The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Mabhena
The history of the world has so far been a huge narrative of what men have done to the world and to humanity. From the colonial conquests, enslavements, the holocaust and genocides to present day terrorism men have been masterminding and enacting the spectacle of death and destruction under the sun.
Such women as Margaret Thatcher that have held power and influence in the world have actually been rare women that enacted masculinity and reproduced patriarchy to survive in the game.
As a powerful woman in American politics Hillary Clinton had to be a warrior, not a lady and a mother. In reference to the NATO involvement in the murder of Muammar Gaddafi she was warlike and poetic: “we came, we saw, he died! Biologically they might have been female but politically and socially such women as Thatcher and Clinton had to be men in order to fit into the scheme of power and world affairs.
In its form and content, the Euro-American Empire has been white and male. One can observe that the world system itself and all its political and economic world orders has been a male system in which female human beings have experienced the world and life as what Zizek has called the “symptoms of men,” people who exist to affirm and show that men exist.
If they are not cooking in the hot kitchens women are in their huge populations grouped into a variety of gardens of flowers and roses that decorate the beds of men. In the religious and education systems of the world, systems that are expected to foster liberation, the domination and exploitation of women is not only endorsed but it is fortified, naturalised and normalised. It may not be such an exaggeration that by and large, women are victims of life par excellence in the entire world.
With all the problems of marginality and exploitation that women have in the world, where ever they appear, women are handled and treated as not people who have a problem but people who are a problem. It may not be such a negligible fact but a telling historical sign that most natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina were named in feminine terms; women are signified as evil and troublesome human beings. If they are not simple “bi***s” they are real “witches” in a world ruled by the warrior male mindset that has brought the entire planet to tears.
The coloniality of gender
The Argentinian feminist philosopher, Maria Lugones, in her rejection of feminist pretensions of western white women has described the coloniality of gender as the imposition of ideas of how to be a woman on black women by white women. In other words western feminism comes from the lazy imagination of privileged white feminists and cannot answer the tough questions of the problems of black women in the Global South.
In their powerful and privileged social positions, white western women pretend that their marginality to white western men is the same as the marginality of black women to men in general. Maria Lugones believes that while white women struggle for more rights, more power and privilege in the West, black women are still fighting the black struggle to be recognised as human beings in the first place.
Part of the propaganda of colonialists, besides the fiction that they came to Africa to rescue warring black tribes from each other is that colonialism brought the emancipation of women from primitive African cultures and traditions. Classic western philosophy is pregnant with telling evidence that proves how the western civilisation has always been oppressive to women. As important and as large a classical western philosopher as Aristotle thought that “the slave is wholly lacking the deliberative element; the female has it but it lacks authority; the child has it but it is incomplete.”
Women had no complete faculty of thinking, Aristotle believed and therefore “as regards the sexes, the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male ruler and the female subject.” The marginalisation and oppression of women, and their children, has been a central and critical part of the slavish and the colonial project at a world scale.
It is a colonial myth and an imperial fiction that the oppression and exploitation of women is solely a problem of African cultures and traditions.
The emancipation of women in Africa
African liberation movements that jointly and severally took arms to fight white settler colonialism and the imperial world system worked in full awareness of the need for the liberation of women. One of Thomas Sankara’s most memorable speeches was: The revolution cannot triumph without the emancipation of women, a speech, which he delivered to a rally of several thousand women in Ouagadougou, the capital city of Burkina Faso, commemorating International Women’s Day on 8 March in 1987.
Sankara noted how African liberation was to be a joke of the centuries if it did not factor in the liberation of women and their recognition as full citizens of their countries and the continent. On 9 August in 2007, Thabo Mbeki in a speech titled: The Emancipation of Women, described the liberation of women as central to the cause of the African Renaissance. One of the central starting points of decoloniality as a philosophy of liberation is the observation and belief that the decolonisation of the Global South became a failed project.
The failure of decolonisation in Africa, Latin America and some parts of Asia has not only been the delay in the delivery of economic freedoms but also the continued subjugation, domination and marginalisation of women in politics and in the economies. In the polities and economies of the Global South women remain inferior and peripheral and the decoloniality movement notices the need for the struggle to locate women and youths in strategic political and economic positions.
Africa and the entire Global South has become tired of the domineering rule and leadership of patriarchs and warriors that have monopolised history and are now part of the problem of coloniality and not of the solution of decolonisation and liberation.
Witches on campus and in parliament
In his treatise on the history of knowledge production in the world, Ramon Grosfoguel has described how the midwives of Latin America that had knowledges and sciences that colonisers did not understand and appreciate were burnt at the stakes as witches. In a strong but symbolic way female intellectuals in African universities are still received and treated as troublesome witches on campus.
Female thinkers have their intellection treated with the suspicion with which witchcraft and insanity are received in the world of the normal. In African politics female politicians are treated as troublesome hurricanes and other natural disasters and not thinking and feeling human beings that also want to contribute to changing the world for the better.
If the female politicians are not reduced and summarised to the political ideas and deeds of their husbands they are simply portrayed as mad women that must at best be tolerated and at worst be punished. It is a painful paradox that as populous as they are, women and youths in the Global South have not seen the need to use their numbers and energy to put an end to the monopolisation of power by men who have painted the world in blood with needless wars.
In the ruling and opposition parties of the Global South there is an urgent decolonial need for the feminisation of the world of politics and power. In democratic South Africa, for instance, the legitimate political aspirations of Dr Nkosazana Zuma are being reduced and summarised to the political crimes and interests of her former husband, President Jacob Zuma, as if she has no political agency and wisdom of her own.
In African parliaments at large and in other political platforms women are tossed around as tokens and not really powerful people, not in so many words they continue to be reminded of their place as the kitchen and the bedroom. Those women that have had the courage to stand up against this domination have been forced, like Margaret Thatcher and Hillary Clinton, to become macho women and iron ladies who speak and act like warriors.
Since politics has been made to be a tough and dirty game of ballsy boys, female politicians have been forced to be ballsy warriors and not docile daughters in law in the remote village.
-Cetshwayo Zindaba Mabhena writes from South Africa: [email protected]
