crops. That was the plan, and it worked for a while. Then the ivory traders brought guns, and, next, the army brought AK47’s. This meant that cattle rustling turned from highly localized to massively lethal. Men were being killed right and left, in furious battles that then became “intractable conflict”.  For women, the fields became too dangerous as well, and so women had to find other means to survive, and they did. The women of Karamoja had always brewed beer, for ritual and ceremonial purposes.  When the guns came and the men died in greater and greater numbers, the women started brewing and distributing beer for purchase. It turns out that “colorful” women are also creative women, “innovative … in managing scarcity.” It was in the context of mounting, and seemingly never ending, internecine warfare, and intimate violence, that women became the peace makers, through a combination of persistence and creativity. In one instance, for example, “two mothers from opposing communities exchange babies and breast-feed them as a symbolic alliance between the two communities.” The women of Karamoja are survivors, creators. They were the ones who, in the catastrophic year 1971 when Idi Amin took power, were attacked and stripped by soldiers, and were forced to crush their beads and melt their wedding bands. Those beads the women of Karamoja wear today are not simply adornments. The women of Karamoja do indeed wear bright colors and physical adornments, which are indeed stunning. Those necklaces and beads,however, do not emerge from “tradition” or  “backward culture”. They come out of a women’s history of struggle.

Song and Dance

By Dan Moshenberg Tuesday, August 9, 2011, was the annual celebration, in South Africa, of National Women’s Day. This public holiday commemorates August 9, 1956, the women’s march on the Union Buildings in Pretoria, in protest of the infamous pass laws. That day 20,000 or so women famously, and heroically, chanted, shouted, screamed: “Wathint’Abafazi Wathint’imbokodo!”. Translation: “Now you have touched the women, you have struck a rock!” That was 55 years ago. On Tuesday morning in South Africa (I am visiting here this week), the morning news talk shows, such as Morning Live on SABC2, celebrated with song, dance, some discussion. Women, and men, challenged the nation to do more, to do better. It was both festive and moving. At the same time, there was a silence at the center and heart of the celebrations. That silence was the abuse and death, in today’s South Africa, of women in childbirth. And that national silence was shared by major Western news outlets, such as The New York Times, Washington Post, the Guardian, the BBC, and others. On Monday, August 8, 2011, Human Rights Watch released a report entitled “Stop Making Excuses”: Accountability for Maternal Health Care in South Africa. Pregnant women, maternity patients, in the Eastern Cape are regularly abused. They are directly abused by so-called health care providers, and they are generally abused by the lack of accountability in the system. This results in women dying in large numbers. Women describe being physically and verbally abused. They are pinched, slapped, and roughly handled during labor. Women in labor are turned away from clinics, without examination or explanation. Women, weak from childbirth, are told to clean up after giving birth. They are left unattended, and uninformed, for hours and sometimes days. That’s South African women. For refugee women in South Africa, the conditions are far worse. What has the provincial or national government done in response to this horror? Nothing. Less than zero and worse than nothing. They have colluded through what might be called a system of non-accountability. And where’s the world press? Nowhere to be found. 1956: “Wathint’Abafazi Wathint’imbokodo! Uzakufa!” “You have touched the women, you have struck a rock, you have dislodged a boulder, you will be crushed!” 2011: “Stop Making Excuses!” Photo Credit: David Goldblatt.

Medea is a Malian woman

By Dan Moshenberg Did you hear about Medea? You know, the woman who killed her two kids? It turns out, according to the Associated Press, she lives in Mali, and her name is Coumba, or maybe Tabita. At any rate, she’s 18, a domestic worker in Bamako, and she did the unthinkable. She killed her child. Why? Why does a woman do “the unthinkable”? There’s the question. According to the AP, it’s because women in Mali are trapped. A poor country where abortion is illegal, where contraception use is rare, women are forced first into abusive, low paying jobs, and in particular domestic work, and then suffer rape and pregnancy. They must then rely on the kindness of strangers to help them pull through. The result? For women in prison, the top three crimes are theft, assault, infanticide. Mali is indeed a hard place. It suffers crushing poverty, is surrounded by weak and poor countries, is landlocked, and, perhaps most significantly, is on the verge of a population tsunami. Mali has one of the highest rates of annual population growth in the world. The capital, Bamako, may be the fastest growing city and, not surprisingly, is becoming one of the most expensive. This means the gap between haves and have-nots is also increasingly, quickly and massively. As if that weren’t enough, Mali is one of the most vulnerable places in the world to climate change. According to a recent report, Mali is hotspot for food insecurity due to climate change. A dismal picture. And an incomplete one. Mali is also considered a stable democracy, even a model moderate Muslim democracy. It’s current Prime Minister is a woman, Cissé Mariam Kaïdama Sidibé. New elections are expected next year. The leading candidate, at least at present, is Dioncounda Traoré, who supported the recent Family Code legislation, which supported equal rights, or more equal rights, between women and men. In fact, women are quite prominent all over Mali. Women choreographers like Kettly Noel, Haitian-born and Bamako-based, compose and perform dances that engage women’s issues, in Mali and across the continent. Militant women artists like Oumou Sangaré sing protest songs against polygamy as they organize concerts that are women’s, and feminist, festivals.  Defiant women singers such as Khaira Arby challenge their families and home communities as they challenge the world to keep up and to keep dancing. Fiercely feminist women writers such as Oumou Ahmar Cissé write, and argue, for the rights and autonomous spaces of women and girls. Malian women are prominently engaged in political structures, in State structures, in anti-poverty and other social movements, and in women’s leadership development among younger women and girls. This is not to say that Mali is perfect or easy. Its homophobic laws, and violence, made the news globally earlier this year and last year. Women struggle daily, and over the long haul, with all sorts of exclusion … and worse. Rather, it is to say that Coumba and Tabita, two young women, are part of a complex local, national, and regional narrative and fabric. They are not simply victims, they are not simply objects of pity, they are not simply vessels of pathos. They are not the African reiteration of a Greek myth or drama. They are, instead, two young Malian women who await and deserve a better report.

Malawi Spring

By Dan Moshenberg Did you hear about Malawi Spring? It started Wednesday, July 20. Thousands of people filled the streets of the capital Lilongwe, the commercial capital Blantyre, the northern city of Mzuzu, and elsewhere. Police are accused of having killed protesters, protesters are accused of having looted. According to the Western press, the streets are filled with riots, “anti-government” protesters, and eruptions of violence. The demonstrators are against the government, the police are against the protestors. But what are the protests for, and who are the protesters? None of the reports mention women. In and of itself, this omission would be bad enough, but given that this particular `spring’, just like those in Egypt and Tunisia, concerns rising food and fuel costs, the absence is glaring. In Malawi, as elsewhere, women not only purchase and prepare food, they farm it. So, where are the women of Malawi? They’re farming. Women farmers, like Esnai Ngwira, are investing in new, environmentally appropriate and sustainable farming techniques. Ngwira, a 57-year-old farmer in Ekwendeni, northern Malawi, has been working with a program that builds social ecology in sustainable ways. Rather than using fertilizer, for example, Ngwira uses crop residue. She gets a better maize harvest, helps the soil, helps the earth. Esnai Ngwira is “a star innovator.” Women are engaged in new projects in agroforestry, which not only provides their households with firewood and income, but opens their daily schedules for other endeavors. Malawian women are at the forefront of struggles for land access and ownership. In Malawi something like 80 percent of the land is communally owned. And so women are organizing into groups that, as a group, control and benefit from land the women farmers either lease or own. Women, like Maggie Kathewera-Banda, of the Women’s Legal Resource Centre, are researching, organizing, engaging and empowering rural women. Researchers and farmers understand that access to land and to household bargaining means access to power. Village women like Ethel James face polluted and fetid water where once it was clean. Infrastructures have collapsed. One borehole serves all of Kwilasha village in Machinga District, in southern Malawi. Women spend, or waste, whole mornings in pursuit of a single bucket of water. So, the women organize. They develop skills to fix the existent pipes and to lay new ones. Women, like Tiwonge Gondwe, are health activists, feminists, movement builders. They take HIV and AIDS and turn the stigma on its head. They organize communities … across the country. The stories could continue. Life in Malawi is hard. It’s a poor country, fuel and food prices are on the rise, the UK recently cut aid because of perceived mismanagement, the State is arrogating more and more power to itself. LGBTIQ people and communities are under attack. None of this should be minimized. At the same time, a mass protest, perhaps the beginning of a next phase of engagement, perhaps not, does not occur in a vacuum. In Malawi, as in Egypt, as in Tunisia, as around the world, spring means harvest. Harvest, in Malawi, as across sub-Saharan Africa, means women farmers. Where are the women? Not in the news reports of the Malawi spring.