‘Hallelujah’ moments: A small victory for women’s rights

Today I was talking to a friend about women’s rights in the constitution. She told me this story about how she recently met a young girl from a very impoverished school in a high density area – the kind of school where there are hardly any text books and you expect the kids to battle their way through to exams, and then probably do badly despite their very best efforts and despite the huge lengths their parents go to to try and get them an education. This bright young woman is apparently dreaming of a trail-blazing career and my friend asked her what she thought was standing in her way.

The young woman replied: ‘Please tell me how we address this patriarchal society and how we can reach a point where women are superior?’

‘In those very words?!’ I asked, thinking it took university and many textbooks to ram that kind of language into my head.

My friend replied: ‘Ja! … Eish, I wanted to stand on a chair and yell “Hallelujah!”’

I know what she means, because I also smiled at the young woman’s aspirations to not be equal – forget that! – but to be superior. I smiled because she’s going to need that kind of bull-headed feistiness to move herself forward in her life, especially if she stays in our country.

Truth is, I’ve been stunned by some of the comments left along the theme of women’s rights on Sokwanele’s constitution resource, so I was ready to hear something about someone standing up to it. Some of the comments have left me with a very heavy heart, thinking that for all the language about oppression, and now all the talk of affirmative action, there is a certain element in male society in Zimbabwe that just doesn’t get it. It’s depressing to think the constitution offers so much potential for such good things, but backward-thinking people who want to hang onto their personal power-positions can’t see the light. I went back to the resource to remind myself (torture myself?) of the things that had been said – I wanted to read them thinking about this unknown bright young women my friend had just told me about.

I’m so glad I did, because today I found a comment left by a male visitor. His words were a response to someone else who was clearly not comfortable with women having certain rights and had argued that western norms and standards should not be imposed on Zimbabweans. The reply he left that struck a chord with me was this one:

‘It is true that we should preserve our norms. The fact is that we are greedy. When we find that western norms benefit us we go there, and we also take African norms when they benefit us. In this developing world we cannot live only on our cultures. We must interact with other people and copy from them what is right. If you look at yourself you are far much improved than your people of previous generations. We expect our children to develop better than us. I wouldn’t be happy to be better than my offspring.’

His words ‘The fact is that we are greedy’ really chimed with me; I’ve been stewing for some time now about how ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ are words that seem to be invoked by some more out of a desire to protect a position of privilege, or to justify oppression.

Many, many years ago I encountered another amazing young woman from a high density area where most of the people had zero prospects of a positive future: I’d been invited to attend a workshop in South Africa (this was a little while before the ‘new’ South Africa was born). The workshop was on addressing violence in the area. I remember being very tired and disengaged from the discussion, until, that is, the talk moved to the issue of violence against women in particular.

My friend, who had asked me to come along to keep her company, was talking to the group about how language used by some men in relation to women was not cool and could lead to violence. Before she could fully finish, a young man at the back of the group stood up and almost exploded with rage: His face was twisted with anger and he was pointing at her while leaning forward aggressively shouting. His rage boiled down to this very simple premise: ‘Don’t tell us how we should behave towards women, it’s not your culture and in our culture we do things differently’.

I was fully alert at this point: The whole group had been stunned into silence and my friend, I could tell, was struggling to find the right appropriate words to say – words that effectively did the right thing in the context of the workshop, but also respected this man’s culture. I was alive with interest, wondering how on earth she was going to navigate this minefield of fundamental human rights colliding with right-on political correctness. She couldn’t find a thing to say; the guy’s argument had led her into a cul-de-sac: If she insisted his culture should change to respect the rights of others, she would in theory be proving his thesis that she didn’t respect his culture. And that’s why that argument seems to carry weight, not because its valid or true, but because it carries with it wheelbarrow-loads of emotional manipulation.

The heavy silence that ensued was eventually rescued by a black woman in the group who quietly stood up – with an air of drama – and walked slowly over to the still-angry man. She started talking very quietly, but loud enough for us all to hear:

‘I’m wondering which culture you are talking about?’ she asked rather ominously and slowly. Then she raised her voice: ‘… because in MY culture, everything you have just said is rubbish!’

It was an incredible moment: the women in the group started to smile, and the whole room descended into chaos as men shouted at women and women shouted at men. It was not exactly what was meant to happen at a workshop about anger and violence – and my friend felt she had failed – but I left that room a changed person and I think that many other women did too. I have never ever forgotten that woman and what she did that day.

As for the young Zimbabwean girl who had my friend nearly standing on a chair shrieking ‘hallelujah’ … I’m struck today by my sense of time shifting forwards. Here we are, many decades down the line – and there she stands, yet another amazing young women, fighting the same fight in a different country also on the brink of change.

I hope in my bones that she will be just as inspirational as that person I encountered in South Africa so many years ago. I hope she will change lives too. And I hope there are more men like the guy who left the comment on our resource who think just like him. I hope they will voice their thoughts and silence the few who are ‘greedy’ and seeking to preserve the status quo by denying rights to others.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* This article first appeared on Sokwanele.
* Hope is a blogger for Sokwanele.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.