Patricia McFadden

I would like to argue that although democracy theoretically is supposed to provide identity, security and legitimacy for all, it has been historically and traditionally exclusionary. As a notion and as an experience. One through gendered exclusion of women. In traditional African societies and in European societies women were excluded except when class mediated. So we have these stories of great women queens and these women were allowed into the practice and experience and discourse on democracy because class defeminized them and provided an access to sites of power which were male. We have examples of African women who dressed as men. We have examples of Egyptian queens, Angolan queens who struggled against early Portuguese colonialization dressed as men: Udzinga, who is always one of the queens who is thrown in my face when I say: African women are not perceived as potential leaders. "Traditionally we hadn't Udzinga?" Can you imagine this huge continent with hundreds of millions of Africans and one woman 300 years ago is supposed to be enough as a leader? The exclusionary character of democracy is so clear when we actually start applying it to the lives of women.

Another issue which is very important is the construction of the public and the private, because in the lives of African women it translates in very real terms. Most women are excluded from the democratic practise and from the experience and exercise of citizenship because we are located in the private. It coincides with particular structures, with particular notions of tradition and with a custodialship we are expected to keep of backward and very repressive practises. For example the issue of social status laws which define women as privatized individuals. In many of our societies in the South these laws exclude women from the public exercise and experience of democracy. When you become married you are removed from the public arena, wifehood itself excludes you from public practise. Many women are denied the right to work by becoming wives. I don't think this is a uniquely African phenomenon. But where colonization has exaggerated the need for authenticity then the exclusion of women from the public becomes almost a necessity for the survival and the identity of people. We can see this within the struggle between the West and fundamentalist ideologies in the Middle East, we can see this in the South and in Africa in particular.

To me citizenship is not only carrying a passport. I invented my own definition of it, because all the ones which are in the books are boring and they pretend that there is no gendered connotation. For me a citizen is one who has legal, social, cultural rights and entitlements through the formal recognition of his/her personhood within a specific geopolitical space which is called or named a country. The physicality of an individual therefore should be the least important aspect in terms of accessing and exercising these rights and entitlements. What I look like, my physical form and my color should be merely incidental. But this is not the case because rights and entitlements are gendered, they are sites of contestation and citizenship plays itself out physically in terms of two major constructs: gender and race.

Parting from the African experiences I would like to talk about how I think the issue of citizenship poses itself in relation to two elements: authenticity and personhood.

Authenticity is a very critical issue for Africans. In fact Africans might be very upset that I in an European context criticize Africa. Because Africa through the colonialization experience has become a sacred bull, something you do not touch especially outside of the continent. And as a feminist reconstructing Africa, reinventing the past so that as African women we have a valid part in that past, it is an ongoing and very difficult struggle. An 'African' is an African man. African men are 'Africans'. Africa is often called "Mother Africa". She gives birth to sons who then authentically represent her but she can never represent herself.

The feminization of the continent is an exclusionary mechanism in the sense that it is referred to the identities of African women. And we as women require men in our lives to have an African authentic identity. Whilst we birth males we never own them. They are not our children and the patrilineal and patriarchal systems that define African authenticity use women as the means through which authentic Africans come into being; but we never can actually be part of this authenticity, we only facilitate it. The notion of being a mother without entitlement to definition and ownership of that identity is reflected in the status of women as wives. Africaness is assumed to be embedded in black maleness. The lineage systems reflect this, the naming of Africa is very masculinist, the very notion of masculinity and heterosexuality as African and racist ideology reproduce these stereotypes about the African male and his masculinity in the sexualization and erotisization of black maleness in particular. And in the definition of black male sexuality heterosexuality becomes the authentic identity. We saw this last year for example when president Mugabe went on a campaign against homosexual rights and defined homosexuality as a western perversion. This deep internalization of heterosexuality is an essential part of our identity as Africans, especially through males. The use of heterosexuality as a mechanism of power and control over women and over some men, is not only typical of patriarchal societies, it is also a reflection of the sexual trauma associated with enslavement because we know that the slavers sexually brutalized Africans as part of the erasure of identity. It was not only by giving us white names, but also by physically brutalizing Africans creating the absence of self-esteem and filling the vacuum with a new identity of enslaved. And in reclaiming that African identity heterosexuality as a hegemonic sexual form becomes very effective and very critical. So HIS story, the history of Africa is a male story. Therefore African women can only become African by association with men, as daughters, as wives, as mothers and as sisters.

Another issue is on African personhood. I want to introduce you to a term called "ubuntu". In Southern Africa all the way up to Eastern and Central Africa in all the languages "ubuntu" is a person in relation to white people. If a white person comes to a village or homestead the children later on will tell their parents: "Kufige umlungu" or "toubab". But if it was a black person they would say: "Kufige ubuntu". So there is one word for a person and there are other words for people who don't conform to the definition of a person. In other languages it is called foreigner. "Ubuntu" is the essence of being which is socially, culturally, linguistically and ethnically recognized and validated through rights, laws and entitlements. "Ubuntu", personhood, the right to have an autonomous existence is male. Women can not have "ubuntu" except through certain rituals and certain relationships. African women do not own themselves as females, as socially constructed personhood. And I think that was the case in most patriarchal societies. The integrity of their being can only be established through a relationship with a man, as a father and as a husband. Their names are those of men, their sexuality is only acceptable if their bodies have been ritualized and made safe. Female genital mutilation is part of the ritualization through which women access personhood. Marriage and mutilation are the two critical rituals within African women's lives. And rituals play a critical role in the exclusion of women from certain sites and processes of power and in the reinvention of their identity for the purpose of control.

As African women we had to and continue to struggle against this erasure and invisibilization, and even participation in anti- colonial and anti-racist struggles did not lead to the transformation of these unequal relationships. Therefore citizenship is a contested terrain in relation to rights and entitlements especially with regard to children, property, safety and personal integrity. The refusal by women to be inherited is an expression of this contestation, that we will not allow a so-called traditional practise to deny us personhood and bodily integrity. Being inherited means that you are a piece of property, you belong to the man's family. Men will say: "I bought that womb, that's why I am not going to use condoms, I don't what contraception. I am not inventing this. Ask anybody who works in the family planning association and they will tell you. The privatization not only of women's bodies but particular parts of women's bodies is not peculiar to Africa. We see the sale of women's bodies all over the world. Recently here in Germany I passed a chemist and I saw an incredible picture of a profile of a woman's body; part of her waist, back and buttocks and half of her thigh were completely naked. I could not tell what they were advertising but I asked myself: Why? How can women walk past that pharmacy every day and see themselves? There is your bum right there in the public. It is the half of the leg and the half of the back of every woman in this society. She was white so I said, okay I am going to use race to dissociate myself from this particular one, but I was enraged. How can we? How?

Once I walked into the office of a woman, a very prominent Canadien development worker, a wonderful person. And I looked to my left and there was a little table an on this table was a half-naked statue of an African woman with breasts reaching down to her waist. Okay, this is an exaggeration but a statement about African women's bodies. I have never seen a half-naked caricature of a white woman's body in a black woman's office. So why would this development activist who is so progressive not see that she is insulting me? These are the layers that we need to start peeling off before we can have a global platform for women's rights.

African women are contesting these inequalities, they are struggling for their removal through legal reform, political campaigns, information systems that link different classes of women in different parts of a country like Zimbabwe for example, and we are creating platforms so we can express solidarity amongst ourselves. A lot of people believe in this lie that the real African woman is that poor illiterate woman with the broken back and ten children. A lot of people like those images of African women by the way. They do not like the Pat McFaddens who are African. They want African women to be mute, to be invisible and so they can go to Africa and find these poor starving broken backs and do some good work. It is very problematical. It is like me coming here to Germany going to the ghettos and finding the women with the broken backs and then when you talk with me I will say: "No, but you do not represent the real women in Germany, the real woman is that one in the ghetto with the broken back." This is the kind of argument that is put to African women who are articulate, who are on the cutting edge of defining a new type of Africa. We are told that we are westernized, we do not reflect the real Africa. And you know where that real Africa is embedded? In a racist past that makes black women passive, stupid, unknowing and all the other adjectives that you can add to that. It is a huge problem creating a new African culture. It is not only African men and traditional African women but it is also everybody else who wants us to stay primitive and deessentialized. So they can come and write their P.H.Ds about us, so that we become the last frontier of what was natural. And this natural link between culture and women is imposed on us: Don't move to this western stuff, stay African. What does it say, what does it mean for African women? It means mutilation, invisibility, silence, inheritance.

The rights and entitlements that citizenship is supposed to endow us with as African women and as women across the world are gendered. In order to democratize them we have to understand them as a relation of power and contestation which must be challenged and transformed. We are all engaged in that process through our participation in struggles for gender and racial equality across the world. So I think political campaigns and legal reforms are some of the ways, in which we can begin to share knowledge because you did it in the West. You changed the legal systems, you developed strategies of campaigning and these were the ways in which entitlement and accessing of rights became possible. That is why we were able to meet in Vienna 3 years ago and proclaim to the world that women's rights are human rights. That was a global platform that was so critical linking up the struggles of women in different parts of the world. It was not by chance that the coalescence took place in the West. After 500 years of collecting everything from everywhere else and centering it in Europe, you developed the technology. And anyway, what else do you expect?

Patricia McFadden, born in Swaziland is South-African. She lives in Harare/Zimbabwe where she works as a professor of sociology on gender studies. During the semester 95/96 she was invited by the Universität of Bochum, Germany as a professor. This lecture on "democratizing citizenship as a gendered relation of power" was given on May 12th, 1996 in Berlin by invitation of the German association of women in journalism. It was shortened and done over for Lola Press by Ulrike Helwerth.

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