by Mona Marshy
The experiences of the majority of women in every country in the world are just beginning to find expression in popular fictional works, that is, works associated with the word "literature". Traditionally, women's struggles have found expression through women's culture - folklore, "wives' tales", kitchen gossip, craft works, knitting circles, song and dance. In Tanzania and Zimbabwe, women's experiences have also been communicated through story-telling, drama, songs, and community theatre.
Through what has been termed participatory methodology, women who would not otherwise have access to regional or national literary forums are integrating their message into forums created by their professional teachers. One such forum in Tanzania is created by the Tanzanian Media Women's Association (TAMWA).
TAMWA created women's programming on national radio and they have held conferences on the use of language, the protrayal of women in the media, malnutrition, and land. Their magazine, Sauti Ya Siti, includes journalistic reporting along with literary works, poetry, art and academic research reflecting women's history and experience. TAMWA is breaking ground by creating a space for women's words.
As a founding member put it: "This is just the beginning. We must get to those issues that affect all women. It's a patriarchal system; turning things around will bring outrage from people, but we have to expect outrage." Halima Shariff is a Tanzanian journalist, studying in Ottawa. She describes TAMWA as a group of professional journalists, photo journalists, writer, singers, performers, artists and other communicators who are "getting into those issues that the state closes its eyes to and the media doesn't want to hear about". The key, she believes is having women write about themselves, and define their own realities.
Unlike in Tanzania, several women in Zimbabwe have written works of prose and poetry that have been published by various publishing houses, including the Zimbabwe Publishing House and Mambo Press. Zimbabwean women are writing about their struggles, their lives, and their aspirations. They are writing about their involvement as women in the pursuit of grassroots survival and national struggle. But why women are writing is also interesting. Women are motivated to write in Zimbabwe by their knowledge of their oppression as women and they are able to publish their writings because of an explicit national and local call for men and women to listen to and to hear the story of women's oppression.
Zimbabwe has gone through recent revolutionary change. The re-building is on-going and occurring at all levels of society. Women's groups have undergone a change of mandate since Independence and include in their work the task of addressing their oppression as women. Women have also had input into community and government forums and are creating a vocabulary to explore their struggles and find solutions.
Zimbabwe's writers come not from the scholarly literary tradition as much as from their participation in social and political struggles. The expression of their struggles in their literary works is one way that women are pushing social and political changes one step further.
The context in Southern Africa is particularly relevant to these attempts to create a representative and empowered voice of women. Both Tanzania and Zimbabwe are at a stage of post-colonial nation-building. The process of underdevelopment created by their colonial pasts is being reversed through programs that include wide reaching literacy campaigns, health care improvements and mobilization of peasant farmers. In this process the national culture becomes a tool of mobilization. The degree to which women's cultural expression finds a forum determines the degree to which women can mobilize according to their own vision and experience of the world.
Mona Marshy has researched women's groups in Zimbabwe and is a member the MA TCH News Collective.
Source: MATCH News, FeblMar 1989 Match International Centre 1102 - 200 Elgin, Ottawa, Cana