Today is the anniversary of the death of Kimpa Vita who together with her baby (Kembo Dianzenza va Kintete) and her boyfriend, were burned to death on July 2nd 1706 by the Catholic church. I only just found out about Kimpa Vita - there is so much of our African and Diaspora history that is unknown to the majority of African people. Who was Kimpa Vita? Information is scarce but Kimpa Vita is one of a long lines of courageous politicised Queens of the Kongo (parts of present day Angola and Congo) who fought against slavery and colonialists as early as the 15century. Women such as Ndona Nzinga, Ndona Mafuta and Ndona Dondwa. The importance of Kimpa Vita is that she fought against slavery and exposed the racism and misogyny of the Catholic church and also incorporated traditional religions with Christianity.

The 17th century gave birth to an icon called Kimpa Vita Dona Beatriz. She concerned herself with the restoration, spiritually and politically, of the Kongo Kingdom. Born in 1684 Kimpa Vita worked as a religious actor[kp1] and was mostly isolated from the rest of her peers. At the time when the Kongo was dominated by political unrest and civil war. Therefore Kimpa Vita’s religious ideology came as an answer to the prayers of many Kongolese people. In her message she combined traditional Kongolese culture with Christianity.

Today she is remembered in “Kanda commune, northern Zaire Province” of Angola

Tags: African Queens; Kongo; Kimpa Vita ;

I would really be interested in finding out more about these African Queens so if any one knows anything please do leave a comment

UPDATE:

Tribute to Dona Beatrice Kimpa Vita

Since April 21st Egyptian women working in the Mansoura-España Garments Company in Egypt have been on a sit-in strike protesting against unpaid wages. The strike is now in its 26th day and the 284 workers 75% who are women are being intimated by the owners who are refusing them any facilities with little food or water and sleeping on the floor. The company is now threatening to close down leaving the workers with no employment and possibly no compensation.

The United Bank (Al-Masraf Al-Muttahid) has notified the Mansoura-España Garments Company workers it will liquidate the firm, diregarding the agreement reached between the government and the parliament, as it decided the fate of the company already, without showing any signs it is interested in holding the agreed meeting with representatives from the Factory Union Committee, the General Federation of Trade Unions and Labor Ministry.

3arabawy has researched into the background of the bank involved in the liquidation which has direct links with the Central Bank of Egypt. For more on the strike and social movements in Egypt checks Hossam’s excellent blog.

The strike is significant because it shows how dire the situation is that women especially have chosen not only to strike but to occupy the premises, leaving their families, their children and husbands so far for 26 days. In taking the action the women are directly challenging the repressive regime of Hossain Mubarak (supported by the US), corporate exploitation as well as cultural and religious norms in defence of their jobs and right to work.

Links: Middle East Report; Infoshop News

Tags: Egypt; Strike; Mansoura-España Garments Company;

Gege Katana, a human rights defender for 25 years from the Democratic Republic of Congo has been awarded this year’s Front Line Defender Award in Dublin. Gégé Katana founded the “Solidarity Movement of Women Human Rights Activists based in Uvira in South Kivu province. She has been prevented from travelling, arrested and received death threats over the past 25 years of activism.

Gégé Katana, 42, is a leading human rights defender working in Uvira, eastern DRC. She is the president of SOFAD, an organisation that works through a grassroots network of 625 women to research and campaign against sexual violence, and provide counselling and help to rape survivors. SOFAD also educates local communities on women and children’s rights, and lobbies the government to deliver justice and reform discriminatory laws.

Gégé Katana has worked with several non-governmental organisations including; IDEA/Afrique - Institut pour le developpement et l’education des adultes. She is a network member of the Global Fund for Women and Coordinator for the Synergie des Femmes Defenseurs des Droits de le l’Homme du Sud-Kivu en RDC (SYFEDH).

The scale and horror of sexual violence against women and girls in Eastern DRC prompted Gégé Katana to work with SOFAD and the lack of existing structures for combating gross violations of human rights, especially perpetuated against women was a significant motivating factor in her fight for women’s rights and human rights. The principal violations of human rights in the region are, forced displacement, arbitrary arrests, torture, rape and pillage.

“For me, winning the award is a recognition of my work as a human rights defender and gives me the strength and encouragement to pursue my struggle in the area of human rights. I cannot fully express my joy in receiving this award, nor my gratitude towards Front Line for supporting and helping me in my work.”

Video: Her work with Women in the DRC

All the nominees for Human Rights Defenders at Risk: Akifa Aliyeva, Gégé Katana,Jackeline Rojas,Radhia Nasraoui,Riza Fanilag

Tags: Human Rights; DRC; Front Line; Gege Katana;

*On Nigeria - not much to say any more but here is an excellent one from Ore’s Notes on the election results

The ‘News’

A friend called me this evening and asked me excitedly if I had heard “the news.”

- “What news?”, I asked. At work, our Internet connection has been patchy and we don’t have radios.
- “Yar’Adua has been declared president-elect!”
I almost collapsed laughing on the phone.
- “That’s it?” I exclaimed, barely choking down my laughter. “Is that one news? No, what would have been news is if someone else had won.”

and oh another surprise “runner up rejects results”!

* On housing in Lagos

Nigerian Village Square reports that

72.5% of Lagosians live in one room apartments, (8-10 per room), while only 4 million Lagosians have access to pipe-borne water. Disturbed, I arranged with a friend to go on a tour of Orile-Iganmu, a densely populated community in Lagos State

* On Surviving Cancer

Nasra Al Adawi has an interview on Liquid Plastic with cancer survivor, Rebecca Musi “An Everyday Heroine”.

When Rebecca was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of forty-nine, her mother became ill at the same time. “I never got a chance to tell her as I did not want to upset her”, said Rebecca. “This was just before I started my treatment, so I suspended treatment and looked after her.” Ironically her mother died four months later. She was ninety-five years old.

Today, Rebecca Musi is a breast cancer survivor, and she travels around the world supporting other breast cancer survivors. She works for Breast Health Foundation (BHF) in Johannesburg. She is also a participant in the Avon Foundation initiatives for cancer awareness. Avon has launched a campaign called the “Global Connection Ribbon Tour”. This tour links survivors from one country to another.

* On Cultures of Domination

Republic of T remixes some text and images [via I Blame Patriarch]

As evidence of this naturalisation, to bring it into awareness, I collect images of my local cultures of domination. Take a look at the selection of them below. I’ve found, as I hope you will, that rather than seeming to be a given, like the weather, by bringing them out into the light of day they become more susceptible to choice, interruption and confrontation. And less undermining of ‘living from love’.

*On Hijabs and snippets of flesh

Pinko Feminist Hellcat

Granted, I’ve already given the “women are dirty temptresses” crowd their drubbing, but it seems women can’t win. We’re either whorish for showing too much skin, or we’re grossly offensive for covering up.

Tags:
Nigeria;
Breast Cancer;
Patriarchy;
Hijab;

Women in South African History by Nomboniso Gasa (Ed) published by HSRC Press, 2007.

Women in South African History traces the lives of South African women from the pre-colonial, pre-union period (mid 18th century) through to the post-apartheid beginnings and present day South Africa. It is written in four thematic parts: Women in the pre-colonial and pre-union periods; Women in early to mid-twentieth century South Africa; War: armed and mass struggle as gendered experiences; The 1990s and beyond: new identities, new victories, new struggles.

The book is a radical departure from the traditional history texts in that it uses a feminist analysis rather than the “more acceptable gender analysis” in it’s approach by examining “the ways in which gender intersects with race, culture, class and other forms of identity and location in South African history“. By including the present as part of history the book shows how the past and present are inextricably linked and thus better examines women’s experiences over the past 300 years. The experiences of women’s struggle and their continuing hazardous journeys towards liberation are expressed through the dual metaphors of “they move boulders” - challenges; and “they cross rivers” - dangers.

Women in South African History goes far beyond the many well known events and periods by feminizing those events and periods where women’s participation has never been acknowledged. In the chapter “Like three tongues in one mouth”: Tracing the elusive lives of slave women in (slavocratic) South Africa, Pumla Dineo Gqola, brings to life the slave women brought to South Africa from South East Asia, East Africa and Southern Africa. Despite the scarcity of historical and biographical narratives, Pumla is still able to document the lives of some slave women and more importantly the ways in which they resisted and revolted against their enslavement and their central role “to the historical constitution of Afrikaner society“. Other examples are women’s mass protests against carrying of passes in Bloemfontein and Potchefstroom in 1913; women’s involvement in the trade union movement during the 1930s; the participation of women in the ANC underground and military wing in the 1950s; township uprisings in the Eastern Cape in the 1970s and 1980s; naked women protests against lack of housing in Soweto in 1990; migrant women in Johannesburg and women learning to live with HIV/AIDS in present day South Africa.

The book concludes with a powerful essay by Yvette Abrahams in which she chronicles her experience of researching and writing on Sarah Bartman. Or rather searching for the REAL Sarah Bartman not the racialised sexualised object constructed by white male fantasies …a “living specimen of barbaric savage races” one who according to Lindfors [Courting the Hottentot Venus]
was willing to collaborate in her own degradation in order to earn more money…

she allowed herself to be exhibited indecently to the European public, and she persisted in this tawdy occupation for more than five years….. She may have been the victim of the cruelist kind of predatory ruthlessness, but her collusion in her own victimisation was unmistakeable…. he concludes
To put it plainly, she may have engaged in prostitution as well as exhibitionism. Her degradation may have been complete..

Abrahams tears these racist, sexist texts to pieces written not in the 1800s but in the 1980s. Men such as Lindfors were able to pass these lies off as academic text by so called intellectuals. Abrahams leads us through to the convincing conclusion that Sarah Bartman was a slave - a Khoekhoe slave woman. She does this by connecting her own personal herstory to that of the Khoekhoe. Born in the pre-colonial period of the 1780s, she must have had a Khoekhoe name and the only way she could have lost that name at that time was through slavery. Also the only way for her to move from her home in the Western Cape to England was as a slave. Sarah Bartman lied (that she willingly exhibited herself) because she was a slave and knew very well that her words would not be believed over that of a white man and the consequences of her telling the truth would have been too horrible to contemplate such as life imprisonment and even more degradation and abuse.

Abrahams again makes the absolute convincing statement without any hesitation or qualification that the “abuse and degradation” of Sarah Bartman was rape. Rape not only of Sarah but of the whole Khoekhoe nation. The white male racist, sexist texts she quotes in her essay are a form of “surrogate violence” against African women, Black women, Khoekhoe women and Sarah Bartman.

“Was it not rape of a symbolic sort to parade the degradation ad humiliation of auntie Sarah before me? Was it not a sexually violent act which expressed male power and my vulnerability to pain? Has not each male author I have brought before you been unable to resist the temptation of demonstrating their psycho sexual power and auntie Sarah’s inability to resist?
In the place of false witness it is time to speak the truth. I name the posthumous abuse and degradation of auntie Sarah’s body, rape. The rape of her body is a rape of my mind.

As Abrahams writes, Sarah Bartman whose real name, real self was stolen like that of millions of other slaves and their descendants, is dead and therefore can no longer feel the pain. But she (Abrahams) feels it - I feel it and Black women throughout the world feel it. Every racist, sexist, misogynist text by whiteness against Black women is felt by me, by all of us. The symbolism of this sexual violence is explained by a more “refined and broader” definition of rape.

…the element of sexual abuse are the violation of a person’s integrity by force and/or threat of physical violence, dishonouring the ethic of mutuality and care in relationships of domination, and an infraction of one’s psycho-spiritual-sexual integrity. Sexual abuse is sacrilege of God’s spirit in each of us [Eugene, TM “If you get there before I do: A womanist ethical response to sexual violence and abuse. In J Grant (ed) Perspectives on womanist theology”

In reviewing South African Women in History, I chose to focus on Yvette Abrahams essay because the story of Sarah Bartman speaks to the book as a whole and speaks to me personally. It is both the beginning - pre-colonial and the present, continued racism but always resistance. Sarah Bartman’s agency was expressed in her act of survival against all odds. For me Sarah Bartman, Khoekhoe woman represents the loss that came with slavery and colonialism as well as the struggle for liberation and emancipation.

Women in South African History is a “transdisciplinary” interrogation of events and periods in the history of South Africa from a feminist perspective. The narratives bring to life the daughters of Africa in their quest for emancipation, sometimes at great cost to themselves and their families, particularly their children. But always there is an unflinching determination - choices are laid bare and the choice is still emancipation.

Tags: South Africa; Women; Feminism; African History; Sarah Bartman; Khoekhoe; Apartheid; Books;