WUNRN
Unique
Societies Where Women Are In Charge
By
Mehru Jaffer
Vienna (Women's Feature Service) -
Nadia Ferroukhi, 38, a Paris-based photographer, is mad about matriarchy and
spends much of her time travelling around the globe in search of dying
societies where women are still in charge.
A photgraph of Tumai, Kenya,female
residents taken by Nadia Ferroukhi, on display in Vienna, as part of the recent
exhibition, Fragrances of Light. (Credit: Nadia Ferroukhi\WFS).
Most recently she spent time at Tumai,
a village 300 kilometres north of Nairobi, Kenya, and returned to Europe with
stunning stills of women like Chile, Naliapu, Consalata, Namjal and others, who
decided to clear away acacia bushes with their own bare hands to build an
entire village only for women.
About 30 women from the indigenous
tribes of Samburu and Turkana led by
The rules at Tumai are very simple. To
live here, women have to be divorced. The women can live with their children,
regardless of whether they are boys or girls. However sons, once they attain 16
years of age, will have to leave the village either to find jobs for themselves
or migrate for higher studies. Even the daughters leave Tumai once they marry.
The 150 residents of Tumai hunt
together for roots that they use as food, build mud homes, rear chickens and
cows and train dogs to guard the village from both jealous men and wild animals
like hyenas.
Most of the money earned by the women
is from tourism. Tours to Tumai are common. Women stage song and dance
performances for tourists and also sell traditional artifacts, wood carvings
and jewellery. Best-selling handicrafts include gourds, small carved stools
propped under the neck while sleeping, shields, spears, wrist knives and
traditional swords called simis. Some women make clothing from local fabrics,
including the typical blanket in red blended with black and blue colours that
is used to keep warm during an early morning African safari.
Each woman gets to keep 90 per cent of
her total earnings for the day, while 10 per cent of it goes into the village
treasury. The decision to buy more chickens or to repair a home is taken
unanimously. Even when an idea is vetoed there is little dissent and never any
violence.
But despite liberating themselves from
men, these women do not wish to be labelled as man haters. Clarifies Ferroukhi,
"These women are not against men. They are against cruelty and often
violent attempts by the husband to dominate them."
During the photo shoot, Ferroukhi found
time to talk to
When she was about seven years,
One day Ferroukhi asked
In Tumai, Ferroukhi found residents
actually practising the principle of sharing. Whatever little there is in the
village is distributed equally between everyone. Everything that is the reverse
of patriarchy is the norm. The women are gentle with their male children who,
even after leaving the village, return for visits. The girls are encouraged to
study and don't have to undergo genital mutilation.
In effect, Tumai is not a traditional
matriarchal society but a very modern idea of women who have made a conscious
decision to take their life into their own hands despite the hardship and
poverty this entails.
Stills from Ferroukhi's visit were
recently displayed in
It is Ferroukhi's sensitivity to the
ideas of social justice that inspires her to study matriarchy. What really
helped her was the fact that she happened to have stumbled upon some important
literature about societies where neither men nor women dominate. She read about
pre-historic societies before the practice of monotheistic religions which
tended to be more egalitarian simply because women were in charge. "I am
most interested in social issues like injustice," she says.
Most of her photographs are focused on
immigrants who are forced to earn a living far away from home. Born of an
Algerian father and Czech mother, Ferroukhi is unable to get over the fact that
in a naturally rich country like
Ferroukhi's first foray into the
workings of matriarchy was in the faraway province south of Shangri La in
southern
Women and men stay together for as long
as they are in love. Words like jealousy and rape are not part of the
vocabulary here and women keep the children. Women are also the
decision-makers. They control household finances and pass on their family name
to their children. A family can be a clan of three generations of women and men
directly related to each other. No person gets to own goods and property and no
one accumulates more wealth than another. The relationship of father is not
important and the mother, along with male members of her family, look after the
children.
Some women in Mosou did tell Ferroukhi
that they yearned to live in modern societies and sometimes dreamt of a nuclear
family. "They look upon their way of life as old fashioned and
unexciting," she reveals.
This adventurous lens-woman has also
visited the Khasi tribe in Meghalaya,
Revealing, indeed, is the lens of
Fearless Nadia!
================================================================
To contact the list administrator, or to leave the list, send an email to:
wunrn_listserve-request@lists.wunrn.com. Thank you.