Starting on April 1, South Africa’s public TV channel SABC3 has been running a weekly series called “I am Woman.” Every week, the show tries to follow the arc of a woman’s journey, the ways in which she comes to understand herself and the world by creating herself as the world and the world as herself. Imagine doing that without over-weaning ego or impossible humility, and you get the picture. The leap of faith is ultimately each woman’s discovery and invention of her own amazing and ordinary kind of humanity. Her discovery, and ours. If you don’t live in South Africa, you can also view the series online.
New public TV series from South Africa: “I am Woman”
May 19, 2012 By 2 Comments
First Lady Marieme Faye Sall: ‘The good Senegalese woman’
April 14, 2012 By 4 Comments
Joyce Banda of Malawi, the newest President of an African country–and only the second sitting African president who is a woman–is getting all the love for her achievements.* (So what if her ascendency came about due to the death of an aging president and his politically weak, colluding brother?). There is also much chatter on the internet about Malawi’s new First Gentleman, retired Chief Justice Richard Banda (with whom Madame Banda has two children). However, the Senegalese might suggest that their country’s new first lady, Marieme Faye Sall, represents a “bigger” deal in how her move to the presidential palace breaks with Senegal’s political history after independence.
You remember Caster Semenya
January 16, 2012 By 2 Comments
There was a big birthday party a week or so ago, in South Africa. No, not that one, not the ANC centenary, although, amazingly, people are still debating that blowout a whole week later, including how some of the VIPs got to experience what ordinary people endure everyday. This was a party of now, of today and tomorrow and then some. On January 7, Caster Semenya turned 21, and she celebrated in style, in her home village of GaMasehlong in Moletjie near Polokwane. She partied with her new coach, Maria Mutola, with the “People’s Poet” and mbaqanga singer Mzwakhe Mbuli, her family and friends, including sister athlete Ashleigh Trotter. Semenya is beaming. The pictures and reports indicate a truly joyous event.
2011: The Year of the Woman
December 21, 2011 By 11 Comments
It was a great year, maybe one of the best ever, for direct action in-the-streets in-your-face pro-democracy movements, and they were largely pushed and pulled by women. Starting with Tunisia, food uprisings spread quickly to Egypt, Algeria, and elsewhere across the continent. Sometimes, big men were pushed out.
The health news that made the headlines
December 20, 2011 By Leave a Comment
In November came the news that the Global Fund to fight Aids, TB and Malaria was in a financial crisis, because of declining donor commitments and failure by donors to honor existing commitments. The Fund’s board cancelled Round 11 of its funding applications, which was supposed to provide money for 2011 to 2013.
The Assault on Patriarchy in Tunisia
October 25, 2011 By 1 Comment
By Dan Moshenberg
Tunisians went to the polls on Sunday, October 23, 2011. Remember the date, because it’s historic. It’s the first free elections of the Arab Spring, which is, in large part, an African Spring. Tunisia. Egypt. Libya. Maybe Algeria next, maybe Morocco. Who knows? Maybe Zimbabwe. If the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe can declare that gay rights should be included in the new Constitution … anything can happen. Anything can happen, that is, when people organize and push.
When Mubarak left office, in February, the Western press described the event as Mubarak stepping down. Mubarak didn’t step down. He was pushed … by Egyptian women in league with many others. When Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and his crew fled the country, again, it was women who pushed … and have kept on pushing.
The Jasmine Revolution, from its inception, was more than “just” the eviction of a dictator. It was an assault on patriarchy, one that emerged from and as part of a decades long process of women and youth organizing. Women like Munira Thibia, a young homeless activist who mobilized and organized. Women like Saida Garrachi of the Association of Democratic Women, women who have made a democracy by acting democratically. Women writers and bloggers like Amira Yahyaoui and Imen Braham, both candidates for office in Sunday’s elections, young women who sought more than an end to censorship, more than freedom of expression. They sought and seek freedom itself, in action. Or Lina Ben Mhenni, another young woman blogger, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize this year, who boycotted the election rather than endorse the illusion of democracy. The struggle, and the work of re-invention, continues.
Nicholas Kristof Saves Another Woman
September 16, 2011 By 14 Comments
By Dan Moshenberg
He’s ba-a-a-ack! After a decade or so of “saving” South East Asian sex workers from “slavery”, sometimes by actually purchasing them, Nicholas Kristof has found Africa. Kenya, to be specific, and there too, sex workers, or in his words “prostitutes”, await.
Kristof tells the story of Jane Ngoiri, a 38-year-old single mother of two, former slum dweller, now “prostitute-turned-businesswoman.” With the help of a group called Jamii Bora, formed initially by 50 “street beggars”, Ngoiri developed skills, learned to save, grew.
Then “catastrophe struck”. Ngoiri’s daughter was in an accident. Medical expenses were crushing. She had to take her son out of school. Fortunately, Kristof was there! He and his peeps collected money, and without having to resort to “street begging” or “prostitution”, and Ngoiri’s son is now back in school.
Kristof’s takeaway. Life for the poor in Kenya is terribly “fragile”.
But what is Kenya?
The Real Maids of Beirut
September 8, 2011 By 3 Comments
By Dan Moshenberg
If you’ve followed the news from the Lebanon over the last few years, you’ve read quite a bit about the difficult to desperate situation of domestic workers. Maids, child care providers, housekeepers face unrelenting abuse. They are assaulted, cheated out of their pay, imprisoned by their employers and trapped by visa conditionalities.
Trapped by visa conditionalities means that the vast majority of domestic workers in the Middle East are transnational or migrant workers. Not immigrant, because they are not allowed to stay, not allowed to become actual residents. Not quite like one of the family, domestic workers are more like part of the scenery. Think of them as furniture, without, of course, the occasionally high price tag or admired design feature.
For years, the vast majority of these workers came from South East and South Asia, especially the Philippines, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka. But recently, Africa has provided much of this commerce in women’s bodies, in particular Kenya and Ethiopia.
Western media and human rights advocates, as well as many from South East and South Asia and from the involved African countries, have told the story of the violence and super-exploitation of these workers. In the past year, for example, the press in the Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Kenya have described the plight of imprisoned and abused domestic workers as attacks on their respective national integrity. And to a large extent they are.
When it comes to domestic workers, the advocacy story always relies on pathos. Those poor women. Those pathetic, hopeless, desperate women. They are the “new slaves” whose tragic and frantic screams pierce the early morning skies. They are women without protection, and so best described by morbidity and mortality rates: every week they die, often at their own hands. Even when the domestic workers are described as “starting to fight back”, the framework of their struggle is that they are “abused, humiliated and deprived of the most basic rights.”
Except that’s not the story the women tell.
Malawi Spring
July 21, 2011 By 4 Comments
By Dan Moshenberg
Did you hear about Malawi Spring? It started Wednesday, July 20. Thousands of people filled the streets of the capital Lilongwe, the commercial capital Blantyre, the northern city of Mzuzu, and elsewhere. Police are accused of having killed protesters, protesters are accused of having looted. According to the Western press, the streets are filled with riots, “anti-government” protesters, and eruptions of violence. The demonstrators are against the government, the police are against the protestors. But what are the protests for, and who are the protesters?
None of the reports mention women. In and of itself, this omission would be bad enough, but given that this particular `spring’, just like those in Egypt and Tunisia, concerns rising food and fuel costs, the absence is glaring. In Malawi, as elsewhere, women not only purchase and prepare food, they farm it.
So, where are the women of Malawi?
They’re farming. Women farmers, like Esnai Ngwira, are investing in new, environmentally appropriate and sustainable farming techniques. Ngwira, a 57-year-old farmer in Ekwendeni, northern Malawi, has been working with a program that builds social ecology in sustainable ways. Rather than using fertilizer, for example, Ngwira uses crop residue. She gets a better maize harvest, helps the soil, helps the earth. Esnai Ngwira is “a star innovator.”
Women are engaged in new projects in agroforestry, which not only provides their households with firewood and income, but opens their daily schedules for other endeavors.
Malawian women are at the forefront of struggles for land access and ownership. In Malawi something like 80 percent of the land is communally owned. And so women are organizing into groups that, as a group, control and benefit from land the women farmers either lease or own. Women, like Maggie Kathewera-Banda, of the Women’s Legal Resource Centre, are researching, organizing, engaging and empowering rural women. Researchers and farmers understand that access to land and to household bargaining means access to power.
Village women like Ethel James face polluted and fetid water where once it was clean. Infrastructures have collapsed. One borehole serves all of Kwilasha village in Machinga District, in southern Malawi. Women spend, or waste, whole mornings in pursuit of a single bucket of water. So, the women organize. They develop skills to fix the existent pipes and to lay new ones.
Women, like Tiwonge Gondwe, are health activists, feminists, movement builders. They take HIV and AIDS and turn the stigma on its head. They organize communities … across the country.
The stories could continue. Life in Malawi is hard. It’s a poor country, fuel and food prices are on the rise, the UK recently cut aid because of perceived mismanagement, the State is arrogating more and more power to itself. LGBTIQ people and communities are under attack. None of this should be minimized.
At the same time, a mass protest, perhaps the beginning of a next phase of engagement, perhaps not, does not occur in a vacuum. In Malawi, as in Egypt, as in Tunisia, as around the world, spring means harvest. Harvest, in Malawi, as across sub-Saharan Africa, means women farmers. Where are the women? Not in the news reports of the Malawi spring.
The Rwandan Glass Ceiling
June 29, 2011 By 2 Comments
The second instalment of Dan Moshenberg’s weekly posts (his first here) on that place where gender, Africa and media collide.–Sean Jacobs
By Dan Moshenberg
Let’s talk about Rwandan women.
Last Friday, June 24, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko and her son Arsene Ntahobali, were found guilty of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, including multiple rapes of Tutsi women and girls. The two were tried at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, located in Arusha, Tanzania. The ICTR is a United Nations tribunal. Nyiramasuhuko was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Pauline Nyiramasuhuko was family affairs and women’s development minister in the administration of President Juvenal Habyarimana. By all accounts, Nyiramasuhuko, a Hutu, organized and led massacres, torture and mass rapes of Tutsi women and girls in the border town of Butare.
Nyiramasuhuko is the first woman to be found guilty of genocide by an international tribunal, and the Western news media had a field day: “Rwandan ex-minister becomes first woman convicted of genocide”: “Rwandan woman, a former govt minister, is first female convicted of genocide; son also guilty”. The BBC was particularly enchanted by the killer’s gender: “Rwanda genocide: Verdict due for female former minister”; “Profile: Female Rwandan killer Pauline Nyiramasuhu”. That’s one helluva glass ceiling.
When does being a Rwandan woman matter? When that woman is a killer, a rapist, a torturer, a `monster’. Not when she is an organizer and a healer.
