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, south african elections 2009, Southern African politics, Uncategorized | Tags: 2009 elections, COPE, nationalism, Shikota, take back the tech, Terror Lekota
How is it possible that a party that started with such fanfare and had such imagination can appear to be self-destructing before our very eyes? I am talking about the Congress of the People (COPE), of course.
Many will remember the excitement it created in promising the birth of an opposition that we could respect. There are millions in South Africa who will never vote for the Democratic Alliance (DA) in their lifetime because we remember too much, are too suspicious of the people in charge of that party and have no respect for many of the DA’s policies. It brought suprise, intrigue and really articulated some of the frustrations felt by previously loyal ANC voters.
Although people have much historic respect for the Independent Democrats (ID) leader, Patricia de Lille, we can’t quite figure out who the other people in that party are. So, it seems we’re not likely to have ID as a real, large opposition either.
Of course, if the Pan Africanists in the various parties that now exist were a little more organised, or AZAPO more visibly convincing, there might be hope there too.
But there has been no such hope. This is why COPE offered an interesting turn in recent SA politics. It was not just the fact that many of the founders came from the same liberation struggle background, it was also that this party offered something new to South African politics.
Even if your loyalty to the ANC was unshaken, you could not really dismiss COPE as insignificant. The ANC electoral campaign clearly took COPE seriously in the run up to the 2009 elections. The amount of energy and attention that the ANC paid to COPE showed, even if just metaphorically, that this was a formation that mattered. Think about how little attention the ANC pays to other small parties – even when these are more established. Now compare this to how much ink was dedicated to the ‘divorce papers’ by Lekota, the speculation on Shilowa, the violent utterings by various ANC leaders as they spoke about their previous comrades who has crossed over, the controversies about who else was organising/raising money for COPE, how hard the ANC fought to prevent COPE from having a name of any sort with leftist associations, etc.
But COPE seems hell bent on showing South Africans that the grand promise was all just an act. How else do you account for the repeated bizzare incidents in the public – from the delayed election presence (which they eventually fixed and spectacularly so), to the endless media mess on whether there should be a Congress or not? Bitter in-fighting does not inspire confidence.
Many people voted for COPE, and as with any other political party, the vast majority of these people are not card carrying members – and will never be. If COPE does not stop irritating and embarassing the people who voted for it in such numbers, they can pack up and go home. The best thing they can do now is to surprise their audiences, and pleasantly so, by staying clear of things that will lose them further confidence. They need to remain an alternative for future elections. This will not be the case if we see more priests (bishops)/uniformed men as compromise candidates, more machismo between the two top leaders, there is more talk of a split, or other boring events typical of mundane politricking.
Come on, people living in South Africa may have very high appetites for soapies and dramas, but we prefer these on our screens not in our political life. With their techno savvy, some of the big money behind them, and their media savvy, COPE really owe us something a lot more imaginative, whether we vote for them or not.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Now I am not in the habit of judging a woman’s character by attributes associated with the man she chooses to cavort with. But, in this particular instance, I am less than suprised at Nadira Naipaul’s nasty piece and the ugly can of worms that she has conveniently unleashed so long after the trip ended. Maybe her choice of Nobel Laureate husband does tell us something about her own character, after all.
This post is not about Nadira Naipaul’s husband, however, so much as it is about the alleged interview she had with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela in which the latter is supposed to have said all manner of unsavory and apparently unfashionable things about Mandela and one or two directed at Archbishop Tutu as well.
For those people who have been living under a rock for the last few days, I am refering to Nadira Naipaul – married to the infamous but celebrated novelist, VS Naipaul (both talented and despicable, sort of like Ezra Pound, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, etc), and the piece she published as an interview with Winnie Madikizela Mandela.
In the much cited article/interview, Naipaul claims that Winnie Madikizela-Mandela said Mandela has sold out Black people, that his daughters find it hard to reach their father without going through much read tape, expressed resentment about Mandela’s acceptance of the Nobel Prize shared with FW de Klerk, the continuing inequity of post-apartheid South Africa, the farce that was the TRC in many respects, etc.
Several things are immediately irritating to me when I read this interview. First, it is reading The London Evening Standard at all. Second, the way in which this article is written, long before Winnie appears, but also the specific representations that Naipaul chooses for Winnie Mandela: the Winnie who is both a monster general queen figure and unsure woman who needs Naipaul’s husband’s approval. Naipaul’s own overblown sense of hers and her husband’s importance at being kept waiting – not in a pubic place but someone’s home to which it is not clear that they were really invited.
Third, so what if Winnie said all of these things? None of these things attributed to her – save for the one about her daughters’ access to their father – has not been said a million times over by many Black people in South Africa, including staunch comrades. Why does this mattr to Naipaul, the journalist? Why does Winnie saying them – and millions of Black South Africans agreeing with her – mean that this soils Mandela? Because this is not the Mandela of mainstream white South Africa and Britain? These views have existed for more than a decade simultaneously: the revolutionary Mandela next to the traitor Mandela next to the benign Mandela much beloved of white SA. The fact that this badly written Naipaul piece is an issue at all just serves to show how little general Black sentiment is aired in public South African culture, even though several prominent figures have expressed the same sentiments in the media more than once.
Fourth, Winnie Madikizela Mandela denies that there was ever an interview. What are we to make of this? The Naipauls were in her house, but there was no interview. So, if we believe there was no interview, we have several places to go.
Either Madikizela-Mandela said what was attributed to her as she sat with these two conservatives in her house, but did so in a conversation that was not an interview OR she said nothing of the sort and Naipaul’s ‘interview’ is fiction. It cannot be complete fiction, because journo Naipaul talked to somebody who probably said all of this. That person would not have been hard to find; it need not have been WMM. The sentiment is that widely held.
But what if WMM did in fact say all these things off the record? So what? Is she not allowed to express an opinion in her house without someone making an ugly spectacle of her, her life, her house and her comments for self-serving reasons nearly a year after the conversation could have taken place?
I felt sick to my stomach when I heard the Naipauls were in Johannesburg. I remember saying to a friend, ‘what horrible ugliness will come out of this visit’ even before that ridiculous story about their pretend hijacking. And more than nine months later, there is something of an answer in the non-story.
Maybe the Naipaul’s should go back to relegating South Africa to the marginal characters of novelist Naipaul’s books.
Filed under: Uncategorized
I was invited by the Director of the Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies, at the University of Pretoria, Dr Elaine Salo, to sit on a lunch hour panel to mark International Women’s Day today. The topic for deliberation is “South Africa’s progress in closing the gender gap”.
The Global Gender Index seeks to measure the disparity (or lack thereof) in opportunities and access to resources between men and women in any given country and across various countries. In 2008 South Africa ranked 22nd in the world, and in 2009 the World Economic Forum report has ranked the country 6th. South Africa and Lesotho are the only African countries that appear in the top 10. Rwanda is not surveyed at all, although I suspect it would rank notably too.
The Top 10 countries (in order) are: Iceland (0.828), Finland (0.825), Norway (0.823), Sweden (0.814), New Zealand (0.788), South Africa (0.770), Denmark (0.763), Ireland (0.760), Philippines (0.758), Lesotho (0.750). To explain the scale and score, 0 = inequality and 1 = equality.
On the face of it, various things are clear. First, contrary to popular opinion the status of women in relation to men, and the textures of gender relations are not primarily linked to levels of development. Feminists in the global South have been saying this for many years, of course, but now it seems as though we have the World Economic Forum backing us up. We live in interesting times, indeed. The Index, if we take its word, suggests that women and men in Lesotho are closer in terms of access to jobs, seniority in those jobs, remuneration, literacy levels, political empowerment, etc than men and women in the USA or France or Britain. Now isn’t that something? Maybe someone should tell that to the next funder that tries to tell women in Lesotho or the Philippines about better access.
Secondly, these countries have been able to do something that gender progressives in the whole world have been working hard to achieve for a long time. It is notable that the scores are quite high – ranging from 0.750 to 0.828, which means these countries are doing really well in the areas surveyed – they might have serious lessons for the rest of the world. For example, according to the Index, Lesotho has no gender gap in education and health.
Third, the Index says little about the actual state of the resources that men and women have similar access to. So, nobody is saying that the health or the school level education systems in South Africa are not in shambles.
Fourth, nobody scores a full 1, not even those Scandinavians who have almost completely eliminated patriarchy according to lore.
I am ambivalent about this report. It is encouraging to see the great progress we have made as a country – at least on paper and official head counts. We are very often quite despondents as feminists and otherwise identifying gender progressives in this country – so this is encouraging because of what is suggests about access. I don’t quite see how this progress has jumped to much over a year – from 22 in 2008 to 6 in 2009, and think that is a cumulative increase, rather than a real jump.
At the same time though, to say we score highly in terms of legislation that criminalises and punishes gender based violence is not the same as saying that legislation is effective. We know it is not SA Medical Research Council research findings continue to show the varied ways in which gender, health and inequity intersect in ways that are complicated, like, for example, that 1 in 9 women who are raped report rape at all, and that of those cases that actually reach the courts, only 5% lead to a successful conviction. How do we make sense of this in light of the high ranking in the Index?
This is just one area, but the same could be said about the violent masculinities that are celebrated and encouraged to take on an increasing visibility in the country today, the use of ‘culture’ discourses to violate and silence dissent, the shifting patterns of female sexual docility, the bizarre and sometimes disturbing rising power of the ‘traditional’ leadership/polygamy/enactment of men’s entitlement to women’s bodies, etc.
Perhaps, as some of us often suggest, the success are the reason for the backlash. Perhaps that is why we have so much to be taken aback by in the brazen actions and words of powerful men in this society.
I think statistics and surveys give us an indication of something otherwise obscured by other forms of research presentation. At the same time, I have been engaged in the research enterprise long enough to know that it is always necessary to retain a healthy level of scepticism when confronted by any research findings.
Filed under: South African universities, Southern African politics, things that suck, Uncategorized | Tags: aa, African nation state, Julius Malema, language, nationalism, popular culture, Redi Direko, South Africa, South African politics
Maybe I am just not as smart as I used to be, but there is something that does not quite sit right with me about the whole media saga on Julius Malema and how he makes his money. The newspapers have been awash with speculation that the president of the ANC Youth League, who is overly fond of refering to himself in the first person plural (we), may or may not be benefitting from unethical practices by one or more of his businesses. The argument, roughly, is that he is a director/owner of various businesses which have benefitted from tenders from government. This is then used to make the additional point that these untoward business deals support his apparently lavish lifestyle.
Let us first get the disclaimers, or as Sibongile Ndashe would say ‘the passwords’, out of the way. I am no fan of the ANCYL president by any stretch of the imagination, but I do not think he is stupid. Far from it, I think he is incredibly canny, witty and deliberately funny. You don’t get to be as powerful and incredibly popular as Julius is by accident. And make no mistake about it, he is incredibly – and somewhat frighteningly – popular with a whole range of people. I find the ongoing jokes about his real or fabricated matric results distasteful. At the same time, I think that Malema can be a bit of a loose canon – which is not always a bad thing in life, mind you. I was enraged by his very thinly veiled threats as he announced that he’d kill for Zuma. I was outraged and offended when he made the hateful misognynist comments about Khwezi. And I would not vote for him because I do not knowingly vote for misogynists. In other words, most of the time he annoys me endlessly. That is a very nice way of saying I find him unbearable most of the time.
But.
Yes, but.
I do not understand the specific tenor of the media obsession href=”http://www.mg.co.za/article/2010-02-21-malemas-lifestyle-sponsored-by-govt-tenders”>with how he makes his money. Firstly, I am not entirely sure that this is news, apart from the general way in which the culture of conspicuous consumption, flash living, and corruption are newsworthy – sort of. At best, if all that is claimed about Malema’s finances is true, what does it tell us about our society or political elite that we did not already know? The media has never shied away from illustrating the connections between political power and business connections in the awarding of tenders and other irregularities. Corruption does always need to be exposed – but what does ongoing exposure of what we (think we) already know achieve?
It confirms our suspicions over and over again, makes us angrier and then maybe prods us to act differently in response to the shoddy work of those we elect to power.
1. If Malema is guilty of doing something illegal – whatever corruption or other guise it takes – he needs to be brought to book. He needs to be investigated, arrested and convicted (in an ideal world, all three together). But I am fascinated by how most media reports are less interested in establishing and/or claiming that there is criminality than in focusing on his body and questioning his gumption in being flash about his cash. In South Africa, are you kidding me? In the world in 2010?
2. If Malema is lying about having resigned from the various Directorships, then I would really like to know what he is hiding. It does not make sense for what he is hiding to be what we already know. That would not be very effective hiding, now, would it? And remember, I don’t think he is stupid. On the one hand, there may be something much more sinister here than ‘just’ corruption in usual guise. On the other hand, he did not technically need to lie to cover up the generalised corruption the papers claim they have found. Given that he is not a public state official – but an elected party official. Technically, he can own as many businesses as he likes and do as much business with government, receive as much cash funded by our tax rands as he likes and not owe us an explanation, unless there is something untoward and illegal happening. Unless ‘we’ elected him to the ANCYL presidency, which I did not. The fact that he seems to have lied about these resignations worries me a lot more than the possibility that he is getting tenders and money through political connections. Newspaper reports and arguments by Redi Direko who interviewed Malema on her show on 702 this morning point out that Malema is still listed as Director of several businesses he claims no connection with. She also pointed to some other illegality since he arrived for the interview with her in the same license-plate free white Range Rover he arrived at Wits in last week. As Direko pointed to the irresponsibility and illegality of driving/riding in the car, Malema remarked that he had not noticed and would talk to the driver about rectifying this. Does he really expect anyone to believe this? Then, there is the bizzare gameplaying or scapegoating that he engaged in rather than answering another journalist’s questions.
This all makes me wonder much more about what is really going on here. I wish the media were doing a better job of actually providing some news on this front, rather than telling us how he flashes his cash at the same time that even respectable media outlets celebrate others who flash their cash. Part of this hypocrisy on bling culture and celebrity culture is that old fashioned business is founded on the same unethical and unscrupulous acquisition of money through barely legal ways.
As for Malema, I wait with bated breath for the REAL story to break, and will continue to scan the repetitive ‘news’ for something new.
Filed under: feminist worlds, Southern African politics, things that suck, Uncategorized, Women's wit | Tags: 'it's my culture', 'just be a man about it', 'out of wedlock', African feminists, anti-feminist rhetoric, Feminist Republic, HIV/AIDS in South Africa, Jacob Zuma, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, polygamy, polygyny, Ray McCauley, south african feminists, Union Buildings
Much has been said in the media and private conversations on the latest revelations of the South African president’s paternity of a child ‘out of wedlock’.
Myth 1: It is a private matter.
Jacob Zuma is not a private citizen, but the President of the country and his sex and love life have implications for the rest of us. He pledged loyalty to certain principles, and it is the duty and right of the citizens to question his office when he is seen to transgress or jeopardise these same principles.
Beyond the Constitution, principles and other legal issues, however, there is no rule that citizens and institutions of a democracy can only question (or generally speak on) some things and not others. Free speech is one of the bases (and basics) of democracy.
When citizens think the president speaks with forked tongue on gender equality, on HIV/AIDS (risk/prevalence), on consistency, etc., this is not a private matter. When citizens’ taxes pay for an increasingly expensive Presidential family, they have every right to speak their minds on the matter.
Myth 2: Zuma can either have multiple partners and be subjected to criticism OR choose one partner and escape public scrutiny.
This is binary logic – which never gets us anywhere. The point of the matter is not whether in a feminist republic we’d force Zuma to choose one wife or banish him. (We’d probably banish Zuma for many more reasons, least of which his preference for multiple partners. There’d be equitable multiple partner relationships in the Feminist Republic.) The heart of the matter is that Jacob Zuma is a public, elected official and an ADULT, which means that he can do pretty much what he likes – apart from commit a crime, be caught and be convicted in a court of law (all together) – but he has to take responsibility for his choices, deal with the consequences of his actions and be grown up about it. Non-feminists could be forgiven for expressing the sentiment behind the saying ‘just be a man about it’ although not for its formulation.
This feminist wishes the President would stop acting like a helpless child who has no decisions, no choice and no mind of his own. We don’t have to agree on what the best choices are, or on why they are made, but addressing the issues instead of creating never ending smokescreens (culture, privacy, unavailability) would merit more respect.
Myth 3: Zuma’s critics romanticise monogamy, his defenders romanticise polygamy.
Debates on single versus multiple partners are such old hat for most feminists that many of us are at a loss for words when forced to explain why anti-feminist rhetoric insists on equating feminist critique of Zuma with a feminist celebration of monogamy. Are you kidding me?
Feminists have been arguing that monogamous heterosexual families were very often at the heart of patriarchal exploitation of women’s sexual, emotional, economic, pyschological, reproductive and intellectual labour for centuries.
Feminists have also said (again over and over again – across history and continents) such homes/families/households are the battleground when white supremacist heteropatriarchies exert violence – hence the devaluation and legalised separation of African/Amerindian/Native American/Asian families in slavery, colonialism, apartheid, etc.
Feminists have insisted that most women experience rape and other forms of violence from their intimate male partners in officially/formally monogynous contexts (and this has been a basic feminist premise for at least 50 years). Feminists said institutionalised monogynous heterosex is about controlling women, containing women’s sexual desire, and policing women’s reproduction.
African feminists especially have said that most monogynous heterosexual relationships benefit the man (to put it mildly) at the expense of the woman in it, and that multiple partner relationships can be about much more than oppression.
Some feminists say the institution of marriage is inherently patriarchal, so the ‘out of wedlock’ thing is not an issue in and as of itself. It’s the larger context of disregard for the dangers that come with infinite sexual relationships in a time of age AIDS that is the problem.
Again, much creative, experimental, public essay, academic, op-ed writing and other knowledge exists on the interesting ways in which multiple-partner relationships can be affirming and interesting spaces for women. Yes, many feminists also disagree with some of the above, but it’s patriarchally inconvenient to deal with any of the above.
Myth 4: The issue is polygamy’s legality and validity, both of which are under attack.
All the people who are saying ‘it is my culture’ to practice monogamy mean it is their culture for a man to have many women as partners – polygyny. They are also saying that their culture is static and we should all respect it without question, even if and when it speaks for us too. But, as feminists we insist that if it is ours too, then we can question, change, lay claim to it, question how it is being misrepresented. Every single proponent of the ‘culture’ plus ‘ploygamy’ argument that I have read in the SA news, seen or personally debated on radio, television or new media platforms has refused the same courtesy to women with multiple partners, whether these partners be men, women, intersex and/or trans-people, or a combination. So, they’re saying ‘it is my culture to practice polygamy’ but what they mean is ‘it is my culture to enter into polygyny’. And there is nothing specifically African about polygamy – people all over the world choose it.
Myth 5: It’s ‘unfair’ to focus on Zuma and leave the women who are his partners alone in public criticism.
When one of these women is an elected public official, she will be subjected to as much scrutiny from those of us who think that public responsibility matters. But so far, the women that Jacob Zuma has relationships are not elected officials – save for Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who married and divorced Zuma. These other women are private citizens of interest and are therefore not obliged to act
Myth 6: Feminists ignore that women choose to enter into polygynous relationships.
See comments under “Myth 3″. There is nothing automatically feminist about either monogamous or polygamous relationships. Women will choose relationships with differing degrees of choice given that we live in a patriarchal and therefore unequal world. Not all women are feminist. No oppressive system has ever succeeded without the complicity and active support of members of those classes/groups it seeks to oppress. This is part of why the personal is political.
Myth 7: An apology deserves automatic acknowledgment and forgiveness, which is really the only way to deal with offered apologies in life.
Would that not just be fantastic? Then we call all go home to that great lala land that Ray McCauley lives in where all of us are Christians, and those of us who are Christians subscribe to the same gold gilded version he does. And there’d be no powerful oppressive institutions like white supremacy, patriarchy, Islamaphobia, imperialism, etc., because everything would be about individual pain and acknowledgement. This way, the only institutions we’d recognise would be the ones led by conservative men who tell us to shut up unless we listen to them justifying the validity of those other power matrices that supposedly don’t exist.
And no, I am not ‘the feminist spokesperson’. I don’t think we need one – we are all our own spokespersons. Women – whether they are feminists or not – are often not taken seriously in this country. Often what we say, and even our differences are generalised as though we are a mass with one mouth. This is patriarchy’s work – finish and klaar. The fact of the matter is that a variety of criticisms have been directed at President Zuma – but none of the variety is addressed in those who jump to his defense.
