THE BLACK AFRICAN BODY - The Wide Margin
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THE WIDE MARGIN 1
THE BLACK
AFRICAN BODY
ISSUE 02
2 THE WIDE MARGIN
The Wide
MARGIN
ISSUE 02
THE BLACK
AFRICAN BODY
The Wide Margin is for African
feminisms by African feminists. A
space on the internet, vast as it is, is as
good as any other, to be claimed
and filled with our feminisms. We write
and read African feminism
because we must.”
Editor in Chief
- Varyanne Sika
THE WIDE MARGIN 3
CONTENTS EDITORIAL
by Varyanne Sika
THE WOMB
by Felicity Okoth
YOU SEXY AFRICAN!
by Kagure Mugo
SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN ZIMBABWE
by Anthea Taderera
Cover Art / Image
JOHN MARKESE BODY AND I
Illustrations by Anne Moraa
NADDYA OLUOCH
Design & Layout IN MY SKIN
by Dorothy Kigen
ZACK ADELL.
NATIVE TONGUE
by Ola Osaze
I AM FROM THE FUTURE
by Fungai Machirori
TRANSFORMATION OF BODIES
by Zahrah Nesbitt-Ahmed
MIRROR
by Murewa Olubela
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
4 THE WIDE MARGIN
01
THE BLACK
AFRICAN BODY
Editorial by Varyanne Sika
“There are thinkings of the
systematicity of the body, there are
value codings of the body. The body as
such cannot be thought.”
– Gayatri Spivak
Our bodies are central to our existence. They signify our presence or
absence in/from material and ideological spaces, and are integral to
our corporeal experiences. Our lived experiences throughout life are as
varied as life itself, unconfined to or within a singular context. We eat,
dance, use our bodies for labour, for art, for pleasure, for reproduction, to
communicate and to embody our different material histories. Our bodies
bleed, hurt, age, menstruate, break, limit us, propel us in varying ways,
and deprive us of or afford us certain liberties.
Women’s bodies specifically are often discussed in feminist and other
discourses particularly in relation to sexuality and reproduction.
Discussions on the body focusing on sexuality and reproductive health
illustrate that those are the points of contention and have greater
vulnerability in body matters. This focus illustrates the areas in which
power and agency struggles are mostly manifested and visible. Feminist
Africa’s “Sexual Cultures” issue in 2005, recognized that African sexuality
is addressed by proxy in the literature available on the global market.
THE WIDE MARGIN 5 In this recognition, Feminist Africa took on the opportunity to “deepen and further inform the ongoing debates and struggles around various aspects of sexuality [in Africa].” Buwa!’s issue, “Sex and Health” shared African stories and experiences in sex and health to challenge Africans to “loosen the lid that has been kept tightly shut for decades to prevent sex and sexuality form being openly discussed…” Pop’Africana’s current call for contributions to their “Sex & the Female Body” seeks to “create a new anthropology of exploration and understanding of the African female body with a focus on erotica, beauty and traditions.” These issues all constitute an important foundation for thinking about the systematicities and value codings of the black African body. In the past few years, there has been more effort to include discussion and exploration of black African bodies outside the context of sex, sexuality and health. For instance, platforms such as ‘Inkanyiso’ which centers African LGBTI persons in visual media, and Hola Africa which is a ‘Pan-Africanist queer womanist collective that deals with African female sexuality...’ have created space for LGBTI in discussing the black African body. Africanah gives an overview of body politics in African women’s art, there is more discussion of black African bodies in film, (more) literature and poetry, sports, and labour. In Buala’s second call for their images and geographies issue, they intended to “reinforce the need to design bodies as sites of essential and full performance and not as mere surfaces of discursive enrolment.” These different discussions and many others unmentioned are the kinds to which we are interested in contributing. In this second issue, the Wide Margin is interested in following the line of thought as in ‘Feminist Theory and the Body’ (edited by Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick); the body matters. This issue covers in a few essays, sexuality, abortion, identity, language, transformation, and the varied experiences with our bodies. Felicity Okoth invites us to discuss abortion and dares those who hide behind religion and law to recognize the desperation of women and girls who resort to dangerous means of terminating pregnancies, and openly discuss the subject.
6 THE WIDE MARGIN
Assumptions are made about the binary often drawn in abortion debates,
“pro-choice” and “pro-life”, such as one being religious and the other
atheistic, and subsequently that one is moral and the other amoral,
but these assumptions are limiting and false and do not contribute to
the discussion, false binaries rarely do. Women of all races are affected
pregnancies they choose not to keep, but women of colour are the most
affected. Economic factors are impossible to ignore when discussing
abortion, similarly and very important is the matter of power and
autonomy in the hierarchy of bodies, but we are reminded that the goal in
the abortion debate should be to seek liberation for women.
African eroticism is contemplated by Tiffany Kagure Muge referencing
Nzegwu Nkiru’s essay ‘Osunality, or African Sensuality: Going Beyond
Eroticism’, published by Jenda in 2010. Tiffany’s discussion offers a look
at sexuality and culture while challenging the norm which seems to
dictate that it is contrary to African culture and traditions to enjoy sex or
to be sensual. A proposition is made, that sex in Africa [on the matter of
traditions] .
“should be about invoking traditions so as
to surface their sex positive foundations”
The essay by Anthea Taderera on sexual harassment in Zimbabwe was
prompted by several incidences, particularly the widely discussed and
reported ‘mini-skirt march’ in Harare, Zimbabwe. Sexual harassment
is commonplace and often dismissed with victim blaming without
considering the glaring lack of safety for women navigating masculinised
spaces. Morality rears its incessant head again on this subject and
respectability and compliance with the norm is peddled as a solution to
the perceived immorality, but this is also a political strategy to reduce the
populace of women who rock the boat as it were.
Anne Moraa shares her experience on coming into and accepting her
body while providing accounts of the black body moving and being in the
world, performing, creating art, resisting and fighting oppression, self-
doubt, and self-consciousness. A sense of detachment from the body in
the early years growing up is later followed by bravery, boldness and a
more profound self-awareness and confidence. One gets the sense that
everything that can be thrown at the black female body often is, and more
than survival, thriving remains a possibility.
THE WIDE MARGIN 7
Another experience of living in one’s body is shared by Dorothy Kigen on
colourism living in Kenya and being biracial. Grappling with prejudices
based on one’s skin while simultaneously aware of the implications of
being in possession of skin with high cachet in Kenya is by no means
a pleasant experience as illustrated in the discussion. Colourism and
Eurocentric beauty ideals motivate skin bleaching and perpetuate division
among women as it pits them against each other, an issue that does not
to apply to men.
Ola Osaze writes about language longing for Yoruba and Edo, his native
tongue but for which he lacks the words. A modern day polyglot speaks
a mix of register and language as they navigate the different parts of the
society they live, all the while recognizing that ‘speaking English fluently
is a cultural capital’ that enables economic survival in a predominantly
English speaking society. A body moves through society through various
ways but cannot avoid communication. Ola shares an experience of
movement in the society and across borders through exploring not only
his language but his evolving relation to his own language.
Looking different from what people expect, curiosity leads to questions
on one’s origins and presumably their identity. Fungai Machirori says she
is from the future which ‘defies rules and conventions on who I should
be and accepts who I am.’ Hope that such a future is within reach is a
shared one particularly by those people who would like to go about living
with a complexity and intersection of identities without constantly being
questioned wherever they turn.
In this issue we have a review of A. Igoni Barrett’s Blackass by Zahrah
Nesbitt-Ahmed. Zahrah thinks about the black African body in literature
and leaned towards Igoni’s book by the surrealist nature of transformation
of bodies. Depending on one’s race in Nigeria, as in many other countries
on the continent and beyond, opportunities are presented or challenges
met. Zahrah discusses the two types of transformations that occur in
the book; racial and gender transformations. Our attention is brought to
Frantz Fanon’s declaration in Black Skins, White Masks (1967), that ‘For
the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.’ Is it possible
to take a close look at identity and write creatively about bodies and
identities beyond the commonplace categories?
Murewa Olubela writes a poem in which a body is observed, appreciated
and accepted, an apt way to end this round of discussions on the body.
There is much more to be said and thought about regarding the body, this
issue of the Wide Margin offers a continuation of other discussions before
it and further more contemplation on the black African body.
END
8 THE WIDE MARGIN
02
THE WOMB
by Felicity Okoth
Abortion — A word from which Africans have of-
ten shied away. We, as a society, have not been able
to grapple with it in a way that protects the health
and life of all women despite one in every five peo-
ple having procured an abortion or know some-
one who has. We could continue to hide behind
Religion and Law or discuss the subject openly and
candidly to address the desperation of the myriad
teenage girls and women who resort to backstreet
clinics and end up infertile or dead.
Populist fears of the breakdown of the traditional family structure and
the disintegration of our culture have been played upon with regards to
the word “abortion”. These fears have permeated public discourse and
legislation often in a strategic manner. Mainstream religions, being highly
patriarchal, have predicated social norms on biological determinism in
a manner that has, more often than not, reinforced demonstrably false
assumptions about women’s bodies.
The terms “pro-choice” and “pro-life”; which are core to the abortion
debate have gained significant attention due to the much publicised pro-
and anti- Planned Parenthood activism on the streets and on social media
globally. The two terms have often been used as binaries with the latter
misconstrued as deriving from religion and the former from antagonistic
atheism. Within this binary, it is assumed that an individual cannot be
religious and pro-choice or an atheist and pro-life. The debate has drawn
in women and men of all races, but the women who are most adversely
affected by unplanned pregnancies are women of colour.1
1 Bachiochi, 2011.
THE WIDE MARGIN 9
Some cultures ostracize a woman who conceives a child outside of
wedlock, and sometimes such a woman is exiled from her community.
Religion similarly stigmatises such women. In some churches, members
are excommunicated from the congregation if found pregnant. Women
have even been stoned to death: For the crime of conceiving a child
outside wedlock, in March 2002 Amina Lawal was sentenced to death by
stoning by a Sharia Court in Nigeria.2
2 Ibrahim, Hauwa. “Reflections on the Case of Amina Lawal”.10 THE WIDE MARGIN
The working woman usually finds herself losing ground on the career
ladder as a result of a pregnancy. Anecdotal evidence abounds about
conspicuously pregnant women being rejected during job interviews due
to their condition. Unfortunately, the law in Kenya is not very vocal about
discrimination against pregnant women in the workplace. This relegates
women to the position of second-class citizens who, as a consequence of
being pregnant, are barred from participating fully in society and enjoying
the common life prevailing in it.
On the other hand, a woman who fails to get pregnant is shamed for being
apparently infertile, incapable of mothering, a travesty of womanhood,
and a disgrace to the society. This amounts to a total objectification of her
womb and her body, subjecting her to a sense of self that is overdetermined
from without.
Abortion then becomes a political act of resistance to the dominant social
order that militates against a woman’s subjectivity. It becomes one of
the tools of women’s survival in a society that cares little about how the
child brought forth or the child’s mother will survive. As an act, it is a
disassociation from what is set for her, before her.
Most women who choose abortion, however, do so not out of a lack of
respect for human life or because they assign no value to motherhood but
because they appreciate that carrying a pregnancy to term not only yields
a baby but their baby, and that birthing turns one into a different person,
a mother. Most of these women have a clear idea of what it means to be a
good mother, and they are honest that at the time of their predicament,
they fall short of such an ideal or are not willing or ready to become one.
They understand the duties and responsibilities of motherhood and their
abilities in that regard. A woman aborts because she understands that
gestation will reshape her body and soul, transforming her into a mother
biologically and emotionally as well as socially, and it is precisely that
transformation that she consciously chooses not to undergo.
Being pro-choice however should not be presented as promoting abortion
as the best option for all women facing an unplanned pregnancy. Far
from it, being pro-choice is about three things: ensuring that women
have access to safe and legal abortion if they choose to; ensuring that a
woman’s choice to abort really is a genuine choice of her own accord and
free will; respecting and supporting any choice that a woman makes in
regard to her pregnancy whether that be abortion, adoption, or parenting.
Pro-choice advocates consistently and correctly argue that abortion
is never an easy decision. Pro-choice affirms the validity of a woman’s
decision to abort, both by acknowledging the reasons she aborted
and well as the difficulties she may have experienced in reaching
that decision. It also affirms the validity of a woman’s decision to be
a mother. This helps draw a distinction between being pro-choice
and being pro-abortion. The latter refers to being in favour of the
medical provision of abortion and abortion-care.THE WIDE MARGIN 11
Whilst there are pro-choice advocates who do not regard abortion as a
moral issue and who disagree that foetal life is valuable and worthy of
some degree of protection, there are feminist pro-choice advocates who,
while fervently arguing in favour of abortion rights, also express care
about the welfare of foetal life. A feminist need not completely negate the
life of the foetus from moral consideration in order to defend abortion
rights. Foetal life matters to many women, including women who defend
the right to abortion. Their voices need not be erased from public debate.
The question around foetal life — whether a fertilized embryo is a bulk of
organic tissue or inchoate life — because it is emotive, takes the focus away
from the deep, structural issues around women’s agency and wellbeing that
are yet to be addressed. There is need to shift the emphasis of pro-choice
discourse from its perceived incompatibility with expressing respect for
foetal life to one that demonstrates a fuller respect for those women who
have functioning uteri, are the only humans capable of bearing life, and
must make decisions regarding that potential life embodied in those cells
as well as their own actual life.
The African woman’s greatest enemy has always been systemic poverty
which disproportionately affects her. The effects of this systemic poverty
are felt at the intersection of all possible social categories of gender,
culture, religion, ability, fertility, age, and so on. The reality facing a single
young African woman should she decide to bring an unplanned pregnancy
to term is often dire which is why so many such women decide to abort.
Women who live below the poverty line are about four times as likely to
obtain an abortion compared to those who live above the poverty line.
On average, single women have a higher poverty rate than single men, a
phenomenon described by Diana Pearce as the “feminization of poverty”.
3Children born of teen mothers face a host of difficulties including
increased risks of failure in schools, poverty, and even of incidences of
physical and mental illness. The main reason women choose abortion is
financial difficulty4.
This should concern pro-choice advocates because aborting for such
reasons compromises genuine choice. One of my favourite feminist
writers on this issue, posits that;
If poverty is the reason she is terminating the pregnancy, if in fact she
wants the child but cannot afford to have it, she is actually being coerced
into abortion. She does not, in fact, have a choice at all […] Feminists should
make our positions clear that when we talk about the “right to choose”, we are
not talking about women having abortions solely because they can’t afford
the child. Obviously, if we are going to work for choice in our reproductive
lives, we also have to work to bring about the conditions — social, economic,
cultural — that will make it a real possibility”.5
Thus the struggle does not stop at the right to choose what we are going
to do with our bodies but extends to how we can change the system to
accommodate us when we eventually feel able to choose motherhood.
3 Pearce, Diana. “The Feminization of Poverty: Women.” Work (1978).
4 Manninen, Bertha Alvarez. “The value of choice and the choice to value: Expanding the discussion about fetal life within prochoice
advocacy.” Hypatia 28.3 (2013): 663-683.
5 McDonnell, Kathleen. Not an Easy Choice: Re-Examining Abortion (1984):12 THE WIDE MARGIN
Pro-life as a movement gives primacy to the sanctity of life and its
protection from the moment of conception to natural death thus shunning
abortion and euthanasia. The movement has its roots in religion but is not
limited to the religious. I know of pro-choice feminists who would never
themselves opt for abortion and are thus also pro-life just as there are
deeply religious individuals who are pro-life and who have themselves
procured abortions.
For years, the mainstream media, pop culture and the conventions of
liberal politics in the developed world have jammed pro-life politicians
and activists into a box with claims that an embryo is mere organic tissue
and not life as such, thus a woman should be able to do away with that
tissue if she so wishes. I find problems with this because a human embryo
is biologically alive if we go by the criteria needed to establish biological
life, that is: metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction.
6The same criteria are used by scientists to categorize bacteria as life
in Mars. Arguments I favour are those that question if the embryo is a
person which has less to do with biology but everything to do with each
individual’s own morals, politics, and philosophy. It is into this emotive
space that religion and personal conviction enter.
Beyond debating when life begins, the pro-life movement in its pursuits
to protect life from conception to natural death has been less vocal with
regards to the welfare of this same life between conception and natural
death. It would be unfair to generalise about all pro-lifers as I know of
many hospitals, orphanages, schools run by various churches who are all
concerned with the quality of a life as it is lived; these good deeds are
however overshadowed by conservative rhetoric by people who identify
as pro-life yet seem not to care about the welfare of their fellow citizens.
Why would an embryo’s life matter so much to an individual who has little
regard for the poor or those different from them with regards to race and
religion? This paradox, is described by Sister Joan Chittister:
I do not believe that just because you are opposed to abortion, that that
makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply
lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated,
not a child housed. And why would I think that you don’t? Because you do
not want tax money to go there. That is not pro-life. That is pro-birth. We
need a broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.
In Kenya, we cannot persecute women for opting out of motherhood when
under the watch of the executive we squander the little that would help
make maternal care financially manageable. The National Youth Service is
reported by Kenyan media to have lost 791 million Kenyan Shillings under
the watch of a few corrupt officials. The National Youth Development Fund
is also is reported to have lost money to the tune of 500 million. In total
we are talking about money to the tune of 1.291 billion Kenyan Shillings.
6. Sagan, Agata, and Peter Singer. “The moral status of stem cells.” Metaphilosophy 38.2-3 (2007): 264-284.THE WIDE MARGIN 13
This is half the amount set up for the Affirmative Action and Social
Development Fund (KES 2.1 billion) in the 2015-16 National Budget. One
cannot fail to see that the money lost could go a long way in improving
maternal care, reproductive health, youth employment and development.
These are the same issues that have been found to cumulatively contribute
to a woman’s decision to terminate a pregnancy in one way or another.
Beyond research, these issues call all who claim to be pro-lifers to political
action, seeking not merely limits to abortion, but strengthened maternal
care policies, child-support laws, compassionate maternity-leave policies,
and adequate accessible medical care for all women. If these issues are not
given the attention they deserve, it will be futile to attempt to stop a girl,
by law or religion, from heading to a quack for an unsafe abortion.
Beyond abortion, the discussion of safe and accessible methods of family
planning that would protect African women’s health and allow them to
control their fertility has been mired with allegations of population control
by critical political theorists and religious clerics, the most vocal being
the Catholic Church. The notion that family planning programs have been
designed as a component of development projects aimed at population
control makes it more difficult for African women to wholeheartedly
adopt the programs. Such programs have instead aroused strong suspicion
and opposition among women. It has so far been impossible worldwide
to separate birth control programs from oppressive population control
policies.7
I strongly believe that African women would desire to control their fertility
but are often unable to access medically safe alternatives. Young women
who seek contraceptives often either lack sufficient information or are
unfairly judged by those with the expertise to assist them. During my
undergraduate studies six years ago, a friend was turned away, on moral
grounds, by the school nurse, when she sought long-term contraceptives. I
do not believe that she was the only one. Young African women are having
sex and at an early age. We could choose to embrace the reality or we
shall collectively perish. In Kenya, during the World AIDS Day, statistics
released revealed a sharp increase in HIV infection rates among teenagers,
with the girls being over-represented.
Countries that have not made talking about sex a taboo have the fewest
incidences of abortion. Such countries have implemented comprehensive
sex education programs and access to contraception in addition to offering
social support programs that provide financial safety nets for their citizens
and residents.8 Such support makes coming of age less perilous for both
teenagers and their parents. The very lack of such social welfare programs
and high rates of child poverty in Africa contributes to escalating rates of
birth among teenagers. Without adequate support systems and education
these teenagers are drawn into the vicious cycle of multigenerational
female poverty.
7. Çaǧatay, Nilüfer, Caren Grown, and Aida Santiago. “The Nairobi Women’s Conference: Toward a Global Feminism?.” Feminist Studies
12.2 (1986): 401-412.
8. Manninen, op. cit.14 THE WIDE MARGIN
Of course this will not eliminate abortions entirely as contraceptives will
and do occasionally fail, even with perfect use, and some women simply
do not want to be mothers despite their affluence, neither at the time
of their pregnancy nor ever. Moreover as long as sexual violence exists
against women, access to abortions is needed for the women who cannot
bring their pregnancy to term after being victimized.
If the pro-life goal is to reduce abortion, criminalizing it without offering
concurrent social support will be ineffective. Rather, a genuine effort to
reduce abortions would include implementing social policies that would
offer prenatal and postnatal care for both mother and child, quality and
affordable childcare that will enable parents complete their education
or obtain full-time work, and support for victims of sexual and physical
abuse. It is also paramount to ensure that certain aspects of the society, for
instance discrimination against pregnant women in places of employment,
overlooking mothers with young children during job promotions, school
and work premises that are hostile to nursing mothers, and so on are
restructured through national affirmative policies. This way, fewer women
will feel coerced into choosing an abortion out of fear that having a child
will force them to compromise other worthwhile goals.
As a pro-life feminist, I believe that it should be our duty to show a respect
for both freedom of choice and freedom of conscience for those who see
life, but not an actual person in a human embryo. It possible for one to
disagree with anyone who sees neither human life nor the potential for
human personhood in an embryo and at the same time respect the dignity
of those who in good conscience hold that view.
When a state deprives women of control over their own reproductive
capacity through abortion restrictions, it is making a social statement
about women’s roles and status in the community. Having female bodies
and the physical ability to bear children does not mean that all women
share a nurturing nature that makes them alone inherently fit to care for
children; nor is it the case that men lack the capacity for such caregiving.
Work-leave policies that differentiate on the basis of gender (offering
lengthy maternity leave but brief paternity leave) reinforce the pervasive
gender-role stereotypes that caring for the family is a woman’s work
while the man is expected to work more and entitled to earn more. Such
stereotypes produce a self-sustaining cycle that reinforces women’s role
are primary caregivers while discouraging men from such roles. Such a
situation prevents women from determining the course of their lives and
from shaping their own destinies. They most certainly deny them the
freedom and equality so prized by democratic peoples and inscribed in
the Kenyan Bill of Rights.THE WIDE MARGIN 15
The gender equitable argument implies that just as men do not have to
get pregnant as a consequence of the sexual act, women who do, should
sufficiently be supported. The professional and personal lives of men are
not usually interrupted by an ill-timed pregnancy, or are not interrupted
to the same extent that women’s lives are, and neither then should
women’s lives be so disrupted. Consequently, the law should recognize
that women who wish to have “non-procreative sex” are as entitled as
men to constitutional protection of their right to define their own destiny.
In other words, women should be equally entitled to remain detached
from the potential consequences of sex.
There is need for the invitation of pro-lifers to expand the morals
arguments of their position as opposed to relying on arguments from
authority, emotion, fear, or threat. Pro-choicers, on the other hand should
also think of articulating a moral argument rather than merely rights-
based ones, given that the African context and Kenya, in particular, is
extremely hostile to the ideas of abortion and pro-choice. The feminist
movement in the region needs to continue to lead an open discussion
about the moral, ethical, physical, and emotional complexity of abortion
that would be more likely to resonate with young African women; a
contextualization that takes into cognisance culture, religion, class, pre-
and post- abortion care for women who have opted to terminate their
pregnancies.
Finally, in this pro-choice, pro-life debate, we must focus not only on
who has the power and autonomy in the hierarchy of bodies and who is
deprived of them, nor on who has the right over the body or who is forced
to be subject to the will of power. We must rather seek the patterns of
liberation for women, together, that emerge from this debate. Discourse
transmits and produces power, reinforces it, but also can subvert and
expose it, render it fragile and makes it possible to thwart and change. The
goal is always to ensure that all women everywhere are safe, healthy, free,
and enjoying expanding range of possibilities their lives have to offer.
END16 THE WIDE MARGIN
03
YOU SEXY
AFRICAN!
by Kagure Mugo
One could be forgiven for thinking that
Africans are sexually conservative;
that at some point between our
freeing pre-colonial toplessness and
the strictures of neo-colonial pastors
praying for us to stop “chronic
masturbation”, we lost our collective
inner sexual freak. We lost that thing
that allowed us to enjoy sex as part
of religious rituals and have schools
that taught men and women how to
unleash the pleasure found in the their
bodies’ connection to the cosmos.
Now we have seemingly become a people who, under
the rubric of a warped morality, have bachelorette
parties in which you are told you shall stay on your
knees in prayer; who judge or attack one another for
wearing miniskirts, or for mentioning that you and
your husband may indeed have sex outside of the three
times required to conceive the three children you have.
One needs only look at how churches speak about
“virtue”, how a girl is raised to not even look sideways
at a boy until the day she must bring a good one home.
One needs only watch a good Nollywood film in which
any woman who is even slightly “loose” ends up either
dead, struck with a strange disease, or plagued by
demons.THE WIDE MARGIN 17
18 THE WIDE MARGIN
The vagina has become that which is supposed to signify all that is pure and
wholesome within society. Yet it can easily be defiled through something
as natural as having your period and unnatural as being raped. It is the
source of good when used well and mass evil when not. It is policed to the
extent that it is now even tied to bursaries awarded in order to reduce
the spread of HIV. It is a kind of Pandora’s Box, a source of both life and
shame.
Women who have decided that they are not going to put up with bad
sex and have their voices grow hoarse from faking orgasms, who instead
choose to seek out the sex they feel they deserve are labelled hoes (whores),
THOTS (That Hoe Over There), thirsty, or simply dismissed as being too
wild. Such a woman’s sexuality makes her both desired and damned;
@Beeyroyce pointed out this irony when she said,
“you may call me a slut now that we have
broken up, but you can never un-eat this pussy.”
Women owning their sexuality are characterised as destructive, incapable
of following society’s rules, or stereotyped as having emotional issues
(often tied to their relationships with their fathers — the so-called daddy
issues — and possible trauma in the form of hypothesised prior sexual
assault). Only the most righteous of women ostensibly ever truly deserves
to be referred to as a “good woman”. Those who cover up are seen as
balanced, confident women while those who expose their bodies are seen
as neurotic, exhibitionist attention seekers.
There are still more insidious ideas wafting around the continent, polluting
our minds and tainting our sex lives. Misconceptions such as women being
mere vessels from which to extract pleasure or as receptacles for men’s
semen; thinking that women are machines into which if you put enough
friendship coins, sex will fall out; women as incapable of articulating
whether they want sex or not; women as incapable of knowing what
they want or when they want it; women as not permitted to change their
minds before, during, or after sex; women as incapable of insane heights
of pleasure (There are some who still consider female ejaculation to be a
myth. It is not). It is still necessary for us to continually (re)understand
sex and pleasure from a woman’s perspective and re-examine notions of
sex, desire, consent, and agency.
Nkiru Nzegwu provides a corrective to these forms of misogynist sexual
conservatism in an analysis of the African erotic in her “Osunality”. 1
Nzegwu wants us to understand the various historical contexts that had an
impact on the ideas we now accept as given. These ideas about sexuality,
agency, and pleasure have evolved over time but are now often accepted
as “the way things always were.”
1. Nzegwu, Nkiru. “Osunality (or African eroticism)” in African Sexualities: A Reader, pp 253- 267.THE WIDE MARGIN 19
When Nzegwu advocates for a modern way of understanding sexuality she
is urging us to think of new ideas not merely based in “modern western
ways of thinking” but rooted in our own African contexts.2 One needs to
only look at the kitchen parties and bed-dancing in Zambia, the aunties
from the coasts of Kenya, ssengas who have set up stalls to teach sexual
skills in the streets, and even the (slightly too heteronormative and
patriarchal) African sex safari based in traditional medicines and healing
practices one can experience in Alexandria Township in South Africa.3
Despite being steeped in modernity we, as Africans, have a tendency to
fall back on culture and tradition either consciously or unconsciously in
order to entrench power relations. One sees a man within polygamous
communities such as South Africa speaking of his need for multiple
women without any understanding of the context of pre-colonial marriage
practices, merely because he wants more than one moist place within
which he can rest his weary penis. With bride price and lobola, for which
men take out loans to “pay” for their future bride, the notion of a man
owning a woman is symbolised and recapitulated.
When challenging oppressive ideas about women’s sexual agency, we can
look to cultural-historical ideas as well as modern ones: In the same breath
that one speaks of a vibrator one can speak about the vagina’s awesome
mystical power in a cultural sense, and show that African mysticism and an
African woman’s orgasm have a meaningful, shared context. Reclaiming
women’s sexual agency happens both by going forward creatively — as
seen in some of the sex-positive African women’s spaces like Nana Darkoa
Sekyiamah’s Adventures From the Bedrooms of African Women — but also
critically, by taking the argument back to the pre-colonial context and
traditional context right to the place of those who argue against women’s
sexual agency like to take refuge.4 The regressive traditionalist cultural
argument against sex positivity and sexual empowerment is that they are
neither cultural nor traditional; but, as African feminist know, they, in
actual fact are a powerful and important elaboration of African culture
and tradition.
Although cultural and traditional rituals may not be performed every
day, they are internalised as received ideas by many and thus inform
contemporary daily interactions. A man does not need to believe in
cutting off the clitoris of a woman or understand the diverse histories of
the practice to misinterpret it as an endorsement of the primacy of his
pleasure, even at the expense of hers; or that his masculinity is assured
only by the symbolic mutilation of her femininity. A woman does not need
to believe in polygamy to justify being cheated on because “men should
not be starved of sex.5” The average African man under the age of thirty-
five who has barely been to the village will nonetheless tell you about
the putative cultural role of women. He does this based on fabulations
of the village “where men are men and women act right” rather than his
personal lived experience.6
2. Tsanga, A. S. Dialoguing culture and sex: reflections from the field in “African Sexualities: A Reader” pp 57 -71.
3. Tsanga, op. cit.
4. Nzegwu, op. cit.
5. Nzegwu, op. cit.
6. MacKinnon, Catharine. Towards a feminist theory of the state (1989).20 THE WIDE MARGIN
“Culture has a rich, diverse and fluid meaning.”7
A look at culture allows insight into the lives of a particular group and
hearing the views of those within the group illuminates power dynamics.
8 There’s a hierarchy of who has control over their sexuality based on
cultural ideas: the coital duty of the wife, practices such as Female Genital
Cutting, breast ironing, and so on. When such ideas are advocated by
female (and male) members of communities, they speak to sexual power
dynamics. When a man and woman, man and man, or woman and woman
confront each other, such ideas choreograph their sexual interactions.
What do men and women talk about when they talk about sex and how do
these conversations play out between the sheets? 9
A conversation with a group of men once came to the mind blowing
conclusion that if women said “no” then men would not cheat. The
assumptions were that men had no control over their genitalia and
women’s vaginas were a vortex from which no man could escape, and thus
they must do their damndest to keep that kitty under control for the good
of all. This conversation gave women a sort of negative agency whilst also
perpetuating the idea of the strong penis that will not be controlled. This
again centred the man as the prime mover during sex whilst the woman
was a crucible for his virility, either checking it or allowing it to spill forth.
From her reflections on the sexual practices of Luo people, Tsanga gives
an example of the practice of widow cleansing, which continues to this
day in some communities: When a woman’s husband dies she must be
cleansed by a jakowiny in order for her to be passed on to the man who shall
eventually inherit her (Ter).10 The jakowiny is an outsider and sometimes
sought after because of his limited mental capacity, often having been a
jakowiny for many other women. Even when a woman dies uninherited
she must be inherited in death showing that a woman, even when she is
dead, must belong to someone sexually. Widow cleansing not only has
repercussions for the prevalence of HIV/AIDS but also raises questions
of sexual agency and ownership as well as the violation of a woman’s
body. Widow cleansing is a cultural practice that occurs in other African
contexts, for example in Southern African countries such as South Africa
and Zimbabwe. Arguably a universal theme, that a woman’s vagina is
public property is one that is deeply entrenched within an array of African
traditional and cultural contexts. Participants in the study emphasise that
“sex in Luo culture brings order to society.” Tsanga argues that there is a
need to explore how cultural and traditional notions seep into the greater
society, which I completely agree with. One cannot act as though we
date and shag in a silo, the notions which inform other interactions will
inevitably inform activities we engage in between the sheets.
7. Giles, J. and Middleton, T. Studying Culture: A Practical Introduction.
8. Tsanga, A. S. “Dialoguing culture and sex: Reflections from the field” in African Sexualities: A Reader, pp 57-71.
9. Bennett, J. “Subversion and resistance: activist initiatives” (2011) in African Sexualities: A Reader, p 80.
10. Bennett, J. “Subversion and resistance: activist initiatives” (2011) in African Sexualities: A Reader, p 80.THE WIDE MARGIN 21
One of the alternative reparative narratives is that of the African eroticism
exemplified by the goddess Osun, and philosophies of the African erotic
described by Nkiru Nzegwu. Nzegwu entices us to engage in a shift of
the mind (and body) to a different cognitive framework, that is, from a
Western one that is based on Greek phallocentric ideas of sex to one based
in African philosophies and understandings of the sexual act.
The resultant European/Western conception
of eroticism underwrites theoretical, literary
and fictional narratives of sexuality from a
phallocentric position that emphasises and
legitimizes the privileging of men’s needs,
desires and fantasies.
She challenges us to throw off the cloak of the argument that “this is
African tradition” which is used to defend a male-centric paradigm of
sex, because it is not how we, as Africans, historically got sexy. It is from
a European context that we have derived manichaean juxtapositions of
the Madonna and the whore, where a woman can only either encapsulate
frigid purity or be wildly, insatiably, disloyal and promiscuous when it
comes to sex. This is “the sexualised gender hierarchy of the West [which]
eroticises male dominance and female subjugation as sexual.”11
The influence of the West must also be seen in how a great deal of our own
history is forgotten or lost.
The African context, however, is thus one that
not only recognises but also unites the power
of the penis and the command of the clitoris, a
fact we must remember.
Jane Bennet says in her paper on subversion and resistance, that “what
can be understood (remembered) of the diverse paradigms, activities
and performances that comprised sexual being within the lives of our
ancestors is minimal.”12
11. MacKinnon, op. cit.
12. Bennett, op. cit. 80.22 THE WIDE MARGIN
This obscured history needs to be re-placed within the consciousness of
post-independence African citizens who continue an engagement with
Christian colonial values (alongside Islamic religious ideas in some parts
of the continent), which include the disallowing of same sex practices,
public displays of desire, the concept of a clean sexuality as well as “the
erasure of the sexual power of people gendered as women.” Furthermore,
there was the hyper-sexualisation of the African body by colonial libido,
with the naked and revealed body becoming something to be both feared
and desired.
Nzegwu points out that “imperialism radicalised sexuality worldwide and
colonialism, apartheid, and global capitalism reconstituted only white
women into paragons of purity and beauty […] deserving of love and
affection and fetishized non-white bodies as dispensable and worthless.”
Thus a contemporary policing of women such that we are unable to dress
as we please for fear of being attacked, and we see instances of corrective
rape as men seek to put women in their place as women, and we have
execrable social media memes such as #Mollis, which was a circulated
audio recording of what sounded like a woman being raped and which
was found risible simply because she, her voice inflected by her ethnicity,
mispronounced her attacker’s name. The meme trended because of
the classist claim that she did not have a mastery of English in spite of
the more important fact that she sounded like she was being sexually
assaulted.
Nzegwu asks this question to cosmopolitan Africans:
…what is the justification for embracing a notion
of eroticism that is steeped in an ideology of
gender inequality, that construes the bodies of
African women as undesirable?
Again, Nzegwu urges us to return to the philosophical roots of certain
threads of African eroticism. She argues that a relocation to an African
ontological schema as well as closer look at the foundation on which it
rests could highlight the flaws of the modern understanding of sexuality
as well as paint a different picture of sexual desire and passion.
Ancient Egyptian erotica are extant in the form of paintings, texts such
as The Instructions of Kagemni, and songs that spoke of love and sexual
desire. Although the Egyptians are but one example of the ancient erotic,
their philosophy shares certain elements with other beliefs from various
others within the continent including that of Yoruba religion. One such
overlap is in the Yoruba goddess Osun. Although Osun is the sole female
divinity amongst sixteen male deities, she is the one in whom “the
Creator-God placed all the good things in earth…” 13 She is the epitome of
sensuality and sexual pleasure and her existence speaks to female sexual
knowledge and agency. In turn, women who embody this cosmic force
wield their sexuality “openly and unselfconsciously.
13. Nzegwu, op. cit.THE WIDE MARGIN 23
“Osun’s force outlines a sequential energy flow from desire, arousal,
copulation, pleasure, fulfilment, conception, birth and growth.” However,
this whole process does not need to culminate in the creation of life.
The principle of pleasure is at its core. The principle of pleasure for both
partners is at the heart of sex. Osun, like other female African deities,
does not exert her power and reinforce female sexuality by negating male
sexuality. It is understood that the two must work in conjunction with
each other to truly realise the transcendence of sexual experience.
This is contrary to contemporary thinking that says a woman who shows
she is sexually equipped to handle herself and her pleasure is not someone
who enjoys a God given right (see “The Song of Songs”) but is a threat to
the order of society; that such a woman’s presence can only make things
sticky and slippery in a way that makes all around her uncomfortable as
they have to deal with their own repression. The contemporary gendered
parlance of “conquering” a woman, “smashing the pussy”, and other
phrases speak to an adversarial idea of sex that means the woman must
eventually submit. Within this rhetoric there is no partnership, only a
sexual battle. (About this conflict, Saul Bellow asks:
“In times like these, how should a woman steer
her heart to fulfillment? […] Man and woman,
gaudily disguised, like two savages belonging
to hostile tribes, confront each other. The man
wants to deceive, and then to disengage himself;
the woman’s strategy is to disarm and detain
him.”14)
The message amidst this sexual antagonism is that
you, as a woman, shall spread her legs and be beaten
with the putative magic stick.
There are still traditional spaces in which women are taught to embody
these ideas of the erotic and the sensual. Sexuality schools such as
those seen among the pan-ethnic Sande and Bundu, in which they have
kpanguima, taught women the potency of pleasure as well as “the value of
controlling and taming the spouse.” Nzegwu says that Sande instructors
focus on moulding young girls into self-assured women. Such schools
recognise sexual power and pleasure as a social good that can, and must
be, taught and harnessed all within a paradigm of what is culturally
acceptable.
14. Bellow, Saul. Herzog: 232.24 THE WIDE MARGIN
Remnants of these sorts of practices can be seen amongst the ssengas of
Uganda or even the “aunties” of the Kenyan coast. Instructors focusing
on sexual pleasure and the sexual empowerment of women are present
in Ghana with the Dipo of the Adangme, Chisungu of the Bemba and
Tonga in Zambia, and the Olaka of the Makhuwa from Yao and Makonde
in Mozambique, among others.
Sex in Africa should be about invoking traditions so as to surface their sex
positive foundations as they truly were and are before they were stripped
of their sensuality. Great sex is not a Western notion; the freedom for
a woman to experiment and explore her sexuality is not for, and does
not even originate from, the “foreign feminists” but is something deeply
ingrained in African spirituality and eroticism. Take a good look at the
vagina, at her secrets, her depth, the fact that she has the only human
organ that is designed purely for pleasure. It may be time to wonder what
else can emerge from there other than a baby. Get a mirror and a friend
to help in the journey of ecstatic discovery, feel your merry way, and
submerge your lovely self in something different.
ENDTHE WIDE MARGIN 25
04
SEXUAL
HARASSMENT IN
ZIMBABWE
by Anthea Taderera
Sexual harassment in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital city, has become a part
of popular conversation following the public stripping of a minor by men,
an incident that provoked the #MiniSkirtMarch. The protest prompted
heated debate on the internet and within mainstream media. Dominant
opinions were that women were merely trying to get away with being
“whores” and that women’s bodily integrity and safety in public spaces
couldn’t be considered a significant issue.
“Our bodies are our primary means of participating
socially, economically, politically, spiritually and
creatively in society. They are the beginning point
of the practical application of rights; the place
in which rights are exercised, and for women in
particular, the place where rights are most often
violated. Without knowledge of and control over
our bodies, including our sexuality, women’s rights
can be neither fully exercised nor enjoyed.”
- (Horn, Jessica. “Re-righting the sexual body” (pdf). Feminist Africa Issue 6.
2006: Subaltern Sexualities.
1. Articles I wrote on the Miniskirt March:
• “Unlearning Modesty Culture: Mini Skirt March, Harare, Zimbabwe”
• “Why I marched in Harare’s miniskirt march”
Media coverage: “Mixed reactions to mini skirt march”
The organiser’s thoughts: “Reflections on the Zimbabwe mini skirt march”
2. Bodily Integrity: Being able to move freely from place to place; being able to be secure against violent assault, including sexual assault,
marital rape, and domestic violence; having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and for choice in matters of reproduction. (Nussbaum,
Martha C. Sex and Social Justice. Oxford UP, 1999. 41-42.)26 THE WIDE MARGIN
Sexual harassment in public spaces is commonplace for many Zimbabwean
women. We get whistled at, catcalled, shouted at, and physically assaulted
simply for having made the decision to leave the house wearing whatever
we wanted. Unfortunately, sexual harassment is not a new problem.
Over twenty years ago, Zimbabwean women — students at University of
Zimbabwe (UZ) held a massive protest after men at the university decided
that they were entitled to strip women whether they were wearing
miniskirts (the quintessential clothing of the immoral) or trousers. During
November 2015, UZ students continued to experience sexual harassment
on campus with no repercussions for the perpetrators. On 13th November
2015, women students from UZ organised a protest against the unabating
sexual violence they experienced on campus.3 The students were beaten
and sixteen of them arrested by riot police.
3.. “16 female varsity students arrested”. News Day, November 14, 2015.THE WIDE MARGIN 27
Public spaces become “masculinised” spaces that women must learn
to navigate.4 Such spaces are marked by men’s aggressive behaviour
towards others. In them, sexual harassment and sexual violence become
normalised. Women must then learn to mitigate their fear and develop
mechanisms which permit safe passage through unsafe spaces until they
are back in their own safe spaces. This is what feminist geographer, Gill
Valentine, describes as a “spatial expression of patriarchy.”5 So when
women leave their homes or other spaces over which we are presumed to
have some sort of control, we are thought to have implicitly consented to
the harms that we may experience outside of them, and to have accepted
that the onus of dealing with those harms is with us individually, not with
society collectively.
The oppressive framing of sexual harassment is based on the idea of an
immoral, disruptive woman, a Jezebel who is “asking for it”, who distracts
honourable God-fearing men from going about their daily lives, and puts
“real women” at risk. Therefore the good people of Zimbabwe must resort
to violent discipline in order to discourage such reprehensible dressing
and behaviour. Women who do not wish to be considered immoral and
who would like to be safe from harm or supported in the event of their
being harmed, have a societally enforced obligation to dress “modestly”.
Modesty as a solution to sexual harassment encourages victim blaming.
When the solution is modesty, the problem is women failing to dress
appropriately and failing to conform to unsafe, masculinised public spaces.
It obscures that ideas about women’s emerge from the way that women
are consistently perceived (and experience themselves as perceived) and
consumed (and experience themselves consumed) as sexual objects to
which men imagine themselves entitled. But when women enforce their
bodily integrity, exercise their autonomy, and deny men their perceived
birth-right entitlement to our bodies, we often suffer violence. When
we complain against this violence and the conditions that support it, we
are further victimised either through victim-blaming — that attempts to
explain how we clearly brought this harm upon ourselves — or through
the deployment of state violence against us when we take to the streets.
Victim blaming is a logical recourse for a society unwilling to confront the
fact that it has a vibrant rape culture that normalises the sexualised harm
of women. The insistence that if a woman is modest she will avoid sexual
harassment is predicated on the misguided belief that society cannot be
changed and that sexual harassment is an inherent part of the experience
of womanhood.
Often, modesty is proffered not only as a solution to sexual harassment,
but also as a formula for getting men to like you in the right way, to
get consumed as a good woman. Women’s bodies are still objectified
as sexually available to men’s advances which we are automatically
imagined as desiring at all times and from all quarters. Modesty then ties
into the way society regulates how and with whom women should engage
in sexual or romantic relationships: women must be passive recipients
of men’s attention, with no ownership of our bodies or our sexualities.
Consumption of women’s bodies remains, male entitlement is reinforced,
and objectification is continuously normalised as an inherent part of
relations between women and men, a fact that women must learn to live
with.
4.. For a discussion of this, refer to Don Mitchell’s Feminism and Cultural Change: the Geographies of Gender.
5. Valentine, Gill. The Geography of Women’s Fear.28 THE WIDE MARGIN
The idea that women’s sartorial choices are contingent on what men will
find acceptable and attractive, continues to be reinforced. As a result,
women cannot simply choose to cover up or not because of the ingrained
patriarchal demand that women live for male desire. Sexual harassment
and sexual violence is framed as the correct response to transgressing
patriarchy’s demands.
Black women in Zimbabwe — and under the white supremacist global
order — continue to bear the burden of being imagined as hypersexual.6
Racist reading of our bodies means that our bodies are perceived as
sexually deviant with the implication that it is impossible to rape women
who, by definition, are always already sexually available. We are perceived
as inherently promiscuous and sinful,7 such that the mere presence of
our bodies in certain public spaces is interpreted as solicitation (with
sex workers being regarded by the state as unsavoury and immoral
characters), leading to the arrest, detention, and fining of many women,
and the institution of a de facto curfew for all women.
Every few years, a police operation ostensibly targeting sex workers
but actually targeting all women, is launched. In 1983 it was Operation
Clean-up which led to the formation of the Women’s Action Group as
a response to the mass detention, by soldiers and police, of about six
thousand urban women in three days. More recently it’s been Operation
Chipo Chiroorwa (operation Chipo Get Married). Women have to go out
of our way to counter the damaging effects of hypersexualised messaging
and to establish recognition of our capacity to be victims of sexualised
harm. This labelling of black women’s bodies by colonialists continues
to haunt Zimbabwean society where many people profess some form of
Christianity and where a lot of moral conservatism has been subsumed
into our various cultures under the misleading banner of “Africanness”.
My own class privilege and access to classed public spaces keeps me
safe(er) because I am usually perceived as one who belongs to them. I
have access to legal and communal recourse should I be harmed in them.
Different rules govern these classed spaces. I am able to frequent them
because I can afford it and because, in them, I feel relatively safer. In
the more affluent areas of Harare women can bare a lot more skin and
will merely be ogled rather than attacked. In spaces that are ostensibly
accessible to the entire public class dynamics still play a part because
men tend to hesitate to harass a visibly privileged person; whereas I’ve
been whistled at, spat on, and cussed out as I walked through downtown
Harare or got off a kombi, other women have been groped and stripped,
and otherwise assaulted.
Whilst modesty is the patriarchal standard for all women, the way in
which it is enforced is affected by the class to which we are perceived to
belong. For the pedestrian or passenger in public transportation, chances
of sexual harassment in public space are high. Those of us who have
access to private transportation are free from the anxieties of walking
through public space or using public transportation to get to destinations
outside our homes. Having the luxury of a vehicle reduces occasions of
sexual harassment in public spaces simply because we aren’t interacting
with people which sometimes creates the illusion that sexual harassment
is a rare occurrence caused by the harassed woman doing something
provocative and wrong.
6.. Hobson, Janell. “Black Female Too-Muchness: Between Hypersexual Norms and Respectable Exceptions”.
7. “[A] group of Black women enjoying an evening at New York’s swank Standard Hotel were harassed by security, who told them bluntly
that he believed they were soliciting sex work.” (Kali Nicole Gross, “The Criminal Unrapeability of Black Women”)You can also read
