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14 February 2000

I would like to begin my presentation by affirming and celebrating this initiative. It has enabled us: however we have come to be whom we are and to do what we do in our relationships with Africa; as a geopolitical space; as a rich and ever changing landscape of peoples and social systems; a fervently and fiercely guarded site of identity and authentication; a narration of pain and bristling pride; of dignity; as sounds that have resonated across time in the fingers, limbs and voices of women and men, celebrating life through dance, art, dress, rhythm and words; as the continent of the future – where life seems always to have been about the challenges and the joys of living.

Through my intervention, I would like to begin- largely for my self as an activist and gatherer of African intellectual energies - a process of unfolding some very preliminary thoughts. These thoughts might eventually serve as markers for a thinking path that could lead me to a better understanding of what the notions of democracy and human rights portend for a different kind of Africa.

I therefore want to approach the discussion on Democracy and Human Rights as an opportunity to interrogate and unveil the relationship between:

- the identity of being African and the notions of integrity and autonomy;

- the historical discourses which construct democracy and rights within narratives of community and collectivizing traditions; and, the growing demand for a recognition of the African is an individual and a person who must have entitlements and who can and will exercise choices;

- and making the linkages between claims of authenticity (related to gender/spatial location/and appearance) and `Othering’, on the one hand, and the reification of exclusion which perpetuates or facilitates undemocratic relationships and practices. These relationships and practices continue to undermine and or violate the human rights of African persons – on the continent and elsewhere.

I interpret the discourse about democracy and human rights as an exciting opportunity to interrogate old paradigms and political stances regarding these notions. This is the case whether one is positioned within the civil society (with all its possibilities to craft commonalities and proclaim differences) or, whether one approaches this engagement from a ‘nationalist’ stance, driven by often unacknowledged yet well known feelings of loyalty and bondage. A very dear friend who has devoted most of his writing life to searching for an understanding of nationalism recently declared to me that nationalism is an emotion; a pounding, irresistable sensation one feels in one’s gut – that stays with one for what seems to be an eternity.

Regardless of how we come to the engagement with wrenching Africa from a past that is marked by pain, anger, rupture and resistance, the most critical issues demand our attention and respect.

How do physical entities become persons--individuals with integrity and autonomy, especially in relation to space( how and when it is constructed and occupied) and rights (as civic phenomena which come out of the collective energies and struggles of people as a community).

How do those persons become individuals and thereafter transit into the status of citizens, with a consciousness that translates through an active engagement with structural , political and esoteric expressions of power into a different, more inclusive society.

I do not think that we can begin to adequately respond to all the possibilities of this discursive opportunity to interrogate the meanings and aspirations Africans bring to the notions of democracy and human rights, without engaging the becoming of citizens for all Africans across the multiple sites of identity that shape us in our respective lived realities.

I would like to reflect very briefly upon the above mentioned three aspects of the debate, even as I ‘chew and ruminate’ on many of the assertions that I will be making. In part, this is because the discourse has remained largely hegemonized by the more traditional notions of democracy, human rights and person-hood. These notions are embedded in a Euro-centric, masculinist epistemology of positivistic thought. At the same time, African feminist intervention has stimulated significant upheaval within the academy of African scholarship and at the wider societal levels ( state and civil society).

My interventions come out of this new and exciting feminist critique of academic and civic reluctance, in some cases; resistance in many instances; and the increasing outright expressions of a ‘backlash’ which manifest in the often inexplicable increases in the violation of the public and private spheres of African existence.

My first assertion is that:

In order to have an active citizenship; a body of agents who engage with power and issues relating to power – one must first become a citizen. And, most Africans are not yet citizens, either in the manner in which they perceive of themselves (at the level of the individual with an identity and an agency to interact with her/his environment and socio-political reality) or in terms of inter-personal relationships and how they relate to each other via the most critical sources of identity in their societies (gender, race, class, ethnicity, age, spatial location and other statuses). Nor are Africans citizens in terms of their relationships with societal structures. The structures include the state, civil society organisations, and other key institutions which mediate between persons and critical resources in political, economic, cultural and religious terms.

However, becoming a citizen is not only dependent upon one’s own conception and an embracing of the notion (and thereby accessing the rights and resources or entitlements associated with the notion, especially its feature of inalienability). Becoming and being citizen is also most critically linked to the process of interfacing the human initiative to be someone who has rights. It is about being someone whose agency is driven by the ownership and exercise of such rights, on the one hand, with the invention and realization of procedures and processes – mechanisms which are real because persons can reach them and use them in their daily existence as individuals, members of collectivities and particular historical constituencies - to express their creativity and energy as social entities.

If we understand human rights as:

the products of social and political struggle; civic phenomena that arise out of the political realities and the visions of entire communities of persons;

and civic spaces which we have crafted through our interactions with other human beings as:

the relationships which express themselves in material and aesthetic structures, formulae and systems, what we call institutions and organizations – the pathways along which we traffic in life which are encoded with our values, prejudices, assumptions and expectations;

then,

It is in the interface between `human rights’ and the civic spaces that the new and critical meanings and energies for a different kind of social reality lies. Human societies have created their most lasting and most socially relevant institutions and `spaces of belonging and identity’ through the mobilization of human agency and knowledge. We have defined such moments as `democratic’ because they express and speak to the innermost desires for peace, fairness ( justice) liberty and a consolidation of what makes us social.

It is through the extension of these commons – the civic spaces where rights and entitlements have emerged and where they most openly reside, and, through their extension to all those who occupy social spaces ( regardless of what ever differences fragment and separate us in our specificities as gendered, classed, raced, and ethnicised beings) that rights become inalienable. They become the `natural’ outcomes of democracy in it’s conceptual and practical senses. They become basic to the existence of all human beings.

However, these notions have been deeply embedded in exclusionary paradigms, women in particular have been excluded from this process of becoming `righted’ and therefore of entering the transformative experience of knowing and exercising ones rights, of being citizens. Therefore, the process of democratization and `righting’ in our societies has remained severely truncated and deeply contested.

Patriarchal constructions of women’s labour deems it as being without value or equivalence to that of men, Therefore, women’s bodies become the private properties of men (as wives, daughters, sisters, nieces, etc); women’s knowledges become mere gossip or `subjectivities’ which cannot be included in the knowledge stock of male-referencing societies. Through legal systems which continue to define women in relation to sexist, supremacists notions of inferiority and subordination – each of these mobilizing culture as a weapon and a resource which excludes women from the most critical sites of social creativity whilst privileging and pampering males as the `knowers’ of our societies – women still have to struggle to break into the most critical sites of contestation in all African societies, without exception.

Therefore, a key question that we need to engage with is how to initiate a process which enables us to reflect on our relationships as Africans ( via the highly contested issues of authenticity and authentification) which seem to be so intimately linked to the exclusion and Othering of Africans who are female, young and located in what we call the `rural’ spaces of the continent.

The position of Africans is determined in many instances by socialisation, cultural practices, conventions and social status laws which have become legalised as so-called customary laws. These laws are now becoming enshrined in the constitutions of most African countries as expressions of our difference from the European other in particular). When we consider this position, we see that these authenicators of African – ness have assumed a `common-sense’ character in our language, interactions and presumptions about each other, especially across the gender divide. It is the making common what in actuality were patriarchal privileging mechanisms which poses a critical test to us as modernizing Africans. Commodifying rituals and practices, which over centuries became `cultural’ practices--and which therefore have not entered the market and or come under civic or public scrutiny--have become barriers to the realization of full citizenship by the majority of Africans.

The reification of `otherness’ and it’s often uncritical acceptance by those who are excluded from modern contestations and discourse about the meanings and the exercise of democracy, human rights and entitlement - whether to land, natural resources, social and cultural heritages and political engagement – presents a key challenge to activists and scholars.

The discourse on democracy, governance and human rights has become universalized and thus more accessible and collectively owned, making it more open to the diverse interpretations of those who contest and jostle for its definition and direction. But the implicit assumption is that each constituency of human beings ( distinguished by gender, class, race, geo-political location, age, ethnic identity etc) will have to resolve the myths and culturalized distortions of these critical human resources in the context of their specific realities in order to enter and access a universalised notion of rights. This resolution has become the urgent imperative of African activism and scholarship.

We can struggle for democracy and rights at the global level – because we live in a globalising/globalised world. But the most critical struggles lie in the reality of Africa as a continent largely unprepared for the 21st century. It is unprepared because the majority of its people have not become persons with a recognized and respected integrity which is expressed through the guaranteed right to be full citizens and owners of the continent in local, regional and continental terms.

That for me is the challenge of the 21st century – a century which will have to be the turning point in the shaping, mapping and realization of Africa as a democratic and right-full space.

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