The Hairy Nature of Our Race Identity

Last week, the controversial topic of Brown women’s hair, was on pretty much everyone’s lips in South Africa and possibly across the globe (and most certainly on social networking platforms) thanks to the latest edition of investigative journalist Debora Patta’s programme, 3^rd Degree which was “investigating” brown women’s hair styles and our alleged propensity to keep it anything but natural.

To begin with, I must highlight that I have misgivings on having a Caucasian woman attempt to tackle this issue. I have these misgivings, not because I believe that Caucasians should not have opinions and subsequently air said opinions on our hair but when it is done in the manner in which Patta did it, it comes across as patronising and condescending to have an “investigation” into the cause of this occurrence while simultaneously ignoring the real roots of what, in my opinion, is a form of self hatred on the part of the Brown woman and the Brown man. In addition to this, I would probably have been more comfortable with Patta’s latest insert if she had looked into the issue more broadly i.e. included an investigation into why Caucasian and even Asian women also go through similar lengths and pains to change their natural appearance because let’s face it, they do crazy and hella painful stuff to their hair too all in the name of beauty.

It goes without saying, if my Afro – textured hair isn’t a dead give away in itself, that I am strongly opposed to wigs, weaves and the texturising/ relaxing of hair by healthy brown women i.e. those not undergoing chemo therapy or experiencing balding. However, in spite of my aversion to it, I acknowledge that I have no right to dictate to anyone what they can or cannot do to feel “beautiful”.

As Afrikans we have always had our own versions of cosmetology and forms of beautification and to be fair, how does one determine what the limits of this vanity fuelled quest for ultimate beauty should be for an individual and should they claim the right to attempt to establish this determination? I do not have an answer for this neither do I wish to find one as that would translate to me finding one other way of controlling people, their bodies and how they choose to identify themselves. I do however wish to, through this article, highlight and explain, more specifically for those who do not believe that these trends bespeak a certain form of hatred and shame of their “Afrikanness”, why I believe that certain forms of the beautification of the brown woman have very racial, borne of colonialism and slavery, connotations and attachments.

Three years ago, I woke up on a Saturday morning and I realised that I had no recollection of what my hair looked like in its natural form. This was because I had been relaxing it from the time I was 13. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I got tired of being asked where I’d got my “weave” done and on one or two occasions being mistaken for another race i.e. mixed race/ coloured. This was not because my hair was exceptionally long as I had a tendency to cut it into a bob when I wanted to “try something new” but it was because of the texture of my hair which looked a lot finer and silkier than “normal” (whatever the hell normal is) Afro – textured hair and even when it had growth it never really showed as it tended to blend in with the relaxed tips. That Saturday morning I walked to the nearest salon and I literally had to beg the female hairdressers to shave my head. They remained steadfast in their refusal to heck away at it until the barber, not necessarily a bleeding heart or humanitarian but more of a savvy businessman, offered to do it for me. Fast forward to today I have a head of natural, albeit not very “kinky”, hair and I have never been happier, in spite of the sometimes hassle of managing Afro – textured hair as it grows longer. I love not only my natural hair, but the natural hair of all brown people. It looks and feels so beautiful I now cannot imagine why I laboured away at making it look as close as humanly possible to that of Caucasian or Asian women and why I, at some point, even took pride in its extra straightness and flowiness.

I have never spotted a weave, even back then. That is where I always drew the line. I would however, very occasionally get synthetic braids and although I haven’t really had a full head of braids since the chop, I am not entirely against them as they are more similar to the various forms of hair adornments that women and men across the continent used to spot even before our colonisation except that they used strands of treated tree bark and various other forms of fabric. Historically, up until the European slave trade, and the height of the Arab Slave Trade, penetrated sub-Saharan Africa, we had invented diverse ways of styling afro-textured hair and our hairstyles were used to define status, or identity, in regards to age, ethnicity, wealth, social rank, marital status, religion, fertility, manhood, and even death. These adornments and styles, some of which resemble the modern day synthetic fibre, were not an attempt to assimilate another race but were a result of our own creativity in a bid to spruce ourselves up as it were.

This is the opposite of wigs, weaves and even the texturising/relaxing of Afrikan hair and bleaching it blonde. All these, practices that are not exclusive to Brown (Black) women but include mixed race women too. Women who are inclined to make use of any one or all of these different offerings of “beauty” have defended this by saying that they want to look, well, beautiful and these things afford them that but I cannot help but wonder if they really do not realise that they are indirectly and perhaps inadvertently saying that there is nothing beautiful about Afrikan hair. That they are saying that they do not feel beautiful until they have a Caucasian or Asian element attached to them? Brown women with relaxed hair are often very distressed when they get growth in their hair. They absolutely hate it and the very sight of it is ugly and upsets them. Put simply, they hate their natural hair so much that they will urgently “fix” it with a retouch.

Many people refuse to acknowledge or accept racial identity and how we as Brown people view ourselves and place ourselves on the proverbial food chain of life as a contributing factor to our desire to carry on what I believe to be a trend, now become a culture, borne out of our oppression. Afro – textured hair aka wool hair, aka nappy hair was seen as “something bad that needed to be fixed” and to some extent it is still seen as such but now it is us ourselves who think that. During the times of slavery (and colonialism here in Afrika), Brown people were overloaded with the suggestion that straight hair was more acceptable than natural, kinky/curly hair textures such that slaves and “freedmen” began exploring solutions for straightening, or relaxing, their tresses in order to thrive, or merely to avoid mistreatment and legal and social discrimination.

Hair straightening is deeply rooted in colonialism and slavery with its foundations being a bid to make one more like the “master” and automatically gaining superiority over the other “backward” and “lesser” Brown people therefore attaining a social upgrade by physically bringing yourself closer to the “superior” being. Also it was an attempt at being more acceptable and easier on the eye for the “master” who considered us savages not only because of our cultures but because we were what they considered an “eye sore” physically.

Sadly, this desperate need to subscribe to the Eurocentric standards of beauty does not end at our hair but even goes as far as skin lightening and skin bleaching. We have over the last several generations, seen the emergence of a kind of Brown person who equates light skin to beauty and to me that is the greatest tragedy and the most blatant symbol of our continued enslavement.

“too dark… Needs to tone her skin a little… Pretty though!!”

That was the comment on the photo above that was posted by a brown woman on the Shadders page on facebook. It is tragic that people think that way. What people do not realize is that the emancipation of the Afrikan neither starts nor ends at political & economic emancipation but should find its foundations in the emancipation of the mind starting with readjusting our view of ourselves.

Interestingly and possibly sadly enough, we see today a paradigm shift, with Caucasians being more appreciative and being the “defenders” of natural Afrikan features and recognising our natural hair and dark complexion (for those who are more darker skinned) for the beautiful attributes that they are. From my own personal observations, you will find Caucasian parents to a Brown child leave their child’s hair natural and Brown parents be the ones to straighten, relax and beweave their children and as in one horror incident I saw on facebook not too long ago, for children as young as 3months old.

Am I saying that Caucasians or Asians are not beautiful? No way! But I am saying that we are as equally beautiful and this is not in spite of but because of our “nappy” hair. People are more interested in changing Caucasians’ perceptions of us; trying to force them to like us and respect us in an attempt to “empower” ourselves and yet it is our perception of ourselves we should be focusing on. Their respect of and love for us does not matter if we cannot respect and love ourselves first. That said, perhaps if Patta’s expose had tackled the issue from this perspective I would find it less offensive and perhaps if my fellow sisters acknowledge this element of latent internalised racism/self hatred within ourselves and we start interrogating the source and the reasons behind our perceptions of beauty can we truly start addressing the issue of identity and empowerment. Until then, the brown woman can never truly claim empowerment and independence and she will instead continue to be a modern day “freak show” attraction for journalists like Patta who like to poke and prod at the fascinating species that is the brown person; a little reminiscent of 19^th century Europe to be honest; and to be dressed up and dressed down to suit the whims of the Eurocentric elite.

© Doreen Victoria Gaura/ Colouredraysofgrey, 2012

 

My Afrikan Feminism

I am a woman of Afrikan origin who embraces and celebrates the knowledge that, like all women, she is a personification of the Goddess and that she is a part of a sisterhood that has been celebrated and venerated in a past age but is, in the present age, oppressed and is weakened but not defeated. Accosted but not destroyed. When asked to define Afrikan feminism I say that Afrika is one big beautiful calabash filled with different and magnificent colours, shapes and sizes of stones, seeds, sands, waters and flora. I am one of those and I know that although I am an individual I am also a part of a whole. A family of creation. My core feels deeply and widely because it is not just my pain and sorrow or elation I feel when I feel but it is the feelings of the other occupants of this bag, however different they maybe from me. My feminism comes in when I identify with my warrior self. She whose quest is not to conquer and destroy, but to empower the members of her community – in its entirety and diversity – but especially the members of the sisterhood. Those who know what I know but have forgotten over time and space. Her quest is to remind them that they have the power to choose, not just to survive but to live and manifest the Goddess in them. It is not about getting them to walk my path – because mine is set out just for me – but to find their own set out just for them individually and choose to walk them. I seek not to teach them the ways of others but to teach them to find their own way as others have, whatever those ways may be.

This continent, our Mother, tells a story of beauty, of love, of hatred, of freedom, of oppression, of joy, of sorrow, of anger, of spirituality, of faith, of wisdom, of knowledge, of science, of magic, of tears, of laughter, of music, of dance, of passion, of sexuality, of sensuality, of death, of unity, of conflict, of family, of friendship, of loyalty, of acceptance, of hospitality, of rejection, of animosity, of hunger, of plenty, of abundance, of wealth, of generosity, of theft, of sacrifice, of loyalty, of betrayal, of envy, of jealousy, of pride, of heaven, of hell, of destruction, of creation but most of all, a story of strength and resilience, a story of survival. A story of Life. A story that cannot be told by one person or told only once or told in just one way or in just one voice. Hers is a never ending story.

They call Her the “dark continent” and tell stories of desolation and destruction but no light has ever shone brighter than the light that She shines and that is why She remains the most coveted in the world. She represents each and every woman born to Her and we represent Her. She is the beginning and She shall be the end, whenever She chooses it to be so. This is the story of the Afrikan woman. The Afrikan feminist. For as long as we continue to wear the shackles around us, the shackles around our minds and our bodies, She too shall She continue to wear the shackles around Herself; In solidarity and in mourning. No one can tell Afrika who She is and no one can tell you who you are. No one but yourself. Not the ram of patriarchy nor the serpent of matriarchy. Just you. My feminism is not to tell you who you should be but to tell you, and them, who I am. To pave the way for you to do the same if you so choose and hopefully I will inspire you to make the choice to choose for yourself too sister. That is my Afrikan Feminism.

© Doreen Victoria Gaura/ Colouredraysofgrey, 2012

 

Afrikan Princess Diaries

“Racism means that a lot of people have a tough time imagining people of colour in places of power and glamour. Specifically, princesses are figured as beautiful and charming, and racist ideas of black women have traditionally positioned them as ugly and bad mannered.”

Although I agree with what I assume is the motive behind the article (http://www.genderacrossborders.com/2012/04/23/a-question-of-royalty-how-black-princesses-are-faring-on-the-international-stage/) I can’t help but interrogate it and in particular the excerpt. I could be wrong but I get the impression that the writer implies that the “black” princesses are just as apt when it comes to exhibiting “white” people’s manners as the “white” princesses and based on this that qualifies them for due recognition. I feel if indeed the point of this piece is to advocate the recognition of brown skinned princesses, particularly those married to European princes, then surely the writer should be highlighting that although our manners may differ from those of the Europeans, they are just as good and deserve the same kind of respect.

Rain Queen Modjadji

In addition this piece, in my opinion, along with the other one who’s link is inserted at the end of this article, lean very heavily towards the eurocentric definition of what a princess makes, from focusing on brown princesses who marry into European monarchies to the innuendos that it is only the glamorous princesses in huge castles wearing jewellery designed by Gauthier who are worth the mention and it is this sort of acclaim that the brown skinned little girls they seem to be representing should aspire to. If we are really celebrating brown royalty, then please, let us celebrate brown royalty and not just brown royalty that only became royalty by “making the cut into whiteness” as well as those born into royalty. Royalty as is defined by taking into consideration the various traditional political systems in Afrika pre colonialism and the few that have managed to survive today such as the Kingdom of the Toro in Uganda with the Princess Komuntale – who incidentally is set to wed this coming July, the Zulu with King Mangosuthu Buthelizi’s daughters and granddaughters who include musical sensation Latoya Buthelezi aka Toya DeLazy; Princess Sikhanyiso Dlamini of Swaziland and the Rain Queens of the Balobedu in the Limpopo Province of South Afrika just to name a few.

Toya Delazy

I appreciate the effort to bring to light the exclusion of brown skinned royalty, particularly those of the female sex, from media focus and celebration but one must be careful that in doing so they are not perpetuating the same stereotypes they are trying fight or even replacing them with equally damaging ones.

© Doreen Victoria Gaura/ Colouredraysofgrey, 2012

 

I Am My Mother’s Daughter

Siphikelelo “Spike” Gaura – 1967 – 2003

Being an immigrant living in South Africa, I have found myself having to answer this question more often than I remember ever having to when I still lived in Zimbabwe: “Are you Shona or Ndebele?”

While out and about a couple of weekends ago, I not only found myself having to answer this question for the umpteenth time, but I also found myself having to defend my answer: “I am half Shona, half Ndebele”.

Usually, the people who ask that are non-Zimbabweans and although they may be a bit baffled by my response, they never question it. Zimbabweans on the other hand, once establishing kinship tend to ask where in Zimbabwe I am from and not “who” in Zimbabwe I belong to and I suppose that is why I have hardly ever had to defend or explain my response on this side of the Limpopo. My questioner, who incidentally is Zimbabwean, however, asked the “who” and not the “where” and I suppose because he is familiar with our cultures and norms he wanted to know why I identify as both when I should be identifying as a member of the ethnic group my father belonged to.

The answer to that is very simple and that is I am my mother’s daughter. A lot of people have assumed before and will probably assume now that this is based on my feminist ideologies as they are presented to us Afrikans by Western world feminism but nothing could be further from the truth.

I was raised by my maternal grandparents. My mother fell pregnant with me when she was still in high school and although my grandparents were disappointed and angry, they did what very few parents in Zimbabwe at that time did and that was not pull my 17yr old mother out of school and force her into marriage. Instead, soon after I was born, she was sent back to school and my grandparents raised me as their child and my mother became my “sister” and her siblings my siblings. I suppose one can say they were progressive and not to mention that being educated helped some.

Although my grandparents always told me that I am their child, they also told me the truth about who my parents were, they never at any point claimed to be my biological parents or made me inherit my mother’s family name so to pre-adolescent Doreen, they were my parents and to adult Doreen they still are. I may not officially have been a Mpofu but I was raised, socialised and educated as one. I identified as one and Gaura was just a name that I wrote on my school books because I had to write something and apparently that something had to match what was on my birth certificate.

I only met my father when I was nine years old and his family and relatives when I was ten when my parents got married. That was the beginning of my induction into the Gaura family and the Gaura ways. Although everyone, including my maternal grandparents and my mother tried so hard to get me to accept that side of my family, I never fully accepted it and in a way they never fully accepted me. They will always be strangers and I will always be a Mpofu.

My great grandfather, on my mother’s side, who died when I was 12years old, was a Sangoma. I only found this out, or rather only got to fully understand and appreciate it much later as such talk and beliefs were somewhat taboo in my grandparents’ home. Ours was a Christian household so this was not really accepted in my family. Thankfully they have become more flexible though in their old age especially given my choice to no longer subscribe to Christianity.

My grandfather and his father were not estranged however, in fact we all enjoyed a wonderful relationship with Khulu Mangidi (a nickname he acquired in his youth on account of the fact that he smoked a pipe, like an English gentleman which is quite ironic if you think about it). We simply never talked about his gift. It is only in my adult years that I have chosen to get in touch with my aboriginal spirituality and to get a better understanding of our culture that I realise that I missed out on a wonderful opportunity to learn all I could from this great man.

During a traditional ceremony called kubika doro a few years ago, a relative from my mother’s side of the family who is a spirit medium, while under possession, told my mother’s family that although I am not mwana wekwa Mpofu (a Mpofu) they recognise me as such and they do not view me as a grandchild who belongs to the Gauras. Their choice to make this acknowledgement was apparently at the behest of my late mother’s spirit. Anyone who has any knowledge of the protocol within the different Zimbabwean cultures when it comes to recognition and genealogical identity will know that this is not done as it is considered a sign of disrespect to the Gaura family and their ancestors. We must however, bear in mind that one can not be sure if this has always been the case amongst the aboriginal people of this little section of Southern Afrika or if it is due to the Christian missions and the resultant colonization of the land and the people. After all, some historians postulate that a lot of tribes in the region of Zimbabwe and Mozambique were at some point matrilineal. Perhaps it was not just our mothers’ names we inherited but also their ancestors.

In my teens I read Egyptian writer and feminist activist Nawal El Saadawi’s autobiography A Daughter of Isis and in her introduction she wrote something that resonated within me:

I loved my mother more than my father. But he removed my mother’s name from next to mine, and wrote down his instead. I kept asking myself why he had done that. When I asked him he said, “It is God’s will.” That was the first time I had heard the word God. I learnt that he lived in the heavens. I could not love anyone who removed my mother’s name from next to mine, who abolished her as though she did not exist. 

I identified with El Saadawi in that moment. I did not understand why I was being forced to belong to someone I did not love. I never loved my father. Prior to meeting him I loved the idea of him. The man I imagined he was but when I met him and especially when I went to live with my parents at 16, I realised that I had no bond with him and I would never love him. I knew why but I did not understand why I was being forced to belong to a people I had no connection with.

Today I have a better understanding of that but I also have a better understanding of the bond between my mother and I and the bond between most mothers and their children. For a very long time, aeons ago, people had no real understanding of conception and believed that women fell pregnant on their own and perhaps this attributed to the Goddess worship that was common place in those times and vice versa. The logic was, because women are the personification of the Goddess and the Goddess is the creator of life therefore they have the power to make themselves pregnant and create life. This reinforced matriarchy and matriliny within these communities therefore making women the centre of social and biological hereditary derivation. Uncertainty around paternity also contributed to the existence of such a social structure.

Although the modern times in which we live have presented us with more logical and accurate explanations and we now know that to have been an incorrect interpretation of conception I am still fond of that notion and not necessarily from a mystical perspective but certainly a spiritual one. Yes a woman needs a man to conceive and yes it is the SRY gene that’s said to set developmental pathways towards maleness in the Y chromosome thereby determining the sex of a child but even though people believe that we get half our DNA from our mother and half our DNA from our father, some scientists maintain that this is not entirely accurate as there is one small piece of DNA that is inherited only through our mothers, the energy generating Mitochondrial DNA aka the Eve Gene. We all inherit this from our mothers, and only our mothers. It is only inherited through the female line. That little bit of extra goodness that only mama can hook you up with. Even in male children who inherit the Y gene from their fathers they still get the little extra from their mothers in the form of the Eve Gene.

It is because I acknowledge this and I know that my father is a part of my complete being that I always acknowledge my Shona “half” but even with this realisation and acceptance of the scientific, I still choose her. It is my mother I bonded with from inception. It is my mother who gave me life and sustained it. Do not get me wrong, I am not dismissing the importance of men in the lives of their offspring nor am I saying that all women who have children are good mothers to their children or that people cannot love their father as much or possibly even more than their mothers as that would not only be very false but also ill informed. Because I do not believe that being a mother and being a father are necessarily mutually exclusive when it comes to parenting – when not confining the self to the limitations of gender and sex, a mother is very capable of being a father to her child and a father a mother to his – I therefore do not think a hierarchy should exist. However, someone already beat me to it and a hierarchy does exist and as it stands it’s the father who takes precedence. Irrespective of whether or not he is present or he is a loving father. It is his family’s name you inherit when you are born even though there is always room for doubt when it comes to paternity. It is his cultures and customs you are expected to know and practice and it is his people you should recognise and affiliate yourself with and not those of your mother.

People subconsciously and even ignorantly for some, venerate the mother and her true role in the life of a child. Father Time has secretly preserved the long forgotten and banished Mother Earth in one of the most powerful and influential instruments of all, language. In our language i.e. the words we assign certain things and the methods of verbal identification, we secretly proclaim the true importance of our mothers and if you are so inclined, the Goddess. Our personification of nature, our countries of origin and our vernacular languages is not only feminine but it is also maternal i.e. Mother Nature, Motherland and Mother Tongue. In Shona and isiNdebele, when you are hurt, anguished or afraid people exclaim the words Amaiwe or Maibabo which when translated loosely is a cry to one’s mother for rescue, relief or comfort.

I personally do not believe in the existence of a hierarchy when it comes to parenting and genealogical identity but if people are going to insist on one and not only that but try and ram one down my throat I am going to tell you that I am my mother’s daughter and I belong to my mother’s people. It is not only about where society positions you in people’s lives. It is also about what position you have earned in people’s lives. I am made up of two parts but if you are going to insist I pick one in order to establish my identity I pick that of my mother. After all:

Mother is the name for God on the lips and hearts of all children – Eric Draven, The Crow originally said by William Makepeace Thackery

 

The Need for Visibility of the Invisible Children Amended

The Kony 2012 campaign against Ugandan LRA leader Joseph Kony and his use of child soldiers released by the human rights organisation Invisible Children (IC) last week has caused quite a stir globally and has been quite controversial. However, the issue of children in combat is not new at all and it is a very grave one which constitutes one of the worst forms of child labour. The issue was highlighted by the landmark 1996 study by Graça Machel and the UN Secretary General appointed a Special Representative on the issue. Although it is not an issue in South Africa (although it could be argued that children involved in gang activity constitute children involved in combat), it is or has been an issue in a number countries on the continent namely Central African Republic, Chad, Sudan, DRC, Cote d’Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Burundi and Uganda. One that is said to be most critical in Afrika affects us all in one way or another.

Both girls and boys fall victim to this. They are beaten and exposed to all sorts of hazardous conditions. Girls are subjected to rape and other forms of sexual violence and many of them fall pregnant and have babies or contract STIs and HIV as a result as they were often “wifed” by commanders in the group. By 2008, the LRA had yet to release many women and children from its ranks, claiming that those remaining were their wives and children. Despite repeated pleas and a request by the UN Secretary-General they were still not released and while the total number of remaining LRA fighters in the bush remained unknown, up to 2,000 women and children were believed to remain in LRA camps in the eastern DRC and southern Sudan. According to the Child Soldiers Global Report, 2008:

“About 25,000 children were abducted by the LRA from the beginning of the conflict in the late 1980s. Abductions peaked after 2002, with an estimated 10,000 children abducted between May 2002 and May 2003 alone. Throughout 2003 and 2004 more than 20,000 child ‘night commuters’ sought safety each night in Gulu, Kitgum and Pader towns, to reduce the risk of their abduction.” 

Child soldiers join armed groups for various reasons such as economic or social pressure or because they believe that the group will offer food or security. Others are forcibly recruited, “press-ganged” or abducted by armed groups. As part of their initiation they are at times forced to kill family or relatives in order to ensure their loyalty and prevent possible defection. Government forces in some countries including Uganda and the DRC have also been guilty of recruiting children under 18 into armed conflict.

There have been developments over the years thanks to local and international efforts particularly in the form of policy and legislation with most notably and most recently the conviction by the ICC of Thomas Lubanga for the war crime of enlisting and conscripting children under 15 in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) armed conflict in the Ituri region between 2002 and 2003 and now faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. Other efforts to note are United Nations Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict which prohibits the forced recruitment of children under the age of 18 or their use in hostilities as well as the ILO Convention on the Worst Forms of Child Labour that prohibits the forced or compulsory recruitment of children under the age of 18 for use in armed conflict. Also, the office of the UN Secretary General’s Special Representative on Children in Armed Conflict was established in 1997, following the Machel Report, facilitating a global focus on the issue.

Although conversation and debate are welcomed and encouraged in activism, it is important not to divert attention from the issue. I acknowledge that very pertinent issues have been raised by different people globally with most of the concerns raised being founded but my bone of contention lies with the fact that the people who are talking about the campaign are not really addressing the issue of children in armed conflict. They are instead focusing on the implications on the portrayal of the continent and its people as a result thereof i.e. either as war and atrocity mongering savages or as helpless victims that need the West to come and save them.

In part, I agree with most of these concerns but I must highlight that I feel that to some degree some of these concerns, particularly the one of the portrayal of Afrika are, however founded, also a matter of projection, denial of our realities as well as self involved and uninterested arrogance. I realise that this is harsh but based on conversations that I have had I think it is fair for me to say. The assumption that everyone else in the world (one wonders if this said world includes the rest of Afrika that is not Uganda, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America or if it only constitutes the US, the UK and the “Western Bloc”) is a supposition that is perhaps informed by one’s own sentiments about the continent upon first watching the video. People seem to either be in denial or actively ignorant of the experiences of the people outside of their immediate social and geographical sphere and although they purport to, in a quasi Pan Afrikanist fashion, champion the rights of the Afrikan in the face of adversity they appear to only be willing to do so when “outsiders” are the said adversity. Lastly, when I asked some of those who question the legitimacy and sincerity of Jason Russell and his colleagues’ claim to care about the children if they themselves care and they have said that they don’t but they care that a group of Americans want to profiteer from Afrikan children. This is fair enough to say but should it really just be about whether or not the Americans genuinely care and not whether or not we as Afrikans care and what we are willing to do about it.

That said, I agree that IC’s callous encouragement of US militarization in Afrika is both harmful and unwelcome especially after the failure of the US backed Operation Iron Fist in 2002 that did more harm than good and saw LRA forces that had left Uganda crossing back into Uganda and carrying out attacks on a large and brutal scale. The same can be said of their suggestion that it is up to their government to put a stop to Kony. There needs to be a rethink on their strategy and they need to take into consideration that a lot of the issues can be attributed to US and Western influence and perhaps it is this that they should be encouraging their government to end.

Awareness raising and advocacy are important but they need to be conducted intelligently and knowledgeably, devoid of any monolithic neo colonial ill informed notions and one needs to be careful what they are advocating for. Unfortunately, this video could also lead people to believe that “stopping” Joseph Kony will be enough and automatically mean the end of over two decades of conflict or that the situation is as simple as Ugandan army and US armed forces = good guys, rebels = bad guys because nothing could be further from the truth.

IC itself is an organisation with questionable motives for the work it does, mostly based on their spending of donations, their continued call for the expansion of US militarization and apparent close relations with the Museveni government and right wing anti-gay rights Christian groups, their arrogant approach and the implications in the video that until now, nothing else was done by others to end the LRA’s reign of terror in Northern Uganda as well as justified concerns of whether or not they truly comprehend the issues surrounding the conflict.

I find it worrying that the current absence of the LRA in Uganda in the last 7years has given credence to and substantiated beliefs by some that the whole campaign is pointless and in part this is true however the issue should not be about the LRA’s presence or absence in Northern Uganda but its presence anywhere and the atrocities that it commits, particularly those committed against children. It is not the work of the LRA in Northern Uganda this campaign, or any other should seek to end but its work, and of other militia forces that use children period and this includes countries like the DRC, CAR, Southern Sudan and Darfur where children in armed conflict are still present.

People have suggested that there are more important issues than that of children in armed conflict that need to be dealt with and that this is just a symptom of these issues and I concur that the issue of children in conflict is as a result of a plethora of other issues but I don’t agree that it is not just as important. As in the case of diseases, symptoms should not be viewed in isolation but they too must be prioritised and dealt with accordingly and it is very troubling that people who have commented do not seem to appreciate this.

At the end of the day however, our differences aside, two things remain and the first is that children need to be protected at all times and at all costs no matter where in the world they are from. Recruiting, abducting and coercing children into armed conflict is a gross human rights violation and there is an urgent need to abolish it once and for all and a good place to start is getting more and more people involved in ensuring this. The second thing is that although we need to do away with the “save Afrika” syndrome, we also need to realise that ultimately we need to encourage collective social responsibility and an altruistic moral strength in people globally as well as foster a transnational connection that doesn’t come from a place of arrogance or mistrust.

 

Whose Feminism Is It Anyway?

A friend forwarded me a link to Zimbabwean feminist activist, scholar, and regional coordinator of Just Associates (JASS)^↑ Southern Africa, Shereen Essof’s article South Africa: patriarchy, paper, and reclaiming feminism and I must say it makes for a very interesting read indeed. It left me thinking about feminism, in all its various forms, and not only did I think of the ideology of it but I did so on a much wider geographical scale than the one tackled by Essof in this article i.e. across the entire continent.

On the most part I agree with Essof, there most certainly needs to be a collective feminism, “measuring success not by how high a woman can climb, but by the condition in which most women remain”. I also agree that often times the feminist agenda falls on the wayside or takes the backburner to what are implied (through a lack of prioritisation or in some countries a blatant disregard for gender equality) to be “more important or bigger” agendas that feminists might be a part of such as trade unions or even Afrikan nationalist struggles during colonialism and all this because it is not considered an agenda in its own right.

For instance, although the liberation struggle in South Afrika, as in many Afrikan countries, created a platform to acknowledge women’s movements across the continent with the collective consciousness (Afrikan liberation) forming the foundations of the indigenous feminist movements, it has become evident that even though women’s groups were very visible and active then, they were still considered by some as auxiliary to the more patriarchal political parties of the liberation. So when Essof says “It’s the same old story, women work in supporting and building the struggles and organizations, but the campaigns are designed in ways that do not  accommodate women’s agendas”, it is easy for me to agree and come to the realisation that although nationalism, by way of example, mobilised women as political agents in the struggle days, it also acted as a restraint that hindered them from exercising their agency or allowing them to bring to the fore their fight against gender inequality.

I also agree that achieving gender equity, not only in South Afrika but in Afrika as a whole should not just be on paper. It goes beyond just signing and ratifying regional and international instruments and means very little if the implementation or lack thereof leaves a lot to be desired.

Be that as it may, I can’t bring myself to agree completely with Essof, particularly when she speaks of the evils of nationalism and its patriarchal make up. I say this because I feel that nationalism in itself is not a bad thing but it is the way in which it is designed and presented that needs to be tackled. A gender sensitive approach is paramount to the idea and success of nationalism and there is a need to deconstruct the masculinity within it and patriarchal foundation on which it is built. The empowerment and complete emancipation of Afrika is a dire need in order for the progression of its people, including the women. We must not forget that women on this continent were once powerful and respected. The subjugation of woman in my opinion, based on history, came with the subjugation of the Afrikan. Unfortunately Pan Afrikanism and Black Consciousness today have a very masculine face and one needs only look up the list of the “well known” Pan Afrikanists online to find that the list is only made up of men. The redistribution of not just political but economic power needs to go back into the hands of the people but these people are not just the men but also the women and there needs to be the realisation that this ideology is not foreign or Western but it is one that has been part of Afrikan authentic tradition, prior to the monotheistic Abrahamic religions that facilitated the enslavement and colonisation of the aboriginal Afrikan (see King Leopold II’s letter to the church). There is also a need for Afrikan feminists to see that tradition and culture need not be the enemy especially if approached from their original composition and they were not always oppressive of the female.

In academic circles, the emergence of spiritual feminism the past 20 or so years has been frowned upon and so quickly dismissed but I would not advise this within the Afrikan context. Afrika is historically acknowledged as the birth place of humanity, civilisation and religion and spirituality so it only stands to reason that Afrikans are amongst some of the most religious and spiritual peoples on the planet. Instead of fighting this I strongly believe that Afrikan feminists learn from this and design their activism against this backdrop and not that of other cultures. Whether one believes in the supernatural or the mystical is neither here nor there if their targeted beneficiaries and constituencies do.

From an academic or intellectual perspective the need for people to hold onto the idea of a supernatural being who is all powerful should be respected therefore the fact that there was widespread Goddess worship with people believing Her/Them to be the original Womb and Creator of the universe and all things within, in Afrika prior to Western influence is testimony to the possibility of empowerment and reverence of women on the continent. Afrika has its own powerful women throughout history from Nefertari and Nefertitti to Dahya, warrior queen of the Berbers to Mamphela Ramphele to Wangari Maathai to Nawal el Saadawi and to Dr. Buchi Emecheta that there really is no need to constantly look to the western champions of women’s lib such as Simone de Beauvoir for inspiration. This of course is not to say that there is nothing to learn from such great and inspirational minds as nothing would be further from the truth but instead is to highlight that not only do contexts differ but as Afrikans we have our own great minds and our own functional systems too, even if we may forgotten them. We need to make use of the feminism within culture and tradition as well as (given the nature of Afrikan societies i.e. a case where spiritualism and religion are paramount on the Continent) a need to make use of spiritual feminism.

Although I may not agree completely with American University professor and author Clenora Hudson – Weems’ Africana Womanism theory I believe she is right when she postulates that by and large the average Afrikan woman does not see the Afrikan man as her enemy as it is suggested by Western feminism that appears to be waging a war against men for subjugating women and therefore that the choice to be a wife, a mother, to cook all the meals, give up the opportunity for career advancement and to provide financially for the family so that your husband can do it instead and give up one’s individual identity by taking on the husband’s name is not necessarily a sign of disempowerment of the woman. Being pregnant and broody should not necessarily be seen as a sign of disempowerment or lack of ambition but instead be seen as the woman accepting the great responsibility that only a woman was capable of carrying out, of creating life.

When Essof tackles the patriarchy in conservative traditionalism in her article I realise that she does so, as do many people in post-colonial Afrika, from the perspective of one who has bought into the ideology of our tradition and culture as it was redefined, redesigned and readministered by our colonisers. The thing this is though, there is a need to provide revisionist histories of the role of the Afrikan woman within Afrikan society and to revisit culture and tradition on the continent. Fighting post-colonial culture which is mistaken by many as authentic indigenous culture and its vilification does nothing for the feminist fight in Africa, in my opinion, and instead only serves to reinforce people’s resistance of it and continues to reinforce the impression that feminism is a western ideology that has no place in Africa. We should instead, look into reviving authentic cultures that revered women as well as rethink our strategy and stop pushing a Western feminist agenda while ignoring our own aboriginal feminism.

© Doreen Victoria Gaura/ Colouredraysofgrey, 2012

 

Patrice and Laygwan Sharkie In Worship of the River

I can not begin to express just how much I am in love with this song and not simply because it is sung by one of my favourite musicians but because it is sung by men who in their tribute to the Goddess, to woman and to Africa exhibit reverence for our roots. From a Zimbabwean perspective, the introduction venerates the Shona Goddess Dzivaguru or Dziva whom, amongst the Shona, is the Goddess of the river, the earth, the rain clouds and the darkness of the night. Patrice personifies her here and therefore, she not only represents our continent but she represents the Woman:

He went down to the river
And this is what she said:
I look simple yet I’m complex
I do not distract
I have the same color 
As the son I was built of
My shape is beautiful

A little further into the song Laygwan alludes to the inspiration for his name and also gives praise to what I assume is the Gwan of the Bambara of Mali. The Gwan are believed to represent fertility and childless mothers are taken to Gwan societies/ associations to help them conceive. In Mali you will find Gwan sculptures which are usually of a mother and a child and a father:

“lay” was born from the soil
that was planted by the “gwan
I am the son of sons of chamnuka and
Nehanda hrere true kwere kwere african

Patrice aka Patrice Bart-Williams is Sierra Leonine-German decent and is based in Europe while Laygwan Sharkie is a Zimbabwean musician, also based in Europe. No matter how far you may be from the Motherland, it is hard to stop loving her and longing for her, if at all your love was pure and true. In fact, sometimes you find that it takes you leaving to realise this love. Enjoy! 

With love,

From Africa x

 

If It Aint Broke’, Why Fix It?

I am a strong African woman,

I am not black but a delicious shade of brown

The colour of my Mother

Mother Earth

I represent the strength of her qualities through the strength of my own

I am the embodiment of her soul

I am sensuous and curvy

Maybe not as curvy as you would like me to be

But I am curvy

My breasts,

Large and round like the mountains

Will one day give sustenance to my offspring

My womanhood is the doorway to my soul

Like the core is the doorway to my Mother’s

My stretch marks,

My beautiful stretch marks

Represent my growth into a woman

My nappy hair,

In all its splendour

Symbolises the plants that grow on the body of my Mother

My narrow but curvy hips

Are big enough to carry the children I will one day bear

And are visible enough  for me to sway to the song of the wind

My portly belly, round and big

Shows my fertility and my ability to one day carry comfortably the young women and men who will lead our nations tomorrow

My loud voice,

Sings sweetly as I speak of the strength of the women who came before and the women who shall come after

My eyes are as clear and glorious as the stars

They speak the truth of my soul

My smile lights up my face just like the sun lights up that of my Mother

My tears cleanse my soul and clean the wounds of those I love,

And so do my Mother’s tears as they rain down to cleanse the earth

My brilliant mind always seeks to learn so that it can one day teach

And my heart beats strongly and purposefully

Gives life to the lives I touch just like the moon that is my Mother’s heart

All these things,

Even those that are imperfect in your eyes

Make up the master piece that is me

And I aint broke,

So don’t try to fix me.

by Doreen Gaura

© Doreen Victoria Gaura/ Colouredraysofgrey, 2012

 

The Death of the African

Perhaps what we need is a rebirth of Africa

I am disgusted when an African man tells me that women are weak and are subservient to men.

Disgusted because, in spite of his education, it displays his ignorance of the history of his people.

He does not know that African Queens lead warriors to fight the Europeans and the Arabs at their onset.

When men did not know how.

I am disgusted by an African woman who foolishly believes Eurocentric patriarchal cultures & beliefs to be our own & vehemently champions them.

Beliefs that demand of her subservience,

When it is we who are the gate keepers of humanity & creators of life.

I am disgusted by the African who when they see me pray, ask me to whom I pray if I am not a Christian.

Who did we pray to before the boats & horses arrived with their monotheistic Abrahamic religions?

Did we not know God?

Or is the idea of a non European version of God so terrible?

Africa is the cradle of human kind & yet to most of us African sovereignty is deeply entrenched in capitalism & hatred.

Regularly administered by the unholy trinity –

Greedy politicians, self serving religious leaders & the propagating media.

I have little desire to fight for the emancipation of the African man right now,

Because in spite of his emancipation the enslavement of the African woman,

Of herself and by herself,

Rages on.

In fact,

It worsens.

As the man grows stronger,

The tighter his grip around her throat becomes,

& the tighter she binds herself in obedient restraint.

The “education” of our people,

A miseducation through misprescription,

Has made them more ignorant.

It has weakened them even more.

We relinquish the power inherent in us

For a power inherent in others,

As we feel it will make us better,

But it doesn’t.

The chains of bondage pull tighter around us.

They came here to “teach” us.

Teach us what?

How to be more like them?

How to survive?

No! How to serve and obey.

We already know how to survive.

Even if we have forgotten,

We know.

Is what they teach wrong?

No. It isn’t.

At least not wrong for them.

It is just wrong for us.

We don’t need to be taught anything.

All we need is to remember.

Remember what we already know.

What we have always known,

But have long forgotten & refuse to remember.

They dazzle us with their ways and their life.

We hate them & yet we wish so badly to be like them.

They came to take and we gave.

Yet today we pretend to reclaim.

Reclaim what if we do not even know what we lost?

They have taught us to hate ourselves

& each other.

They have taught our women how they should look,

& our men how our women should not look,

They have taught us to desire and take more than we need,

& give very little or nothing back.

They have taught us that even if we are “not as good” we are still “better” than.

They have taught us to destroy and justify.

& learn very well we have.

Soon we will forget what true beauty means to us,

& we will always see “ugliness” on every surface.

Mostly our own.

Soon we will have no neighbours or home

Once we have destroyed our Motherland & all that live in it.

We have rejected the Land & She rejects us in return.

We have beaten, raped & murdered our Mother,

& now She wont feed us or protect us.

We turned our backs on the Guardians

& now They cant defend us.

We have betrayed ourselves

& soon, we may never be able to save ourselves.

by Doreen Gaura

© Doreen Victoria Gaura/ Colouredraysofgrey, 2012

 

I Am Doreen and I am not Black!

Colour me brown I say!

Why are my fellow brown skinned people touchy about being called kafir or nigger and yet are so quick to persecute me when I refuse to be identified as black and would rather be called a brown skinned woman. People don’t seem to want to bother with finding out the origins and meanings of these words. The words “nigger” & “black” mean more or less the same thing, just in different languages. Kafir means “infidel” in Arabic, where the word finds its origins. Honestly, I am more a kafir than I am a black person. Why? Because I am not Muslim nor am I Christian or Jewish, the other two Abrahamic religions, so that would make me some what an infidel. The colour of my skin is brown, not black. The colour of my eyes is brown not black. My hair is very black but seeing as I have more skin than I do hair I refuse for you to call me by my hair colour. Besides, you are likely to find a lot more people who have different skin colours, complexions and tones from mine with black if not blacker hair and yet their race is identified by their skin not their hair.

Some of you might be quick to jump to the argument that there are historically negative connotations to the words “kafir” and “nigger” and you would be right but let me ask you this, have you ever stopped to think that there are negative connotations to the word black as per its use to identify us? Have you asked yourself why when we are so obviously brown, those that came from the outside decided to identify us as black and why they decided to call themselves white? Across various cultures and faiths, the symbolism of those two colours varies with a lot of the much older or prehistoric/ ancient being positive but in those of the “explorers”, “traders” and “missionaries” who gave our ancestors this identity that is not the case. Given that the Caucasians aren’t really white neither are the       aboriginal peoples of the African continent really black, one can’t help but feel that these colours were also chosen because the colour white, in their culture, signified something pure, good and divine and the colour black signifies sin, darkness, the underworld. In other words white people are pure and good and black people are soiled and bad.

This can be seen in our societies today and particularly within brown skinned communities. Be it in Africa or America or the UK. Brown skinned women spend a lot of time, money and energy in an effort to look “beautiful” and when you really scrutinize how this beauty is defined you will see that beauty to brown skinned women is as was defined during colonial times and slavery i.e. long locks of straight hair, fair complexions and smaller and straighter noses. If one takes the time out to watch the documentary Dark Girls they will see that in the African American and “black” American community, the darker you are, the less attractive you are. Here in Africa, fairer skinned Africans consider themselves better looking than the darker skinned Africans. As if that is not bad enough, we have brown skinned men who believe that a beautiful brown skinned woman is one who looks like African barbie. The point is, the people who claim to have more pride and a firmer grasp on their identity than I do simply because I reject the word black as my identifier seem to have more of an identity crisis than I do.

What does all this mean? Simple, I am not black so don’t call me black. Call me African. Call me Zimbabwean. Call me brown but call me black and you and I will have a serious problem. You dare to question my loyalty to my roots and heritage simply because you identify yourself and subsequently me based on misinformation and indoctrination and I will do more than poke your eye out with a sharp stick.

I am not ashamed of the colour of my skin. The true colour of my skin. I am not ashamed of the diversity in the African culture and spirituality that I descend from. I am not ashamed of my curly-kinky head of hair. The way I speak or my refusal to be called black are neither an endorsement of your ignorance nor are they a renunciation of the brown skinned, curved, curly haired African Goddess that I am.

© Doreen Victoria Gaura/ Colouredraysofgrey, 2012