"Global feminism: Whose agenda?" By Patience Akpan University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. An Excerpt The language: The practice has always been referred to as "barbaric." And my usual question has been, "barbaric on whose say-so?" Is it barbaric because "western feminists" and their elitist counterparts in the Third World say so? Is this the only way we can linguistically frame this debate, or describe this practice? This is the word that was used to describe us Africans and our way of life when the colonialists (under the guise of Christian mission) first arrived our shores. In fact, not only our way of life was barbaric, WE were barbaric. And now we have unreflectively taken on this ethnocentric language in our discourse about female circumcision, rituals of widowhood and other such practices that seem "alien" to the West. We have allowed western activists around this issue area to set the agenda for us and we have taken on the discourse without reflecting on its linguistic and cultural implications. Let's consider for a moment, a practice that I consider absolutely odd here in North America. On a Saturday morning, parents herd their children off to McDonalds to stuff them with junk food. In my society, this is considered an appalling lifestyle. What kind of parent would do such an "immoral" thing? For many women who work outside the home, and who may not always have time for elaborate breakfasts, Saturday morning is the time to make up. In my household, on Saturday morning, we made akara and ogi which was a real treat for the kids. Of course, we couldn't ever buy street akara. What horrors!!! In the evening, we baked bread to last for the following week, and Sunday lunch was a real celebration. The only concession to the strange lifestyle of eating out, was bringing home suya bought from the nearest Suya Mallam (one of the best in Lagos, by the way). Once in a while, we would go to the great isi ewu joint on Tonade Street, Ikeja, but it was definitely NOT a family outing.. So I come here and see all these strange behavior by parents who generally don't cook. If they are not feeding their children at a fast-food restaurant, they are giving them one-minute microwave dinners. I consider this practice absolutely "barbaric." That is, if that's the word for anything that seems "strange" to one's usual way of life. Ideology: The argument, and as has been distilled here even in this mini-debate on the subject, is usually about individual's rights to choose. We are told that individual rights should come before societal or communal rights -- individuals before society. Part of the women emancipatory project is about the right to choose. It therefore fits into feminist theory and practice to fight against any practice that denies women that right to choose. And female circumcision is clearly one in which the woman can not choose, because majority of female circumcision is done when the woman is still an infant. Tunde Giwa paints the picture of the innocent, trusting, helpless infant who gets "mutilated" by her barbaric society even before she has a say in the matter (or in any matter, for that matter!). This is a gripping picture, and one that tugs at the heart of every "civilized" human being. However, this focus on individual rights is another attempt to impose an ideology that is "alien" to us. Individualism is to western as communitarianism is to African. Each has its shortcomings, but we should not ignore the negative aspects of individualism and the positive aspect of communitarianism. In our societies, we speak about societal/communal rights, and not individual rights. And communitarianism, with all its negatives, has worked for us. In a society such as Nigeria, where there are no social safety nets, or any integrated sociopolitical system that works FOR the people, our people have survived so far because of this sense of community. I read a study somewhere that showed that the average income earner in Nigeria is financially responsible for the welfare of nine people. I didn't get to see the full report -- a Federal Office of Statistics study - - but I doubt that the nine people are all members of the income earner's nuclear family. In some cases, the nine people may not even be a direct family member, especially where the person is single. It is this communitarian spirit that would make someone pack a bag and go to Lagos, to stay with a "brother" or "sister" who is often just someone from the same village, confident that he/she will not be turned away. We lived in a three-bedroom house (or bungalow, as we say it back home) in Lagos. At every given moment, there was always at least one "sister" or "brother" staying with us. At a time, we used to jokingly say our house was a "bus stop -- people get off the bus and stop here." Contrast this with this colleague of mine here who gave up her apartment and moved into her grandparents' basement to cut costs. She pays rent -- a reduced rent, but a rent -- to live with her mother's parents. And she is cool about it -- it's only natural. She even defended it when I failed in the effort to pretend I wasn't shocked. There is a lot of value to individualism, and we can import it to our society. But are we ready to go the whole hog? Can we pay the cost of individualism? I seriously doubt that. So when we harp on the individual-rights aspect of this discourse on female circumcision, we should be conscious of the ramifications of individualism for a society that is still uncertain about how to achieve an organic-type state, in which we will be fully aware of ourselves as citizen-individuals in a relationship to a state that works for everyone. Until then, we will continue to depend on our sense of community to see us through, and any advocacy for individualism that ignores the benefits of communitarianism will hurt us more than help. Prioritization of issues: The question here is, is this the only issue? Why do "western feminists" privilege this issue out of the myriad of ills that afflict the African woman? It is amazing the amount of activism and verbiage that has gone into the question of female circumcision. If you do a keyword search anywhere (a library or WWW), you will come up with tons of materials -- and even more, if one is searching for female genital mutilation (the phrase "western" feminists love so much). A keyword search on "women, poverty and Nigeria" will throw up far less materials. Why is that so? Should I believe that the "problem" of female circumcision is more important than the problem of poverty among our women? If the activists around female circumcision care so much about our women, how come they are not directing their efforts at the more urgent issues of infant and maternal mortalities (the rates are higher in Africa than in any other region of the world)? Our women still routinely die during childbirth. A higher percentage of our children do not survive their fifth birthday. Our women still live in economic bondage -- many are stuck in emotionally and physically abusive marriages because they can't afford to leave. And recall that in many African societies, and in Nigeria specifically, our women are the ones who "leave" when a marriage fails. They are the ones who return, penniless, to their father's family leaving behind their youth and years of helping the man attain his goals. In many cases, she is asked to leave with the children, and she spends the remaining years of her life struggling to raise them. (Of course, when they become adults, they are returning to their fathers, who celebrate the "reunion" without any pang of conscience for abandoning them and their mothers). Many African girls still do not have access to education because, if the resources are scarce, and it comes down to a choice between her and a brother, she will be asked to stay at home. In many cases, she is married off and her bride price is used to fund her brother's education. Bride price, that's another issue that should agitate the minds of activists who truly care about our women. There's nothing wrong with the exchange of gifts at marriage, etc., but there's everything wrong with the "possession mentality" that bride price creates. Where I was growing up, it was common to hear a man scream at his wife: "I paid (x amount) to marry you, so don't give me nonsense." There's even a closer-home example. A cousin of mine got into one of those nightmare marriages, but she couldn't get out of it. Why? She lost her father during the war, and she and her brother and sisters were raised by our grandfather (her maternal, and my paternal). When she got married, the bride price was used to pay her brother's school fees. And so when that marriage hit the rocks, she got out of it the only way our tradition allows. She got married to another man and his money was used to pay off the first man. But if the first husband was bad, the second was a suitor straight from the pits of hell. Once, while I was on a visit to the village, this man came visiting. I saw him, listened to what he had to say, the way he talked about my cousin and that day, I knew what it means to feel like strangling someone. I resisted the urge only because I didn't think the idiot-ikot-iwa was worth going to prison for!!! Finally, the incidence of female circumcision has reduced in many parts of the continent, and it certainly has nothing to do with western feminists labeling it "barbaric." As I argue elsewhere, the practice no longer has social capital. In my society -- one of those often cited as the headquarters of female circumcision -- the practice was associated with femininity and everything that is good about a woman. It was a rite of passage to womanhood -- and something many women looked forward to. It was accompanied by the fattening room ritual which prepared the girl for life as a woman and wife. (In my society, not all women were circumcised in infancy -- others went through it at the nexus between adolescence and womanhood, usually, between the ages of 13 and 15.) An uncircumcised woman was considered "unclean" and if unclean, therefore unmarriageable. In the past, as it is now, the only way a woman could get some sense of independence and attain a certain level of economic comfort was to get married. The idea was that the man would provide for her -- though as I look back, I realize that that was a myth of the patriarchy. The woman was nothing but an economic slave for the man who needed free labor. Often, the woman's condition was even worse than if she had done the same thing she was doing in marriage for herself as a single woman. But it was also a society where marriage was what every adult had to do. It was like paying taxes in Canada. You just had to do it, even if it killed you. Again, in retrospect, I don't recall anyone in my grandmother's generation who was never-married single. The few women in my mother's generation I know who are single are either divorced or widowed. None was never unmarried. An unmarried woman in my society (as in many societies) was (and in many places still is) considered a social misfit. Against this backdrop therefore no parents wanted to render their daughter unmarriageable, by not circumcising her. But all these have changed. Many women of my generation were not circumcised, and I don't know any of my age mates (including the pre-literate ones) who have circumcised their daughters. The practice has lost its socio-cultural relevance because with formal education, a woman can provide for herself, generally speaking. Since many literate women are likely to marry like-minded men, parents generally no longer feel that their daughter would be considered unclean by her future husband if she wasn't circumcised. While researching a paper on this subject last year, I spoke with a retiring professor of anthropology and nursing at the University of Alberta, Prof. Pamela Brink. She spent a post-doc year in my community in the mid-70s researching the fattening-room practices among our people. I didn't meet her then (but I heard of the "white woman" living in the next village). She knows so much about my culture that it's always hilarious when our conversations turn to "our people" as she refers to "my" people. One of the things Professor Brink told me is that the Annang people have for years now been doing "ritual female circumcision." Rather than "mutilate" anything, the woman who does it, just draws a small thin line on the inner thigh. A trickle of blood flows out and this is rubbed against the circumcised female's body. And the woman/girl goes into the fattening room (the duration of which has also been reduced to anywhere between one week and one month -- down from the one year that it used to be). On the day of "outing" (similar to the debuts of western girls not too long ago), the girl/woman is taken to church in a white dress and a communal celebration follows. It seemed the dominant religion n my area (Catholicism) found a way of "sanitizing" this "barbaric" practice. This seems to be a perfect middle ground between keeping a custom that holds the people together without inflicting any violence on women. Agreed, female circumcision is still practiced in its extremities -- as Bamidele has listed -- in other parts of the country, and Africa. I agree that it is really a "mutilation" in some parts of Africa. And I am NOT making an advocacy for the practice. Neither do I call it "barbaric." My ambivalence on this subject is deliberate. However, the point of this insertion into the discourse is basically this: there are more urgent problems facing African women than female circumcision. While this subject may be extremely titillating, and satisfying to western feminists who have raised the rhetoric on "female sexuality" to a religion, African women joining the discourse should be conscious of the implications of the language and ideology that frame this debate. At the level of practice, African women, feminists or not, must refocus their energies on the fact that the sisters on whose behalf they speak daily face more mundane, but vitally urgent problems than "female sexuality." African women do not have the socioeconomic luxury that western women have to spend their energies on sexuality. For western women, if all else fails, the state will pick up the tabs. They can then have the time to attend rallies, and carry placards that extol the virtues of "right over my body." African women will get to this point (and I pray the day comes soon), but for now, there are more important things to attend to. For what will it profit a woman if she has the rights over a body that has been wasted by preventable diseases and malnutrition? I attended a talk on female circumcision last year. After the four "African" speakers (including a man) had finished, someone (a white woman) in the audience made a comment, the thrust of which was: "orgasm is every woman's fundamental human right." Later, I told her, "go tell that to the woman who is watching her child die from a preventable disease because she has no money to take her to the hospital." Tell that to the woman who wakes up at 5 a.m. and treks 10 miles to fetch a pot of water; treks more miles in search of firewood. Tell that to the woman who spends an entire day in the market and ends up selling nothing, and returns home without buying any food for the children because no one will sell to her on credit anymore. Tell that to the woman whose husband has thrown her out of the home they struggled for 30 years to build. Tell that to the woman who, with four children trailing her, walks the streets of any African city begging for "alms." I thought of, but didn't tell her: "when you have buried yet a fifth child, put your malnourished and Kwashiokored children to bed, on an empty stomach -- again -- you can then talk to an African woman about orgasm." What am I saying, that "female sexuality" is bad? Oh no, I won't even go there! Sexuality is whatever each of us chooses to make of it. We have the right to define it whatever way it suits us, but not the right to impose our particular definition of it on other women. Personally though, at the level of practice, if I had the resources, I would first set up a revolving loan scheme for the women in my village, install labor and time-saving devices for their palm-oil and garri-processing work, ensure a direct supply of fertilizer for their overworked farms, build a primary health care centre for them, drill huge communal water boreholes in the middle of the village, and set up a scholarship fund so every girl in the village who wants to go to school can. After that, I can talk to them about "female sexuality." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html ----------------------------------------------------------------------------