tag:theconversation.com,2011:/ca/topics/african-women-20497/articlesAfrican women – The Conversation2023-08-30T13:39:00Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1923382023-08-30T13:39:00Z2023-08-30T13:39:00Z‘Motherhood is hard’: young, HIV-positive mums in South Africa open up about regret and anger<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489318/original/file-20221012-22-szjlec.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Women aren't often given space to discuss the difficult aspects of motherhood.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">fizkes/Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>For any woman, pregnancy and giving birth are major life-changing experiences. Becoming a mother brings with it a range of emotions and, in <a href="https://www.africaknowledgeproject.org/index.php/jenda/article/view/92">many African cultures</a>, positive emotions are centred when talking about motherhood. </p>
<p><a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?hl=en-US&publication_year=2016&author=O.+Oyewumi&title=What+gender+is+motherhood%3A+Changing+Yoruba+ideals+of+power%2C+procreation%2C+and+identity+in+the+age+of+modernity">Scholarship</a> from the eastern, western and southern parts of the continent has <a href="https://www.africaknowledgeproject.org/index.php/jenda/article/view/92">emphasised</a> how motherhood is linked to <a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139344333">notions</a> of continuity, strength and sacrifice, unconditional love, consecration and spirituality, family ties, loyalty and happiness.</p>
<p>In many African cultures, mothers are expected to be resilient, happy and tenacious. But what about the often “silenced” aspect of motherhood? Generally, mothers are not expected or encouraged to share any <a href="https://doi.org/10.1086/678145">negative emotions about their experiences and role</a>. Those who defy this expectation are <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0743558420945182">frequently stigmatised</a> and labelled “bad mothers”. </p>
<p>These responses often arise from the belief that motherhood is life’s key purpose. Seen through this societal lens, becoming a mother ought to be fulfilling and overwhelmingly positive.</p>
<p>But human emotions are complex. People can experience joy and sadness simultaneously. This is underscored by <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2158244019848802">our study</a> among HIV-positive mothers in South Africa about their experiences of motherhood. These young women, aged between 16 and 24, told us how they grappled with harsh realities and daily challenges. </p>
<p>They expressed regret about their unplanned experience of motherhood and wished their circumstances were different. It was clear they were experiencing conflicting internal emotions as they considered the roles, responsibilities and difficulties of motherhood. </p>
<p>Such negative emotions – especially regret – are seldom expressed when talking about motherhood. This leaves little room for African mothers to be vulnerable. To change this ideology and practice, safe space must be created for these feelings. </p>
<p>Doing so can promote open, honest and non-judgmental discussions that will lead to changes in the narratives surrounding motherhood, influence practices and boost emotional, mental and physical health. It can allow mothers and their children to thrive and be better equipped with the necessary skills to face life, irrespective of their challenges.</p>
<h2>Motherhood is hard</h2>
<p>We conducted one-on-one, in-depth interviews with ten HIV-positive mothers in Johannesburg, South Africa. The women all became mothers when they were adolescents. Their children’s ages ranged from two months to seven years old. We also interviewed three key stakeholders who, through their work as academics and researchers and in the healthcare field, engaged closely with adolescent mothers and HIV-positive individuals in South Africa.</p>
<p>None of the young mothers had planned to become pregnant. They were dealing with intersecting psychological, socioeconomic, health, cultural and physiological dynamics. They were stepping into new, unknown realities: as young mothers, some still had school responsibilities. Others were unemployed, <a href="https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.UEM.1524.FE.ZS?locations=ZA">as is the case</a> for most adolescent girls and young women aged between 15 and 24 in South Africa. They depended financially on others such as their grandmothers, the government’s monthly child support grant, or transactional sex partners. </p>
<p>Their HIV status created another layer of complexity due to the attached health responsibilities, stigma and shame. Apart from the <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2791450#:%7E:text=In%202019%2C%20an%20estimated%2070,aged%2020%20to%2024%20years.">high susceptibility</a> of adolescent girls to unplanned pregnancy and HIV infection in South Africa, another important reason for working with this group of mothers was to give voice to their experience and to possibly inform relevant policies.</p>
<h2>No judgment</h2>
<p>We created a safe, non-judgmental space in which the young women could share their feelings, both positive and negative. At least half of the participants told us that this was the first time they’d felt able to freely narrate their experiences, especially negative feelings about the experience of motherhood. Away from the pressure of cultural beliefs and expectations, they opened up. </p>
<p>The most prominent emotions they expressed were negative: specifically, they felt regret and anger. Their reflections were sometimes painful. One said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I will always feel like I robbed myself of my childhood, and at times I will resent my child. I would hit my child so badly, and even though she couldn’t hear what I was saying but I will always tell her that I regret being with her.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Another told us:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I don’t know whether it was worth it, but I know maybe I could have prevented it … I wish I had known how difficult it was to actually be a mother.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is a powerful negation of society’s notion that the moment a woman becomes a mother, she has access to knowledge and systems that enable her to maintain the image of <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/678145">“the good mother”</a>. The notion that the fear and doubt will be pushed aside and only positive emotions will dominate is simply false.</p>
<p>Most of the mothers also shared the joy and rewarding feelings of having their children. One stated that: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>… at first I was scared, but now I am happy because I look at her and she inspires me a lot … now I am seeing life in another way … with the support of my aunt and friends, I feel better.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Another said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… it is good to see my baby laughing, happy, playing, very nice … like it is very (long pause) … it is beautiful … I like him smiling cos I’m like I can no longer imagine my life without my son (laughs).</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Freedom and support</h2>
<p>It’s time to shift the conversation from conventional and rigid constructions of motherhood to a more open, inclusive picture across Africa. </p>
<p>This will do more than just give mothers the freedom to express the full range of their emotions about motherhood: it can also contribute to more inclusive, tailored policies and programmes that take into account the many complexities and dilemmas our participants spoke about. </p>
<p>These might include access to need-specific, supportive, non-judgmental counsellors and therapists, and increased peer mentorship programmes, as well as access to sexual and reproductive health information and career support programmes.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/192338/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Morolake Josephine Adeagbo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Negative emotions, especially regret, are seldom expressed when talking about motherhood.Morolake Josephine Adeagbo, Senior Research Associate, University of JohannesburgLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2070652023-07-04T13:27:41Z2023-07-04T13:27:41ZPaulina Chiziane, Mozambique’s grand novelist, finally receives her prestigious award<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534576/original/file-20230628-29-rv1e03.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Paulina Chiziane in Portugal after being awarded the Camões Prize for writers from Portuguese-speaking countries.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Horacio Villalobos/Corbis via Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://ilcs.sas.ac.uk/research-centres/centre-study-contemporary-womens-writing-ccww/ccww-author-pages/portuguese/paulina">Paulina Chiziane</a>, the first woman to publish a <a href="https://www.google.co.za/books/edition/Balada_de_amor_ao_vento/0ccvAAAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0&bsq=Balada%20de%20Amor%20ao%20Vento">novel</a> in Mozambique, has become the first African woman to <a href="https://www.portugal.gov.pt/en/gc23/communication/news-item?i=prize-giving-ceremony-for-the-camoes-prize-to-paulina-chiziane#:%7E:text=Set%20up%20by%20Portugal%20and,heritage%20of%20the%20Portuguese%20language.">receive</a> the most important award for Portuguese literature, the Camões Prize. She’s also the first to break all the rules about what a writer may reveal about Mozambique’s patriarchal culture and social taboos. </p>
<p>Born in Manjacaze in 1955 and raised in the capital, Maputo, Chiziane’s mother tongue is <a href="https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/11368/MZ">Chopi</a>, a Bantu language spoken along the southern coast of Mozambique, which she practised along with Portuguese, the language imposed during the colonial period. Today Chiziane has a degree in linguistics and is a leading global figure in Portuguese literature.</p>
<p>Speaking in a TV interview from the yard of her house in Zambezia province about winning the 2021 Camões Prize, she <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jG4BGhYpcQ">said</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>This prize is for all the people of my country, because I always wrote from a collective experience, transmitting a collective voice … even if my novels are written in the first person.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>She finally received the award in person at a ceremony in Lisbon in May 2023 – the annual event had been suspended during the COVID-19 pandemic. Named after the famed 16th century Portuguese poet <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Luis-de-Camoes">Luís de Camões</a>, the <a href="https://antigo.bn.gov.br/en/explore/literary-prizes/camoes-prize-literature">Camões Prize</a> was first awarded in 1988 to recognise great literature in Portuguese. In her <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCCzfdQJ09Q">speech</a> in Lisbon, Chiziane said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I was walking without knowing my direction, and yet I arrived somewhere. I come from Africa. I am black, and I am here, being the first black woman to receive this high recognition … I am black. Yes, and so what? If you want to be someone in life, in this world, you need to affirm your space. Leave traces of your feet on the ground, indelibly engraved, for other people to say: here someone has passed.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As a <a href="https://cec.letras.ulisboa.pt/en/research-team/francesca-negro/">scholar</a> of comparative literature who has <a href="https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6102-3730">researched</a> African writing in Portuguese, I have followed Chiziane’s career and wish to shed some light on the work of this important writer and activist. Her groundbreaking novels and short stories have not all been translated into English and French, limiting her recognition in Africa.</p>
<h2>Her protagonists</h2>
<p>Chiziane’s first novel <a href="https://www.google.co.za/books/edition/Balada_de_amor_ao_vento/0ccvAAAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0&bsq=Balada%20de%20Amor%20ao%20Vento">Balada de Amor ao Vento</a> (Ballad of Love in the Wind) (1990) is a powerful story about a rural woman trapped in a patriarchal system. It anticipates her most famous novel, the 2002 <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books/about/Niketche.html?id=3slfPgAACAAJ&redir_esc=y">Niketche: A Story of Polygamy</a>, awarded the José Craveirinha Prize. Set in the south of Mozambique, it exposes the trials that Niketche must endure in a polygamous household. </p>
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<p>Chiziane’s protagonists are characterised by a profound loneliness and sadness. They are victims of the painful subjugation of women that is still normalised – and seldom publicly discussed – in some regions of the country. She writes in absolute terms, revealing the good and the bad in society, and the emotions she evokes are extreme. And yet these women face their burdens and bear them bravely, discreetly and with dignity.</p>
<h2>A life in service</h2>
<p>Chiziane’s stories often reflect the social instability of a country oppressed by a war of liberation that was followed by civil conflicts after <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/Mozambique/Mozambique-under-the-New-State-regime">independence</a> from Portugal in 1975. They reflect her commitment to the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Frelimo">Frelimo</a> liberation movement. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534771/original/file-20230629-21-hgr84q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A book cover with illustrations of two women wearing traditional African headgear." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534771/original/file-20230629-21-hgr84q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534771/original/file-20230629-21-hgr84q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534771/original/file-20230629-21-hgr84q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534771/original/file-20230629-21-hgr84q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534771/original/file-20230629-21-hgr84q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1167&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534771/original/file-20230629-21-hgr84q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1167&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534771/original/file-20230629-21-hgr84q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1167&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>During the civil war of 1977 to 1992, she joined the <a href="https://www.icrc.org/en/movement">Red Cross</a> humanitarian organisation as a volunteer. This allowed her to observe the suffering of her people up close. Some of the most painful memories of that period converged in her second novel, the 1993 romance <a href="https://www.academia.edu/29416691/Ventos_do_Apocalipse_Paulina_Chiziane">Ventos do Apocalipse</a> (Winds of the Apocalypse). </p>
<p>As a volunteer, she encountered a woman who at first confused her with her dead daughter, establishing a profound bond with her. The painful memory of that mother <a href="https://www.publico.pt/1999/11/13/jornal/nunca-houve-arma-mais-fulminante-que-a-mulher-126390">inspired</a> her to write the book:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The two original names of the mother and the daughter, Minosse and Wusheni, are maintained in the novel as homage to that woman that has shaken my soul forever. I wish I could sit at her side now and tell her: of your tears I did this.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Chiziane went on to join the Nucleus of Feminine Association of Zambezia or <a href="https://nafezamoz.wordpress.com/apresentacao">Nafeza</a>, a non-governmental organisation created in 1997. She was now fighting oppression through her literary works, as well as through political actions. </p>
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<p>Nafeza works at strengthening and coordinating the efforts of the country’s female associations and community-based organisations to improve women’s lives on all levels. </p>
<p>Currently, Chiziane advises on the development of international aid projects focused on conflict and the defence of women’s rights and dignity.</p>
<h2>Social realities and taboos</h2>
<p>Her third novel, <a href="https://www.google.co.za/books/edition/O_S%C3%A9timo_Juramento/3cJKEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0">O Setimo Juramento</a> (The Seventh Pledge) in 2000, is again focused on daily life and the female condition. This time the context is the city. </p>
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<p>The work explores the strategies women have developed to cope with the social inferiority they face. In a context of political and economic corruption, a group of women who were meant to be rivals band together to improve their lives.</p>
<p>Through tapping into a geography of the country’s imagination – with its legends and myths that crash against the concrete realities of urban life – Chiziane constructs a powerful allegory about Mozambique’s socio-cultural conditions, especially for women. </p>
<p>Here actual development is destined only for the elite few, while the rest wander through a forest of symbols that make them question what is real and what is not.</p>
<h2>Outspoken voice</h2>
<p>Chiziane is prolific. She is also the author of numerous other novels and short stories. Her 2015 novel <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340157964_Ngoma_Yethu_o_curandeiro_e_o_Novo_Testamento">Ngoma Yethu</a>: O Curandeiro e o Novo Testamento (Ngoma Yethu: the Healer and the Old Testament) is also notable.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/womens-memories-of-food-offer-insights-into-mozambiques-liberation-struggle-149003">Women's memories of food offer insights into Mozambique's liberation struggle</a>
</strong>
</em>
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<p>Ngoma Yethu created quite a scandal in Mozambique, especially because it was written by a woman (women are not supposed to talk about the rituals or the role of the nyanga or traditional healer) and for firmly denouncing the demonisation of traditional African spiritual beliefs by the Catholic church.</p>
<p>But apart from Niketche: A Story of Polygamy, none of her books are available in English. Her novel The Joyful Cry of the Partridge is, however, due to be published in English in 2024.</p>
<p>Chiziane has remained unwavering in amplifying women’s voices in her country. Her literary path has already made history and the Camões Prize, now officially celebrated, is a testament to the enormous importance of her role in representing African culture in the context of Portuguese-speaking countries.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/207065/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Francesca Negro does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Camões Prize is the most important award for Portuguese literature, and Paulina Chiziane is the first African woman to receive it.Francesca Negro, Associate research scientist, Universidade de Lisboa Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2042872023-05-07T08:30:01Z2023-05-07T08:30:01ZChildren’s book revolution: how East African women took on colonialism after independence<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524145/original/file-20230503-27-t4c7oy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Detail from the cover of the children's book Kayo's House by Ugandan author Barbara Kimenye.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Macmillan/Mactracks Series</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>As independence from British colonial rule swept across East Africa in the early 1960s and freedom was won in <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/uganda-gains-independence">Uganda</a>, <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/kenya-granted-independence">Kenya</a> and <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/tanzania-gains-independence">Tanzania</a>, parents and teachers worried about what their children were reading.</p>
<p>Most children’s books on the market were dominated by European writers like <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Enid-Blyton">Enid Blyton</a>. One of Kenyan writer <a href="https://ngugiwathiongo.com/about/">Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo’s</a> most stringent criticisms of colonialism was the explosive effect of this “cultural bomb” in the classroom, as missionaries taught African students western cultures and foreign histories. This, according to Kenyan publisher Henry Chakava, <a href="https://www.africanbookscollective.com/books/publishing-in-africa">was producing</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>a new breed of black Europeans, who began to despise their own skin and background. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Publishers and African writers were quick to realise the gap in the market for literature that was suitable for a new generation growing up in independence. From the mid-1960s onwards, publishing houses began a concerted effort to produce such literature. What’s particularly noteworthy is that most of these authors of children’s books in this period were women. </p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-story-of-an-african-childrens-book-that-explains-the-science-of-skin-colour-164324">The story of an African children's book that explains the science of skin colour</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<p>As an historian of East Africa, these women writers and their children’s books formed part of my <a href="https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/31493/1/Adima_205057140_CorrectedThesisClean.pdf#page=107">doctoral research</a>. Not only have they been largely ignored by history, but their voices matter because through them we receive a unique insight into this period of East African history.</p>
<h2>The women writers of independence</h2>
<p>In the 1960s, ideas of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/decolonization">decolonisation</a> and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Afrocentrism">Afrocentrism</a> dominated East African culture and academia. The <a href="https://www.vestiges-journal.info/Abbia/Abbia_1_1963/Abbiav1n7.pdf">1962 African Writers Conference</a> was convened at Uganda’s Makerere College (today Makerere University). The University of Nairobi’s English Department was dissolved in a 1968 <a href="https://literature.uonbi.ac.ke/basic-page/our-history">revolution</a> led by East African writers and thinkers. It was replaced by a department of literature, and a department of linguistics and African languages. But such discourse happened mainly inside elite intellectual spaces and small circles. </p>
<p>We mainly know of male voices in East African literature from this period – the likes of Ngūgī, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Okot-pBitek">Okot p'Bitek</a> and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Taban-lo-Liyong">Taban lo Liyong</a>. As men, they had more educational and professional opportunities, and better access to publishing networks. Women writers were seldom published and often dismissed or even ridiculed.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524419/original/file-20230504-27-szm0nf.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A children's book cover with an illustration showing a classroom of school pupils in uniform, alarmed and recoiling at the sight of a green snake emerging from the shirt of a boy." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524419/original/file-20230504-27-szm0nf.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524419/original/file-20230504-27-szm0nf.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524419/original/file-20230504-27-szm0nf.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524419/original/file-20230504-27-szm0nf.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524419/original/file-20230504-27-szm0nf.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524419/original/file-20230504-27-szm0nf.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524419/original/file-20230504-27-szm0nf.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Oxford University Press</span></span>
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<p>They found a gap in children’s literature. Women writers took it upon themselves to educate children about independence and the meaning of decolonisation. They did this outside of the academy’s ivory tower, with popular work that trickled down to all levels of society.</p>
<p>These authors included <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/sep/18/barbara-kimenye">Barbara Kimenye</a>, <a href="https://www.asenathboleodaga.com/her-story">Asenath Bole Odaga</a>, <a href="https://nation.africa/kenya/life-and-style/lifestyle/the-making-of-prof-miriam-were-africa-s-2022-nobel-peace-prize-nominee-3777092">Miriam Khamadi Were</a>, <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/kola-pamela">Pamela Kola</a>, <a href="https://peoplepill.com/people/anne-matindi">Anne Matindi</a>, <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/zirimu-elvania-namukwaya-1938-1979">Elvania Namukwaya Zirimu</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/31/marjorie-oludhe-macgoye">Marjorie Macgoye</a>. </p>
<p>They wrote for children of all ages, creating fiction, folk tales, and works used in school textbooks. With their words, the women imparted lessons they believed were important for the post-independence generation to learn in order to undo colonialism’s “cultural bomb”. These were works of transformative potential that foregrounded African settings and lessons.</p>
<h2>The Moses series</h2>
<p>Some of the best known African children’s books of the 1960s and 1970s included the Moses series by Ugandan author <a href="https://globaleastafrica.org/global-lives/barbara-kimenye-1929-2012">Barbara Kimenye</a>, one of East Africa’s most celebrated children’s book writers. The series follows the adventures and misdemeanours of Moses and his friends at the ficitional Ugandan boarding school, Mukibi’s Educational Institute for the Sons of African Gentlemen. The Moses series was published between 1968 and 1987 by Oxford University Press.</p>
<p><a href="https://books.google.co.za/books/about/Moses_in_Trouble.html?id=GUYQAQAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">Moses in Trouble</a>, the fifth in the series, centres on an upheaval at Mukibi’s due to poor school meals. Moses and his friend King Kong “sneak off to the village duka (shop) to buy a packet of biscuits” and are later forced to go to nearby farms to steal food. Eventually, Moses is hospitalised with malnutrition. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524423/original/file-20230504-17-53qf0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A children's book cover with an illustration of a boy falling to the ground as he's hit by a coconut from a tree." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524423/original/file-20230504-17-53qf0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524423/original/file-20230504-17-53qf0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=938&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524423/original/file-20230504-17-53qf0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=938&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524423/original/file-20230504-17-53qf0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=938&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524423/original/file-20230504-17-53qf0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1179&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524423/original/file-20230504-17-53qf0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1179&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524423/original/file-20230504-17-53qf0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1179&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Oxford University Press</span></span>
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<p>Despite the seriousness of the topic, the narrative is humorous, and the Moses series remained popular for decades. The book contains subtle criticism of post-colonial political oppression. Mukibi’s can be seen as a replication of the (post) colonial state: it restricts the boys’ movements and demands complete obedience to authority, but fails to provide basic necessities. </p>
<p>With Moses in Trouble, Kimenye encourages even young readers to remain critical of authority, especially in a time when then-president <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Milton-Obote">Milton Obote</a>’s rule in Uganda was becoming increasingly authoritarian. </p>
<h2>Folk tales</h2>
<p>African folk tales were another popular literary genre for children. African publishers encouraged that these be written and distributed across East Africa. One example is the collection <a href="https://www.africanbookscollective.com/books/east-african-why-stories">East African Why Stories</a> by Kenyan author Kola. It was published by East African Publishing House in 1966. </p>
<p>The stories recount the origins of the habits and characteristics of animals native to Kenya, with titles such as Why the Hippo Has No Hair or Why Baby Chickens Follow Their Mothers. As an educator, Kola understood the need for African stories to be read by African children. She wrote down the stories as they were told to her by her grandmother in the local Luo language before translating them into English. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524422/original/file-20230504-25-oq48q3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A children's book cover with an illustration of a buck leaping up at a bat in an African hut." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524422/original/file-20230504-25-oq48q3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524422/original/file-20230504-25-oq48q3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524422/original/file-20230504-25-oq48q3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524422/original/file-20230504-25-oq48q3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524422/original/file-20230504-25-oq48q3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1164&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524422/original/file-20230504-25-oq48q3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1164&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524422/original/file-20230504-25-oq48q3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1164&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">East African Publishing House</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>The oral origins of the stories are reflected in the entertaining, conversational style in which they are written. Reading traditional folk stories was a way for African children to remain in touch with their heritage, which the colonial education system effectively eradicated.</p>
<h2>Why this matters</h2>
<p>The works of male authors continue to be celebrated today for their contributions to the East African literary canon. Fewer remember the role children’s book authors played in the Africanisation of written literature in the 1960s and 1970s – probably because most of them were <a href="https://africainwords.com/2020/08/18/where-were-the-women-east-african-writing-and-the-1962-makerere-conference/">women</a>.</p>
<p>Looking beyond the texts discussed here, the women critiqued colonialism and neocolonialism, inequality, oppression, patriarchy and state authoritarianism, often representing marginalised communities. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/five-things-you-should-know-about-ngugi-wa-thiongo-one-of-africas-greatest-living-writers-67009">Five things you should know about Ngugi wa Thiong'o, one of Africa's greatest living writers</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>In writing for young readers, these writers imparted their hopes for independence to them. Their texts reached all echelons of society, exposing children to ideas that allowed them to understand their changing world while serving as an antidote to Eurocentric education.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/204287/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anna Adima received funding from the Leverhulme Trust. </span></em></p>At independence, adults were reading decolonial classics - but children were reading Enid Blyton. A generation of unsung women writers changed that.Anna Adima, Post-Doctoral Research Associate in History, The University of EdinburghLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2037702023-05-01T10:43:10Z2023-05-01T10:43:10ZAmma Darko uses fiction to portray the real plight of women and street children in Ghana<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522628/original/file-20230424-1294-nzw4m7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Detail from the cover of an edition of Amma Darko's novel Faceless.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sub-Saharan Publishers</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/culture-magazines/darko-amma-1956">Amma Darko</a> is one of Ghana’s leading novelists, known for exploring gritty social issues and the lives of women. There is much to be unearthed in the childhood narrative of deprivation and danger that she tackles in her 2003 work <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books/about/Faceless.html?id=uiggAQAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">Faceless</a>. </p>
<p>Faceless is the story of an investigation into the death of a young girl called Baby T, a child sex worker whose naked body is found dumped behind a marketplace, beaten and mutilated. During the progression of the novel, Darko skilfully reveals details about Baby T’s life through the eyes of her younger sister, Fofo, herself a street child.</p>
<p>In Faceless, Darko interrogates the seeming normalcy of the life of a street child by highighting the multiple complexities that children face in their homes, leading to some of them ‘choosing’ to live in the streets.</p>
<p>In as much as street children can be a result of dysfunctional homes, they are also created because of poor state policy implementation and broader structural inequalities. Darko reveals how violence shows itself in women’s experiences of gender inequality and impacts on their children.</p>
<p>We came together as a literary researcher and a psychology scholar to <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23277408.2023.2188685">conduct a critical review</a> of Faceless, a book that wrestles with the structural violence that bleeds into people’s homes, affecting their everyday experiences. The challenges of street children and gender inequities continue to stare at us, and Darko’s articulation of these issues 20 years ago continues to be relevant today. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522743/original/file-20230425-2206-e0v61v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522743/original/file-20230425-2206-e0v61v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522743/original/file-20230425-2206-e0v61v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522743/original/file-20230425-2206-e0v61v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522743/original/file-20230425-2206-e0v61v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522743/original/file-20230425-2206-e0v61v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1164&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522743/original/file-20230425-2206-e0v61v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1164&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522743/original/file-20230425-2206-e0v61v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1164&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sub-Saharan Publishers</span></span>
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<p>The main argument in our reading of Faceless is that gender inequality provides fertile ground for violence and disorderliness. An understanding of its complexities is needed for societies to achieve social justice for women and children.</p>
<h2>Who is Amma Darko?</h2>
<p>The award-winning Darko is an important voice on the West African literary scene. She has published numerous books, including the novel <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books/about/Beyond_the_Horizon.html?id=zH1aAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y#:%7E:text=The%20expectations%20of%20her%20family,of%20those%20they%20leave%20behind.">Beyond the Horizon</a> (1995), <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books/about/The_Housemaid.html?id=-mXIfRXET0wC&redir_esc=y#:%7E:text=The%20Housemaid%2C%20by%20Amma%20Darko,who%20is%20responsible%2C%20are%20legion.">The Housemaid</a> (1998), Faceless (2003), <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books/about/Not_Without_Flowers.html?id=KikgAQAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">Not Without Flowers</a> (2006) and <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books/about/Between_Two_Worlds.html?id=Rti-CQAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y">Between Two Worlds</a> (2015). Some of her books are published in both German and English, with two novels published in German only, the country where Darko was living when she established her literary career. In her novels, Darko focuses particularly on how women navigate the world, reflecting common Ghanaian life experiences. </p>
<p>Darko was born in 1956 in Koforidua, the capital city of the eastern region of Ghana. She grew up in the cosmopolitan capital Accra. After spending her formative years there, Darko moved to Kumasi where she obtained her diploma in industrial design in 1980. She also obtained a qualification in sociology and spent a year working at the <a href="https://www.devex.com/organizations/knust-technology-consultancy-centre-38077">Technology Consultancy Centre</a> at the university in Kumasi.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522742/original/file-20230425-20-7315si.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A woman smiles, sitting in front of a library of books." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522742/original/file-20230425-20-7315si.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522742/original/file-20230425-20-7315si.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=263&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522742/original/file-20230425-20-7315si.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=263&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522742/original/file-20230425-20-7315si.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=263&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522742/original/file-20230425-20-7315si.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=330&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522742/original/file-20230425-20-7315si.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=330&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522742/original/file-20230425-20-7315si.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=330&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Amma Darko.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Heinemann</span></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>In 1981, Darko moved to Germany because of the <a href="https://mg.co.za/thoughtleader/opinion/2021-11-13-the-coup-that-changed-ghana-forever/">political instability</a> in Ghana. She stayed there until 1987. It was in Germany, while doing menial jobs, that she wrote and published her debut, Beyond the Horizon. For Darko, Germany was a perfect space for her to focus, to think, and to develop her writing about her home country. She returned to Accra in 1987 to study accounting and continue writing novels that explore the impact of gender inequality on women’s lives and choices.</p>
<h2>Gender and choices</h2>
<p>Despite Ghana’s <a href="https://freeshs.gov.gh/index.php/free-shs-policy/#:%7E:text=The%20free%20SHS%20policy%20aims,year%20scholarship%20for%20secondary%20education.">free education</a> policy, gender plays a key role in access to formal education in a country where there still exist several factors that impact the education of adolescent girls. These are social, cultural and economic. In Faceless she writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the traditional settings of our villages, cohesion and familiarity is so imbued in the lives of individuals that women are more conscious of what they do. But in the cities, there is a fragmentation, which results in behavioural flexibility. A woman like Fofo’s mother, whose ‘village’ happens to be inner-city Accra, is more likely to lose her sense of onus rather speedily when pushed by joblessness and poverty and the non-existent male support … </p>
</blockquote>
<p>And so she lets Fofo and her sister Baby T take to the streets without much guilt. In the course of the novel Fofo meets a group of women who run a non-governmental organisation called Mute. It serves as a space for collecting and documenting community issues that no one is interested in recording. </p>
<p>However, their encounter with Fofo challenges Mute to shift from focusing only on documentation towards active involvement in bringing about change in the lives of the children who are living in the streets. Mute takes on Fofo’s case, unravels the mystery of the death of Baby T, and eventually rehabilitates Fofo. </p>
<p>This discovery of voice and a sense of self is important. Once Fofo finds these, her life is transformed. </p>
<p>Children like Fofo have had to grow up too quickly in order to assume the responsibilities their parents have abandoned. Presented as a social reject, Fofo grows to be the one who brings change into her life and provides peace and closure for her dead sister. </p>
<h2>Tackling social ills</h2>
<p>Darko unapologetically and courageously tackles the not-so-often talked about social ills that are persistent in many communities. She takes the reader on an uncomfortable but necessary journey. </p>
<p>With these persistent multiple challenges both in Ghana and other parts of the continent, we argue that Darko’s novel continues to be relevant today and her piercing narration cuts across borders. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-short-story-by-ghanas-ama-ata-aidoo-offers-a-view-of-humanitys-place-in-the-world-177227">A short story by Ghana's Ama Ata Aidoo offers a view of humanity's place in the world</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Darko tells the real-life stories of those who are discarded, living on the fringe of society. The general population and government behave as if they do not exist, as if they are invisible, faceless.</p>
<p>But Darko gives them life and demands that the reader considers how they came to be in that place so that something can be done to give them a future.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/203770/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Puleng Segalo receives funding from the National Institute for the Humanities and the Social Sciences. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Theresah Patrine Ennin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A psychologist and a literary scholar analyse Faceless, a powerful novel about homeless children - and their mothers.Puleng Segalo, Chief Albert Luthuli Research Chair, University of South AfricaTheresah Patrine Ennin, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Cape CoastLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1883452022-08-08T13:43:00Z2022-08-08T13:43:00ZLilian Ngoyi: an heroic South African woman whose story hasn’t been fully told<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477946/original/file-20220807-56706-dfjnx6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Detail of a photo of Lilian Ngoyi making a speech in 1960.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Azola Daniel/Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Despite her key role in the struggle against <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/history-apartheid-south-africa">apartheid</a> in South Africa, details about <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/lilian-masediba-ngoyi">Lilian Ngoyi</a>’s life remain sparse. The short paragraphs on her legacy repeat a few well-worn phrases. South Africa’s “mother of the black resistance”, a widow and rumoured lover of <a href="https://www.nelsonmandela.org/content/page/biography">Nelson Mandela</a>, and the first woman member of the national executive committee – the core leadership of the African National Congress (ANC), the resistance movement that would later become the government of a democratic South Africa. She was also, of course, one of the leaders of the country’s famous <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/1956-womens-march-pretoria-9-august">Women’s March</a>. </p>
<p>On 9 August 1956, now commemorated as <a href="https://www.gov.za/womens-day">Women’s Day</a> in South Africa, Ngoyi and other woman leaders led an estimated 20,000 women to the Union Buildings in Pretoria, the seat of power of the white minority government. They were protesting extending the much-hated pass <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/pass-laws-south-africa-1800-1994">laws</a> to women. These laws required black citizens to carry pass documents to better control their movement.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478097/original/file-20220808-22-co33hn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="An illustration of a woman with a raised fist, handcuffs broken, and the words 'Now you have touched the women you have struck a rock. You have dislodged a boulder; you will be crushed.'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478097/original/file-20220808-22-co33hn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478097/original/file-20220808-22-co33hn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=854&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478097/original/file-20220808-22-co33hn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=854&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478097/original/file-20220808-22-co33hn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=854&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478097/original/file-20220808-22-co33hn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1073&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478097/original/file-20220808-22-co33hn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1073&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478097/original/file-20220808-22-co33hn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1073&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A poster celebrating the march.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Judy Seidman/Medu Art Ensemble</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Beyond this, Ma-Ngoyi, as she was affectionately known, remains an often-mentioned but somewhat two-dimensional figure in history.</p>
<p>Perhaps because she was not the wife of a high-profile ANC leader and lived much of her life as a banned person, dying in penury, there is no Lilian Ngoyi Foundation and no substantive biography. Yet the pioneering role she played, and the sacrifices she made, extended well beyond the Women’s March.</p>
<h2>Upbringing</h2>
<p>Born Lilian Masediba Matabane in 1911, Ngoyi had a different life from other anti-apartheid struggle stalwarts. Not only was she an independent woman, but she was born into urban poverty. She did not hail from a royal or rural household like the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/nelson-mandela-family-tree">Mandelas</a>, <a href="https://southafrica.co.za/sisulu-family.html">Sisulus</a> and other elite members of the ANC, whose role in the fight against apartheid is well documented. </p>
<p>Ngoyi was the granddaughter of a trailblazing Methodist minister, a historical figure in his own right. But his extraordinary contribution to the missionaries’ endeavours in southern Africa did not translate into any significant upward mobility for the family.</p>
<p>Her mother, though literate, worked as a washerwoman and domestic worker and her father was a miner and labourer, who died of mining-related lung disease. As the only girl in a family of four, she was the last in line when it came to education. Still, Ngoyi’s family rallied to keep her in <a href="https://methodist.org.za/the-kilnerton-story/">Kilnerton</a>, a leading black Methodist school, even though she was only able to complete her junior schooling. She moved to Johannesburg to take up a short-lived position as one of the country’s first black female trainee nurses at City Deep Mine Hospital. </p>
<p>Her youth typified the contemporary experience of many black women in urban South Africa. She fell pregnant at 19, married at 23, but was widowed at 26. She took on the care of her newborn cousin when her brother’s wife died, and was the primary carer for her elderly parents. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477947/original/file-20220807-60769-n21ldy.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Black and white portrait of a young woman with short hair, smiling shyly and tilting her head." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477947/original/file-20220807-60769-n21ldy.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477947/original/file-20220807-60769-n21ldy.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477947/original/file-20220807-60769-n21ldy.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477947/original/file-20220807-60769-n21ldy.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477947/original/file-20220807-60769-n21ldy.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477947/original/file-20220807-60769-n21ldy.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477947/original/file-20220807-60769-n21ldy.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lilian Ngoyi.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Azola Dayile/Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The family spent a miserable decade living in The Shelters, the site of the country’s first urban land invasion under the charismatic <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/james-sofasonke-mpanza">James Mpanza</a>, who encouraged backyarders to occupy open land in Orlando, Soweto. Here, Ngoyi experienced the indignity of poverty first hand.</p>
<h2>Defiance</h2>
<p>Politics changed everything for her. In 1953, at the tail end of the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/defiance-campaign-1952">Defiance Campaign</a>, a mass non-violent resistance protest, Ngoyi risked a three-year prison sentence by walking into the whites-only section of a Johannesburg post office. Apartheid laws created and policed racially segregated spaces and to defy them took great bravery.</p>
<p>Ngoyi became an ANC member and rose rapidly through its ranks. She joined the newly formed Federation of South African Women (<a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/federation-south-african-women-fedsaw">Fedsaw</a>), forging a lifelong friendship with trade unionist and activist <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/helen-joseph">Helen Joseph</a>. A broad-based coalition of women’s organisations, Fedsaw was the organiser of the 1956 march, with Ngoyi and Joseph leading the way. </p>
<p>Ngoyi had the skill to inspire mass mobilisation and bring people together, especially women. By all accounts, she was an exceptional orator. In a 1956 profile in the leading black magazine of the day, <a href="https://theconversation.com/journalism-of-drums-heyday-remains-cause-for-celebration-70-years-later-142668">Drum</a>, author and activist <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/eskia-mphahlele">Ezekiel Mphahlele</a> <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=tXiJAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA236&lpg=PA236&dq=ezekiel+mphahlele+lilian+ngoyi+drum+She+can+toss+an+audience+on+her+little+finger,+get+men+grunting+with+shame+and+a+feeling+of+smallness&source=bl&ots=Uu97v5vImK&sig=ACfU3U3KHLfWiG0howoJGwOrovOgLWm1IA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjvmIvKlbf5AhUihv0HHTTRCYcQ6AF6BAgCEAM#v=onepage&q=ezekiel%20mphahlele%20lilian%20ngoyi%20drum%20She%20can%20toss%20an%20audience%20on%20her%20little%20finger%2C%20get%20men%20grunting%20with%20shame%20and%20a%20feeling%20of%20smallness&f=false">wrote</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>She can toss an audience on her little finger, get men grunting with shame and a feeling of smallness.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Anti-apartheid activist and wife of Nelson Mandela, <a href="https://theconversation.com/winnie-madikizela-mandela-revolutionary-who-kept-the-spirit-of-resistance-alive-94300">Winnie Madikizela-Mandela</a> <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/lives-of-courage-women-for-a-new-south-africa/oclc/19723691">recalled</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>She spoke the language of the worker, and she was herself an ordinary factory worker. When she said what she stood for, she evoked emotions no other person could evoke.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In 1955 Ngoyi was sponsored for an overseas trip by the Women’s International Democratic Federation, regarded as a Soviet Front organisation. She attended conferences and propaganda tours in Europe, China and the USSR. </p>
<p>She returned home to the government’s plans to extend the pass system to women. The experience abroad, of being treated like a human being for the first time, had invigorated her. Ngoyi set about canvassing support for the famous march. The largest gathering of women in the country’s history, it was the kind of mass mobilisation the ANC men had only dreamed of.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477948/original/file-20220807-32086-63k234.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A young woman in a uniform holds up her hand to make a point as she stands and talks, earnestly" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477948/original/file-20220807-32086-63k234.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477948/original/file-20220807-32086-63k234.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477948/original/file-20220807-32086-63k234.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477948/original/file-20220807-32086-63k234.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477948/original/file-20220807-32086-63k234.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477948/original/file-20220807-32086-63k234.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477948/original/file-20220807-32086-63k234.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">At friend and comrade Ida Mntwana’s funeral.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Azola Dayile/Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 1956 Ngoyi was among 156 dissidents arrested in a swoop by security police. Charged with treason, they became known as the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/treason-trial-1956-1961">Treason Trialists</a>. She was finally acquitted in 1960, but had lost her job as a factory machinist. She was soon arrested again and detained for five months, 19 days of which she spent in solitary confinement. In a 1963 arrest, she spent 71 days in solitary, an experience which affected her ability to focus.</p>
<h2>Isolation</h2>
<p>Thereafter, Ngoyi drops out of history. She was subjected to three five-year banning orders, living in a state of permanent lockdown. For most of the remainder of her life she was forbidden from interacting with other banned persons. She was unable to meet with more than three people at a time and could not attend a lecture, go to the cinema or accept invitations to weddings, funerals or parties of any sort. </p>
<p>The banning orders ended her political career and gradually eroded her ability to earn a living as a seamstress, unable to travel into town to purchase fabrics. Security police frequently raided her home, chasing away potential customers. Ngoyi was forced to rely on sporadic donations. In a letter of gratitude to a sponsor, she expressed the humiliation of her position:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We feel small to say thanks all the time. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Not the wife of an elite ANC leader, she received no financial contributions from exiled men, nor was she supported by the International Defence and Aid Fund, which helped the families of political prisoners. She did not lose hope, however, and like Mandela, took solace in gardening, planting seeds sent to her by her overseas friends. Her small yard was full of blooms.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0fMNcpl8yG8?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Ngoyi’s funeral.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On 13 March 1980, two months before her third banning order was due to expire, Ngoyi passed away, aged 69. She never saw freedom in her lifetime, nor did she receive the recognition she deserved for her efforts to achieve it. At her funeral, activist and church leader <a href="https://theconversation.com/archbishop-desmond-tutu-father-of-south-africas-rainbow-nation-97619">Desmond Tutu</a> <a href="https://sthp.saha.org.za/memorial/articles/isolated_for_two_decades.htm">said</a> that when the true history of South Africa was written Ngoyi’s name would be in “letters of gold”. </p>
<p>This has manifested to some extent – a few clinics and roads bear her name. But the true nature of her accomplishments and challenges, and those of other banned and banished persons in South Africa, should never be forgotten.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/188345/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Martha Evans receives funding from ANFASA. </span></em></p>The pioneering role she played, and the sacrifices she made, extended well beyond the famous 1956 Women’s March.Martha Evans, Senior Lecturer in Media Studies, University of Cape TownLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1600632021-07-15T12:26:27Z2021-07-15T12:26:27ZHow Sarah Baartman’s hips went from a symbol of exploitation to a source of empowerment for Black women<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411507/original/file-20210715-25-v3qw7a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=5%2C4%2C968%2C727&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Sarah Baartman was an international sensation of objectification.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/7B5C/production/_87508513_spl.jpg">British Library</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In “<a href="https://genius.com/The-carters-black-effect-lyrics">BLACK EFFECT</a>,” a track from Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s 2018 collaborative album “<a href="https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-carters-everything-is-love/">EVERYTHING IS LOVE</a>,” Beyoncé describes a quintessential Black female form:</p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code>Stunt with your curls, your lips, Sarah Baartman hips
Gotta hop into my jeans like I hop into my whip, yeah
</code></pre>
<p>The celebration of Sarah Baartman’s features marks a departure from her historical image. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/baartman-sara-saartjie-1789-1815/">Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman</a> was an African woman who, in the early 1800s, was something of an international sensation of objectification. She was paraded around Europe, where spectators jeered at her large buttocks.</p>
<p>With celebrities like Beyoncé recognizing Baartman’s contributions to the ideal Black female body – and with the curvaceous posteriors of Black women lauded on TV and celebrated on social media – I wanted to understand how this ideal is viewed by the very people it most directly effects: Black women.</p>
<p>So I interviewed 30 Black women from various cities in South Africa and the mid-Atlantic U.S. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/00219347211006483">and asked them about Baartman</a>. Would her image represent a reviled past or a canvas of resilience? Were they proud to bear a similar buttocks or ashamed to share a similar stature?</p>
<h2>Hips and history</h2>
<p>Baartman, a Khoisan woman from South Africa, left her native land in the early 1800s for Europe; <a href="https://archive.org/details/sarabaartmanhott00crai">it’s unclear whether she went willingly or was forced to do so</a>. Showmen exhibited her throughout Europe, where, in an embarrassing and dehumanizing spectacle, <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Venus-in-the-Dark-Blackness-and-Beauty-in-Popular-Culture/Hobson/p/book/9781138237629">she was forced to sing and dance before crowds of white onlookers</a>.</p>
<p>Often naked in these exhibitions, Baartman was sometimes suspended in a cage on stage while being poked, prodded and groped. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1353/hyp.2003.0079">Her body was characterized</a> as grotesque, lascivious and obscene because of her protruding buttocks, which was due to a condition <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00449795">called steatopygia</a> that occurs naturally among people in arid parts of southern Africa. She also had elongated labia, a physical feature derogatorily referred to as a “<a href="https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Hottentot+apron">Hottentot apron</a>.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A drawing depicts Sarah Baartman being ogled and mocked by onlookers." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411323/original/file-20210714-27-1vzk7q3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411323/original/file-20210714-27-1vzk7q3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=458&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411323/original/file-20210714-27-1vzk7q3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=458&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411323/original/file-20210714-27-1vzk7q3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=458&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411323/original/file-20210714-27-1vzk7q3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=576&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411323/original/file-20210714-27-1vzk7q3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=576&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411323/original/file-20210714-27-1vzk7q3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=576&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Baartman had a naturally occurring condition called ‘steatopygia.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://media.britishmuseum.org/media/Repository/Documents/2014_11/12_11/58060ffd_0fcb_4075_86f1_a3e100bc7c83/mid_00099425_001.jpg">British Museum</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Both became symbolic markers of racial difference, and many other women from this part of Africa <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/00219347211006483">were trafficked to Europe for white entertainment</a>. Because they diverged so drastically from dominant ideas of white feminine beauty, Baartman’s features were exoticized. Her voluptuous and curvaceous body – mocked and shamed in the West – was also <a href="https://doi.org/10.1353/hyp.2003.0079">described in advertisements</a> as the “most correct and perfect specimen of her race.”</p>
<h2>The Baartman ideal</h2>
<p>Of course, Black women’s bodies vary; there is no monolithic – nor ideal – type. </p>
<p>Nonetheless, there is a strong legacy of the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0021934716686022">curvaceous ideal</a>, more so than in other races. </p>
<p>It persists to this day.</p>
<p>In my interviews, Black women revealed how they felt about Baartman’s story, how they compared her to their own body image and what her legacy represents. </p>
<p>One American participant, Ashley, seemed to recognize how entrenched the Baartman ideal has become.</p>
<p>“[Baartman] was the platform for stereotypes,” she said. “She set the trend for Black women [to] have these figures and … now these stereotypes are carrying through pop culture.”</p>
<p>Mieke, a South African woman, described being proud of her proportions and the way they’re connected to Baartman, saying, “I’m proud of my body because of the resemblance I feel it has with hers.”</p>
<h2>Exploitation or empowerment?</h2>
<p>Today, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0021934716686022">the Baartman body can be advantageous</a>, especially on social media, where Black women have the opportunity to produce content that’s socially and culturally relevant to them and their audiences – and where <a href="https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/megantheestallion/thotshit.html">users can make money off their posts</a>. </p>
<p>On various platforms, women leverage their looks to obtain paid advertisements or receive free gifts, services or merchandise <a href="https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2017/05/152932/instagram-influencer-gender-salary-difference">from various beauty and apparel companies</a>. They’re also more likely to gain more followers – and perhaps attract more wealthy suitors, depending on their ambitions – <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/00219347211006483">by hewing more closely to the contemporary Baartman ideal</a>. </p>
<p>So you could argue that Black women are taking control of their objectification and commodification to earn money. They’re also protesting the ideals of white mainstream beauty, seizing Baartman’s exploitation and mockery and recasting her as a source of pride and empowerment on places like #BlackTwitter, Instagram and OnlyFans.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="InstagramEmbed" data-react-props="{"url":"https://www.instagram.com/p/CPzepgwA18G","accessToken":"127105130696839|b4b75090c9688d81dfd245afe6052f20"}"></div></p>
<p>On the other hand, it cannot be denied that Baartman’s image is rooted in a legacy that is engulfed by slavery, unwillful submission and colonialism. The white gaze that fetishized Baartman’s body as exotic and overtly sexual was the same one that <a href="https://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/jezebel/">promulgated the stereotype</a> that Black women were sexually promiscuous, lascivious and hypersexual. </p>
<p>While Baartman may not have been able to keep the cash people paid to ogle at her, Black women today can strive for her body type and make money off it. Once subjected to the mockery of an insidious white gaze, Baartman’s physique is now profitable – as long as these women are comfortable with being objectified. </p>
<p>But is selling this body type always a form of empowerment? Would someone who wasn’t already exploited do it?</p>
<p>This may explain why Black women today are conflicted when they think about Baartman. </p>
<p>Lesedi, from South Africa, highlighted this tension. </p>
<p>“I feel you do find girls like me who are not proud of what they see when they look in the mirror and they just feel like, ‘I need to drop this off,’” she said. However she added that “you find other girls that are just so happy about it that they twerk. … I guess Sarah Baartman definitely does have an influence, but it’s either positive or negative whether you’re proud to have a bum.”</p>
<p>[<em>Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/weekly-highlights-61?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=weeklybest">Sign up for our weekly newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/160063/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rokeshia Renné Ashley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In the 19th century, Baartman was dehumanized and mocked for her large posterior. So what does it mean when Black women today strive for ‘Sarah Baartman hips’?Rokeshia Renné Ashley, Assistant Professor of Communication, Florida International UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1614442021-06-03T15:04:17Z2021-06-03T15:04:17ZYoung female South African architect reinvents Serpentine Pavilion in London<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403835/original/file-20210601-23-1cwn2pv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Interior of the winning design for the Serpentine Pavilion.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image courtesy Counterspace</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The arrival in London of a new <a href="https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/about/serpentine-pavilion/">Serpentine Pavilion</a> is a design diary highlight every year. </p>
<p>Each commission sees a new temporary garden building – a <a href="https://buildyourownpavilion.serpentinegalleries.org/what-is-a-pavilion/">pavilion</a> – created by a selected international architect. It is organised by the <a href="https://www.serpentinegalleries.org">Serpentine Galleries</a> in Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, regularly attracting over 1.2 million <a href="https://www.visitbritain.org/annual-survey-visits-visitor-attractions-latest-results">visitors</a> a year.</p>
<p>In 2020 the prestigious Serpentine Pavilion was awarded to South African studio <a href="https://counterspace-studio.com">Counterspace</a>. Soon afterwards, the organisers decided to delay and <a href="https://www.designboom.com/architecture/counterspace-serpentine-pavilion-2020-london-cork-recycled-bricks-02-10-2020/">extend</a> the commission over two years because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, finally, it is about to emerge into public life.</p>
<p>News of the choice of Counterspace was greeted with <a href="https://www.businessinsider.co.za/johannesburgs-counterspace-will-build-this-years-serpentine-galleries-in-kensington-gardens-2020-2">enthusiasm</a>. The three women who set up the interdisciplinary Johannesburg practice are the youngest architects to land the Pavilion commission in its 20-year history. Past designers include architectural superstars such as Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind and Peter Zumthor. </p>
<p>The Serpentine Pavilion, a free-to-access destination and venue for cultural gatherings, has been seen as a <a href="https://www.archdaily.com/790106/round-up-the-serpentine-pavilion-through-the-years">vehicle for innovation</a>. But detractors argue it has become a platform to celebrate “starchitects” and host paparazzi-friendly parties. </p>
<p>Recent attempts to diversify the message by selecting “up and coming” designers have met with mixed reviews, but the choice of Counterspace ups the ante. Here’s why.</p>
<h2>Diverse alternatives</h2>
<p>The pavilion is designed by Sumayya Vally, the Counterspace director. She is not the first female appointee. Celebrated British-Iraqi architect <a href="https://theconversation.com/zaha-hadid-even-more-than-her-buildings-its-her-mind-that-left-its-mark-158004">Zaha Hadid</a> designed the <a href="https://www.zaha-hadid.com/design/serpentine-pavilion/">inaugural pavilion</a>, and women followed in 2009, 2015 and 2018. But Counterspace represents a new, forward-looking and timely attitude to inclusion, diversity and creativity.</p>
<p>Responding to the news, <a href="https://www.archpaper.com/2021/01/lesley-lokko-talks-race-academia-and-starting-an-architecture-school-in-ghana/">Lesley Lokko</a>, <a href="https://africanfuturesinstitute.com">African Futures Institute</a> director and <a href="https://www.architecture.com/knowledge-and-resources/knowledge-landing-page/professor-lesley-lokko-wins-2020-riba-annie-spink-award">RIBA Annie Spink Award laureate</a>, said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As the world grapples with issues of race, identity and inequity in the built environment, this is an opportunity for a young African practice to show that the imagination is the most powerful tool for change.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Named for <a href="https://www.designindaba.com/videos/interviews/counterspace-architects-investigate-johannesburg%E2%80%99s-abandoned-mine-dumps">its belief</a> that “every space has an equal and opposite counter-space”, Counterspace operates as a collaborative studio in which a culture of questioning is fundamental. </p>
<h2>Who is Counterspace?</h2>
<p>Founding principal Vally and her partners Sarah de Villiers and Amina Kaskar established the firm in their twenties. They want to change architectural knowledge just as much as they want to make buildings. All three teach while practising professionally. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403123/original/file-20210527-14-wkc4k7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="An illustration of woman walking towards a structure in the middle of a park, with people sitting inside it. The structure has no walls and a round roof held up by a variety of angular, modern columns." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403123/original/file-20210527-14-wkc4k7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403123/original/file-20210527-14-wkc4k7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403123/original/file-20210527-14-wkc4k7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403123/original/file-20210527-14-wkc4k7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403123/original/file-20210527-14-wkc4k7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403123/original/file-20210527-14-wkc4k7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403123/original/file-20210527-14-wkc4k7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The winning design for the new Serpentine Pavilion.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image courtesy Counterspace</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Projects in the Counterspace <a href="https://counterspace-studio.com/projects/">portfolio</a> include performances, installations, choreography and curating, as well as research investigations and building designs. Works include <a href="https://counterspace-studio.com/projects/folded-skies/"><em>Folded Skies</em></a>, a large-scale mirror sculpture in Cape Town, and the <a href="https://counterspace-studio.com/projects/brixton-mosque/">Brixton Mosque</a> in Johannesburg, a scheme to wrap an existing church reused as a mosque in a new envelope that speaks the architectural language of Islamic geometry. </p>
<p>By contrast with the object-oriented architecture of most pavilions to date, Counterspace emphasises process. It wants to steer and gather the Serpentine Pavilion into being over time.</p>
<h2>Time and the city</h2>
<p>The act of building will extend beyond the opening date, spreading across the summer months. So the pavilion you see in June may change by the time you return for a second look in September. </p>
<p>This aligns with the Serpentine Gallery’s view too. According to artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist, the silver lining of the pandemic is an “opportunity to take more time”. A range of events and research activities have been initiated, reframing the official <a href="https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/about/press/serpentine-pavilion-opens-11-june/">opening date</a> as a milestone on the Pavilion’s journey, rather than its destination.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.architecture.com/awards-and-competitions-landing-page/awards/royal-gold-medal">Eminent architect</a> David Adjaye counselled the pavilion’s trustees to </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Accept the slowness reshaping society today and utilise it to develop a deeper relationship with the architects. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The Counterspace ethos will allow the pavilion to accommodate difference, even conflict. Vally, the only architect on the <a href="https://time.com/collection/time100-next-2021/5937725/sumayya-vally/">2021 Time100 Next</a> list, recently told me of her aspiration to deliver a space meaningful to Londoners near and far. It should reach out to those at the periphery, and reach in to the city centre. </p>
<h2>The pavilion</h2>
<p>A lofty circular roof defines the extent of the pavilion. It is both cosmological – a canopy of stars – and childlike in its <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691020686/images-and-symbols">symbolism of centrality</a>, reminding us of the circle of play we make by joining hands. </p>
<p>Rising columns and wall fragments echo other histories, borrowing bits of the city and bringing them together in a <a href="https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/para.2012.0064">bricolage</a> of recombined and recycled fragments. Connections to other buildings, moments and places across London are suggested. </p>
<figure>
<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/422837423" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Counterspace’s Summaya Vally speaks about the inspiration for the 2021 pavilion.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This architecture of visual quotations recalls the postmodern theories of <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/learning-las-vegas-revised-edition">Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown</a>. The approach superimposes memories represented by design motifs. A cut and paste detail from a <a href="https://www.mylondon.news/news/nostalgia/mangrove-notting-hill-cafe-panthers-18365882">Notting Hill Caribbean café</a> that was a hub for anti-racist activists in the 1960s might appear on the pavilion alongside an element drawn from the South London offices of the <a href="https://artsandculture.google.com/entity/west-indian-gazette/g11cjj8kty8?hl=en"><em>West Indian Gazette</em></a>, a major Black newspaper founded by activist <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/photograph-of-claudia-jones-at-the-west-indian-gazette-offices#">Claudia Jones</a> in 1958. </p>
<p>This accumulation of elements and influences is filtered through Vally’s artistic <a href="https://vimeo.com/422837423">processes of interpretation</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Any work that I do is about how I am shaped by the people that I work with, about ingesting as much as I can from a place and its people and then translating that into form.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Architecture of invitation</h2>
<p>To date, the Serpentine Pavilion has provided a passive setting for people to meet. But Counterspace aims to actively engage with communities and sites of marginalised history across London – to draw people in. </p>
<p>This is an architecture of invitation. The design does not attempt to deliver insights but rather foster understanding, absorbing conflict by providing a context for bringing differences together.</p>
<p>It captures something of an emergent creative spirit – influenced but not defined by <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/21437879/stay-woke-wokeness-history-origin-evolution-controversy">wokeness</a> and related cultural controversies – in which the space to be flawed and unsure, to be real, is claimed as a stage for belonging. </p>
<p>This approach, which resonates with <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/building-machines/oclc/16714086">Robert McCarter’s</a> reformulation of “<a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02533952.2011.569995">place-making as resistance</a>”, reminds us of the need to reclaim our capacity for human relationships. The pavilion invites us to rediscover public life and meet again, after our long confinement, in a space made for us and with us.</p>
<p><em>The 2021 Serpentine Pavilion <a href="https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/about/press/serpentine-pavilion-opens-11-june/">opens</a> on 11 June in London</em></p>
<hr>
<p><em>This article was updated on 8 June 2021 to reflect that Vally was now the lead designer on the project.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/161444/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Barac does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The winners of the prestigious architecture commission are from Johannesburg’s Counterspace studio and offer a fresh view on creating buildings.Matthew Barac, Reader in Architecture, London Metropolitan UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1614452021-05-30T07:57:50Z2021-05-30T07:57:50ZBlack feminist writers in South Africa raise their voices in a new book<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/402857/original/file-20210526-17-3knnz0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Detail from the cover of the book Surfacing.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wits University Press</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the third decade of the new millennium, despite many publishers still seeing black women’s writing as having a limited market, readers have far more access than before to publications by writers from the global South. In particular, the perspectives of black women are certainly more visible in the public domain. </p>
<p>Yet gaps and erasures – based on intellectual authority, financial resources and visibility in the knowledge commons – mean that it’s still easier for work by black, postcolonial and decolonial feminists from global centres to secure publication and wide distribution. </p>
<p>As a result, the growing audience of radical young readers grappling with questions about race, gender, sexuality and freedom in global peripheries often have to turn to critical writing outside their national contexts, which inflect the topics they want to explore. Even for many restless and radical readers in the global North, much remains silenced and absent. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/402684/original/file-20210525-13-visxn4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A book cover for 'Surfacing' with the names of the contributors written out in ink pen italics across the surface of the book." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/402684/original/file-20210525-13-visxn4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/402684/original/file-20210525-13-visxn4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402684/original/file-20210525-13-visxn4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402684/original/file-20210525-13-visxn4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402684/original/file-20210525-13-visxn4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402684/original/file-20210525-13-visxn4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402684/original/file-20210525-13-visxn4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wits University Press</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the new book <em><a href="http://witspress.co.za/catalogue/surfacing/">Surfacing: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa</a></em>, South African author <a href="https://brittlepaper.com/2020/12/zukiswa-wanner-african-literary-person-of-the-year/">Zukiswa Wanner</a> has contributed a piece titled <em>Do I Make You Uncomfortable?</em> about writing in a white publishing industry. </p>
<p>It reminds us that black women writers in South Africa have distinct experiences of being stereotyped. Wanner sums this up in her confrontation with one reviewer who described her work as “chick lit”.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>And if black women are the majority in South Africa and I am therefore the standard, shouldn’t it just be called a good book? And I was chick lit versus what? Could she point out to me the male authors in South Africa whose books she’d referred to as ‘cock lit’? Take (JM) Coetzee, with his women characters who aren’t well-rounded and don’t seem to have any agency; was he cock lit?</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Undocumented and innovative</h2>
<p><a href="http://witspress.co.za/catalogue/surfacing/"><em>Surfacing</em></a> traces a path within black South African feminist thought in 20 dazzling chapters. The collection shows how radical black South African women have been part of several traditions of undocumented intellectual and artistic legacies. In the book Mary Hames recalls, for example, the radical spaces outside conventional classrooms in which she studied banned material during the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/history-apartheid-south-africa">anti-apartheid struggle</a>. </p>
<p>Our aim as editors was to show how writers in the academy, fiction-writing, journalism and the art world are grappling innovatively with essential topics. Like the politics of self, the complexities of sexual freedoms and identities beyond the blunt frameworks of human rights models. And how to think about “knowledge” more completely and adventurously.</p>
<p>The rich descriptions and interpretations of local realities in <em>Surfacing</em> refine the categories of transnational and black feminism. They bring the breadth of black feminist engagement in the south of the continent into fuller view.</p>
<h2>Sara Baartman and Winnie Mandela</h2>
<p>The book is acutely aware of the contrast between the absence of acknowledgement of most black South African women writers and the way certain women, like Khoi historical figure <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/sara-saartjie-baartman">Sara Baartman</a> and activist and politician <a href="https://theconversation.com/winnie-madikizela-mandela-revolutionary-who-kept-the-spirit-of-resistance-alive-94300">Winnie Mandela</a>, have been made into global icons. It therefore starts with reflections on them. </p>
<p>Sara Baartman has been exhaustively examined in the north and Winnie Mandela has been the subject of numerous biographical, fictional and non-fictional projects by white scholars. </p>
<p>Intervening into this legacy, author <a href="https://www.sisonkemsimang.com">Sisonke Msimang</a> writes an emphatically self-reflexive study which reframes Winnie Mandela. Yet in doing so her interest “was never about ‘cleaning up’ her image or revising facts. It was about recognising that the facts about her required contextualisation.”</p>
<p>Most publications by black South African women are seen as testimonial or fictional. But the contributors of <em>Surfacing</em> seek both to contribute to and to interpret existing bodies of knowledge. In addition, the collection will undoubtedly be remembered for its enthralling writing. </p>
<h2>New narratives</h2>
<p>Many chapters take the elastic form of the personal essay. For example, academic and poet <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/danai-mupotsa-296051">Danai S. Mupotsa</a> draws on poetry to talk about experiences of both intimate and public scale. Academic and author <a href="https://mg.co.za/article/2017-08-11-00-a-beautiful-feminist-mind-divorced-from-self-indulgence/">Pumla Dineo Gqola</a> pens a playfully serious letter to the South African artist <a href="https://www.goodman-gallery.com/artists/gabrielle-goliath#bio">Gabrielle Goliath</a>. And photographer and curator <a href="https://www.vogue.it/fotografia/article/not-the-usual-suspects">Ingrid Masondo</a> collaboratively authors an essay with the photographers about whom she writes. </p>
<p>In other pieces, academic and author <a href="https://www.newframe.com/barbara-boswell-on-the-audacity-to-write/">Barbara Boswell</a> recounts her fascinating exchanges with feminist student activists during the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/mar/16/the-real-meaning-of-rhodes-must-fall">#RhodesMustFall</a> protests in her essay about the meanings of pioneering feminist author <a href="https://theconversation.com/rest-in-power-miriam-tlali-author-enemy-of-apartheid-and-feminist-73790">Miriam Tlali</a> for the present. Academic <a href="https://johannesburgreviewofbooks.com/2020/07/03/thinking-while-black-read-grace-a-musilas-essay-from-the-award-winning-book-black-academic-voices-the-south-african-experience/">Grace Musila</a>’s delightful <em>My Two Husbands</em> unfurls the experience of being a brilliant student whose intellectual accomplishment was seen by some men as undermining theirs. Yet within her family her education constituted a cherished and defining achievement. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/rest-in-power-miriam-tlali-author-enemy-of-apartheid-and-feminist-73790">Rest in power, Miriam Tlali: author, enemy of apartheid and feminist</a>
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</p>
<hr>
<p>Several chapters in the collection trace the intersections of religion and feminist thinking in South Africa. Academics <a href="http://www.religion.uct.ac.za/religion/staff/academicstaff/sadiyyashaikh">Sa’diyya Shaikh</a> and <a href="http://www.agi.ac.za/agi/gender-studies/axl/people/fatima-seedat">Fatima Seedat</a> offer vivid reflections as Muslim feminists on the costs of feminist neglect of the gender of divinity. Dancer, choreographer and academic <a href="https://zeitzmocaa.museum/artists/jackie-job/">jackï job</a>’s striking memoir traces a shift from Christian expectations of how to be a “lady” to finding a language in dance for becoming “more than just this body”. And scholar and activist <a href="https://academic.oup.com/ijtj/article/10/1/189/2356899">gertrude fester-wicomb</a> recounts her experience as a Christian lesbian anti-apartheid activist of the constrained spaces for queerness during the 1980s. </p>
<p>How to recover histories in the face of reticence is evocatively described by essayist and novelist <a href="http://www.panashechigumadzi.com/bio">Panashe Chigumadzi</a>. Through patient listening, she discovers how to hear the language of her grandmother’s silences. In <em>The Music of My Orgasm</em>, anthologist, essayist and poet <a href="https://wiser.wits.ac.za/users/makhosazana-xaba">Makhosazana Xaba</a> movingly testifies to the heritage of feminism she received from her grandfather and her mother. She describes how she learned to cultivate the pleasures of her own body as a force of radical sexual and political liberation. </p>
<p>In their tender relationship to the land on which they grow organic food and medicine, historian and farmer <a href="https://habitat3.org/the-conference/programme/speakers/yvette-abrahams/">Yvette Abrahams</a> and sociologist and activist <a href="https://artsandculture.google.com/entity/patricia-mcfadden/m0gfd769?hl=en">Patricia McFadden</a>’s chapters map a visionary future of sharing and abundance.</p>
<h2>Why these writings matter</h2>
<p>Throughout the book, it is therefore made clear that foregrounding the positionality of the writer – the social and political contexts that shape their identities – can deepen what is being said. </p>
<p>Who the author is and what perspective she speaks from are in fact integral to her view of the world. </p>
<p>Contrary to advocates of “universality” and “detachment”, this stance seeks to strengthen growing efforts to “surface” the rich diversity of ways of seeing and understanding our world.</p>
<p><em><a href="http://witspress.co.za/catalogue/surfacing/">Surfacing: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa</a> is available from <a href="http://witspress.co.za">Wits University Press</a></em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/161445/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Undocumented for decades, black South African feminists are increasingly visible. The essays in Surfacing present 22 leading thinkers.Desiree Lewis, Professor of Gender Studies, University of the Western CapeGabeba Baderoon, Associate Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies and African Studies, Penn StateLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1496892020-11-25T14:36:33Z2020-11-25T14:36:33ZThe Kenyan film director taking on the world – with positive stories of black life<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/368548/original/file-20201110-15-1pzluqu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Big World Cinema/Afrobubblegum</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In a 2017 <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/wanuri_kahiu_fun_fierce_and_fantastical_african_art/up-next?language=en">TED Talk</a>, the Kenyan film <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1393967/">director</a> <a href="https://time.com/collection/time-100-next-2019/5718796/wanuri-kahiu/">Wanuri Kahiu</a> shared her mission to make what she called “Afrobubblegum” art. The aim is to contribute to a world where African audiences see themselves reflected in ways that capture a full range of human experiences. To go beyond agenda-driven single stories of war, famine and HIV that have characterised much storytelling about Africa. </p>
<p>Put simply, to tell stories where Africans are “loving and thriving and living … beautiful, vibrant lives” with the aim of creating among audiences a feeling that African lives are “worthy of more happiness”.</p>
<p>In 2018, Kahiu took Afrobubblegum’s aim and queered it in the form of <a href="http://bigworldcinema.com/production/rafiki-2/"><em>Rafiki</em></a>, a vibrant film that tells the story of two young Kenyan women who fall in love. </p>
<p>Same-sex sexual expression is <a href="https://theconversation.com/homosexuality-remains-illegal-in-kenya-as-court-rejects-lgbt-petition-112149">prohibited</a> in Kenya. The legal framework continues to deny the possibility of queer existence. In addition, <a href="https://africasacountry.com/2015/08/why-obama-blundered-by-speaking-out-on-lgbtq-rights-in-kenya">government officials</a> as well as religious leaders uphold a discourse of anti-homonationalism – to exclude queer-identifying people from the imagination of the nation. <em>Rafiki</em> was accused of promoting homosexuality and swiftly <a href="https://kfcb.co.ke/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/CEO-STATEMENT-ON-RAFIKI-RESTRICTION-27-4-2018.pdf">banned</a> by the Kenyan Censor Board.</p>
<p>Much of the international media focus has been on <em>Rafiki’s</em> ban in terms of the law and <a href="https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/kahiu-v-mutua/">human rights</a>. What has received less attention is the fact that, in telling an upbeat story of two women in love, Kahiu successfully achieved in 83 minutes something the Kenyan government remains unwilling to do: include queer Kenyans in the national imagination.</p>
<p>There’s a <a href="https://www.okayafrica.com/lgbt-african-movies-moonlight-black-gay-identity/">growing body</a> of African films that tell queer stories, but <em>Rafiki</em> is one of the first feature-length films that fully celebrates queer love while also offering a glimpse of a future through the film’s happy, hopeful ending. This, I <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13696815.2020.1816931">argue</a>, gives the film radical worldmaking potential. And as Kahiu’s star rises, she brings with her a more hopeful narrative for Black life.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7M_-ucSaFpU?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption"><em>Rafiki</em> is the first Kenyan film to screen in competition at the Cannes Film Festival.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Queer worldmaking in <em>Rafiki</em></h2>
<p>Queer worldmaking describes the many ways in which heterosexual social structures have been challenged with the aim of creating a more equitable world in which queer people might thrive.</p>
<p>For some years in Kenya, a number of artists, writers and scholars have been engaged in worldmaking processes. Artists such as <a href="https://www.irex.org/people/neo-musangi">Neo Musangi</a>, for example, whose performance art <a href="https://kauru.co.za/neo-musangi-kenya-close-featured-artist/">challenges</a> gender normativity. Writers like <a href="https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-02-17/kenyas-gay-community-comes-out-one-story-time">Kevin Mwachiro</a> and the late <a href="https://africasacountry.com/2014/01/i-am-a-homosexual-mum/">Binvavanga Wainaina</a> whose writings on their experiences of being gay have effectively, in the words of <a href="https://time.com/70795/">Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>demystified and humanised homosexuality. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Like Kahiu with <em>Rafiki</em>, they have created a visual affirmation of queer existence that is often considered an important step in the worldmaking process.</p>
<p>There are several scenes in the film that are particularly significant for the way that Kahiu brings together hope and horizon in the plot and narrative. </p>
<p>In one, the lovers Kena and Ziki are alone on a rooftop discussing their plans for the future. Kahiu weaves together dreamy visuals with lingering glances as the young women gaze both at each other and at the horizon in ways that signal to queer-identifying audiences that there is hope for the future.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/368544/original/file-20201110-21-1gusxl9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="An urban street scene where two men on a stationary motorbike chat to a young woman standing in front of them and another young woman with pink hair extensions comes down some stairs towards them in the background." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/368544/original/file-20201110-21-1gusxl9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/368544/original/file-20201110-21-1gusxl9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=255&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/368544/original/file-20201110-21-1gusxl9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=255&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/368544/original/file-20201110-21-1gusxl9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=255&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/368544/original/file-20201110-21-1gusxl9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=321&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/368544/original/file-20201110-21-1gusxl9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=321&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/368544/original/file-20201110-21-1gusxl9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=321&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Kena chats to friends as Zika approaches - their paths cross when their fathers become political rivals.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Big World Cinema/Afrobubblegum</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In another scene I analyse, the lovers are in a park, having fun in a paddleboat on a lake – showing queer-identifying people occupying public spaces around the neighbourhood. The Kenyan state’s official stance around homosexuality – that it is <a href="http://www.rci.uct.ac.za/sites/default/files/image_tool/images/429/feminist_africa_journals/archive/02/standpoints_-_unnatural_and_un-african-_contesting_queer-phobia_by_africagcos_political_leadership.pdf">“unnatural” and “unAfrican”</a> – together with the continuing criminalisation of queer bodies, makes this scene an important tool for queer visibility. It’s followed by the lover’s first date, in a nightclub. Here queer love and desire take centre stage in terms of visibility as they share their first kiss.</p>
<p>In the film’s final scene we see Kena standing on a hilltop. She’s just received news that Ziki has returned after being sent overseas by her parents as punishment for her lesbianism. In the closing scene, therefore, when we see a hand on Kena’s shoulder, we deduce from the smile on her face that this hand belongs to Ziki. In this way, <em>Rafiki’s</em> viewers are left with a glimpse of a happy ending that, to date, remains rare in the global queer film canon. </p>
<p>This, I argue, is truly Afrobubblegum in action.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/nigerias-queer-literature-offers-a-new-way-of-looking-at-blackness-133649">Nigeria's queer literature offers a new way of looking at blackness</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>My analysis is not confined to scenes from the film. The <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/rafiki-kenya-banned-her-film-for-its-corrupt-lesbian-romance-so-she-showed-it-off-to-the-world">banning</a> and later unbanning of <em>Rafiki</em> by the Kenyan courts also created a situation where the Afrobubblegum effect could be observed in action.</p>
<h2>Beyond the cinema screen</h2>
<p>Kahiu <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/apr/12/kenyan-director-wanuri-kahiu-rafiki-lesbianism-african-art">sued</a> the Kenyan authorities and won the right to screen <em>Rafiki</em> for a period of seven days. This is a prerequisite for eligibility for entry into the best international film category at the Academy Awards. Following the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-45605758">lifting</a> of the ban, <em>Rafiki</em> was shown to <a href="https://mg.co.za/article/2018-10-03-banned-kenyan-film-rafiki-film-tops-kenyas-box-office-in-limited-screening-run/">packed</a> cinemas in the Kenyan cities Nairobi, Mombasa and Kisumu.</p>
<p>I gathered data from media coverage of the screenings. A good deal of this was from interviews with queer cinema-goers who had gone to <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/09/28/652302785/rafiki-the-lesbian-love-story-that-kenya-banned-and-then-unbanned">watch</a>.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/a_avBsX60-s?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Director Wanuri Kahiu’s talk introducing Afrobubblegum as a creative vision.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A pattern emerged of queer viewers describing their excitement at seeing themselves reflected on the screen positively. But beyond this, they described how, by the very act of attending the screenings, they felt a sense of community, friendship and belonging in a state where they are commonly excluded from the national conversation. </p>
<p>Nor does the worldmaking potential of <em>Rafiki</em> and its director end there. The <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/2019/04/rafiki-interview-wanuri-kahiu-afrobubblegum-1202127697/">success</a> of <em>Rafiki</em> has helped Kahiu <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/disney-tackling-adaptation-broadway-musical-once-island-1305121">land</a> <a href="https://deadline.com/2020/10/on-the-come-up-wanuri-kahiu-set-to-direct-feature-based-on-the-hate-u-give-author-angie-thomas-book-1234599674/">projects</a> in the US, where she is set to <a href="https://deadline.com/2020/01/the-black-kids-movie-wanuri-kahiu-director-gotham-group-1202843336/">direct</a> an adaptation of Christina Hammond Reed’s novel <em><a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Black-Kids/Christina-Hammonds-Reed/9781534462724">The Black Kids</a></em>. She is also <a href="https://shadowandact.com/wild-seed-viola-davis-developing-adaptation-of-octavia-butler-novel-at-amazon-scripted-by-nnedi-okorafor-and-wanuri-kahiu">adapting</a> Octavia Butler’s book <em>Wild</em> <em>Seed</em> into a film. </p>
<p>In this way, her aim to tell positive stories about African and Black lives continues to inspire hope in audiences. Her work is particularly inspirational to African, African American and Black women.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/149689/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lyn Johnstone does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>It wasn’t just the film Rafiki - a joyful lesbian love story - but also the experience of going to watch it after it was unbanned that created a new kind of freedom.Lyn Johnstone, Research fellow, Royal Holloway University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1421952020-07-26T09:52:15Z2020-07-26T09:52:15ZEternal mothers, whores or witches: being a woman in politics in Zimbabwe<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349183/original/file-20200723-29-8mzr6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Grace Mugabe at the funeral of former president Robert Mugabe.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">JEKESAI NJIKIZANA/AFP via Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The political arena in Zimbabwe is a de facto male space in which women play very peripheral and insignificant roles. <a href="https://www.theindigopress.com/these-bones-will-rise-again">Author</a> and scholar Panashe Chigumadzi sums the situation up in an op-ed <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/02/opinion/zimbabwe-elections-mugabe-fear-women.html">article</a>, writing that </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Politics in Zimbabwe remains a man’s game, and virility is a measure of one’s ability to rule over others. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>It is not the place of women to rule, especially over men. Women who dare to aspire to rule are considered to be wild and unruly.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-30307333">Grace Mugabe</a>, the former first lady of Zimbabwe, is one such woman, I <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10130950.2020.1749523">argue</a> in a paper on the tropes used to describe women in politics in the southern African country. </p>
<p>Grace rattled political cages in 2019 in her bid to replace her ageing <a href="https://theconversation.com/mugabe-is-dead-but-old-men-still-run-southern-africa-123611">husband</a>, both as leader of the ruling <a href="https://www.qeh.ox.ac.uk/events/zanu-pf-history-1963-2017">ZANU-PF</a> party and also possibly as president of the country. </p>
<p>But instead of focusing on the merits and demerits of her political interests, the recurring comment was that she was a sex-starved <em>hure</em> (a Shona word for “whore”). This sexist slandering has not been used to describe just Grace Mugabe. It has been used systematically to <a href="https://www.newsday.co.zw/2018/06/mudslinging-sexism-scath-female-politicians/">denigrate women</a> who aspire for any political positions.</p>
<h2>From ‘gold-digger’ to mother figure</h2>
<p>Grace became a public figure in 1996 when she married Robert Mugabe after the death of his first wife. She had previously been his personal assistant. At the time of the marriage, she was defamed for having an affair while his first wife, Sally, was terminally ill. </p>
<p>Moreover, Grace was labelled a gold-digger because she had married a rich and powerful man who was 40 years her senior. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349196/original/file-20200723-21-aerk5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349196/original/file-20200723-21-aerk5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349196/original/file-20200723-21-aerk5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349196/original/file-20200723-21-aerk5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349196/original/file-20200723-21-aerk5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349196/original/file-20200723-21-aerk5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1146&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349196/original/file-20200723-21-aerk5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1146&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349196/original/file-20200723-21-aerk5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1146&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sally Mugabe (1931-1992), former first lady.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>She was often compared to Sally, the latter characterised as womanly, motherly and homely. Sally was a saint, according to public opinion, partly because she had assumed a more ornamental role as first lady. </p>
<p>However with time, Grace was embraced as the proverbial mother of the nation and the endearing appellation of <em>Amai</em> (mother) was bestowed on her.</p>
<p>In 2014, she took her first steps in politics when she was elected president of the women’s league of the ruling Zanu-PF party. She was fronted as the face of the Generation 40 faction within the ruling party. Generation 40 was a group of young party members who felt there was need for a change of power from the old guard that had waged the liberation war. Grace began a series of rallies across the country. The rallying call at these events was the Shona phrase <em>Munhu wese kuna Amai</em> (Everyone, side with Mother). </p>
<p>She used the rallies to <a href="https://www.newsday.co.zw/2017/11/g40-plots-anti-mnangagwa-demo/">attack</a> not just members of the opposition but more importantly members of the competing faction which was headed by current president <a href="https://theconversation.com/will-mnangagwa-usher-in-a-new-democracy-the-view-from-zimbabwe-88023">Emmerson Mnangagwa</a>. Her outbreaks were far from diplomatic, they were blunt, <a href="https://www.news24.com/news24/africa/zimbabwe/mugabes-launch-scathing-attack-on-vp-mnangagwa-20170911">scathing and contemptuous</a>.</p>
<h2>From mother figure to ‘whore’</h2>
<p>It was around the time of the countrywide interface rallies that the name <em>Amai</em> was gradually replaced by the tag of <em>hure</em>. Academic and writer Rudo Mudiwa in the <a href="https://www.africasacountry.com/2017/11/on-grace-mugabe-coups-phalluses-and-what-is-being-defended">article</a> <em>On Grace Mugabe: coups, phalluses, and what is being defended</em>, explains how Grace came to be called <em>hure</em> and shows how the name was linked to the November 2017 “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/11/15/zimbabwe-when-a-coup-is-not-a-coup/">coup that was not a coup</a>”:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Grace, already branded a harlot, was considered a threat to the nation-state on the basis that she was improperly influencing Mugabe, weaponising their pillow talk to sway a senile old man. Her speeches, nakedly ambitious, only seemed to confirm that it was she who was in power in Harare. The phallus had been deposed.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The <em>hure</em> label was used because Grace had subverted the image of the domesticated first lady who was not interested in politics. In Mudiwa’s argument, the soft coup that overthrew Mugabe was actually a defence of patriarchy and a counter attack against the anxieties that Grace was causing men in politics. The military intervention could thus be read as the protection of male dominance which had been challenged by a woman who had left behind her decorative role as a silent, domesticated and thus respectable woman.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349181/original/file-20200723-15-ztomms.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349181/original/file-20200723-15-ztomms.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349181/original/file-20200723-15-ztomms.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349181/original/file-20200723-15-ztomms.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349181/original/file-20200723-15-ztomms.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349181/original/file-20200723-15-ztomms.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349181/original/file-20200723-15-ztomms.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349181/original/file-20200723-15-ztomms.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Grace Mugabe addresses a religious gathering and rally in 2017.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">JEKESAI NJIKIZANA/AFP via Getty Images</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>What this tells us</h2>
<p>Grace Mugabe’s short stint in politics has shown that women are far from being afforded a place in Zimbabwean politics. </p>
<p>Sexist and misogynistic slurs such as <em>hure</em> point to how women continue to be sexualised and objectified. The treatment of women in politics is no different from how women in general are regarded in the country, because their competencies are often disregarded or unnoticed. Emphasis is placed rather on their bodies and sexualities.</p>
<p>In the few instances that women are accorded a space in politics, they are used as pawns in factional battles within political parties, as Grace was. </p>
<p>When she attacked other women politicians like former vice president <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-africa-35708891/joice-mujuru-mugabe-s-new-rival-in-zimbabwe-my-hands-are-clean">Joice Mujuru</a>, she was not considered dangerous. However, when her verbal attacks targeted men like Mnangagwa she was deemed to be treading treacherously. When the coup that toppled Mugabe was in progress, the men in the Generation 40 faction clandestinely left the country, leaving Grace alone to deal with the military.</p>
<h2>The future of women in Zimbabwean politics</h2>
<p>As long as safe and conducive spaces are not created for women in Zimbabwe, they will continue to be sidelined from positions of political power and authority. As Zimbabwe continues to aspire towards democracy and democratic ideals, despite the odds, more needs to be done to level the political playing field.</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/mugabe-is-dead-but-old-men-still-run-southern-africa-123611">Mugabe is dead, but old men still run southern Africa</a>
</strong>
</em>
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<p>Women who do choose to venture into the field of politics will need to do so fully aware of the multifarious challenges that lie in wait. They will need to be strategic in their actions and how they navigate a space that is slanted heavily against them.</p>
<p>For as long patriarchal societies, such as Zimbabwe, do not recognise the vast potential women have as knowledgeable politicians and skilled decision-makers, an equitable society cannot be realised.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/142195/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gibson Ncube does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Sexist slandering has been used not just to describe Grace Mugabe, but to denigrate any women who aspire to political positions.Gibson Ncube, Associate Professor, University of ZimbabweLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1123282019-03-07T06:19:32Z2019-03-07T06:19:32Z#MeToo isn’t big in Africa. But women have launched their own versions<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262678/original/file-20190307-82695-102zskx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The racial nature of the campaign lies behind the poor uptake in Africa.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Nearly one and a half years ago when Alyssa Milano asked women to click MeToo on their social media platforms, the <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/year-ago-alyssa-milano-started-conversation-about-metoo-these-women-n920246">#MeToo movement was born</a>. Since then millions of women have indicated through social media that they too have been victims of sexual harassment or assault. </p>
<p>The power of this movement has been its ability to show the world how pervasive sexual harassment is. And it’s had an effect on perpetrators. In the film industry producers and actors such as Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey and Bill Cosby all lost their jobs.</p>
<p>But is Africa part of this global movement against sexual violence? In her assessment of transnational activism in Africa, author Titilope Adayi, indicates that the global dimension of #MeToo has centred on the involvement of certain countries such as the US, the UK, France, India and China. There’s been virtually <a href="https://africasacountry.com/2018/07/metoo-africa-and-the-politics-of-transnational-activism">no mention of Africa or the Middle East</a>.</p>
<p>But the visibility of #MeToo makes it easy to overlook the very powerful campaigns against sexual violence that go on in Africa. Most are happening outside the digital space. </p>
<p>MeToo was actually <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2018/10/tarana-burke-me-too-founder-movement-has-lost-its-way.html">started</a> by an African American women, Tarana Burke in 2006 – 11 years before #MeToo – to help young women deal with sexual harassment. Her campaign wasn’t on social media and didn’t become global. But it has now been tagged on to the digital campaign.</p>
<p>Before #MeToo there was the <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-south-africas-young-women-activists-are-rewriting-the-script-60980">#EndRapeCulture campaign</a> which was started in South Africa in 2016 by African women students. The #EndRapeCulture campaign was powerful enough to force universities in South Africa to <a href="https://www.sun.ac.za/english/Documents/Stellenbosch%20University%20EndRapeCulture%20Report%202017.pdf">appoint task teams</a> to deal with the pervasive normalisation of sexual violence on campuses. But #EndRapeCulture didn’t become a global movement, even though it combined direct action (topless protests) with the digital campaign.</p>
<p>So why didn’t the #MeToo make big inroads into Africa?</p>
<h2>The response of African women</h2>
<p>One of the reasons for the lack of uptake is related to the racial nature of the campaign. It was started by white, wealthy women in the film industry in the US who had access to digital platforms. </p>
<p>Another reason #MeToo wasn’t that big in Africa is because of the very strong <a href="https://newafricanmagazine.com/news-analysis/development/metoo-in-africa/">patriarchal culture</a> in which women fear being stigmatised when they speak out about sexual harassment or assault. The very visibility of this kind of action makes them more vulnerable. Women are also afraid that their families may <a href="https://newafricanmagazine.com/news-analysis/development/metoo-in-africa/">find out about the abuse</a>. Women are therefore silenced by “cultures of respectability”.</p>
<p>And in many countries women are quite aware that the law won’t protect them. In a range of countries, including South Africa and Zimbabwe, secondary victimisation of survivors is rife in male dominated courts, where conviction rates for rape are on average <a href="https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2018-09-07-the-cost-of-rape-seeking-justice-in-south-africa/">below 10%</a>.</p>
<p>But women in many African countries have staged street protests. This enables them to avoid individualised attention, but nevertheless makes their causes visible. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260423/original/file-20190222-195873-luescj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260423/original/file-20190222-195873-luescj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260423/original/file-20190222-195873-luescj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260423/original/file-20190222-195873-luescj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260423/original/file-20190222-195873-luescj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260423/original/file-20190222-195873-luescj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260423/original/file-20190222-195873-luescj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">#MyDressismyChoice protest in Nairobi.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/rubygoes/15320586614/in/photolist-pkQ1D5">Fickr.com/RubyGoes</a></span>
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<p>In Kenya women started <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/mydressmychoice-kenyans-hold-rally-to-support-woman-beaten-for-wearing-miniskirt/a-18069645">#MyDressismyChoice</a> protests in the streets of Nairobi after a woman was assaulted at a bus stop for wearing a miniskirt. In Senegal two young women <a href="https://qz.com/africa/1501088/the-metoo-movement-should-listen-to-the-silence-of-african-women">started “#Nopiwouma”</a> to challenge Senegal’s silence on gender based violence. It means “I will not shut up” in Wolof. The campaign #Doyna, also in Senegal means “that’s enough”.</p>
<p>A consequence of not wanting to speak out about sexual harassment is that high profile men get away with this behaviour, and even when women speak out there may still be <a href="https://mg.co.za/article/2017-12-05-00-south-africas-metoo-gap-no-accountability-for-high-profile-men">no consequences</a>. </p>
<p>South Africa has a <a href="https://www.sahrc.org.za/index.php/sahrc-media/news/item/1466-gender-based-violence">very high incidence</a> of gender based violence. A recent example involved the former deputy minister of education Mduduzi Manana, <a href="https://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2017-08-07-mduduzi-manana-threw-me-on-a-car-bonnet-and-hit-me-in-the-face-says-ermelo-woman/">who beat up two women in a nightclub</a>. He resigned from his job, and was eventually <a href="https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/breaking-mduduzi-manana-resigns-as-mp-20180724">forced</a> to relinquish his parliamentary seat, but it took a very long time.</p>
<p>In Uganda, MP Sylvia Rwabwogo filed a complaint against a man who had stalked her for eight months. He was eventually sentenced to two years in prison but she was strongly criticised by Ugandans who expressed their sympathy <a href="http://www.africanews.com/2018/10/06/african-women-reluctant-to-embrace-metoo//">for the “enamoured” student</a>.</p>
<p>Organisations such as the African Union (AU) have also failed women when it comes to sexual assault. In January 2018, women staffers appealed to senior officials to end harassment in the AU. The matter was only dealt with after it reached the media. The AU’s <a href="https://qz.com/africa/1501088/the-metoo-movement-should-listen-to-the-silence-of-african-women/">limp-wristed response</a> was to say that vulnerable young interns and volunteers hoping for permanent work were targeted, but that it could do little to protect them.</p>
<p>African novelist and film maker, Tsitsi Dangarembga, from Zimbabwe laments that #MeToo has not reached Zimbabwe were sexual harassment is also rife. She herself was in an abusive relationship for <a href="https://thisisafrica.me/tsitsi-dangarembgas-local-metoo-movement/">nearly eight years</a>. </p>
<p>In South Africa women started another campaign, <a href="https://www.okayafrica.com/real-story-behind-menaretrash-south-africas-viral-hashtag/">#MenareTrash</a>, to challenge men to speak out about the epidemic of violence against women, especially intimate femicide by men killing their partners. There was a <a href="https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2017-06-01-if-men-dont-like-hearing-menaretrash-change-south-africa-not-the-hashtag/">big push back</a> by men against the campaign because some felt they were all being stigmatised.</p>
<p>This doesn’t appear to be a problem confined to South Africa. Globally men have problems showing solidarity with women speaking out against sexual harassment, assault and rape. This was clearly evident in Brett Kavanaugh’s case in the US. Accused of attempted rape, he went on <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45660297">to be confirmed</a> as a judge of the US Supreme Court.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/112328/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Amanda Gouws receives funding from the National Research Foundation</span></em></p>The visibility of #MeToo makes it easy to overlook the very powerful campaigns against sexual violence in Africa.Amanda Gouws, Professor of Political Science and SARChi Chair in Gender Politics, Stellenbosch UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1051452018-10-30T14:11:09Z2018-10-30T14:11:09ZHow Nigerian women are using WhatsApp to chat, learn and earn<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242020/original/file-20181024-48706-1sbbios.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Messaging services like WhatsApp open many doors for Nigerian women.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">i_am_zews/Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Mobile phones have become widespread all over the world, including in rural and low-income communities. As research <a href="https://www.gsma.com/newsroom/press-release/mobile-industry-accelerating-delivery-of-sustainable-development-goals/">shows</a>, these devices have the potential to bring about significant societal change – a fact acknowledged in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.</p>
<p>But while the promising role that mobile phones and other Information and Communication Technologies could play in empowering women – particularly in Africa – has long been discussed, <a href="https://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/itintd/v4y2008i2p89-104.html">relatively little</a> is known about how, when, and why this happens. </p>
<p>We conducted <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09718524.2018.1509490">a study</a> with women from the Nigerian city of Kano to see how they were using the mobile messaging service WhatsApp. We wanted to know whether the app had opened up opportunities and freedoms that contributed to empowering them. </p>
<p>Many women said that WhatsApp had allowed them to communicate better, particularly with local politicians. They felt empowered to talk about their concerns openly in WhatsApp discussion groups. And they had more access to information. Others joined religious study groups on WhatsApp, sharing questions and knowledge with other women.</p>
<p>Some women converted their access into opportunity. For instance, they advertised small businesses or services on WhatsApp groups, and earned money as a result.</p>
<p>The women in our study were able to use WhatsApp groups to push the barriers of societal norms that typecast them in gendered roles of mothers and housewives. Using this technology, they were able to become agents of their own change as well as make and exercise choices.</p>
<h2>WhatsApp and the Women in Kano</h2>
<p>Kano is a predominantly Muslim community. It is in Kano state, which has one of Nigeria’s highest smartphone densities – about <a href="https://techpoint.africa/2016/06/01/mobile-subscribers-nigeria-q1-2016/">7.81 million</a> of the country’s 60 million smartphone users live there. </p>
<p>First, we identified two women leaders in community groups to help us find participants for the study. These were selected based on how actively they were engaged in community groups. They also needed to own a smart mobile phone. We did interviews and focus groups with a diverse group of women, asking how they used WhatApp and what benefits they felt this had. </p>
<p>Some had become more politically empowered. Murja'atu*, a 34-year-old housewife, said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Initially I always wondered on how to communicate with elected officers especially those of them located in Abuja. We only saw them during the election period but now this online group allows me to interact with them more frequently using the women leader as the intermediary.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Her experience was echoed by 28-year-old Safiya, a shop owner:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Our senator made some certain promises during his election campaign after some time we still had not heard from him. I posted it on the group and other members picked up on it, we kept at it till the woman leader passed on our message. Some of the issues have been addressed now.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The inexpensive and simple form of sharing information on the groups enhanced women’s ability to learn and get clarification about concepts that were unclear to them. In other cases they were able to get help with their children’s homework. This was mentioned repeatedly in the focus group session as one of the things women valued the most about being part of a WhatsApp group. </p>
<p>WhatsApp also proved to be a valuable source of information about health and safety. For example, 41-year-old Asabe, one of the community group leaders, shared this story:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A husband of one of our group members is a health worker, so she regularly posts information regarding health practices, during the last cholera outbreak, I learnt of it from the post she made. It includes preventive measures such as washing vegetables thoroughly, adding salt while washing and boiling water before drinking.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The focus groups participants repeatedly mentioned that WhatsApp groups made them feel like part of a community. There was a strong commitment to working together and solving problems. </p>
<h2>Economic opportunities</h2>
<p>The WhatsApp group forums have also enabled the women to conduct business sales by marketing their products and services. These entrepreneurs usually send photos of the products and services to prospective clients to have a precise image of what they are planning to buy. A customer is allowed to choose the method of payment and also the method of delivery.</p>
<p>These business women have also used WhatsApp to reach out to their customers on changes in prices. With the current economic situation in country, market prices fluctuate on a daily basis. The women use the forum as a platform where they can post and discuss changes in market prices.</p>
<p>The women now have greater access to customers all over Nigeria. One said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I met a lady that lives in Yola (910 kms away from Kano) through WhatsApp and now she has become one of my most trusted and loyal customers, I send her products worth thousands of Naira and I have never met her physically before.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Postings about jobs and vacancies also formed part of the discussion in these WhatsApp groups. These jobs included household jobs, events and catering. Those who were interested usually contact the employers and interviews were arranged using WhatsApp voice and video calls.</p>
<h2>Positive impacts</h2>
<p>The findings of this study show that income generation, saving opportunities, expansion of businesses were all economic capabilities that were expanded and afforded to the women by the use of mobile phones. </p>
<p>The use of mobile phones also led to other capabilities that covered other aspects of human development and that have different impacts on the lives of these women and their communities.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/105145/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>With technology women are able to become agents of their own change.Salihu Ibrahim Dasuki, Lecturer in Information Systems, University of SheffieldNaima Hafiz Abubakar, Lecturer in Information Systems, Bayero University, KanoLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/838922017-09-13T17:00:32Z2017-09-13T17:00:32ZWhy Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is no feminist icon<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/185638/original/file-20170912-19504-o2j90o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's record on women's rights has been mixed.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">REUTERS/Tiksa Negeri</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>When Liberians go to <a href="http://www.necliberia.org/">the polls</a> in October 2017, there will be a disproportionate number of men on the ballot papers. Only 163 of 1026 approved candidates – just 16% – in these presidential and legislative elections <a href="http://necliberia.org/pg_img/Final%20Candidates%20listing.pdf">are women</a>. This represents only a marginal increase since 2005 and 2011, when women accounted for 14% and 11% of candidates, respectively. </p>
<p>Ellen Johnson Sirleaf – who, 12 years ago, became the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/03/vote-for-woman-how-africa-got-its-first-female-president/518874/">first woman</a> to be elected head of state in any African country – has often <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/05/world/africa/liberia-president-ellen-johnson-sirleaf-women-voters.html?mcubz=0">been hailed</a> as a feminist icon. But the poor representation of women in elections is as much her fault as it is a reflection of Liberia’s acutely <a href="https://www.academia.edu/12656646/Patriarchy_Power_Distance_and_Female_Presidency_in_Liberia">patriarchal political system</a>.</p>
<p>Her presidency has actually served the interests of a small, elite group of women and men in politics. It has upheld the country’s long-standing patriarchal norms. She has publicly distanced herself from the very movement that first got her elected, decrying feminism as “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/jul/23/can-president-ellen-johnson-sirleaf-save-liberia">extremism</a>”.</p>
<p>Sirleaf’s brand of <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/43657968">femocracy</a> – a term coined by Nigerian feminist scholar Amina Mama – has severely stifled women’s political participation.</p>
<p>Mama, whose research focused on African first ladies as femocrats, makes an important distinction between feminism and femocracy. She argues that while feminism attempts to shatter the political glass ceiling, femocracy deliberately keeps it intact. This remains true even though, some decades on from her original writing, the continent can now boast of women presidents like Sirleaf and former Malawian head of state <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2012/04/201247163726657558.html">Joyce Banda</a>.</p>
<h2>Women in Liberian politics</h2>
<p>Sirleaf has been conspicuously silent about bolstering women’s roles in politics, apart from a recent public statement in which she <a href="http://www.emansion.gov.lr/2press.php?news_id=4128&related=7&pg=sp">vowed</a> to campaign actively for female candidates in these elections. </p>
<p>There have been some legislative efforts to involve more women in Liberia’s political leadership, with minimal to no input from Sirleaf. </p>
<p>A 2014 elections law <a href="http://necliberia.org/doc_download/New%20Elections%20law%20Amendments.pdf">amendment</a> encouraged political parties to increase their representation of women in leadership roles. Yet Sirleaf’s own Unity Party– with only 10 women out of 58 candidates on its roster – ranks below smaller, less prominent parties in fronting female candidates this year. The United People’s Party, <a href="http://necliberia.org/pg_img/Final%20Candidates%20listing.pdf">for instance</a>, has 17 women candidates out of a total 64.</p>
<p>Elsewhere on the continent Rwanda, Senegal and South Africa have implemented gender equity bills specifically to propel women to <a href="http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/classif.htm">high public office</a>. In 2010 the Liberian women’s legislative caucus sponsored an <a href="http://www.loc.gov/law/foreign-news/article/liberia-proposal-to-increase-womens-participation-in-politics/">act</a> which mandated that women should occupy at least 30% of political party leadership. The act would also have set up a trust fund to finance women’s electoral campaigns.</p>
<p>Sirleaf did not actively support the proposed law and it was never ratified. </p>
<p>She has also failed women when it comes to her own high-level political appointments. Only four of her current 21 cabinet officials are women – and none of them occupy strategic ministries like defence, finance, education or public works.</p>
<p>Nepotism has been a problem on her watch, too: Sirleaf has appointed <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2012/nov/01/liberia-johnson-sirleaf-nepotism-corruption">three of her sons</a> to top government positions. </p>
<h2>A few successes, but…</h2>
<p>This is not to say that Sirleaf’s two terms in office have left women completely high and dry. </p>
<p>Her administration has built or renovated hundreds of markets across the country for thousands of female informal traders called “<a href="http://womensenews.org/2009/03/presidents-fund-repays-liberias-market-women/">market women</a>”. </p>
<p>She has also instituted policies to protect women and girls from male aggression. Under her rule, Liberia has implemented the most comprehensive <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/topics/regions/africa.html">anti-rape law in Africa</a>. A fast-track special court has been established to deal specifically with gender based violence.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, a decade after it was opened, the court remains only in the capital city, Monrovia. This makes it inaccessible to most Liberian women.</p>
<p>And the person who heads the court, Serena Garlawolu, has gone on record endorsing <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2016/06/female-genital-mutilation-fgm-160601125718596.html">female genital mutilation</a>. Garlawolu says the practice “is not a violation of anyone’s rights culturally”. Liberian women’s rights activists <a href="http://frontpageafricaonline.com/index.php/news/3315-women-group-wants-female-genital-mutilation-act-put-into-law">petitioned</a> to criminalise the harmful procedure. But the proposed ban was omitted from a recently passed Domestic Violence Act.</p>
<h2>Gender equity</h2>
<p>Sirleaf’s record over the past 12 years demonstrates that gender equity is not magically achieved when a woman occupies a country’s highest political office. This is borne out by countless other examples, including Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May in England, Indira Gandhi in India, Dilma Rousseff in Brazil and Julia Gillard in Australia. </p>
<p>The international media and Sirleaf’s supporters continue to hoist her up as the matron of women’s rights in Africa. However, she does not deserve this title. The evidence of this will be glaringly obvious in the October election results. </p>
<p><em>This article was co-authored with Korto Reeves Williams, a Liberian feminist and a strategic civil society leader in Liberia and the sub-region. It is based on <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/08/liberia-sirleaf-standing-women-170827092802275.html">a piece</a> that was originally published by Al Jazeera English.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/83892/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Robtel Neajai Pailey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The international media and her supporters continue to hoist Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf up as the matron of African women’s rights. But she does not deserve this title.Robtel Neajai Pailey, Research associate, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/557722016-03-06T11:21:00Z2016-03-06T11:21:00ZWomen who work are held back by a lack of quality daycare in Africa<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113917/original/image-20160304-17765-1hnd0j8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Women's ability to work is severely constrained by the lack of child care facilities in urban slums.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters/Thomas Mukoya</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Women’s economic empowerment hinges on the assurance that quality and affordable child care is available so that they can go about the business of doing their jobs.</p>
<p>Globally, women’s participation in the labour market has remained at around 52% for the last 20 years, according to <a href="http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/products/worldswomen/WW_full%20report_color.pdf">United Nations</a>. But women also bear most of the responsibilities at home, including caring for children or other dependants, cooking, cleaning and other housework. </p>
<p>In Kenya, only 46% of the country’s women participate in the <a href="http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS">labour force</a>. For most working mothers, having formal employment may allow them more options for child care. A steady source of income eases their ability to send their children to daycare centres, or even pay for in-home care. </p>
<p>But for the women in Nairobi’s slums, who toil in the informal sector with modest and irregular pay, their likelihood to afford child care is greatly reduced. This is partly due to the increasingly disjointed nature of life in the urban slum where there’s no network of family support. In the past mothers could rely on this network to lend a hand or a watchful eye until a child is of school age.</p>
<p>There has been a growing awareness of the potential to provide daycare for children in Nairobi’s urban slums. But the quality of care varies widely because of a lack of adequate regulation. </p>
<p>Caregivers in this setting lack the support they need to provide quality child care or ways that they should stimulate the children’s environment while their mothers are at work.</p>
<h2>Improving women in the workforce</h2>
<p>Our <a href="http://aphrc.org/projects/creating-better-economic-opportunities-for-women-in-nairobi-slums-through-improved-childcare-options">study</a> is a three-year project. It explores the daycare options available in Nairobi’s slums. It also assesses whether a woman’s ability to work and earn can be improved if quality child care is provided and subsidised. The study provides subsidised and quality improved daycare interventions to mothers in Korogocho, one of the largest slum neighbourhoods of Nairobi. </p>
<p>Almost half of all Kenyan women aged 15 to 49 years have a child under the age of five. For most of these women, participating in the labour force is dependent on concurrent child care responsibilities. </p>
<p>Our aim is to examine the nature and magnitude of barriers to child care, such as high cost and low quality and what impact these have on the way that women participate in the labour force. This will generate critical evidence-based policy recommendations aimed at increasing the participation of women in the labour force.</p>
<p>The results of the study will also provide researchers with insights into ways women’s participation in the workforce can be stimulated and how the gender gap in earnings can be narrowed.</p>
<p>The findings can also serve as the basis for discussions between policymakers and community leaders about how better to meet the needs of mothers with young children.</p>
<h2>A global conversation</h2>
<p>The research findings could have broader impact. Exploring the challenges that women in the most vulnerable and compromised environments face may improve their livelihoods.</p>
<p>This research will feed into the global conversation about women in the workforce, and how to approach the targets outlined in the newly ratified <a href="http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/">sustainable development goals</a>, in particular, goals five and eight that deal with gender equality and economic growth through employment. </p>
<p>Understanding the choices women have to make to meaningfully contribute to their countries’ development, while also sustaining their households, is a step towards realising economic parity. Economic parity should not only be an ambition for the privileged but for all women.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/55772/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stella Muthuri does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>For most women, participating in the labour force is dependent on whether they have adequate child care they can rely on.Stella Muthuri, Postdoctoral fellow, African Population and Health Research CenterLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/477762015-09-28T04:42:40Z2015-09-28T04:42:40ZDistance learning can help women from poor backgrounds build careers<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/96221/original/image-20150925-17716-uqrvm7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Many women are trying to juggle existing work and family. They feel distance learning gives them the opportunity to improve their career prospects without dropping any balls.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Women in South Africa are in a far better <a href="http://www.women.gov.za/attachments/article/92/STATUS%20OF%20WOMEN%20IN%20THE%20SOUTH%20AFRICAN%20ECONOMY%20.pdf">position</a> economically now than they were at the dawn of democracy two decades ago. This is thanks largely to <a href="http://sajems.org/index.php/sajems/article/view/145/39">laws</a> and <a href="http://www.labour.gov.za/DOL/legislation/acts/basic-guides/basic-guide-to-affirmative-action">policies</a> designed to diversify the country’s public and private sectors after apartheid.</p>
<p>Legislation is one way to improve the lot of women in the workplace. The other involves what Aretha Franklin and Annie Lennox call “sisters doing it for themselves” – individual women taking their careers into their own hands and mentoring their peers to do the same.</p>
<p>One way in which women can do this is to advance their careers through distance learning, which has been <a href="http://www.sajhrm.co.za/index.php/sajhrm/rt/printerFriendly/447/549">proven</a> to greatly aid individual career development.</p>
<p>It allows people who are already working to study for the first time or to improve on their existing qualifications. My research, which is about to be published in the <a href="http://www.sajhrm.co.za/index.php/sajhrm">South African Journal of Human Resources</a>, explored what factors influence the career success of South African women who are enrolled as distance learners. I also wanted to understand what they felt stood in the way of perceived career success.</p>
<h2>Women’s stories</h2>
<p>According to the South African Department of Education one-third of all South Africans studying in higher education institutions chose distance learning as their preferred mode of study. From this cohort of one-third, 65% to 69% of students in distance learning universities are deemed previously disadvantaged with women forming a substantial bulk of this number. </p>
<p>The 30 women who took part in this study were all distance learners with the University of South Africa (Unisa). They were based in Port Elizabeth in the impoverished Eastern Cape province. All were recognised by South African law as <a href="https://www.environment.gov.za/sites/default/files/legislations/bbbee_act.pdf">previously disadvantaged</a> either by their race or gender.</p>
<p>I conducted unstructured interviews so that the women felt able to talk freely about their experiences rather than sticking to set questions. One of the issues examined was why they had chosen to study while already working. Most spoke about how becoming more qualified would see them recognised as a professional, with the responsibilities that accompany such a title. They wanted to be considered “experts” at something, and equated this description with being successful.</p>
<p>Jennifer, a 29-year-old black woman, was working as a bank teller while studying for an accounting degree through Unisa. She wanted to become a chartered accountant at the bank. Jennifer said she did not enjoy the “routine” and mundane activities that came with being a teller and saw a further qualification as a way to contribute to her becoming an expert.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s about being an expert at what I do and people turning to me because of this expertise. If that happens then I consider myself as successful. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Participants viewed their pursuit of career development as being inextricably linked to career success. They were constantly improving themselves by studying further through Unisa, rather than remaining stagnant in one job or field. Many also made use of internal development programmes offered by their current employers. </p>
<p>The women said that distance learning was the right choice for them because they were hardworking, persistent and able to juggle their existing jobs with studies and family commitments.</p>
<h2>Barriers to success</h2>
<blockquote>
<p>I am from rural Cofimvaba and you can see people in my community are not supportive to the career development of women. This can be due to thinking that our role as women is just to have children, stay in the kitchen and fend for the children. To an extent because of this prevailing attitude, girls like me will never be anything and that is sad and limiting. – Nwabisa, a 30-year-old black accountant and distance learner</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nwambisa was one of several women who talked about society’s traditional views of women as holding them back. Others said the pressure came from themselves: they wanted to be good wives, mothers and successful career women. They saw distance learning as a good way to strike a balance.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I do not want to be a successful person career wise and yet a failure to my family. Distance learning is flexible so I can still be a mother and a wife while also pursuing my own ambitions. – Zama, 38-year-old black teacher</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The participants also complained about the <a href="http://www.feminist.org/research/business/ewb_glass.html">glass ceiling</a> in their existing workplaces. They constantly referred to the privileged position of men in society ahead of women and the preferential treatment they said men received at work.</p>
<p>The women interviewed for this study saw distance learning as a means to an end: a way to improve their qualifications and get ahead in their careers. It also tends to be cheaper than full-time study, which the women found useful because many were supporting themselves and their families. Finally, they enjoyed the flexibility of distance learning, as illustrated by Zama’s story.</p>
<p>It would appear that, for these women and probably many others, career success is about more than achievements in study and at work. It is also about seeking a balance between these and their obligations to their families and communities. </p>
<h2>Practical applications</h2>
<p>Traditional career theories tend not to focus on individual, lived experiences. This produces reductionist, fragmented ideas about what constitutes career success. But this study shows us career development is actually a complex process that doesn’t follow a hierarchical approach.</p>
<p>It also allows for some practical ideas about improving women’s experiences of both distance learning and individual career development. Current policy interventions tend to focus on inclusion and access to education. </p>
<p>Much more needs to be done in offering women the chance to acquire even informal education and training to help their career development. The focus should not just be on formal education, but on making sure that each community is a hub that encourages the development and application of skills.</p>
<p>Distance learning can be a crucial space not just for getting an education – but for moving away from a life of disadvantage that is all too common for many black South African women.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/47776/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Willie Chinyamurindi receives funding from the National Research Foundation.</span></em></p>Distance learning provides a great way for women who are already working to improve their skills and meet their own standards for a successful career.Willie Tafadzwa Chinyamurindi, Senior Lecturer in Business Management, University of Fort HareLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/476382015-09-25T04:31:31Z2015-09-25T04:31:31ZWhy hearing the voices of Kenyan women is important for a more just future<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/95216/original/image-20150917-7521-3hiwji.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Women in Kenya face issues of beatings, polygamy and being forgotten after bearing children. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Arsirya/www.shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Reflecting on <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Harvest-Women-Constitution-Making-Kenya/dp/9966792104/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1442847549&sr=1-1&keywords=time+for+harvest%2C+wanjiku+kabira">oral testimonies</a> by <a href="http://mlgi.org.za/resources/local-government-database/by-country/kenya/commission-reports/Main%20report%20CKRC%202005.pdf">ordinary Kenyan women</a> during the constitutional review process in Kenya between 2001 and 2005 and seeing the influence it has had on the <a href="https://www.kenyaembassy.com/pdfs/The%20Constitution%20of%20Kenya.pdf">new constitution</a> is a good example of what can come from using both female and male experiences in shaping our world. </p>
<p>Often, women have spoken but they have not been heard. </p>
<p>African women have had to explain themselves to a world that does not seem to understand them. Women have talked themselves hoarse, explaining the problem: how culture, traditions, stereotyping, economic status, women status, and how the nature of institutions affect their positions in society. They have lived in the shadows. They have been looking at a world to which they are invisible and often one which is incomprehensible for them. </p>
<p>My <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=XTW0tP8AAAAJ&hl=en">research</a> was guided by theoretical perspectives of For the Record: The Making and Meaning of Feminist <a href="http://www.amazon.com/For-Record-Meaning-Feminist-Knowledge/dp/0704339609">Knowledge</a>, which argues that if we want to understand what women’s lives, experiences and challenges are, we must begin with them. They know. </p>
<p>The research analysed women’s personal narratives documented during the collection of views from people about the Kenya constitution. </p>
<h2>Finding the voices, hearing the stories</h2>
<p>Women theorise less and speak with particular examples. In many cases when women spoke to commissioners in the review process they told their own stories, their struggles of daily lives to feed and clothe their children. They spoke from their experiences or from experiences of other women and other members of society.</p>
<p>I chose a number of personal stories from women of different ages and from different communities and ethnic backgrounds.</p>
<p>They would often start their presentation like this:</p>
<p>“Me, this is what I want to say: we have many problems in this area. Food is difficult to get. We have no water, our children have no clothes, they are not going to school, and we have no school fees. Like me, I have five children; I just work on land and if it rains, we get food; if it does not rain, we don’t get food. This mountain here, you can see it, it keeps away the rain. Women need to be assisted.”</p>
<p>The women at times requested to be heard in their women only groups. They wanted to express their views about their personal lives, their experiences, particularly about what happens within marriage and in the homes. </p>
<p>I chose to listen to their voices about marriage because, according to common wisdom, marriage is the desired status for African women. Women shared their stories about marriage, polygamy and the status of a wife, among others. They challenged society’s sacred presentation of marriage as an institution. They challenged contemporary and traditional images of the beautiful African marriage where, it is claimed, you are protected. </p>
<p>Women said they saw the institution of marriage as a hindrance to the progress of the girls, their daughters. They wanted them educated and to be able to take care of themselves. Men, on the other hand, saw their girls as a source of wealth. </p>
<p>Akinyi is a young woman who considered herself an old woman at the age of 24, married with three children and in a <a href="http://www.thefreedictionary.com/polygamous">polygamous</a> home. </p>
<p>Her ambitions, except those of looking after the children, were over. She lived in the shadows, her dreams no longer real and her hopes and aspirations transferred to her children. She had become her mother. She said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am 24 years old. I want the constitution to protect old women like me. You see, when I got married, he was very good to me. He would come home every day with something for our child and me. Sometimes, he would bring half a kilo of meat or fish. Now he does not sleep in my house. He says I smell, I am dirty, I don’t cook well and that I have grown old. I have four children now, the oldest one is now eight years, and the youngest is one year old. I don’t have anyone to help me with the children when I go working in the garden, or fetching firewood. I have to go looking for food every day.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Women also spoke about female genital mutilation. Monicah Makuti of the Sengwer Community Centre in the <a href="http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1060">Rift Valley</a> told us:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We no longer want female genital mutilation. In our community, when a girl is circumcised, the father says he has now gotten wealth and starts to count cows or pieces of land. But when a man is born, they say he now has land and wealth. So I say we stop female genital mutilation completely. Because as soon as a girl from Sengwer is circumcised, she is forced to get married. The father wants cows and the girl is forced to go to another man’s house. And even if the girl is married and her husband brings cows, they come back at night to steal those cows. What good will that do?“</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Gains at the National Constitutional Conference</h2>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Harvest-Women-Constitution-Making-Kenya/dp/9966792104/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1442847549&sr=1-1&keywords=time+for+harvest%2C+wanjiku+kabira">Women’s rights</a> did make some gains at the <a href="http://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/568_atm6pfau.pdf">Bomas</a>, as the constitutional review process came to be called. </p>
<p>These gains would later be safeguarded throughout the rest of the Constitutional Review Process, a struggle which was to take the next six years. Kenya’s constitution banishes gender discrimination in all spheres of life, including the social, economic, cultural and political arenas.</p>
<p>In 2010 as we were about to harvest the fruits of our work at Bomas there was one major gain we eventually lost. This was the 30% women’s representation in the National Assembly. Instead, we harvested the special seats, one from each county, which added up to about 13%. Nevertheless, we harvested close to 27% senate representation and 30% in county assemblies.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/47638/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Wanjiku Mukabi Kabira is the Director African Women's Studies Centre and Professor of Literature, University of Nairobi. She has mobilised resources from government agencies, ministries and development partners. She is affiliated with a number of organisations including: Board Member of; International Centre for Research on Women (ICRW), Institute of Policy Analysis and Research (IPAR), Affirmative Action Social Development Fund, Riara University Council, among others.</span></em></p>African women have had to explain themselves to a world that does not seem to understand them.Wanjiku Mukabi Kabira, Associate Professor of Literature and Director, African Women's Studies Centre, University of NairobiLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.