Veron hmmm’d again. “I worked at a place like that once.”
“A plantation?”
Veron’s scoff was dry like ashum. “A hotel. The owner named it after his daughter . . . Hyacinth Hills.”
Emily laughed. “Seriously?”
Veron hmmm’d again, eyes still closed. She opened them when Emily didn’t continue speaking right away, to find her niece watching her. When their eyes met, Emily looked away.
“Well, anyway,” Emily continued, “Betty got me thinking about women who didn’t have slave plantations named after them, you know . . .”
“Women like us?” Veron said.
Emily’s hands slowed, and she was sorry she’d interrupted. She wiggled her feet a bit to get the massage going again.
“Well, yeah . . .” Emily said. “I mean . . . inside the plantation museum they had some pictures showing the whole plantation business, the cutting and the boiling and the transporting on the loco line . . . In this one picture . . . with women packing the cane onto, like, a rail cart . . . two women stood out, one in a head-tie, and one in a straw hat, both in pink dresses. When Mr B. told us we had to write about the trip, I decided to write about these women who weren’t Betty. I’d never heard about those women . . . when you hear ’bout the factory and field work cutting cane and them thing, is man you hear ’bout but there wasn’t one man in the picture . . . except in another picture there was a man on a horse, in a long coat and a broad-brimmed white hat, that picture was black and white and could well ah been a different plantation, a different time . . . except for the women, packing the sugar cane, as he stood over them looking on . . . I had never read or heard their story and the Museum didn’t have much . . .”
Emily’s voice trailed off and it was the sudden absence of sound that brought Veron back to herself.
“That sound like a good story,” Veron said.
Emily shrugged and smiled shyly at the praise. “Well, I’m still writing it,” she said. She paused. “I guess I just never thought of it like that before.”
“Like bakkra pon horseback, black man and black woman a bruk dem back?”
“No, just . . . I mean, yes . . . but just the way some get plantations named after them and some get . . . erased.”
Veron told her the only truth she had. “Black woman hard fu rub out, them need some special eraser for that. Ent you see them?”
And Emily kept looking at her.
“Yeah, I see them,” she said, just when her gaze was starting to make Veron uncomfortable.
Emily placed her feet gently on the patchwork mat they kept in the kitchen.
She opened the back door to dump out the grey water, came back for the bowl and dumped out the dumms seeds.
“Yeah, good story,” Veron mused again. “You know what it put me in the mood for, though?”
“Huh?” Emily turned from the sink.
“Some sugar cane,” Veron said, and Emily laughed out loud, shaking her head at her aunt and her long belly.
Ethel Irene Kabwato
Born in Mutare, Zimbabwe, she trained as a teacher and holds a BA in Media Studies. She is a founding member of the Zimbabwe Women Writers’ Mutare Branch and a member of the Harare Branch. In 2004 she participated in the British Council Crossing Borders Writers project. She has read her work at several institutions including Rhodes University and the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, and has been a guest of Cinema Without Borders at the Amnesty International Film Festival in Amsterdam. She has also participated in a reading and discussion of her work at the Hay Festival in Wales, UK. She works with Slum Cinema, a voluntary initiative to empower disadvantaged communities through multi-media work. She has been published in Writing Now, Sunflowers in Your Eyes and Writing Free. Her poetry is included in Between Two Rocks and in Ghetto Diary, an anthology that is currently a set book for advanced-level literature students in Zimbabwe.
After the Roses
After the champagne, chocolates and music
When the red, red roses have lost their bloom
. . . and the perfume has lost its scent . . .
When he sells
Your dreams to the devil . . .
After the red, red roses
Of Valentine’s Day
Have withered
After a one-day wonder
Of hoping and dreaming
That he holds many honeymoons
In his hands
That “he is happy ever after” material . . .
She counts the scars on her back
She cradles the broken stems
Of roses in her arms
Long after the petals have gone . . .
After the roses
He is the custodian
Of broken dreams
She is the voice you hear crying at night
She is the faceless woman
You see everyday
. . . smiling but broken
Laughing but hurt . . .
Her words are under the tongue
Of one who steals
The dreams of women
The Missing
Sometimes I hear your voice
In places where we both
Have loved hanging out;
The Terrace, Café 263
The Flea Market
Sometimes I hear your laughter
In my sleep
And I know you are singing
The songs in my heart . . .
There are times when I
Run low in faith
And I go into the forest
Near your school
To look for signs of mass graves
But I know
When they brought out the dead
You were not among them
When they brought out the survivors
You were not among them
When they called out the missing
You were among the missing 43
The last one on their list;
Tell me that the voices
I hear each morning
Are speaking to my soul
Wherever you are
My free spirited one,
Sing the songs in my heart
Talk to me if you can still dream
Listen to the sound of the bell
At St Mary’s Cathedral
It still rings at 7 a.m.
The time you always left home for school
Women’s Day
I’ve seen you travel
The same road over the years
I’ve watched you pick up
The broken threads of your life
I’ve heard you sing
About the scars that you bear
But you have not faltered
I stand here and wait
For the sound
Of the African drum
Whose silence
Evokes a kaleidoscope of emotions
The haunting stillness
Of dreams
Yet to be realized
I’ve watched you dance
To the silent drum
But the sores on your feet
Are too heavy to take you through
To the last dance.
When you walk that same road again
Remember to take me with you.
Fatimah Kelleher
A Nigerian and Irish-British women’s rights technical adviser and strategist engaged in feminist activism, research, policy and programming, since 2000 she has been involved primarily in the areas of women’s economic justice and empowerment, education and health, providing feminist analysis and advice to varied stakeholders including women’s groups and local civil society, NGOs, UN bodies, and national/subnational government organisations. She works and publishes at the international level primarily on Africa, but also on South Asia and the Caribbean. She also writes on diaspora issues, literature and the arts, and is particularly passionate about increasing African and diaspora representation within the area of travel literature.
In 1997 she was the founder of Urban Griots, a popular open-mic night in London that was a key part of the spoken-word resurgence of that era. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies and in magazines such as Sable Litmag.
To Chew on Bay Leaves: on the Problematic Trajectory of Instrumentalist Justifications for Women’s Rights
“You forgot to really emphasise how girl-child education will benefit society overall. Oh, and how much more productive an educated woman will be in the economy we want for the future. These policy makers need to be convinced you see.”
The year is 2010 and I have just delivered an introductory address at a gender equality workshop. The person hastily mouthing these fervent words to me is a civil servant I’m collaborating with to deliver a training session in one of the government ministries I’ve visited in recent years. We are trying to make the case for Gender Responsive Budgeting at the national and sub-national levels and have lined up five days to regale a posse of largely recalcitrant government folk who have already communicated their irritation at being expected to learn all this “gender stuff”. My opening salvo has focused squarely on women’s rights to education, health, and economic resources as inalienable rights that governments should deliver as an ethical impetus. I have chosen to tone-down the “and also . . .” justifications of macro economic contributions that are often part and parcel of such sessions.
The civil servant’s words are not a surprise. In fact, underscoring the economic and wider societal value of a woman’s right to education has been one of my missions for years and I am certainly not opposed to highlighting them. But today, I’ve had enough. Not only of the constant necessity for such further justifications, but also of their growing ascendency over rights, full stop.
“So what if a woman wants to go and chew bay leaves in a cave somewhere afterwards?” I ask her.
Pause. “What?”
“Chew bay leaves. In a cave. After her education. You know . . . go completely off-grid. Perhaps to contemplate the meaning of life. Or just to sleep . . . even dispense with the need for a job. Can she still be educated then?”
Pause. Pause. A few baffled blinks, then: “So why would she need an education? What would be her use?”
And there it was. Ascendency had become primacy. Inalienable rights could not be championed unless they were instrumental to some wider output.
Looking back at this exchange years later, I know my question had been an irritated, rhetorical one. Compounded aggravation from a decade of dealing with recalcitrant folk who did not really give a damn for women’s rights meant I was teetering on that dangerous brink where healthy cynicism becomes a plummet into despair. But her response was welcome in the end. Its confirmation helped to strengthen my own positioning not to become hooked into the instrumentalist premise that a woman’s empowerment must always be of use to something else beyond her simple right to have it.
Instrumentalism has arguably always been a part of the women’s rights agenda, and not necessarily without good cause; highlighting how women’s access to education, healthcare and economic resources enrich and create a better society overall is important. However, the manner in which instrumentalism has become a critical part of justifying gender equality/a women’s rights approach is also problematic, especially as it has become driven primarily by economic indicators, and often without any radical commitment to social and economic justice outcomes. Sometimes known as the “business case for gender equality”, such terminology in itself smacks of the need to monetarily quantify first.1 Even when rights-based arguments are put forward initially, it is often only a sentence or two before an instrumentalist positioning—such as women’s contribution to GDP growth through increased economic participation—follows in order to “convince” stakeholders that rights and equality are value for money.
But this need to convince is a craw that eventually sticks in many a feminist throat. How much a woman’s right to education/land/fair work/markets can equate to an increased dollar amount is now a common prerequisite when lobbying recalcitrant governments, indifferent private sector CEOs, and your common or garden misogynist everywhere. Somewhere along the neo-liberal line the mantra of economic growth latched itself to the women’s rights and empowerment agenda. In one week in early 2018 there were three events on women’s economic empowerment in London where the same McKinsey Global Institute Report—The power of parity: How advancing women’s equality can add $12 trillion to global growth—was quoted by five different speakers with greater fervour than the moral impetus for women’s rights alone.
Of course, for many it’s difficult to fathom why such an impressive sum would be problematic to women’s rights, and as a stand-alone piece of data it is indeed innocuous. But the problem with this focus is that beyond economic growth the debate around who controls and benefits from such increases in wealth is rarely engaged with. This in turn propagates the view that economic growth is a panacea in itself, distracting from those realities where per capita increases improve little when the cost of living is so steep citizens cannot comfortably keep a roof over their heads. As such, the fiscal charm of this figure starts to obscure the justice implications of what growth actually means for women and society overall.
For example, the question of whether women get to control their incomes as economies grow has often been secondary (if it comes up at all) to the simple focus on the contributory role of women’s labour to global markets. Women’s rights and gender equality subsequently become defined by participation, and economic participation at that. A focus on Africa’s economic growth for example has often been aligned with a “covetous eye” on African women’s economic productive capacity, particularly within the agricultural sector.1 Today countless organisational reports and media junkets utilise the African woman—often carrying a basket of produce—as the image of the continent’s recent economic productivity as readily as she was once used as the face of the continent’s battle with HIV and AIDS fifteen years ago.2
In the quest to see dollar increases as equivalent to empowerment, the reality that increased earnings do not necessarily lead to a fairer society is often skated over. Taking the time to radically unpack the word “power” in relation to either individual, societal, or corporate behaviour when using the word “empowerment” remains rare, while the patriarchal landscape itself is rarely systemically attacked. But as the feminist experience in the West has shown, patriarchal norms persist despite women’s increased engagement in the formal economy. Unaddressed and nuanced inequities beneath the surface (such as a recent furore over gendered pay gaps) can become initially obscured as the simplistic goal of participation is celebrated. Without a “social upgrading”3 the hype of women’s increased formal participation and its macro contributions can water down feminist goals for decades as systemic prejudices remain intact even whilst a façade of progress is projected. The problem remains that rather than fundamentally challenging an unequal system, women are asked to simply join it.
Historically, this type of compromised social justice has often followed on the back of instrumentalist justifications. For example, today’s economically developed countries universalized their education systems on the back of women teachers whose unequal status meant they were paid lower wages than men, and as such girls’ education became cyclically instrumental to the maintenance of the education system in itself.1 As women were mainly recruited for the primary sector, this also fed stereotypical expectations of women as automatic nurturers. Today, many of these teacher workforces are viewed as “feminized”, with larger numbers of women teachers overall than men. However, hidden under the congratulatory mask of representation, women continue to face inequalities in career promotion and unequal presence in the secondary and tertiary sectors, while tabloid papers take periodic pot shots at the perceived inability of women teachers to address moral panics in “boys’ underachievement”.2
This is a pattern not unique to women’s rights alone: a core impetus behind the mass education of
the poorer classes in late Victorian and early twentieth-century Britain was the call for an educated workforce who could fulfil the increasingly mechanized and service needs of an industrial society. Over a hundred years later the class inequalities of that time—despite having been blunted in the post-WWII era of the welfare state—have morphed but are yet to be eradicated. However, it often takes periodic financial crises and recessions and their resultant austerity policies slashing social safety nets to dissipate the mythical fog of a “classless” British society.3 So whilst the instrumentalist premise did deliver on universal basic education, without a radical egalitarian premise first underpinning that education, the move towards equality has been a piecemeal endeavour.
But arguably some of the most conflicting evolutions of instrumentalist positioning around women’s rights have been calculations around what violence against women monetarily costs public and private sector purses. Sometimes a valiant attempt to lobby for funding during a time of cuts to women’s services, these approaches seek to demonstrate the wider economic impact of such violence, such as the cost to emergency response services.1 More recently however the business case for why the private sector should also engage has become popular.2 Decreases in a woman’s productivity and resultant loss in profit for businesses when absent from work due to domestic and workplace violence are one feature of such calculations. And whilst the importance of public and private sector bodies tackling gender-based violence is certainly not in question here, the need for this focus presents a reductionist approach to women’s experiences of violence that is heart breaking. When such economic rationales are also needed, it suggests that the human costs alone—the physical and emotional wreckage, the violation of body and psyche—are not enough.
It is this realisation that moral and ethical parameters are less attractive than instrumentalist ones that makes the need to convince using such arguments so difficult to accept. More insidiously, they provide a silent legitimacy to the reverse scenario, where a world without rights and justice can just as easily provide economic growth; slavery, bonded labour, and unfairly remunerated work have all done so/continue to do so in one society or another. An elementary question then must be asked: if the spread of rights provided no economic benefits at all, what would our arguments then be?
New Daughters of Africa Page 75