Brunt: somewhere between rights and reconciliation, women

December 16, 2009 by 1 Comment

Yesterday was 16 December 2009. In South Africa, it’s the Day of Reconciliation. President of the Republic of South Africa Jacob Zuma spoke, in Tshwane, about reconciliation. The President spoke at length about the military, about veterans and about serving members of the South African National Defence Force. Reconciliation.

Seven days earlier, 10 December, was Human Rights Day. President of the United States Barack Obama spoke in Oslo, Norway, as this year’s Nobel Peace Laureate. He spoke of just war. Peace.

Both presidents spoke of responsibility. For one, it was the responsibility of nation building, for the other the responsibility of peace. This was a week then that began with war as peace and ended with the military as agent of reconciliation.

Women know better. Women `bear the brunt’ of these speeches.

“Women often bear the brunt of poverty and human rights abuses; but as activists they use these roles to trigger positive social change”. Women bear the brunt of poverty because they are the target of discrimination, oppression, exploitation, violence. Here’s how Amnesty describes the world of women: “Over 70 per cent of the world’s poor are women. Women earn only 10 per cent of the world’s income but do two thirds of the world’s work. Three quarters of the world’s illiterate are women. Women produce up to 80 per cent of the food in developing countries but own only one per cent of the land.”

Treated as objects, women refuse to be abject. Around the world women are mobilizing, gathering, celebrating, organizing. Women like Ugandan human rights activists Jacqueline Kasha, Solome Kimbugwe Nakawesi, Sylvia Tamale, speaking out and organizing against the homophobic bill in Uganda’s parliament; or Val Kalende, an out lesbian in Uganda who has the courage to speak truth to power, and the truth is she simply wants to live a full and joyful life.

Women like Terra K, Joan S, Michelle M, pregnant women prisoners in the U.S. struggling for decent health care and for decency and dignity. Women like Nepalese widows Bhagwati Adhikari, Lily Thapa, Rekha Subedi, Nisha Swar, members of Women for Human Rights who reject the oppression of widows and of all women.

Women like Annise Parker, new mayor of Houston and first elected out gay mayor of a major U.S. city, or Elizabeth Simbiwa Sogbo-Tortu, campaigning to become the first paramount chieftain in the country.

Women like Zimbabwean activist Kuda Chitsike, women who dare to organize, women who dare to win.

These are a few women who were reported on during the week that began with a peace speech justifying war and ended with a reconciliation speech focusing on military well being.

We found out this week that, in KwaZulu Natal, urban women `bear the brunt’ of AIDS: “The face of HIV/AIDS in KwaZulu-Natal is a woman in her thirties living in eThekwini, according to a study released this week. Urban women in the province are far more likely to be HIV positive than their rural sisters, while over half (54%) of all pregnant women in their thirties were HIV positive….Despite levels of poverty being higher in the rural districts, social scientists believe that there is more social cohesion in rural communities that protects against women against HIV.…People living in informal settlements have the highest HIV prevalence.” How do you reconcile the urban and rural sisters? Call in the military?

We found out this week that, in Honduras, women `bear the brunt’ of human rights abuses at the hands of the coup regime, and the Obama regime is doing little to stop that: “Repercussions from this summer’s coup in Honduras are far from over….The brunt of …abuses is borne by the women….Women make up the majority of the vast resistance movement in Honduras, playing a critical leadership role in civil disobedience and citizen protection. For their tireless and courageous support of democracy, they have received death threats and been attacked with nail-studded police batons, tear gas, and bullets. Detained by police or military for hours and even days without charges or access to legal counsel, women have been deprived of medicine, food, and water. At least two cases have resulted in death. Lawless violence against women has pervaded Honduras since the coup.” When war is peace, violence against women is national security.

This is the logic of the brunt, of the sharp blow, the assault, the violence, the shock, the force. Women `bear the brunt’ because men understand peace and reconciliation as military engagements, from the bedroom to the boardroom and beyond. Women are meant to inhabit the space between hollow rights and empty reconciliation, And beyond? As one necessarily anonymous writer opined recently, looking at the current situation in Uganda, “You want gay rights? Get more women elected.” You want real peace, real reconciliation? Look to women’s organizing histories, stories, lives.

Today is 17 December. A new week begins.

 

Val Kalende

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Regret haunts the world

October 3, 2009 by 2 Comments

Regret is in the air this week. You might say, regret is the name of the game and, even more, the game of the name. From Geneva to the Gushungo Dairy Estate, in Zimbabwe, to Guinea, it’s been a week of declarations of regret.

On Monday, in Conakry, the capital of Guinea, thousands gathered in peaceful, and courageous, protest, to demonstrate their opposition to the military dictatorship of Captain Moussa Dadis Camara, who seized power in a military coup last December. Reports suggest that as many as 157 people were killed by soldiers who opened fire on them. Survivors and witnesses also reported, “A number of women taking part in the demonstration were stripped naked and sexually assaulted by security forces”. This has been described as “most shocking to the wearied citizens in this predominantly Muslim nation” who were “`profoundly traumatized’ by what had happened to the women in the stadium”.

The government of neighboring Liberia, a country that knows something about militarized sexual violence, issued a statement: ““The government of the Republic of Liberia has expressed grave concern at the events unfolding in neighboring Republic of Guinea, and has learned with profound regrets of the deaths of over 90 persons during a demonstration in Conakry on Monday, September 28, 2009”.

From Conakry, “Guinea’s military junta leader has expressed regret over the bloodshed in the clash between the opposition and security forces in the capital Conakry, Radio Senegal reported on Tuesday.” Death merits “merits” regret. Rape and sexual violence are clothed in silence, deep and profound.

In the same week, it was revealed that Nestlé had been purchasing dairy products from the Gushungo Dairy Estate, in the Mazowe Valley, about 20 kilometers north of Harare, a dairy farm recently taken over by Grace Mugabe. Once this was discovered, other connections were revealed. For example, DeLaval: “DeLaval, a leading equipment firm based in Sweden, is part of the giant Tetra Laval group owned by the Rausing dynasty”. They had sold a ton, actually tons, of equipment to Gushungo. Their response: “.Jörgen Haglind, a spokesman for Tetra Laval, said: “Tetra Laval was not previously aware of this transaction and we can only regret that the control functions within DeLaval have failed as this transaction should never have been approved.””  On Tuesday, “Delaval’s international spokesperson and vice-president of marketing and communications, Benoit Passard, said….”We regret that this has happened. We first made contact with the SA Dairy Association and then a long list of investors. The Mugabe name was never mentioned. This has come as a surprise to us and we would never have done business with them had we known this was who we were dealing with.””

Tuesday was a big day for expressions of regret. On Thursday, Nestlé Zimbabwe “ditched” Gushungo, without any expression of regret but rather an explanation of market forces. Perhaps those would include the threatened global boycott. We’ll never know. By Thursday, the government of Guinea was no longer expressing regret for anything, but rather claiming outside agitators and other nefarious forces were at work in Monday’s demonstration.

What is regret? “To remember, think of (something lost), with distress or longing; to feel (or express) sorrow for the loss of (a person or thing)…. To grieve at, feel mental distress on account of (some event, fact, action, etc.).” Regret is lamentation, grief, sorrow. Regret is loss.

In Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, Andrea Smith, Cherokee scholar, feminist, rape crisis counselor, activist, woman, tells a story of regret: “`Assimilation’ into white society …only increased Native women’s vulnerability to violence. For instance, when the Cherokee nation was forcibly relocated to Oklahoma during the Trail of Tears in the nineteenth century, soldiers targeted for sexual violence Cherokee women who spoke English and had attended mission schools….They were routinely gang-raped causing one missionary to the Cherokee, Daniel Butrick, to regret that any Cherokee had ever been taught English.”

As Smith records for Native women in the United States, as the women of Guinea and Zimbabwe understand deeply, as women in Sweden and Switzerland might know as well when they consider DeLaval and Nestlé as elements of their own well being and comfort, sexual violence is a State policy. It is not an exceptional event, but rather is woven into the very fiber of State security and national development. Ask the Sudanese women refugees in eastern Chad, who have no place to hide from or escape the daily sexual violence.

The United Nations Security Council this week voted to request the appointment of a special representative to address sexual violence in armed conflict zones. After the vote, “Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon … immediately following the text’s adoption…. expressed regret that previous responses to sexual violence had not been able to stem the scourge.”

Were the Security General to express regret, or the leader of Guinea, or the corporate representatives, or the clergy, or anyone in public office or private spaces, for sexual violence, it would have to be more than a simple pro forma apology. The one expressing regret must perform and demonstrate grief, lamentation, sorrow, must understand and teach a lesson of loss. Until then, regret haunts the world … profoundly.

(Photo Credit: Rhizome)

 

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The socialism of those who wash others’ underwear

July 28, 2009 by 2 Comments

Eridania Rodriguez

Maids fill the rooms and haunt the stories in Petinah Gappah’s An Elegy for Easterly, a brilliant and evocative narration of living and dying in Zimbabwe.

“The Maid from Lalapanzi” tells the heartbreaking story of SisiBlandina, a revolutionary, tragic, ordinary woman. Read the story and you’ll see. The next story, “Aunt Juliana’s Indian”, focuses on the complex relationships between Indian Zimbabweans, particularly male employers, and `African’ Zimbabweans, particularly women employees. Juliana is herself a revolutionary who strikes out against oppression and unreason … literally. The story of Mr. Vaswani and Juliana is the story of a nation being born, despite the Big Men who were already trying to kill it in the name of liberation.

Susan, the neighbors’ daughter, is a minor character. She works as a maid in a white household. She and Juliana spend their time arguing about who has the worse boss and who suffers the most. Whoever suffers the most wins.

When the first real elections are impending, the air is filled with the promise of change.  Juliana dreams of a raise, better treatment, time off, so that she might complete her secretarial studies. Only Susan has doubts: “`It may well be that there will be this socialism, Juliana,’ she said, `But I can tell you right now that no amount of socialism will make my madam wash her own underwear” (191)

Maids, domestic workers, nannies, babysitters, care providers, housemaids, cleaners haunt stories of the world, of the everyday, of everything important and everything ordinary. They are present and yet absent, valuable and yet worthless. They are the stuff of national liberation, of revolution and socialism, of feminism, of development. They are as unmentionable as the dirty underwear that somehow gets washed.

As Petinah Gappah noted in a recent interview, “Zimbabweans are more than just victims of Robert Mugabe….We are also horrible to each other. We’re not very nice to women. We don’t treat our maids very well.” When it comes to the oppression and exploitation of maids, if Robert Mugabe didn’t exist, we’d have invented him, a Great Man. Who washes his underwear?

In Burma/Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi is on trial this week. Aung San Suu Kyi is a great woman. July 5, 2009, marked 5,000 days in captivity for Aung San Suu Kyi. She spent the day “with the two women she has been detained with since 2003.” Who are those women? They are her co-defendants, her two “housemaids”, her two “maids”, and most reports don’t mention their names.

“On May 14, Special Branch police arrested Aung San Suu Kyi and her two live-in party supporters and domestic workers, Daw Khin Khin Win, and her daughter, Win Ma Ma, at Aung San Suu Kyi’s home in Rangoon, and transferred the three to Insein Prison.”

Daw Khin Khin Win. Win Ma Ma. Mother and daughter. Party supporters and members. Maids. There is no Aung San Suu Kyi without them. This does not take away from the value and accomplishment of Aung San Suu Kyi. In fact, it enriches it. But do a Google news search for Daw Khin Khin Win, and what comes up? Nothing. Unmentionable and invisible as the washing of dirty underwear.

Everyone needs a maid. In South Africa, there’s a white squatter camp, where the white residents are mostly unemployed. It’s located near Krugersdorp, in the West Rand, Gauteng. It’s a historic site. The British built a concentration camp in Krugersdorp, during the Anglo-Boer War, for Afrikaans women and children. But the camp is not all white: “The camp is also home to a few black people, mostly maids and handy-men of the white squatters.” A place called home, by Whites only, requires Black maids and handymen. Whose names go unspoken. As unmentionable as the dirty underwear they wash.

They are like maids everywhere. They are exploited and betrayed. Recently, the New York Times Magazine featured a lengthy interview with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Justice Ginsburg tells a story about maids: “The very first week that I was at Columbia, Jan Goodman, a lawyer in New York, called me and said, Do you know that Columbia has given layoff notices to 25 maids and not a single janitor? Columbia’s defense was the union contract, which was set up so that every maid would have to go before the newly hired janitor would get a layoff notice.”

Bosses and unions collude to protect men and sacrifice maids. Again.

They are sacrificed. That Ginsburg interview appeared in the July 12th edition of the Magazine. The night before, on July 11, the body of Eridania Rodriguez was found. Eridania Rodriguez was an office cleaner in a building in lower Manhattan. Eridania Rodriguez was one of the thousands of women who clean offices, alone, at night. Elizabeth Magda continues to clean offices in the same neighborhood, night after night, alone, largely unnoticed and unknown by those who work in the offices: “Few people pay attention to the workers who clean their offices, as long as the desks are clean in the morning and papers are not tampered with. But every once in a while, something happens to cast a spotlight on their relatively solitary, uncelebrated occupation. On July 11, there was a grisly discovery that did just that: the body of a cleaning woman was found stuffed in an air-conditioning duct in the Lower Manhattan office building where she had worked at night.”

What does it take for cleaners, maids, housemaids to be seen, to be named? Must the narrative of domestic labor, in households or in offices, be one of sacrifice and martyrdom, framed by anonymity, punctuated by sexual abuse and torture? Daw Khin Khin Win, Win Ma Ma, Aung San Suu Kyi.  Black women domestic workers in white households and neighborhoods. The Columbia 25. Eridania Rodriguez, Elizabeth Magda. They are not specters and they are not supplements to some more important national or workers’ or any other story. They are women with names, bodies, stories, and lives. They struggle to create the socialism of those who wash others’ underwear. The struggle continues.

(Photo Credit: nytimes.com)

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Mourning Mothers, Morning Mothers

July 24, 2009 by 7 Comments

Kessie Moyo with a picture of her son Godfrey Moyo

“A mother is a mother for as long as she lives.”

Around the world, mothers gather in parks, gardens, public open spaces. As they sit and watch and talk, they gather and create comfort, wisdom, knowledge, strength, pleasure, laughter, sighs, touch, love, safety. They create spaces where truth can be spoken and heard. This is not sentimental or romantic. It is the news of the day.

Parvin Fahimi is Sohrab Arabi’s mother for as long as she lives.

Sohrab Arabi, a 19 year old student, “was reportedly killed on June 15, when a member of Iran’s ideological basiji militia opened fire on a crowd of protesters close to central Tehran’s Azadi Square, according to his aunt Farah Mohamadi, who was informed of his death by security forces.”

Fahimi went looking for her son. She went to the prisons, she went to the courts, she went to the hospitals, she went to the morgue. Then, on Saturday, July 11, 26 days later, Parvin Fahimi “was finally called in by officials and asked to identify her son in several photographs of corpses.” He had been shot.

She went looking from place to place to place, from face to face to face, for her son.

Taraneh Mousavi was also a young person in Iran. On Friday, June 19, she went to the Ghoba Mosque, in Tehran, to hear a sermon on the post-election `martyrs’. She was arrested. Reports suggest she was tortured, raped, burned to death. It’s hard to confirm. What isn’t in dispute: Taraneh Mousavi was arrested and disappeared. “Taraneh, whose first name is Persian for “song”, disappeared into arrest. Weeks later…her mother received an anonymous call from a government agent saying that her daughter has been hospitalized in Imam Khomeini Hospital in the city of Karaj, just north of Tehran — hospitalized for `rupturing of her womb and anus in…an unfortunate accident’. When Taraneh’s family went to the hospital to find her, they were told she was not there.”

Taraneh Mousavi’s mother is Taraneh Mousavi’s mother for as long as she lives.

The Mourning Mothers, the Mothers of Laleh Park, gather every Saturday in public parks, such as Laleh Park in the heart of Tehran, from 7 – 8 pm, the day and hour in which Neda Aghasoltani was killed.

The world is too full with Mourning Mothers.

Kessie Moyo is Godfrey Moyo’s mother for as long as she lives.

Godfrey Moyo was from Zimbabwe and suffered from epilepsy. On January 3, 2005, he was awaiting trial, at Belmarsh prison in the UK, when he suffered a seizure, followed by a behavioral disturbance, in which he attacked his cellmate and struggled with guards. He was taken out of his cell, thrown to the floor, constrained and controlled, during which he suffered two more seizures. Unconscious, he was taken to the intensive care cell and dumped, kneeling against a bed. Then he was injected with a sedative and died, 20 minutes later.

Four and a half years later, an inquest was finally held, from June 22 to July 6, 2009.  This story brings together disability, race, nation, class into one terrible stew. And it conjures the Mourning Mothers.

Kessie Moyo, Godfrey Moyo’s mother, lives in Zimbabwe. In 2005, she received a six-month visa to attend the funeral and inquest, the inquest which wouldn’t occur for another four and a half years. When Mrs. Moyo applied for an extension, she was denied. Due to “very compelling family reasons”, Kessie Moyo stayed in England until 2007, only then returning to Zimbabwe. When at last the inquest date was announced, she was denied a visa. Why? She had overstayed the earlier one, and those family reasons didn’t matter. Also, since Zimbabwe is a humanitarian crisis site, Kessie Moyo would have no reason to return. There’s no logic like State logic.

Finally, the High Court [a] granted her a visa and [b] forced the UK Border Agency to expedite the processing. She barely arrived in time to sit with her daughter, Godfrey’s sister, Lomaculo Moyo, and listen to the guards describe her son as `a smashing lad’. She barely arrived in time to weep for her murdered son.

Kessie Moyo is Godfrey Moyo’s mother for as long as she lives.

Marta Servin lives in Koreatown, in Los Angeles, and she is the mother of three children. She is their mother for as long as she lives.

Koreatown, located in the center of Los Angeles, is the most densely populated area of the city. Mostly Koreans and Latin@s. Ten years ago a group of women started a community garden, Francis Street Community Garden. Small in size, huge in value. Now, “every day at about 5 p.m., women from the neighborhood gather at the garden to drink coffee and tea, cook spontaneous meals and talk for hours as the sunlight fades and neon signs begin flickering on in neighboring strip malls. They celebrate birthdays together with colorful pinatas and paper flowers and welcome newcomers to the neighborhood. Their children play and chase after the free-roaming roosters, hens and chicks.”

Marta Servin is one of those women. She came to help the clean up and never left. Mothers and daughters gather, in their garden, in their space. They are the Morning Mothers. One day, I hope the Mourning Mothers, those of Iran, those of Zimbabwe, those of anywhere else, might become the Morning Mothers as well, because, you know, a mother is a mother for as long as she lives.

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Who’s in, who’s out, who’s counting?

July 9, 2009 by 3 Comments

Roma

Maps and tallies tell stories. They tell something about what’s going on, who’s in, who’s out, who’s where. They reveal more about the mapmaker and the list maker, the cartographer and the accountant.

Over the weekend, police in three major provinces of South Africa were accused of `fiddling’ with the statistics to make it look as if they, and `we’, are winning the war on crime. Like all modern wars, the war on crime is a statistical phantasmagoria, and so to win the war, one must play the numbers. The police played. Charges include stockpiling, burning, hiding dockets generally; ditching dockets of crimes on the increase; failing to register crimes with a low chance of prosecution; reducing serious crimes to lesser charges; and cover up.

Meanwhile, the police in Los Angeles are fiddling as well. The LAPD online crime map `omits’ close to 40% of serious crimes committed over the last six months, serious crimes that are actually reported elsewhere by … the LAPD! The Department officially reported 52,000 serious crimes between January and June of this year. The map shows 33,000. 19,000 crimes went missing. That’s a lot of missing numbers. That map has some pretty big holes.

From South Africa to the United States, and beyond, some numbers are abandoned, others are abducted.

In Rangoon, Aung San Suu Kyi is a guest of the State, in Insein Jail. She counts. Sunday July 5 marked the 5000th day of her incarceration.

In Uttar Pradesh, or UP, in India, Roma counts, too. She’s Number One, the first woman in the state to be charged under the National Security Act. She’s accused of consorting with Naxalites, of being a terrorist, a dangerous woman. There have been no incidences of insurgent violence where Roma works and lives. There has been “a silent revolution”. Women from over 500 villages have occupied over 20,000 hectares of forest land and have established farming cooperatives. Without committing an act of violence. But Roma is a member of the National Forum of Forests People and Forest Workers, she has worked and lived with tribals in UP for twenty some years, she is a writer, a researcher, an activist who calls for democratic dialogue, a woman who supports tribal women, social justice, peace. She says she has lost count of the number of accusations and arrests. She has never been successfully prosecuted.

In Zimbabwe, Jestina Mukoko, director of the Zimbabwe Peace Project, is also counting. Having been abducted and disappeared last year, she now counts the number of times the government of Zimbabwe lies in order to keep her in prison or under the formal threat of imprisonment. At the end of June, state prosecutor Fatima Maxwell admitted that indeed Mukoko had been abducted by state security agents, and that the abduction was illegal. According to government testimony, at least three rights were violated: the right to liberty, the protection of the law, and the right to freedom from torture. A week later, State Security Minister Sydney Sekeramayi denied it all, said no rights were violated. Jestina Mukoko is counting the lies and mapping the spaces where rights used to be. Some are abandoned, some are abducted. We keep trying to count, we keep losing count, we keep counting.

We are in a map of the countless. In Iran, for example, journalist, feminist Zhila Bani Yaghoub was arrested, along with her husband, Bahman Ahmadi Amooy. They were taken to Evin Prison. Yaghoub has written about, and for, women’s rights in Iran for years. The Nobel Women’s Initiative expressed concern “for the safety of Zhila, her husband and the countless other Iranian activists and protesters currently being detained in Iran.” Countless. The numbers are countless. Not because they are so many, although they are many. They are countless because the tally is forbidden. How many lives lost, how many acts of violence, how many rights lost, how many mourners?

Mairead Maguire, Cynthia McKinney, Derek Graham, were among a small boatload of 21 people and humanitarian aid, toys and building supplies and medicine, headed for Gaza, epicenter of the countless. The Israeli Navy took the boat and hijacked it to Israel, where the crew and passengers were detained, mostly in Ramle Prison. Two days later, Maguire, Graham and McKinney were deported. According to Maguire, “Gaza is like a huge prison, but—because its borders are closed. The sea pass into Gaza, which has been closed for over forty years by the Israeli government—we are only the seventh ship to get in to the port of Gaza that tried to break the siege.…And also farmers—fishermen, who try to go out without—in about twelve miles to fish for their families, are shot up and have been killed by the Israeli navy in that area. So, Gaza is a huge occupied territory of one-and-a-half million people who have been subjected to collective punishment by the Israeli government…. It is also tragic that out of ten million Palestinians of a population, almost seven million are currently refugees out in other countries or displaced within their own country, particularly after the horrific massacre by Israeli jet fighters after just earlier this year. Twenty-two days Israel bombarded Gaza, Gazan people, civilians.” 40 years, seven ships, twelve miles, 1.5 million people, 10 million Palestinians, 7 million refugees and displaced persons, 22 days of bombing. Countless. Not infinite, not insuperable, not unimaginable. Simply imprisoned, behind walls and barriers. How many abductions, how many abandonments?

In Ramle Prison, Cynthia McKinney met African women refugees, women who had “arrived…in a very difficult way”. Those countless women wait to be counted. In immigration detention centers around the world, countless women and children and men wait for the fog of their war to dissipate, for the fiddling to stop, for a new set of maps and tallies, and cartographers and accountants.

 

(Photo Credit: CJP)

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`I still live in fear’

May 17, 2009 by Leave a Comment

The borders are everywhere, especially for women. Audre Lorde and Gloria Anzaldua taught that lesson, the borders are not only geographically everywhere, but they are also everywhere in our bodies, in our selves. Every act of violence is another border establishment. Every act of border is another act of violence. Let’s talk about fear, violence, specters, justice.

A year ago, xenophobic pogroms swept across and dug into South Africa, dug into the landscape, dug into the consciousness, and some want to know if that violence dug into the very fabric of the country. Ramaphosaville, in the East Rand, was one of the places named, a place that “exploded into horrific and shameful violence”. “Places like Alexandra, Ramaphosaville and Khayelitsha have become the dumping grounds of the marginalised and alienated. Daily, poor people eke out an existence in the insalubrious warrens of congested squatter camps or the dilapidated prison-like hostels. These environs subject people to the most degrading conditions, resulting in poor fight against poor.”

And today? “I still live in fear” In Ramaphosaville, both the fear and anger, and the potential for more violence, do more than linger. They simmer: ““What do you do if people come and tell you they have more rights than you because you are a foreigner? I choose to give them what they want to save my life. “I still live in fear.”” But who is articulated in this statement? Miro Mavila and Benet Oguda, Mozambican nationals, express their fear of South African violence, Prince Mofokeng, a South African national, expresses his fear of living in “a little Maputo”.

This is not a case of the poors against the poors, although certainly class and poverty have been stirred into the pot. It is a case of the affect of border, the ways in which border breeds and intensifies the logic of fear as an alibi for `justifiable’ homicide, torture, violence. And patriarchy. Even in this article, only men are interviewed. Women? Silently walking away, carrying the daily water, carrying the remains of the day. Look at the picture that accompanies the article; what do you see?

“I still live in fear”. The South African government announced it is scrapping visas for Zimbabweans, in effect more or less opening the border. This should be good news, right? Yes and no. As long as the border exists, fear exists: “The news of the scrapping of visas for Zimbabweans entering South Africa has been received with mixed feelings by citizens of the two countries. Many of those from north of the Limpopo gave a sigh of relief with regard to the difficulties they had endured over the years whenever they wanted to cross the border into South Africa. On the other hand, many people in South Africa now fear a new influx of refugees who may not have entered the country because of the very restrictions that have just been lifted. This has heightened fears of the revival of the xenophobic attacks experienced last May when South African mobs turned on their neighbours, killing many.” Previously, the South African immigration policy towards Zimbabweans was “arguably the toughest visa regime in post-colonial Africa, especially between countries that were not at war.” It also was good business for those working the border, 5000 crossing legally every day and who knows how many crossing through `informal’ entry points: “a well-oiled corruption system has reportedly developed at the Beitbridge border, the main beneficiaries being the low-paid officials on both sides of the border who have to “assist” desperate Zimbabweans for a fee.”

What never gets mentioned, again? Women. Zimbabwean women are the principal cross border traders at Beitbridge. Zimbabwean women have suffered much of the greatest violence, State and `informal sector’, in Musina, in Lindela. When do women enter into the border picture? As long as borders define nation, define citizenship, define `the human’, that human will be man. Watch closely the agreements between the governments of South Africa and Zimbabwe over the next months, concerning the rights of migrant and immigrant populations.

But the border is not only between nations, it’s across nations. Xenophobic violence is not only `civilian’. It’s also State. A year ago, agents of State came into Postville, Iowa, and `swept’ the meatpacking plants of its `dangerous elements’, underpaid, abused workers without legal documents. Real danger there, I tell you. This week, 20 of those workers received U Visas: “Twenty undocumented workers arrested a year ago at a meatpacking plant have received visas through a law that protects victims of crime, reports La Opinión. The immigrants arrested 
last year at Agriprocessors Inc. received U visas from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS), which allow them to stay and work legally in the country for four years. In their third year, they may apply for permanent residence. “A government agency is admitting that these women and children have been subjected to physical and emotional harm by Agriprocessors,” said attorney Sonia Parras-Konrad. “These people have been exploited, assaulted, humiliated, verbally and emotionally abused by this employer.””

Women and children have been subjected to harm by their employers and then by the State. Here are the faces of menace and danger. Look closely. What do you see?

They are still afraid. The borders are not the peripheries nor are they the margins. They are the core … of the nation and of every resident, and they define women as other-than-human and not worth discussing or representing. Borders must be opened, removed, and completely transformed. Until then, I still live in fear.

(Image Credits: Shubnum Khan / IOLS Commentary) (Photo Credit: https://durbanaction.wordpress.com)

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Bordering on: citizens, prisoners, exceptions, women

April 8, 2009 by 2 Comments

I used to think that all prisoners are political prisoners because they’re `guests of the State’, housed and held in total institutions in which the very least the State was obliged to do was acknowledge the prisoners’ existence and maybe keep them alive. Given the convergent news of this past week, I have had to rethink that a bit.

Four names: Edwina Nowlin, Alberto Fujimori, Jacob Zuma, Gladys Monterroso. Four countries: the United States, Peru, South Africa, Guatemala. If your country isn’t on this list, that’s accidental good fortune. Trust me, it should be. In fact, it is.

A girl is flogged in Pakistan, a video captures the moment and circulates and suddenly everyone is concerned about gender and punishment in Pakistan. Even the Pakistani courts perform concern: “Pakistan’s newly reinstated chief justice has ordered a police committee to investigate the controversial flogging of a teenage girl. Ayesha Siddiqa wonders about the innocence of the sudden gaze, “As the entire Pakistani nation watches video footage of a 17-years-old girl screaming on their television screens during the process of her torture at the hands of the brutal Taliban in Swat, one wonders if the mothers, sisters, daughters and the male members of this nation will ever take time out to think about this system of justice advocated by these men who are not even qualified to interpret the Quran and Sunnah.” She lays the system of Hudood laws squarely on the shoulders of the Zia regime: “In Pakistan in particular where the Hudood laws were formulated under the Zia regime, the objective was not to bring justice in the society but to throttle all forms of justice. In this respect, the Taliban in Swat and those who ruled Afghanistan for some time are Zia’children. They use force arbitrarily and apply laws without the real context to enhance their own power.” Flogging is never `spontaneous’ , never `organic’, and never `gender neutral.’

In the United States, there’s the tale of Edwina Nowlin: “Edwina Nowlin, a poor Michigan resident, was ordered to reimburse a juvenile detention center $104 a month for holding her 16-year-old son. When she explained to the court that she could not afford to pay, Ms. Nowlin was sent to prison. The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, which helped get her out last week after she spent 28 days behind bars, says it is seeing more people being sent to jail because they cannot make various court-ordered payments. That is both barbaric and unconstitutional.”

This practice is going on all over the country: poor women, and men, who cannot pay the fines, and cannot be the additional fees to the companies that collect the fines, are thrown into jail: mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, strangers. Debt, the not so secret origin of primitive accumulation, built on the backs of the poors, largely people of color, largely women, haunts our world, from Pakistan to the United States and beyond.

Meanwhile, death stalks and storms the corridors and cells of Zimbabwe’s prisons, as demonstrated in a documentary shown this past week. Emaciated prisoners can’t bring the morsel of food to their lips, can’t stand and can’t fall. Hell hole. Death camp. These phrases are too elegant by far for what’s going on. George Nyathi, recently released from the torture of Hami maximum security prison outside of Bulawayo, looks into the mirror now, now that he is `free’, and sees Edwina Nowlin. The young woman in Pakistan looks into the mirror and sees …

I’ll tell you what they don’t see. They don’t see Jacob Zuma, who was exonerated of all corruption charges on Tuesday. They might see Alberto Fujimori, already in jail and sentenced, at almost the same instant that Zuma was released, to twenty-five years for having ordered kidnappings and killings when he was president. Fujimori may be in prison, but he’s powerful. His daughter says she may run for president of Peru, and would pardon her father. There’s no such daughter for that girl in Pakistan, for the prisoners in Zimbabwe, for Edwina Nowlin. There’s no powerful daughter coming to rescue those `suspected of terrorist activities’ being tortured in the prisons of Uganda, of the United States, of everywhere. No powerful kin or kith comes to the rescue of those mysteriously jumping from police vans or prison windows, such as Sidwel Mkwambi, beaten to death by police.

And when Gladys Monterroso, a prominent Guatemalan attorney and activist, was abducted last month, held for thirteen hours, burned, beaten, sexually and psychologically abused, there was no Great Man nor any of his family or cronies, to swoop down and save her. When Fujimori and Zuma and their gang look in the mirror, they see the State, they see State Power. When the rest look in, we see ourselves and those like us, call us citizens, of a nation, of the world, of whatever.

I used to think that prisons demonstrated the limit case of citizenship, that we had to ask why some people were in prison and why others were not. This week has me wondering. Perhaps it’s the other way around. Perhaps we have to wonder how it is that any of us, that anyone you or I meet on the street, is not in prison. Perhaps prison is the crucible of normative citizenship in the world we inhabit, and being-outside, what’s that called again, oh yeah, freedom, that’s the exceptional state. And that would go some distance in explaining why women are the fastest growing prison population and still don’t get counted, still are not recognized. Citizenship. Gladys Monteroso, Edwina Nowlin. Citizens, not exceptions.

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CHII CHIRIKUITA : WHAT’S UP? Nine: Women Asking the Hard Questions

April 4, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Now is the time to question the terms on which we organise our struggles and wage our battles.
Now is the time to claim our citizenship.
Now is the time to do the work that ensures our lasting freedom.
In this time of “transition” in Zimbabwe, we need to be asking the hard questions of ourselves and each other.  We need to organise, hold our structures accountable, make our demands and claim our visions and dreams.  Now.

For if not now, when?  

As women we have already lived through many empty promises and betrayals by men:  be they located within our homes, communities, nationalist movements, newly found states, emerging political parties or that unwieldy, amorphous civil society.  

Our lives as women have deteriorated dramatically in the last decade in Zimbabwe, by now we all know why.  This deterioration has impacted on how we organise.  It has made things harder and more chanllenging.  It has eroded our sense of humanity and community.  The regime has damaged us all, in one way or another.  

But now is the time to be creative in order to do the necessary radical change work. It’s difficult but not impossible. One starting point is articulating the vision of our struggle as women and finding ways to unite around its realisation.  This unity has to cut through the partisan politics, the suspicion, the political jockeying, the donor stangle hold and the organisational forms of this time.

For women in Zimbabwe, the horizon of liberation that was intimately connected to our early feminist agenda’s in the 1980’s and 1990’s was gradually left behind, as many of us started operating with a horizon of the law, policy, of governance and  gender.  Some argue that this was a strategic discursive move but it was at the expense of losing a destabilising power, and women’s organising losing its beating heart. 

Feminist consciousness refers to the political consciousness that the gender roles prescribed by societies all over the world for women are rooted in deep prejudices that put the women at social, political and economic disadvantages. It is the desire to counter and stamp out, through collective action and a broad ongoing cultural conversation, such restrictions imposed upon women. Feminist consciousness might have different roots for different women but the vision is the same.

Feminist consciousness challenges many of our deep-held assumptions which, if are not often noticed, is because they are pervasive like gravity.  Its complexity helps us understand other related oppressions based on race, class, age, sexual orientation, and disability amongst others.

Gender consciousness is the realization that gender is a socio-cultural construction and society has roles, not rooted in biology, specifically designed for those born into the male and female sexes.  But challenging and changing roles is not enough.

Ultimately, gender consciousness and feminist consciousness are related but different concepts.  (But I don’t want to get tangled in words.  Many women around Zimbabwe are engaging in acts of resistence that are feminist, even though they may have never heard of the word.  As long as we share the same commitment to our freedom, to confronting oppression wherever it may be found, let’s move ahead.)

Surely we, including our non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have learnt that gender policies alone ≠ an end to violence, to discrimination, to the bridging of the divides between the public and the private, to a redefinition of our relationships and re-organisation of society where all women can enjoy the fruits of freedom.  Almost always legislative, these policies have lacked financial resources and political will.  They have not altered the foundations of our oppression.  What they have done however, is help to conceal or assuage some of the most detrimental effects of our inequality.

What the so-called gender perspective hides is a total lack of perspective.  It’s a convenient myth that a depoliticised gender perspective will lead to equality and overcome sexism.

Now is the time to be critical.  To get to the heart of the matter.  To think differently.  To confront, unpick, challenge patriarchal and capitalist power in order to make lasting change real for women.

What vehicle is going to allow us to do this?  If our organizational forms are not going to allow us to get where we want to be, then we must be bold enough to say so.  To step out of the shell of the old and into the possibility of the new.

And of course it’s going to be dangerous.  You tamper with power, you feel the effects.

I know.  This is a rant.  It comes from the belief that the gender perspective is not going to get us as far as we need to go.

I don’t have all the answers but my experience tells me that women’s organising in Zimbabwe and the Southern African region needs to politicise.

Politicisation is the (im) pulse running through our organising. “The personal is the political” is a continuous process, a process of transformation which demands time and time again personal engagement, reflection and action.

To put it another way.  Opening spaces, to gather what I call feminist forces is a start.
This can be done anywhere and everywhere. 

It is literally the process of women getting together, telling each other the stories of the conditions of our lives, and crafting collective visions and practices of resistance out of them.  Channelling this into action. 

These autonomous dynamic spaces can ground our actions, visions and desires, thereby providing a basis to craft common ground, and create, rather than presume, a basis for collectivity and alliances. This is a start. 

The sustainability and radical democracy of this process relies precisely on creating new ways of relating to each other that undermine existing hierarchies and the depoliticisation of power inequalities. Also central to this strategy is the need to practice and nurture alliances between different struggles; the linking of scattered resistances cannot be underestimated. 

Much lip-service has been paid to these alliances, often skirting over the hard work they demand in practice. Alliances are about engaging with others, and hence also about dealing with positions invested with power.  These alliances are inevitably based on the involvement of our subjectivities; they are about working with differences and working through conflicts.  Perhaps they are about love. About humanism.  In any case, we cannot render them into abstract models.  But we can find words of inspiration for the yearnings that push us to engage in them. 

Feminism is about a shared engagement, in anger but more importantly in joy, in laughter, in desire, in solidarity. Right now with constitutionalism looming large in Zimbabwe, what we need to refuse, is performing “the woman’s question” within a larger civic or nationalist movement, that can be raised in certain moments of goodwill, only to be dropped later on when it’s time to get back to “the real business” or to have women’s rights relegated to a toothless policy. 

When Adrienne Rich asks women “to see from the centre”, she does so precisely in the context of refusing to be “the woman’s question” or the empty policy.  “We are not the ‘woman’s question’ asked by someone else” she comments, “we are the women who ask the questions.” 

Women need to ask the questions that disrupt, contaminate and create.  However we name them, our struggles are [should be] about nothing less.

(Photo Credit: Research and Advocacy Unit)

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CHII CHIRIKUITA : WHAT’S UP? Eight: Where have all the Women Gone?

April 1, 2009 by Leave a Comment

To play the game you will need: 

  • Dice
  • Minimum of two players
  • Tiddleywink for each player.
  • Roll 6 on the dice to start.
  • Move along the game board and follow the instructions
  • Try to avoid finishing

Inspired by the game “Alternatives to Globalisation” designed by RW.

7c3yyo

A rusted wire fence divides the old Zimbabwe from the new.

On the one side lies Effie Malamba, born in 1901 she was buried beneath a granite headstone 90 years later.

On the other is Sylvia Ncube, born in 1974 she was laid to rest just 35 years later.
The wire separates Bulawayo’s old Hyde Park cemetery from its extension.
Effie lies amid ordered ranks of stone epitaphs.
Sylvia lies in a chaos of churned earth. All around her the mounds of mud and stones, garlanded with plastic flowers, tell the story. 

Zimbabwe now has the lowest life expectancy for women anywhere in the world: 34.
A forest of black metal plates mark the mounting death toll and their hand-painted white numbers record the birth dates of a missing generation. Irene Phiri born 1972, Gugu Hlanbangana in 1971, Lulu Olomo in 1975, are just three of thousands.

This cull is not an act of God. It’s Zimbabwe’s game of health, of life, of death. 

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Who pays for the rule of law? Who will pay?

March 28, 2009 by 2 Comments

Birtukan Mideksa is currently being held in Kaliti Prison, in Ethiopia. Remember her name, Birtukan Midekas, and remember Kaliti Prison. There will be a test on prison geography and another on prisoners, with special attention to women prisoners. Women prisoners aren’t only in prison, however. Consider Mitmita. She’s an Ethiopian human rights activist. Mitmita is not her name. She can’t write in her own name. Reading Prespone Matawira’s series on Zimbabwe, I’ve been thinking of the anonymous and pseudonymous women, those one knows about, those completely obscured, in the shadows, disappeared. How many named and unnamed are there, officially or existentially political, imprisoned and confined women, in Ethiopia, on the continent, globally? Why do we know some names and not others? How many are hidden under or within, how many are blurred and waiting a proper reading, a proper enunciation? For every Prespone, for every Mitmita, for every Birtukan Mideksa, for every Jestina Mukoko, how many go unheeded, unrecognized? What becomes of their lives and stories? How much of silence, shadows, blurs is gendered? How do these women, and these women’s issues, mark a border between human rights and women’s rights? How is that border different from the militarized U.S. – Mexico borderlands, that actually extend across Central America, that home sweet home in which women are trapped in the transnational household, and how are they identical?

Recently, in Tanzania, the Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs suggested a review of the Sexual Offences Special Provisions Act, SOSPA, because the sentences were too severe. Women’s and feminist activists protested the statement and decried the incompetence underlying its reasoning. Between 2006 and 2007, Salma Maoulidi conducted a study of Zanzibari attitudes towards sexual violence: “sexual violence continues to be viewed more as a moral crime rather than as a legal crime. It is thus not surprising that about 34 per cent of respondents consider sexual crimes as private issues. Only 16 per cent think that it is a criminal offence…. only 50 per cent of functionaries interviewed indicated using the Penal Decree in matters concerning GBV, the remaining 31 per cent used religious laws, and 18 per cent used medical guidelines when dealing with GBV cases. The study found knowledge of laws related to GBV to be very low in communities. Over 65 per cent of individuals interviewed were not aware of any law related to GBV. Largely, local customs and religious law are used to solve GBV matters.”

Moral crime, Legal crime. Human rights. Women’s Rights. What does it mean to categorize, to differentiate and perhaps by so doing to make some offenses more equal than others?

In Norway, a Muslim woman police officer requests permission to wear her hijab as part of her uniform, and all hell breaks loose. Is this the hell of human rights or of women’s rights? In Nigeria, a bill is passing through parliament that would further criminalize same sex  relationships and associations. Is this moral criminalization or legal criminalization?In Dar es Salaam, a culture of silence prevails for lesbian women. Is this the silence of morality or of legality?

Women are imprisoned, jailed, confined. In the U.S. almost 3 million children have their parents in jail. This occurs at a period of escalating incarceration of women, most of whom are Black or Latina, two thirds of whom are mothers of young children. What happens to those children? Who cares? Not the State. The State cares about war, war on poverty, war on drugs, war on terror. They’re all wars on women. Women with names, women with pseudonyms. In Quito, Ecuador, as all over the world, women know that the war on drugs is a war on women.

In Tanzania, distinguishing between the moral and the legal is killing women. In the United States as well, where women immigrants in detention are dying for health care. Women are flat out denied or have to wait ridiculously long times for any sort of gynecological care, mammography and breast health care, any sort of prenatal or postnatal care. It’s a gruesome list, indeed, and women are targeted as women. And services for survivors of sexual and gender-based violence? “ICE policy fails to comprehensively address the needs of survivors of violence.” Au contraire. Inaction is a policy, non-policy is a policy. If rape during border crossing is `routine’ and routinely unreported, and if those, mostly women, who have suffered sexual violence during their journeys across borders and across streets, at work and at home, if there is no address, is that moral criminalization or legal criminalization?  Human rights or women’s rights? Which state actually cares? Not the United States, not if you’re an `immigrant woman’, certainly not if one recalls that “immigration detention is the fastest-growing form of incarceration in the United States.”

The U.S. immigration detention complex is a black hole. “Victoria Arellano, a 23-year-old transgender woman from Mexico, was detained at ICE’s San Pedro Facility in May 2007. Arellano was suffering from AIDS though not exhibiting symptoms. In detention, her condition deteriorated because she was not given access to the antibiotics she needed.  According to The Los Angeles Times, her requests to see a doctor were ignored by facility staff. Other detainees dampened towels to reduce her fever and created makeshift trash cans from cardboard boxes to collect her vomit. Only after a strike and civil disobedience by detainees in the facility did staff take her to the infirmary. Arellano died two days later, after two months in detention, due to an AIDS-related infection.” Women, and children, in shackles. Transgender women violated every which way.

Nomboniso Gasa says all political prisoners in Zimbabwe must be freed now. Furthermore, the situations and conditions, and dreams and dignity, of women must be addressed: “All of the crises affect women more severely. One important issue is the widespread use of rape as a political weapon. And there has recently been a noticeable change in the way security forces relate to women. When Jestina Mokoko was arrested she was in only a nightdress. She asked if she could get dressed before she was taken but security denied her the right to her dignity by not allowing her to change clothing or take her female medication with her. And of course widespread shortage of food affects women more because they are always the last to eat. Even though they forage more food, after the men and the children eat it is the women’s turn, but by then there is nothing left.” The conditions in Zimabwe’s prisons are dire.

Across the United States, states are relaxing sentencing guidelines and softening drug laws. When Tony Papa, a victim of the Rockefeller drug laws, was finally released, he co-founded Mothers of the NY Disappeared. Now he feels truly released, and can exhale freely, if with a lingering sense of disbelief. So, the 70s at last may be laid to rest: “Nearly 40 years after the Rockefeller laws launched America down the disastrous road to wholesale incarceration, a more sensible and nuanced approach to drug sentencing is starting to take centre stage.” Where are the women in this account, in this relief program?

The rule of law targets many: drug users, sex workers, lesbians, immigrants, Muslims, activists, women. Everywhere. These laws have driven the hyperincarceration rates of women, in the U.S. and everywhere. The rule of law is a war zone. The laws change, they may be gone, but nothing changes until women’s names, bodies, lives are brought into the light of day. How many more stories, how many more articles, are required before that action is taken, before the war on women is acknowledged and addressed? Who pays for the rule of law? Women. Who will pay? There’s the question.

(Photo Credit: Ethiopia Forums)

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