Zimbabwe’s ‘gender neutral’ agreement blind to women

Over the last week, news of the agreement signed by Robert Mugabe, Morgan Tsvangirai and Arthur Mutambara has received repeated airplay. As well it should. Indeed, radio station listeners have been calling in to comment on the perceived vindication of the now former South African president in the eyes of the international community now that there has been success in Zimbabwe. All of this has been seen as further evidence that African solutions work best for African problems. Significantly, this narrative has continued to permeate the contributions of even those callers who are more critical of Mbeki’s other stances. We have, therefore, been reminded that although there may be solutions in Zimbabwe, and maybe next in Darfur, problems at home abound.

As I listened to the live coverage of the signing, I was struck by consistent absences in the reporting as well as in what could not comfortably be used in the interest of the celebrated moment. One reporter, live outside the venue in Harare, noted that even as the ink was drying on the paperwork, a group of MDC women approached him to say they had been attacked by ZANU-PF male youths moments before. I was somewhat relieved that this was a radio, rather than a television broadcast because I did not want to see more brutalised bodies. I could not help noticing that this information was quickly passed over.

I recoil from the sight of more bruised and bloodied bodies not because of what Gail Smith has called ‘compassion fatigue in relation to the crisis in Zimbabwe,’ but because there are other ways to make sense of our continent. A.C. Fick insists that when we privilege particular forms of evidence over others ‘we run the risk of giving the former more power than they already have in our world.’ Therefore, we trap ourselves in a certain cycle, since ‘we are educated to understand the world in particular terms.’ Furthermore, we remain so accustomed to our particular view that we completely miss the presence of other events and ‘critical languages’ in the very same moment in which we attempt to understand. Part of what we have grown accustomed to is the near total elision of women’s lives, contributions and agency from large political events.

Consequently, I turned away from the coverage I had been obsessively following in between teaching, and reflected on what was unfolding through other events I have access to. Sometimes it helps to turn away in order to better make sense of what we are in the midst of. This is the approach I brought to my reading of the text of the power-sharing agreement signed on Monday 15 September.

In August, I formed part of a group of South African women who went on a feminist solidarity trip to Zimbabwe. The excursion was coordinated by activist and international relations and development expert Bunie Matlanyane Sexwale, and divided into a group that went to Harare and one that flew to Bulawayo. My group, the Harare group, included the essayist Gail Smith, as well as poets Lebogang Mashile and Gertrude Fester. We went to have conversations with a variety of women’s and civil society groups; unionists, students, health activists, law and human rights activists and so on. This trip clarified many of the niggling questions that had been plaguing me in previous years. The Johannesburg office of the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition had made the trip possible, also offering us insights into what we might encounter upon arrival. Among us, Bunie was the only feminist who was personally familiar with the different Zimbabwean epochs.

To the extent that it had been impossible to live in South Africa without reflecting on Zimbabwe constantly, the trip followed numerous conversations with people more familiar than I with the crisis in Zimbabwe. Two artist friends, one a filmmaker and the second a novelist, who had grown up in Zimbabwe as South Africans in exile, noted upon returning from visits recently that this was a different Zimbabwe from the one they knew. There was sadness in one’s eyes and anger etched onto the face of the other. My child’s day-mother, herself Zimbabwean, had remarked upon return from an earlier trip that her homeland made her despair. Colleagues commented on how fatigued they were at being asked to comment about their home country at every turn. I was careful to listen to information volunteered, but not to pry and further exhaust them. Only one said ‘things are not the worst they have ever been.’

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

The trip was to help me grapple better with some of these struggles.

Unfortunately, it also raised many more. Very few of the new questions are addressed in the resolution we are all invited to celebrate. The Harare we arrived in at the end of August brought different worlds into collision. In a very public sense, it was the Harare in which the (Women of Zimbabwe Arise) WOZA 14 trial was scheduled to start, after many postponements. These are women considered so dangerous that the Zimbabwean State imagines their varied activism treasonous. This was also the Harare which staged the opening of the new parliament, during which MDC leaders, among them the leader of Senate Sekai Holland, shouted for Mugabe to go back to the talks so much that he was visibly flustered as he tried to open parliament.

When Holland agreed to meet us in a public place, with unionist and former MDC Women’s Assembly Chair, Lucia Matibenga, the disbelief was palpable on the faces of many young Zimbabweans in the Harare CBD location where we met. There was no question that both women were recognised. As they explained to us, it was unusual for powerful Zimbabwean politicians to be seen in a food court. Holland and Matibenga had both been driven underground by the physical and other attacks instigated by ZANU-PF and other agents of state sanctioned violence. They shared some of these experiences with us. But more so, and interspaced with a wicked sense of humour shared by both, they articulated a very clear vision for a new Zimbabwe. These were women who demonstrated what Pregs Govender has called ‘insubordinated spirit’, in their actions, incisive analysis of power and in rising after being personally attacked. I was saddened by the fact that as powerful and active as they have been, even these women’s names were often lost in the reporting of what occurs in Zimbabwe.

I wonder how much of such voices we will hear in the future, given the bizarre half-protected freedom of speech as articulated in Article 19 of the agreement signed on Monday. Recognising the necessity for freedom of speech in Zimbabwe, the article nonetheless opens doors for dismissing certain media outlets if they are ‘foreign government funded external radio stations broadcasting into Zimbabwe’ since these ‘are not in Zimbabwe’s national interest.’ What about radio stations operated by Zimbabweans in exile as one of the few ways to contest state-controlled media outlets? So what if another government or its agencies fund them? What if that government is Botswana’s? How will the stated desire to ensure ‘the opening up of the airwaves and ensuring the operation of as many media houses as possible’ translate in a context where ZANU-PF youths allegedly attack people outside the signing?

Further down the same srticle, I had to laugh as I read ‘the public and private media shall refrain from using abusive language that may incite hostility, political intolerance and ethnic hatred or that unfairly undermines political parties and other organisations.’ Perhaps there is hope for the Zimbabwean Broadcasting Corporation, whose evening television bulletins were peppered with Mugabe pronouncing on the immaturity of MDC MPs, their unsuitability to lead, and on this being the worst parliament he had ever presided over.

However, that was the end of August when we watched aghast, and everything had changed now that it was September and the agreement had been signed.

What would that change mean, when Article 18 of the agreement, which focuses on the security of persons and prevention of violence, conflates state-sanctioned brutality against citizens after the elections with violence by unarmed people? There is no mention of the brutality of the military, even though this emerged in many of the conversations we had with women on our visit. The army was credited with hunting people down, militia and the formal army tortured, killed, maimed and raped. What happens to this memory? How do people just move forward? Many women’s organisations reported on how women were forced to pay for reintegration into their communities after surviving previous post-election displacement. Given that the violence between the powerful and ordinary citizens is falsely equated in this agreement, what happens to the scars? Where do these women, whose houses have often been razed to the ground and their means of livelihood destroyed while their children are raped or driven into exile, fit into the ‘gender neutral’ language of the agreement?

History teaches us that ‘gender neutral language’ is very often blind to women’s lives. Yet, women in Zimbabwe, like in South Africa, are the majority. They are the majority of the displaced, raped, tortured and burnt alive, and of the people sleeping in the safe houses all over Harare. They are also the majority of those who resisted and voted for change.

Writing of another African context, Pregs Govender has recently reminded us in her Julius Nyerere Lecture on Lifelong Learning at the University of the Western Cape last week that, the links between ‘the militarisation of society and the increased levels of violence against women across borders and in homes’ are not just clear but also backed up by much research at academic and trans-national levels.

Is the Zimbabwean crisis over? Can it be over when there is no recognition of the results from the March elections or of how people suffered for the choices they made? It is not inconceivable, given the absence of a clear call for accountability for perpetrators of violence in Article 18, that the president of Zimbabwe may claim the power vested in him under Article 19 to both ‘declare war’ against his enemies as in the past, as well as ‘grant pardons, respite, substitute less severe punishment and suspend or remit sentences, on the advice of the Cabinet’ which he chairs. Is it conceivable that he will bring the rapists and the men who destroyed the livelihoods of men to book?

Perhaps I am pessimistic at what should be a moment of great joy. However, the questions remain in the aftermath of the signing: where are the women?

When we met Netsai Mushonga, the co-ordinator of the Women’s Coalition of Zimbabwe, she reminded us of the necessity to come up with new paradigms for thinking about vigilance. The automatic equation of violence with militancy is an unfortunate southern African inheritance. In an article written long before our meeting, and far before the agreement, Mushonga had written: ‘Democracy for women in Zimbabwe can be summarized in two key capacities: participation in decision-making at all levels, and equal access to resources.’ The Agreement is vague on this.

Pregs Govender could have been speaking directly to this statement when she remarked last week: “One of the central features of patriarchal authoritarian systems is the way in which we stop thinking for ourselves and begin to depend on the political leader, the expert, the husband or the priest.’ This is also a statement for those of us who watch as Zimbabwe changes, and who feel solidarity and search for ways to assist and support meaningful change.

I am not entirely convinced that the agreement, which mentions women only three times – in relation to access to land, entitlement to full citizenship and gender equity, as well as the need to appoint women to ‘strategic Cabinet posts’ – goes far enough. These are important recognitions, and reflections on South Africa’s recent past illustrate how difficult it is to get any gender recognition into a negotiation process. The presence of these acknowledgements is no small matter.

However, it seems that much ended up on the negotiation floors given the demands that were shared with us by various women’s groups and individual women. It would be a travesty if this southern African country continues to revel in our most uncomfortable heritages as a region, that of downplaying women’s lives and pretending women exist as nothing but victims. Our trip showed that women are organising across class and education status in ways that directly intervene in the crisis, and the manner in which the state’s courts and violent men responded was a clear recognition of the power of such women. Yet, this agreement that we are all invited to celebrate falls short of this recognition of women’s multi-faceted activisms.

On the importance of telling stories carefully, Veronique Tadjo argues: ‘We live in a community and in trying to tell one story in particular, I have to rely on other stories. Our destinies cross, we meet people, they enter our lives, then exit, to be replaced by others, etc. Our existence is layered by an amazing number of stories. So that’s why I move in and out.’

Would it not be a remarkable thing if this were true of the Zimbabwean Agreement and the future it ushers in?

* Pumla Dineo Gqola is a feminist writer and blogger, and is associate professor of literary, media and cultural studies at the University of the Witwatersrand.

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