Feminist Freedom Warriors by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781608468980
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Further Reflections: Imagining a Revolutionary Feminist Politics

AM: Reflecting on the current global scenario, it strikes me that the commonalities between developed and underdeveloped nations are becoming clearer than they have been for a while. Africans mostly pursued political independence and ended colonial occupation in order to become nations like other nations. The first decade of political independence energetically pursued modernization programs to this end, only to find themselves mired in deepening dependency and indebtedness, accompanied by authoritarian regimes that see-sawed between grace and disparagement among their powerful international benefactors and detractors. Post the Cold War, decades of economic reform have also not led to the envisaged fraternity of nations. Instead we have a global web of corporate interests backed up by a global security system, both working to transform life and the planet in ways hitherto seen on the sets of dystopic sci-fi films.

In the African Union, as in the USA, the beneficiaries of the residualized state are the rich, and their lives are organized around private schools, private health care, and air-conditioned SUVs with darkened windows. In Lagos, as in Kingston, the inconveniences of infrastructural decline are now so advanced that even the poorly paid professional class have to invest in backyard boreholes, and internet access requires a generator. Like US citizens, many citizens of African nations are born into indebted nations, where poor people are taxed disproportionally higher than the super-rich.

However, there is no doubt that the enforcement of free market economics has had its most negative effects in already weak markets. Millions of Africa’s people are enmeshed in poverty, without health insurance or any other safety net. What desperation drives people to clamber onto dinghies and take their chances crossing the Mediterranean, knowing that thousands before them have drowned? How have decades of poverty alleviation and sustainable development sustained so much poverty? Why are growing security budgets not improving security? What is peace where peacekeepers buy a child’s body for a piece of bread? In any case, what does “security” mean for women farmers scratching at increasingly desiccated land? Livelihoods are precarious, quality of life indexed by peacetime life expectancies in the forties and fifties, and survival is not guaranteed at any age. There are no indicators that can convey what life is like in such places. But nor do indicators tell us the flavors of the food, the love people have for one another, or the vivid beauty of landscapes that extend to thousands of miles as yet ungrabbed. These are lands where, despite such extreme contradictions, women walk with straight backs, and children invent toys with old tires and metal wires. These are the fringes of neoliberal empire.

The contrast between the mass movements of the past and the civil society of today has deep implications for the politics of what is possible with regard to democratization in general and feminist agendas in particular. In practical terms, the liberal interest in building civil society in Africa has translated into funding for NGOs. Women’s NGOs—most of them

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