Year: 2016
STANDING ON AFRICAN FEMINIST LAND : A reflection by Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah
STANDING ON AFRICAN FEMINIST LAND : A reflection by Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah
The African Feminist forum was an event full of revolutionary love and heated discussion. It was a time of growth, and a time of healing. It was a time for us as Feminists to just be. Below is a reflection on the experiences of an AFF alum, and renowned blogger and the media co-coordinator for AWID. Find out more about AWID and the original piece here.
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STANDING ON AFRICAN FEMINIST LAND
On my first day in Zimbabwe I visited the National Museum of Science. Above the doorway of the anteroom hung a picture of Nehanda Charwe Nyakasikana, with the caption ‘MAPFUPA ANGU ACHAMUKA’. This was translated to me to mean, “my bones will rise”. Nehanda was a spirit medium active in the first Zimbabwe Chimurenga [1]. She inspired her people in the liberation struggle, refused to convert to Christianity and was sentenced to death by the colonisers. The story is told that Nehanda went singing and dancing to the gallows declaring, “my bones will rise” to win freedom.
An image of a poster at the National Museum of Science, Harare. (Photo: Nana Darkoa)
I have always felt strongly that Zimbabwean women embody resistance. Women in Zimbabwe took active part in the liberation struggles for independence as fighters and comrades. In my 2008 interview with Margaret Dongo, a former freedom fighter, she emphasized, “there were no rubber bullets for women”. On the warfront, women and men were trained in a similar manner, women did not get preferential treatment.
A Milestone on the #AfriFem Journey
The resistance, creativity and strength of Zimbabwean women resonated in the fourth African Feminist Forum (AFF) held in Harare from 10-12 April 2016. The presence of over 160 African feminists from 32 African countries and the Diaspora amplified and multiplied the energy of the Zim sisters.
Sisters from South Africa sang, “…this land is women’s land…” and right there, in the hall of Rainbow Towers, it felt as if we were standing on African feminist land.
As someone who has been lucky enough to attend three consecutive AFFs, I felt a different energy at #AFFZim. The space felt more radical, it was clear that the AFF had been on a journey, and suitably on its 10th anniversary had grown into a more formidable space. A space that confidently said, “We are feminist. No ifs. No buts”. A space full of young feminists, queer bodies, academics, differently abled women, sex workers, older women… A space with sisters from all parts of our continent across our various arbitrary colonial divisions – activists from Egypt, Senegal, Kenya, Nigeria, Mali, Botswana, Angola, South Africa, Mauritania, Uganda… emphasizing the need for us to continue to build solidarity across our movements, and to create spaces which welcome us in all our diversities.
from left to right: Bella Matambanadzo, Everjoice Win, Thoko Matshe and Margaret Dongo. (Photo: Nana Darkoa)Nurturing the Body and Soul
Wellness was weaved into the entire AFF programmeof the AFF with some of us waking up early to shake what our collective Mamas gave us at Zumba classes with Kuda whilst the more zen sisters worked on their downward dog poses. We did not forget about the importance and benefits of sexuality and its links to well being. In an evening session on ‘Sexuality and the Well of Being’ we shared about a variety of sexual experiences and I had the pleasure of passing dildos around the room with Iheoma Obibi and Prudence Mabelele, my collaborateurs in sex positivity.
Highlights & Lowlights
We spoke about the continued need to dismantle patriarchy in all its forms. Sisters from Zimbabwe shared that they had nicknamed patriarchy ‘Patrick’. In speaking on ‘New Faces of Patriarchy’, Bisi Adeleye Fayemi extended the metaphor and reminded us that we needed to work against both ‘Patrick’ and ‘Patricia’.
In a session on ‘Protest Movements’, we heard from Thenjiwe Mswane about the #FeesMustFall movement, its non-hierarchical leadership structure and the recent exclusion of feminist and queer bodies within the movement. Marian Kirollos spoke about the ongoing struggles in Egypt, and the prominent role that women continued to play in the continued uprising. Dorothy Njemanze reminded the audience that the secondary school girls abducted from Chibok, Nigeria represent a tiny fraction of the thousands of girls captured and forced into sexual slavery by terrorists and militias.
In breakout sessions, we discussed the importance of creating feminist cultural spaces, documenting our stories by writing and blogging, and the connections that need to be made amongst our feminist diasporas for Pan-African organizing across the world.
As with every gathering of passionate, strong-minded sisters, we had our moments of tensions and disagreement. I was with the crew that felt, ‘what is this respectability politics?’ when one too many Aunties sighed about how ‘young women are showing all their breasts and vaginas on social media’.
Kampire Bahana from Uganda challenged this eloquently, pointing out that this was part of a purity narrative. Some younger queer sisters spoke up about feeling a level of discomfort and silencing in the space. We were all reminded that we needed to be conscious and attentive to the various forms of privileges that we carry.
As in all previous AFFs that I have attended, I left feeling inspired and reinvigorated to continue in my life of activism, knowing that I have sisters all over the continent and globe who stand with me, and whose work and dynamism continues to blaze a path for those to come.
Ebola: Local efforts were key in Sierra Leone
Ebola: Local efforts were key in Sierra Leone
Chuku Emeka Chikezie is a writer we commissioned to write a piece that focused on the ways in which women were involved in responding to the Ebola Crisis. The piece was originally posted on the Journalist but has been re-posted below.
Ebola: Local efforts were key in Sierra Leone
Lessons can help in battle against Zika virus
Hot on the heels of the Ebola outbreak that gripped Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone in 2014 and 2015, experts are now reflecting on the experience of the battle with Ebola to inform the Zika virus fight. The lesson? Keeping it local pays off.
The biggest lesson after the Ebola outbreak, certainly in Sierra Leone, was the centrality of community participation, ownership, mobilisation, and engagement in ending the epidemic; however a recent Harvard Business Review article highlighted four lessons from the Ebola crisis with relevance to the recent spreading of the Zika virus: pinpoint hotspots with widespread testing; implement targeted control measures; prevent widespread transmission; and integrate research with immediate action.
It isn’t that the four conclusions the experts draw in their HBR article are necessarily wrong, the problem is that they tend to overstate technical solutions that rely upon foreign expertise at the expense of locally adapted, people-centred solutions that, when applied early enough, are less costly and disruptive.
I worked for nearly a year on the Sierra Leonean Ebola response and found that there were many lessons at the end of the outbreak. For instance, upon visiting one northern district in Sierra Leone, which was at the epicentre of the outbreak, the research team was intrigued to learn that one Member of Parliament, Isata Kabia, had organised awareness raising activities as early as April 2014, a month before the first confirmed case in the region.
Kabia was an MP in the Port Loko district of Sierra Leone. A cosmetic chemist by profession, Kabia is one authority figure who knew she had a massive role to play in mobilising her constituents. “I told them, I’m a scientist,” Kabia recalled reflecting on those early days, “I’m more scared of Ebola than you are.”
Kabia proved to be an unstoppable force during the first few months of the spread of Ebola. Using $600 of her own money, a matching sum from donors, and six phones donated by a local telecoms company, she set up a communications network linking health authorities with some of the most remote settlements that she had identified when elected in 2012, through a citizens’ parliament she had initiated.
“In 2013, right after elections, we did a citizens’ parliament and this was my way of making sure the people were involved and owned their own development track,” recalled Kabia. “We sat down, we highlighted the issues, agriculture, business opportunities, jobs, the mines, the health and education issues in the constituency. We prioritised. We decided among ourselves, what is a priority? Which area should we focus on?”
This hands-on approach helped in mounting an effective Ebola response in the constituency. “What we wanted to do was to make sure that within the interior where the burials are going on that you don’t know about, where the sick don’t have any hospitals so they’re going to be cared for at home, had a way to reach the CHO [Community Health Officer] in Lunsar,” Kabia explained. “The CHO had the command phone, and then the phones within the interior are to call him in case of any suspected case or any suspected symptoms so somebody could go and verify instead of them trying to move the person.”
Kabia explained that many of the areas were inaccessible by even the motorbikes (known as Okadas) commonly used for transportation, let alone cars. “You can’t imagine somebody sick and trying to get out to a main hospital because there’s no hospital within their own area,”said Kabia.
Significantly, this early engagement with the local community signaled a warning which, had it been heeded, may have averted huge loss of life and economic disruption later. Kabia recalled how young people from the area put on a play “using the first messages we got from the Ministry of Health about not touching sick people, not touching the dead and certain foods. So the message right there on that day in Marampa was zero touch. Zero touch for bat foods, zero touch for sick people, zero touch for dead people,” she said.
At the time, Kabia had alerted health authorities, however, due to the levels of resistance around burials and the touching of dead bodies, which is the prime cause of infection, the warning wasn’t sufficiently heeded. “When we said zero touch for dead bodies, there was such a ruckus around the room, we just knew it was going to be a big issue,” she said.
Prior to the Ebola outbreak, Kabia had championed women’s causes and concerns in her parliamentary work. “Most of my focus is on women, they need the most assistance and assisting them has greater impact for the whole society,” she said; further noting that ‘women’s concerns are everybody’s concerns’.
The distribution of power in a patriarchal society such as Sierra Leone’s typically disempowers women and Kabia notes that this is an important social point in the fight against any infection. “With Ebola and what happened we reaffirmed, with any disease, it’s the women who are the caregivers at home,” Kabia argued. “Usually, when the women themselves are sick at home, they don’t even have the power of choice. As a woman, you can’t decide when/if you go to a hospital. Somebody has to allow you, by giving you money to go to a hospital. That extends all the way through to maternal care. Somebody’s deciding for you when you go to a hospital when you’re sick. When sick at home, you are the doctor, you are the nurse. Women have the potential to be much much more affected by this disease just because of that culture,” she said.
For these reasons, Kabia had a hunch that women would play a key role in the response as informers and first responders. In the end, she worked with older women as well as young men and women. Kabia believes this mobilisation effort paid dividends: “I think, because immediately they felt included. Immediately, they felt maybe saving lives could be their responsibility. You give people that kind of power, they respond,” she said.
And respond they did. The former MP recalls how her constituents approached her and said “Honourable, how can we help?” Young people became the de facto surveillance officers, the contact tracers, the first responders. “I think that community ownership helped tremendously in my constituency and I’m sure in other areas as well. I couldn’t be everywhere so the natural thing was to set up teams where we’d have people in the local areas. We didn’t import anybody to say you go and manage that particular area,” Kabia said.
Her approach paid off. Local leadership in other districts, such as Koinadugu in the North and Pujehun in the Southeast, helped to either stave off the worst effects of the Ebola outbreak or to end it. And a lot of this happened before the massive international mobilisation joined government efforts to tackle what eventually became its peak in November 2014, with an outbreak producing a staggering 500 cases a week.
Yet we hear so little of the efforts by the MP Kabia and other local leaders whose tireless efforts undoubtedly made a decisive difference at significant points in the 18-month outbreak. It is partly understandable that the international media pays disproportionate attention to foreign medical workers who risk their lives (as frontline Ebola response workers undeniably did) to help out in a faraway land. But unless we pay greater attention to local agency, we may inevitably arrive at flawed conclusions that poor countries like Sierra Leone are totally dependent on overseas assistance; lack resilience to handle crises (even if they need additional support); and that their entire leadership is inept, ineffectual, or corrupt.
Worse, if citizens of Sierra Leone and other developing countries internalise such faulty insights, they will miss vital opportunities to build on all the positive things they achieved under extremely challenging conditions. There’s something there for Brazilians and Latin Americans to take away too.
Unlocking the Doors. Feminist Insights for Inclusion in Governance, Peace and Security
Unlocking the Doors. Feminist Insights for Inclusion in Governance, Peace and Security
By: Dr. Awino Okech
This is the third in a series of three African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF) primers entitled Feminist Perspectives on Governance, Peace and Security. The primers are intended to:
1. Offer a review of the major debates on women, governance, peace and security in Africa.
2. Review and analyse women’s movements’ interventions in governance, peace and security.
3. Offer a set of policy and advocacy priorities based on political and practical realities.
4. Benefit women’s rights activists, organisations and people in government at the frontline of local and national mobilization initiatives seeking to enhance women’s leadership.
5. Assist in building alliances and structuring support across various institutions working towards enhancing women’s political participation.
This is the third primer in the series. It analyses the successes and gaps in women’s movements’ approaches to the intersections between governance and the security complex. These insights are based on AWDF’s analysis of some of the major challenges confronting movement building in the areas of governance, peace and security. With these primers, our objective is to re position feminist politics as a fundamental expression of accountability to our cause and constituencies, and to provide an opportunity for advancing individual and collective learning.
Gender and Security in Africa
Gender and Security in Africa
By: Dr. Awino Okech
This is the second in a series of three African Women’s Development Fund primers entitled Feminist Perspectives on Governance, Peace and Security. The primers are intended to:
1. Offer a review of the major debates on women, governance, peace and security in Africa.
2. Review and analyse women’s movements’ interventions in governance, peace and security.
3. Offer a set of policy and advocacy priorities based on political and practical realities.
4. Benefit women’s rights activists, organisations and people in government at the front line of local and national mobilisation initiatives seeking to enhance women’s leadership.
5. Assist in building alliances and structuring support across various institutions working towards enhancing women’s political participation.
This primer reflects on women’s peace activism and gendered security in Africa. It explores the following interlinked questions: What factors drive women’s peace activism? Who are the major actors that women peace activists target? What are the key lessons that can be drawn from these interactions? This primer begins by tracing the evolution of debates and activism on gender and violence.
Secondly, it highlights national, regional and international policy frameworks that have emerged out of this activism. Finally, the primer draws on a few peace building initiatives led by women’s rights actors across the continent. We hope the lessons highlighted here offer a basis for building alliances and structuring support across various institutions working to enhance women’s peace activism.
Statecraft and Pursuing Women’s Rights in Africa
Statecraft and Pursuing Women’s Rights in Africa
By: Dr. Awino Okech
This is the first in a series of three African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF) primers entitled Feminist Perspectives on Governance, Peace and Security. The primers are intended to:
1. Offer a review of the major debates on women, governance, peace and security in Africa.
2. Review and analyse women’s movements’ interventions in governance, peace and security.
3. Offer a set of policy and advocacy priorities based on political and practical realities.
4. Benefit women’s rights activists, organisations and people in government at the front line of local and national mobilisation initiatives seeking to enhance women’s leadership.
5. Assist in building alliances and structuring support across various institutions working towards enhancing women’s political participation.
This particular primer maps key areas of feminist analysis and intervention in governance. Based on existing research on the major factors that hinder women’s political participation, emphasis is placed on electoral systems, political parties, quotas and national constitutional mechanisms. These are also areas where the impact of the women’s rights movement has been felt. This primer therefore assesses the ways in which women’s participation in governance has been assured, the challenges arising from these approaches, and lessons therein. This primer is intended to benefit women’s rights activists and organisations at the frontline of local and national mobilisation initiatives that seek to enhance women’s leadership. We hope the primer is useful for building alliances and structuring support across various institutions working towards enhancing women’s political participation.