Dear Pambazuka,

I was challenged by the poignant letter by my sister Everjoice Win to Nkosozana Dlamini Zuma et al and in the same breath buoyed up with the Issa Shivji's article. While it is true that the nationalist movement was not that overtly gender sensitive and that the seeds of sectarianism and exclusion were surreptitiously sown even then by vested interests, I also believe that the African women's movement was more focused in the earlier years. It is a great shame to me as a Panafricanist to witness the pain African women have to endure, having had to engage the sticky floor!

My question to Ndugu Shivji is: in your silent class struggle, where do you locate the women’s movement within the nationalist struggle as an integral part of the national question? Is it in the early resistance to colonialism that must include Nehanda Mbuya, the Lancaster generation, because Priscilla Abwao was there or the first Independence governments with Ella Koblo Gulama in Sierra Leone and Bibi Titi in Tanganyika?

My reading of the situation is that male dominated movements cannot be easily weaned from their original tokenism, hence the top women in South Africa can only view the plight of Zimbabwe through the glass ceiling! As Amilcar Cabral put it: "Claim no easy victories, tell no lies". Were he to come back to life he'd see a post colonial landscape dotted all over with leaning towers of failure!

A luta continua.