WUNRN
The women's movement must argue against a de-historicized understanding of new social movements in the African region, profiling examples of women’s active participation and leadership and situating these movements in the history of African people’s struggles for building alternative world orders, says Hakima Abbas.
At the recently concluded OpenForum,
held in
We are the solution
As this statement suggests, the moments of
significant shift to democratize society in Africa’s North are part of a larger
process of change – not only does the struggle continue, it is part of a long
history and trajectory of people- centered African struggle for liberation.
Indeed
Activist and writer Arundhati Roy, speaking
at the People’s University in
Arundhati Roy
Occupy, as an anti-imperialist movement led
largely around anarchist principles, is indeed following the multitude of
people around the world from Mozambique to Senegal, Greece to Honduras, who
have opposed a neo-liberal onslaught which has strangled nations and citizens
into entrenched poverty and dependency. Because of (our)stories[4] of
centuries of resistance against occupation, part of the struggle of the 99% in
the United States must be to dismantle the power and privilege which keeps them
in the 1% in relation to 99% of the world’s people.
It seems evident, if only demographically,
that no movement could thrive without the active participation of women.
Despite this, what is consistently disputed is the participation of women in
acts of civil resistance and while the question of role is posed, an important
question of power remains. In the age of Twitter, Facebook and rapid diffusion
of images around the world, the participation of women on the front lines of
protest and in acts of mass civil resistance can no longer be disputed. However,
the power of women evidenced by our leadership within movements, the actions
committed, and the ensuing change remains to be assessed. Further, the feminist
perspectives, theories, practices that shape the movements lack analysis.
Indeed, assessments of the ways in which patriarchal power within the movements
is or is not destabilized are needed.
Bibi Titi Mohammed
It is our responsibility as women in the
struggle to not only document our presence and analyze our modes of
participation in movements for change, but we must also seek to understand how
our theory (individual and collective) informs movements, deconstructs
patriarchy within movements, and shapes the collective vision for liberation
for all. Even people’s (our)stories have rested on the narrative of men in the
struggle—men who have access to tools of documentation and have been positioned
in formal leadership. So while the political thought of independence struggle
in Ghana, for instance, is largely documented through the writings of Nkrumah,
the invisible political process, thought, and tactics of the market women who
were central to liberation remains obscured with recognition relegated to
participation rather than leadership of thought, knowledge, ideas and
strategies. Even the political thought of women who have held formal leadership
positions in our liberation struggles, like Field Marshal Muthoni in Kenya,
Bibi Titi Mohammed in Tanzania, Thenjiwe Mtintso in South Africa, has yet to be
archived. We need to know how their knowledges shaped the movements in which they
held active leadership roles.
Long before people took to the streets of
Tunis and the squares of Cairo, two important acts of mass civil resistance
tipped the balance of power and forced concessions for democratization in
Guinea (2007) and Madagascar (2009). Women maintained visible leadership roles
within the top tiers of the mobilizations in Guinea and in Madagascar. In
Guinea, Rabiatou Serah Diallo, General Secretary of the National Confederation
of Guinean Workers was one of three leaders of the general strike and in
Madagascar Mamy Rakotondrainibe is the president of the ‘Collectif pour la
Défense des Terres Malgaches’ which was active in the protests against land
grabbing that sparked the mass protests of 2009. Without the corporate media
spotlight on this civil resistance, the gains and losses have not shaped the
popular imagination of Egypt and Tunisia and allowed for the proliferation of
lessons learned. And as with the field marshals of liberation, no significant
attempts to document the political thought of these women and the countless
foot soldiers have been made.
In both our past and present struggles, the
documentation of women’s political thought must not be a purely academic
exercise but rather a feminist movement building process, which allows women’s
contributions to create and build an alternative world order. As Shereen Essof points
out, “In an environment of deepening polarisation, alienation and misogyny,
when the world’s socio- economic and political paradigms are failing us, it is
important that as feminist activists we re-evaluate our strategy in order to be
clear about which platforms allow us to engage in activism that contributes to
building a free world for all people by dismantling patriarchy and its brother
ideologies.”
Importantly, the growing movements for
democratization of Africa are pushing organizing outside of the NGO space, the
dominance of which was strangling resistance into logframes. The leadership of
women in multiple sites of struggle creates important conversations about where
transformative processes percolate and whether the revolution can create
self-determination from the body to national borders. The unique protest of
Aliaa Magda in Egypt whose near naked photos stood as a singular reclamation of
embodiment spoke eloquently to this nexus.
Let us bring together multiple people,
groups, and communities from and in various spaces to redefine and create
alternatives based on past and present community-based knowledges, principles
of equity, and value for plurality. Not merely as an intellectual exercise, but
as a profound community process of building a different world. As Paulo Freire says:
“Critical and liberating dialogue, which presupposes action, must be carried on
with the oppressed at whatever the stage of their struggle for liberation. The
content of that dialogue can and should vary in accordance with historical
conditions and the level at which the oppressed perceive reality. But to
substitute monologue, slogans and communiqués for dialogue is to attempt to
liberate the oppressed with the instruments of domestication.”
As the people of Africa take to the streets, at the vanguard are those most
disempowered and marginalized from the dominant project, it is indeed time that
African women, and peoples broadly, create our world in our image reclaiming
our power and self-determination.
[1] The term “North Africa” has become
associated with the division between so-called sub-Saharan
[2] Yara Sallam, Nazra for Feminist
Studies, during Open Forum, May 2012, Cape Town, South Africa
[3] The Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings in
2011 are often referred to as “leaderless revolutions.” I posit here that
these, more accurately, can be described as leaderfull civil resistance.
[4] I use (our)stories throughout in an attempt to gender neutralize the terms history or herstory, which is more commonly used in feminist activism, in recognition of gender plurality rather than a binary and an attempt to reclaim the past in the narrative of the people rather than the powerful.
This article was originally published in The
Feminist Wire.