Despite Our Best Efforts, "Women's Rights" Still Resists Africanization

The focus of African women activists on gender violence and on women’s rights remains disconcerting.

But before I get into the details of why this is so, I would like to highlight the historical figure named Mary Nyanjiru. Nyanjiru entered the local Kenyan legends in the 1920’s after she challenged the men in the crowds outside a colonial prison to exchange their trousers for skirts if they were afraid to protest the arrest of Harry Thuku. The protest subsequently resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people at the hands of the colonial authorities. What makes Nyanjiru’s action striking is her use of African sensibilities to challenge oppression.

In many African societies, a man’s masculinity rests on two key elements: his initiation and his affirmation by African women. I will not dwell on the former because traditionally, that is an area for African men to sort out between themselves, preferably in secret and away from the media.  As an African woman, I am interested in the second element, because of the manner in which Nyanjiru has shown that referring to man’s masculinity is a rhetorical device used by women for empowerment of the entire society, not just themselves.

I heard of Nyanjiru when I was a young girl and so I grew up knowing that a man who fights with or beats a woman demonstrates the greatest cowardice that few African men worth their pride would want to be associated with. By this African logic, domestic violence is an expression of a man who is a coward twice, for he not only is fighting with a woman, but he is also fighting her in private in order to hide his cowardice from the public. I am not saying that there was no domestic violence when I was a child. I am saying that I grew up knowing that domestic violence was wrong and un-African thanks to African values rather than feminism or human rights. 

During the run up to party nominations for the Kenyan general elections, a woman who beat Najib Balala in party nominations responded to his refusal to accept the result by challenging him to prove he was a man and fight her again at the ballot box. I will remind the reader that the population in the Coast province is predominantly Muslim, so all that hoo-haa about Muslim women having no voice and being subservient is something I find very hard to believe, especially if the speaker is white, educated in Western schools or a Christian. In any case, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Indonesia have had Muslim women as heads of state and government, an achievement that the United States has not yet been able to boast of, and may not if Hilary Clinton fails to win the presidency next year.  

I have a humble repertoire of other historical moments in which women, from their consciousness as Blacks and as members of a society that has been routinely persecuted by Europeans, fought for justice using this age-old African construction of masculinity. It includes the Mothers of Political Prisoners in Kenya, who in the 1990’s used traditions to challenge their unfair imprisonment of Koigi wa Wamwere and others. There are also the South African women’s protests against the passes that fractured their families, an event that Lauretta Ngcobo brilliantly fictionalised in her novel And They Didn’t Die. Of course this is just one of the many platforms on which African women have inspired and led many struggles for our dignity in both the continent and its diaspora.

There are African women who were queens, warriors and prophets and who made important contributions to our societies. We know of women such as Winnie Mandela and Agathe Uwilingiyamana whose struggled against oppression and assumed prominent political roles. The names of such women would make better names for NGO’s that focus on women’s rights, rather than the English and French based acronyms that we now use. 

 The common bond between these women is their love for their societies that leads them to confront the system that dehumanises every African rather than limit themselves to blasting men and “patriarchy.” It is this consciousness of the larger world in which we live, or what Steve Biko called Black Consciousness, that I find lacking in feminism and the discourse of women’s rights. In most discussion of African women’s rights, there is an inherent assumption that African societies and traditions wholeheartedly endorse women’s oppression, and that human rights – a discourse imported from the West – is the solution to this crisis.  

It is true that there are some African traditional practices that disavantage women. However, blanket statements that condemn African cultures and histories in their totality ignore the global reality in which we live. We are currently dominated by a racist empire that renders any criticism of African cultures, however well intended, an affirmation of the racist distortion of our history and our identity to faciliatate our subjugation.

The recognition of this reality is missing in African women’s endorsement of Western, dubiously called “international,” protocols on women’s rights.  Elizabeth Mataka, for instance, asks the rhetorical question “[A]m I wrong to say that in some of our cultures here in Africa, a well brought up daughter is one who is submissive and obedient?” I assume that the answer expected from the reader is “no,” but I say a categorical “yes,” for the simple reason that the question does not appreciate the context in which we speak and remains virtually silent about the millions of famous and ordinary African women who can hardly be considered submissive.

Mataka also asks: “Another example, am I wrong in saying that some of our cultures here in Africa condemn divorce; and our societies are quick to denounce marriage separation, even a marriage with high risk and abuse?” Again I say “yes.” From my experience growing up in Nairobi, it was the Christian pastors, in the name of Ephesians or some other epistle from Paul, who told women that God did not endorse divorce and what they needed to do was to pray for the salvation of their brutal husbands rather than leave them.  

On the other hand, I know from my traditions that the ceremony of divorce was performed when the dowry paid during marriage was returned to the man’s family by the woman’s family. And in some cases, the husband’s violence was a major reason for divorce. And sometimes, he could not get too far with brutalizing his wife because the woman’s brothers would give him a stern warning. In other words, the reasons for which families discourage women from getting a divorce range from concern to keeping a certain public image to greed and a desire to maintain contact with a rich male in-law. These noble and not-so-noble motivations need not be pegged to African traditions. African traditions do not deserve to have their reputation and integrity smeared by the selfish inclinations of some African individuals.  

Factual inaccuracy aside, the main problem with “rights” as a framework to address African women’s issues is its disregard for the specific historical context in which we live. However objective and well-intended women might be in criticizing our societies and governments for the appalling gender inequity in our continent, the reality is that our critisms are interpreted to endorse the Euro-centric view that Africans are backward.

And the fact that these criticisms are issued in colonial languages means that they are more accessible to our accusers and exploiters than to the majority of African societies who do not even get a chance to challenge the accusations. Boubacar Boris Diop highlights this reality in his essay in the edited work Negrophobie, in which he argues that the culturalist critique of African societies by African intellectuals is, in reality, a conversation with a certain Western world rather than amongst Africans themselves. 

When the global context in which we live is minimized or ignored in the name of championing the cause of African women, it erroneously portrays African women as siding with the West against African men. Therefore, it would be more profitable to discuss the specific communities and practices that women take issue with so that the Africans concerned can engage in a fruitful discussion under the appointed tree where they can thrash out the problem and find an amicable solution. Mooladé, the last film by Ousmane Sembene, brilliantly accomplishes this in its portrayal of African women who challenge the practice of female excision using African institutions rather than by appealing to Western dogma. Moreover, the price paid by the female protagonists ensures that the glory of the women’s accomplishments are not usurped by Western feminists pretending that African women have always been feminist even though they did not use the specific term. 

The second problem with “rights” is that it is usually framed in terms of African women’s access to elitist goods such as Western-education and employment. There is no problem with advocating for policies that allow a greater numbers of girls to go to school. However, a family that is constrained by limited economic resources to send only one child to school will have to discriminate on some basis, be it age, gender or intelligence. Moreover, despite the greater proportion of boys who attend school, the fact remains that these boys are a minority even within their own gender. Rather than lament the few girls who go to school, we should lament the limited access of all African children to education and training that will broaden their options in this globalized world.  

The focus on access to elite institutions also overlooks one of the serious cultural problems confronting our societies today: Western consumerism. As Fanon warned in The Wretched of the Earth, the responsibility and self-confidence of African youths was under serious threat from advertisements and promotion of Western consumer goods which they could barely afford. But the reality is worse than he predicted. African masculinity has been distorted to such a point that access to big cars, expensive clothes and dollars – generally referred to as the bling-bling culture – has now overtaken intiation, leadership and responsibility to family and society as the rite of passage for young men. And naïve young African women who have not yet learned to look at a man’s character rather than wealth are caught up in this snare, and are sometimes left holding the babies of the men who are yet to grow up. The framework of “rights” does not adequately address this cultural assault on the dignity of both African women and men, an assault which usually pushes aside the all-important issues of responsibility and maturity. 

The third and most important problem with rights as a platform for African women’s concerns is the primarily Eurocentric philsophical and historical foundation of “human rights.” The American Constitution and the French Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme, which provide the inspiration for the UN Charter, were written by the proverbial dead white men in an attempt to protect their own privileges rather than guarantee the freedom of all human beings living on their countries’ soil. William Lloyd Garrison, a white American abolitionist, recognized that the American constitution protected slavery from being legislated out of existence, and that is why he called it “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.” In France, a country that boasts of being the “home” of human rights, universal sufferage was a illusion until 1945, when women finally got the right to vote. French women were apparently “given” the right by Charles de Gaulle as a thank-you gift for their support during the war.  

“Human rights” were never intended for women or worse still, for Africans. That is why the drafting of the venerated American and French documents coincided with a concerted effort by Western scientists that prove that Africans were not human. And that is why slavery continued in the United States and French-ruled islands while the intellectuals sang about Enlightenment and human rights. Toussaint Louverture irked these same countries when he interpreted the declarations to apply to Africans and led the emancipatory war in Haiti. More than two hundred years later, France, the United States and their allies have continued to ensure that Haiti pays dearly for making the assumption that human rights applied to Africans.

In the United States, the fight for dignity and justice by African Americans in the 1960’s led to a separate bill on “civil rights,” thwarting efforts by nationalists such as Malcolm X to bring their plight before the United Nations as a human rights issue. During the Algerian War for independence, French intellectuals continued to justify their country’s atrocities by arguing that colonialism was an inherently good institution that had been sabotaged by a few “bad elements,” since in their view, France was uniquely bestowed with humanity and was duty-bound to spread it to the rest of the world. 

The discourse of rights is problematic when applied to Africans – including African women – because it ignores this history and exonerates our oppressors who have no moral authority to judge our societies. But for African women, the discourse of “rights” poses a more insidious problem. It portrays African women as too focused on what goes on in the house to have a larger perspective of the global forces that affect them, their families and societies. The failure of women’s rights activists to address the manner in which the global framework interracts with our lives makes us appear as too simple-minded to understand the connection of global politics to the brutality and irresponsibility of our husbands, our ability to be professionals, to earn a descent income from our work, to go to school, to enjoy a decent marriage, to put food on children’s plates and clothes on their backs.

The focus of gender also fails to recognize that as daughters, sisters, cousins, friends, mothers and wives of African men, we are still humiliated when African men are portrayed by the Western world as hooligans or when they are impoverished and imprisoned by the oppressors. Discourses that portray our motherhood as a social demand rather than as a relationship between generations are demeaning to both us and our children. 

The International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, in my view, confirms the de-socialization of women. The UN chose 25th November to commemorate the struggle against violence against women because it marked the anniversary of the assassination of the Mirabal sisters in the Dominican Republic under the regime of Rafael Trujillo. The limitation of the sisters’ struggle to women is demeaning and patronizing, because it ignores an important point: the central events that influenced their activism was the imprisonment of their father and their husbands. They did not die from a domestic battle, as the International Day suggests. They were assassinated on their way home from visiting their husbands in prison. Moreover, Trujillo was an amourous and racist dictator supported by the United States, and the deaths of the sisters heralded the end of his regime.  

The turning point of Dominican history symbolized by the Mirabal sisters is conspicuously missing from the UNFPA that limits the violence against women to sex, marriage and pregnancy. No mention is made of violence suffered by women under structural adjustment programs, environmental degradation and political repression under Western-supported and funded dictatorships. As far as the UN is concerned, the only violence women suffer is from conspicuously non-Western traditional practices rather than from racist exploitation and government repression. 

By pointing to the divisive politics of “women’s rights,” I am not excusing the African men who collude with Europeans to impoverish us and oppress us. Neither am I exonerating the African male heads of states who make fools of themselves when they grovel to George Bush and Nicolas Sarkozy who are the age of their sons. On the contrary, I am insisting that African men who are frustrated with their bosses or our childish politicians should take their frustrations to the streets like the men they say they are, instead of unleashing violence on their wives and children. And we need to knock the heads and pull the ears of those young men who entertain primarily white consumers by demeaning our daughters and their sisters.  

Tackling the issues that both women and men confront requires a recognition of the global framework, otherwise we will inadvertently arrive at the common scenario in which Africans entertain the Western world with our in-house battles across the gender divide. Africans would be better off challenging the countries that have distorted gender relations by dehumanizing both men and women, rather than African women attempting to use the language of our oppressors to liberate ourselves. Let us African women remind our brothers that behaving like cowards and hooligans in the name of following “African traditions” is unacceptable. Such excuses are an insult to our ancestors who have fought so gallantly for us to be where we are today. 

The problem with the discourse of “rights” is that the African women, men, children, animals, environment, culture and history are always found wanting in comparison to a Western world that does not even possess the moral standing to judge us, and that does not allow its own record to be questioned using the same standards by which it judges us. I strongly advocate for distancing ourselves from the language of rights and asserting that our traditions, language and history provide us with the necessary tools for safeguarding our dignity as women and as Africans. Let us highlight the roles of women in Pan-Africanism and Black Consciousness so that African women are assumed to be an integral part of these movements rather than seen as a late inclusion following an after-thought about the gender balance.