African Women Making Change
Commentary: It's like the old days of the women's movement in the U.S. and the informal consciousness-raising get-togethers that blew the collective mind of my generation.
May 13, 2008
|
|
[Introduction by Tom Engelhardt]
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Ann Jones spent several years as a humanitarian aid worker in Afghanistan focusing on the lives of women and wrote a moving book, Kabul in Winter, about her experience. More recently, she took Tomdispatch readers to West Africa. There, she laid out the chilling nightmare of women's lives in strife-torn lands in which the war against women doesn't end just because grim wars between men finally do. Today's dispatch from the Democratic Republic of Congo, a place where war between men of an especially brutal sort remains an ongoing reality, highlights quite a different aspect of women's lives in West Africa—the way in which some women are moving from victims to actors in their own life dramas. This is the second in a series of reports Jones will be writing for this site in the coming months, as she works with refugees in Africa and elsewhere. To check out an accompanying Tomdispatch video (filmed by site videographer Brett Story) in which Ann Jones discusses the camera project that is the subject of this dispatch, click here. Tom Engelhardt
African Women Making Change
It's like the old days of the women's movement in the U.S. and the informal consciousness-raising get-togethers that blew the collective mind of my generation.
By Ann Jones
Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo—The last time I was back in the U.S.A., everyone was talking about "change." Change seemed to mean electing Barack Obama president and thereby bringing all Americans together in blissful agreement. But real change isn't like that. Didn't the guy who's got the job now promise to be a "uniter"? Real change has content and direction. It's driven by courageous people unafraid to speak up, even—or perhaps especially—when it's risky.
Anyway, there are plenty of Americans I'll never agree with, so I'm in self-imposed exile in Africa where I work with women who teach me a lot about real change and the risks involved in going for it. The women I work with live in the aftermath of civil wars—in the midst of a continuing war on women that's acted out in widespread sexual exploitation, rape, and wife beating. They've had enough.
As a volunteer with the International Rescue Committee (IRC), I go from country to country, running a simple little project dreamed up by the IRC's Gender-Based Violence unit. (GBV is the gender-neutral term for what I still call VAW: Violence Against Women.) The project—dubbed A Global Crescendo: Women's Voices from Conflict Zones—is meant to give women a chance to document their daily lives, their problems, their consolations and joys. It's meant to give them time and space to talk together and come up with their own agenda for change.
Digital cameras are the tool. I arrive with them and lend them to women, most of whom have never seen a camera before. I teach them to point and shoot—only that—and then I turn them loose to snap what they will. I ask them to bring me some photos of their problems and their blessings. They work in teams, two or three women sharing a camera and very nervous at first. (Some women actually shake.) It takes the whole team to snap the first photos: one holds the camera, another points, another shoots. The teamwork they build is a step to solidarity.
Once a week for four or five weeks these teams get together—some 10 to 15 women in all—to look at their photos and talk about why they shot the things they did. For most of these women, whose lives are consumed by endless chores, this is a rare chance to sit and talk—really talk—with their neighbors. Most of them are non-literate. They don't have television. Few have radio. Whatever news they get comes largely from their husbands—and husbands often tell them nothing, except what to do. Excluded from public life, they have no say in the decisions of men who determine everything from issues of sexuality and childbearing to matters of war and "justice." Even at home, they're never asked their opinion, never encouraged to make a decision about anything. For such women, real conversation with other women invariably proves a revelation.
For me—listening in, asking questions—it's like the old days of the women's movement in the U.S. and the informal consciousness-raising get-togethers that blew the collective mind of my generation. Now a senior citizen, I have the privilege of surfing another wave of feminism, a distant continent away.
What Women See
What do they talk about, these women struggling to survive, to make a life for themselves and their children in countries shattered by the wars of "big men"? It depends on where you are. In Ivory Coast, village women talk about having too much backbreaking work to do, while men do very little. In Liberia, urban women talk about not having enough work to do to earn the money to keep their husbands (who do very little) from straying. In Sierra Leone, they talk about the problems of war widows who can't support their children or send them to school or save their young girls from sexual exploitation. In the Democratic Republic of Congo they talk about the problems of gang-raped women, repudiated by their husbands, unable to bear children, many literally ripped apart, never to be made whole again. In all these countries, simple questions quickly come up: Is this fair? Is it just?
Snapping pictures, women see what a lifetime of experience already tells them: that men run the world, the country, the province, the village, the home. In these lands, men of all persuasions have waged disastrous wars—most lasting more than a decade, one (in the Congo) still unofficially going on—characterized by unspeakable atrocities. Even many men will admit that they've made a terrible mess of things. In all these lands, when armed men stopped shooting and called it "peace," they continued to assault and rape and murder women.
The pattern of assaulting women, once adopted as a tactic of war, has become a habit with ex-combatants. Civilians have adopted it, too. In the Congo, rapists now target little girls. One village women's group I work with in South Kivu Province has reported five rapes in the last month of girls younger than nine, the most recent, a six-year-old by the pastor of her church. So any time women begin to talk—really talk—about their lives, and the conspicuously different lives of men, the word "justice" is bound to come up, even if the conversation concerns only the seemingly trivial (though fundamental) question of who fetches the water and who enjoys the bath.
The women to whom I lend cameras take a startling number of photos of physical violence against women: men beating women in the house, the yard, the street, the market place. Men throwing women to the ground. Men wielding sticks and tree branches and brooms. Acts of violence intended to punish women for things they've done or left undone, or to force them to do things they haven't the will or the strength to do. These are acts of violence intended to control lives. Women can easily take these photos because men feel free to beat women anywhere, anytime, without fear of interruption or disapproval. War set the precedent.
Women take many photos of abandoned women, often pregnant, with their children—like the photo of a penniless young woman with three tiny children living in the open on the outskirts of a village. This image is deeply troubling in ways not obvious to an outsider. Most West African women feed and clothe themselves and their children by working their farms, selling produce in the market, making things for sale or trade. But the house still belongs to the man, together with everything in it and the land it stands upon. To be abandoned is to become homeless. The threat of abandonment is what coerces women to endure all other forms of abuse.
Women take pictures of economic violence, too. In Ivory Coast, for instance, a woman photographed the family's cocoa crop: her husband's share spread across the frame like a rich gray carpet, hers—as the principal farm laborer—a tiny mound barely visible to one side. A photographer in Sierra Leone snapped a shot of a woman working knee deep in a pit of red palm oil, while her husband stood by to pocket the proceeds from her sales.
Then there's the labor of daily lives. Women take photos of women working in fields, forests, plantations, markets, and homes; women cultivating, harvesting, processing, selling, cooking, and serving food; women washing dishes, clothes, babies; women sweeping houses and yards; women fetching and carrying water, firewood, produce; women bearing burdens of all sorts on their heads—stalks of plantains, basins of tomatoes, bundles of firewood, bags of laundry—walking long distances to a field, or the market, or the river.
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?