Filed under: feminist worlds, Kenyan intellectuals, Southern African politics, The feminist imagination, Uncategorized, Women's wit | Tags: African feminism, African feminist, Albertina Sisulu, Chris Hani, Fatima Meer, Keguro Macharia, Kenne Mwikya, Mau Mau, MS Otieno, Peter Mbugua, South Africa, Walter Sisulu, Wambui Otieno, Women's Month
The news of Wambui Otieno came at the end of August 2011, as South Africans wrapped up Women’s Month, and a particularly horrid women’s month it had been too, with backlash and misogyny in public spaces like we had not seen in a long time.
I have loved Wambui Otieno, Mau Mau, feminist, unbowed woman ever since I have known about her. Although I never met her personally, I followed her life – backwards and forwards – first, as the African feminist universe buzzed when she lost the legal battle to bury her husband where she wanted, then reading a borrowed copy of her memoir, and afterwards “stalking” her online.
If it were not such a phallic metaphor, I would speak of Wambui as a tower, like a lighthouse of sorts, casting her light all around her at a dazzling world-changing pace, standing unbowed no matter the waves, weather, standing steadfast as volcanoes and earthquakes shook the world beneath her feet.
That might well be someone else’s Wambui Otieno. But I imagine she would have frowned at the limits of my imagination.
So, I think of her more like a galaxy of possibilities. As she lived her life through increasingly unpredictable, but powerful choices, Wambui changed not just the world, but who we are in it too. When she joined Mau Mau as a teenager, and in later writing about this in ways that challenge expectations, she drove home the importance of living our convictions. Although she could have settled into a life cushioned by class in colonial Kenya, she chose radical politics rather than complicity or “safer” forms of resistance.
After independence, her principles often brought her into a collision path with her former comrades. Wambui spoke her truth regardless of the consequences. She stared danger in the face and not only spoke truth to power, but retained her revolutionary subjectivity in action. Consistently.
She epitomised the personal is political and loved who she wanted to, shamelessly and irregardless. Bless her. Ethnicity, class, age are all boundaries used to police who we may love on this continent, repeatedly. They are often ways of reminding women what our place is. These tools are sjamboks (whips) used to remind our spirits when we dare transgress the narrow limits of who society says we are.
Wambui loved in independent Kenya as freely as she had scouted, spied, negotiated and carried arms for Mau Mau in colonial Kenya. She stood by her decisions and refused to be intimidated, no matter who stood against her. She survived her fiance’s betrayal and the imprisonment, attempted to sue her rapist as a way of holding him accountable in a world that said colonisers mattered and African women did not, loved her comrade and husband even though he was the “wrong” ethnicity, fought his family in the legal and public courts to bury him where the couple had decided, and married a man she loved even though he was from a lower class and more than four decades younger.
And in video clips, Wambui looks not only defiant, but joyful. She lived her life on her own terms. And she inspired many of us to do the same: to live our truth, be unapologetic, and defend our revolutionary selves irregardless.
I still need her to be alive in the world. I want her back. I am not ready to “get over it”.
And so it is that in the week since Wambui Otieno died, I have been struck by an overwhelming sense of grief. Although I have thought about her daily, revisited why she was so important to me as an African, feminist, Pan-Africanist, stubborn woman, etc, I have been paralysed and able to articulate my grief only in short, brief bursts.
Until now.
For someone who feels and thinks deeply through words, their reading and their writing, this is quite startling. I do not know what to make of myself when I am being like this.
For, while people often mourn and feel closer to their heroes than makes sense, I have always observed such stated loss at a figure admired from a distance with some skepticism. Although fascinated by the world’s responses to Michael Jackson or Princess Diana before him, or even more recently Amy Winehouse, etc, I took it to mean that the loss was part recognition of the genius and part marking of the passing as necessary ritual.
As I battled to make sense of it all, I realised I was looking at the “wrong” places for explanation. Perhaps, looking at the meanings and experiences of loss closer to Wambui’s politics would help me out. I had remarked that the death of Albertina Sisulu marked the end of an era, so too Fatima Meer, Albertina Sisulu’s comrade and life partner, Walter Sisulu before that. The death of beloved revolutionaries is a bizarre experience. Watching them remembered afterwards, in ways that do not quite seem enough, just reinforces this feeling.
Then it hit me in the pit of my stomach. News of Wambui Otieno’s death felt like hearing news of Chris Hani’s death. While I had someone to direct my anger at – a system, and a series of faces – when Hani was brutally murdered, a similar rage was unleashed at the universe when Wambui died. But, without a clear target, for she died in hospital.
I am angry at her loss. It is too soon, for I still needed her in the world, and I am not ready to “get over it”. But, it has helped me enormously to have a community that loved and mourned her with me. See Kenne Mwikya’s beautiful blog post here: http://kennemwikya.wordpress.com/2011/09/01/wambui-otieno-circling-and-scrutinising/#comment-273 as well as Keguro Macharia’s poignant and powerfully political reflection on Gukira (here: http://gukira.wordpress.com/2011/08/30/welcome-mourning/#comment-2458).
My links are acting up, so I have posted the full URLs above.
Filed under: South Africa nationalism, Southern African politics, things that suck | Tags: African nation state, African people, Black Consciousness, Black people, Black women writers, language, Ntombenhle Nkosi, Pedi, Simphiwe Dana, Sotho, South Africa, South African politics, Swahili, Swati, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, writing back, Xhosa, Zulu
Although I have written about this topic in the papers before, several years ago in the Mail and Guardian, this post is motivated by Simphiwe Dana’s courageous opinion editorial in this past weekend’s Sunday Times. There are a few aspects of Ms Dana’s argument that I disagree quite strongly with, but I do share many of the concerns that she articulates. The gist of her argument (in case something happens to the link above, as sometimes happens), as I understand it, is as follows:
a) In much of urban South Africa, outside of townships, looking for schools that teach Xhosa/Zulu/Sotho/Tswana/Swati/Tsonga/Venda/Pedi/Ndebele is a lesson in pain. She refers to experiencing this earlier when trying to get a school for her children in Cape Town. I am pretty sure she had similar hardship in Johannesburg.
b) The above is true because only Afrikaans and English, out of the official languages of the country, are taught in ways that take the languages seriously and in manners that encourage their use at first language level.
c) The status of a people’s language says a lot about the status of that people’s culture – to them, when they are in power – as well as to their (previous) oppressors.
d) Parents should not have to move or take their children to township schools in order to have language -which is their right legally – taken and taught seriously.
e) African languages carry more than the meanings in the words used to communicate. They carry a worldview and a series of abstract and concrete reference points that are present in various African languages. This is why Ms Dana cares less about which African language her children learn well than she does about them learning one (and the world it carries) well. This is an urgent task that we must take up or deal with the consequences of language neglect.
f) She suggests that Zulu be the official language that is taught at first language level in schools since it is widely spoken and relatively easy on the tongue.
g) We need to hold our current government responsible and accountable for the language mess in our schools even as we keep an eye to the historical context that brought us here.
h) Afrikaans is not an African language. It carries the arrogance of the Dutch colonisers and the apartheid establishment. Although the language was shaped through African location, its Afrikaner nationalist use ensured that it remained a language of wounding.
I am really glad that Dana wrote and submitted this article for publication because it raises several issues that I think need to be raised again and again until something changes. I know that the bulk of the responses will be defensive and vile because any questioning of Black marginalisation in this country elicits this kind of silencing. Mark my words, people will write back to her piece and claim that she has a chip on her shoulder, that she is playing the race card, that she doesn’t know what she is talking about. They’ll also write in and say she is out of touch with what is important in the world and the country, that most Black parents don’t mind the condescending third languages taught at Model C schools because they know their children need to speak English to make it in the world. How do I know? Because these are the stock responses that follow us everywhere. So, I applaud Dana because I think that we need to change the sorry state of education in SA, private schooling included. But I’d like to engage with the layers of her argument in more detail – agreeing and disagreeing with her, as I go along.
to a) I don’t think anybody can deny that what Dana describes is the state of language education in many SA schools post-apartheid. This is an insult of the highest order for the children who go through such schooling, regardless of which race they are. South African children should be able to speak various languages in their country – more than their parents can, even when their parents are polyglots. The school system should play a leading role in this. But it does not. This is a topic that has come up in various conversations with other parents in my own life. I was aghast, when my partner and I started looking at possible schools for our child, to learn that most schools we would have preferred – many with ‘progressive credentials’ – teach English and Afrikaans at first language level, and all other official languages at third language level until the end of primary school. I have various friends who did Xhosa third language at school. Many of them did so for twelve years. None of them can speak Xhosa beyond tentative understanding and elementary small talk. Learning a language at third year level does not teach you how to speak it no matter what your grades say. The fact that languages are taught at third language level at all is an insult.
to b) nothing more to add to this argument. This policy keeps all other SA languages marginal. It makes a joke of the eleven official languages policy/legislation since that is only true on paper. It also points to the inefficiency of our government on this point as well as – perhaps much more so – the irresponsibility of the parents who continue to leave this unchanged in the schools they pay fees to.
to c) yes. see my response to b) above. This current situation means that while these schools are located in a democracy, effectively, they operate as though they are in an apartheid state with two official languages.
to d) No, they should not. We should litigate, and in this respect follow Ntombenhle Nkosi’s example of taking a Durban High School to court, and who is quoted after her victory as having said “Parents must just not take it for granted that schools are going to do it for them, they won’t. Every parent must ensure that their language – be it isiXhosa, be it isiSwati, Zetswane, Sesotho Saleboa, Tshivenda, Tsonga – must be offered as the first language because the National Curriculum Statement states that every learner must choose the home language, not the home language of the school.” I will say nothing of the typos in the transcribed quotation, even though they, too, tell an interesting story about the disrespect of African languages.
e) I agree that this is always true of language. This is why even those of us who are polyglots often cannot translate a concept across unrelated language families. This is also why I have said over and over again that I would prefer to send my child to a school that teaches all SA languages on its books at first language. I am not overly concerned about whether the language is Tsonga or Zulu or Sotho. I am mortified that the only schools that do this in my area are schools whose other values are at odds with mine (mainly on consumerism). But I’d rather send my child to a bizzare school that takes his language and his right to language seriously (and deal with the consequences of helping him unlearn the capitalist values) than to one with “ostensibly” socialist, feminist and anti-racist politics but that tells him his language, ancestry and continent are expendable.
f) Here, I disagree on various technical points. First of all, I don’t see why our children should have to learn only one language when we speak several languages in this country and continent. Many of these Model C schools are capable of teaching SA children how to speak German and French alongside English and Afrikaans. I am sure with motivation, they can do the same with various official languages. The second technicality on which I disagree is on whether isiZulu is any easier than some other indigenous languages. I don’t think that there is such a thing as an easy language, where ease is similar for everybody. I think that what is easy for you is based on what you already know. So, no, I am not convinced that Zulu is easier than Tsonga. My third technicality is about adopting a language spoken by a larger group due to issues of possible future dominance – we will be saying something about Venda when we make Zulu more appropriately official. We do not matter because there are many of us. We matter because we are human beings.
g) Yes, let us do this as a matter of urgency. And not just our government either. Corporate SA needs to get with the programme too. In 2010, I am sick and tired of medicine inserts and packaging that comes in English and Afrikaans exclusively, as though it is 1990. This is where the power of coalitions and campaigns might be harnessed. A movement that says we matter and our languages matter is long overdue.
h) Afrikaans is an African language. Afrikaans comes from a range of languages and was formed as a creole in the mouths of slaves. The first texts written in Afrikaans were not written by people who were “Dutch” – the first Afrikaans texts were written in Arabic script because that was the script used by the first Muslims in the Cape, many of whom came as slaves from East African hinterland, East African islands, South Asia and South East Asia. This makes Afrikaans not Dutch any more than Caribbean creole languages are English or Swahili Arabic. At the same time, this once creole, once defiled by the Dutch, then became appropriated for Afrikaner nationalism in a manner that ensured that it could be used against the very people whose ancestors formed it and were punished for speaking it. Yes, someone who speaks Nederlands may understand parts of Afrikaans, and parts of Aukan (a Surinamese creole also formed by slaves using partly Dutch). However, Aukan is not Afrikaans is not Dutch, even if we do not dispute that they are related. At the same time, to say Afrikaans is African does not undo the fact that Afrikaans is also the language of wounding, misrecognition, displacement, oppression, apartheid. To honour part of our African ancestry we must remember the former because it was their mouths that crafted the creole and were punished for speaking it. To honour another part of our African ancestry, we must highlight the latter. For most Black South Africans growing up under apartheid, Afrikaans was the latter. For many Black South Africans (esp. some classified coloured), it was both. This is our thorny inheritance, and it all matters.
I hope we continue this conversation across all platforms. And, while I could have picked up the phone and had this conversation with Simphiwe in person, I chose not to. I think it is important to respond to what artists say in the public publicly – to honour the difficult task of making the important less privately. I am often very annoyed when people send me endless sms and emails disagreeing with me on something I deliberately wrote publicly, so that I have to engage them privately at the same time as engaging other responses publicly. It’s exhausting.
Filed under: groovy Black men, Johannesburg 2010, South Africa nationalism, Southern African politics | Tags: African nation state, ANC, anti-apartheid struggle, Nelson Mandela, South Africa, South African politics
As so many people choose to do what is right for 67 minutes today all over the world, I hope that we all remember that you have lived your life as a revolutionary who thought that justice could triumph, even as many in our county and the world would rather pretend that you are a teddy bear, benign grandfather figure. Here’s to your most revolutionary self and much love on your birthday.
Filed under: feminist worlds, Johannesburg 2010, Southern African politics, The feminist imagination, things that suck, Women's wit | Tags: African feminists, African Women, Black people, Black women writers, Black women's activism, black women's bodies, body size and image, CGE, Eric Miyeni, feminist South Africa, L'atitude, Lebo Mashile, Lebogang Mashile, Nomboniso Gasa, popular culture, SABC, south african feminists, Sowetan, Xoliswa Sithole
As a rule, I try not to blog about issues that relate to my friends being maligned in the press. This is the only reason I have not blogged about the entire mess with Nomboniso Gasa and the CGE, which continues to enrage me in the injustice of it all, or Xoliswa Sithole and the backlash to her brilliant _Shouting Silent_ saga, or similar things that I may change my mind (re blogging about). But this week, while I was dealing with personal drama, a writer that I think matters – my difference with what he writes notwithstanding – went public with an issue that I think off-page disagreement can no longer serve. This week, Eric Miyeni, author of three books, popular personality, touted eye candy and recognised misogynist in many circles, went public with his hateful nonsense this week by writing an article in Sowetan that really needs more responses than the one Lebo Mashile felt pained to write, even though I am sure she has better things to do with her time. It is totally ridiculous that Mashile had to respond to this rubbish at all, and if Miyeni had the courage of his convictions, there is no shortage of stuff to take on in SA. I have a column on which I may take this up more coherently and calmly but since it is not with the newspaper in question – and papers can be sticky about responses – blogs offer a great opportunity for unedited copy for us writers.
Miyeni’s piece feigned some concern with Mashile’s health in various ways as a thin veil to attack her for deigning to be anything but a self-hating woman. He does not have any reason to think that Mashile has any health issues – or that the presumed existence of these merits waving her privacy. He declares that “under all those layers of fat that she now carries, Lebo Mashile is one of the most beautiful women I have ever met.” Miyeni’s is very thin veiled misogyny.
How dare Lebo Mashile be anything less than rake thin and deign to think we can take her seriously for being gob-smackingly beautiful physically, profound, talented and radical without starving and begging for favours in order to live on her work? How dare she not be a cokehead and rake-thin as a result so that we can feel better about “ourselves”? How dare she not secretly have bulimia or anorexia or be on endless diets so that she can look like the image propped up by skinny women who hate their bodies in order to stay on magazine covers? How dare she be radical, beautiful, “big”, popular, unapologetically feminist and an icon today when we all think we have the answers about South Africa being so conservative?
Yes, I also think that SA is more conservative than we’d all like to admit. And yet, Lebo Mashile’s ground breaking television show, L’atitude, and “formula” is copied over and over again in popular culture – tv and beyond – and pulled many more audiences across the board than many others. She won the coveted and prestigious NOMA prize for her brilliant poetry before she even realised how significant an award it is.
I am not saying Lebo Mashile is perfect. She is a human being – and therefore automatically imperfect. And because of her courage, she is a wonderful example and affirmation for smart girls and women in this country in a million ways. This is nothing to apologise for, no matter how much hatred – in the manner of Miyeni and similar – she receives.
Eric Miyeni’s vitriol against women who are not stick thin deserves attention and rebuttal. It deserves recognition for the hateful nonsense that it is. (Maybe those of us who think he is hateful should not spend anymore money on his books.)
First of all, Eric Miyeni seems to think that you need to be thin to be healthy. However, he is clearly disingenious in this claim. He may be an infuriatingly smart but lazy writer – talented but unwilling to polish his words before subjecting his writers to them, unlike Mashile who respects her audiences too much to torment them with sloppy copy – but he has worked in advertising/media/marketing long enough to know how unhealthy many skinny women and men are, and he is intelligent enough (even though he sometimes pretends not to be) to know that most ‘fat’ people in this country are much healthier than the skinniest people on our media pages.
The column that he anchored on Lebo Mashile is probably one of his shoddiest pieces of writing and a very cheap, hateful shot. Lebo Mashile is there simply to titilate. In other words, no matter how important and profound her work, on Miyeni’s column she is the exact opposite of what she is in her work (profound, provocatice, intelligent, attractive). When Miyeni had nothing interesting to write about, he chose to pen a column about a writer whose brilliance he has not met even though his writing career has been much longer, and a writer whose genius he may never live up to, hateful cheap shots notwithstanding.
That is what misogynist do all the time in this county, and maybe it is time we stopped taking them on off-page.
Filed under: FIFA World Cup 2010, Indomitable lions (Cameroon), things that suck | Tags: Aboubaker, African World Cup, Cameroon 2010, Idrissou, Jean Makoun, Pierre Webo, Samuel Eto'o
I went into the match with high spirits, but after watching wasted opportunity after wasted opportunity – in spite of Eto’o's fantastic first goal – I am now seriously depressed about the indomitable lions. What on earth was wrong with Webo today?
What really bugs me is that this should have been a done deal. The expectations on Cameroon were not too high – they were well within the team’s capacity. Denmark did not even play that exciting a game. They just did not waste any opportunities.
Eto’o, the man who went into ’2010′ under a cloud and therefore must have felt enormous pressure, is the only one who really delivered. And he did so quite early in the came, trying to set the pace for what should have been a clear win by his side.
Clearly his team mates did not feel as much pressure, certainly not Webo who wasted five chances. Or Jean Makoun, Idrissou or even Aboubaker, who, although not as wasteful and disappointing as Webo, nonetheless also cost the team goals.
Filed under: Bafana Bafana, FIFA World Cup 2010, South African flag | Tags: England versus Algeria, Itumeleng Khune, Kaizer Chiefs, Orlando, Soccer City, South Africa versus Uruguay, South Afriva versus Mexico, Steven Pienaar, Teko Modise, vuvuzela
I am breaking my resolve not to blog or write any columns about the FIFA World Cup once it actually started. The only column I’d written thus far was published a few weeks ago and it was about the world cup songs. I had decided not to write about soccer here for the same reasons I don’t like to write about it at all: I can be completely irrational when it comes to a few things, and soccer is one of them. Maybe I am too vain to leave traces of my utter madness in cyberspace, even though I know that rationality is over-rated, etc, etc. And you cannot really be lukewarm about soccer – you either walk away or feel too much.
It is no secret that football fans – or soccer supporters, if you’re South African – are a fickle and temperamental bunch. This is clear from the responses to losing teams generally. More recently, Bafana supporters were seen leaving before the end of the SA team’s match against Uruguay and English fans booed their team after a draw with Algeria, in what was the dullest match played thus far, in my book.
I went to the World Cup Opening match with my mother, who is the biggest and most consistent supporter I have ever known, my partner, who is another serious soccer fan, and our child, who loves balls and teams in yellow (and reads these as Bafana Bafana even when they are Sundowns, Chiefs or Brazil) and blows a vuvuzela better than many adults.
I was as sick as the proverbial dog, but pumped full of antibiotics which I usually avoid like the plague, was quite prepared to risk collapsing as soon as the game was over. It was worth all the money and the legal drugs and more. I enjoyed myself thoroughly: loved the game, felt the whole gamut of feelings that come with watching a soccer game where the stakes are high, was impressed by how many Mexican fans turned up even though it was obviously yellow Bafana terrain, and loved the stadium. I may have soccer loving DNA (courtesy of my mother), but I generally am not a big fan of stadiums because they usually come with significant hassle. Soccer City was pretty impressive: beautiful, masterfully designed so that all amenities were easily accessible and to avoid bottle necks (during half time, exits, especially in the women’s loos, at the boerewors and other food and drinks stalls), etc. I also really liked the fact that the opening game was in Orlando for a whole range of other obvious reasons as well.
Yes, I would have been much happier if my team had actually won, rather than drawing with Mexico. There were obvious missed opportunities. Teko Modise, no matter how many groupies he has that are willing to defend him, could have played a much better game. I know he has apologised for not playing well against Uruguay, but he was not exactly in top form against Mexico either. (Okay, it happens!) Steven Pienaar could have had a lot more support from team mates, although the guy next to me had no patience for Pienaar, so I know that we may watch the same game, but we actually don’t always share the irritations. And I am not going to make excuses for him in the Uruguay match, where he seemed to disappear.
Still on the Opening Match 2010 I am now even more partial to Siphiwe Tshabalala and Itumeleng Khune than I already was (they also play for my other team – Kaizer Chiefs).
And, yes, I despaired after the second match with Uruguay. I am not entirely over my despair, but supporters really did not have to leave the match before it was officially over. I think it is important to support your team regardless of the performance. I think this even though I “stop” watching Chiefs when they are on a bad perfomance streak. I have also been known to “stop” watching Bafana games for months at a time.
So, I am going to resist my boycotts and continue watching more soccer than is good for anybody over the next few weeks. I have got it so bad that I am even watching re-runs of matches I have already seen.
And I am still going to wear my Bafana shirts and root for them against France. Hey, Western European teams are not doing to great in this tournament, so a suporter can hope. Sometimes I think that the reason Bafana lose when they do is a shortage of confidence that leads to fewer chances, less aggression, playing defensive games (that sometimes concede too many goals in any event, and so are not very effective defensive games). In the game against France, I am hoping for none of this lacklustre defensive game nonsense and a team that plays like it has nothing to lose and all the world to gain. And goals! I am not interested in that self-comforting “the boys played well” post-game talk without goals. For one thing, it is loser talk. Playing well is all well and fine, but this supporter wants goals from her team.
Go Bafana!
