Africans facing the crisis:
The crucial role of women
by Fatma Alloo
Far from being helpless victims of hunger and famine, as portrayed by the Western mass media and others, the people of Africa are themselves major resources in the search for ways out of current crisis. While it can be said, on the whole, theat the current crisis is a legacy of the colonial past, it is now obvious to us that the policies pursued in the post-independence period have compounded it. In his last writings Kwame Nkrumah, the pioneer of the decolonisation process, admitted that the anti-colonial struggles had invariably led to neo-colonial situations because the inherited structures remained intact.
Africa's crisis is "the crisis of the working people of Africa, the essence being their failure to transform the order forged during the colonial era. We believe that the most fundamental and underlying principle of an-other development should be that of structural transformation, a notion which challenges the economic, political and cultural forms of domination which are found at the international, national and household level."
Africa is basically an agricultural continent. Per capita arable land in Africa is the highest of any continent. In principle land availability is not a problem: the problem is either equitable distribution of land, or collective and maximised exploitation of the land. "I want to produce food because it guarantees that my children will eat. Why should I toil to produce a commodity which is useless to the household and for which my husband pockets the little money he gets?" asks a peasant woman in Msoga village, Tanzania.
African Concord reports that there is no direct relationship between drought and famine. "For example while Ethiopia was reported as being a tragic victim of starvation, it was exporting coffee....groundnuts to England....flowers and vegetables to Europe." The villagers of Msoga say: "Give us what we want. The people of this village want water. We do not ask for chocolates for which they want us to produce cocoa and coffee. That is the food of those in power. Our needs are basic yet we do not.have them. Why?"
It has been suggested that a 10-year programme is needed, on a continental level, for irrigated agriculture with a strategy of agricultural industry; an integrated economy whereby agriculture is a direct consumer of industry, and vice-versa. "If foreign exchange is a problem, why not the barter system as we in Uganda have begun?" asks a Ugandan woman. We have begun to see it work. For example, my mother in Fort Portal is happy because she gets her salt and sugar now. This system can work if we are serious about our development. If people do not see their standard of living rising, they won't listen to you. For example, we know our land has the richness and the resources. We are rich yet we are poor. How do you explain this except for greed?"
At the 1980 meeting in Lagos, a Plan of Action was drawn up representing a comprehensive strategy for coordinating existing and planned regional and sub-regional economic institutions to achieve economic integration of the continent by the year 2000. "The Plan has not been implemented," says AAWORD. "A major stumbling block has been the imposition of development strategies by external forces to whom Africa's self-reliant development would be inimical. Africans should insist on their right to define and implement an autonomous development strategy."
"The people of Africa must fight the poverty of Africa," said President Nyerere at the OAU Special Summit Meeting in Lagos. "Economic development is about people, and for people. To be effective it has to be done by the people themselves. It therefore starts within each nation, and at sub-levels inside the nations. If there is no development and no planning inside our nation states, very little - if anything can be done at a regional or continental level. A nation which is in chaos internally, or which is not serious about development, cannot be an effective partner with others in any joint schemes; indeed, its pretended participation merely endangers economic cooperation between the other nations involved in a particular multinational undertaking."
As the legacy of dependence left by the colonial infrastructure is slowly being confronted in Africa through mechanisms such as preferential trade agreements and the Southern Africa Development Coordination Conference (SADCC), the people are moving as forces of change. They are questioning, and have become aware that fundamental changes have to take place for Africa to get on its feet. This growing awareness, particulary among women, stems from the realisation that post-independence policies have failed to lead the people to better living standards. As African regimes plunge into a debt of $160 billion or more, where up to 60% of Africa's export earnings go towards the servicing of these debts, people have begun to take their own initiatives for change.
In 1986, for the first time in the history of post-independence Africa, we saw a people's movement - 50% of its army being women - take control of their nation, Uganda. This is a new departure in Africa: the people of Uganda overthrew an established military power thanks to their determination to take the situation into their own hands. In Soweto, South Africa, we see another example of an outright rejection, including that of an education system which aims at creating a subservient mentality.
Social writer, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, says "for too long Africans have been thinking and working in a foreign language, so that solutions are also sought in a foreign context....culture is seen as a product of history, which in turn reflects the image-forming agent in the mind of a child. Our whole conception of ourselves as people, both individually and collectively, is seen to be based on those pictures and images, transmitted through the spoken and written language; colonial domination imposed control through culture, thus effectively controlling economics and politics and the people's tools of self-definition in relation to others."
Such social commentators consider that promotion of our own national language is crucial to our liberation. "But then you find OAU has just endorsed Portuguese as its fourth official language instead of beginning to move more to our national languages like Kiswahili. Language imbibes culture and thoughts are controlled that way. Thus the language question is very important."
Scholars, thinkers and writers are proposing alternatives for African development. "The existence of a crisis in Africa demands that attention be directed to the subjective factor in African development. For whatever the roots of that crisis - external, internal or a specific mix of the two - its solution can only be the result of initiative by organised social forces inside Africa. Hitherto, all schools of thought have either focussed one-sidedly on the African state as the subject of African development, or to some sector of the popular masses....in a manner which has tended to isolate social or historical context. As a result our understanding - both of these movements and of the twin processes of democratisation and development - has tended to remain partial."
As African theoreticians wade through the tide of theories of "modernisation", from "mass" to "participational" approaches, grassroots people are adopting concepts of "research" imbued with popular culture - the concept of "from the masses to the masses", as is indicated by the work of the African Participatory Research Network (APRN). Women have also begun to participate in defining and demanding their rights, using cultural fora they identify with.
On a pan-African level, organizations like AAWORD are playing a vital role in linkage and promotion of "multidimensional development, i.e. development in the service of political awareness as well as the economic, social, cultural and psychological fulfillment of the African peoples, and to make government, public authorities and research centres sensitive to the need for decolonising research."
Side by side with lively debates on issues and the upsurge of non-governmental organizations are the setting up of alternative media net-works such as the Pan-African News Agency (PANA) and Inter-Press Service (IPS). The NorthSouth and South-South dialogues, and the creation of networks like DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for New Era) which demand that "women's voices must enter the definition of development and the making of policy choices" are among the important developments emerging in our region.
As women put it: "So far we have been the crutches of the legs the developed world has been standing on. Time has come to strengthen our own legs." And: "As women we are also awakening to our capabilities to organise, since our day-to-day life is organising five or six different activities under extreme pressures as our economic situation deteriorates." And: "They don't say women hold up half the sky for nothing!"
As DAWN breaks over Africa, there are also strategies being debated incorporating the experiences and concerns of the poor and among women, the most disadvantaged in our continent. With growing alternative visions both in the African continent and in the developing world generally, and growing realisation of the strings attached to external resources, nations are increasingly being forced to rely on internal resource mobilisation. Women's contribution - as workers and as managers of human welfare - are central to the ability of households, communities and nations to tackle the current crisis of survival. Women have begun to mobilise towards this end in creative ways, both individually and collectively."
"In the long term, it is only by reinforcing and building upon their (women's) efforts in such vital sectors as food production, commerce and trade that the needed transformation to move self-reliant national development strategies can be achieved. Thus while creating serious and immediate hardships for the poor and middle-income earners, the crisis may prove a blessing in disguise, if it leads to more self-reliant policies that are geared to meeting people's survival and subsistence needs," proclaims DAWN.
New strategies for survival cannot succeed if women continue to suffer from decreased access to resources and increased demands on their labour time. Rather than see women crushed further under the burden of their traditional work in unchanging divisions of labour, we argue that if human survival is now the world's most pressing problem, and if women are crucial to that survival, then the empowerment of women is essential for the emergence of new, creative and cooperative solutions to the crisis.
"Women's organizations are central to these strategies," emphasises the Tanzania Media Women's Association (TAMWA). Women must not only strengthen their organizational capacity but must crystallise perspectives that will move them beyond their present situation. The United Nations Decade for Women which bravely proclaimed "Development, Equality and Peace" has given so little of these to the majority of people. "We did not achieve Development, Equality or Peace through the Decade, but what we learnt during its course has empowered us. We see the path we have to take ahead," states the former Secretary-General of AAWORD, Zene Tadesse.
We enter an era in which we have shed naive expectations and dependency on others. Initially we went through a phase of wanting to be "integrated" into development strategies. We never questioned the nature of this "development", whereby male- dominated development models were propagating the "integration" of developing nations into an unjust international market system. The notion of "growth" was to be manifested in increased production. The problem now is the development strategy itself, and the manner in which women as well as other social groups have been systematically excluded.
Moreover, despite growing awareness in Africa today of the plight of the dispossesed and of women (as shown by the Decade), change will not necessarily drop from above. The nature of development strategies pursued in Africa tend to be the major obstacle confronting women's efforts to achieve gender equality.Moreover, despite growing awareness in Africa today of the plight of the dispossesed and of women (as shown by the Decade), change will not necessarily drop from above. The nature of development strategies pursued in Africa tend to be the major obstacle confronting women's efforts to achieve gender equality.
For women to become a vital force in their societies, change will have to be based on a new development theory which embraces gender equality. The artificial barriers between the political, social and economic aspects of society must be questioned. Women's experiences must be recognised and validated in relation to change. The struggles against oppression and exploitation of peasant women's groups, working-class women's groups and the middle-class women have led to the elaboration of theories of change which challenge the power of patriarchy.
Liberation movements have also passed the stage of arguing that, when pressing issues of politics and peace are dealt with, only then will the needs of women be looked at. There are a number of examples in Africa today to show that when the needs, talents and potentialities of half of the world's population are seen as secondary and marginal, a just and true development cannot happen. The concerns of feminists are thus not frivolous. It is the call made by Anita Anand of the Women's Features Service (WFS) of InterPress Service (IPS), "for a political struggle, for it stands for a more direct and self-conscious sharing of power, making those who wield it more accountable to those affected by it. It calls on men to have greater vulnerability, greater awareness of their own pain, doubts and struggles, and at the same time it asks them to reduce their emotional dependence on women. Feminism in Africa is a call for true strength born of the power of sound relationships."
Source:
Voices from Africa, Issue No. 1
UN Non-Governmental Liaison Service (NGLS)
Palais des Nations, CH 1211 - Geneva 10, Switzerland
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Notes:
1. Echo, published by the Association of African Women for Research and Devclopment (AAWORD).
2. Council for the Development of Economic and Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA)