One of the most profoundly amazing features of human society is the manner in which we have created – often through difficult and protracted struggles amongst ourselves, notions and practices of inclusion and acceptability, as well as brutal rituals and systems of exclusion and denigration. The human narrative is rife with battles over the ownership of wealth and identity; over the occupancy of space and the control over the physical and creative capacities of some groups or individuals by others. We have differentiated amongst ourselves on the basis of colour and race; gender; location; sexual orientation; ability and; social class. All of these markers have fractured and or cemented into seemingly impenetrable and unchangeable social and cultural notions of who is considered human and who can or cannot belong to the heavily mediated and qualified ways.
All social groups and communities in the world have traveled the path of struggle and resistance against different forms of exclusion and impunity. And each group and the individuals who constitute it, have had to find the courage and the desire to imagine themselves 'outside' the bounded notions and enclosures that their respective societies have tried to lock them into. Working people; people with disabilities; black people, female people; people with a non-heterosexual orientation; and numerous other social groups have had to resist exclusion in order to initiate the process of becoming part of their societies. For example, working people have over the millennia struggled and demanded to be remunerated for their labour, and for as long as they fought as
individuals, trapped in a fundamentally unequal relationship to those who controlled and owned the means through which human life is sustained, they did not have a snow-balls chance in hell of succeeding.
However, when they finally recognized that collective agency is the most powerful resource available to those who are faced with discrimination and exploitation, the journey towards a changing relationship with their societies, and those who wielded power was initiated. And, most crucially, this journey entailed stepping outside the boundaries of the privatized locations within which human labour could and had been ruthlessly exploited, largely through the manipulation of individual vulnerabilities, fears and insecurities. The crucial change occurred when the struggles of working people became both public and political – and their demands and interests were located within the public domain. This led to the phenomenon of Rights as Entitlements to become a historical fact that had to be reckoned with, acknowledged and respected – albeit still with the caveat that the struggle to ensure and improve, exercise and protect those rights remains a central priority of all worker's movements and organizations universally.
Black people have taken a very similar journey through the human historical – especially during the past half millennium; bought and sold with impunity, commodified in ways that are unimaginable but real in the living memory of millions of Africans around the world, immortalized in the blatantly inhuman practices of enslavement and barbaric cruelty on all the continents of the earth. And whilst the struggle against racist exclusion and supremacist impunity continues to rage on the African continent and in the diaspora, the transition from enslavement to recognition that Africans are human and persons occurs also when we collectively, persistently and with incorrigible resilience, struggle against the violation of our integrity and personhood as individuals with a collective identity and agency.
Why have I used such a detailed preface to arrive at the issue of the rights of African women today? There are many reasons, but for purposes of this short discussion, I would like to draw attention to two aspects or commonalities among these three social categories of human beings who have had to 'earn' the right to be recognized, and sometimes treated as human beings – and more recently as citizens of the societies they live in.
First of all, it is important to draw attention to the historical significances and commonalities between the struggles of working people, black people and women. We must look at these groups within a context and time period where neo-liberalism is trying to depoliticize and appropriate the legacies of each group in the academy, through post-structuralist and post-modernist claims and dismissive rhetoric, and through scrutiny, censorship and the sanitization of political debates at the policy levels in both state and civil society groups everywhere.
Secondly, while the struggles against exploitation, racism and sexism have been waged at different moments and in varied arenas over centuries of time, it is in the lives and on the bodies of black women – of African women – that these three crucial social differentiators play themselves out in the most dramatic and in-human ways.
Much has been written, said, declared and pronounced with regard to the human rights of women – globally and within Africa, much of which is admirable and often quoted. Therefore, while the statement in Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that proclaims "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards each other in a spirit of brotherhood" flew in the face of colonial and apartheid reality, in addition to being overtly and unabashedly sexist and exclusionary in its language and content – it did mark an interesting moment in the ideological and moral shift within the West as well as globally.
Without a doubt, since 1948 women all over the world have become visible and vocal in ways that were unthinkable only a few decades ago. In 1993, through the crafting of the Vienna Declaration, women from all walks of life across the globe insisted on the recognition and adoption of an international protocol that stated categorically that "The Human Rights of women and the girl-child are an inalienable and indivisible part of Universal Human Rights" (Article 18). With hind-sight, it is clear that we have come a long way within human society; from a place where we were booty and bounty – things to be bought sold, exchanged and used – to currently standing at the cusp of a vibrant, modern identity; an identity that has become one of the most distinctive features of the progress in all our societies. Our conviction in ourselves and the determination to change our communities, families, societies, nations – the world, have become the flags that governments and often quietly resentful males of all classes, ages, colours and social statuses nonetheless proclaim as collective social achievements.
However, beyond the Conventions and Declarations lies the reality that much of what is understood as women's human rights are still basically rhetorical and inaccessible to the majority of African women. There are undoubtedly instances where small minorities of middle class women who have the knowledge, resources, mobility and courage to demand access, are able to exercise such rights in situations that affect their private and public lives. But for the vast majority of African women, rights are barely a dream; especially for those women who are located in the deeply feudal, privatized spaces of the countryside, or in the slums and ghettos on the margins of the cities and towns, or in the desolate vulnerability of so-called refugee camps – places where misogynist violation and impunity rampage across the lives and bodies of women and their children with a vengeance almost impossible to imagine or bear. Here, in these places of ruin and destruction, of incredible pain and waste of human life and worth - awaits the critical challenge to the claim that African women have human rights that are real and reachable.
That is why I would like to interrogate and juxtapose, even if only briefly, the claims of the current notion of Human Rights, in its liberal, universalistic, all-inclusive rhetorical construction, against an analysis of women's oppression and social exclusion from the category of 'human-ness'. 'Human-ness' centers the notions of bodily/physical integrity, autonomy, dignity and personhood vis-a vis the prevailing and dominant systems and practices of patriarchal supremacy, impunity, sexism and the private ownership of women as 'things' – as social goods that are born, bred, socialized and used by males, everywhere.
The fact of the matter is that Rights are the social outcomes of struggles and political engagements not only with the state, but with those institutions and structures within patriarchal societies that have institutionalized and preserved – and which protect and perpetuate the privileges and prerogatives – of maleness and male power. In every African country, the state, core patriarchal institutions and individuals across all the social divides, actively and deliberately collude and perpetuate practices and cultural myths that facilitate for or directly violate the human-ness of women and female children.
And the patriarchal, heterosexual family is the earliest and most resistant site of male control over the female body and its capabilities. In Africa, one need only look at the relationships of authority, control, surveillance and violation that men exercise over women and female children in particular, as their 'right' as the man who owns a family (or even as a brother or uncle) to see the connections between the denial of women's human-ness and personhood, and the perpetuation and institutionalization of male privilege in all the societies of the continent.
In these privatized spaces of families and rural areas where often the most basic infrastructure through which individuals could begin to acquire a consciousness of entitlement and a sense of being 'righted' simply do not exist, millions of women and female children survive in almost pre-historic conditions. The state remains a distant arbiter of tensions and conflict among males, often intervening only to intensify the crises of social and political reproduction in a particular location – in places like Darfur at the present time – and women and their families become trapped in the age-old struggles between males over the control of critical resources – both material and ideological, with disastrous consequences. In situations such as these, it becomes crystal clear that in spite of the fine sounding rhetoric and the claims by neo-colonial African states that they recognize and respect the rights of women (and poor men), the reality is actually radically different.
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Rights have to be understood and experienced not only as rhetorical devices in the articulation of demands and particular interests by classes or social categories of people within a society. Much more than that, they have to become the expression of an interactive, negotiated, flexible and mutually respective relationship between individuals – in this case women as individual persons – and the state, which is the dominant social and political player in the lives of Africans at the present time, regardless of whether we accept the existence of the state or not.
Humans invent and create states as mechanisms through which the tensions between and among groups and classes of people can be discussed, managed, negotiated and hopefully resolved. We create states so that they can manage and distribute, in the most equitable manner, those critical resources that our societies are endowed with, on behalf of those who cannot compete with others – for reasons related either to class, age, gender, and or other exclusionary systems that emerge in societies that are socially and economically differentiated.
Therefore, for all the reasons that historians, social scientists, and philosophers have ponder upon and debated for millennia, the state must always be made accountable and responsible to the people, regardless of who the people are. This is a fundamental premise for the existence of the state. And the protection of women's physical, sexual, and bodily integrity as citizens of our societies is neither negotiable nor open to any kind of compromise. The integrity and wholeness of women's bodies; their right to a life with dignity and protection is a responsibility that the state cannot and must not be allowed to compromise as an accommodation of some backward notion of cultural authenticity or African-ness. The Right of women and girls to integrity in all its aspects is fundamental to making rights real for women everywhere.
Pat McFadden is a feminist activist and writer currently based in the US.
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