Popular Feminism Lecture
Centre for Women’s Studies
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
April 2, 2007
African Feminist Perspectives of Post-Coloniality
Patricia McFadden
(Edited Toronto 2007)
It gives me great pleasure to be here with you. Thank you especially to Angela Miles for
so graciously inviting me to OISIE and for hosting me in her lovely home.
The world has changed so much since we the last time we can remember – and the
change is throwing up so many new challenges. This evening, I shall be speaking briefly
to some of the most outstanding challenges that we face as feminists living and working
on a continent that has been considered booty for over half a millennium of human
history. I shall not dwell on the multitude of costs that this plunder and degradation has
resulted in for us as people who, incredulously, still retain the capacity to smile and
imagine a different future, in a collectively transformed world. But I will mention some
of the interconnections between the struggles that we are engaged in on the continental
space (including the islands that are part and parcel of the African geo-political reality),
and the blatantly rambunctious greed and impunity of neo-imperialism and recolonisation that is occurring in many parts of the continent at the present time, led
mainly by the USA and Britain.
I shall be using the notions of the post-colonial and post-coloniality as conceptual and
relational markers to enter a moment of transition occurring in Africa at the present time,
which is often represented as a time of crisis and chaos in western and other media. In
actuality what is happening in a society such as that of Zimbabwe reflects the emergence
of a consciousness and understanding of rights and entitlement among working African
people, particularly within the context of the African women’s Movement. This
interpretation of getting beyond an ugly, deeply painful, destructive past in order to
imagine ourselves as citizens comes out of an appreciation of feminism as an ideological
worldview that has as its core the belief in an ability to transform individual and
collective lives. Being able to read the moment wherever we live and struggle is a very
special insight that derives from being feminist; from being free and open-minded,
having the ability to imagine ourselves and our communities in new and liberated ways.
It is this sense of prescience that I am applying to situations where the political agency of
women, of feminist politics, is acquiring an increasingly critical significance in the
crafting of an alternative political tradition and practice.
So, I would like to present the notion of the post-colonial as a moment that reflects the
coalescence of a series of historical relationships between various groups and political
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constituencies, specific to the African continent. I will also link this notion to the
emergence and unfolding of particular class configurations and struggles within the
societies of the continent and their interface with the larger global environment. Central
to my definition of post-coloniality as a state of consciousness, a moment of transition
and a political performance is the agency of women, particularly working women and
other working communities across the African continent.
Feminist scholarship and activism is increasingly showing the difference between neocolonialism, as a period after the formal declaration of independence, when the middle
classes have used the state and the various colonial instruments of extraction and
domination to consolidate their positions within African societies through the enactment
of public and legal policy that facilitated accumulation for predominantly black men; and
post-coloniality as an emerging moment of contestation between those who have
occupied the state before and since independence, and those whose interests and needs
have become peripheral to the anti-colonial, nationalist project launched almost a century
ago. The resistance to colonialism is distinctive in its narration and significance because,
in my opinion, it expresses the process through which African women became political in
public and new ways – and this, addition to the dreams and visions that working people
in general brought to the liberation project – is what marks a turning point in the political
story of African history. Public, collectively crafted notions and expressions of being, of
consciousness and presence, became the vehicles through which women in particular
were expressing their expectations and demands from the neo-colonial state at the
moment of independence. When women dream, they dream powerful, amazing dreams;
dreams and desires that shift the landscapes of human relationships and power.
However, as those of us who study the neo-colonial moment know, the rhetoric of
promise and assurance did not translate into the viable and or durable social, legal,
economic or personal outcomes for most people in African (and other societies globally).
A critical analysis of class politics and of the ways in which small groups of
predominantly older males have manipulated and mobilized national resources in their
favour ( and on behalf of more global ruling class interests), enables us to bring that
understanding of the ‘politics of economy’ to feminist analysis in deeply illuminating and
empowering ways – in the context of Africa in this instance. The realization that most
people, located outside the largess of the state, would have to continue struggling – in
newer and more insightful ways – so as to establish the legitimacy of their entitlement to
and the exercise of their most basic rights as citizens and as human beings – is what I
think informs the struggles that we are observing in Southern Africa (and continentally)
at the present time. To become post-the-colonial by acquiring a consciousness of
entitlement that enables people to imagine themselves ‘citizens’ and to engage the state
on this crucial yet so easily assumed status (thanks to neo-liberal rhetorical claims) – is
what we see occurring in Zimbabwe and across that region in particular. It is a struggle
for a national democratic revolution - for the establishment and defense of people rights
and protections – in ways that are concretely about the immediate and long-term
livelihoods of working people. How our societies become post-colonial is the central
challenge for feminists in particular, given that most of the social indicators are pointing
to the consolidation of narrow, deeply exclusionary class practices and policies, moving
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our societies even further away from the visions that inspired and motivated the liberation
struggles of only a few decades ago.
Working African people, the majority of whom are rural women, who have been
excluded and treated as objects of occasional political expediency – for example during
infrequent elections – have begun to rise up in resistance to the hegemonic dominance of
both the state and those classes and groups that so far have used neo-colonialism to their
own expediency. Zimbabwe is an excellent example of how post-colonial consciousness
is reflected in the making of new political traditions within the civil society, with the
women’s Movement having assumed, until recently, an interesting and often
contradictory role, particularly in relation to the State and to the opposition parties that
are contesting power. In this instance, the collaboration between the women’s
Movement, the Trade Unions, the MDC and the National Coalition Assembly (which
encompassed all NGO/civil society groups in the country) has created a sharply contested
political terrain between ‘the opposition’ and the ruling ZANUPF party. In general
terms, the involvement of a women’s Movement in the national struggle for
democratization marks an important political and activist shift forward, and should be
recognized as such. However, the ideological and political/strategic implications of
becoming “swallowed-up” by a male-directed and male-owned political structure that
shows no shift in its patriarchal attitudes and behaviour towards women, pose serious
challenges to the women’s Movement and to feminists in particular.
The fact of the matter is that neo-liberal macro economic policies have not only reentrenched the interests of historically privileged white minorities in Southern Africa, in
the independence/neo-colonial period, particularly within commodity agriculture, mining
and other productive sectors of the region’s economies, but they have also created
multiple opportunities for newly emergent black middle class elements to begin
consolidating themselves as a class, using the state as a key site of accumulation and
political dominance. The deal between white settler elements and an emerging black
ruling class over the protection of property rights and the creation of opportunities for
accumulation is blatantly obviously in all the societies of this region.
This collusion (and conflict) in the exercise of primitive accumulation between white and
black men extends across the vast resource base of the continent, and is expressing itself
in the grotesquely skewed military budgets of most African countries compared to what
they spend for education and health care, for example, and the intensification of military
collaboration between African military structures and US/British and other European
military elites. Wars are raging all over Africa, fed by millions of small arms, which
become Africa’s debt – dumped into the remotest communities, where even the most
basic health, educational and social resources are non-existent. Death and destruction
reign on the bodies and in the lives of girls and women, and entire communities are being
wiped out; unimaginable forms of violation are being metered out by bandits and
supposedly legitimate military regimes, which are funded, trained, directed and condoned
by the so-called democracies of the western world. And the white ruling classes of the
north do not give a damn for the hundreds of thousands of African babies and women that
die as a consequence of capitalist greed; blown to bits by the millions of mines laid by
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bandits whose masters barter modern weaponry for bags of diamonds, tanzanite, gold,
oil, and mountains of coltan (a rare mineral essential in the production of cell phones and
other micro-chip dependent new technologies). At least 3and a half million Africans have
died in the DRC/Congo conflict these past five years, while the western ruling classes
have schemed with and or cajoled one group of African bandits after another (in Rwanda,
Burundi, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Angola, Zambia) to ensure that the mining operations of
Canadian, Belgian, French and US multinationals continue – regardless of the human
cost. In the western media, Africans are portrayed as primitive savages, who are unable
to function in the modern age, and who are engaged in acts of cannibalism amongst
themselves. What is the civilized west to do?
Clearly in order to get past the racist arrogance reflected in such right-wing expressions,
which are often accompanied by the call for a re-colonisation of Africa, we need to
refresh our feminist politics by re-visiting the critical notions of supremacy and impunity,
and show how they underpin capitalist and class privilege all over the world. It is at this
interstice that the difficult issue of privilege and its facilitation for most individuals in the
North has to be interrogated and politicized. We have to find the courage to live our lives
differently in order to distinguish ourselves, in every way possible, from the vicious
systems of exploitation which have provided consumerist democracy and ‘stability’ to
northern societies through the unmitigated, normalized plunder and degradation of
African societies and other regions of the Southern world.
At the local and national level, the active participation of newly independent
governments in the political and economic restructuring of formerly colonial economies,
without changing the fundamentally undemocratic relationships of power between the
state and poor Africans has created a new terrain of struggle. The tensions and
contestations that are emerging within the societies of the continent reflect the more
immediate issues of citizenship among the severely impoverished communities of rural
and urban poor, whose lives are further jeopardized by the rampancy of HIV/AIDS.
Instead of transforming the liberation project through long-term sustainable policies and
democratic practice, the newly emergent ruling classes have tended to further consolidate
the unequal relationships between themselves and the working poor by using the state
and the private sector for their interests, and more latterly through economic restructuring
programs, have systematically excluded large sections of the populace from access to and
the use of essential resources like health, shelter and education. South Africa is a mirror
image of regional disaster in the making.
The contestation over citizenship and inclusion into the nation-state as a two-fold
relationship that raises fundamental issues of property and other entitlements is key to
any attempt at explaining what is happening within Southern Africa and on the continent
as a whole. Very obviously, rights as historically situated social outcomes are located
within and in relation to the key public institutions of any society. Rights as public
resources are also directly linked with ones relationship to the market and systems of
production and exchange – all of which occur predominantly in the formally constituted
spaces of the public. Therefore, in the main, it is those persons who have a direct
relationship with property and or who control the structures and systems that regulate and
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distribute property and wealth in capitalistic societies, who can access their rights and or
demand some form of entitlement from the state. It is those who control wealth in our
societies who dictate to a greater degree the meanings of rights, even if such hegemonic
definition is continuously challenged and contested by the majority of people who are
poor and without such leverage.
More critically, the relationship between the state and individuals or groups of people is
still largely mediated by property relations, and on the African continent, it is this issue of
inclusion through the acquisition of property which has brought the land issue and
tensions around social/class reproduction to the fore.
How can we as radical feminists, who are critical of property relations and understand
their function in the hundreds of years of pillage and human degradation and indignity,
unravel this apparently intrinsic connection between the notion of rights and entitlements
to market systems and exploitative capitalist relations of production and consumption.
Without a doubt, every single Zimbabwean and South African woman would like to have
a piece of land – as property, not as a use value that is controlled and manipulated by the
state and its functionaries in both the rural and urban contexts but as an expression of her
autonomy and capacity to function as a modern African citizen. What middle-class
women ( feminists included) take for granted – a home and a steady ( or erratic but
possible) source of income, working class and peasant women dream of a the key to their
realization of a life with dignity and pride. Individual autonomy and the ability to
challenge and or confront the state and the apparatuses of the modern society are deeply
implicated in the ownership of property of one form or another. Women who have no
means of social reproduction are easy targets of violation, exclusion, victimization and
abuse. The sense of self-confidence and well-being that women acquire when they know
that they have a place of their own – whatever the quality of that shelter – is something
we all know is real and deeply political. The reality is that we are faced with an immanent
demand by women all over Africa, to own their own land and or acquire some form of
property.
The conceptualization of what engagement with property relations means for feminist
politics and for the survival of our societies has not yet begun. Overall, there is barely a
recognition of the challenges posed by the interpolation of property relations and
ownership systems onto the sites of struggle for accessibility of rights for all women,
while the notion of entitlement remains characterized largely by the narrow ethics of
materiality and inclusion into more secure social class locations. The conflation of
becoming a citizen with the occupancy and ownership of land – the most ubiquitous and
seemingly most accessible form of private property in the countries of southern Africa
today, poses an urgent imperative to feminist analysis and activism.
Black men all over the continent have used the symbolic re-occupancy of land as the
metaphoric reclamation of their manhood and masculinity– as men who once again rule
over the land and women in a space that they have fiercely contested with white men for
centuries. Inclusion into the nation/state has become contingent upon the recognition by
those in the state of not only ancient narratives of lineage and belonging, (and those who
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do not fulfill the criteria of authenticity are excluded legally and forcibly), but it is also
premised upon the acceptance of an ideological worldview that is giving greater primacy
to property and to middle-class status. How the African women’s Movement responds to
this challenge will be influenced by the class interests of dominant elements within the
Movement.
This is invariably exposing the gaps between and among women as a social group that
came together at independence to form the women’s Movement as a political and social
space within which the collective interests of women were identified; political and legal
strategies were formulated and designed/implemented; and organizations were created to
serve as the vehicles through which a core of women’s activists – including feminists –
would take the issues and demands of women into the public/institutional spaces of our
respective societies.
However, given the ideological narrowness of the women’s Movement as a political
platform that is defined by nationalist ideology and mainstream notions of gender
equality, tensions have begun to emerge between those in the Movement who have used
it as an opportunity to enter the middle-class and consolidate a negotiated relationship
with the state and certain patriarchal institutions, and those who have adopted a more
radical feminist stance on issues of state responsibility and accountability to women as
citizens, particularly on matters of equal rights and protections from cultural impunity,
misogynist violation ( by individual males and militarized elements), a more inclusive
notion of democracy in the public and private lives of women, and the delivery of
urgently needed health and educational resources.
It is at this intersection, where an invocation of feminist agency in the interest of
women’s collective rights and entitlements that should not be tied to property regimes,
clashes with the increasingly hegemonic interests of a small, black female middle-class
that the politics of post-coloniality come alive. Through a series of contested sites and
notions within the women’s Movement and in the wider social milieu, a new political
energy has begun to emerge within the region. This is evident in the kinds of intellectual
debates occurring within feminist discursive sites like feminist and gender journals; at
women’s studies workshops; at UN meetings and within global feminist and women’s
arenas like DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era), AWID
(Association of Women in Development), Amanitare and many other activist networks
and partnerships.
The most intense debates are occurring in relation to identity and women’s relationships
to patriarchal culture (which still provides the most essential markers of female
authenticity) and social conformity. In particular, the tensions are related to issues of
sexuality, pleasure, choice and integrity – and how crises like HIV/AIDS are impacting
on women’s sexual autonomy and rights. While the HIV/AIDS epidemic has not only
provided western media and a plethora of NGOs and aid organizations with a windfall in
terms of the re-invention of deep-seated prejudices and myths regarding the alleged
rampancy of African sexual behaviour (of particular fascination is the sexuality of
heterosexual black males who have come to represent the ultimate sexual monsters in
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most global media forms), it has also suppressed and or distracted attention from the
historically and racially entrenched systems of white/class privilege that still shape the
political economy of Southern Africa in particular, thus shifting attention from important
structural and policy issues that are also driving the virus.
Unquestionably, heterosexual rape and sexual assault by males within families, in public
spaces, and in situations of war and conflict have played a major part in the crushing,
genocidal wave that HIV has become across the continent, and feminists must continue to
challenge and bring to justice those who commit acts of impunity and misogyny against
females of any age or social status. However, beneath the fear and the terror that the
epidemic has unleashed, is also the creeping, increasingly belligerent sound and presence
of fundamentalist orthodoxies and condemnations of women’s consciousness and the
exercise of their sexual and reproductive rights and freedoms.
With the humanitarianism and supposed unconditional support to families ravished by
poverty and deprivation ( most of which is linked to the relentless plunder of African
resources by multinational corporations, supported and abetted by multilateral agencies
like the World Bank and the IMF), comes the entrenchment of rightwing fundamentalist
beliefs and practices that are not only shoring up ancient repressive practices that demand
the submissiveness of women and girls, but which roll back whatever progress feminists
and women’s activists have made over the past decades. How do we cut through the
rhetoric of rescue and survival and re-assert the inalienable and non-negotiable rights of
women to own and enjoy their bodies; to choose what happens to their bodies and their
minds, and to understand the power of pleasure as a political energy. These are the
challenges that pre-occupy us as feminists in the African women’s Movement at the
present time.
It is obvious that the resolution of ‘the land issue’ in southern Africa and continentally
will not necessarily translate into fuller rights for all citizens, given the deeply entrenched
differences that groups and individuals have in relation to the state as a mediator and
guarantor of rights and entitlements. However, if a broader rights discourse, which
interrogates the important interstices between citizenship as a status that is still linked to
property and issues of race, class, gender, and location – especially as it affects black
women, could be more widely initiated and sustained, this would enable newer ideas and
activist energies to be released and mobilized, especially in civil society engagements
with the state. The challenge of privileged inside the Feminist Movement and beyond has
to be encountered and considered for the possibilities it holds in terms of strengthening
solidarity and sisterhood among feminists, across the differences that separate us locally
and globally.
Let me conclude by reiterating that the most important challenges we face as African
feminists are directly linked to the need to re-conceptualize citizenship as a socially
inclusive notion and practice. It has to become a notion that cuts across raced, classed,
gendered and locational disparities and differences, and in that transgression, emerge as a
new expression of social and national inclusion. How to reconstitute the notion of
citizenship beyond its historical relatedness to property and the commodification of rights
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as market related social products presents a major imperative of post-colonial political
discourse and policy formulation.
The rapidity with which national states are being restructured into ‘regional states’ within
the ambit of concepts like the Southern African Development Community and the
African Union, poses an additional challenge, particularly as most citizens in the societies
of the continent have not yet established a consistent and or viable relationship with the
state and or with systems that confer and secure rights and entitlements for all. These
regional systems are also providing ruling elites with opportunities to establish and
consolidate military networks, which are difficult to confront and or make accountable to
citizens. Additionally, restrictive and exclusionary trading and surveillance systems and
structures are being put in place across the continent, to patrol and control women’s
mobility and economic activity. This raises the serious issues of women’s autonomy in
both civil and economic terms, and will undoubtedly undermine the networks that women
have created and used for decades as they traverse the region in search of socially
reproductive opportunities. Very central to these emerging state systems is the deliberate
distancing of the state from the citizen – a strategy which reflects a core objective of
structural adjustment/restructuring World Bank and IMF liberalization policies and
practices. While all the states of the continent liberally spew the rhetoric of ‘gender
mainstreaming’ and ‘gender equality’ – the real intent of regionalization is to facilitate
higher levels of surplus extraction by a small elite (black and white) class whilst creating
additional constraints on the abilities of citizens to hold the state accountable and
responsible.
Thus it is even more imperative that in the African context, becoming post-colonial has to
encompass a radical transformation of the feminist agenda into a lived politics of
contestation and consistency in our demands for the restructuring of the state and the key
social institutions as well as the creation of an alternative political, cultural and social
system that will enhance and nurture our creative and spiritual energies and life styles.
Patricia McFadden lives in Southern Africa and works as a radical feminist in the
African Feminist Movement and in the global Feminist Movement. Email:
McFaddenpt@aol.com
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