African Women Making Change
Page 2 of 2
|
|
Even in big cities, women do these chores. In Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, women living in the very heart of the city spend hours each day, trudging back and forth to polluted wells in search of water. My computer now holds thousands of photos of women at work.
What emerges from these massed photos, first and foremost, is a bigger picture, a broader definition of violence against women. It is not just wife-beating or rape or sexual servitude. It is not just psychological tyranny and threat. For countless women in village and town, violence against women is life itself—a life that demands relentless forced hard labor just because they are women.
Showtime
Wherever I go, the Global Crescendo Project culminates in a photo show. Invariably, in every location, it is the First-Ever-All-Women's-Photographic-Exhibition and a very big deal. Each photographer selects her most important images. I print enlargements and have them laminated. The photographers choose a venue and extend formal invitations to the chiefs and sub-chiefs, notables and dignitaries, families and friends, sometimes the whole village.
If the show is held in a meeting hall or school, we mount the photos on the wall. If it takes place under a village tree, the photographers hold up the pictures themselves, for all to see. Each woman in turn speaks about her photos—why she took them, what they show about what's right or wrong with the community, what must change.
What happens then depends largely on local leadership. Outsiders often draw broad generalizations about foreign "cultures" as if they were all of a piece. In fact, African cultures are in flux and often dramatically varied. Old traditions may be belligerently defended by one chief, while repudiated by another in a village just down the road. African "cultures" rest on the conservatism or courage of such men—and on the rising voices of women.
Last September, in the village of Zatta in Ivory Coast, women photographers who had never before attended a village meeting, spoken in public, or even dared to look at a chief stood before the village notables in the public square and showed their photos of women working hard. Then, Zounan Sylvie displayed a photograph of a woman's bruised and bleeding leg. The woman's husband had beaten her badly. Sylvie said the woman couldn't take any more beatings and wanted the villagers to see a photo of her whole battered body, but Sylvie feared that if the woman was recognized, her husband might kill her.
At that, the chief raised his arm. "I have heard your message," he said. "I do not want violence of any kind. If such violence goes on in this village, it must stop now."
After the show he invited the photographers—who had formed an organization called Anouanze ("Unity")—to join his council of advisors. He invited all village women to attend village meetings. Overnight, cameras in hand, the women of Zatta village, who had never had a voice in public affairs, moved to the center of governance, and there they remain almost eight months later. This was our project's greatest triumph, and a rebuke to those who adhere to the truism, "Change takes time."
In February, at the photo exhibition in the town of Kailahun in Sierra Leone, another powerful chief denounced all foreign non-governmental organizations (without whom his war-torn town would have even less in the way of health care, schools, and food) and warned all the townspeople: "Do not speak of FGM [female genital mutilation]. It is our tradition. We do not want foreign traditions." He then stomped out of the exhibition hall, followed by his cronies.
I was taken by surprise, for the chief had once welcomed us warmly and, in the whole course of the project, nobody had ever spoken about FGM. I make it a point to discuss only issues the women themselves raise with their photographs; FGM is an atrocity, but it is also a potent taboo.
After the show, when IRC national staff members went to talk to the chief, he told them he knew that FGM was a bad practice and should be stopped, but gradually—another believer that change takes time, despite the power he can wield.
A week later, after I'd left, 500 women marched through the town in a display of support for FGM, a display of loyalty to the chief. They carried signs that said in Mende and English, "We don't talk about it." I saw this as our greatest defeat until I got an email from an IRC national staff member. "It's really a very good thing," she wrote. "Before, nobody could even mention it. Now, thanks to the chief, at least people are talking about how they can't talk about it. That's progress."
"Your Eyes Are the Lens"
But you see what I mean about the riskiness of change? A great many African women are fed up with violence, fed up with their enslavement to work and the sexual proclivities of men. They want a better life for their daughters. They want to be able to send them to school and keep them safe from the sexual advances of their teachers and other grown men (or boys). They want change, and many of them—like the battered woman who wanted Zounan Sylvie to show her photograph—are willing to put their lives on the line.
In the South Kivu region of Congo, where I'm working now, we've just had to put the project on hold for security reasons in an area where the war seems to be heating up again. The IRC's security specialists determined that women photographers might be in danger.
The women themselves, who have already survived acts of violence I can't bear to tell you about, were eager to risk it. Their concept of risk is quite different from ours. One of them told me she'd found it crushing to be "hated," even by her own husband and family, after she was gang-raped by armed soldiers. She was helped by joining a group of women survivors—of whom there are thousands. She was able to get over her shame, she said, when she realized that being gang-raped is "normal."
Women's wants are basic. They want their husbands to forgive them for having been raped by others. They want their husbands to help with the chores on the farm and around the house. They want men to take responsibility for their children, to help with their support and care. They want men to stop making senseless and devastating wars. One says, "We want to be safe in our homes, in our country, and that is our right." Another says, "We have a right to dream of a free, safe country. It is possible." ("Right," like "justice," is word such women increasingly use.)
What would these women I've been working with like to see in five years' time? Vera dreams that all the broken buildings will be rebuilt and all the girls and boys will go to school together. Anna hopes to walk freely in the streets, without fear of assault. Mantina hopes that women and girls may be safe in their homes. Annie dreams that women will be self-employed. Esther prays that girls will be educated and take up positions in government. Kebeh hopes that her sister, paralyzed during a gang rape, may walk again. Betty wants women to act in solidarity. She says: "We are like a bundle of sticks. If the bundle is loose, men can pluck us out, one at a time, and break us. But a tight bundle of sticks cannot be broken."
When the show is over, I collect the cameras, pack my bag, and move on to the next country. Local staff from the International Rescue Committee continue to work with the women and support their agenda for change. As I write, I've just been informed by email that, after IRC staff and women photographers in Sierra Leone displayed their photos to a parliamentary committee, the women were invited to mount an exhibition for the full Parliament.
We don't give away the cameras because there's no way the women could maintain them or get the photos processed; and more important, they don't need them. This project isn't really about photography. It's about women's voices rising in conflict zones in a global crescendo of pain, protest, and hope. The camera is a device to encourage new ways of looking. The discussions the women organize around the photographs stimulate new methods of analysis and advocacy. My IRC colleague in Ivory Coast, Tanou Virginie, told photographers they didn't need cameras. "Your eyes are the lens," she said. "The memory card is in your brain. And the picture can come out of your mouth."
I repeat that to all the photographers I work with. And they get it. One photographer in Liberia told the women's group, "Some people use cameras. Some people are cameras. Me, I'm a camera."
Throughout the conflict zones of Africa, among women worn out by violence and wars in which they've had no voice, no role to play but that of target, and who now have no desire but to feed their surviving children, there are some women who have picked themselves up, reached out, and organized to help others. They've formed groups with names like Unity or the Commune of Women. They are smart and courageous, and many of them are angry. They are looking anew at the lives they've been handed by men and "tradition." Some of them took part in the Global Crescendo Project—seeing things with new eyes, talking things over, speaking up, and arguing persuasively for change. Amid the ruins of their countries, their voices grow louder every day.
Writer/photographer Ann Jones is working as a volunteer with the Gender-Based Violence unit of the International Rescue Committee (IRC) on "A Global Crescendo: Women's Voices from Conflict Zones," the special women's advocacy project she describes in this article. Her blogs about the project and the participants' photographs can be viewed by clicking here. She's the author, most recently, of Kabul In Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan (Metropolitan Books), a report from another war that's not yet over. To view a video of Ann Jones discussing her photography project in West Africa, click here.
Changing the values and believes of mothers is a start but can they compete with the believes and values of the husbands and communities that are pressured on their sons and daughters? I mean look at us, a supposedly civilized culture and country, yet we have child exploitation, violence against women and girls, and such in various communities, in many ways with elements like the communities in this article. The difference is that we do it behind closed doors - is that really better?