African Perspectives Issue1, Vol1

Editorial 2Tsitsi Makina

We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For 5

Reflections on African Women’s Thought Leadership in the 21st Century: The Importance of Engaging with Sexuality 10Zine Magubane If God Were A Woman: Women’s Citizenship in South Africa 18Liepollo Lebohang Pheko Becoming Post-Colonial Citizens In Africa: Through Feminist Vistas 31Patricia McFadden

Young African Rural Women Engage The Public Sphere: On Africa’s Agenda 2063 38Roseline Achieng’ Visual Essay 52

Contents

2 Issue One | Volume One

EditorialTsitsi Makina

“Feminism is a matter of life and death. It is the question that concerns every facet of our being on this earth. It is every issue of life, every concern and every struggle. It traverses every circumstance, every belief, every hope, every matter and challenge that we will meet in this life and all that consumes us until our death”

Liepollo Lebohang Pheko’s beautiful articulation of the why of feminism brings to the fore the fact that we focus a lot of

time and energy on what it means to be or not to be a feminist, and consequently very little space is left to talk about the reasons why we are and should all be feminists. Being a feminist is still constructed in the negative, feminists are construed as being anti-African (culturally) and anti-male because popular narratives negate the long tradition of feminist culture that is universal, a culture that collapses created boundaries of continent and colour. A rich and colourful tradition which allows the choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf by Ntozake Shange to co-habitate alongside Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2013 TEDx Talk We should all be feminists.

So you how do you begin to unpack issues facing women on the continent? We start by acknowledging that we need more collective thinking sites as women to unpack issues pertaining to us, by us, in an unadulterated space. We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For, is an introduction to these spaces. Not only does this introduction remind us why these spaces are so important, it proposes six newer areas for us to look at and to review in order for us to continue on the path that so many women, African women have treaded before.

The African Union and by proxy, the United Nations play a vital role in the policy and rights spaces of Africa and it is through this lens that Roseline M. Achieng’ engages the agenda of an economically, physically and societally marginalised and disempowered group, young African rural women. Her paper takes a critical look at how these young women engage in the public sphere through means of economic and knowledge production and how they in turn consume that knowledge and the fruits of the economy. The paper looks at the emerging culture

3Women Transforming Africa

African Perspectives

of social critique through the arts in Kenya, as a means of giving a voice to young African rural women who are still missing in terms of being visible to and within the policies and social issues that govern their lives. This is all played out against the backdrop of the African Union’s Agenda 2063 paper, which she proposes, offers a viable and alternative way of allowing young African rural woman to fully engage in production, policy and rights spaces in Africa and allowing them a voice.

International Women’s Day 2014 is the collective thinking site in which Zine Magubane presented is an evocative and thought provoking (possibly controversial) paper, as the keynote address. Controversy attached to sexuality, which in turn leads to (in terms of State policy), rights restriction is one of the main issues that she tackles in her address. Compulsory heterosexuality or coerced heterosexuality have become the ‘norm’ for the African continent. Zine Magubane highlights the need to address the historicism of heterosexuality as the normative societal value and that through all these laws, it is women, hetrosexual, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgendered who are the predominant victims. She argues that these laws are a way and means of controlling the female body and consequently, the female. She calls for us to critically engage with this space and to continue a tradition of avant-garde African Women’s Thought Leadership. Women’s citizenship should not just be on paper, full access and the enjoyment of its rights is what Liepollo Lebohang Pheko unpacks in her paper. Grounded in the South African context, she speaks about the dimensions of citizenship, about the laws and policies that promote equality

and fairness for women in order for them to have full access to their citizenship, and the reality that these laws and policies have failed to translate into a tangible reality for many South African women. Her critical look at how African States operate in relation to women’s citizenship exposes the undeniable truth that women need to critically, openly and fully engage in and own these State spaces of policy and rights in order for women’s citizenship to be actualized in a manner that is not patronizing, shallow or short-term and not placed within a patriarchally constructed problematization of women’s full access and enjoyment of rights. The conversation on citizenship is continued by Patricia McFadden, she maps out new ways of becoming post-colonial citizens and proposes that we need to find new avenues of thinking and that we need to collapse structures that are used as tools of exclusion of citizenship, in-order to re-imagine and create new inclusive social formations. From her paper one understands that citizenship needs to move from the idea or ideal to a reality because citizenship or belonging allows people (women), access to the State, its spaces and society at large.

The publication ends with a Visual Essay by students from the Department of Visual Arts and Musicology at the University of South Africa, whose introduction by practising artist and lecturer Simmi Dullay ties the Visual Essay together by weaving it into a narrative.

These women visually articulate issues that a familiar to all African women, from Stephanie Neville’s celebration of women and sexuality, and Zymia Amien’s poignant narrative of forced

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Issue One | Volume One

removal, to Roxanne Wilson’s critique of the pandemic of human trafficking of women and children. Roxanne Wilson’s critique is a sobering reminder that human trafficking is not something that happens to ‘other people’. This pandemic affects all of us, our families and our societies. The recent abduction of over 200 Nigerian school girls by militant Islamist group Boko Haram not only reminds us of the cruel and destructive nature of human trafficking and its assault on the female body, but it highlights the need to stop the scourge of human trafficking on the continent.

The month of May marks an important milestone for the continent. Each year in May, Africa Day

arrives and marks the amazing vibrancy of the continent. It is a day where the continent shows off its full plumage. And this is why we are honoured to have the first publication of the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute’s (TMALI) bi-annual series, African Perspectives published this month. The purpose of African Perspective is to harness scholarship from a pan-African paradigm and to develop and to promote writing by emerging and seasoned writers and thinkers. This publication serves to advance TMALIs mission of advancing the African Renaissance through being a centre of choice for research, teaching, learning and dialogue.


We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For

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Often when the idea to come together and engage on the issues that concern us as radical women, intellectuals and activists

is proposed, the creation of a ‘collective thinking site’ becomes a useful strategy in pooling our energies and thoughts around the specific work we are doing in our respective locations. Having a ‘concept paper’ as a stepping stone of sorts facilitates entry for all involved, into the moment of sharing and exchange; into the moment of contestation and new visioning. This brief overview is offered in that spirit – as a map of the general terrain of women’s struggles and visions; of the road travelled thus far across the diverse societies that African women live in and as an indicator of some of the emerging and imperative challenges and possibilities that confront and or await us.

International Women’s Day, as a moment of reflection and celebration is also a vital opportunity to pause and reassess the directions that women’s political and personal struggles have taken each year. This reflexivity enables us to identify the areas and sites of resistance that women need to strengthen and or step away from; the political and personal cul de sacs that individuals and groups can so easily become trapped in; as well as to reassess the relationships that women (in all their racial, class, ethnic, sexual and gendered identities) have with the State as the hegemonic patriarchal institution, as well as with various other patriarchal institutions which impact on our daily realities in a myriad of ways. As with all other Africans on the continent, women have been central to the processes that have brought us into this Contemporary Moment which is dominating our thinking, our ideas, our

perspectives and imaginaries as vibrant beings. This is an uncontestable fact, we have become or we are Africans in new ways that are increasingly and insistently defined and owned by ourselves. As Alice Walker so succinctly puts it, We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For.

In a general sense, the shift forward since independence reflects the tremendous energies and various forms of intellectual and activist agency that women have imbued their respective societies with, ranging across the socio-economic, legal, political and cultural spectrums of everyday life, and initiating the transformative processes and relationships that have changed the African landscape and have opened up new vistas; new ways of seeing the world and of being in the world. While these important changes are not yet the reality for the majority of African people, the vision of a different African future is steadfastly being situated in the daily struggles and demands that women are making in public, private and in the ‘in-between spaces’ of life at community, national, regional and continental levels.

Self-Advocacy has proven to be a tremendously effective tool for showing up the past as a ‘burden on the backs’ of women and their communities in terms of exclusionary practices, policies and ideological rhetoric which keep the majority of Africans outside sites of power and resources that in fact belong to all citizens. And Collective Advocacy has reiterated the necessity of moving everyone in our respective societies beyond the euphoria of the independence moment (which had its minimal benefits and insights), towards the new challenges that neo-colonialism and



particularly the economic hegemony that neo-liberalism poses for all Africans, regardless of where they are positioned in relation to the hierarchies and systems of power and material wealth. Given the recognition that Africa – in all its meanings – is poised at the cusp of a new time; and given that we know how critical it is for us to own and direct these new opportunities (in the face of a renewed colonisation of the continent’s material, intellectual, cultural, artistic and biological wealth), understanding what it will take to reorient our various societies and communities in new directions, has become the most urgent contemporary task facing us all.

The occasion of a day when women can remind themselves of their amazing human and creative energies and potentialities, (especially because Women’s Day has largely been appropriated by state functionaries who use it to repeat empty promises and lies about ‘empowerment’ and ‘change’), is also an opportune moment to pool our radical ideas and thoughts, and to craft alternative agendas that belong to us; to our communities and to our futures.

What then are some of the newer issues that require our attention and scrutiny in moments such as these, when we can ‘think together’ and re-imagine ourselves and our lived realities:

1. A critical understanding of the patriarchal state in all its complex relationships with economic classes/systems at national, regional, continental and global levels – extending to the United Nations as a Global State System which reflects all the minutia and characteristics of the dominant, neoliberal capitalist system,

must become a key entry point into the process of crafting an alternative notion and practice of the State in Africa.

2. A recognition of the fact that the moment of independence ushers in the imperative of establishing and consolidating a black ruling class in all the societies of the continent (in the context of existing colonial capitalist economic, political, legal and social infrastructures). And that, in order to rule, those who accede to the State at independence become the new rulers of our societies, by historical and ideological (nationalist) fiat. By virtue of not transforming the colonial state infrastructure, they become the new custodians of the global capitalist order on the continent. This ‘coup’ over the dreams of the working people is achieved through a manipulation of the euphoric rhetoric of the independence moment and a demand for loyalty that is increasingly imposed through the barrel of the gun.

3. An understanding of the reality that ruling classes come into being and consolidate their power by economic means (plunder and accumulation); legal and political rhetoric (liberal constructions of constitutions and the law as inclusive); re-invention of feudal patriarchal practices and rituals (cultural and traditional authenticators and essentialisms) and militarism, violence and hegemonic masculinity (patriotism and loyalty to the ‘nation’, fatherhood, patriarchs). Complaining about it does not change it. Critiquing it and challenging it through the creation of alternative, post-colonial imaginaries and

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activisms is the solution.

4. Citizenship is an outcome of the struggle for social, economic, legal, sexual, and political entitlements, which must be collectively crafted and owned in order to position them in State institutions as rights and protections for all. Without the necessary engagements and contestations with the State and all those who control and wield power within the structures of the State and its related institutions, women in particular will remain subjects. Subjected to the myriad of exclusionary systems, practices and expressions of patriarchal violence and impunity that currently dominant their lives and the realities of their respective communities everywhere on the continent.

5. Recognising the intersections between the destructive practices and policies of increasingly militarised neoliberal/neo-colonial States and the plunder and destruction of the natural environments that are our source of life and futures. The bloated military budgets of all African countries, without exception, speak to this blatant relationship between plunder and impunity. Armies, mining companies, and other capitalist industries are the biggest polluters and destroyers of our planet and its life-giving resources and eco-systems. This egregious behaviour by global and local capital translates into the violence and exclusion that hundreds of millions of women and their communities are experiencing across the continent in the form of poisoned water resources, the lack of (portable) water; desertification and the loss

of critical bio-diversity and healing plants. The the privatization and plunder of forests and the exclusion of communities from arable and residential land; the ubiquity of GMOs and the homogenisation of agriculture with its attendant health effects particularly on working people. And the commodification of black bodies, in particular black female bodies, in relation to an entire range of ‘re-invented’ capitalist and corporate industries that are reaping the harvest of African independence.

6. Building Feminist Movements and infusing our communities with feminist ideas and perspectives is the key ideological, political and activist task facing all radical women, regardless of where they are positioned in their societies. Feminism is the politics of total social inclusiveness and of comprehensive human security and dignity for all. Beginning with and embedded in the recognition and respect for the inalienability of women’s rights to bodily and sexual integrity; dignity, equal access to all social, cultural, educational, legal and wellness resources, and the right to be a complete and whole human being, physically, sexually, emotionally, spiritually and psychologically.

The old has to be allowed to die and fade (without losing the memory of the past and the knowledge of the imbalances and inequalities that were established by brutal economic, political, racial, class and gendered systems), so that the new, the contemporary, the post-colonial, the future, can truly emerge and blossom, providing the next layer of foundational relationships and systems,



from which alternative policies and practices can be built that encompass and include all of us as African people.

Women’s politics, activisms and personal practices are the core, the foundational basis of this alternative future for Africa. If and when, other groups of Africans move themselves into new and radical sites of thinking and activism, their ideas and practices will become part of this inclusive foundational premise to the build a different kind of African reality.

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Reflections on African Women’s Thought Leadership in the 21st Century:

The Importance of Engaging with SexualityZine Magubane



The transformations in politics, economics, and social life that the African Continent has witnessed between the dawn of the

21st century and today are nothing short of epic.

Since the dawn of the 21st century, we have seen a new country, South Sudan, added to our map. Protests have swept through Egypt. The government of Mali was rocked. Nigeria saw the rise of Boko Haram, and South Africa and the world wept as we bid a final farewell to our beloved leader, Nelson Mandela. The social structures of continent wide societies have undergone tremendous change in the course of a single generation.

In what other time period have so many African women been so totally exposed, at so fast a pace to such searing earthquakes of global change? And yet, for most of us, what we do on any given day and what we are directly aware of is circumscribed by the private orbits in which we live. Our visions and our persons are limited by the ‘close up scenes’ of our jobs, families, neighborhoods, and countries. Even as our individual lives are determined, at least in part, by forces that emanate from far beyond our immediate locales (Mills 1959:3).

Thus, an investment bank fails in New York, and a woman in Durban finds it increasingly difficult to keep up with her escalating mortgage payment. An oil discovery in South Sudan might mean that an enterprising young business school graduate in Nigeria gets a coveted promotion and raise while her sister in Chad is kidnapped and forced into service by a warlord determined to gain access to the coveted Black Gold. A pharmaceutical merger in Britain might mean that the price of AIDS

drugs drop, thus saving hundreds of lives at the same time that hundreds of people face job cuts or losses.

This scattered handful of examples demonstrates that neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood in isolation. Each is impacted by the other. The well-being that some African women enjoy and the suffering that others endure are direct reflections of the ups and downs of the societies in which they live. The patterns of their lives reflect, in miniature, the course of world history. Every woman lives, from one generation to the next in some society, and each woman also lives out her individual biography. By the very act of living she contributes, however minutely, to the shaping of her society and to the course of history, even as she is made by society and its historical push and shove.

It is difficult, however, for ordinary women and men to grasp the exact interplay between the changes in their individual lives and the broader structural changes that their societies undergo; between their individual biographies and the long sweep of history; between their individual selves and the larger world.

And herein lies the importance of African Women’s Thought Leadership in the 21st century. The most powerful definition of a thought leader is a person who understands the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for both the inner life and the life trajectory of a variety of individuals. This type of leader is able to “grasp history and biography and the relations between the two in society” (Mills 1959:6). Those who recognize this task and its promise are the people that we honor with the title of Thought Leader.

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The 20th century has seen such African Women Thought leaders as Oyeronke Oyewumi, Patricia McFadden, Pumla Gquola, Zimitri Erasmus and Cheryl Carolus, Ifi Amadiume.

These intellectuals have had the capacity to shift from one perspective to another—from the political to the psychological; from an examination of a single woman’s life to the comparative assessment of financial crises around the world; from considerations of the global telecommunications industry to studies of art and dance. They have been able to give us insight into matters that range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self—and to see the relations between the two. That, in brief, is why it is by means of African Women’s Thought Leadership that we can hope to grasp not only what is going on in the world, but to understand what is happening within ourselves.

We urgently need leaders who can give us insights as to “the personal troubles of our age and the public issues of social structure” (Mills 1959:8). By personal troubles I mean those things that occur within the life of the individual and within the range of their immediate relations with others. They have to do with the Self and with those limited areas of social life of which she is directly and personally aware. Public issues have to do with matters that transcend these local environments and the individual and the range of her inner life. They have to do with the institutions of society as a whole.

What are the major issues for African Women Thought Leaders at this time? How do they

interface with the private struggles we face as individual women? One of the issues that I see as most pressing for African Women Thought Leaders of the 21st century—one that bridges both the larger realm of social structure and the individual realm of biography is that of sexuality, particularly as it interfaces and intersects with patriarchy and various forms of either compulsory heterosexuality or coerced heterosexuality.

I choose the words compulsory heterosexuality and coerced or coercive heterosexuality very carefully. It is not that I feel that there is anything at all wrong with the notion of (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) LGBT rights or that I am avoiding the notion in any way. Rather, what I would like to do is to find a concept that allows us to bring together a number of different forms of violence and discrimination in ways that allow us to see and appreciate and understand their specificities and differences while at the same time understanding and challenging the common dynamics that underlay them.

Let us consider, perhaps, a few specific examples. On February 19 of this year Uganda passed an anti-pornography law. The law not only bans pornography it also outlaws ‘suggestive’ music and ‘indecent’ clothing on women. Specifically, the law bans women from revealing their thighs, breasts and buttocks and from dressing a manner that will ‘sexually excite’. When Uganda’s Ethics and Integrity Minister proposed the law, he said that women who wore anything above the knee should be arrested. He was quoted as saying, “Any attire which exposes intimate parts of the human body, especially areas that are of erotic function, is



outlawed. Anything above the knee is outlawed. If a woman wears a miniskirt, we will arrest her” (Svenso 2013). The act has been called the ‘miniskirt ban’ and has sparked a series of acts of violence against women in public places.

Tina Musya, Executiove Director at the Center for Domestic Violence Prevention in Kampala, reported that since the bill has passed, there have been daily reports of women falling victims to mobs of men assaulting and undressing them as well as sexually harassing them and making public places generally unsafe. Rita Achiro, the Executive Director of the Uganda Women’s Network, a rights advocacy group, says that the law has emboldened men to abuse women. She was quoted by the BBC as saying that the law had really put Ugandan women at risk for domestic and public abuse. “Now people are going to do it more openly. They are going to judge women according to what they see as indecent because there are no parameters defined by law. Such laws actually take a country like Uganda backwards in regards to women’s empowerment. I do not want to look at it just as the miniskirt, but rather look at it from controlling women’s bodies, and eventually that will end up into actual control of women” (Uganda Miniskirt Ban 2014).

The anti-pornography law was signed just days before a law that defined homosexual acts in Uganda as punishable by life in prison was passed. The act specifically calls for up to three years in prison for failure to report a homosexual; seven years for ‘promoting homosexuality’; life imprisonment for a single homosexual act or for something called ‘aggravated homosexuality’

which includes sex while HIV positive, or with a disabled person, or being found to have engaged in same sex activity more than once. In Uganda, like many other places in Africa where homosexuality is illegal, the police and other authorities use provisions restricting or criminalizing cross-dressing and female impersonation as avenues for targeting and persecuting the LGBT community. Just as heterosexual women have been forcibly stripped in public, so too have gay activists been hustled off to police stations and forced to remove their clothing in front of male officials to prove their sex. Yvonne Oyo, an LGBT activist, was sexually assaulted by the police after being detained for ‘questioning’.

Uganda is not alone, 38 African countries have criminalized consensual same sex contact. South Sudan, on becoming independent in 2008, criminalized consensual same-sex conduct for women and men with up to ten years imprisonment. Burundi criminalized same sex conduct in 2009. In 2011 and 2012, Nigeria and Liberia respectively introduced bills to toughen penalties for same-sex conduct. In Mauritania, northern regions of Nigeria, the southern region of Somalia and Sudan retain the death penalty for the same. When United States of America President, Barack Obama visited Senegal, Senegalese President Macky Sall told him that Senegal was “not ready to decriminalize homosexuality” (Kutsch 2013). Indeed, last year charges were brought against five women in Senegal for violating the country’s law prohibiting homosexual acts. Northern Nigeria, where the death penalty is the punishment for homosexuality, was also the place where female heterosexual victims of Boko

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Haram, after witnessing the massacre of a many of their classmates, were told to “go home and get married and abandon their education” (Nigeria School Raid 2014).

Even in places, like South Africa, where exemplary laws have been passed, corrective rape is a persistent problem. Despite the fact that the South African constitution is the first in the world to secure the equal rights of the LGBT community and has laws allowing gay marriage, violence against LGBT people is not uncommon. Statistics against corrective rape have not been complied nationally, however researchers from an advocacy group in Cape Town called Action Aid have reported that they sometimes face as many as ten new cases each week.

However, rape is not only an issue for women in the LGBT community. Ever since a report produced by the United Nations Office on Crime and Drugs ranked South Africa as having the highest number for rapes per capita, it has been repeatedly described, along with the Congo, as one of the rape capitals of the world with an estimated 500,000 rapes per year; one every seventeen seconds.

While we don’t want to engage in a politics of comparison where we try to determine who is more oppressed—gay men or lesbians—we must look at the ways in which patriarchy affects lesbians and gay men differently. While anti-gay attitudes are often thought of in terms of gay men, reports by Amnesty International have found that in Senegal, for example, lesbians are at greater risk for human rights violations. The Amnesty International report, Making Love a Crime, goes on to say that in several African countries it has been

shown that lesbians are deliberately targeted for sexual violence (Amnesty International 2013).

And while we don’t want to collapse phenomena that are clearly distinct, nevertheless, just as we must seek to understand the common social forces behind Uganda’s anti-gay laws and anti-pornography laws, we should also consider what are the forces that tie together the rape of women and children (both lesbian and heterosexual), domestic violence, and the forced marriage of girls who are sometimes as young as 10 years old. In 2009, for example, it was reported that more than 20 girls in the Eastern Cape drop out of school every month and are forcibly married. Another study conducted in 2011 reported that over 60 girls between the ages of 10 and 15 in the Eastern Cape had been forcibly married to older men. And another study reported that in Kwazulu-Natal in 2011, about 20 underage girls were abducted and forcibly married each month. According to research conducted by the Medical Research Council in 2011, 24 out of 30 young girls interviewed indicated that they did not have any prior relationship with the men who married them.

While the practice affects both women and girls, there is compelling evidence suggesting that the majority of the victims are young girls, aged 10 to 14 years. Research indicates that the practice disproportionately impacts the poor, with over 50 percent of victims coming from families living at or below the poverty line and over 60% of the victims did not have matric. The South African Journal of Sociology recently described the practice as “A form of gender-based violence against a girl child which will ultimately compromise her development and can result in early pregnancies, increasing the



changes of maternal mortality. Furthermore, the young girl will suffer from social isolation with little or no education, poor vocational training, which will increase her vulnerability to domestic violence. This simply reinforces the gendered nature of poverty” (Monyan 2013:77).

I recount these horrifying statistics, not to leave us with a sense of hopelessness or to suggest that no progress has been made, but rather to frame why I think that the issue of sexuality is such a key issue for African Women’s Thought Leadership in the 21st century. I have read the mission statement of the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute, which, as we all know, states that the principal purpose of the institute is to train Africans for the political, economic, social and cultural renewal of the African continent and its people. I maintain that issues of sexuality, gender based violence, and efforts to enforce compulsory sexuality are not only major issues in and of themselves, but also interface with issues we more commonly see as having centrality, such as economic empowerment, globalization, class struggle, racism, etc. If serious thought leadership is absent on these issues, Africa’s political, economic, social and cultural renewal simply will not happen.

The laws that criminalize homosexuality must be seen for what they are, attacks on universally protected human rights that open the door for broad based repression and discrimination. Just as in the days of apartheid, the suppression of Communism Act, allowed for unheralded harassment, arrest, detention, and torture for not only being a suspected Communist but for harboring sympathy of views of such persons

or aiming to promote them—promotion being defined in extremely broad and sweeping ways; so too does legislation targeting homosexuality. In Cameroon, individuals are regularly arrested after having been denounced to authorities as being gay or lesbian. Even in countries where anti-homosexuality laws are not routinely implemented, the existence of the laws alone provide opportunities for the abuse of anyone state elites do not like and provide cover for criminalizing all kinds of advocacy. Examples of abuse include, but are certainly is not limited to, intimidation, blackmail and extortion, unlawful search and seizure, by both police and non-state actors. Homophobic witch hunts which have swept across Africa in Uganda, Cameroon, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, the Gambia, Malawi, Zambia, and Ghana have also provided a pretext and cover for the blanket targeting of political opponents, journalists, and activists that state elites find threatening.

The criminalization of homosexuality provides an opening for the undermining of democratic the rights of all citizens. Senegal’s anti-gay laws, for example, violate the country’s own constitution and the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights, both of which guarantee equal treatment and non-discrimination to all citizens. In Uganda, parliamentarian Mira Matembe was quoted as saying that although she was a “human rights activist, she didn’t support homosexuality as a human right” (Sharlet 2013:27). Indeed, some have gone so far as to call Uganda an anti-gay police state where the LGBT community is frequently given the inflammatory label of ‘terrorist’—a tactic that all South Africans who survived apartheid

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are certainly familiar with.

The Thabo Mbeki Leadership Institute manifesto further states that, the training of Africans for renewal and leadership should emphasize “Afrocentricity and African-centered epistemologies and methodologies.” Sexuality provides an important, yet under-explored avenue, for engaging African-centered epistemologies, because often, in the debate about the rights of LGBT persons in Africa, ideas of African culture and tradition are often invoked in opposition to so-called Western same-sex sexuality. However, there is in fact a long history of same-sex sexuality and non-normative gender identities in sub-Saharan Africa that must be further researched, explored, and brought forward and made a part of African Thought Leadership. As the Institute’s manifesto says, the vision of the Institute is to provide leadership that will give a person “a strong sense of African identity empowered to act and empowered to become an authentic African leader in the service of humanity.” What better way to do this than to explore the extent to which different concepts of sex and gender identities have existed in different parts of Africa, particularly prior to colonization. For example, woman-to-woman marriages have been documented in over forty ethnic groups in Africa, spread over Southern Africa, Benin, Nigeria, Kenya and Southern Sudan. Rather than simply viewing variations in sexual orientation and gender identity as Western imports, 21st century African Thought Leadership must also explore, not only how colonial models for African society had no place for existing gender variance or same sex sexuality and were thus complicit with

the larger colonial project of colonial oppression.

Furthermore, I would be remiss if I did not mention the ways in which violence against LGBT persons is part and parcel of a neo-colonial project in Africa. While African leaders and publics are, of course, to be held responsible for their actions, nevertheless, we must grapple with and make known the American roots of Uganda’s anti-gay persecutions. When he authorized the anti-gay legislation, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni supported it by saying that homosexuality was an example of imperialism and Western cultural chauvinism. “It seems the topic of homosexuals was provoked by the arrogant and careless Western groups that are fond of coming into our schools and recruiting young children into homosexuality and lesbianism, just as they carelessly handle other issues concerning Africa,” the President opined before Parliament ‘President Museveni’s Speech 2014). However, anti-gay rhetoric is much more of an imposition from the West than homosexuality. For many years, American fundamentalists have looked on Uganda as a laboratory for theocracy or as they put it “a government led by God” (Sharlet 2010:37). Americans have not only sent money and missionaries to Uganda but also ideas. Prior to crafting the bill, Ugandan politicians were invited to attend prayer breakfasts in America. Republican Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma and former attorney General John Ashcroft and celebrity pastor Rick Warren (a frequent guest on the Oprah Winfrey show) have been frequent attractions at Uganda’s Independence Day and National Prayer Breakfast. Three years ago there was a conference organized in Uganda by an American fundamentalist named Scott



Lively. Lively and his Abiding Truth Ministry journeyed to Uganda to give speeches about a so called ‘international gay agenda’. Furthermore, Lively played a major role in helping Ugandan politicians to draft the anti-homosexuality bill. In many of his public speeches and advocacy work, Lively has repeatedly stressed the link between pornography and homosexuality.

I would not like to end on a negative note, and indeed, it would not be fair if I did not mention the many promising developments that are happening related to activism in this realm. A number of African countries have introduced legislation to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or have removed discriminatory provisions of existing legislation. Examples of such countries include Mozambique in 2007, Cape Verde and Mauritious in 2008 and Botswana in 2010. Several countries never criminalized same sex activities including Burkina Faso, Rwanda, and Cote d’Ivoire. Furthermore, some of the most progressive social activism at grassroots level is happening in this area, with organizations such as Sexual Minorities Uganda, Women’s Smile in Senegal – the only group in the country to advocate for lesbian rights, and Free Gender in South Africa which specifically focuses on the issue of helping victims of corrective rape.

Since the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute is located in South Africa, it has a potentially revolutionary role to play in the renewal of thought leadership in this regard. As we all know, South Africa became the first African country and only the fifth in the world to mandate marriage equality. South Africa has taken a

leadership role in pushing for an inclusive human rights agenda at the United Nations, in sponsoring the first ever resolution on sexual orientation and gender identity, with some Africa countries like Mauritius and Cape Verde voting in favor of it. International human rights obligations provide an important legal basis for the repeal of offending laws. Without seeking to minimize the many struggles that South Africa still has to overcome, a recent Amnesty International report noted that “South Africa has taken a leadership role on sexual orientation and gender identity issues at the international level” (Amnesty International 2013:8).

We on the Continent of Africa and in the Diaspora have been blessed with such a high caliber of thought leadership that our expectations for the future are high. African Women’s Thought Leadership in the 21st century must continue to build upon and expand the good work that has been done without becoming complacent. We must make it a priority to spearhead progressive thought leadership on sexuality and seek to partner with and also learn from progressive initiatives around the Continent. With the death of former President Nelson Mandela last year, we saw the impact that the South African freedom struggle has had on the world. We have had our ups and downs in the last twenty years it is true, but the potential exists for us to inspire ourselves, and the rest of the world, again. Let’s seek to live up to the challenge.

*This paper is the keynote address presented by Professor Zine Magubane at the 2014 Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute’s International Women’s Day roundtable event.

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If God Were a Woman:Women’s Citizenship in South Africa

Liepollo Lebohang Pheko

Do you remember,When we all walked tall and proudWhen we were the salt of the earthWhen we sang with voices loud and clearAnd put the most vain of birds to shameLong before the lies, the deception, the mythsBefore the gradual destruction of our bodies, our spirits and our mindsDo you rememberWhen God was a woman? by Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi

AbstractAn understanding of Citizenship is critical because it concurrently acts as a force for inclusion and exclusion (Elson 1991). Classical citizenship theory highlights the inclusionary aspects and discards those that do not meet its implicit criteria as employed, educated, independently resourced, male, self-defined individuals. Feminists and other citizenship activists have discussed citizenship’s exclusionary dynamic as the point of departure for their analysis and have utilized the principle of inclusiveness to challenge that dynamic. It is critical that we examine the constructs of the economic agency of women and gendered citizenship as critical and differentiating nuances of citizenship theories in South Africa. This differentiating will then assist in formulating and correcting State led citizenship to enable social inclusion. Twenty years into the new South African dispensation there remains a dearth in understanding multiple and interfacing layers of rights and violations of women’s experiences of this citizenship.


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Introduction“Feminism is a matter of life and death. It is the question that concerns every facet of our being on this earth. It is every issue of life, every concern and every struggle. It traverses every circumstance, every belief, every hope, every matter and challenge that we will meet in this life and all that consumes us until our death” (Liepollo Lebohang Pheko 2014).

It has been commonplace to consider the question of women and the articulation of their full and meaningful citizenship as an

appendage to the National question on citizenship (Gasa 2007, Mcfadden 1997). Many countries and more specifically, the postcolonial Afrikan State, illustrate varying levels of misunderstanding or ultimate disinterest in women’s universal engagement with the levers of power and the fundamental architecture of these nations. Although country contexts are heterogeneous, there remains an area of broad comparison and similarity particularly in the realms of governance, the relationship between power and gender, the utilisation of women as voting fodder and often-deep contradictions between women of various class backgrounds (Adeleye-Fayemi 2005).

While the social binaries are often overstated, South Africa’s class and race composition is not entirely dissimilar to most Afrikan countries. It is foregrounded by a deeply fragmented and problematic link between the means of production –including human capital –and the gendered and race based dividends of that production. These factors have presented South Africa with a missed opportunity to construct a nation that understands the complexities and imperatives of constructing

and enabling meaningful citizenship beyond legal formalities and voting rights, particularly for the women in this country, them appreciating the particularities of their deficit social and power relations (Pheko 2010).

This paper will discuss the various layers of South Afrikan women’s location within this Nation State, their dispossession from substantive influence in the market economy, their experiences of poverty and gendered constructions of citizenship. Finally it offers a critique of the State’s governance as an enabler of its citizen’s aspirations.

Dimensions of Women’s Citizenship The role of South Africa’s policy in marginalising and excluding women requires a theoretical framework against which to measure and deconstruct women’s economic agency and citizenship. Governance needs to redefine the rights based approach that often shows callousness in its method of ascribing rights with a universality that is not appropriate for the imperatives and realities of people who are not white, male, middle class, university educated, able-bodied, socially-connected, formally employed and urbanised. As a concept, gender justice faces special definitional difficulties for several reasons. Women are not a homogeneous group with monolithic preferences and requirements. Afrikan Feminist approaches -though not universal- have traditionally had a socialist and people centred bias owing to the geo-historic locus of struggle on this continent. A host of the injustices that characterise gender relations occur in the ‘private’ sphere of family and community relations but are not contained in State’s ambit of actively promoting safe and



equal citizenship, because State embodiments of patriarchy pervade economic, social and political institutions (Oyewumi 2002). Conversely the State still exerts patriarchal power and collusion with hyper masculine violence which often occurs in the private realm of home, marriage and family, and is often invisible or ignored.

Twenty years into the new dispensation, many South Afrikan women remain embattled by the amplification of institutions, structures, systems, policies and an economy that entrenches and enables various forms of masculine privilege. Fundamentalism is inimical to most forms of substantive citizenship and economic and cultural fundamentalisms are two forms at play in this country. The foundation of the South African State – in common with many other Afrikan States- is that Afrikan women bear the cost of a faltering State that has been unable to convert its constitutional premise to avert and reverse the widening inequalities across various sectors of South African society (Hoogeveen et al 2006)

While millions of women [and men] continue to reside off the socio- economic radar in South Africa, the idea of economic citizenship needs to be examined in relation to economic orthodoxy. The relationship between the State and women as evidenced by trade policy appears to be characterised by contradictions between the market agenda, its inequitable consequences and Government’s stated intentions to redistribute wealth and provide basic services.

Although the ascendance of the South African post-colonial State after 1994, may have contributed to the rise of one form of popular democracy,

the ceding of control to international and local private sector and corporations; increased protest violence and social disintegration have threatened the emerging State. Equally problems of authoritarianism, bureaucratic rigidity, promotion of elite class interests, and unaccountable and increasingly questionable instances of judicial processes, create tensions and concerns that call into question the capacity of this emerging State to craft and mediate equitable socio-political relations (Nussbaum 2000).

The issue therefore is not whether women are for or against this State; rather the subject of inquiry should be whether the South African State has the capacity and intent to recognise and support the nurturing of its citizens aspirations and respond to the demands derived from citizenship entitlements. Perhaps an alternative starting point is whether in fact the State in its construction and foundation has the capacity to recognise and enable the best interests of women. There exist multiple layers of violences against women that manifest in both private and public spaces, reiterated by legislation, judicial services, media narratives, interpretations of religion and culture, policy priorities, literature and discursive spaces.

Feminist models of citizenships that are useful in the South African context are centred around models of:

1. Political transformation: connected with the emancipatory objectives of the Nation State and women’s contribution to carving those objectives.

2. Material living conditions: citizenship

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as a lived experience beyond theoretical frameworks. There is still paucity in research and studies to assess and measure these experiences in postcolonial States.

3. Social and political entitlement: the interface between de jure rights and de facto benefits remains a key pillar to constructing meaningful citizenships.

4. Local and transnational/trans-locational situations and the arising forms of citizenships: these connect local and international struggles and locate citizenship within the broad philosophy of solidarity, belonging, nurturing and shared cause beyond narrow nationalism (Taylor 2000).

An entry point to the feminist critiques of the liberal view of citizenship is that liberalism does not easily recognise difference. An important critique of the limited construction of citizenship based on narrow nationalism is that this undermines its broader purpose, which is embedded in humanity, dignity, hospitality, care, nurturing and provision. It also resonates with regionalism and Africanism as more compelling currencies of citizenship, shared identity and belonging. South African forms of feminisms have not yet been able to influence the framing of women’s demands beyond what the State has been willing to cede and this presents a serious limitation to State and government accountability.

This is diametrically opposed to the idea of rights apportioned according to social markers of constructed privilege. However the neo-classical

construction of human rights still does not provide a nuanced understanding of women’s specific needs and experiences. It has not imbibed them into broader rights frameworks. South Africa’s much vaunted constitution presents an opportunity to examine the distance between State defined concerns for citizens and the increasing protests by those citizens in reaction to the State’s inability to respond consistently to their demands of citizenship whether it be jobs, homes, wages, education or an end to various other forms of lack. On the hierarchy of demands, women’s demands are either subsumed within broader, organised constituencies such as workers or viewed as pertaining to women only thus treated as a diversion from the imperatives of State (Basu 2000).

The formulation of universal rights suggests the idea that individuals are each entitled to the same rights and treatment irrespective of race, class, caste and gender. In this sense, perhaps it potentially presents emancipatory potential because it states that identity and entitlement are not tied to one’s ascribed or social location or relations. Possibly more compelling, is the notion of human dignity inspired by thinkers and philosophers such as Confucius, King Moshoeshoe, King Dingane and Amartya Sen (Agarwal et al 2003, Palais 1996). The construct of human rights has been created often without thought to societal norms, preferences and social equity. Rights in several African languages are translated as ‘entitlements’, or ‘requirements’ meaning that they are non–negotiable and are a fundamental part of the human experience.



Those ‘Other’ WomenSouth Africa provides a lucid illustration of women’s deficit power and economic positioning despite the myriad of institutions, legislation and regulatory frameworks that should signify the government’s good intentions. The critical question is not only whether women are less materially resourced than men, but rather a process of analysis that includes the dimensions of power and poverty and their manifestly differentiated impact on the lived experiences of women and men. An investigation into income alone does not produce a comprehensive or fully responsive answer. An examination of statistics on health, nutrition, education and labour force participation begin to more meaningfully confirm that women are severely impoverished and that this impoverishment includes more than just material conditions, and is linked to various forms of poverty that disadvantage and dislocate women even more than materially deprived men. The experience of poverty for Women extends to the:

• Poverty of power;• Poverty of social capital;• Poverty of voice;• Poverty of time;• Poverty of leisure;• Poverty of life choices;• Poverty of physical and emotional well-

being;• Poverty of autonomous movement and

association;• Inability to contribute to the construction

of the State and State imperatives.

Poverty surpasses meagre material means and includes a many other indicators that necessitate expansion on governance that encompasses the rights to dignity, autonomy, participation and the ability to be a part of the decision-making process. The marginalisation of women, particularly economically, means that they are typically objects (Mama 1996), of indifference, fear, contempt or hostility, or are voiceless non-participants who require assistance, investigation, ‘government programmes’ or even punishment with very scarce opportunity to be regarded as equal fellow citizens with the rights that they have shaped to give meaning to their own circumstances. Afrikan women have the highest levels of unemployment and the lowest salaries in relation to men and white women despite ubiquitously evoked and often-problematic State led initiatives and models of inclusion such as gender mainstreaming. This clearly illustrates the dichotomy between women’s contribution as key drivers of the architecture that is the South African nation, and their contribution to that nation as liberators, peace builders, combatants, producers and primary subsidisers of state social delivery deficits (Tsikata 2004).

As such, governance in South Africa needs to be conceptualised in new ways devoid of abstraction. The total cost of women’s labour to compensate for the State’s disengagement from basic delivery, whether through outsourcing or discontinuing provision, is not sufficiently calculated and contributes to the ‘othering‘ of women’s fundamental interests from broad National questions. This is in common with the tendency to view women’s access to governance as recipients rather than as central to shaping

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governance (Antrobus 2004).

The overlap between women’s justice and citizenship relies on the way citizenship defines governance in terms of the boundaries of the sphere of justice. This means that governance should take into account how citizenship defines what women’s identity, roles and entitlements in relation to men are and how these will be adjudicated. The shifting tide towards citizenship, participation and social inclusion does not however mean that differently mediated gender relations inevitably become a launch pad for investigating the distribution of rights, resources and recognition. Feminist scholarship across the continent and beyond illustrates this. In the context of economic governance; patriarchal patterns of production, ownership, skills acquisition and independent access severely curtail South Afrikan women’s scope for economic self-identification and definition.

The State, The Economy and Women Prevailing trade theories of competitive advantage and market led economic growth that replace supposedly inefficient State functions with corporate led governance and growth, are defined by flexible labour regulations, recession of economic policy space, depreciation and /or unfettered movement of currencies, withdrawal of social protections and conditional loan and funding models. These prototypes purport to uphold human rights whilst excluding large portions of society . However the law, the economy, culture and other institutions that determine and regulate social life and power relationships should not be seen as neutral instruments which

confer rights based on equity and justice.

2014 South Africa has greater socio-economic inequalities and deficits than most countries across the world and has seemingly not used the currency of people centred demands to carve new economic and political spaces for women. Although gender mainstreaming, affirmative action and employment equity have been implemented in order to equilibrate economic relations, their impact has, to date been limited (Budlender 2004). Key to this, is a lack of conceptual clarity about what these instruments are intended to achieve and the appropriate understanding of how to qualitatively attain these results.

Emerging and reframed social models may contribute to a new way of looking at governance by focusing on the social inclusion of women citizens and family issues in social development planning. Another more recent model has conceptualised ‘the right to be cared for and the right to care, e.g. for children and the elderly’, as a way to re-integrate care work and family responsibilities in public life (Knijn & Kremer 1997). There are various models of political inclusion including ‘politics of presence’, manifested by quantitatively increasing the quotas of women’s participation in political spaces such as party lists, Parliament and cabinet positions. South Africa’s attempts to draw women into political institutions though laudable, has not created spaces that significantly shift their orientation and discourse closer to women’s concerns in substantive and transformative ways (May 2000).

In this era of unflinching market led economics, governance needs to reflect on a model that



focuses on the inclusion of women and of oppressed groups. Feminists have evoked the politics of difference through social, community and voluntary organisations. These provide some possibilities for Afrikan women’s self-articulation in the economy through autonomous organisations and spaces unfettered by the encroachment of intrusive social or political agendas.

Stokvels and burial societies in South Africa offer such opportunities but do not encompass the full scope of moving beyond conservatism and radically changing the structural deficits that prevent women from moving from the periphery of small businesses, co-ops and survivalists enterprises to the centre of the economy (Mhone 2000). However, these movements and organisations can also contribute to the depoliticisation of women’s activism, again rendering them peripheral to the ‘real politics’ of State and nation. Achieving structural transformation thus becomes the domain of masculine politics rather and post 1994 South African politics largely seem to consider women’s issues as ‘soft‘ and expendable. Women’s contribution to the economic discourse and output is thus rendered invisible or inadequately quantified. (Kabeer 2004 & Catagay 2001)

Being on the periphery suggests that feminist perspectives have not permeated the centre of trade policy and decision-making structures. The puzzle of orthodox trade discourses in relation to differentiated citizenship is that the policies do not recognise the variant starting points, social deficits and different relationships with the State, with policy and with power presented

to women as opposed to men. The State far from being a neutral social arbiter reinforces the social exclusion of women in the economy and in many respects effectively echoes and institutionalises the role of the Father or the Husband. Illustrating this is that no analysis is made of the existing effects of current trade policies on men as compared to women, nor is there such analysis of projected impacts before further policy decisions are made. (Tsikata, 2004)

Economic and trade policy are mistakenly presumed to be gender neutral in intent and impact. In common with many States, South African policymaking assumes that women and men can participate in and benefit equally from trade policy and economic participation. This advances the falsehood that impacts are not substantially different between men and women, and that the modalities will neither affect nor be affected by power and social relationships between men and women. Accordingly, South Africa’s trade policy regime is not only gender-blind but also impervious to the nuanced nature of power, sex, class, race and other social determinants that impact the experience of citizenship. Global markets function both through women’s social reproduction and market production. (Budlender et al 2004)

This bias is circumscribed and shaped primarily in ways in which South Africa organises the relationship between paid work and raising children (unpaid work). Women engaged in raising children often do not have an independent entitlement to resources and are dependent on partners, husbands and the State to meet their

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needs. Markets operate without recognising that the unpaid work of social reproduction and maintenance of human resources contributes to the functioning and realisation of formal market relations.

Rights, the state and the women who ‘care‘The existence of equality clauses in the South African constitution does not preclude unequal treatment sanctioned by custom, community and religious regulations. Citizenship undertakes to release the citizen subject from the burden of ascribed social relations into a relationship with a neutral arbiter, the State (Oyewumi 2002). This is manifested in the substance of laws and policies and in their interpretation and implementation. However entitling all citizens to the same rights does not necessarily promote equitable outcomes and formal rights do not ensure substantive equality or agency especially when the State is the primary custodian and ‘purveyor’ of those rights and entitlements. (Amadiume 2000)

Given the privatisation of services through as a result of various exigencies of externally driven neo liberal governance, the South African State has all but legitimised the exclusion of women from the centre of mainstream economic activity. Social reproduction is still ascribed to women by ‘culture’ or ‘history’ and even implied in the policy design that rarely subsides workplace child care, telecommuting or flexi time to enable different forms of economic participation. Assigning women the monopoly of basic services of care work given the already challenging effects of privatised and unaffordable healthcare, education, electricity and

water will inevitably further marginalise them and exclude from professional, social, economic, educational, recreational and creative pursuits [Adeleye-Fayemi, 2005].

Being on the periphery thus means that a gender perspective has not begun to enter mainstream of the trade agenda and decision-making structures. The contradiction of the neo liberal trade agenda with differentiated citizenship is that the policies do not recognise the variant starting points, social deficits and different relationships with the State, with policy and with power presented to women as opposed to men. As an example, most policy making dos not offer an analysis of the existing or potential effects of current trade policies on men and women respectively, much less a gendered analysis of projected impacts before decisions are taken.

The market however functions because women make it possible through the many unpaid functions they conduct. Women’s unpaid work in social reproduction and ‘family maintenance’ can be seen as a “tax” which women are required to pay before they can engage in income-generating activities (Palmer 1995). This tax is not recoverable from the South African State and is not indicated by orthodox economic measures such as GDP (growth domestic produce) or the SNA (system of national accounts).

This bias is circumscribed and shaped primarily in ways in which South Africa organises the relationship between paid work and raising children (unpaid work).

Ideas of governance, democracy and the State are often utilised without investigating how



these constructs arise both geo-historically and from current socio economic realities. Political organising and state led forms of governance are still considered to the most pivotal. Three components intersect to give meaning to the role of the State:

1. State power as the interconnection between control over resources, over actors and over outcomes.

2. Most political discourses are implicitly presumed to be exclusive to masculine State formations and power.

3. Power resides largely with the same State processes and is determined by the interplay between social and economic, the private and public, personal expectations and policy interests and the power these have over the people in those states. (Taylor 2000)

Gendered Analysis of Poverty and Social exclusion The indivisibility or interdependence of economic rights which include social, cultural civil and political rights reiterate that it is difficult to fully exercise political and civil rights if people are hungry or homeless. Poverty and social exclusion have both been conceptualised in terms of the denial of the enjoyment of the trio of political, civil and social citizenship rights. The markets and the trade regime deny the dignified and respectful treatment of its workers. By facilitating procedural rights rather than substantive engagement, the State fails to enable a critical component of citizens’ agency, which can be crucial in bridging the gap between formal rights on paper and their

enjoyment in practice, particularly for women.

Systematically linking a gender-relations analysis to trade and economic policy frameworks is a difficult task, given the blindness to gender issues in economic discourse. Gender relations can be defined in terms of the interplay between historical practices that are distinguished according to masculine and feminine (theories and ideologies, including religious ideas), institutional practices (such as State and market), and material conditions (the nature and distribution of material capabilities along gender lines)(Antrobus 2000).

Gender relations are social constructs (social forces and historical structures) that differentiate and circumscribe material outcomes for women and men. This definition of gender relations recognizes that the interplay of race, class and sexuality underpins the form and structure of actual gender relations. Most economic discourse is dominated by neo-classical conceptions of markets that function on the basis of perfect competition.

As a result, economic analysis is rooted, in its basic theoretical assumptions, in a gender-neutral abstraction of markets functioning with ‘homogeneous labour inputs’. However, markets do have a gender dimension to them. A gender relations analysis focuses precisely on how market relationships that appear gender-neutral implicitly infer the male standpoint.

In order to carry out women’s plans and programmes, separate structures have been created such as women ministries, bureaus, units, division and offices on the status of women. The

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creation of separate structures to operationalise women’s plans and programmes has led to two kinds of effects of the biases (Statistics South Africa):

1. The creation of dedicated divisions or units with a small share of resources and the label of being a special group with regard to anti-poverty and basic needs programmes. This is the model followed by Chapter 9 institutions such as the Commission of Gender Equality and Women’s Ministry including South Africa’s. Where these entities focus on issues of economic empowerm ent, poverty eradication, political decision-making, women’s legal capacity, training, education and employment, there are major structural deficiencies because of the weak or non-existent linkages to broader macro-economic and trade policies.

2. The marginalisation of women in the structural mechanism of the economy, trade and industry where the bulk of resources and implementation mechanisms exist is problematic. If no connections are made to determine women’s enfranchisement against poverty eradication, this cannot be solved within the growth model of the industry, trade policy and implementation, women will remain on the periphery of these so-called ‘mainstream’ policy areas. Therefore, the lack of an appropriate operational framework has prevented the consideration of gender as a variable in planning as well as in the implementation process of the South Africa’s Trade Policy (Budlender 2004, Tsikata 2004).

These are important questions because they could illustrate patterns of growth and economic management more effectively than merely illustrating growth rates and South Africa’s ability to deal with poverty. The distributional structure along gender, class and race that affect resource allocation and access to development benefits in particular would be important mediating factors to consider.

Conclusion Women’s substantive citizenships in relation to the South African Nation State processes and influence remain contested, marginal and fragile. Current interpretations of entitlement and belonging deny full economic citizenship to women because outcomes are surely as fundamental as processes. This is where outcomes of deficit power relations, truncated autonomy, low wages and narrow access to life opportunities, processes and the framing of rights and citizenship must be questioned. Procedural citizenship as facilitated by the South African State should be engineered in coalescence with substantive citizenship; this could potentially narrow the space between neo-classical rights and substantive women’s citizenship and keep more people within the ambit and reach of State provisions, protections and entitlements.

Currently the structurally unchallenged model of corporate led governance enables and strengthens social apartheid, encourages racism and social strife, depletes the rights of women and threatens to precipitate our nation into continuing confrontations. The process of systemic social exclusion undermines women’s citizenship and



tries to fragment any organised and cohesive articulation of an alternative imagination.

The context of the Afrikan woman in South Africa provides an opportunity to examine the various textures of economic struggle including the original struggles against colonialism and the struggles for self-determination socially, politically, financially and culturally. South Africa entered this millennium with less reckless abandon than what characterised the 1994 elections. Twenty years on, it is absolutely critical to analyse whether this is a State nation or a nation State propelled by market priorities over broad community and human interests. In common with many post-colonial States, South Africa faces a crisis of legitimacy based on its ability to enable trans-locational interconnection and collective identities that formed the nexus of colonial struggles as an inevitable continuation of the liberation project. This against the backdrop of depoliticised and delegitimised local struggles and the external pressures of international governance that have reshaped the re-organisation of States along economic and across ideological divided blocs, have created patronage and crony capitalism that further entrenches male privilege. This presents sharp tensions between State functions and its responsibilities towards the women who have actively fought for the creation of the South African State.

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Becoming Post-Colonial Citizens In Africa: Through Feminist Vistas Patricia McFadden

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This paper focuses on five critical areas which I think are foundational to how we become post-colonial through new

notions and practices of citizenship as Africans at national, regional and continental levels. In order to understand the context within which we are engaging feminist and women’s struggles in relation to the State, patriarchal institutions, and the agenda of building new theorising and new political movements for the transformation of the continent, we need to interrogate the following challenges:

1. What are the key features of the current context in terms of the Patriarchal Backlash and the inaccessibility of Liberal notions and policies which have entrenched the ‘distance’ between women and State institutions, as well as key socio-economic and cultural systems in terms of Citizenship and creating lives of Dignity for all Africans.

2. How do we effectively respond to the persistence of Feudalism and the recycling of practices, rites and ideological systems that underpin Patriarchy – as culture and tradition – and as ‘commonsensical’ to being African. Exposing these power relations as expressions of exclusionary practices particularly in the realities of African females is critical to initiating the transformational process.

3. How do state functionaries, feudalists and homophobes use Sexual Violence and the Social Exclusion of certain groups of Africans, in particular Queer people, as markers of ‘inauthenticity? What are the new political discourses and forms of activism needed

to support and protect these communities and individuals against so-called ‘corrective practices’ that violate their bodily and sexual integrity. Violence and the blatancy of Impunity as normative forms of exclusion and for instilling of fear in individuals and groups that are perceived as in need ‘of management and control’ (Women, Queers, Radicals etc) are crucial challenges facing all Africans who are engaged in crafting new social terrains.

4. When do we begin engaging in the new discourses and debates about how Africans Be-Come Citizens in alternative and futuristic ways, through a critical understanding of Patriarchy, The State, and through a retrieval of the idea of Freedom as a foundational part of defining Contemporary forms of struggle, visioning and living.

What then, is the current context within which we are operating as activists and scholars who intend on transforming our personal lived realities, and of being part of the ideological, social, structural and policy-defined circumstances of most working people and their communities, and of course achieving the goal of making the future a contemporary lived existence for us all.

I am using a Radical Feminist Perspective1 on the issues surrounding the conceptual re-imagination of Citizenship as a status, a consciousness and a relationship with oneself. In the first instance, as part of a class, a racial category, and as gendered beings who have diverse abilities and make differing sexual choices. In the second instance as an expression of agency and of a critical understanding of relationship between those



who are situated outside the State as the main custodian of power and the material wealth of any contemporary society. And in the final instance, as an individual who uses her or his agency to define and live an identity that is multiple, in flux, and which is juxtaposed to the systems and structures, practices of the State and of their respective communities.

It is at the intersection of these multiple sites that the new ideas, energies and possibilities of crafting new notions and lived realities reside. And while the identity and discipline of Feminism is still widely disparaged and treated as other – mainly because of its liberatory power in explaining patriarchy in all its forms and expressions, and because it provides the only effective political vision for all humans to become free persons beyond gendered, raced, classed, ablelist and sexualised ‘social cages’ – the reality is that increasingly, the power of feminist analysis and visioning is being recognised and embraced. The future will be a feminist future, without any doubt.

Key to reading the context of our African societies, therefore, is the understanding that we are in the midst of a serious, concerted and fully intentional Backlash, led by those who would rather maintain the status quo as is; a moment of accumulation, decadence and plunder for those who rule, as well as for those who provide the ideological and material infrastructure for such affluence. The Backlash is a notion that comes out of the feminist movements of the world. and it derives its meaning from an understanding that even after certain demands have been met in terms

of the push and pull over power in any context, those who control and exercise power invariably push back on the shifts that have allowed for a small breathing space for the majority in terms of dignity and wellbeing. Therefore, while the current neo-colonial regimes of the continent had to concede some limited benefits to the working people who made independence possible through their courage and tenacity in the belief that liberation and a sense of freedom were necessary and possible, invariably, these new elites lost sight of the future, and instead concentrated on the containment and corralling of the working people in order to minimize the amount of resources that are available to communities, insisting all the time that ‘change takes time’ even as they fill their private coffers with the wealth and material resources of their respective societies.

Thus while generally the notion of the Backlash tends to apply most appropriately to the losses that each generation of women has experienced, particularly when the ideological and political pendulum swings far to the Right – as is the case currently with the deeply entrenched hegemony of Neo-liberalism – in reality, the Backlash affects all groups of people situated outside the State and its conservative, repressive infrastructure and institutions. All working people suffer personal loss when girls and women are brutalised, stigmatized and or murdered as part of the sexual backlash to women’s perceived ‘unruly sexual behaviour’. All working people are affected by the misogynist impunity that is unleashed everywhere on the continent against older women who are murdered for supposedly being ‘witches’ and ‘demons’ by patriarchal forces that

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direct their grievances against older women as scapegoat – seiphers without any real human and or social consequence.

However, it is crucial that we position an understanding of the Backlash within a feminist epistemology and resist the seduction of extending the realities of women (conceptually and empirically) to everyone around them. This is a difficult but important position to assume and retain, given that the current definitions and uses of gender as a thinking tool, are overwhelmingly influenced by Neo-liberal sensibilities and policy implications that homogenise working people’s lives. The conflation of women – as bodies, identities, constituencies and occupants of planetary space – leads inevitably to the invisibilization of women and to their distancing from the very resources and interests that were the initial focus of research, policy and redistributive mechanisms.

Central to this conflation and ‘distancing’ is the currently popular notion and practice of citizenship. The challenge then becomes how to re-define citizenship as an ideal, an inclusive site, and as an identity that individuals and communities craft and imbue with particular elements and capabilities, and which people deploy as a platform – a site of negotiation – in their relationships with the State and its ancillary institutions.

It is by theorising the lived realities of women as lives of struggle for alternative futures that we are able to scrutinise and assess the notion and practice of liberal citizenship – in relation to the expectations of individuals and their respective

communities, vis–à–vis the occupants of the state and key patriarchal institutions. For women in particular, this is an urgent and necessary contemporary imperative.

“Debates around formal citizenship enable feminists to expose the contradiction between states’ constitutional declarations of equal citizenship and treatment of women as the possessions of their husbands or communities, relegated to the ambiguous space of personal law, for example.” (Pettman 1999)

This questioning of the notion and practice of citizenship beyond its liberal inclusivity, which is mediated by important markers around class, ethnicity, sexual identity or orientation and ability, enables radical intellectuals to open up the epistemological assumptions that have presented liberal citizenship as a given – in societies that aspire to bourgeois democratic statuses within the globalised system of capitalism – as well as create a discursive opportunity for communities and individuals to imagine and engage in the process of re-crafting citizenship in accordance to their particular needs and circumstances.

I am speaking to the notion of citizenship in terms of it having become the fetish which bridges the divide between the individual or community and the occupants of the patriarchal class state of the neo-colonial moment. As with all fetishes, for citizenship to be realised, it depends on commoditised resources – education, legal knowledge and access, economic wealth and private property, and identities that are privileged via certain classed, gendered and raced matrixes. This is the reality of the State in all African societies.



While’...many feminists are ambivalent about approaching the state, the state that feminists address is itself changing dramatically.” (Leech 1994)

This last statement brings me to the point that I have been making in my recent work, arguing that as feminists in Africa, we must re-conceptualise the meanings of what the state is becoming in order to acquire a contemporary consciousness of ourselves as people who are ‘be-coming’ citizens in new ways.

The critique of liberalism in economic, constitutional, socio-cultural and political terms provides the necessary stepping stones to debates and conversations that re-configure the relationships between and among individuals and communities, principally in relation to the State and its institutions.

Therefore, in terms of initiating new socio-cultural possibilities, my second point emanates from the urgent imperative of responding to the matter of Feudalism, as the most persistent relic of pre-capitalist patriarchy, which is recycled through practices of male privilege and deeply embedded ideological systems that underpin current expressions of patriarchal exclusion and the control over women’s bodies and lives. Feminists on the continent and internationally, have scrutinised and critiqued feudal forms of patriarchy in relation mainly to the character and resilience of the heterosexual family form and its attendant social and cultural systems and practices. However, in Africa, due partly to the experience of colonialism as a culturally disenfranchising structure and practice that degraded and despised anything African and

indigenous, while ‘customizing’ indigenous conventions and practices into ‘customary codes or laws’ that served the colonial purpose of using ‘local authorities’ as managers of the working people, in situ, there has developed a particularly obsessive discourse about ‘retaining and protecting culture and traditions’ – which serve as authenticators into the very identity of being African. These reified practices and rites front as a commonsensical claim to patriarchal privilege across the spectrum of social and cultural existence, especially in the spaces that are furthest from urban life and from the direct impacts of overtly colonised or modernised life.

However, when we lift the mythical authenticating veil surrounding these relics of African ‘realness’, we expose a myriad of vicious, often brutal exclusionary beliefs and practices that give men licence to violate and abuse females of varying ages; to continue privatising women as bodies that can be circulated between male-owned and controlled household structures and systems of economic and sexual privilege and power; and which allow males of various ages to learn, exercise and legitimize impunitous behaviour in the name of ‘culture and tradition’.

All these practices that women activists have failed to eradicate using liberal legal precepts inherited from the colonial state, (in spite of a few gains reflected in the language of constitutions and ‘gender laws’), form the foundations of feudal patriarchy and will not be eliminated without a systematic removal of feudal patriarchal systems in every domain of our societies. This relegation of feudalism into the past must begin with the

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removal of individuals and their parallel state structures and systems (chiefs and their retinues); the abandonment of constitutional apparatuses that have legitimised feudal hierarchies at the levels of the national parliaments and local governments; the criminalisation and punishment of practices that brutalise and maul the bodies of young females through egregious practices like ‘virginity testing’, Female Genital Mutilation including labia elongation’ and most crucially, the re-definition of the heterosexual family as a domain that locates women and their children outside the protections of a contemporary citizenship, where their bodily, sexual, emotional, and psychological integrity would be secured. The very meaning of what a family is, who constitutes it, and how this foundational institution is shaped and experienced by humans from birth to death must be transformed radically to eliminate the authoritarianism and impunity that allows males to dominate and repress women in particular. This foundational transformation of family from heterosexism into a site where everyone and anyone can love, nurture and support those they love – and create the necessary conditions of the emergence of successive generations of young people who do not believe that they have to wield power over women or children and or the elderly to be complete as human beings – this deep-seated change, must accompany the transformation of the patriarchal state into a caring, responsible, and distributive state that is wholly accountable to the citizens of each and every African society.

We need to understand that violence and exclusion are the pillars of patriarchal power and impunity in every sphere of social life, and

that the struggle against violation. Which is the essential root of violence as experienced in the various relationships that women and working people generally encounter, (with males, with the police and military, with elite and the owners of capital, in the plantations and on corporate farms; on the corporate factory floor and in the face of expanding neo-imperialist aggression against societies of the South)... that this is a critical entry point into re-defining citizenship ...bodily, sexual, emotional integrity.

Be-coming Citizens encompasses the re-theorisation of ideas and notions; the acknowledgement that Africans need radically new ways of being, intellectually and socio-culturally, and that activists have to create different systems and organisational structures and discourses about transformation, in addition to understanding the contemporary neo-colonial state as it re-constitutes itself at the level of the ruling classes; in terms of strategies of plunder and accumulation; and in instituting new and technologically advanced systems of surveillance and control over the majority of people in all our respective societies.

How we manage these elements that shape the contemporary moment will determine whether Africans continue to struggle in a quagmire of the numerous Exclusions (both colonial and neo-colonial) that have led to our continent being described as a place of doom. Or we will be able to initiate an alternatively radical path; a trajectory that will involve the reconstruction of our identities, institutions, discourses and overall realities towards increasingly inclusive social formations that recognise, respect and



celebrate the uniqueness and human value of every single person living on the continent. This is the alternative vision of post-colonial societies, as formations that actively and systematically consider every citizen the most valuable resource, to be protected, enhanced, and rewarded as a social value.

ReferencesBadoe, Y. (2005). What makes a woman a witch?.

Feminist Africa, 5, 37-51.

De Lauretis, T. (Ed.). (1986). Feminist studies, critical studies (Vol. 8). Indiana University Press.

El Saadawi, N. (2007). God dies by the Nile. Zed Books.

Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch. Autonomedia.

Guy-Sheftall, B. (Ed.). (1995). Words of fire: An anthology of African-American feminist thought. The New Press.

Hooks, B. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom (Vol. 4). New York: Routledge.

Hooks, B. (2000). Feminism is for everybody: Passionate politics. Pluto Press.

Kaufman, C. (2003). Ideas for action: Relevant theory for radical change. South End Press.

Kolmar, W. Frances Bartkowski, (Eds). 2000. Feminist Theory: A Reader. Mayfield Publishing.

Kolmar, W. Frances Bartkowski, (eds). 2000. Feminist Theory: A Reader. Mayfield Publishing.

Leech, M. (1994). Women, the state and citizenship:‘Are women in the building or in a separate annex?‘. Australian Feminist Studies, 9(19), 79-91.

Mama. A, Sow. F, et al, (eds). 2000. Engendering African Social Sciences. CODESRIA

Mayo, M. (2005). Global citizens: Social movements and the challenge of globalization. Zed Books.

McFadden, P. (2003). Sexual pleasure as feminist choice. Feminist Africa, 2(8).

McFadden, P. (2011). Re-crafting Citizenship in the

Postcolonial Moment: A Focus on Southern Africa. Works And Days, 57/58(29).

McFadden, P.(2010). Contemporary African Feminism: conceptual challenges and transformational prospects. BUWA!.

Mvududu, S. C., & McFadden, P. (2001). Reconceptualizing the Family: In a Changing Southern African Environment. Southern African Research &.

Pateman, C. (1988). The sexual contract. Stanford University Press.

Pettman, J. J. (1999). Globalization and the gendered politics of citizenship. Women, citizenship and difference, 207-20.

Walker, A. (2007). We are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness: Meditations. The New Press.

Endnotes1 A Radical Feminist Perspective is premised on

the stance of non-compromise with Patriarchy on the most fundamental entitlements and rights of women as complete human beings – in terms of Bodily, Sexual, Physical, Emotional and Psychological Integrity and Dignity.


YOUNG AFRICAN RURAL WOMEN ENGAGE THE PUBLIC SPHERE: ON AFRICA’S AGENDA 2063

AbstractTwo major concerns underpin the paper, the first, is exploring the changing composition of the African public sphere with the aim of interrogating what is changing and how it is changing. The African Union’s (AU) Agenda 2063, a document which is now in the public purview, forms the central focus. The paper argues that whereas certain social groups are finding and securing their spaces by critically engaging the document and articulating their voices, dismayingly, other social groups are still left out. This missing group, the paper posits, is young African rural women. The write-up argues that the lack of young African rural women’s effective articulation of their voice is due to the lack of effective positioning of their agendas to the larger societal dynamics. Through the theoretical background of food markets, the paper will explore some of these socially embedded agendas. It is against this backdrop that the second major concern of the paper is arrived. The proposition is that food markets are critical socio-economic institutions that young African rural women can capitalize upon to articulate transformative voices and consequently change their prevailing status quo. Africa’s Vision 2063 provides for this space.

Roseline Achieng’



From A Hopeless To A Hopeful Continent: Africa Rising

In May 2000, the Economist magazine carried on its front cover, a caption that read: Africa the hopeless continent. Providing an analysis

of Sierra Leone as the typology of what besets the rest of the continent, the article painted a picture of an Africa slipping deeper into the abyss of poverty, disease, famine and endemic corruption amidst wealth that is used to support unscrupulous governments and warlords. The write-up predicted a bleak future for Africa. It outlined the continued reliance on aid, the lack of industrialisation, disease, violent conflicts and mass atrocities amidst a growing youthful population without any meaningful prospects, as the malaises that would see Africa wallow in continued dependency as the continent sunk deeper into hopelessness and despair. Sealing Africa’s destiny, the article concluded that the situation will provoke a few sympathetic responses from certain agencies to bail the continent out of its conundrum of complications. With certitude, the article prophesied Africa’s demise.

Alas, in December 2011, little more than a decade later, the same influential magazine featured an article that analysed Africa as a hopeful continent. It gallantly attuned that Africa is rising! The article pointed out that ten of the fastest growing countries were African. It attributed this growth to several factors. Central of these were; the commodities boom which came from revenues of natural resources, key institutions that have been set up which checked the spread of violent conflicts across the continent and ascertained a peaceful environment for development, wide spread use

of technology, a rising manufacturing sector, a supportive infrastructure, a growing middle class and above all a favourable demography of young and well educated adults1.

Indeed, an analysis of the social-economic and political dynamics on the continent point to a growing assertion that Africa is entering its third moment2 of societal transformation. Social-economic issues have now, more than ever before, become the main focus of analysis and concerted attention. Gumede (2013)3 has called this phenomenon an African Economic Renaissance. Not only is the continent a growing business hub especially in the mineral resources sector, it is predicated that Africa’s youthful demographic makeup is a key driver for social economic change as Africa enters the 22nd century. However, the question at large, is how this untapped potential can be harnessed.

The paper posits that whereas some groups have carved themselves a niche and are influencing reforms that privileges their issues, other groups, for example, young African rural women, are still missing. This is the case despite this group bearing significant transformational capacities for the achievement of social-political and economic development of the continent. The paper questions why this is so, in arriving at the answer, the paper asserts that this missing group does not strategically position itself in knowing how to speak to power, bringing other groups along or tying their issues to broader societal issues in order to gain legitimacy. The paper offers an analysis of some of the dynamics that young African rural women could capitalise on, with the

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aim of articulating their voices and thus enabling their issues to be put in the limelight.

Taking the AU’s Agenda 2063 as a case study, the paper starts by discussing some of the poignant points that the Agenda sets forth. The aim is to bring to the fore the pertinent issues for social economic development that the Agenda outlines. Thereafter the case of young people in Africa is presented and it is argued that whereas there is potential in the current demographic make-up of Africa, alarmingly, this capacity is not yet adequately tapped into. The paper zeroes into the group that is still missing in action, that is, young African rural women and posits that whereas young African rural women are intricately involved in both the productive and reproductive sectors of the economy, there is a societal veiling of their activities. Presenting a case of food markets as the sphere in which young African rural women’s economic activities are visible, the reasons as to why such a societal veiling persists are outlined. With the Agenda 2063 currently being on the public realm, it is argued that young African women can capitalise on the momentum and bring their issues to the fore. Nonetheless, the paper asserts that young African rural women cannot do it alone and the rest of the paper dedicates itself to exploring the social dynamics that young African rural women could explore in articulating their issues, positioning themselves and eventually realising the much needed societal transformation through changes in policy.

The African Union’s (AU) Agenda 2063: A Vision And Action Plan For Africa’s Developmental Growth

On 25 May 2013, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) now African Union (AU) celebrated 50 years of its existence. In marking the occasion and projecting a future for the continent, the incumbent chairperson of the AU commission, Dr. Nkosozana Dlamini-Zuma, presented a document named Africa’s Agenda 20634. The paper laid out a broad vision for Africa’s social-economic growth path. In its’ preamble on what Agenda 2063 is about, the document states that

“….Agenda 2063 must be seen as a part of the African Renaissance… building on the NE-PAD experience…and institutions of the AU such as the APRM, etc…Indeed, Agenda 2063 is a logical and natural continuation of NE-PAD and other initiatives….”

The document laments that despite Africa having some of the most profound institutions to bring about social-economic development, implementa-tion has been elusive. In light of this, the Agenda calls for a paradigm shift, that is, changes in at-titudes and mindsets to inculcate the right set of African values in the achievement of set goals and objectives for the development of the continent. These, the document outlines as discipline, focus, honesty, integrity, transparency, hard work and the love for Africa and its people. The preamble goes on to state that

“… Agenda 2063 provides the opportunity for Africa to break away from the syndrome of ‘always coming up with new ideas but no significant achieve-



ments’ and set in motion high levels of productivity, growth, entrepreneurship and transformation. Agenda 2063 is an approach to how the continent should effec-tively learn from the lessons of the past, build on the progress now underway and strategically exploit all possible opportunities available in the immediate and medium term, so as to ensure positive socioeconomic transformation within the next 50 years. Agenda 2063 is both a Vision and an Action Plan to achieve the Af-rican Union’s vision of an Integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa, driven by its own citizens and repre-senting a dynamic force in the global arena. It is a call for action to all segments of African society to work together to build a prosperous and united Africa based on shared values and a common destiny. Agenda 2063 will put in place a results-based approach with concrete targets that are measurable and can be tracked and monitored. This is with a view to capacitating Africa to do things differently and take advantage of the current momentum towards 2063…..”

At an ideological level, the agenda sets forth a broad vision for Africa: The Africa we want in 50 years to come. The thrust of Agenda 2063 is a program of social, economic and political rejuvenation that links the past, present and the future in order to create a new generation of Pan Africanists who will harness the lessons learnt and use them as building blocks to consolidate the hope and promises of the founding parents for a true renaissance of Africa. Agenda 2063 is expected to be a source of inspiration for development of national and regional sustainable development plans.

The document braces itself to build from the experiences of the past and present with the view

of being bolder and ambitious in terms of the social economic development of the continent. In this regard, the Agenda has integrated mechanisms set forth by the Lagos Plan of Action of 1980, the Abuja Treaty of 1991, the AU Constitutive Act and the New Partnerships for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) of 2000. At an operational level, the document puts forward a road map and an action plan to achieve this vision (Agenda 2063 Draft Framework Document 2013: 16).

The Main Elements Of Agenda 2063 At An Operational Level

In providing a framework for action at an oper-ational level, Agenda 2063 starts by presenting a number of questions. These are:

a. How the current African growth trajectory can be sustained for another two to three decades to ensure that it transforms the structure of economies and addresses un-employment?

b. How we can ensure inclusive growth that leads to poverty reduction, shared devel-opment and social inclusion?

c. Does the growth trajectory meet the me-dium to long term development needs of Africa, or is it simply based on the external demand for our raw materials?

d. Is Africa making optimal use of its com-parative advantages- especially in natural resources and how should it achieve this?

e. Are we addressing the underlying causes of conflict (resources and identity issues)?

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f. Is the state of democracy and inclusion on the continent conducive for development?

g. Do we have an endogenous African devel-opment agenda that will lead to prosperi-ty and peace? (Agenda 2063 Draft Frame-work Document 2013: 14- 15)

The document discusses key drivers of change that are critical in making the Agenda 2063 vision a reality. These are, promoting science, technolo-gy and innovation; investing in human develop-ment, especially converting Africa’s population bulge into a demographic dividend; managing the natural resource endowment; pursuing cli-mate-conscious development; creating capable developmental States and harnessing regional in-tegration.

Two points from the key drivers of change are im-portant for the continued discussion of this paper. These are investing in human development and harnessing regional integration. It is on the two issues that the paper will focus on.

Unlocking Young People’s Potential Or The Lack Thereof?A report5 by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) pinpoints many of the gains that women and especially young women have accomplished. The report discusses the successes witnessed in levels of education and socio-economic, and reproductive rights. The report further demonstrates that young African women have made great leaps in following career choices that were previously reserved for men. Not only have they excelled in these fields, they are also projecting a new kind of professionalism

that significantly departs from the ‘old boys club’ rites of passage and rules of engagement. Despite these individual endowments, dismayingly, young women face new structural discrepancies which they are either unaware of or are ill-equipped to challenge. This is partly due to their continued lack of engagement in critical issues and partly because of the restrictions imposed on their agency to act otherwise. Several reasons can be attributed to this incapacity and lack of agency. There is a deficiency in formulating an agenda that is socially embedded. This, it is argued, can be attributed to the ‘ignorance’ of issues that stream from young rural women’s lived realities. This ignorance is perpetuated by the excessive emphasis on cultural issues and divorcing these issues from the mainstream social-economic interests. For example, whereas the campaigns on abolition of Female Genital Circumcision (Nageeb 2008) and helping young girls/women to cope with the excesses of puberty are important in themselves, without critically tying these issues to socio-economic themes, and in this manner seeing how the lack of access to economic entitlements puts women in social-cultural strait-jackets, a system of ignorance (Lachenmann 1996) is perpetuated.

Conversely, the continued lack of politicization of cultural issues by embedding them in social-economic dynamics has incapacitated young rural women in articulating transformative voices. This has culminated in the non-confrontation of political-economic structures which hinder the expression of their (young women’s’) capabilities. This is further compounded by the fact that young rural women’s contribution in society is either



made invisible, neglected (taken for granted) or marginalized thus further rendering them incapacitated and incapable of articulating on these issues.

The particular observation that young African women and their issues are lacking at the level of the public sphere necessitates the question, ‘So, where are the young women?’ Observed trends in urban areas show a multifaceted reality. On the one hand, there are professional young women, however, the majority of young African women are still found in the informal sector. Here, they engage in economic activities such as hair-dressing, tailoring, sale of second-hand clothes or the food processing industry. They are the ones in copy-shops, internet cafés and call centres, and are engaged in promotional work, especially as sales people for major companies, notable of which are mobile phone companies.

In the rural areas, most young women are employed in farming and marketing activities. Rioba (2005)6, for example, provides an analysis of young Kenyan rural women who flock to the economic processing zones for employment. One further observes that young rural women are engaged in the hawking of food crops from peri-urban areas to urban centres. A common feature of this is door-to-door hawking of especially vegetables, fruits and eggs7. Indeed, young women are intricately involved in productive and reproductive work albeit under worsening conditions.

What is analytically glaring is that whereas young women are significantly contributing to the economy, especially in reproductive work8, their

contribution is not recognised let alone significant to the transformational agendas built around their continued involvement in the productive and reproductive sectors of markets. It seems like this cycle of invisibility (Achieng’ 2005) and consequent marginalization and reduction to vulnerability (Lachenmann, Dannecker 2008) is the norm.

Of Markets: Issues vs. Agendas-Formation and Formulation Writing on the possibilities of an African Economic Renaissance for the 22nd Century, Gumede (2013) contends that developments in countries such as Brazil, Malaysia and others, suggest that a country needs a robust economic policy framework to sustain its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth. He posits that although Africa has embarked on policy reforms, two economic policy areas still need concerted and sustained attention. One he outlines as robust industrial development policies that create opportunities for the provision of jobs along value chains. The other, he contends, are labour market policies that transform social relations and improve human development. Alongside these economic policies, the Gumede asserts that sound social policies that protect especially the vulnerable in society are critical. Gumede boldly affirms that agriculture and land policy along value chains hold a significant potential in not only advancing development in the industrial and manufacturing sectors but also ensures gainful and sustainable employment for majority of Africa’s young populace. Consequentially, the issues are, how to make agricultural activities attractive to young people, how to maximise value chains and how to

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leverage these in the world commodity markets. Indeed, with food security being the number one agenda for most countries, both on the continent and in the world, the potential that agricultural activities have alongside value chains as one of the pillars to Africa’s Economic Renaissance in the 22nd century holds great promise.

If we go by the token that young African rural women are intricately involved in the reproductive and productive agricultural sector of the economy, and have pertinent social policy issues to discuss but are incapacitated to articulate on issues because their contribution to the productive and reproductive sectors of the economy is invisible, often marginalised or taken-for-granted, then we can dare to postulate that in order to reverse the current order, issues have to be critically confronted and agendas around these issues formulated. Since young African rural women are significantly engaged in the agricultural sector of the economy, then it goes without much ado that markets and especially food markets (which interlink both the productive and reproductive sectors of the economy) have to be brought back onto the analytic drawing board but this time intrinsically interlinked to Africa’s Agenda 2063.

The Importance Of Food MarketsIn the introductory chapter of her edited book, Sidiropoulos (2012) points out that one of the biggest risks facing the modern world is the gulf that separates the ‘haves’ from the ‘have-nots’. Two different but connected global risks, one being economic disparity and the other, world-wide failures in governance, the author argues, will exacerbate this divide. Zeroing in on South Africa as a case study and the country’s

efforts to exert soft power through development cooperation and what she calls development diplomacy, Sidiropoulos (2012) maintains that South Africa is now engaged in the support of regional integration and projects related to the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). These initiatives are braced at conflict resolution, peacekeeping and support for the continent’s institutional architecture and technical assistance in State capacity-building. An important pointer, Sidiropoulos brings to the fore, is NEPADs agenda for Africa, especially the promotion of agriculture and consequent food security as envisaged in the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP). Coupled with the NEPAD agenda is the Millennium Development Goal Target 1c to reduce by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.

NEPAD’s base document postulates that although the majority of Africa’s people’ live in rural areas, the agrarian systems are generally weak and unproductive, leading to poverty. The document reads:

“The urgent need to achieve food security in African countries requires that the problem of inadequate agricultural systems be addressed, so that food production can be increased and nutritional standards raised...”

These thoughts have been eloquently captured by former South African President Thabo Mbeki in his article Tasks of the African Progressive Movement (Mbeki 2014). In his write-up Mbeki argues, among other things, that the progress agenda of the African Progressive Movement must prioritise the progressive transformation of rural areas,



including through the implementation of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP). In line with these thoughts, not only do agricultural systems need revamping, more importantly, food markets value chains should be formed. For the topic at hand, it is important to interrogate why food markets are important.

Food markets are important because as we have seen, many young African rural women are engaged in activities that are interconnected to these markets. This is either in the processing, sale or consumption of food. Moreover, food markets are crucial because they form the critical inter-linkage between household economies (the reproductive sector) and markets as a productive sector of the economy. This inter-linkage is central for the fact that it forms an interface where different kinds of actors, (the State, male and female individual farmers, farmers’ cooperatives, transporters, agri-business groups, Third Sector groups, civil society groups, women market groups and associations etc), interact and relate on their different kinds of entitlements and access or lack of access. It is on this basis, (access or lack of access to entitlements and how different groups negotiate), that agendas that are socially embedded and allow for a positioning and an articulation of voices that could be formulated if one is to critically analyse how Africa’s Agenda 2063 can be negotiated by young African rural women. Food market systems show an impressive achievement of production (innovation) techniques and social organisation despite the lack of classical models of the development of markets and government agro-planning support (Guyer

1997). Lastly, food markets are intrinsically linked to differing conceptualisations of human security mechanisms (Gladwin 1991).

Some of the issues that flow out of looking at food markets at an interface and the different kinds of entitlements and how young women can capitalize on some of these agendas in order to articulate their issues and thus bring about transformation include an analysis of labour, capital and markets not as formalised systems but as socially embedded institutions that depend by and large on social-cultural organisation of economies of solidarity. Of major importance herein is to analyse the ‘how’ of the processes of mediation between society and markets (Guyer 1997).

Talking to Power: The Articulation of Voice or the Lack of it? Indeed, as explicated here, the how of the processes of mediation between society and markets and the inter-linkages with the political-economic sphere, catapults us to the several different public spheres and the debates occurring or not occurring therein. There is a gap in not only how young women articulate their voices (their agendas and issues), but also in how they strategically position themselves in their engagements with political-economic structures. Thus, of critical importance is a thorough knowledge of the modes of articulation. This means being informed of what the agenda is (both overtly and inertly), knowing how to speak to these different agendas and with whom to speak.

Closely aligned to a deep knowledge of the modes of articulation is the strategic use of place

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as discursive spaces for a critical engagement. Achieng’ (2006) explicates how the religious space is now being transformed into a political space. For young women, more secularized places are sought. For example, the work-place is increasingly being transformed into a space for critical reflection and information sharing on emerging governance issues. Increasingly, recreational centres and public forums have become spaces for an engagement in debates and critical reflection. This phenomenon is mostly found in the urban centres where pubs, cinemas, recreational parks and youth sports clubs provide spaces for critical engagement on issues of governance. One cannot ignore the proliferation of the radio and television series and of course the music arena as some of the spaces being used by young people to engage politically. The internet has become a common phenomenon in most African cities and towns. Although this means of communication is one of the main means used as a way of keeping in touch with friends, some groups of young people are exploiting this means as a way of keeping abreast of governance issues. Blogging Africa has now become a major enterprise whereby blogs are set up to allow public opinion on governance issues. Different websites have also sprung up, which offer young people a chance to not only recognise the creative talents that are explicated on various pages, but also to politically engage on pertinent societal issues of the day (Manji 2007). Art, choreographic expressions and photography are increasingly being used by young people to voice issues of the day. A vivid example is a recently ended photographic exhibition of the violent post-election conflicts that rocked Kenya after the 2008 general elections. Kenya Burning is a

pictographic book edition of the grotesque killings that took place in several locations in Kenya. What is analytically critical, is the creative, strategic and transformative articulation of voices on a critical issues of the day by an exhibition centre run by a young woman9 and supported by a group of other young artists both men and women through the exhibition’s salient depiction of the ferocity of violence and artist’s desire to see it ‘never happen again’, by keeping this fateful event alive in people’s minds and daily conversations and hence reflective consciousness. Indeed, the role of the media in building a consciousness and consequent creative ‘speaking to power’ on pertinent issues especially among young African women cannot be underestimated.

Trans-local Networking Among Female Movements At Various LevelsGlobal geopolitics, especially those of women mobilising at international level has had positive effects on the course of women’s regional networking. For young women, these different forms of socially embedded movements offer avenues for self-organisation and arenas for interaction, discussion and information sharing on critical social and political issues. Increasingly, for example, young women are forming professional groups which are linked in one way or another to the enterprise of society. They (the young women), not only meet with their peers in such groups but are often accorded opportunities for mentorship by other feminist women holding positions of influence and who have defined themselves as agents of a transformative agenda (Mbilinyi 2006).



However, young women have not yet fully capitalised on the opportunities offered by trans-local networking. This, as earlier explored, is either because agendas that could form the basis for inter-linkages are poorly defined or are not effectively linked to governance issues of the day. Access to relevant information in a timely fashion is critical and the scenario is that young African women lack information or access to these sites. This leaves young women isolated and forces them to trend the ‘known paths’ before branching off by which time many of the issues are passé and devoid of their (young women) points of view. It seems that men have developed better coping mechanisms in this regard, which help them get relevant information, quickly sieve through the information and are thus enabled to stay abreast of governance issues, thereby being competitive in offering up-beat, timely decisions that serve to push forward their own agendas. The issue of dissemination of critical information in a timely manner using innovative avenues that are closer to the young women’s worlds is thus crucial. Therefore the first challenge for trans-local networking becomes defining those common agendas of interest for the different groups that are seeking to network trans-locally, and there-after remaining agile in translating these agendas accordingly across time and space and disseminating relevant information in a timely manner.

Young women have to be vigilant enough not to take for granted agendas being articulated at different fronts and applying these unquestioningly in their various environments. A critical and questioning

stance has to be adopted with the aim of ensuring that oscillations of agendas through its translation into different contexts occur. For example, agendas being propounded at the international level could be distilled and translated into different African contexts, not with the aim of adopting them unquestioningly but rather with the objective of using them as mirrors into which further reflecting on context specific changes and new modes of action is required. The reverse could hold, whereby context specific agendas are refracted onto the international scene with the aim of gauging whether changes occurring at the international level necessitate different ways of conceptualisation. For example, agri-business as a form of trans-local linkage of rural food markets to urban ones is now a common place phenomenon in urban areas. However, the numbers of Third Sector groups that are trans-local in orientation is still lacking. Furthermore, the business and professional groups that exist have issues that hardly reflect what is occurring at the societal level. When this occurs, agendas are taken up in the form of charity drives and fund-raising (benefit concerts) or business exhibitions with the main aim of networking amongst the various enterprises. Although a step in the right direction, such benefit concerts or business exhibitions could be used as avenues to bring to consciousness the plethora of issues and debates that society-market relations in Kenya currently grapples with. Coupled with this, strategically targeting the youth, in both urban and rural areas could see a move towards a more critical mass not only aware of issues but critically engaging these issues on different fronts with the aim of articulating transformative voices and thereby

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changing the status quo. How fair trade or trans-local and regional market integrative mechanisms could occur are examples in point.

Implications For Policy: National and ForeignFor policy makers, critical questions that straddle two fronts emerge. On the one hand is the national policy towards youth. Different funds have been set up in certain countries. For example, in Kenya there is a fund that supports youth economic empowerment called kazi kwa vijana which funds entrepreneurial activities that young people engage in. In South Africa, the controversial youth wage subsidy is a case in point. The analysis still lacking is whether such initiatives create dependency or avenues for engagement at a national level. Critical to this, is questioning how such initiatives change the national developmental goals if at all, the sustainability of these changes and the suitability in the long term.

On the other, is foreign policy, it is imperative how these national level initiatives translate into a positioning on the international front, especially as they relate to food security, agri-business and regional integration through regional food market chains. It is important to analyse how avenues for engaging continental structures and institutions, for example, regional economic communities, are created and maintained. How objectives at international level feed into national strategies and vice versa, along the lines mentioned above, are a research lacuna which begs further analysis.The Agenda 2063 provides the avenue for new policy articulations at national, continental and international levels. It remains for young African

rural women to engage the platform through trans-local networking with young urban women and pro-feminist men, and through the strategic use of place and articulation of voice.

Conclusion This paper moved from the premise that young African female movements’ critical voices are missing in the different African public spheres. It was consequently argued that this may be attributed to the lack of articulated transformative voices and that because young women’s issues, especially those that cut across society-market relations, are marginalized, taken for granted or rendered invisible, their (the young women’s) capabilities to critically question oppressive systems in place, is eroded. A kind of ‘societal veiling’ occurs and with it, young women’s inability to formulate critical agendas. Consequentially, young women have been ill-served in interlinking their agendas to broader social issues, strategically positioning themselves in the power structure, and thereby articulating critical transformative voices.

The paper continuously asserted that a critical analysis of some of the issues and agendas currently being pursued under Africa’s Agenda 2063 could serve as windows of opportunity for young African rural women, especially in influencing and bringing about policy changes in social-economic developmental issues of the day. Young African rural women cannot do it alone. Through trans-local networking with other groups, the strategic utilisation of place and an effective articulation of voice, young African rural women, by capitalising on the platform offered



by Agenda 2063, could bring about significant policy shifts that could see phenomenal societal transformation.

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Achieng’, R. (2006). ‘…And Hens began to Crow…’: Young African Women engage the Public Sphere, in, CODESRIA Bulletin, 1, 70-75.

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Boserup, E., Tan, S. F., & Toulmin, C. (2013). Woman’s role in economic development. Routledge.

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Dowden, R. (2000). The hopeless continent. The Economist, 19.

Economic Commission for Africa. (2013). Economic Report on Africa 2013. Economic Commission for Africa.

Elson, D. (1999). Labor markets as gendered institutions: equality, efficiency and empowerment issues. World development, 27(3), 611-627.

Gladwin, C. H. (1991). Structural adjustment and African women farmers. University of Florida Press.

Gumede, V. (2013). African Economic Renaissance as a Paradigm for Africa’s Socio-Economic Development. Perspectives in Thought Leadership for Africa’s Renewal. AISA Press, 484-507.

Guyer, J. I. (1997). An African niche economy: farming to feed Ibadan, 1968-88. Edinburgh University Press.

Kelsall, T., & Ellis, S. (2006). Rethinking African development: Beyond impasse, towards alternatives. African Affairs, 105(419), 295-297.

Kitunga, D., & Mbilinyi, M. (2006). Notes on Transformative Feminism in Tanzania. CODESRIA Bulletin, 1, 46-48.

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Lachenmann, G. (2008). Researching translocal gendered spaces: methodological challenges. Negotiating development in Muslim societies. Gendered spaces and translocal connections. Lanham, 13-36.

Lachenmann, G., & Dannecker, P. (2008). Negotiating development in Muslim societies: Gendered spaces and translocal connections. Lexington Books.

Manji, F. (2007). Using ICTs for Social Justice in Africa. Africa Media Review, 15(1&2), 111-124.

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Rioba, N., 2005. The Women Behind Beautiful Roses: Solving Occupational Health Hazards in Cut. CODESRIA

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United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (2012). Millennium Development Goals. United Nations Pubns.

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (2013). Millennium Development Goals. United Nations Pubns.

United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. (2005). Gender equality: striving for justice in an unequal world. United Nations Pubns.

Endnotes1 In the same breadth, whilst the Economist

article heralded a rising Africa, it cautioned against extreme optimism. It outlined the still persistent inequalities ranging from abject poverty, climate change, drought and famine, lack of viable savings, kleptocractic regimes to endemic corruption; and that above all lack of food security as food production per person which has slumped since independence in the 1960s, as factors that could impede a fully blown social-economic development for Afri-ca.

2 The continent’s first moment of transformation was the early years of independence, where many African states upon freeing themselves from the shackles of colonialism were now concerned with putting in place effective polit-ical institutions and getting governance issues right. The second moment was heralded by the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPS), which, despite causing tremendous structural constraints to the African political-economic and social landscape, necessitated states to de-mocratize. Once again the issue of governance was in the limelight.

3 The author provides statistical indicators that show that whereas growth has been registered

in some quarters, it cannot be celebrated as transformative. This is for the reason that this growth has remained stagnant over time, it’s too susceptible to external financial shocks and above all, this growth has not yet translated to social-economic development of the peoples of Africa. The latter point, the author attunes, can be vividly gauged by a reading of the Millen-nium Development Goals (MDGs). Evidence obtains that come 2015, Africa will be off track in four out of seven MDGs. Whilst this is not a mean achievement, a closer look at the projec-tion shows that Africa is off track in one of the most important social-economic developmen-tal issue. This is eradicating extreme poverty and hunger!

4 Currently, there are a number of consultations with different social groups. The results of the consultations and negotiations will be inte-grated into the current document and tabled for adoption as the continent’s vision of so-cial-economic growth at the summit of heads of state to take place in Addis Ababa in Janu-ary 2014.

5 See http://www.unrisd.org/publications

6 Rioba (2005) explicates the indecent work con-ditions that these young women are exposed to.

7 There are hardly any statistical analyses of this phenomenon and how these activities up-hold household economies and contribute to the productive sector.

8 Here, reproductive work is understood from a feminist perspective. It is taken to mean every day work that supports the household to en-gage efficiently and effectively in the produc-



tive sector (Boserup: 1970) or what is known as the economy of care (Elson: 1999).

9 Joy Mboya is a young Kenyan artist of re-nowned performance arts capacities and is the director of the go-down exhibitions centre lo-cated in Nairobi’s Industrial Area, a house to many creative arts depictions. Another impres-sive development in the Kenyan New Genera-tions critical art scene is the Kwani Trust run by a young Kenya writer and award winner Binyaviranga Wainaina and a host of other young Kenyan creative arts writers. Their in-novative book Kwani? Written is a mixture of provocative short stories, poems, cartoons and pictures taken from every day scenes in Nai-robi that criticize systems and structures and in everyday parlance (sheng) used by young Kenyans.


I have been with the University of South Africa for just over a year in the Department of Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology. I am pleased to join the university at a time where we hope to be making significant change regarding decolonising knowledge production. As an exile child of the Black Consciousness Movement it is imperative to be part of integrating the radical imagination that was part of liberation struggle and offer our students a knowledge that reflects the cultures and stories most often silenced, appropriated and mined as Western concepts. We are here to build a ‘national identity’ beyond the epistemic violence of the Eurocentric curriculum. The exceptional work produced by our students does not just lend itself to a ‘seductive’ aesthetic, but delves into the pluralities of existing as women within the possibilities of South Africa as well as recognising the neo liberal capitalist industrial complex that draws from the economy of sex and sexuality like in Roxanne Wilson’s work, which exposes modern slavery’s corporate venire. Zyma Amien steps into the critical trajectory of working from a black feminist praxis. Amien maps her heritage and begins to unpack the intersectionalities of dislocation tied into South Africa’s legacy of race, culture and kin, and the on-going ramifications

Simmi Dullay is a black consciousness exile returnee based in South Africa as well as a cultural producer. She teaches at the University of South Africa in the Department of Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology

of structural racism. Hanolet Uys uses a form of bricollage, where she cuts, pastes, draws, erases and rearranges images, creating a visual process as a methodology that investigate the unspoken. The mapping of Uys’s journey deals with coming to terms with an identity that has agency, as separate from the Apartheid culture in which she was raised and yet still acknowledge that we exist within a society of white privilege…but most importantly to find her voice to address how to identify herself beginning with a self-articulation, and not articulating or speaking for the other. On a lighter note, but just as deep a subject we have Stephanie Neville’s celebration of women and sexuality playfully presented by the whimsical rich and seductive material resembling fleshy flowers referring tongue-in-cheek to the poetry of Baudelaire Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil). The selection made focusses on the contemporary experience of what it means to be a woman in South Africa; my own work included about my experience of being forced to leave South Africa, and how I came to define the many departures and arrivals in my search for ‘home’, though later I would realise that ‘home’ did not exist in place, but in the space inhabited through relationships I forged, remembering and the imagined.

Visual Essay


An extension of the installation here not here (2012), her embroidery portraits deal with the concept of absence within a relationship from work-related separation. The unravelling figures in Man (2013) and Woman (2013) are a metaphor for the disintegration of a relationship due to absence, as well as loosing a sense of ‘self’ from being part of a long term commitment. Couple (2013) juxtaposes disengagement with the sentiment of holding on and being tied together. The traditional technique of hand embroidery echoes the effort invested in relationships and emphasizes the time spent reminiscing during periods of absence.

Inspired by the Feminist Movement, Fantasy Flower (2014) is an extension of the installation Confessions of a Bored Housewife (2013) which deals with female sexual fantasy. The overt yonic and phallic characteristics describes the concept relating to the acceptance of female sexual pleasure and the exploration of the female body.

Stephanie Neville is a Dubai based South African artist. She is UNISA Alumni and received the Excellence Award for her third year Bachelor of Visual Arts installation here not here (2012) at the UNISA Art Gallery.

Zyma looks at memory and the effects of displacement in her artwork. District 6 Overview (2011), Zig Zag pattern (2011) and memory wall (2011) deal with the effect that the displacement of her Grandfather, firstly from District Six, and again from Lansdowne had on her family. Her use of cement in Zig Zag pattern (2011 is a metaphor for home, strength, permanence and durability. In Zyma’s own words, her grandfather’s fez formed part of his identity, which he thought was permanent, but with the forced removal, he lost his identity. Zyma Amien examines aspects of socio-political history from an intensely personal perspective, with memories of her Grandfather’s twice-lived experiences of forced removal from the places where he had created his home. The impact of these has been transferred through the generations of her

family in intangible ways that constitute the familiarity of a home.

Zyma Amien is a visual artist who was born 1962 in Lansdowne, Cape Town and was the 2012 joint winner of The UNISA Best Student Award Exit Year BVA.

peoplesexploitation is an installation piece that comprises of a typical stand one would find at a business exhibition. Complete with an investors handbook and info-graphic banner, the International Trafficking Initiative is a fictious company is advertising the lucrative industry of trafficking of women and children, who in this context form a never ending supply of disposable commodity. Underneath her satirical and mocking manner, Roxanne explores themes of displacement, loss, the female body and children as consumable commodities and slavery. Through the use of a fictional company Roxanne questions the role capitalism and consumers feigned naivety of trafficking.

Roxanne Wilson is a visual artist and photographer and is currently completing BVA degree at Unisa.

Bertha Gxowa walked up the stairs of the union buildings among the many women that silently used their bodies in defiance to protest freedom of the oppressed and the betterment of the marginalised battlement. The white body in Africa forms the basis of Hanolet’s art making process. Through the white body she investigates social, political and cultural advantages accorded to whites through the legacy of the darker side of coloniality in global society. The mapped memories of racial encounters is investigated at sites of social engagement, embodied and social memory and wounded places to consider the artistic and activist place-based practice find and map the tradition of oral rather than written history.

Hanolet Uys was born in 1971 in the Free State. She is currently enrolled for a Masters in Fine Arts at the University of South Africa.

Artist biographies

Stephanie NevilleEmbroidery Portrait (Couple) (2013)Hand stitched Embroidery

Stephanie NevilleEmbroidery Portraits (Woman) (2013)Hand stitched Embroidery

Stephanie NevilleEmbroidery Portraits (Man) (2013)Hand stitched Embroidery

Stephanie NevilleFantasy Flower (2014)Acrylic on canvas

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Zyma AmienMemory Wall (2011)Installation

Zyma AmienDistrict Six overview (2011)Mapwork

Zyma AmienZig zag pattern (2011)Installation

Simmi DullayUntitled (2012)Photograph

Men

HumaNOID

MARKET SHARE

Men

HumaNOID

MARKET SHARE

Roxanne WilsonITI Map(2012)Ink on paper

Hanolet UysUntitled (2012)Ink on paper

Roxanne WilsonCrates (2012)Installation



Short Learning Programmes (SLPs)

TMALI offers the following short learning programmes.

The duration of TMALI SLPs is 6 months.Prospective students can enrol for any of the available programmes twice a year;

Semester 1: January - JuneSemester 2: June – November

Registration RequirementsStudents with relevant NQF-level 5 (Matric) plus one year of tertiary qualificationsTeaching and Learning MethodologyTuition will be delivered through:

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Fees Each Short Learning Programme costs R5 400. A deposit of R1 800 is payable on registration.

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Afrikan Feminist and Gender Studies Module 1: Introduction to the Theories of Gender and Third World Feminisms (HIPGETF)Module 2: Third World and Afrikan Feminist Responses to the UN Gender and Development model (CAGEPDR)Module 3: Role of Afrikan Feminisms in Response to States and National Policy-making (AFAINS8)

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African Perspectives Issue1, Vol1

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