My African Feminist Manifesto: Rated R for strong language and "western" content

In some ways I just cannot BELIEVE that it's taken me this long to get angry here. I log into my computer to write this, with hands shaking with anger, and the Buffy screenshot that is my desktop background reminds me once again how very far away I am from home. From the easy feminism of Joss Whedon. Even Grey's Anatomy seems like a radical feminist manifesto right now.
French class today. Where to start? The conversation didn't even start until the very end of class. Let me try to explain how it developed. Keba, our French professor, decided that after a long class of subjonctive grammar, we would spend the last half hour doing Senegalese riddles or some such. We didn't get past the first one however, so let me tell it to you to try and convey what sparked this rant. Please excuse the poor translations from French. The riddle is: What one thing can you tell a family that will make three people happy and proud at one time? We guessed around a little bit. Evie suggested that if you tell the family that their child is handsome or smart, it will make the parents happy as well. Keba said that was close. I suggested that the child resembled his parents. Keba said that I had gotten it, but to be more precise it was that the child (let's say a son) looked like his father. When we asked why the answer was that the child looked like the father, specifically, he pointed out that sometimes if a wife cheats on a husband and becomes pregnant, it's possible for her to keep the child and pretend that it is her husband's. Therefore, to tell a family that a son resembles his father is to make the father happy with his wife's fidelity, and to make the wife happy that she has given her husband proof of her fidelity. And I guess the kid's just happy that he looks like his dad. Whatever. We got the riddle, and it makes sense, of course, but we pointed out that there was a little bit of cultural sexism hiding behind the theme of the joke. Keba disagreed. (I mean, that's the understatement of the century, because that's what sparked the half-hour long charged discussion that left most of us incensed and, I have to admit, me near tears.)
To provide a little background: The French classes are separated by proficiency, and my class is the most advanced. But that doesn't mean that it's always easy to discuss big political and social theory in a language that's not our mother tongue. Keba is a pretty good French teacher, but tensions of the passive-agressive variety have often flared over teaching methods or disagreements or misunderstandings. He can be a little condescending, to be more clear. Understandably so, since he's the teacher.
ANYWAY. I explained that I didn't think that the joke or Keba himself was sexist, but that the idea behind the joke is that the man is made happy, and the wife is made happy by making her husband happy. That happiness, once again, for a woman, rests on pleasing her husband by giving him children. (To say nothing of having so little faith in your spouse that you need physical proof of their fidelity.) After much discussing and beating about the bush, and throwing about of the terms 'sexism' and 'feminism', Keba kindly explained to us that sexism and feminist were western notions that had no relevance here in Africa. That if you told a traditional Senegalese family about inequality and sexism they would throw you out of their house. Later he changed that to 'not know what you were talking about'. When we brought up women's movements in Africa, he pointed out that the women heading these movements were the educated, intellectual women. That is, who had been subjected to Western influence. That a traditionally family, and in traditional Africa these ideas didn't exist.

"Traditional" here is doublespeak. It means rural. It means poor. It means uneducated. It means happy and hard-working, but struggling nevertheless. Where Keba sees 'untainted by Western values', the rest of us see socio-economic difference. Which, YES, does come with increased exposure to America and Europe and 'western' values. What we could not seem to impress upon Keba was that EQUALITY and INEQUALITY were not "western" values. It's true that the United States is more advanced in terms of women's rights than Africa. That doesn't mean that the United States invented equality, though. The fact that the "west" has given African women words with which to describe a concept and practice that has existed since the beginning of time is not a bad thing but instead a step in the right direction. I think it's time for the people of Africa to take responsibility. When we pointed out that 'western' countries had to struggle to understand and accept the inequality that existed within their borders, Keba tried to use colonialism as an excuse for why Africa was 'different'. Colonialism and it's effect on Africa was horrific and debilitating. But it is not an excuse. There is no excuse for abandoning the struggle towards human rights. Senegal contains within it the vestiges of colonialism, slavery, inter-ethnic tensions, traditional Islam, and the fundamental inequalities of social structure that have existed since, as Keba put it, Adam et Eve. That's fine. We can agree that that makes the fight that much harder. But it is no reason not to acknowledge the fight at all.

I am SO TIRED of being culturally sensitive. I am SO TIRED of women's rights and human rights movements here having work within the traditional social structure. You know what? FUCK the traditional social structure. Traditional social structure SUCKS. Just because people in this country try to right the wrongs they see in their own "traditional" lives doesn't mean that they are submitting to outside influences. The woman sifting cornmeal in the rural village with the baby on her back knows that she is working really hard. She knows that her brother got to go to school and she doesn't. She knows that Islamic tradition says that she can't pray out loud, even though her husband can, for fear that her voice might seduce him into impure thoughts. She knows that, although her husband works hard in his eggplant fields a lot of the time, she works hard every minute of every day just to feed the kids and when the white study abroad students come to stay with him he has miraculous amounts of free time to talk to them and show them around and drink endless cups of tea with them. She can't talk to the students, though. Because she doesn't speak French, because she didn't go to school. Because she never stops working, even as her brothers and young sons and uncles and fathers sit around her watching her work, doing nothing. She doesn't have time to talk to me because she is 20 years old and has three children, the oldest of whom is 5.

But here's what I think. I think that if she did have the time, energy or language to talk to me, and we talked about western values like 'feminism' and 'sexism' and 'inequality' and 'human rights' and 'family planning' and 'solar-power' and 'historical subjugation of women' I think she would have a lot more to say about it than Keba imagines.


Sorry for the cursing. And sorry to be posting this when I have so much other work today. And sorry that just for right now, I love Africa a little less than I normally do. That will pass. But I think it's sort of fitting that today is election day, and the culmination of an election season fraught with issues of race and gender. Today, no matter your political beliefs, we have a historic election day, with the significant possibility of the USA electing an African-American president, or a female vice-president. Those, competence aside, are huge things. I can only wish milestones in the fight against sexism just as big and encouraging and historical for Africa one day.


Robin