May 9, 2009 - Kampala, Uganda

Evelyn, one of the funniest and funkiest people I work with, walked past my desk yesterday. She stopped, thought for a second, turned around with a playful grin on her face, and said: “I am looking for someone who can talk on my panel tomorrow [on African feminism]. I wish I could paint you Black.” Everyone in the office laughed out loud.

Might just have been the strangest and best compliment I’ve gotten this year (or at least tied with the dude who wanted to give my dad the airplane as bride price).

So, I couldn’t be on the panel she moderated today, but they invited me to sit there and soak it up.
It was electric. It wasn’t a panel so much as it was a circle of African women of all ages, talking.

They talked about patriarchy (the idea that power is a finite thing we each have to grab or someone else will) vs. feminism (at its most basic, the idea that power is an infinite thing that we can nurture in ourselves and others, so we each have enough). They talked about mentoring younger women, about struggling with their husbands, about being supportive instead of critical of prominent female politicians, about learning to be proud of who we are.

Hope (one of my co-workers, who I lived with last time I was here) spoke on the panel about her own life. Her last name, in local language, means “unable to be uprooted”. She talked about how she loves her mother for naming her “Hope Unable-To-Be-Uprooted”. She talked about how she loves herself, because she knows she is phenomenal. She said each young woman should decide for herself whether she ever wanted to get married or have children. If so, we should go for it, and not allow ourselves to be bought (bride price is common here) or convinced of who we should marry because it is expected of us, but rather do what makes us happy. If we don’t want marriage or children, we shouldn’t be ashamed not to want it, and we should go for what we want instead.
(How many young women in the U.S. really believe that, I wonder? How many of us still think we’re incomplete somehow if we’re not in a relationship? How many people think “how sad” when they see a woman who never had kids—even if she didn’t want them?)


Another panelist, Dr. Gloria, talked about our power as mothers and aunties to socialize our kids differently—how she raised a feminist son. She said, “It is the same patriarchal system that imprisons men and victimizes us as women. We are clear that we are not at war with men, but with patriarchy. Many men would choose something different if there were another, viable role presented to them.” She then talked about how the mothers in the room could socialize their sons differently, and socialize our daughters to love and stand up for themselves.
I could go on and on and on.

In other words, they SO didn’t need me on that panel. I haven’t felt that kind of honest, self-reflective energy in awhile—the kind that allows us to remember that we can celebrate our accomplishments and still realize there is so much we still internalize that keeps us boxed in.

I started to think about how much I apologize for myself, how I still struggle not to think of my self-worth only in relation to how helpful I’m being, how my strategy in my last relationship was to avoid talking about my work (which is a HUGE part of my life) because I know it freaks most guys out. This group of women had so much in common with my own struggles—trying to do it differently in our own lives. The energy in the room was much like how I imagine it felt to be in the women’s movement in the U.S. in the 70’s, where ideas were sparking and no one quite knew yet the immensity or even the direction of change that they were setting in motion, and so much was yet to be determined.

In short, these women rock. It’s so contrary, isn’t it, to the depictions we often see of African women in the Western media?—the victimized recipients of aid after tragic famine and warfare, the overly-heroic mother figures that share some ancient wisdom that we hold on a pedestal and at the same time ignore, the National Geographic exotic beauties or scary witches, etc.
One of the things I love about my organization is how all of our work, including writing, graphics and photographs, flies in the face of all those myths. We publish things showing people as they are everywhere—laughing, struggling, working, playing, and searching for themselves somehow. And, like the women in that room, a force to be reckoned with, equally, on their own terms.

www.raisingvoices.org
www.preventgbvafrica.org