Africa: The Problem of the Gender Line

THE classification of human beings according to race, followed by using skin colour as a marker of social and political difference has haunted the world for centuries now.

E.W. B. Dubois called it “the problem of the colour line.” The line itself being a border that was socially and psychologically constructed to separate peoples.

White skinned people were socialised and politicised into believing in their natural superiority and difference from the black, brown and other colours of people. The black people in turn were socialised and politicised into believing and living their difference from white people and inferiority.

White people were constructed into a “master race” that could enslave and colonise other people. The colour line became a forcefully tyrannical line that was known and feared, and respected, by people of different colours.

Apartheid took it very far. As from 1948, where different tests were carried out on human bodies to ascertain the authenticity of their race, South African felt the colour line in its most violent mode. Skin colour, hair texture, shape of the nose, shape of the head and colour of the eyes all became signs that were used to spot the racial differences of people.

At a world scale, the scientific discipline of scientific racism was generated to specialise in proving the differences between the races. Some ridiculous theories such as the “survival of the fittest species” as opposed to the extinction of inferior races were generated. At the theological level white people were constructed as blessed, the first-born children of God, that must naturally rule the planet.

The colour line, in short, became a very violent and murderous line.

Not the only Line
The German philosopher, Karl Marx, haunted the entire world with the theory of classes and class struggles. People, according to Marx, came to be divided along the violent line of class. Just as racism is still a growing problem in the world class differences and struggles still dog world societies today.

Class, in other words, matters. Colonialism made class matter more in the way the colour line and the line met, through capitalism, to make white people systematically wealthy and hold monopoly over all resources.

There is also the religious and spiritual line. The clash between Muslims and Christians in the world is a representation of the religious and the spiritual line that has caused struggles that have cost humanity many lives. Because of religious and spiritual differences and conflicts the world has not known peace for a very long time now.

People of opposing religious and spiritual faiths have been constructed into seeing and treating each other as blood enemies. Loving one’s God so much that one can kill or be killed for him is a religious and spiritual political tendency. Every religious and spiritual faith creates its enemies, spiritual and human, that must be conquered for salvation to place.

One of monumental lies of the colonisers and enslavers was to say they were closer to God than the natives were. And the true sin of the natives was ever to believe such lies.

The Gender Line
The classification of human beings according to the gender line, the division between men and women, has been another tyrannically violent line that is a problem of the centuries. Colonialists and enslavers tried to have us believe that the conquest, domination and exploitation of women by men was a primitive African problem.

But a reading of European history shows that in ancient and modern Europe were equally if not more oppressed than women in Africa. It is colonial propaganda that in the West women have enjoyed freedom and equality throughout the centuries.

In terms of time, for instance, it is only in some countable decades ago that women in the western world were given the suffrage, the right to vote. Not so long ago in Europe women were counted as minors that cannot be trusted with such serious matters as electing leaders.

It cannot be denied that before colonialism and after in Africa the social and political gender roles put women in the receiving end of domination and exploitation. The continent of African is referred to as Mother Africa and the countries themselves, like others in the world, are referred to in feminine terms. Wherever women have been given importance it is in symbolic and ceremonial terms and not in giving them raw power to

lead. There have been countless African Union Conventions just like there have been United Nations proclamations declaring women equal to men but that has not changed the status of women as marginalised and inferiorised economically, socially and politically.

Africa might be lagging behind the West in the political empowerment of women but that does not mean that the West has achieved the equality of women in the economies and the polities. The marginality of women is a world systemic problem that needs to be tackled with the same determination as the opposition to racism and apartheid. Women make the larger part of the world population.

Marginalising them from power, economically and politically, robs the world of the contribution that women can make towards the betterment of humanity. If world politics remains a ‘boys club’ thing the world will remain an incomplete place that is run through narrow and partisan lines, a world under the tyranny of a masculine minority of bullies.

The Coloniality of Gender
Two of the western classics of political philosophy are Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics. The two books present women, children and slaves in servile and inferior terms. In that way, the original theorists of democracy did not have women in mind as part of the democratic political experience.

Democracy was born without women in mind. Colonialism and slavery only spread the western inferiorisation of women to the parts of the Global South that had their own asymmetrical gender roles that also oppressed women.

The oppression of women is a world systemic problem that Maria Lugones called the “coloniality of gender” because the domination of women was fortified by colonialism, and it is part of colonial power relations. One key manifestation of coloniality is the worldwide domination of women.

One of the pillars of the Colonial Power Matrix is the “control of gender and sexuality” where the human family worldwide must be structured along Roman-Dutch lines in Christian and heteronormative terms. Men as heads of families circulate in society as natural leaders that will always be superior to women and take the front seats of power.

What has been naturalised as the normal power and privilege of men over women is, like racism, another social and political construct that is defended with sexist and patriarchal propaganda. Many myths and fictions are circulating to sustain the colonial lie that men are superior to women and make better leaders.

The trouble is that, like coloniality at large, women as victims of the coloniality of gender have believed the fictions and myths about their inferiority. If this was not so women would have long used the advantage and power of their numbers to rule the world.

The zenith of coloniality in general, just like witchcraft, is when victims believe that their victimhood is God’s will and not a crime against humanity. The stubborn and durable truth is that the decolonisation and liberation of humanity will remain a half-truth if the liberation and equality of women is not achieved, at a world scale.

Tokenising women and bringing them in as statistics and place holders to tick politically correct boxes is to postpone human liberation.

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina, Pretoria, in South Africa. Contacts: [email protected]