3 weeks after being arrested WOZA activists, Jenni Williams and Magodonga have finally been released from Mlondolozi Prison.. They report some horrific conditions such as having to share cells with mental health patients and being subjected to body searches everyday whilst male prison guards are free to wonder around.

The extreme hunger experienced by most prisoners means that even orange peels and the scraps on dirty plates are fought over. There is also no privacy for the female prisoners. Male prison guards are allowed to wander around the female prison and can see into washing facilities. Prisoners in Yard Two are also stripped naked every day for inspection by prison officers as they are locked down. At least three minors (aged 15 and 16) were being kept in the same cell as Williams

Life on the outside of prison is not that great either. Apart from women being invisible in the media and political landscape they are also living to survive a life expectancy of just 34 years. Living to survive physical and sexual violence and 300 million % inflation (don’t even bother to do the maths) forage for food and scrape through the days. Shereen Essof comments on the political infighting and maneuvering over the past 6 months none of which has addressed the needs and priorities of women and therefore the freedoms of everyone.

The polarisation of Zimbabwean politics means that women only have two options (now three in truth, with the split in the MDC producing MDC Tsvangirai (T) and MDC Mutambara (M), along with the ruling ZANU-PF). If you take the time to examine the parties’ constitutions, election manifestos, and programmes, none adequately addresses or expresses a commitment to the priorities and needs as identified by women, thus none provides a really viable alternative for a new dispensation that seeks alternatives that allow for the freedom of all. For this freedom is not something to be decreed and protected by laws or states, it is something that we shape for ourselves and share.

But despite the very real dangers, women are also struggling hard against the daily tyrannies of living. How many have survived these past months and years is incredible as the odds against them are high on every level not just from the tyranny of the state and their truncheon carrying battalions of bullies but also from sexism and local patriarchies and as she writes “being held hostage by three men”!.

The eternal’, according to Spinoza, ‘is now’, and women in Zimbabwe are living history and taking it very personally. The worst cruelties of life are its killing injustices. Zimbabwean women’s acceptance of adversity is neither passive nor resigned. It’s an acceptance that peers behind the adversity and discovers there something nameless. Not a promise, for women know that (almost) all promises are broken; rather something like a hiatus, or parentheses, in the otherwise remorseless flow of history. And the sum total of these parentheses is eternity and in that the knowledge that ‘on this earth there is no happiness without justice’

Technorati: Zimbabwe Women Mugabe

America has it’s first Black Democrat President and I have no doubt the country will be a better place for it. Beyond that I don’t know. Barack Obama’s win unleashes a tsunami of aspirations and expectations not to speak of the rhetoric which has reached new heights of super hyper reality. It is possible America has begun to reclaim itself. We will see….Nonetheless my support for McKinney & Clemente and their vision remains without reservation.

Technorati: Cynthia McKinney Rosa Clemente US ElectionsBarack Obama

“I cant cast a vote but I will feel the consequences” therefore I need to speak my piece.

I read the other day that Toni Morrison will be voting for Obama. A couple of weeks ago it was Alice Walker writing what I described as “driveling bullshit.” and one more example of the mainstreaming of the progressives - Rosa Clemente has a more definitive list here. Obama talks about bringing “fundamental change” but the only fundamental change is his colour and when one looks more closely even his colour is not that fundamental afterall. Obama is intrinsically tied to the mainstream, pro-Zionist war mongering American superstructure. Though disappointing it is not so surprising that so many millions all over the world have been drawn in by Obama who panders to black and white notions of a “post racial” America and world. An imaginary world of convenience particularly for the millions of white people who will vote him into the White House.

These are not truths. Nor do I think it is an accident that the first Black president of the USA will be a Black man who is not historically tied to slavery and the Black American experience. Facts like these are what makes the Obama’s presidency so dangerous because the establishment will use his Blackness to press the notion of a post racial society, of a fairer society, a more just society - all of which are big white lies. He will be held up as a pure example of the lie that is called the American dream along with Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell at the expense of the people in most need. This is already happening as we watch the so called progressives launch a double edged sword of complicity by jumping on the cultist bandwagon of unquestioning worship along with the likes of Powell and Hitchins. Whilst on the other hand silencing the voices of two women of colour who represent the real fundamental change.
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On the 16th October members of WOZA (Women of Zimbabwe Arise) held a demonstration declaring the food situation a “national disaster” and demanding immediate food aid. On that day 9 members of WOZA were arrested, 7 were released on the same day but 2, Jenni Williams and Magodonga Mahlangu, remain in custody.

Members of WOZA and other Zimbabwean women have always been at the center of the struggle against repression and state violence in the country. Yet if you follow the mainstream and alternative media sources you would imagine that the women of Zimbabwe, if at all reported, were solely the victims of violence. Otherwise they are largely silent. How many times do you hear women activists, academics or politicians speak to the crisis in the country? In a recent essay in Pambazuka News, Pumpla Dineo Gqola uses her experience in Zimbabwe to highlight the “conspicuous absence” of women in political events and the use of “gender neutral language” of the media.

Where were the women in all the coverage of Zimbabwe, in the negotiations, in the interviews broadcast, among the experts explaining and helping the continent and the world make sense of the crisis? I know from reading, watching and from interactions with feminists from the continent over the years that Zimbabwe has a very strong women’s movement. How is it that I was hearing so little about what women were doing, when they were not being brutalised, inside Zimbabwe?

Pumla goes on to speak of the women she met on her recent trip to Zimbabwe as part of a feminist solidarity group from Southern Africa who were organising “across class and educational status in ways which directly in ways that directly intervene in the crisis”. Evidence of the power of these women can be found in the violent response of the state and men and is further evidence of the direct connection between the “militarization of society” and increased violence against women as seen in Zimbabwe, Nigeria and remains a legacy of Apartheid in South Africa.

Including women in any decision making process is about improving the lives of everyone - women are not at war, women are not killing and destroying life. On the contrary it is women who are the ones calling for peace, growing food, maintaining the homes we grow in, the majority of displaced, of refugees and victims of violence.

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Marian Douglas-Ungaro with some very provocative thoughts on the nomination and possible presidency of Barack Obama….. her view may not be a popular mainstream one but it is an important one and at least encourages a debate away from the cultist mass worship of “Obamatronics” which is gathering momentum in Africa, the Americas and Caribbean………..

Speaking for myself, one of the two most disturbing facts about the U.S. presidential election of November 2008 is that so many folks - even folks who’ve never set foot in the United States, are not U.S. citizens, and have never suffered as 3rd, 4th & 5th class Americans on U.S. soil - are so geared up to “elect themselves a black president.” Yet they either have no clue or absolutely do not care that the person who’s been put forth is not a descendant of any of the millions of OUR Black American families whose ancestors were physically and genetically bred (as prized “slaves”), and lived and died in this “fair land of milk, honey and money,” all the while sharing the same legal status as horses and cows. That long history has marked this country, and it forged the Black American people, as slavery did the entire Afrodescendant population of the Americas, three hundred million-strong today. And yet in 2008, to the best of my knowledge, in any non-majority-Black country of the Americas, and in spite of our history which pre-dates the countries established and built up around us, not one of these descendants will be elected president of her or his land.

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