The enormity of the crisis is paralyzing. At the macro level, universal treatment with antiretroviral drugs is required, and a vaccine or a cure needs to be found. New drugs, such as the microbicides that can be used vaginally before sex to prevent HIV but allow conception, need to be made available. But all of that requires an international commitment of funding. And so far, apart from superstars like Bono and philanthropists such as Bill Gates, no one is stepping up. Passing out condoms simply isn’t solving the problem.
At the Stephen Lewis Foundation office in Toronto, the messages attached to the project reports coming in from Africa reflect the ongoing terrible consequences of the pandemic. One hastily scribbled note reads, “Sorry to be late. We couldn’t get the report to you on time because the leader passed away.” Another says, “The house was burned down, we had to write the report again.” Still another reads, “The lawyer helping us died.” It’s hard to measure the progress that will ameliorate the effects of the pandemic when the virus hasn’t yet been tamed.
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At the Gathering, there were five hundred official delegates from thirteen African countries and forty-four Canadians who represented two-hundred and forty grandmother groups from across Canada. The goal was to amplify the voices of the grandmothers in sub-Saharan Africa, to validate their needs and establish the economic link between getting their orphaned grandchildren raised and educated and the future of the thirteen countries they represented. The visiting Canadian grannies vowed to press their government to maintain its commitment to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS and to make the less expensive generic drugs available to Africans.
On the day of the march, grandmothers from all over Swaziland joined in, swelling the numbers. Organized by SWAPOL, the three-day conference and workshops let the world know that in the face of great darkness women from two sides of the world quilted together a patchwork of survival.
One of those women was Sabina Muale from Zambia, who’d made contact with the grandmothers’ group in her area, the Busy Bees, just weeks before coming to the conference. She wasn’t sure of her age but assumed she was more than seventy. She’d had twelve children—strong sons and daughters who worked hard, raised their families and looked in on their mama every day. Then the pandemic struck. Every one of her children died. Every single one. She wound up taking care of the orphaned grandchildren—eight of them between the ages of three and sixteen. The four-year-old was HIV-positive. The kids weren’t in school because Muale could hardly earn enough to feed them, never mind pay school fees. She was doing what she calls “yard work”—weeding and hoeing—to earn money for food. She was worn out, her dulcet way of talking muted by her own exhaustion. With her gnarled fingers clenched in her lap, she said, “I never, ever thought I’d be in this position. My children would have taken care of me.” Then she shrugged, turned her arms inward as if to cover her heart and said in a barely audible voice, “I’m just me now,” and she began to cry. This was the picture of despair.
The conference, however, became a turning point for Muale. She’d made small rag dolls to sell. The Canadian grandmothers snatched them up as though at a fire sale. Muale also got to know other grannies, both Canadian and African. She felt the solidarity, attended the sessions. She came away with a new sense of hope. “It lessens my burden,” she said. “I see others in the same situation. My heart is heavy at home. It’s gentle here. And I know after this gathering that if I go, other grannies will take care of my babies. I have the courage to carry on now.”
Although Swaziland’s royal household had displayed a shocking disregard for the catastrophe that had brought the country to its knees, just days before the event the spin doctors at the palace realized that there was a public relations coup at their doorstep and suddenly announced that the royal household would host the opening night of the conference.
There was hoopla and pomp; there were ceremonial swords and dancers. The much-loved Queen Mother presided at the head table, along with the crown prince and four of the king’s wives (who spent much of the night talking on cellphones). It looked as though the royal family had hijacked the event.
But when the Queen Mother instructed her musicians to strike up, a bit of serendipity entered the proceedings. With little warning and no planning, the African and Canadian grandmothers leaped from their seats and boogied arm in arm to the dance floor, taking the event back into their own hands. It was a remarkable sight. These women, who had travelled great distances because the welfare of grandchildren was at stake, briefly laid down their burdens and danced the night away.
The workshops that began the next day dealt with the harsh realities of their lives: the grinding poverty and a particularly heinous form of violence—the beating, rape and robbery of vulnerable grannies. They sought means to stop the violence, and they examined the law to find a way around the customary tradition of a surviving brother taking all his brother’s assets, including the widow, as his rightful property and leaving the children penniless.
And they talked about the means of raising money: the grannies from Canada relied on the tried-and-true methods of bake sales and quilting bees and silent auctions and stuffed dolls with no-skid slippers. The African grannies, on the other hand, do their part tilling the soil and weeding the gardens of those who have money to pay. They grow vegetables, make soap, knit blankets with wool from old sweaters and sell everything they make at a market.
When the marchers reached their destination at the community centre on the final day of the conference, the grannies read the Manzini Statement: “We are the backbones of our communities. Africa cannot survive without us.” They called on their governments to help their HIV-positive grandchildren; they demanded food security and microcredit financing, social security, a stop to violence and a change in the jurisprudence that results in the disinheritance of their grandchildren. The closing line of the statement was “We are strong. We are visionary, we have faith and we are not alone. Together we will turn the tide of AIDS. Viva!”
Siphiwe Hlophe, the director of SWAPOL and the host of the event, was exhausted the morning after the march as she waved off busload after busload of grannies heading back to their own hearths in Zambia and Zimbabwe, in Ontario and British Columbia, in South Africa and Rwanda, in Quebec and New Brunswick. The Gathering had been all she hoped for and more.
“A lot has changed since last we met in Canada,” she said. “In 2006, the African grandmothers were grieving. They were needy, disconnected and exhausted. Now many more can put food on the table, clothe the grandchildren, send them to school, but, more than that, a movement started here.”
Gloria Steinem has seen women come together to alter their status in North America as well as Africa. When we sat down to talk in New York, she said, “It’s all about having faith in women.” She shared a story about being in Zambia for a meeting about sex-trafficking and discussing strategies to stop it. “After the meeting I ended up on the Zambezi River with a huge group of women. There were too many different languages being spoken; I wondered how we were going to communicate, but experience told me that circles of women always work; someone speaks the truth, and then it works.”
Gradually out of the babble of discussion came the fact that what the local women needed was to grow maize so they would have food security for a year in order to pay their kids’ school fees. “They explained that the maize they grew was being eaten by the elephants. They needed a fence to keep the elephants out and didn’t have the funds to buy one. To earn money so they could buy food for the children and send them to school, the women were going to Lusaka and joining the sex trade.”
Steinem ended up helping to raise money for an electrified fence so the elephants didn’t come and eat the maize. “When I went back the next year,” she said, “they had a bumper crop of maize; they were singing songs to the maize, dancing under the trees to the maize. What it meant was they could stay at home and not go to Lusaka where they’d be sex-trafficked. If someone had told me an electrifi
ed fence would be the answer to sex-trafficking, I couldn’t have believed it. You’ve got to listen to women, to the wisdom of women in each situation.”
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Putting morality and social justice to one side for a moment, we can see that investing in women simply makes good economic sense. Hillary Clinton predicts a change in the economic climate for women, and there’s research data to support her view. Economists estimate that women-owned businesses will create nearly a third of the new jobs anticipated over the next seven years. Globally, women will control $15 trillion in spending by the year 2014. Narrowing the gender gap could lead to a 14 percent rise in per capita incomes by the year 2020, and a reduction in barriers to female labour-force participation would increase the size of America’s GDP by 9 percent, the eurozone’s by 13 percent and Japan’s by 16 percent. By 2028, women will be responsible for about two-thirds of consumer spending worldwide.
The World Bank’s 2012 World Development Report on gender equality and development argues that gender equality is a core development objective in its own right. Greater gender equality can enhance productivity, improve development outcomes for the next generation and make institutions more representative.
Women used to be viewed as victims of poverty and illiteracy, of violence and seemingly unbreakable cultural traditions. Melanne Verveer, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues, says, “Now promoting the status of women is not just a moral imperative but a strategic one; it’s essential to economic prosperity and to global peace and security. It is, in other words, a strategy for a smarter foreign policy.” There are millions of women around the world—some of them grandmothers, some of them teenagers—who would say Verveer is absolutely right.
SIX
The Ascent of Women
Until women are afforded their rights, global progress and prosperity will have its own glass ceiling.
— HILLARY CLINTON
Like Sisyphus, women have been rolling a rock uphill for millennia. Our victories, while significant, have invariably been tempered by backlash as well as hampered by cultural and religious dogma. Today, I believe that women are poised, at last, to reach the summit. Given the rapidly changing status of women, an optimist could even suggest that women are at a tipping point when age-old oppression is seen as damaging to the economy and the health of the community and its opposite—emancipation—is seen as the prescription for prosperity.
How these coming changes play out will differ from place to place. The women of Afghanistan have found their voices and are demanding change. The women of Liberia have banded together and elected a female president for the first time in 2005 because their lives were in danger in the hands of the men who were running the country. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is a place where it’s more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier, women are organizing a Silence Is Violence campaign and breaking a taboo that has historically demanded that they keep the abuse in their lives a secret.
A vast collection of knowledge and learned ways of dealing with particular circumstances inevitably feed a tipping point. One of them is changes in language itself. Language matters. It creates a response, sets a scene, delivers legitimacy. Calling the widespread rape, murder and displacement of a people “ethnic cleansing” lets its perpetrators off the hook. To call it what it is—genocide—makes them bear some responsibility. When the adage “boys will be boys” is applied to a carful of racist young men hurling insults at Aboriginal women walking on the roadside, it cultivates acceptance. Saying that you are acting in the name of God can be either a blessing or a curse: feeding the poor and caring for the sick in the name of God is one thing; being denied an education and health care in the name of God is another. Dismissing violence as cultural rather than criminal excuses the act. Until we call crimes against women (and humanity) by their true names, we’ll not only fail to stop the violence against women that is endemic throughout the world, we will be endorsing it.
Circumstances also contribute to a tipping point. For example, traditionally women in Saudi Arabia had never attended the Olympic Games as athletes. They were not allowed to attend athletic events at home and were discouraged from playing competitive sports. During the buildup to the London Olympics in 2012, the absence of Saudi female athletes began to get a lot of attention. The pressure from probing media increased almost daily. The Olympic Games are a place to showcase national accomplishment; denying women the chance to participate became too big a stain for the Saudi kingdom to wear. It caved in, and with weeks to go before the opening ceremonies, two female athletes—one in judo, the other in the eight-hundred-metre track event—were added to the Saudi Olympic team. Other Gulf States, such as Qatar, followed suit. When those women walked into the Olympic Stadium in London, they made history. They became part of a growing collection of circumstances that are contributing to the tipping point for women.
It’s not just “firsts”—first governor general, first cabinet minister, first chair of the board, first firefighter—that clear the way for women, it’s a sea change in attitudes about the treatment of women. Stories about underage girls being forced to marry or become prostitutes are no longer dismissed as “the way those people live.” They make headlines, go viral, wind up on YouTube. When a fifteen-year-old child bride named Sahar Gul was rescued in 2011 by Afghan police from a home that was a torture chamber—the girl said her mother-in-law had pulled out her fingernails with pliers—the news made headlines in the foreign press. Gul had been married off to a man twice her age, and soon after the nuptials, she was told she had to become a prostitute to bring money home to her new husband’s family. When she refused they beat her, pulled out her hair, burned her with cigarettes, cut off pieces of her flesh and locked her in a windowless toilet. The neighbours called the authorities after hearing her crying and moaning day after day.
Even a short time ago, Gul’s story would likely have been ignored, first by the police, as it would have been seen as a domestic issue and nobody’s business, and then by the media, who would not have been alerted by the police or the neighbours. During the Taliban regime, the atrocities committed against women and girls in Afghanistan were shockingly brutal. One eighteen-year-old girl was in labour for forty days while the Taliban forbade medical help because she was a woman. Her family tried to help her with hot compresses that burned her abdomen and endless concoctions that made her sick. When Dr. Sima Samar at last was able to travel to the girl’s home, she did a Caesarean section to save the girl’s life and remove the fetus, which had been dead for most of the forty days. Afterwards, Samar said to me, “Losing the baby wasn’t the worst thing that happened to that girl. I had to do a hysterectomy because all the reproductive organs were infected. Now she’ll be relegated to be someone’s slave because she cannot bear children.”
There was almost no media attention on the fate of Afghan women at the time, most assigning editors concluding that what was happening to them was “someone else’s culture, none of our business.” For most news agencies, the women became a story only after the Americans toppled the Taliban after 9/11.
Although Sahar Gul’s husband fled before the police arrived, her in-laws were arrested and charged. And in a sign of the times in Afghanistan, Noorjahan Akbar, of Young Women for Change, named the Internet café that the organization opened on International Women’s Day in 2012 after the girl, to honour her and keep her story alive. Reporting the story is one thing. Naming a café after her so that her story will never be forgotten is an example of how women’s issues have taken on a new status in places where it seemed as if such change would never happen.
The international community has historically been cowed by accusations that by protesting injustice and abuse they are interfering in someone else’s culture. By suggesting that rape was an inevitable consequence of war, they normalized it. In the guise of a message from God, oppression of women seemed acceptable. Diplomats and activists were silenced by thugs who’d hijacked their culture and
their own religion for political opportunism, and bowed to the finger-wagging of self-appointed guardians of cultural and religious codes. While endemic mistreatment still goes on in many places—which country would tell a Saudi Arabian prince that his oil was not wanted as long as his country lashed women for driving—at least women are winning the public relations war on oppression and subjugation.
Case in point: on March 31, 2009, the international community did a major about-face that altered the course for women in Afghanistan, as well as for the men who oppress them. At a NATO summit meeting on the war in Afghanistan in Strasbourg, France, Hamid Karzai announced that he had signed the Shiite Personal Status Law, which rolled back the gains women had made in Afghanistan since the Taliban were ousted. Among other draconian measures, the law blesses marital rape, accepts child marriage and forbids wives to leave their homes unless the right to go to work has been written into their marriage contract. It stripped women of custody of their children after divorce and of the ability to inherit property. Article 132 (3) stated, “The couple should not commit acts that create hatred and bitterness in their relationship. The wife is bound to preen for her husband, as and when he desires.”
Shiite Muslims make up about 20 percent of the Afghan population; they are mostly Hazara, the most persecuted tribe in Afghanistan. But Shiite women have been vocal about the need for change. They are often first to register for literacy classes and take every opportunity to upgrade their skills. So the passing of such a law was a blow to their new emancipation. They, like most Afghans, had presumed that Karzai would let the issue float: he’d claim in public that the retrograde measures were being discussed, even taken seriously, but would never table such a law. In fact, behind the scenes Karzai was being pressured by the fundamentalists to sign the Shiite law. But here he was meeting in Strasbourg with the very people who had committed troops and funds to get his country back on its feet and announcing a return to the dark ages. The reaction was swift and excoriating. The Guardian newspaper reported that it was Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, who spoke first. “If you support that,” he told Karzai, “we can’t support you.” Leaders from the international community lined up to condemn the Afghan president and to stand together on the line that Harper had drawn in the sand.
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