African Perspectives Issue1 Vol1-Libre

Contents
Editorial
Tsitsi Makina
We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For
Relections on African Womens Thought Leadership in the 21st Century: The Importance of
Engaging with Sexuality
Zine Magubane
10
If God Were A Woman: Womens Citizenship in South Africa

Liepollo Lebohang Pheko
18
Becoming Post-Colonial Citizens In Africa: Through Feminist Vistas

Patricia McFadden
31
Young African Rural Women Engage The Public Sphere: On Africas Agenda 2063
Roseline Achieng
38
Visual Essay
52
Editorial
Tsitsi Makina
Feminism is a matter of life and death. It is the question

that concerns every facet of our being on this earth. It is
every issue of life, every concern and every struggle. It
traverses every circumstance, every belief, every hope,
every matter and challenge that we will meet in this life
and all that consumes us until our death
iepollo Lebohang Phekos beautiful

articulation of the why of feminism brings
to the fore the fact that we focus a lot of
time and energy on what it means to be or not
to be a feminist, and consequently very little
space is left to talk about the reasons why we
are and should all be feminists. Being a feminist
is still constructed in the negative, feminists are
construed as being anti-African (culturally) and
anti-male because popular narratives negate the
long tradition of feminist culture that is universal,
a culture that collapses created boundaries of
continent and colour. A rich and colourful tradition
which allows the choreopoem For Colored Girls
Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is
Enuf by Ntozake Shange to co-habitate alongside
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichies 2013 TEDx Talk We
should all be feminists.
Issue One | Volume One
So you how do you begin to unpack issues

facing women on the continent? We start by
acknowledging that we need more collective
thinking sites as women to unpack issues
pertaining to us, by us, in an unadulterated space.
We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For, is
an introduction to these spaces. Not only does this
introduction remind us why these spaces are so
important, it proposes six newer areas for us to
look at and to review in order for us to continue
on the path that so many women, African women
have treaded before.
The African Union and by proxy, the United
Nations play a vital role in the policy and rights
spaces of Africa and it is through this lens that
Roseline M. Achieng engages the agenda
of an economically, physically and societally
marginalised and disempowered group, young
African rural women. Her paper takes a critical
look at how these young women engage in the
public sphere through means of economic and
knowledge production and how they in turn
consume that knowledge and the fruits of the
economy. The paper looks at the emerging culture
African Perspectives
of social critique through the arts in Kenya, as a
means of giving a voice to young African rural
women who are still missing in terms of being
visible to and within the policies and social issues
that govern their lives. This is all played out against
the backdrop of the African Unions Agenda 2063
paper, which she proposes, offers a viable and
alternative way of allowing young African rural
woman to fully engage in production, policy and
rights spaces in Africa and allowing them a voice.
International Womens Day 2014 is the collective
thinking site in which Zine Magubane presented
is an evocative and thought provoking (possibly
controversial) paper, as the keynote address.
Controversy attached to sexuality, which in
turn leads to (in terms of State policy), rights
restriction is one of the main issues that she tackles
in her address. Compulsory heterosexuality
or coerced heterosexuality have become the
norm for the African continent. Zine Magubane
highlights the need to address the historicism of
heterosexuality as the normative societal value
and that through all these laws, it is women,
hetrosexual, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgendered
who are the predominant victims. She argues that
these laws are a way and means of controlling
the female body and consequently, the female.
She calls for us to critically engage with this
space and to continue a tradition of avantgarde African Womens Thought Leadership.
Womens citizenship should not just be on paper,
full access and the enjoyment of its rights is
what Liepollo Lebohang Pheko unpacks in her
paper. Grounded in the South African context,
she speaks about the dimensions of citizenship,
about the laws and policies that promote equality
and fairness for women in order for them to

have full access to their citizenship, and the
reality that these laws and policies have failed to
translate into a tangible reality for many South
African women. Her critical look at how African
States operate in relation to womens citizenship
exposes the undeniable truth that women need
to critically, openly and fully engage in and
own these State spaces of policy and rights in
order for womens citizenship to be actualized
in a manner that is not patronizing, shallow or
short-term and not placed within a patriarchally
constructed problematization of womens full
access and enjoyment of rights. The conversation
on citizenship is continued by Patricia McFadden,
she maps out new ways of becoming post-colonial
citizens and proposes that we need to ind new
avenues of thinking and that we need to collapse
structures that are used as tools of exclusion of
citizenship, in-order to re-imagine and create new
inclusive social formations. From her paper one
understands that citizenship needs to move from
the idea or ideal to a reality because citizenship
or belonging allows people (women), access to the
State, its spaces and society at large.
The publication ends with a Visual Essay by
students from the Department of Visual Arts
and Musicology at the University of South
Africa, whose introduction by practising artist
and lecturer Simmi Dullay ties the Visual Essay
together by weaving it into a narrative.
These women visually articulate issues that a
familiar to all African women, from Stephanie
Nevilles celebration of women and sexuality,
and Zymia Amiens poignant narrative of forced
Women Transforming Africa
removal, to Roxanne Wilsons critique of the
pandemic of human traficking of women and
children. Roxanne Wilsons critique is a sobering
reminder that human traficking is not something
that happens to other people. This pandemic
affects all of us, our families and our societies.
The recent abduction of over 200 Nigerian school
girls by militant Islamist group Boko Haram
not only reminds us of the cruel and destructive
nature of human traficking and its assault on the
female body, but it highlights the need to stop the
scourge of human traficking on the continent.
The month of May marks an important milestone
for the continent. Each year in May, Africa Day
arrives and marks the amazing vibrancy of the

continent. It is a day where the continent shows off
its full plumage. And this is why we are honoured
to have the irst publication of the Thabo Mbeki
African Leadership Institutes (TMALI) bi-annual
series, African Perspectives published this month.
The purpose of African Perspective is to harness
scholarship from a pan-African paradigm and to
develop and to promote writing by emerging and
seasoned writers and thinkers. This publication
serves to advance TMALIs mission of advancing
the African Renaissance through being a centre
of choice for research, teaching, learning and
dialogue.
We Are The Ones

We Have Been Waiting For
ften when the idea to come together and
engage on the issues that concern us as
radical women, intellectuals and activists
is proposed, the creation of a collective thinking
site becomes a useful strategy in pooling our
energies and thoughts around the speciic work
we are doing in our respective locations. Having a
concept paper as a stepping stone of sorts facilitates
entry for all involved, into the moment of sharing
and exchange; into the moment of contestation
and new visioning. This brief overview is offered
in that spirit as a map of the general terrain
of womens struggles and visions; of the road
travelled thus far across the diverse societies that
African women live in and as an indicator of some
of the emerging and imperative challenges and
possibilities that confront and or await us.
International Womens Day, as a moment

of relection and celebration is also a vital
opportunity to pause and reassess the directions
that womens political and personal struggles
have taken each year. This relexivity enables us
to identify the areas and sites of resistance that
women need to strengthen and or step away
from; the political and personal cul de sacs that
individuals and groups can so easily become
trapped in; as well as to reassess the relationships
that women (in all their racial, class, ethnic, sexual
and gendered identities) have with the State as
the hegemonic patriarchal institution, as well as
with various other patriarchal institutions which
impact on our daily realities in a myriad of ways.
As with all other Africans on the continent,
women have been central to the processes that
have brought us into this Contemporary Moment
which is dominating our thinking, our ideas, our
perspectives and imaginaries as vibrant beings.

This is an uncontestable fact, we have become or
we are Africans in new ways that are increasingly
and insistently deined and owned by ourselves.
As Alice Walker so succinctly puts it, We Are The
Ones We Have Been Waiting For.
In a general sense, the shift forward since
independence relects the tremendous energies
and various forms of intellectual and activist
agency that women have imbued their respective
societies with, ranging across the socio-economic,
legal, political and cultural spectrums of everyday
life, and initiating the transformative processes
and relationships that have changed the African
landscape and have opened up new vistas; new
ways of seeing the world and of being in the
world. While these important changes are not yet
the reality for the majority of African people, the
vision of a different African future is steadfastly
being situated in the daily struggles and demands
that women are making in public, private and
in the in-between spaces of life at community,
national, regional and continental levels.
Self-Advocacy has proven to be a tremendously
effective tool for showing up the past as a burden
on the backs of women and their communities
in terms of exclusionary practices, policies and
ideological rhetoric which keep the majority of
Africans outside sites of power and resources
that in fact belong to all citizens. And Collective
Advocacy has reiterated the necessity of moving
everyone in our respective societies beyond the
euphoria of the independence moment (which
had its minimal beneits and insights), towards
the new challenges that neo-colonialism and
particularly the economic hegemony that neoliberalism poses for all Africans, regardless of
where they are positioned in relation to the
hierarchies and systems of power and material
wealth. Given the recognition that Africa in
all its meanings is poised at the cusp of a new
time; and given that we know how critical it is
for us to own and direct these new opportunities
(in the face of a renewed colonisation of the
continents material, intellectual, cultural, artistic
and biological wealth), understanding what it
will take to reorient our various societies and
communities in new directions, has become the
most urgent contemporary task facing us all.
The occasion of a day when women can remind
themselves of their amazing human and creative
energies and potentialities, (especially because
Womens Day has largely been appropriated by
state functionaries who use it to repeat empty
promises and lies about empowerment and
change), is also an opportune moment to pool
our radical ideas and thoughts, and to craft
alternative agendas that belong to us; to our
communities and to our futures.
What then are some of the newer issues that
require our attention and scrutiny in moments
such as these, when we can think together and reimagine ourselves and our lived realities:
1. A critical understanding of the patriarchal state
in all its complex relationships with economic
classes/systems
at
national,
regional,
continental and global levels extending to the
United Nations as a Global State System which
relects all the minutia and characteristics of
the dominant, neoliberal capitalist system,
must become a key entry point into the process

of crafting an alternative notion and practice
of the State in Africa.
2. A recognition of the fact that the moment of
independence ushers in the imperative of
establishing and consolidating a black ruling
class in all the societies of the continent (in the
context of existing colonial capitalist economic,
political, legal and social infrastructures). And
that, in order to rule, those who accede to the
State at independence become the new rulers
of our societies, by historical and ideological
(nationalist) iat. By virtue of not transforming
the colonial state infrastructure, they become
the new custodians of the global capitalist
order on the continent. This coup over the
dreams of the working people is achieved
through a manipulation of the euphoric
rhetoric of the independence moment and
a demand for loyalty that is increasingly
imposed through the barrel of the gun.
3. An understanding of the reality that ruling
classes come into being and consolidate their
power by economic means (plunder and
accumulation); legal and political rhetoric
(liberal constructions of constitutions and
the law as inclusive); re-invention of feudal
patriarchal practices and rituals (cultural and
traditional authenticators and essentialisms)
and militarism, violence and hegemonic
masculinity (patriotism and loyalty to the
nation, fatherhood, patriarchs). Complaining
about it does not change it. Critiquing it
and challenging it through the creation of
alternative, post-colonial imaginaries and
activisms is the solution.
4. Citizenship is an outcome of the struggle for
social, economic, legal, sexual, and political
entitlements, which must be collectively
crafted and owned in order to position them in
State institutions as rights and protections for
all. Without the necessary engagements and
contestations with the State and all those who
control and wield power within the structures
of the State and its related institutions, women
in particular will remain subjects. Subjected to
the myriad of exclusionary systems, practices
and expressions of patriarchal violence and
impunity that currently dominant their
lives and the realities of their respective
communities everywhere on the continent.
5. Recognising the intersections between
the destructive practices and policies
of increasingly militarised neoliberal/
neo-colonial States and the plunder and
destruction of the natural environments that
are our source of life and futures. The bloated
military budgets of all African countries,
without exception, speak to this blatant
relationship between plunder and impunity.
Armies, mining companies, and other
capitalist industries are the biggest polluters
and destroyers of our planet and its life-giving
resources and eco-systems. This egregious
behaviour by global and local capital translates
into the violence and exclusion that hundreds
of millions of women and their communities
are experiencing across the continent in the
form of poisoned water resources, the lack of
(portable) water; desertiication and the loss
of critical bio-diversity and healing plants.

The the privatization and plunder of forests
and the exclusion of communities from arable
and residential land; the ubiquity of GMOs
and the homogenisation of agriculture with
its attendant health effects particularly on
working people. And the commodiication of
black bodies, in particular black female bodies,
in relation to an entire range of re-invented
capitalist and corporate industries that are
reaping the harvest of African independence.
6. Building Feminist Movements and infusing
our communities with feminist ideas and
perspectives is the key ideological, political
and activist task facing all radical women,
regardless of where they are positioned in
their societies. Feminism is the politics of total
social inclusiveness and of comprehensive
human security and dignity for all. Beginning
with and embedded in the recognition and
respect for the inalienability of womens
rights to bodily and sexual integrity; dignity,
equal access to all social, cultural, educational,
legal and wellness resources, and the right
to be a complete and whole human being,
physically, sexually, emotionally, spiritually
and psychologically.
The old has to be allowed to die and fade (without
losing the memory of the past and the knowledge
of the imbalances and inequalities that were
established by brutal economic, political, racial,
class and gendered systems), so that the new, the
contemporary, the post-colonial, the future, can
truly emerge and blossom, providing the next
layer of foundational relationships and systems,
from which alternative policies and practices can
be built that encompass and include all of us as
African people.
Womens politics, activisms and personal
practices are the core, the foundational basis of
this alternative future for Africa. If and when,
other groups of Africans move themselves into
new and radical sites of thinking and activism,
their ideas and practices will become part of this
inclusive foundational premise to the build a
different kind of African reality.
Relections on African Womens Thought

Leadership in the 21st Century:
The Importance of Engaging with Sexuality
Zine Magubane
10 Issue One | Volume One
he transformations in politics, economics,
and social life that the African Continent
has witnessed between the dawn of the
21st century and today are nothing short of epic.
Since the dawn of the 21st century, we have

seen a new country, South Sudan, added to our
map. Protests have swept through Egypt. The
government of Mali was rocked. Nigeria saw
the rise of Boko Haram, and South Africa and
the world wept as we bid a inal farewell to our
beloved leader, Nelson Mandela. The social
structures of continent wide societies have
undergone tremendous change in the course of a
single generation.
In what other time period have so many African
women been so totally exposed, at so fast a pace to
such searing earthquakes of global change? And
yet, for most of us, what we do on any given day
and what we are directly aware of is circumscribed
by the private orbits in which we live. Our
visions and our persons are limited by the close
up scenes of our jobs, families, neighborhoods,
and countries. Even as our individual lives are
determined, at least in part, by forces that emanate
from far beyond our immediate locales (Mills
1959:3).
Thus, an investment bank fails in New York, and
a woman in Durban inds it increasingly dificult
to keep up with her escalating mortgage payment.
An oil discovery in South Sudan might mean that
an enterprising young business school graduate in
Nigeria gets a coveted promotion and raise while
her sister in Chad is kidnapped and forced into
service by a warlord determined to gain access to
the coveted Black Gold. A pharmaceutical merger
in Britain might mean that the price of AIDS
drugs drop, thus saving hundreds of lives at the

same time that hundreds of people face job cuts
or losses.
This scattered handful of examples demonstrates
that neither the life of an individual nor the history
of a society can be understood in isolation. Each is
impacted by the other. The well-being that some
African women enjoy and the suffering that others
endure are direct relections of the ups and downs
of the societies in which they live. The patterns of
their lives relect, in miniature, the course of world
history. Every woman lives, from one generation
to the next in some society, and each woman also
lives out her individual biography. By the very act
of living she contributes, however minutely, to the
shaping of her society and to the course of history,
even as she is made by society and its historical
push and shove.
It is dificult, however, for ordinary women and
men to grasp the exact interplay between the
changes in their individual lives and the broader
structural changes that their societies undergo;
between their individual biographies and the long
sweep of history; between their individual selves
and the larger world.
And herein lies the importance of African
Womens Thought Leadership in the 21st century.
The most powerful deinition of a thought leader
is a person who understands the larger historical
scene in terms of its meaning for both the inner life
and the life trajectory of a variety of individuals.
This type of leader is able to grasp history and
biography and the relations between the two in
society (Mills 1959:6). Those who recognize this
task and its promise are the people that we honor
with the title of Thought Leader.
11
The 20th century has seen such African Women
Thought leaders as Oyeronke Oyewumi, Patricia
McFadden, Pumla Gquola, Zimitri Erasmus and
Cheryl Carolus, Ii Amadiume.
These intellectuals have had the capacity to shift
from one perspective to anotherfrom the political
to the psychological; from an examination of a
single womans life to the comparative assessment
of inancial crises around the world; from
considerations of the global telecommunications
industry to studies of art and dance. They have
been able to give us insight into matters that
range from the most impersonal and remote
transformations to the most intimate features of
the human selfand to see the relations between
the two. That, in brief, is why it is by means of
African Womens Thought Leadership that we
can hope to grasp not only what is going on in
the world, but to understand what is happening
within ourselves.
We urgently need leaders who can give us
insights as to the personal troubles of our age
and the public issues of social structure (Mills
1959:8). By personal troubles I mean those things
that occur within the life of the individual and
within the range of their immediate relations
with others. They have to do with the Self and
with those limited areas of social life of which she
is directly and personally aware. Public issues
have to do with matters that transcend these local
environments and the individual and the range of
her inner life. They have to do with the institutions
of society as a whole.
What are the major issues for African Women
Thought Leaders at this time? How do they
interface with the private struggles we face as

individual women? One of the issues that I see
as most pressing for African Women Thought
Leaders of the 21st centuryone that bridges
both the larger realm of social structure and the
individual realm of biography is that of sexuality,
particularly as it interfaces and intersects with
patriarchy and various forms of either compulsory
heterosexuality or coerced heterosexuality.
I choose the words compulsory heterosexuality
and coerced or coercive heterosexuality very
carefully. It is not that I feel that there is anything
at all wrong with the notion of (Lesbian, Gay,
Bisexual and Transgender) LGBT rights or that I
am avoiding the notion in any way. Rather, what
I would like to do is to ind a concept that allows
us to bring together a number of different forms
of violence and discrimination in ways that allow
us to see and appreciate and understand their
speciicities and differences while at the same
time understanding and challenging the common
dynamics that underlay them.
Let us consider, perhaps, a few speciic examples.
On February 19 of this year Uganda passed an
anti-pornography law. The law not only bans
pornography it also outlaws suggestive music
and indecent clothing on women. Speciically,
the law bans women from revealing their thighs,
breasts and buttocks and from dressing a manner
that will sexually excite. When Ugandas Ethics
and Integrity Minister proposed the law, he said
that women who wore anything above the knee
should be arrested. He was quoted as saying,
Any attire which exposes intimate parts of the human
body, especially areas that are of erotic function, is
outlawed. Anything above the knee is outlawed. If a

woman wears a miniskirt, we will arrest her (Svenso
2013). The act has been called the miniskirt ban
and has sparked a series of acts of violence against
women in public places.
Tina Musya, Executiove Director at the Center
for Domestic Violence Prevention in Kampala,
reported that since the bill has passed, there have
been daily reports of women falling victims to
mobs of men assaulting and undressing them
as well as sexually harassing them and making
public places generally unsafe. Rita Achiro, the
Executive Director of the Uganda Womens
Network, a rights advocacy group, says that
the law has emboldened men to abuse women.
She was quoted by the BBC as saying that the
law had really put Ugandan women at risk for
domestic and public abuse. Now people are going
to do it more openly. They are going to judge women
according to what they see as indecent because there
are no parameters deined by law. Such laws actually
take a country like Uganda backwards in regards to
womens empowerment. I do not want to look at it just
as the miniskirt, but rather look at it from controlling
womens bodies, and eventually that will end up into
actual control of women (Uganda Miniskirt Ban
2014).
The anti-pornography law was signed just days
before a law that deined homosexual acts in
Uganda as punishable by life in prison was
passed. The act speciically calls for up to three
years in prison for failure to report a homosexual;
seven years for promoting homosexuality; life
imprisonment for a single homosexual act or for
something called aggravated homosexuality
which includes sex while HIV positive, or with a

disabled person, or being found to have engaged in
same sex activity more than once. In Uganda, like
many other places in Africa where homosexuality
is illegal, the police and other authorities use
provisions restricting or criminalizing crossdressing and female impersonation as avenues for
targeting and persecuting the LGBT community.
Just as heterosexual women have been forcibly
stripped in public, so too have gay activists
been hustled off to police stations and forced to
remove their clothing in front of male oficials to
prove their sex. Yvonne Oyo, an LGBT activist,
was sexually assaulted by the police after being
detained for questioning.
Uganda is not alone, 38 African countries have
criminalized consensual same sex contact.
South Sudan, on becoming independent in
2008, criminalized consensual same-sex conduct
for women and men with up to ten years
imprisonment. Burundi criminalized same sex
conduct in 2009. In 2011 and 2012, Nigeria and
Liberia respectively introduced bills to toughen
penalties for same-sex conduct. In Mauritania,
northern regions of Nigeria, the southern region of
Somalia and Sudan retain the death penalty for the
same. When United States of America President,
Barack Obama visited Senegal, Senegalese
President Macky Sall told him that Senegal was
not ready to decriminalize homosexuality (Kutsch
2013). Indeed, last year charges were brought
against ive women in Senegal for violating
the countrys law prohibiting homosexual acts.
Northern Nigeria, where the death penalty is
the punishment for homosexuality, was also the
place where female heterosexual victims of Boko
13
Haram, after witnessing the massacre of a many
of their classmates, were told to go home and
get married and abandon their education (Nigeria
School Raid 2014).
Even in places, like South Africa, where
exemplary laws have been passed, corrective
rape is a persistent problem. Despite the fact
that the South African constitution is the irst in
the world to secure the equal rights of the LGBT
community and has laws allowing gay marriage,
violence against LGBT people is not uncommon.
Statistics against corrective rape have not been
complied nationally, however researchers from
an advocacy group in Cape Town called Action
Aid have reported that they sometimes face as
many as ten new cases each week.
However, rape is not only an issue for women
in the LGBT community. Ever since a report
produced by the United Nations Ofice on Crime
and Drugs ranked South Africa as having the
highest number for rapes per capita, it has been
repeatedly described, along with the Congo,
as one of the rape capitals of the world with an
estimated 500,000 rapes per year; one every
seventeen seconds.
While we dont want to engage in a politics of
comparison where we try to determine who
is more oppressedgay men or lesbianswe
must look at the ways in which patriarchy affects
lesbians and gay men differently. While anti-gay
attitudes are often thought of in terms of gay men,
reports by Amnesty International have found that
in Senegal, for example, lesbians are at greater
risk for human rights violations. The Amnesty
International report, Making Love a Crime, goes on
to say that in several African countries it has been
shown that lesbians are deliberately targeted for

sexual violence (Amnesty International 2013).
And while we dont want to collapse phenomena
that are clearly distinct, nevertheless, just as we
must seek to understand the common social
forces behind Ugandas anti-gay laws and antipornography laws, we should also consider what
are the forces that tie together the rape of women
and children (both lesbian and heterosexual),
domestic violence, and the forced marriage of
girls who are sometimes as young as 10 years
old. In 2009, for example, it was reported that
more than 20 girls in the Eastern Cape drop out
of school every month and are forcibly married.
Another study conducted in 2011 reported that
over 60 girls between the ages of 10 and 15 in
the Eastern Cape had been forcibly married to
older men. And another study reported that in
Kwazulu-Natal in 2011, about 20 underage girls
were abducted and forcibly married each month.
According to research conducted by the Medical
Research Council in 2011, 24 out of 30 young girls
interviewed indicated that they did not have any
prior relationship with the men who married
them.
While the practice affects both women and girls,
there is compelling evidence suggesting that the
majority of the victims are young girls, aged 10
to 14 years. Research indicates that the practice
disproportionately impacts the poor, with over
50 percent of victims coming from families living
at or below the poverty line and over 60% of the
victims did not have matric. The South African
Journal of Sociology recently described the practice
as A form of gender-based violence against a girl child
which will ultimately compromise her development
and can result in early pregnancies, increasing the
changes of maternal mortality. Furthermore, the

young girl will suffer from social isolation with little
or no education, poor vocational training, which will
increase her vulnerability to domestic violence. This
simply reinforces the gendered nature of poverty
(Monyan 2013:77).
I recount these horrifying statistics, not to leave us
with a sense of hopelessness or to suggest that no
progress has been made, but rather to frame why I
think that the issue of sexuality is such a key issue
for African Womens Thought Leadership in the
21st century. I have read the mission statement of
the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute,
which, as we all know, states that the principal
purpose of the institute is to train Africans for the
political, economic, social and cultural renewal of
the African continent and its people. I maintain
that issues of sexuality, gender based violence,
and efforts to enforce compulsory sexuality are
not only major issues in and of themselves, but
also interface with issues we more commonly
see as having centrality, such as economic
empowerment, globalization, class struggle,
racism, etc. If serious thought leadership is absent
on these issues, Africas political, economic, social
and cultural renewal simply will not happen.
The laws that criminalize homosexuality must
be seen for what they are, attacks on universally
protected human rights that open the door for
broad based repression and discrimination.
Just as in the days of apartheid, the suppression
of Communism Act, allowed for unheralded
harassment, arrest, detention, and torture for
not only being a suspected Communist but for
harboring sympathy of views of such persons
or aiming to promote thempromotion being

deined in extremely broad and sweeping ways;
so too does legislation targeting homosexuality.
In Cameroon, individuals are regularly arrested
after having been denounced to authorities as
being gay or lesbian. Even in countries where
anti-homosexuality laws are not routinely
implemented, the existence of the laws alone
provide opportunities for the abuse of anyone
state elites do not like and provide cover for
criminalizing all kinds of advocacy. Examples of
abuse include, but are certainly is not limited to,
intimidation, blackmail and extortion, unlawful
search and seizure, by both police and nonstate actors. Homophobic witch hunts which
have swept across Africa in Uganda, Cameroon,
Nigeria, Zimbabwe, the Gambia, Malawi, Zambia,
and Ghana have also provided a pretext and cover
for the blanket targeting of political opponents,
journalists, and activists that state elites ind
threatening.
The criminalization of homosexuality provides an
opening for the undermining of democratic the
rights of all citizens. Senegals anti-gay laws, for
example, violate the countrys own constitution
and the African Charter on Human and Peoples
Rights, both of which guarantee equal treatment
and non-discrimination to all citizens. In Uganda,
parliamentarian Mira Matembe was quoted as
saying that although she was a human rights
activist, she didnt support homosexuality as a
human right (Sharlet 2013:27). Indeed, some have
gone so far as to call Uganda an anti-gay police
state where the LGBT community is frequently
given the inlammatory label of terrorista tactic
that all South Africans who survived apartheid
15
are certainly familiar with.
the larger colonial project of colonial oppression.
The Thabo Mbeki Leadership Institute

manifesto further states that, the training of
Africans for renewal and leadership should
emphasize
Afrocentricity
and
Africancentered epistemologies and methodologies.
Sexuality provides an important, yet underexplored avenue, for engaging African-centered
epistemologies, because often, in the debate
about the rights of LGBT persons in Africa,
ideas of African culture and tradition are often
invoked in opposition to so-called Western samesex sexuality. However, there is in fact a long
history of same-sex sexuality and non-normative
gender identities in sub-Saharan Africa that must
be further researched, explored, and brought
forward and made a part of African Thought
Leadership. As the Institutes manifesto says, the
vision of the Institute is to provide leadership
that will give a person a strong sense of African
identity empowered to act and empowered to
become an authentic African leader in the service
of humanity. What better way to do this than to
explore the extent to which different concepts of
sex and gender identities have existed in different
parts of Africa, particularly prior to colonization.
For example, woman-to-woman marriages have
been documented in over forty ethnic groups
in Africa, spread over Southern Africa, Benin,
Nigeria, Kenya and Southern Sudan. Rather than
simply viewing variations in sexual orientation
and gender identity as Western imports, 21st
century African Thought Leadership must also
explore, not only how colonial models for African
society had no place for existing gender variance
or same sex sexuality and were thus complicit with
Furthermore, I would be remiss if I did not

mention the ways in which violence against LGBT
persons is part and parcel of a neo-colonial project
in Africa. While African leaders and publics are,
of course, to be held responsible for their actions,
nevertheless, we must grapple with and make
known the American roots of Ugandas anti-gay
persecutions. When he authorized the anti-gay
legislation, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni
supported it by saying that homosexuality was
an example of imperialism and Western cultural
chauvinism. It seems the topic of homosexuals was
provoked by the arrogant and careless Western groups
that are fond of coming into our schools and recruiting
young children into homosexuality and lesbianism,
just as they carelessly handle other issues concerning
Africa, the President opined before Parliament
President Musevenis Speech 2014). However,
anti-gay rhetoric is much more of an imposition
from the West than homosexuality. For many
years, American fundamentalists have looked
on Uganda as a laboratory for theocracy or as
they put it a government led by God (Sharlet
2010:37). Americans have not only sent money
and missionaries to Uganda but also ideas. Prior
to crafting the bill, Ugandan politicians were
invited to attend prayer breakfasts in America.
Republican Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma
and former attorney General John Ashcroft and
celebrity pastor Rick Warren (a frequent guest
on the Oprah Winfrey show) have been frequent
attractions at Ugandas Independence Day and
National Prayer Breakfast. Three years ago
there was a conference organized in Uganda
by an American fundamentalist named Scott
Lively. Lively and his Abiding Truth Ministry
journeyed to Uganda to give speeches about a so
called international gay agenda. Furthermore,
Lively played a major role in helping Ugandan
politicians to draft the anti-homosexuality bill. In
many of his public speeches and advocacy work,
Lively has repeatedly stressed the link between
pornography and homosexuality.
I would not like to end on a negative note, and
indeed, it would not be fair if I did not mention
the many promising developments that are
happening related to activism in this realm. A
number of African countries have introduced
legislation to outlaw discrimination on the
basis of sexual orientation or have removed
discriminatory provisions of existing legislation.
Examples of such countries include Mozambique
in 2007, Cape Verde and Mauritious in 2008
and Botswana in 2010. Several countries never
criminalized same sex activities including Burkina
Faso, Rwanda, and Cote dIvoire. Furthermore,
some of the most progressive social activism at
grassroots level is happening in this area, with
organizations such as Sexual Minorities Uganda,
Womens Smile in Senegal the only group in the
country to advocate for lesbian rights, and Free
Gender in South Africa which speciically focuses
on the issue of helping victims of corrective rape.
Since the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership
Institute is located in South Africa, it has a
potentially revolutionary role to play in the
renewal of thought leadership in this regard. As
we all know, South Africa became the irst African
country and only the ifth in the world to mandate
marriage equality. South Africa has taken a
leadership role in pushing for an inclusive human

rights agenda at the United Nations, in sponsoring
the irst ever resolution on sexual orientation and
gender identity, with some Africa countries like
Mauritius and Cape Verde voting in favor of it.
International human rights obligations provide an
important legal basis for the repeal of offending
laws. Without seeking to minimize the many
struggles that South Africa still has to overcome,
a recent Amnesty International report noted that
South Africa has taken a leadership role on
sexual orientation and gender identity issues at
the international level (Amnesty International
2013:8).
We on the Continent of Africa and in the Diaspora
have been blessed with such a high caliber of
thought leadership that our expectations for
the future are high. African Womens Thought
Leadership in the 21st century must continue to
build upon and expand the good work that has
been done without becoming complacent. We
must make it a priority to spearhead progressive
thought leadership on sexuality and seek to
partner with and also learn from progressive
initiatives around the Continent. With the death
of former President Nelson Mandela last year, we
saw the impact that the South African freedom
struggle has had on the world. We have had our
ups and downs in the last twenty years it is true,
but the potential exists for us to inspire ourselves,
and the rest of the world, again. Lets seek to live
up to the challenge.
*This paper is the keynote address presented
by Professor Zine Magubane at the 2014
Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institutes
International Womens Day roundtable event.
17
If God Were a Woman:

Womens Citizenship in South Africa
Liepollo Lebohang Pheko
Do you remember,
When we all walked tall and proud
When we were the salt of the earth
When we sang with voices loud and clear
And put the most vain of birds to shame
Long before the lies, the deception, the myths
Before the gradual destruction of our bodies, our spirits and our minds
Do you remember
When God was a woman?
by Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi
Abstract
An understanding of Citizenship is critical because it concurrently acts as a force for inclusion and
exclusion (Elson 1991). Classical citizenship theory highlights the inclusionary aspects and discards
those that do not meet its implicit criteria as employed, educated, independently resourced, male, selfdeined individuals. Feminists and other citizenship activists have discussed citizenships exclusionary
dynamic as the point of departure for their analysis and have utilized the principle of inclusiveness to
challenge that dynamic. It is critical that we examine the constructs of the economic agency of women
and gendered citizenship as critical and differentiating nuances of citizenship theories in South Africa.
This differentiating will then assist in formulating and correcting State led citizenship to enable social
inclusion. Twenty years into the new South African dispensation there remains a dearth in understanding
multiple and interfacing layers of rights and violations of womens experiences of this citizenship.
19
Introduction
Feminism is a matter of life and death. It is the question
that concerns every facet of our being on this earth. It is
every issue of life, every concern and every struggle. It
traverses every circumstance, every belief, every hope,
every matter and challenge that we will meet in this life
and all that consumes us until our death (Liepollo
Lebohang Pheko 2014).
t has been commonplace to consider the

question of women and the articulation of
their full and meaningful citizenship as an
appendage to the National question on citizenship
(Gasa 2007, Mcfadden 1997). Many countries and
more speciically, the postcolonial Afrikan State,
illustrate varying levels of misunderstanding
or ultimate disinterest in womens universal
engagement with the levers of power and the
fundamental architecture of these nations.
Although country contexts are heterogeneous,
there remains an area of broad comparison and
similarity particularly in the realms of governance,
the relationship between power and gender, the
utilisation of women as voting fodder and oftendeep contradictions between women of various
class backgrounds (Adeleye-Fayemi 2005).
While the social binaries are often overstated,
South Africas class and race composition is not
entirely dissimilar to most Afrikan countries.
It is foregrounded by a deeply fragmented and
problematic link between the means of production
including human capital and the gendered and
race based dividends of that production. These
factors have presented South Africa with a missed
opportunity to construct a nation that understands
the complexities and imperatives of constructing
and enabling meaningful citizenship beyond legal

formalities and voting rights, particularly for the
women in this country, them appreciating the
particularities of their deicit social and power
relations (Pheko 2010).
This paper will discuss the various layers of South
Afrikan womens location within this Nation State,
their dispossession from substantive inluence in
the market economy, their experiences of poverty
and gendered constructions of citizenship. Finally
it offers a critique of the States governance as an
enabler of its citizens aspirations.
Dimensions of Womens Citizenship

The role of South Africas policy in marginalising
and excluding women requires a theoretical
framework against which to measure and
deconstruct womens economic agency and
citizenship. Governance needs to redeine the
rights based approach that often shows callousness
in its method of ascribing rights with a universality
that is not appropriate for the imperatives and
realities of people who are not white, male, middle
class, university educated, able-bodied, sociallyconnected, formally employed and urbanised.
As a concept, gender justice faces special deinitional
dificulties for several reasons. Women are not a
homogeneous group with monolithic preferences
and requirements. Afrikan Feminist approaches
-though not universal- have traditionally had
a socialist and people centred bias owing to the
geo-historic locus of struggle on this continent.
A host of the injustices that characterise gender
relations occur in the private sphere of family
and community relations but are not contained
in States ambit of actively promoting safe and
equal citizenship, because State embodiments of
patriarchy pervade economic, social and political
institutions (Oyewumi 2002). Conversely the State
still exerts patriarchal power and collusion with
hyper masculine violence which often occurs in
the private realm of home, marriage and family,
and is often invisible or ignored.
Twenty years into the new dispensation, many
South Afrikan women remain embattled by the
ampliication of institutions, structures, systems,
policies and an economy that entrenches and
enables various forms of masculine privilege.
Fundamentalism is inimical to most forms of
substantive citizenship and economic and cultural
fundamentalisms are two forms at play in this
country. The foundation of the South African
State in common with many other Afrikan
States- is that Afrikan women bear the cost of a
faltering State that has been unable to convert its
constitutional premise to avert and reverse the
widening inequalities across various sectors of
South African society (Hoogeveen et al 2006)
While millions of women [and men] continue
to reside off the socio- economic radar in South
Africa, the idea of economic citizenship needs to
be examined in relation to economic orthodoxy.
The relationship between the State and women
as evidenced by trade policy appears to be
characterised by contradictions between the
market agenda, its inequitable consequences and
Governments stated intentions to redistribute
wealth and provide basic services.
Although the ascendance of the South African postcolonial State after 1994, may have contributed
to the rise of one form of popular democracy,
the ceding of control to international and local

private sector and corporations; increased protest
violence and social disintegration have threatened
the emerging State. Equally problems of
authoritarianism, bureaucratic rigidity, promotion
of elite class interests, and unaccountable and
increasingly questionable instances of judicial
processes, create tensions and concerns that call
into question the capacity of this emerging State
to craft and mediate equitable socio-political
relations (Nussbaum 2000).
The issue therefore is not whether women are for
or against this State; rather the subject of inquiry
should be whether the South African State has
the capacity and intent to recognise and support
the nurturing of its citizens aspirations and
respond to the demands derived from citizenship
entitlements. Perhaps an alternative starting point
is whether in fact the State in its construction
and foundation has the capacity to recognise
and enable the best interests of women. There
exist multiple layers of violences against women
that manifest in both private and public spaces,
reiterated by legislation, judicial services, media
narratives, interpretations of religion and culture,
policy priorities, literature and discursive spaces.
Feminist models of citizenships that are useful
in the South African context are centred around
models of:
1. Political transformation: connected with
the emancipatory objectives of the Nation
State and womens contribution to carving
those objectives.
2. Material living conditions: citizenship
21
as a lived experience beyond theoretical
frameworks. There is still paucity in
research and studies to assess and measure
these experiences in postcolonial States.
3. Social and political entitlement: the
interface between de jure rights and de
facto beneits remains a key pillar to
constructing meaningful citizenships.
4. Local and transnational/trans-locational
situations and the arising forms of
citizenships: these connect local and
international
struggles
and
locate
citizenship within the broad philosophy
of solidarity, belonging, nurturing and
shared cause beyond narrow nationalism
(Taylor 2000).
An entry point to the feminist critiques of the liberal
view of citizenship is that liberalism does not
easily recognise difference. An important critique
of the limited construction of citizenship based
on narrow nationalism is that this undermines
its broader purpose, which is embedded in
humanity, dignity, hospitality, care, nurturing
and provision. It also resonates with regionalism
and Africanism as more compelling currencies of
citizenship, shared identity and belonging. South
African forms of feminisms have not yet been able
to inluence the framing of womens demands
beyond what the State has been willing to cede
and this presents a serious limitation to State and
government accountability.
This is diametrically opposed to the idea of
rights apportioned according to social markers of
constructed privilege. However the neo-classical
construction of human rights still does not

provide a nuanced understanding of womens
speciic needs and experiences. It has not imbibed
them into broader rights frameworks. South
Africas much vaunted constitution presents an
opportunity to examine the distance between State
deined concerns for citizens and the increasing
protests by those citizens in reaction to the States
inability to respond consistently to their demands
of citizenship whether it be jobs, homes, wages,
education or an end to various other forms of
lack. On the hierarchy of demands, womens
demands are either subsumed within broader,
organised constituencies such as workers or
viewed as pertaining to women only thus treated
as a diversion from the imperatives of State (Basu
2000).
The formulation of universal rights suggests the
idea that individuals are each entitled to the same
rights and treatment irrespective of race, class, caste
and gender. In this sense, perhaps it potentially
presents emancipatory potential because it states
that identity and entitlement are not tied to ones
ascribed or social location or relations. Possibly
more compelling, is the notion of human dignity
inspired by thinkers and philosophers such as
Confucius, King Moshoeshoe, King Dingane and
Amartya Sen (Agarwal et al 2003, Palais 1996). The
construct of human rights has been created often
without thought to societal norms, preferences and
social equity. Rights in several African languages
are translated as entitlements, or requirements
meaning that they are nonnegotiable and are a
fundamental part of the human experience.
Those Other Women

South Africa provides a lucid illustration of
womens deicit power and economic positioning
despite the myriad of institutions, legislation
and regulatory frameworks that should signify
the governments good intentions. The critical
question is not only whether women are less
materially resourced than men, but rather a
process of analysis that includes the dimensions
of power and poverty and their manifestly
differentiated impact on the lived experiences of
women and men. An investigation into income
alone does not produce a comprehensive or fully
responsive answer. An examination of statistics
on health, nutrition, education and labour force
participation begin to more meaningfully conirm
that women are severely impoverished and that
this impoverishment includes more than just
material conditions, and is linked to various
forms of poverty that disadvantage and dislocate
women even more than materially deprived men.
The experience of poverty for Women extends to
the:

Poverty of power;
Poverty of social capital;
Poverty of voice;
Poverty of time;
Poverty of leisure;
Poverty of life choices;
Poverty of physical and emotional wellbeing;
Poverty of autonomous movement and
association;
Inability to contribute to the construction
of the State and State imperatives.
Poverty surpasses meagre material means and

includes a many other indicators that necessitate
expansion on governance that encompasses the
rights to dignity, autonomy, participation and the
ability to be a part of the decision-making process.
The marginalisation of women, particularly
economically, means that they are typically objects
(Mama 1996), of indifference, fear, contempt or
hostility, or are voiceless non-participants who
require assistance, investigation, government
programmes or even punishment with very
scarce opportunity to be regarded as equal fellow
citizens with the rights that they have shaped to
give meaning to their own circumstances. Afrikan
women have the highest levels of unemployment
and the lowest salaries in relation to men and
white women despite ubiquitously evoked and
often-problematic State led initiatives and models
of inclusion such as gender mainstreaming. This
clearly illustrates the dichotomy between womens
contribution as key drivers of the architecture that
is the South African nation, and their contribution
to that nation as liberators, peace builders,
combatants, producers and primary subsidisers
of state social delivery deicits (Tsikata 2004).
As such, governance in South Africa needs
to be conceptualised in new ways devoid of
abstraction. The total cost of womens labour to
compensate for the States disengagement from
basic delivery, whether through outsourcing
or discontinuing provision, is not suficiently
calculated and contributes to the othering of
womens fundamental interests from broad
National questions. This is in common with the
tendency to view womens access to governance
as recipients rather than as central to shaping
23
governance (Antrobus 2004).
confer rights based on equity and justice.
The overlap between womens justice and

citizenship relies on the way citizenship deines
governance in terms of the boundaries of the
sphere of justice. This means that governance
should take into account how citizenship deines
what womens identity, roles and entitlements
in relation to men are and how these will be
adjudicated. The shifting tide towards citizenship,
participation and social inclusion does not
however mean that differently mediated gender
relations inevitably become a launch pad for
investigating the distribution of rights, resources
and recognition. Feminist scholarship across the
continent and beyond illustrates this. In the context
of economic governance; patriarchal patterns of
production, ownership, skills acquisition and
independent access severely curtail South Afrikan
womens scope for economic self-identiication
and deinition.
2014 South Africa has greater socio-economic

inequalities and deicits than most countries
across the world and has seemingly not used the
currency of people centred demands to carve
new economic and political spaces for women.
Although gender mainstreaming, afirmative
action and employment equity have been
implemented in order to equilibrate economic
relations, their impact has, to date been limited
(Budlender 2004). Key to this, is a lack of conceptual
clarity about what these instruments are intended
to achieve and the appropriate understanding of
how to qualitatively attain these results.
The State, The Economy and Women

Prevailing trade theories of competitive
advantage and market led economic growth that
replace supposedly ineficient State functions
with corporate led governance and growth, are
deined by lexible labour regulations, recession
of economic policy space, depreciation and /or
unfettered movement of currencies, withdrawal
of social protections and conditional loan and
funding models. These prototypes purport to
uphold human rights whilst excluding large
portions of society . However the law, the economy,
culture and other institutions that determine
and regulate social life and power relationships
should not be seen as neutral instruments which
Emerging and reframed social models may

contribute to a new way of looking at governance by
focusing on the social inclusion of women citizens
and family issues in social development planning.
Another more recent model has conceptualised
the right to be cared for and the right to care,
e.g. for children and the elderly, as a way to reintegrate care work and family responsibilities
in public life (Knijn & Kremer 1997). There are
various models of political inclusion including
politics of presence, manifested by quantitatively
increasing the quotas of womens participation in
political spaces such as party lists, Parliament and
cabinet positions. South Africas attempts to draw
women into political institutions though laudable,
has not created spaces that signiicantly shift
their orientation and discourse closer to womens
concerns in substantive and transformative ways
(May 2000).
In this era of unlinching market led economics,
governance needs to relect on a model that
focuses on the inclusion of women and of
oppressed groups. Feminists have evoked the
politics of difference through social, community
and voluntary organisations. These provide some
possibilities for Afrikan womens self-articulation
in the economy through autonomous organisations
and spaces unfettered by the encroachment of
intrusive social or political agendas.
Stokvels and burial societies in South Africa
offer such opportunities but do not encompass
the full scope of moving beyond conservatism
and radically changing the structural deicits
that prevent women from moving from the
periphery of small businesses, co-ops and
survivalists enterprises to the centre of the
economy (Mhone 2000). However, these
movements and organisations can also contribute
to the depoliticisation of womens activism,
again rendering them peripheral to the real
politics of State and nation. Achieving structural
transformation thus becomes the domain of
masculine politics rather and post 1994 South
African politics largely seem to consider womens
issues as
soft and expendable. Womens
contribution to the economic discourse and
output is thus rendered invisible or inadequately
quantiied. (Kabeer 2004 & Catagay 2001)
Being on the periphery suggests that feminist
perspectives have not permeated the centre of
trade policy and decision-making structures. The
puzzle of orthodox trade discourses in relation
to differentiated citizenship is that the policies
do not recognise the variant starting points,
social deicits and different relationships with
the State, with policy and with power presented
to women as opposed to men. The State far from

being a neutral social arbiter reinforces the social
exclusion of women in the economy and in many
respects effectively echoes and institutionalises the
role of the Father or the Husband. Illustrating this
is that no analysis is made of the existing effects
of current trade policies on men as compared to
women, nor is there such analysis of projected
impacts before further policy decisions are made.
(Tsikata, 2004)
Economic and trade policy are mistakenly
presumed to be gender neutral in intent and
impact. In common with many States, South
African policymaking assumes that women and
men can participate in and beneit equally from
trade policy and economic participation. This
advances the falsehood that impacts are not
substantially different between men and women,
and that the modalities will neither affect nor be
affected by power and social relationships between
men and women. Accordingly, South Africas
trade policy regime is not only gender-blind but
also impervious to the nuanced nature of power,
sex, class, race and other social determinants
that impact the experience of citizenship. Global
markets function both through womens social
reproduction and market production. (Budlender
et al 2004)
This bias is circumscribed and shaped primarily
in ways in which South Africa organises the
relationship between paid work and raising
children (unpaid work). Women engaged in
raising children often do not have an independent
entitlement to resources and are dependent on
partners, husbands and the State to meet their
25
needs. Markets operate without recognising
that the unpaid work of social reproduction and
maintenance of human resources contributes to
the functioning and realisation of formal market
relations.
Rights, the state and the women who

care
The existence of equality clauses in the South
African constitution does not preclude unequal
treatment sanctioned by custom, community and
religious regulations. Citizenship undertakes
to release the citizen subject from the burden of
ascribed social relations into a relationship with a
neutral arbiter, the State (Oyewumi 2002). This is
manifested in the substance of laws and policies
and in their interpretation and implementation.
However entitling all citizens to the same rights
does not necessarily promote equitable outcomes
and formal rights do not ensure substantive
equality or agency especially when the State is the
primary custodian and purveyor of those rights
and entitlements. (Amadiume 2000)
Given the privatisation of services through as a
result of various exigencies of externally driven
neo liberal governance, the South African State
has all but legitimised the exclusion of women
from the centre of mainstream economic activity.
Social reproduction is still ascribed to women by
culture or history and even implied in the policy
design that rarely subsides workplace child care,
telecommuting or lexi time to enable different
forms of economic participation. Assigning women
the monopoly of basic services of care work given
the already challenging effects of privatised and
unaffordable healthcare, education, electricity and
water will inevitably further marginalise them

and exclude from professional, social, economic,
educational, recreational and creative pursuits
[Adeleye-Fayemi, 2005].
Being on the periphery thus means that a gender
perspective has not begun to enter mainstream of
the trade agenda and decision-making structures.
The contradiction of the neo liberal trade agenda
with differentiated citizenship is that the policies
do not recognise the variant starting points, social
deicits and different relationships with the State,
with policy and with power presented to women
as opposed to men. As an example, most policy
making dos not offer an analysis of the existing or
potential effects of current trade policies on men
and women respectively, much less a gendered
analysis of projected impacts before decisions are
taken.
The market however functions because women
make it possible through the many unpaid
functions they conduct. Womens unpaid work in
social reproduction and family maintenance can
be seen as a tax which women are required to
pay before they can engage in income-generating
activities (Palmer 1995). This tax is not recoverable
from the South African State and is not indicated
by orthodox economic measures such as GDP
(growth domestic produce) or the SNA (system of
national accounts).
This bias is circumscribed and shaped primarily
in ways in which South Africa organises the
relationship between paid work and raising
children (unpaid work).
Ideas of governance, democracy and the State
are often utilised without investigating how
these constructs arise both geo-historically and
from current socio economic realities. Political
organising and state led forms of governance
are still considered to the most pivotal. Three
components intersect to give meaning to the role
of the State:
1. State power as the interconnection between
control over resources, over actors and
over outcomes.
2. Most political discourses are implicitly
presumed to be exclusive to masculine
State formations and power.
3. Power resides largely with the same
State processes and is determined by the
interplay between social and economic, the
private and public, personal expectations
and policy interests and the power these
have over the people in those states.
(Taylor 2000)
Gendered Analysis of Poverty and

Social exclusion
The indivisibility or interdependence of economic
rights which include social, cultural civil and
political rights reiterate that it is dificult to fully
exercise political and civil rights if people are
hungry or homeless. Poverty and social exclusion
have both been conceptualised in terms of the
denial of the enjoyment of the trio of political, civil
and social citizenship rights. The markets and the
trade regime deny the digniied and respectful
treatment of its workers. By facilitating procedural
rights rather than substantive engagement,
the State fails to enable a critical component of
citizens agency, which can be crucial in bridging
the gap between formal rights on paper and their
enjoyment in practice, particularly for women.

Systematically linking a gender-relations analysis
to trade and economic policy frameworks is
a dificult task, given the blindness to gender
issues in economic discourse. Gender relations
can be deined in terms of the interplay between
historical practices that are distinguished
according to masculine and feminine (theories and
ideologies, including religious ideas), institutional
practices (such as State and market), and material
conditions (the nature and distribution of material
capabilities along gender lines)(Antrobus 2000).
Gender relations are social constructs (social
forces and historical structures) that differentiate
and circumscribe material outcomes for women
and men. This deinition of gender relations
recognizes that the interplay of race, class and
sexuality underpins the form and structure of
actual gender relations. Most economic discourse
is dominated by neo-classical conceptions of
markets that function on the basis of perfect
competition.
As a result, economic analysis is rooted, in its
basic theoretical assumptions, in a genderneutral abstraction of markets functioning with
homogeneous labour inputs. However, markets
do have a gender dimension to them. A gender
relations analysis focuses precisely on how
market relationships that appear gender-neutral
implicitly infer the male standpoint.
In order to carry out womens plans and
programmes, separate structures have been
created such as women ministries, bureaus, units,
division and ofices on the status of women. The
27
creation of separate structures to operationalise
womens plans and programmes has led to two
kinds of effects of the biases (Statistics South
Africa):
1. The creation of dedicated divisions or units
with a small share of resources and the label
of being a special group with regard to antipoverty and basic needs programmes. This is
the model followed by Chapter 9 institutions
such as the Commission of Gender Equality
and Womens Ministry including South
Africas. Where these entities focus on
issues of economic empowerment, poverty
eradication,
political
decision-making,
womens legal capacity, training, education
and employment, there are major structural
deiciencies because of the weak or nonexistent linkages to broader macro-economic
and trade policies.
2. The marginalisation of women in the
structural mechanism of the economy, trade
and industry where the bulk of resources
and implementation mechanisms exist is
problematic. If no connections are made to
determine womens enfranchisement against
poverty eradication, this cannot be solved
within the growth model of the industry,
trade policy and implementation, women will
remain on the periphery of these so-called
mainstream policy areas. Therefore, the lack
of an appropriate operational framework
has prevented the consideration of gender
as a variable in planning as well as in the
implementation process of the South Africas
Trade Policy (Budlender 2004, Tsikata 2004).
These are important questions because they

could illustrate patterns of growth and economic
management more effectively than merely
illustrating growth rates and South Africas ability
to deal with poverty. The distributional structure
along gender, class and race that affect resource
allocation and access to development beneits in
particular would be important mediating factors
to consider.
Conclusion
Womens substantive citizenships in relation
to the South African Nation State processes
and inluence remain contested, marginal and
fragile. Current interpretations of entitlement
and belonging deny full economic citizenship
to women because outcomes are surely as
fundamental as processes. This is where
outcomes of deicit power relations, truncated
autonomy, low wages and narrow access to life
opportunities, processes and the framing of rights
and citizenship must be questioned. Procedural
citizenship as facilitated by the South African
State should be engineered in coalescence with
substantive citizenship; this could potentially
narrow the space between neo-classical rights
and substantive womens citizenship and keep
more people within the ambit and reach of State
provisions, protections and entitlements.
Currently the structurally unchallenged model
of corporate led governance enables and
strengthens social apartheid, encourages racism
and social strife, depletes the rights of women and
threatens to precipitate our nation into continuing
confrontations. The process of systemic social
exclusion undermines womens citizenship and
tries to fragment any organised and cohesive
articulation of an alternative imagination.
Amartya Sens work and ideas: A gender perspective.

Taylor & Francis.
Amadiume, I. (2000). Daughters of the goddess, daughters
of imperialism: African women struggle for culture,
power and democracy (pp. 240-257). London: Zed
books.
The context of the Afrikan woman in South

Africa provides an opportunity to examine the
various textures of economic struggle including
the original struggles against colonialism and
the struggles for self-determination socially,
politically, inancially and culturally. South
Africa entered this millennium with less reckless
abandon than what characterised the 1994
elections. Twenty years on, it is absolutely
critical to analyse whether this is a State nation
or a nation State propelled by market priorities
over broad community and human interests. In
common with many post-colonial States, South
Africa faces a crisis of legitimacy based on its
ability to enable trans-locational interconnection
and collective identities that formed the nexus of
colonial struggles as an inevitable continuation of
the liberation project. This against the backdrop
of depoliticised and delegitimised local struggles
and the external pressures of international
governance that have reshaped the re-organisation
of States along economic and across ideological
divided blocs, have created patronage and crony
capitalism that further entrenches male privilege.
This presents sharp tensions between State
functions and its responsibilities towards the
women who have actively fought for the creation
of the South African State.
agatay, N. (2001). Trade, gender and poverty. New

York: UNDP.
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Becoming Post-Colonial
Citizens In Africa:
Through Feminist Vistas
Patricia McFadden
31
his paper focuses on ive critical areas
which I think are foundational to how
we become post-colonial through new
notions and practices of citizenship as Africans
at national, regional and continental levels. In
order to understand the context within which we
are engaging feminist and womens struggles in
relation to the State, patriarchal institutions, and
the agenda of building new theorising and new
political movements for the transformation of the
continent, we need to interrogate the following
challenges:
1. What are the key features of the current context

in terms of the Patriarchal Backlash and the
inaccessibility of Liberal notions and policies
which have entrenched the distance between
women and State institutions, as well as key
socio-economic and cultural systems in terms
of Citizenship and creating lives of Dignity for
all Africans.
2. How do we effectively respond to the
persistence of Feudalism and the recycling of
practices, rites and ideological systems that
underpin Patriarchy as culture and tradition
and as commonsensical to being African.
Exposing these power relations as expressions
of exclusionary practices particularly in
the realities of African females is critical to
initiating the transformational process.
3. How do state functionaries, feudalists and
homophobes use Sexual Violence and the
Social Exclusion of certain groups of Africans,
in particular Queer people, as markers of
inauthenticity? What are the new political
discourses and forms of activism needed
to support and protect these communities

and individuals against so-called corrective
practices that violate their bodily and sexual
integrity. Violence and the blatancy of
Impunity as normative forms of exclusion and
for instilling of fear in individuals and groups
that are perceived as in need of management
and control (Women, Queers, Radicals etc)
are crucial challenges facing all Africans who
are engaged in crafting new social terrains.
4. When do we begin engaging in the new
discourses and debates about how Africans
Be-Come Citizens in alternative and futuristic
ways, through a critical understanding of
Patriarchy, The State, and through a retrieval
of the idea of Freedom as a foundational part
of deining Contemporary forms of struggle,
visioning and living.
What then, is the current context within which we
are operating as activists and scholars who intend
on transforming our personal lived realities, and
of being part of the ideological, social, structural
and policy-deined circumstances of most
working people and their communities, and of
course achieving the goal of making the future a
contemporary lived existence for us all.
I am using a Radical Feminist Perspective1 on the
issues surrounding the conceptual re-imagination
of Citizenship as a status, a consciousness and a
relationship with oneself. In the irst instance, as
part of a class, a racial category, and as gendered
beings who have diverse abilities and make
differing sexual choices. In the second instance
as an expression of agency and of a critical
understanding of relationship between those
who are situated outside the State as the main
custodian of power and the material wealth of any
contemporary society. And in the inal instance, as
an individual who uses her or his agency to deine
and live an identity that is multiple, in lux, and
which is juxtaposed to the systems and structures,
practices of the State and of their respective
communities.
It is at the intersection of these multiple sites
that the new ideas, energies and possibilities
of crafting new notions and lived realities
reside. And while the identity and discipline of
Feminism is still widely disparaged and treated
as other mainly because of its liberatory power
in explaining patriarchy in all its forms and
expressions, and because it provides the only
effective political vision for all humans to become
free persons beyond gendered, raced, classed,
ablelist and sexualised social cages the reality
is that increasingly, the power of feminist analysis
and visioning is being recognised and embraced.
The future will be a feminist future, without any
doubt.
Key to reading the context of our African societies,
therefore, is the understanding that we are in the
midst of a serious, concerted and fully intentional
Backlash, led by those who would rather maintain
the status quo as is; a moment of accumulation,
decadence and plunder for those who rule, as
well as for those who provide the ideological
and material infrastructure for such afluence.
The Backlash is a notion that comes out of the
feminist movements of the world. and it derives
its meaning from an understanding that even
after certain demands have been met in terms
of the push and pull over power in any context,

those who control and exercise power invariably
push back on the shifts that have allowed for a
small breathing space for the majority in terms
of dignity and wellbeing. Therefore, while the
current neo-colonial regimes of the continent had
to concede some limited beneits to the working
people who made independence possible through
their courage and tenacity in the belief that
liberation and a sense of freedom were necessary
and possible, invariably, these new elites lost sight
of the future, and instead concentrated on the
containment and corralling of the working people
in order to minimize the amount of resources
that are available to communities, insisting all
the time that change takes time even as they ill
their private coffers with the wealth and material
resources of their respective societies.
Thus while generally the notion of the Backlash
tends to apply most appropriately to the losses
that each generation of women has experienced,
particularly when the ideological and political
pendulum swings far to the Right as is the case
currently with the deeply entrenched hegemony
of Neo-liberalism in reality, the Backlash affects
all groups of people situated outside the State and
its conservative, repressive infrastructure and
institutions. All working people suffer personal
loss when girls and women are brutalised,
stigmatized and or murdered as part of the sexual
backlash to womens perceived unruly sexual
behaviour. All working people are affected
by the misogynist impunity that is unleashed
everywhere on the continent against older
women who are murdered for supposedly being
witches and demons by patriarchal forces that
33
direct their grievances against older women as
scapegoat seiphers without any real human and
or social consequence.
However, it is crucial that we position an
understanding of the Backlash within a feminist
epistemology and resist the seduction of
extending the realities of women (conceptually
and empirically) to everyone around them. This
is a dificult but important position to assume and
retain, given that the current deinitions and uses
of gender as a thinking tool, are overwhelmingly
inluenced by Neo-liberal sensibilities and
policy implications that homogenise working
peoples lives. The conlation of women as
bodies, identities, constituencies and occupants
of planetary space leads inevitably to the
invisibilization of women and to their distancing
from the very resources and interests that were the
initial focus of research, policy and redistributive
mechanisms.
Central to this conlation and distancing is
the currently popular notion and practice of
citizenship. The challenge then becomes how
to re-deine citizenship as an ideal, an inclusive
site, and as an identity that individuals and
communities craft and imbue with particular
elements and capabilities, and which people
deploy as a platform a site of negotiation in
their relationships with the State and its ancillary
institutions.
It is by theorising the lived realities of women as
lives of struggle for alternative futures that we
are able to scrutinise and assess the notion and
practice of liberal citizenship in relation to the
expectations of individuals and their respective
communities, visvis the occupants of the state

and key patriarchal institutions. For women
in particular, this is an urgent and necessary
contemporary imperative.
Debates around formal citizenship enable feminists to
expose the contradiction between states constitutional
declarations of equal citizenship and treatment
of women as the possessions of their husbands or
communities, relegated to the ambiguous space of
personal law, for example. (Pettman 1999)
This questioning of the notion and practice of
citizenship beyond its liberal inclusivity, which
is mediated by important markers around class,
ethnicity, sexual identity or orientation and
ability, enables radical intellectuals to open up the
epistemological assumptions that have presented
liberal citizenship as a given in societies that
aspire to bourgeois democratic statuses within the
globalised system of capitalism as well as create
a discursive opportunity for communities and
individuals to imagine and engage in the process
of re-crafting citizenship in accordance to their
particular needs and circumstances.
I am speaking to the notion of citizenship
in terms of it having become the fetish which
bridges the divide between the individual or
community and the occupants of the patriarchal
class state of the neo-colonial moment. As with all
fetishes, for citizenship to be realised, it depends
on commoditised resources education, legal
knowledge and access, economic wealth and
private property, and identities that are privileged
via certain classed, gendered and raced matrixes.
This is the reality of the State in all African
societies.
While...many feminists are ambivalent about

approaching the state, the state that feminists address
is itself changing dramatically. (Leech 1994)
This last statement brings me to the point that I
have been making in my recent work, arguing that
as feminists in Africa, we must re-conceptualise
the meanings of what the state is becoming in
order to acquire a contemporary consciousness of
ourselves as people who are be-coming citizens in
new ways.
The critique of liberalism in economic,
constitutional, socio-cultural and political
terms provides the necessary stepping stones to
debates and conversations that re-conigure the
relationships between and among individuals
and communities, principally in relation to the
State and its institutions.
Therefore, in terms of initiating new sociocultural possibilities, my second point emanates
from the urgent imperative of responding to the
matter of Feudalism, as the most persistent relic
of pre-capitalist patriarchy, which is recycled
through practices of male privilege and deeply
embedded ideological systems that underpin
current expressions of patriarchal exclusion
and the control over womens bodies and lives.
Feminists on the continent and internationally,
have scrutinised and critiqued feudal forms of
patriarchy in relation mainly to the character
and resilience of the heterosexual family form
and its attendant social and cultural systems
and practices. However, in Africa, due partly
to the experience of colonialism as a culturally
disenfranchising structure and practice that
degraded and despised anything African and
indigenous, while customizing indigenous

conventions and practices into customary
codes or laws that served the colonial purpose
of using local authorities as managers of the
working people, in situ, there has developed a
particularly obsessive discourse about retaining
and protecting culture and traditions which
serve as authenticators into the very identity of
being African. These reiied practices and rites
front as a commonsensical claim to patriarchal
privilege across the spectrum of social and cultural
existence, especially in the spaces that are furthest
from urban life and from the direct impacts of
overtly colonised or modernised life.
However, when we lift the mythical authenticating
veil surrounding these relics of African realness,
we expose a myriad of vicious, often brutal
exclusionary beliefs and practices that give men
licence to violate and abuse females of varying
ages; to continue privatising women as bodies
that can be circulated between male-owned and
controlled household structures and systems
of economic and sexual privilege and power;
and which allow males of various ages to learn,
exercise and legitimize impunitous behaviour in
the name of culture and tradition.
All these practices that women activists have
failed to eradicate using liberal legal precepts
inherited from the colonial state, (in spite of a few
gains relected in the language of constitutions
and gender laws), form the foundations of feudal
patriarchy and will not be eliminated without a
systematic removal of feudal patriarchal systems
in every domain of our societies. This relegation
of feudalism into the past must begin with the
35
removal of individuals and their parallel state
structures and systems (chiefs and their retinues);
the abandonment of constitutional apparatuses
that have legitimised feudal hierarchies at the
levels of the national parliaments and local
governments; the criminalisation and punishment
of practices that brutalise and maul the bodies of
young females through egregious practices like
virginity testing, Female Genital Mutilation
including labia elongation and most crucially,
the re-deinition of the heterosexual family as a
domain that locates women and their children
outside the protections of a contemporary
citizenship, where their bodily, sexual, emotional,
and psychological integrity would be secured. The
very meaning of what a family is, who constitutes
it, and how this foundational institution is shaped
and experienced by humans from birth to death
must be transformed radically to eliminate the
authoritarianism and impunity that allows males
to dominate and repress women in particular.
This foundational transformation of family from
heterosexism into a site where everyone and
anyone can love, nurture and support those they
love and create the necessary conditions of the
emergence of successive generations of young
people who do not believe that they have to wield
power over women or children and or the elderly
to be complete as human beings this deep-seated
change, must accompany the transformation of
the patriarchal state into a caring, responsible,
and distributive state that is wholly accountable
to the citizens of each and every African society.
We need to understand that violence and
exclusion are the pillars of patriarchal power
and impunity in every sphere of social life, and
that the struggle against violation. Which is the

essential root of violence as experienced in the
various relationships that women and working
people generally encounter, (with males, with the
police and military, with elite and the owners of
capital, in the plantations and on corporate farms;
on the corporate factory loor and in the face of
expanding neo-imperialist aggression against
societies of the South)... that this is a critical entry
point into re-deining citizenship ...bodily, sexual,
emotional integrity.
Be-coming Citizens encompasses the re-theorisation
of ideas and notions; the acknowledgement
that Africans need radically new ways of being,
intellectually and socio-culturally, and that
activists have to create different systems and
organisational structures and discourses about
transformation, in addition to understanding the
contemporary neo-colonial state as it re-constitutes
itself at the level of the ruling classes; in terms of
strategies of plunder and accumulation; and in
instituting new and technologically advanced
systems of surveillance and control over the
majority of people in all our respective societies.
How we manage these elements that shape the
contemporary moment will determine whether
Africans continue to struggle in a quagmire of
the numerous Exclusions (both colonial and neocolonial) that have led to our continent being
described as a place of doom. Or we will be
able to initiate an alternatively radical path; a
trajectory that will involve the reconstruction
of our identities, institutions, discourses and
overall realities towards increasingly inclusive
social formations that recognise, respect and
celebrate the uniqueness and human value of
every single person living on the continent. This
is the alternative vision of post-colonial societies,
as formations that actively and systematically
consider every citizen the most valuable resource,
to be protected, enhanced, and rewarded as a
social value.
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Endnotes
1
A Radical Feminist Perspective is premised on

the stance of non-compromise with Patriarchy
on the most fundamental entitlements and
rights of women as complete human beings
in terms of Bodily, Sexual, Physical, Emotional
and Psychological Integrity and Dignity.
Kolmar, W. Frances Bartkowski, (Eds). 2000. Feminist

Theory: A Reader. Mayield Publishing.
Kolmar, W. Frances Bartkowski, (eds). 2000. Feminist
Theory: A Reader. Mayield Publishing.
Leech, M. (1994). Women, the state and citizenship:Are
women in the building or in a separate annex?.
Australian Feminist Studies, 9(19), 79-91.
Mama. A, Sow. F, et al, (eds). 2000. Engendering African
Social Sciences. CODESRIA
Mayo, M. (2005). Global citizens: Social movements and
the challenge of globalization. Zed Books.
McFadden, P. (2003). Sexual pleasure as feminist
choice. Feminist Africa, 2(8).
McFadden, P. (2011). Re-crafting Citizenship in the
37
YOUNG AFRICAN RURAL WOMEN ENGAGE THE

PUBLIC SPHERE: ON AFRICAS AGENDA 2063
Roseline Achieng
Abstract
Two major concerns underpin the paper, the irst, is exploring the changing composition of the African public
sphere with the aim of interrogating what is changing and how it is changing. The African Unions (AU) Agenda
2063, a document which is now in the public purview, forms the central focus. The paper argues that whereas
certain social groups are inding and securing their spaces by critically engaging the document and articulating
their voices, dismayingly, other social groups are still left out. This missing group, the paper posits, is young
African rural women. The write-up argues that the lack of young African rural womens effective articulation of
their voice is due to the lack of effective positioning of their agendas to the larger societal dynamics. Through the
theoretical background of food markets, the paper will explore some of these socially embedded agendas. It is against
this backdrop that the second major concern of the paper is arrived. The proposition is that food markets are critical
socio-economic institutions that young African rural women can capitalize upon to articulate transformative voices
and consequently change their prevailing status quo. Africas Vision 2063 provides for this space.
From A Hopeless To A Hopeful

Continent: Africa Rising
n May 2000, the Economist magazine carried

on its front cover, a caption that read: Africa
the hopeless continent. Providing an analysis
of Sierra Leone as the typology of what besets
the rest of the continent, the article painted a
picture of an Africa slipping deeper into the
abyss of poverty, disease, famine and endemic
corruption amidst wealth that is used to support
unscrupulous governments and warlords. The
write-up predicted a bleak future for Africa. It
outlined the continued reliance on aid, the lack
of industrialisation, disease, violent conlicts
and mass atrocities amidst a growing youthful
population without any meaningful prospects,
as the malaises that would see Africa wallow in
continued dependency as the continent sunk
deeper into hopelessness and despair. Sealing
Africas destiny, the article concluded that the
situation will provoke a few sympathetic responses
from certain agencies to bail the continent out of
its conundrum of complications. With certitude,
the article prophesied Africas demise.
Alas, in December 2011, little more than a decade
later, the same inluential magazine featured an
article that analysed Africa as a hopeful continent.
It gallantly attuned that Africa is rising! The
article pointed out that ten of the fastest growing
countries were African. It attributed this growth
to several factors. Central of these were; the
commodities boom which came from revenues of
natural resources, key institutions that have been
set up which checked the spread of violent conlicts
across the continent and ascertained a peaceful
environment for development, wide spread use
of technology, a rising manufacturing sector, a

supportive infrastructure, a growing middle class
and above all a favourable demography of young
and well educated adults1.
Indeed, an analysis of the social-economic and
political dynamics on the continent point to
a growing assertion that Africa is entering its
third moment2 of societal transformation. Socialeconomic issues have now, more than ever before,
become the main focus of analysis and concerted
attention. Gumede (2013)3 has called this
phenomenon an African Economic Renaissance.
Not only is the continent a growing business hub
especially in the mineral resources sector, it is
predicated that Africas youthful demographic
makeup is a key driver for social economic change
as Africa enters the 22nd century. However, the
question at large, is how this untapped potential
can be harnessed.
The paper posits that whereas some groups have
carved themselves a niche and are inluencing
reforms that privileges their issues, other groups,
for example, young African rural women, are
still missing. This is the case despite this group
bearing signiicant transformational capacities for
the achievement of social-political and economic
development of the continent. The paper
questions why this is so, in arriving at the answer,
the paper asserts that this missing group does
not strategically position itself in knowing how
to speak to power, bringing other groups along
or tying their issues to broader societal issues
in order to gain legitimacy. The paper offers
an analysis of some of the dynamics that young
African rural women could capitalise on, with the
39
aim of articulating their voices and thus enabling
their issues to be put in the limelight.
Taking the AUs Agenda 2063 as a case study, the
paper starts by discussing some of the poignant
points that the Agenda sets forth. The aim is to
bring to the fore the pertinent issues for social
economic development that the Agenda outlines.
Thereafter the case of young people in Africa is
presented and it is argued that whereas there
is potential in the current demographic makeup of Africa, alarmingly, this capacity is not yet
adequately tapped into. The paper zeroes into the
group that is still missing in action, that is, young
African rural women and posits that whereas
young African rural women are intricately
involved in both the productive and reproductive
sectors of the economy, there is a societal veiling
of their activities. Presenting a case of food
markets as the sphere in which young African
rural womens economic activities are visible, the
reasons as to why such a societal veiling persists
are outlined. With the Agenda 2063 currently
being on the public realm, it is argued that young
African women can capitalise on the momentum
and bring their issues to the fore. Nonetheless, the
paper asserts that young African rural women
cannot do it alone and the rest of the paper
dedicates itself to exploring the social dynamics
that young African rural women could explore in
articulating their issues, positioning themselves
and eventually realising the much needed societal
transformation through changes in policy.
The African Unions (AU) Agenda 2063:

A Vision And Action Plan For Africas
Developmental Growth
On 25 May 2013, the Organisation of African
Unity (OAU) now African Union (AU) celebrated
50 years of its existence. In marking the occasion
and projecting a future for the continent, the
incumbent chairperson of the AU commission, Dr.
Nkosozana Dlamini-Zuma, presented a document
named Africas Agenda 20634. The paper laid out
a broad vision for Africas social-economic growth
path. In its preamble on what Agenda 2063 is
about, the document states that
.Agenda 2063 must be seen as a part of the
African Renaissance building on the NEPAD experienceand institutions of the AU
such as the APRM, etcIndeed, Agenda 2063
is a logical and natural continuation of NEPAD and other initiatives.
The document laments that despite Africa having
some of the most profound institutions to bring
about social-economic development, implementation has been elusive. In light of this, the Agenda
calls for a paradigm shift, that is, changes in attitudes and mindsets to inculcate the right set of
African values in the achievement of set goals and
objectives for the development of the continent.
These, the document outlines as discipline, focus,
honesty, integrity, transparency, hard work and
the love for Africa and its people. The preamble
goes on to state that
Agenda 2063 provides the opportunity
for Africa to break away from the syndrome of always
coming up with new ideas but no signiicant achieve-
ments and set in motion high levels of productivity,

growth, entrepreneurship and transformation. Agenda
2063 is an approach to how the continent should effectively learn from the lessons of the past, build on the
progress now underway and strategically exploit all
possible opportunities available in the immediate and
medium term, so as to ensure positive socioeconomic
transformation within the next 50 years. Agenda 2063
is both a Vision and an Action Plan to achieve the African Unions vision of an Integrated, prosperous and
peaceful Africa, driven by its own citizens and representing a dynamic force in the global arena. It is a call
for action to all segments of African society to work
together to build a prosperous and united Africa based
on shared values and a common destiny. Agenda 2063
will put in place a results-based approach with concrete
targets that are measurable and can be tracked and
monitored. This is with a view to capacitating Africa to
do things differently and take advantage of the current
momentum towards 2063..
At an ideological level, the agenda sets forth
a broad vision for Africa: The Africa we want
in 50 years to come. The thrust of Agenda 2063
is a program of social, economic and political
rejuvenation that links the past, present and the
future in order to create a new generation of Pan
Africanists who will harness the lessons learnt
and use them as building blocks to consolidate
the hope and promises of the founding parents
for a true renaissance of Africa. Agenda 2063
is expected to be a source of inspiration for
of being bolder and ambitious in terms of the social

economic development of the continent. In this
regard, the Agenda has integrated mechanisms
set forth by the Lagos Plan of Action of 1980, the
Abuja Treaty of 1991, the AU Constitutive Act and
the New Partnerships for Africas Development
(NEPAD) of 2000. At an operational level, the
document puts forward a road map and an action
plan to achieve this vision (Agenda 2063 Draft
Framework Document 2013: 16).
The Main Elements Of Agenda 2063

At An Operational Level
In providing a framework for action at an operational level, Agenda 2063 starts by presenting a
number of questions. These are:
a. How the current African growth trajectory
can be sustained for another two to three
decades to ensure that it transforms the
structure of economies and addresses unemployment?
b. How we can ensure inclusive growth that
leads to poverty reduction, shared development and social inclusion?
c. Does the growth trajectory meet the medium to long term development needs of
Africa, or is it simply based on the external
demand for our raw materials?
development of national and regional sustainable

development plans.
d. Is Africa making optimal use of its comparative advantages- especially in natural

resources and how should it achieve this?
The document braces itself to build from the

experiences of the past and present with the view
e. Are we addressing the underlying causes

of conlict (resources and identity issues)?
41
f.
Is the state of democracy and inclusion on

the continent conducive for development?
g. Do we have an endogenous African development agenda that will lead to prosperity and peace? (Agenda 2063 Draft Framework Document 2013: 14- 15)
The document discusses key drivers of change
that are critical in making the Agenda 2063 vision
a reality. These are, promoting science, technology and innovation; investing in human development, especially converting Africas population
bulge into a demographic dividend; managing
the natural resource endowment; pursuing climate-conscious development; creating capable
developmental States and harnessing regional integration.
Two points from the key drivers of change are important for the continued discussion of this paper.
These are investing in human development and
harnessing regional integration. It is on the two
issues that the paper will focus on.
Unlocking Young Peoples Potential

Or The Lack Thereof?
A report5 by the United Nations Research Institute
for Social Development (UNRISD) pinpoints many
of the gains that women and especially young
women have accomplished. The report discusses
the successes witnessed in levels of education
and socio-economic, and reproductive rights. The
report further demonstrates that young African
women have made great leaps in following career
choices that were previously reserved for men.
Not only have they excelled in these ields, they
are also projecting a new kind of professionalism
that signiicantly departs from the old boys club

rites of passage and rules of engagement. Despite
these individual endowments, dismayingly,
young women face new structural discrepancies
which they are either unaware of or are illequipped to challenge. This is partly due to their
continued lack of engagement in critical issues
and partly because of the restrictions imposed on
their agency to act otherwise. Several reasons can
be attributed to this incapacity and lack of agency.
There is a deiciency in formulating an agenda
that is socially embedded. This, it is argued, can
be attributed to the ignorance of issues that
stream from young rural womens lived realities.
This ignorance is perpetuated by the excessive
emphasis on cultural issues and divorcing these
issues from the mainstream social-economic
interests. For example, whereas the campaigns on
abolition of Female Genital Circumcision (Nageeb
2008) and helping young girls/women to cope
with the excesses of puberty are important in
themselves, without critically tying these issues to
socio-economic themes, and in this manner seeing
how the lack of access to economic entitlements
puts women in social-cultural strait-jackets,
a system of ignorance (Lachenmann 1996) is
perpetuated.
Conversely, the continued lack of politicization
of cultural issues by embedding them in socialeconomic dynamics has incapacitated young rural
women in articulating transformative voices.
This has culminated in the non-confrontation of
political-economic structures which hinder the
expression of their (young womens) capabilities.
This is further compounded by the fact that young
rural womens contribution in society is either
made invisible, neglected (taken for granted)
or marginalized thus further rendering them
incapacitated and incapable of articulating on
these issues.
The particular observation that young African
women and their issues are lacking at the level of
the public sphere necessitates the question, So,
where are the young women? Observed trends in
urban areas show a multifaceted reality. On the
one hand, there are professional young women,
however, the majority of young African women
are still found in the informal sector. Here,
they engage in economic activities such as hairdressing, tailoring, sale of second-hand clothes or
the food processing industry. They are the ones in
copy-shops, internet cafs and call centres, and are
engaged in promotional work, especially as sales
people for major companies, notable of which are
mobile phone companies.
In the rural areas, most young women are
employed in farming and marketing activities.
Rioba (2005)6, for example, provides an analysis
of young Kenyan rural women who lock to the
economic processing zones for employment. One
further observes that young rural women are
engaged in the hawking of food crops from periurban areas to urban centres. A common feature
of this is door-to-door hawking of especially
vegetables, fruits and eggs7. Indeed, young
women are intricately involved in productive
and reproductive work albeit under worsening
conditions.
What is analytically glaring is that whereas young
women are signiicantly contributing to the
economy, especially in reproductive work8, their
contribution is not recognised let alone signiicant

to the transformational agendas built around
their continued involvement in the productive
and reproductive sectors of markets. It seems
like this cycle of invisibility (Achieng 2005) and
consequent marginalization and reduction to
vulnerability (Lachenmann, Dannecker 2008) is
the norm.
Of Markets: Issues vs. AgendasFormation and Formulation

Writing on the possibilities of an African Economic
Renaissance for the 22nd Century, Gumede
(2013) contends that developments in countries
such as Brazil, Malaysia and others, suggest
that a country needs a robust economic policy
framework to sustain its Gross Domestic Product
(GDP) growth. He posits that although Africa
has embarked on policy reforms, two economic
policy areas still need concerted and sustained
attention. One he outlines as robust industrial
development policies that create opportunities
for the provision of jobs along value chains. The
other, he contends, are labour market policies
that transform social relations and improve
human development. Alongside these economic
policies, the Gumede asserts that sound social
policies that protect especially the vulnerable in
society are critical. Gumede boldly afirms that
agriculture and land policy along value chains
hold a signiicant potential in not only advancing
development in the industrial and manufacturing
sectors but also ensures gainful and sustainable
employment for majority of Africas young
populace. Consequentially, the issues are, how
to make agricultural activities attractive to young
people, how to maximise value chains and how to
43
leverage these in the world commodity markets.
Indeed, with food security being the number one
agenda for most countries, both on the continent
and in the world, the potential that agricultural
activities have alongside value chains as one of
the pillars to Africas Economic Renaissance in the
22nd century holds great promise.
If we go by the token that young African rural
women are intricately involved in the reproductive
and productive agricultural sector of the economy,
and have pertinent social policy issues to discuss
but are incapacitated to articulate on issues
because their contribution to the productive and
reproductive sectors of the economy is invisible,
often marginalised or taken-for-granted, then
we can dare to postulate that in order to reverse
the current order, issues have to be critically
confronted and agendas around these issues
formulated. Since young African rural women are
signiicantly engaged in the agricultural sector
of the economy, then it goes without much ado
that markets and especially food markets (which
interlink both the productive and reproductive
sectors of the economy) have to be brought back
onto the analytic drawing board but this time
intrinsically interlinked to Africas Agenda 2063.
The Importance Of Food Markets

In the introductory chapter of her edited book,
Sidiropoulos (2012) points out that one of the
biggest risks facing the modern world is the
gulf that separates the haves from the havenots. Two different but connected global risks,
one being economic disparity and the other,
world-wide failures in governance, the author
argues, will exacerbate this divide. Zeroing in
on South Africa as a case study and the countrys
efforts to exert soft power through development

cooperation and what she calls development
diplomacy, Sidiropoulos (2012) maintains that
South Africa is now engaged in the support of
regional integration and projects related to the New
Partnership for Africas Development (NEPAD).
These initiatives are braced at conlict resolution,
peacekeeping and support for the continents
institutional architecture and technical assistance
in State capacity-building. An important pointer,
Sidiropoulos brings to the fore, is NEPADs agenda
for Africa, especially the promotion of agriculture
and consequent food security as envisaged in the
Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development
Programme (CAADP). Coupled with the NEPAD
agenda is the Millennium Development Goal
Target 1c to reduce by half the proportion of
people who suffer from hunger.
NEPADs base document postulates that although
the majority of Africas people live in rural areas,
the agrarian systems are generally weak and
unproductive, leading to poverty. The document
reads:
The urgent need to achieve food security in African
countries requires that the problem of inadequate
agricultural systems be addressed, so that food
production can be increased and nutritional standards
raised...
These thoughts have been eloquently captured by
former South African President Thabo Mbeki in
his article Tasks of the African Progressive Movement
(Mbeki 2014). In his write-up Mbeki argues,
among other things, that the progress agenda of
the African Progressive Movement must prioritise
the progressive transformation of rural areas,
including through the implementation of the
Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development
Programme (CAADP). In line with these thoughts,
not only do agricultural systems need revamping,
more importantly, food markets value chains
should be formed. For the topic at hand, it is
important to interrogate why food markets are
important.
Food markets are important because as we have
seen, many young African rural women are
engaged in activities that are interconnected to
these markets. This is either in the processing,
sale or consumption of food. Moreover, food
markets are crucial because they form the critical
inter-linkage between household economies (the
reproductive sector) and markets as a productive
sector of the economy. This inter-linkage is
central for the fact that it forms an interface where
different kinds of actors, (the State, male and
female individual farmers, farmers cooperatives,
transporters, agri-business groups, Third Sector
groups, civil society groups, women market
groups and associations etc), interact and relate
on their different kinds of entitlements and access
or lack of access. It is on this basis, (access or
lack of access to entitlements and how different
groups negotiate), that agendas that are socially
embedded and allow for a positioning and an
articulation of voices that could be formulated if
one is to critically analyse how Africas Agenda
2063 can be negotiated by young African rural
women. Food market systems show an impressive
achievement
of
production
(innovation)
techniques and social organisation despite the lack
of classical models of the development of markets
and government agro-planning support (Guyer
1997). Lastly, food markets are intrinsically linked

to differing conceptualisations of human security
mechanisms (Gladwin 1991).
Some of the issues that low out of looking at
food markets at an interface and the different
kinds of entitlements and how young women
can capitalize on some of these agendas in order
to articulate their issues and thus bring about
transformation include an analysis of labour,
capital and markets not as formalised systems
but as socially embedded institutions that depend
by and large on social-cultural organisation of
economies of solidarity. Of major importance
herein is to analyse the how of the processes of
mediation between society and markets (Guyer
1997).
Talking to Power: The Articulation of

Voice or the Lack of it?
Indeed, as explicated here, the how of the processes
of mediation between society and markets and the
inter-linkages with the political-economic sphere,
catapults us to the several different public spheres
and the debates occurring or not occurring
therein. There is a gap in not only how young
women articulate their voices (their agendas and
issues), but also in how they strategically position
themselves in their engagements with politicaleconomic structures. Thus, of critical importance
is a thorough knowledge of the modes of
articulation. This means being informed of what
the agenda is (both overtly and inertly), knowing
how to speak to these different agendas and with
whom to speak.
Closely aligned to a deep knowledge of the
modes of articulation is the strategic use of place
45
as discursive spaces for a critical engagement.
Achieng (2006) explicates how the religious space
is now being transformed into a political space.
For young women, more secularized places are
sought. For example, the work-place is increasingly
being transformed into a space for critical
relection and information sharing on emerging
governance issues. Increasingly, recreational
centres and public forums have become spaces for
an engagement in debates and critical relection.
This phenomenon is mostly found in the urban
centres where pubs, cinemas, recreational parks
and youth sports clubs provide spaces for critical
engagement on issues of governance. One cannot
ignore the proliferation of the radio and television
series and of course the music arena as some of
the spaces being used by young people to engage
politically. The internet has become a common
phenomenon in most African cities and towns.
Although this means of communication is one
of the main means used as a way of keeping in
touch with friends, some groups of young people
are exploiting this means as a way of keeping
abreast of governance issues. Blogging Africa has
now become a major enterprise whereby blogs
are set up to allow public opinion on governance
issues. Different websites have also sprung up,
which offer young people a chance to not only
recognise the creative talents that are explicated
on various pages, but also to politically engage on
pertinent societal issues of the day (Manji 2007).
Art, choreographic expressions and photography
are increasingly being used by young people
to voice issues of the day. A vivid example is a
recently ended photographic exhibition of the
violent post-election conlicts that rocked Kenya
after the 2008 general elections. Kenya Burning is a
pictographic book edition of the grotesque killings

that took place in several locations in Kenya. What
is analytically critical, is the creative, strategic and
transformative articulation of voices on a critical
issues of the day by an exhibition centre run by
a young woman9 and supported by a group of
other young artists both men and women through
the exhibitions salient depiction of the ferocity
of violence and artists desire to see it never
happen again, by keeping this fateful event
alive in peoples minds and daily conversations
and hence relective consciousness. Indeed, the
role of the media in building a consciousness
and consequent creative speaking to power on
pertinent issues especially among young African
women cannot be underestimated.
Trans-local Networking Among

Female Movements At Various
Levels
Global geopolitics, especially those of women
mobilising at international level has had positive
effects on the course of womens regional
networking. For young women, these different
forms of socially embedded movements offer
avenues for self-organisation and arenas for
interaction, discussion and information sharing on
critical social and political issues. Increasingly, for
example, young women are forming professional
groups which are linked in one way or another to
the enterprise of society. They (the young women),
not only meet with their peers in such groups but
are often accorded opportunities for mentorship
by other feminist women holding positions of
inluence and who have deined themselves as
agents of a transformative agenda (Mbilinyi 2006).
However, young women have not yet fully
capitalised on the opportunities offered by translocal networking. This, as earlier explored, is
either because agendas that could form the basis
for inter-linkages are poorly deined or are not
effectively linked to governance issues of the
day. Access to relevant information in a timely
fashion is critical and the scenario is that young
African women lack information or access to
these sites. This leaves young women isolated
and forces them to trend the known paths before
branching off by which time many of the issues
are pass and devoid of their (young women)
points of view. It seems that men have developed
better coping mechanisms in this regard, which
help them get relevant information, quickly sieve
through the information and are thus enabled to
stay abreast of governance issues, thereby being
competitive in offering up-beat, timely decisions
that serve to push forward their own agendas.
The issue of dissemination of critical information
in a timely manner using innovative avenues
that are closer to the young womens worlds
is thus crucial. Therefore the irst challenge for
trans-local networking becomes deining those
common agendas of interest for the different
groups that are seeking to network trans-locally,
and there-after remaining agile in translating
these agendas accordingly across time and space
and disseminating relevant information in a
timely manner.
Young women have to be vigilant enough not to take

for granted agendas being articulated at different
fronts and applying these unquestioningly in their
various environments. A critical and questioning
stance has to be adopted with the aim of ensuring

that oscillations of agendas through its translation
into different contexts occur. For example,
agendas being propounded at the international
level could be distilled and translated into
different African contexts, not with the aim of
adopting them unquestioningly but rather with
the objective of using them as mirrors into which
further relecting on context speciic changes and
new modes of action is required. The reverse
could hold, whereby context speciic agendas
are refracted onto the international scene with
the aim of gauging whether changes occurring
at the international level necessitate different
ways of conceptualisation. For example, agribusiness as a form of trans-local linkage of rural
food markets to urban ones is now a common
place phenomenon in urban areas. However, the
numbers of Third Sector groups that are translocal in orientation is still lacking. Furthermore,
the business and professional groups that exist
have issues that hardly relect what is occurring at
the societal level. When this occurs, agendas are
taken up in the form of charity drives and fundraising (beneit concerts) or business exhibitions
with the main aim of networking amongst the
various enterprises. Although a step in the right
direction, such beneit concerts or business
exhibitions could be used as avenues to bring to
consciousness the plethora of issues and debates
that society-market relations in Kenya currently
grapples with. Coupled with this, strategically
targeting the youth, in both urban and rural areas
could see a move towards a more critical mass
not only aware of issues but critically engaging
these issues on different fronts with the aim of
articulating transformative voices and thereby
47
changing the status quo. How fair trade or translocal and regional market integrative mechanisms
could occur are examples in point.
Implications For Policy: National and

Foreign
For policy makers, critical questions that straddle
two fronts emerge. On the one hand is the national
policy towards youth. Different funds have been
set up in certain countries. For example, in Kenya
there is a fund that supports youth economic
empowerment called kazi kwa vijana which funds
entrepreneurial activities that young people
engage in. In South Africa, the controversial youth
wage subsidy is a case in point. The analysis
still lacking is whether such initiatives create
dependency or avenues for engagement at a
national level. Critical to this, is questioning how
such initiatives change the national developmental
goals if at all, the sustainability of these changes
and the suitability in the long term.
On the other, is foreign policy, it is imperative
how these national level initiatives translate into
a positioning on the international front, especially
as they relate to food security, agri-business and
regional integration through regional food market
chains. It is important to analyse how avenues for
engaging continental structures and institutions,
for example, regional economic communities,
are created and maintained. How objectives at
international level feed into national strategies
and vice versa, along the lines mentioned above,
are a research lacuna which begs further analysis.
The Agenda 2063 provides the avenue for new
policy articulations at national, continental and
international levels. It remains for young African
rural women to engage the platform through

trans-local networking with young urban women
and pro-feminist men, and through the strategic
use of place and articulation of voice.
Conclusion
This paper moved from the premise that young
African female movements critical voices are
missing in the different African public spheres.
It was consequently argued that this may be
attributed to the lack of articulated transformative
voices and that because young womens
issues, especially those that cut across societymarket relations, are marginalized, taken for
granted or rendered invisible, their (the young
womens) capabilities to critically question
oppressive systems in place, is eroded. A kind
of societal veiling occurs and with it, young
womens inability to formulate critical agendas.
Consequentially, young women have been illserved in interlinking their agendas to broader
social issues, strategically positioning themselves
in the power structure, and thereby articulating
critical transformative voices.
The paper continuously asserted that a critical
analysis of some of the issues and agendas
currently being pursued under Africas Agenda
2063 could serve as windows of opportunity
for young African rural women, especially in
inluencing and bringing about policy changes
in social-economic developmental issues of the
day. Young African rural women cannot do it
alone. Through trans-local networking with other
groups, the strategic utilisation of place and an
effective articulation of voice, young African rural
women, by capitalising on the platform offered
by Agenda 2063, could bring about signiicant
policy shifts that could see phenomenal societal
transformation.
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49
in some quarters, it cannot be celebrated as
transformative. This is for the reason that this
growth has remained stagnant over time, its
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obtains that come 2015, Africa will be off track
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Endnotes
1
In the same breadth, whilst the Economist

article heralded a rising Africa, it cautioned
against extreme optimism. It outlined the still
persistent inequalities ranging from abject
poverty, climate change, drought and famine,
lack of viable savings, kleptocractic regimes to
endemic corruption; and that above all lack of
food security as food production per person
which has slumped since independence in
the 1960s, as factors that could impede a fully
blown social-economic development for Africa.
The continents irst moment of transformation
was the early years of independence, where
many African states upon freeing themselves
from the shackles of colonialism were now
concerned with putting in place effective political institutions and getting governance issues
right. The second moment was heralded by the
Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPS),
which, despite causing tremendous structural
constraints to the African political-economic
and social landscape, necessitated states to democratize. Once again the issue of governance
was in the limelight.
The author provides statistical indicators that
show that whereas growth has been registered
most important social-economic developmental issue. This is eradicating extreme poverty

and hunger!
4
Currently, there are a number of consultations

with different social groups. The results of the
consultations and negotiations will be integrated into the current document and tabled
for adoption as the continents vision of social-economic growth at the summit of heads
of state to take place in Addis Ababa in January 2014.
See http://www.unrisd.org/publications
Rioba (2005) explicates the indecent work conditions that these young women are exposed
to.
There are hardly any statistical analyses of

this phenomenon and how these activities uphold household economies and contribute to
the productive sector.
Here, reproductive work is understood from a

feminist perspective. It is taken to mean every
day work that supports the household to engage eficiently and effectively in the produc-
tive sector (Boserup: 1970) or what is known as
the economy of care (Elson: 1999).
9
Joy Mboya is a young Kenyan artist of renowned performance arts capacities and is the
director of the go-down exhibitions centre located in Nairobis Industrial Area, a house to
many creative arts depictions. Another impressive development in the Kenyan New Generations critical art scene is the Kwani Trust run
by a young Kenya writer and award winner
Binyaviranga Wainaina and a host of other
young Kenyan creative arts writers. Their innovative book Kwani? Written is a mixture of
provocative short stories, poems, cartoons and
pictures taken from every day scenes in Nairobi that criticize systems and structures and
in everyday parlance (sheng) used by young
Kenyans.
51
Visual Essay
Simmi Dullay is a black consciousness exile returnee based in South Africa as well as a cultural producer. She
teaches at the University of South Africa in the Department of Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology
I have been with the University of South Africa for
just over a year in the Department of Art History,
Visual Arts and Musicology. I am pleased to join
the university at a time where we hope to be
making signiicant change regarding decolonising
knowledge production. As an exile child of the
Black Consciousness Movement it is imperative
to be part of integrating the radical imagination
that was part of liberation struggle and offer our
students a knowledge that relects the cultures
and stories most often silenced, appropriated and
mined as Western concepts. We are here to build a
national identity beyond the epistemic violence
of the Eurocentric curriculum. The exceptional
work produced by our students does not just lend
itself to a seductive aesthetic, but delves into
the pluralities of existing as women within the
possibilities of South Africa as well as recognising
the neo liberal capitalist industrial complex that
draws from the economy of sex and sexuality
like in Roxanne Wilsons work, which exposes
modern slaverys corporate venire. Zyma Amien
steps into the critical trajectory of working from
a black feminist praxis. Amien maps her heritage
and begins to unpack the intersectionalities of
dislocation tied into South Africas legacy of race,
culture and kin, and the on-going ramiications
of structural racism. Hanolet Uys uses a form of

bricollage, where she cuts, pastes, draws, erases
and rearranges images, creating a visual process
as a methodology that investigate the unspoken.
The mapping of Uyss journey deals with coming
to terms with an identity that has agency, as
separate from the Apartheid culture in which she
was raised and yet still acknowledge that we exist
within a society of white privilegebut most
importantly to ind her voice to address how to
identify herself beginning with a self-articulation,
and not articulating or speaking for the other. On
a lighter note, but just as deep a subject we have
Stephanie Nevilles celebration of women and
sexuality playfully presented by the whimsical
rich and seductive material resembling leshy
lowers referring tongue-in-cheek to the poetry of
Baudelaire Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil).
The selection made focusses on the contemporary
experience of what it means to be a woman in
South Africa; my own work included about my
experience of being forced to leave South Africa,
and how I came to deine the many departures
and arrivals in my search for home, though later
I would realise that home did not exist in place,
but in the space inhabited through relationships I
forged, remembering and the imagined.
Artist biographies
An extension of the installation here not here (2012), her

embroidery portraits deal with the concept of absence within
a relationship from work-related separation. The unravelling
igures in Man (2013) and Woman (2013) are a metaphor for
the disintegration of a relationship due to absence, as well
as loosing a sense of self from being part of a long term
commitment. Couple (2013) juxtaposes disengagement with
the sentiment of holding on and being tied together. The
traditional technique of hand embroidery echoes the effort
invested in relationships and emphasizes the time spent
reminiscing during periods of absence.
Inspired by the Feminist Movement, Fantasy Flower (2014)
is an extension of the installation Confessions of a Bored
Housewife (2013) which deals with female sexual fantasy. The
overt yonic and phallic characteristics describes the concept
relating to the acceptance of female sexual pleasure and the
exploration of the female body.
Stephanie Neville is a Dubai based South African artist. She
is UNISA Alumni and received the Excellence Award for her
third year Bachelor of Visual Arts installation here not here
(2012) at the UNISA Art Gallery.
Zyma looks at memory and the effects of displacement in her
artwork. District 6 Overview (2011), Zig Zag pattern (2011) and
memory wall (2011) deal with the effect that the displacement
of her Grandfather, irstly from District Six, and again from
Lansdowne had on her family. Her use of cement in Zig Zag
pattern (2011 is a metaphor for home, strength, permanence
and durability. In Zymas own words, her grandfathers
fez formed part of his identity, which he thought was
permanent, but with the forced removal, he lost his identity.
Zyma Amien examines aspects of socio-political history
from an intensely personal perspective, with memories of
her Grandfathers twice-lived experiences of forced removal
from the places where he had created his home. The impact
of these has been transferred through the generations of her
family in intangible ways that constitute the familiarity of a

home.
Zyma Amien is a visual artist who was born 1962 in
Lansdowne, Cape Town and was the 2012 joint winner of
The UNISA Best Student Award Exit Year BVA.
peoplesexploitation is an installation piece that comprises
of a typical stand one would ind at a business exhibition.
Complete with an investors handbook and info-graphic
banner, the International Traficking Initiative is a ictious
company is advertising the lucrative industry of traficking
of women and children, who in this context form a never
ending supply of disposable commodity. Underneath her
satirical and mocking manner, Roxanne explores themes
of displacement, loss, the female body and children as
consumable commodities and slavery. Through the use of a
ictional company Roxanne questions the role capitalism and
consumers feigned naivety of traficking.
Roxanne Wilson is a visual artist and photographer and is
currently completing BVA degree at Unisa.
Bertha Gxowa walked up the stairs of the union buildings
among the many women that silently used their bodies
in deiance to protest freedom of the oppressed and the
betterment of the marginalised battlement. The white body
in Africa forms the basis of Hanolets art making process.
Through the white body she investigates social, political and
cultural advantages accorded to whites through the legacy of
the darker side of coloniality in global society. The mapped
memories of racial encounters is investigated at sites of social
engagement, embodied and social memory and wounded
places to consider the artistic and activist place-based practice
ind and map the tradition of oral rather than written history.
Hanolet Uys was born in 1971 in the Free State. She is currently
enrolled for a Masters in Fine Arts at the University of
South Africa.
53
Stephanie Neville
Embroidery Portrait (Couple) (2013)
Hand stitched Embroidery
Stephanie Neville
Embroidery Portraits (Woman) (2013)
Stephanie Neville
Embroidery Portraits (Man) (2013)
Stephanie Neville
Fantasy Flower (2014)
Acrylic on canvas
Zyma Amien
Memory Wall (2011)
Installation
61
Zyma Amien
District Six overview (2011)
Mapwork
Zyma Amien
Zig zag pattern (2011)
Installation
Simmi Dullay
Untitled (2012)
Photograph
Men
MARKET SHARE
HumaNOID
Roxanne Wilson
ITI Map(2012)
Ink on paper
Hanolet Uys
Untitled (2012)
Ink on paper
Roxanne Wilson
Crates (2012)
Installation
Short Learning Programmes (SLPs)

TMALI offers the following short learning programmes.
The duration of TMALI SLPs is 6 months.
Prospective students can enrol for any of the available programmes twice a year;
Semester 1: January - June
Semester 2: June November
Registration Requirements
Students with relevant NQF-level 5 (Matric) plus one year of tertiary qualiications
Teaching and Learning Methodology
Tuition will be delivered through:
Distance education
Exams
Fees
Each Short Learning Programme costs R5 400. A deposit of R1 800 is payable on registration.
Programmes offered:
Thought Leadership for Africas Renewal
Module 1: Introduction to Thought Leadership for Africas Renewal (ITLR01V)
Module 2: Deconstructing the Africa Vision for Africas Renewal (ITLR02W)
Module 3: Decision Making and Conlict Management in the African Context (ITLR03X)
Africa and International Trade Building an African Developmental State
Module 1: Global Trade Theory and Practice and African Development (CAIT01D)
Module 2: Africa and the Politics of International Trade (CAIT02E)
African Political Economy The African Economic Challenge
Module 1: Economic Theory with Reference to African Development (CAPE01L)
Module 2: African Economies and Their Place in the World Economy (CAPE02M)
Module 3: Perspectives on Challenges for African Economies and Models for Growth (CAPE03N)
71
Afrikan Feminist and Gender Studies

Module 1: Introduction to the Theories of Gender and Third World Feminisms (HIPGETF)
Module 2: Third World and Afrikan Feminist Responses to the UN Gender and Development model
(CAGEPDR)
Module 3: Role of Afrikan Feminisms in Response to States and National Policy-making (AFAINS8)
Good Governance in Africa
Module 1: Good Governance Concepts and Principles (GOCAFRT)
Module 2: Good Governance and the Anti-Corruption Agenda (GOCAFRS)
Module 3: Role of Civil Society in the Good Governance Agenda (GOCAFRU)
For more information or queries, please email tmali.registrations@unisa.ac.za

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Contents

We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For

If God Were A Woman: Womens Citizenship in South Africa

Becoming Post-Colonial Citizens In Africa: Through Feminist Vistas

Feminism is a matter of life and death. It is the question

iepollo Lebohang Phekos beautiful

Issue One | Volume One

So you how do you begin to unpack issues

and fairness for women in order for them to

Women Transforming Africa

Issue One | Volume One

arrives and marks the amazing vibrancy of the

We Are The Ones

Women Transforming Africa

International Womens Day, as a moment

Issue One | Volume One

perspectives and imaginaries as vibrant beings.

must become a key entry point into the process

Women Transforming Africa

Issue One | Volume One

of critical bio-diversity and healing plants.

Women Transforming Africa

Relections on African Womens Thought

10 Issue One | Volume One

Since the dawn of the 21st century, we have

drugs drop, thus saving hundreds of lives at the

Women Transforming Africa

12 Issue One | Volume One

interface with the private struggles we face as

outlawed. Anything above the knee is outlawed. If a

which includes sex while HIV positive, or with a

Women Transforming Africa

14 Issue One | Volume One

shown that lesbians are deliberately targeted for

changes of maternal mortality. Furthermore, the

or aiming to promote thempromotion being

Women Transforming Africa

the larger colonial project of colonial oppression.

The Thabo Mbeki Leadership Institute

Furthermore, I would be remiss if I did not

16 Issue One | Volume One

leadership role in pushing for an inclusive human

Women Transforming Africa

If God Were a Woman:

18 Issue One | Volume One

Women Transforming Africa

t has been commonplace to consider the

20 Issue One | Volume One

and enabling meaningful citizenship beyond legal

Dimensions of Womens Citizenship

the ceding of control to international and local

Women Transforming Africa

22 Issue One | Volume One

construction of human rights still does not

Those Other Women

Poverty surpasses meagre material means and

Women Transforming Africa

confer rights based on equity and justice.

The overlap between womens justice and

2014 South Africa has greater socio-economic

The State, The Economy and Women

24 Issue One | Volume One

Emerging and reframed social models may

to women as opposed to men. The State far from