Rant about Joining a Murderous Terrorist Organisation

 

I rarely rant about current affairs.  That is for people with more flexible schedules, and nimble minds.  I take time to think my rants through and then to write them.  I’m hoping the topics are not going to be moot a week from posting them.

But at the same time I feel that we are seeing something quite unprecedented here, so it would look odd in perspective, if somebody looked at these ten years down the line, and got the impression that I was ranting about pandas, heels and washing machines, as if there wasn’t a massive war going on, a war which scores of my countrymen (and some countrywomen) were joining.

In this day and age that post-dates Enlightenment by about 250 years, European kids are running off to fight the good fight, not for any noble humanitarian reasons, but in order to force a brutal religious dictatorship on people and off with their heads if they don’t conform.

There seems to be a certain amount of head scratching going on among people of just about every colour and creed in Europe.  We don’t understand why this is happening.  The parents and friends of these facebook-jihadists don’t understand why this is happening.

I actually find it quite easy to understand. 

It is happening because these people are young and because they are confused.  ISIS responds to their twin need of absolute certainty at a time when everything is uncertain and for adventure that just doesn’t get satisfied by playing video games.

Don’t you remember when you were young?  There are all kinds of confusing ideas going on in your head.  Your body is doing funny things.  You are supposed to start behaving like a grown up, having a life plan, deciding what you want to do with your life.  We all thought on some level that we were going to be special when we were kids.  We were going to have a purpose and make a difference.  We were going to change the world.  Now it was dawning on us that we probably weren’t.  Being a lawyer or a lab technician was not the master plan we had vaguely imagined as kids.  The adult that we were becoming was bound to disappoint everyone, but most of all the kid we had so recently been.

Add to that the confusion of living at the intersection of two cultures, which are both pulling you in different directions.  There is simply no way of satisfying everyone around you, the needs and wishes of your parents are diametrically opposed to those of (some of your) friends.

This is when someone comes and tells you that he has all the answers.  No need to make difficult choices, no need to feel inadequate and confused.  The answers are all there, in the holy book.  You are special, you have a mission from god.  You are god’s soldier.  You just have to follow the rules and orders.

But there is more.  You don’t just want certainty and a purpose.  You want adventure.  Boys will be boys, they say.  Boys drive too fast and they commit petty crime.  But that is all a bit lame, all a bit childish.  You get told that you get to go and BLOW SHIT UP.  And you can be absolutely certain that this is happening for a good cause.  Not just a good cause, but the only cause there is.  God’s cause.

Alas, a full circle.  It all comes together beautifully.  God is the answer to your need for certainty as well as to your need for adventure.

Now I don’t know how many of them are disappointed or scared or regretful when they arrive in Syria and reality kicks in.  I understand that the westerners hang out among themselves, so that will probably make it easier.  But I don’t know what happens to these people.  Chopping off someone’s head or taking part in gang rape is presumably a bit more difficult to grow out of than shoplifting.

So I don’t know much.  But I think I know why this is happening. 

Thoughts?

I also have an idea (not THE idea, just AN idea) how this could be tackled.  I’ll get back to that in my next rant.

Rant about How Mobile Phones Will Save the World

 

I may have just found the most effective environmental innovation of the century.  It’s called “pay as you go”.

 

We humans are lazy and indulgent.  We are comfort-seeking and prefer to close our eyes from all the inconvenient stuff, as that might make us feel guilty or even get off our fat bottoms and do something about it, heaven forbid.  Better not to notice, to silence that little nagging voice in our heads and think that the “climate change sceptics” might have a point,* and oh well, what could I do anyway.

 

But the one thing that motivates us is money.  Not money in general, OUR money.  We don’t want to spend too much of it, and we want to make more of it.  No human being in the history of the world has ever had too much money.

 

Our decisions are made based on a tug-of-war between our financial prudence (called also “stinginess” in less flattering terms) and our laziness.  Calculating the most efficient and cheap way can’t be too complicated or we give up.  So something that saves us money is only worth it if it is easy for us to understand how and why and how much it saves.

 

Enter pay as you go. 

 

Take the most obvious example, mobile phones.  Most of us have a contract that charges us a certain basic amount per month, and this includes often a number of calls, text messages and data transfer.  We like to kid ourselves into thinking that we got a good deal by telling everyone how many “free” minutes or “free” text messages we get with our phone deal, when of course the real answer is “zero”.  Those minutes and SMSs are not free but included in our contract, and probably we don’t even use them all, meaning that we end up paying for supposedly “free” stuff we don’t use.

 

I also had one of these contracts.  I congratulated myself on a good deal and sometimes called people just to use all my “free” minutes.  But then I went to Namibia and got a pay-as-you-go phone, which I fed with vouchers I bought from street vendors.  If I had to reload more than once a week, I felt I was spending too much money and began paying attention to my phone habits.  Yet my average weekly voucher was NAM 20, which amounts to about € 1.50.  Hand on your heart: how many of you, with your great phone deals, pay less than € 6 per month?

 

This could be rolled out to all kinds of stuff.  We also had pay-as-you-go electricity in Namibia, where we fed vouchers to the machine, which then ticked down the amounts at an alarming rate.  Apart from my refusal to let go of the heater that I carried around the house (I did get used to the cold at some point and stopped doing that…), it made us VERY conscious of the consumption of electricity.  Similarly, the washing machine in our building was fitted with a card system while we were away, and I can assure you that we pay much more attention to filling the machine up properly and reducing the number of loads we wash now that we see every time exactly how much it is costing us.**

 

So every house and every flat should move to pay-as-you-go electricity.  Could the same be done with gas and water?  I don’t see why not.  In a way cars already do this, but maybe the measuring could be done more explicitly, so that behind your wheel the meter is not telling you how much petrol you have left, but how much money you have just spent driving.  Same with restaurants.  My new favourite restaurant is a buffet where you pay by the weight of the food.  Makes you MUCH more conscious of how much stuff you're piling on your plate and thus reduces waste. 

I bet several other ideas have already popped to your heads while you’ve been reading.

 

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how the world will be saved.  Or do you disagree?

 

*They do not.  Don’t be stupid.

**An arm and a leg, that’s how much.

The One You've Been Waiting for: Rant against Marriage (aka "How to Piss Off Most of Your Friends")

Many of you, my dear friends, are married. 

I am not. 

People in Namibia were hardly subtle about their view on this state of affairs.  A common comment from colleagues at the LAC, for example: “You’re not married”, looking at my hand and the glaring absence of the tell-tale ring.  “You must get married.  Soon.”

Now you’re thinking “sure, but Namibia is a banana republic, this is not how we civilized people think”. WRONG.  Here is, just as a taster,* the Supreme Court of Canada:

 

“[The] ultimate raison d’être [of marriage] is firmly anchored in the biological and social realities that heterosexual couples have the unique ability to procreate, that most children are the product of these relationships, and that they are generally cared for and nurtured by those who live in that relationship.  In this sense, marriage is by nature heterosexual.  It would be possible to legally define marriage to include homosexual couples, but this would not change the biological and social realities that underlie the traditional marriage.”**

Ah, the good old “traditional marriage”.  What the HELL is that?  The “traditional marriage” is about ownership of land and movable property, such as women.  Marriage was the social construct that permitted men to police the sexual conduct of women and in this way try to ensure that the son who would inherit the land was in fact the product of their loins.  

And WHEN did this lovely “traditional marriage” exist? Well, it was prescribed in the Marriage Act of Switzerland UNTIL 1988 that wives had a legal obligation to obey their husbands.***  Nice. 

 

So the marriage that most of you have entered into, and which is based legally nowadays on the equality of spouses but apparently still tied to popping babies (or at least the theoretical possibility of doing so), and therefore not available to homosexuals, is a fleeting concoction of a few decades.  Before then marriage was something quite different.  Some of this “traditional” stuff still remains.  How many of you ladies were “given away” by your fathers as part of the ceremony?  The symbolism of THAT particular gesture is hardly subtle.

 

When I make these points in discussion, everyone (married) gets defensive and tells me that all this is nonsense and meaningless to THEIR very special relationship, which they are entitled to define for themselves.  Sure, everyone is indeed entitled to define their relationship as they wish.  But they are not entitled to define their “marriage” as they wish.  You see, the society has made a huge deal of ensuring that homosexuals CANNOT define their very special relationship as a marriage.  So once a (hetero) couple has decided that “marriage” is the relationship they wish to have, they are plunging into a structure that is predefined by law and society.  “[T]he words ‘I do’ bring the most intense private and voluntary commitment into the most public, law-governed and state-regulated domain.”****

 

Until the institution of marriage changes, becomes truly equal and keeps its nose out of my procreative designs, the society can keep its stinking marriage.  I indeed define my own relationship (well, F has a bit of a say as well…), and “marriage” is a definition I want to steer well clear of.*****

 

Now PLEASE tell me you were provoked enough to leave some comments.  Rebel! Protest! Tell me that my views suck and you never want to hear them again!

 

 

*You REALLY don’t want to get me started on the comments that were made during the debates in the Finnish Parliament when the Marriage Equality Bill was being debated.  It is remarkable how unashamedly regressive supposedly modern people can get when they oppose the human rights of others, but just don’t want to say that this is what they are doing.

**Egan v. Canada, [1995] 2 S.C.R. 513, p. 536 (La Forest, J.).

***A good short introduction to the development of the law on marriage in Switzerland is provided in Baddeley “Le droit de la famille, un droit en constante evolution”, in Chappuis,Foëx and Thévenoz, Le législateur et le droit privé : Colloque en l'honneur du professeur Gilles Petitpierre. (Genève, Schulthess, 2006) pp. 39-56.  Amusing in a painful way.

****Minister of Home Affairs and Another v Fourie and Another (CCT 60/04) [2005] ZACC 19; 2006 (3) BCLR 355 (CC); 2006 (1) SA 524 (CC) (1 December 2005) (Sachs J).

 

*****Cue in smugness from friends from countries such as Canada (which changed its mind quite quickly after the Egan decision quoted above), France and the UK, where an equal marriage is of course already the reality.  I hereby raise an imaginary toast to C in Canada and T in England on their recent engagements to enter into an equal marriage!

Rant in Defence of Nasty People

For them marriage outside one’s own caste is punishable by death, and too much contact with non-believers is in general polluting, and to be discouraged.  Only men can become chiefs and once they do, they may take several wives.  They believe they are descended only from Adam, not Eve, with her undesirable feminine ways.

If I had been the head of marketing at the murderous terrorist organisation ISIS (an interesting thought experiment…), the above would have featured quite heavily in my recent propaganda.

You see, this is from the Wikipedia description of the Yadizis, the people that ISIS has been genociding in Northern Iraq in recent months and for whom we have all been feeling very sorry as a result.*  Would we have been feeling quite so sorry for them, if we had known that they are not necessarily the nicest people on earth themselves, but have some practices and beliefs that we feminists actually find quite objectionable?

I really hope the answer for everyone is “yes”. 

As I mentioned in my post about LGBT rights some weeks ago, human rights are for everyone, not just nice people.  This is why I don’t get the reaction of the islamophobic trolls that fill the comments sections of any news involving Muslims, for example.  They think that if only they educated me about the fact that women are discriminated against by their menfolk in the Gaza strip, I would – as a feminist – accept the Israeli bombing of them.  How silly.  I’m well aware of some problematic aspects of Islam, and I’m happy to have a conversation about anyone on the Gaza strip about them, but PLEASE STOP BOMBING THEM FIRST.  I am also happy to have this conversation with any Muslim in Finland or Switzerland, but PLEASE STOP DISCRIMINATING AGAINST THEM FIRST. 

In short, someone not being herself or himself an angel is no reason not to grant her or him the same rights as everyone else.  And I should not have to pretend that they are an angel in order to convince everyone that their rights merit protection.

This hit me quite hard last week, when I received some torture campaign material from Amnesty.  Torture is wrong; I hope all of us agree.  So why do they have to only include nice people among their list of examples of torture victims?  One is described as a father and a husband, another as a prisoner of consciousness.  Who cares?  They should not be tortured whether they are saints or terrorists.

As the well-known saying goes: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”**  That should hold true for every right, and for every person.***

 

*Although not doing much else than feeling sorry but that is another story.

**Often misattributed to Voltaire, but actually the phrase is apparently from Evelyn Beatrice Hall, his biographer.  A woman’s wise words being attributed incorrectly to a man, how surprising.

***Well, maybe not quite the death part, but you get the general sentiment.

Rant about Wolves, Elephants and Other Forms of Stupidity

Reading this short report on the BBC environment site about the accelerating decline of world wildlife population brought back some thoughts I had when admiring the stunning flora and fauna (especially fauna) in Etosha national park in North Namibia.

There are very few who would not be awed by African wildlife.  You don’t need to visit the many parks and reserves in Africa to see and be impressed – if you haven’t seen the BBC Africa series from 2013, I’d recommend you watch it.  Immediately.  Several times.*

African wildlife is not only impressive in its own right, but even more so when compared to our own.  Part of it is of course because of exoticism, something we see every day by necessity ceases to amaze us and becomes boring.  I’m always reminded of this when I talk to people who enthuse about having been to Finland for the first time.  Apparently Finnish landscape is pretty exotic to many people.

But another reason why African wildlife appears more impressive is because it IS more impressive.  This is partly because of geography, meteorology and natural history, but to a large part because we fucked it up.  We slashed and burnt our forests, polluted our rivers and killed off everything bigger than a rabbit.  This all happened at least decades, if not centuries ago.

So it riles me when we Europeans now turn around and try to teach Africans how to take care of their wildlife.  It’s almost comic, we really are the last people they should be taking advice from on these issues, unless it is of the “look how stupid we were, don’t copy us!” –kind, which it inevitably is not.  Instead we present ourselves as experts and concerned citizens of the world. 

In reality, if we were living in Africa, and had to deal on a daily basis with the magnificent African wildlife, we would destroy it within a few decades.  Because Europeans can’t live in or with nature, we have to kill it.** 

A case on point: A few wolves have managed to survive the rampage against nature within the borders of Finland, but they are at risk all the time, and being poached illegally probably at worse rates than rhinos in Namibia.  Not because they are valuable,*** but because they are thought to be dangerous.  We don’t want them near us, we can’t share our surroundings with them.  Yet it is over 120 years since the last time a wolf killed a human in Finland.

By contrast crocodiles, lions and leopards, but also hippos and elephants, kill people in Africa all the time.****  In addition they kill livestock, a serious problem in a country like Namibia where farming is mostly of the subsistence kind.  Yet we have no problem chastising the terrible, savage Africans that shoot these beautiful, majestic creatures.

I am not saying that lions, cheetahs or elephants should be killed.  I am saying that it is not for us Europeans to decide whether they are killed or not.  It is for the Namibians and their neighbours that come face to face with them.  If we want to protect wild animals, we should focus on making them profitable for the local people that are currently suffering from their attacks.  We can do this by handing over cash (e.g. by visiting parks and reserves) or by making innovative suggestions, to the extent we have any.  But the suggestions cannot start from the premise of telling Namibians what they should do and in particular what they should not do (i.e. kill wildlife).  Given our history, we have no leg to stand on in criticising them for anything when it comes to the treatment of the human-wildlife conflict.  Until we have cleaned up our own backyard, which is a sad, concrete-covered place in which nothing grows or lives, we cannot start telling others how to handle theirs.  We can only humbly request permission to go and play there from time to time.

(This was more preachy than my usual style.  But it doesn’t mean I don’t want people to comment and disagree!)

 

*Here is a link to a site that seems to stream the full series.  I haven’t tested the streams and I don’t know if it is legal, so take no responsibility.  Here is a link to the BBC presentation site for the series, which is definitely legal.

**Here is a link to a story of Bruno the bear that made the mistake of crossing into German territory in 2006, if you need evidence.

***Rhino horns are insanely valuable, which is why I have some sympathy with the (often poor) locals in Namibia who help the poachers.  If you want to address the problem of rhino poaching, focus on the demand, not the supply.  Same with drugs.  Free advice here to any concerned governments, NGOs etc.  You’re welcome.

****Numbers are hard to come by, but here are some from the FAO.

Rant about the Pot of Gold at the End of the Rainbow

I keep coming back to this topic of LGBT* rights.  Maybe somebody will think “move on already”, but I am not apologising, since I think it is THE human rights question of our time.  There are other live issues in Europe, such as the rights of the Roma and immigrants, but that is more a question of recognising and giving effect to rights that exist on the legal level.  The rights of LGBT persons do not even yet exist in law in many countries.

There really seems to be a clear split in where the world is going, as I witnessed in Namibia.  Western countries (including much of South America) are slowly but surely moving towards recognition of equal rights.  Some need a bit of nudging, like Russia, which is trying to jump off the human rights bandwagon and climb aboard the homophobia train, but it will struggle.  There is very little doubt that the European Court of Human Rights will give them the slap they amply deserve for their “homosexual propaganda” law.  That is the price to pay for wanting to be part of European society, Mr Putin.

Some other countries, mostly those in Africa (South Africa excluded), or where the majority religion is Islam, are racing in the opposite direction.  They are tightening laws and, arguably more importantly law enforcement, against sexual minorities.  The discrimination is very real.  It is absolutely PC to spout homophobic crap in Namibia, usually coupled with thundering religious judgment.  The part about Jesus being on the side of the outcast and persecuted appears to be forgotten in the righteousness of the family being about multiplying and filling the earth.  We even had a few colleagues, working for a HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANISATION, who did not support equal rights for gays.  I mean, where do you begin in such circumstances?

I kept asking myself why this is.  There appear to be a few reasons.  The publisher of the Namibian, the country’s main newspaper, thought it was diversion.  Politicians always thought it was a good time to make homophobic statements whenever the heat was on the government for some alleged misdeed or other: “Look over there, a moffie, let’s all go and beat him up!”  You can also see why this would apply in places like Zimbabwe.  Very practical example of the technique satirized in the movie Wag the Dog.

The second reason appears to be relentless, and successful, hate campaigning by a few nutjob American preachers.  There is currently a case ongoing in Massachusetts against a certain Scott Lively brought by Sexual Minorities Uganda, and the facts in the Court’s Order permitting the claim to proceed make for pretty chilling reading.  Scott Lively is very proud of how he has managed to convince prominent Ugandans, including Parliamentarians, that homosexuals are behind just about all evil in the world and it is important that they be contained, if not exterminated.  He is the author of a historical book on the subject called Pink Swastika.  Go on, google it (I refuse to provide a direct link) and you will be amused and horrified in equal measures.  You will also see why Mr Lively well deserves the title of a “nutjob”.

This is perhaps the saddest part of the story.  Homosexuality is not the western import that evil tyrants like Robert Mugabe claim it to be, homophobia is.  It is not that countries like Namibia were previously totally accepting of homosexuality.  They just didn’t really care.  There was a lack of information on the part of both, the LGBT persons themselves, as well as the general public, about what it means to be “homosexual”, “bisexual” or “transgender”.  Nowadays LGBT persons are more self-aware, and consequently clamour for recognition of their right to be who they are more openly.  This in part, and the Scott Livelys of this world in part, lead to homosexuality being more understood, but not well enough understood to be accepted.  It is the classic case of the fear of the unknown, but peppered with a heavy dose of malicious misinformation.

So the fight is very important.  I must admit that F and I were quite disheartened at times in Namibia; we even ended up writing a newspaper op-ed to correct a blatant untruth stated publicly by a high-ranking public official in terms of what the law said about the rights of a certain group of sexual minorities (asylum seekers). 

Then we went to a sexual minorities party and it came at just the right time.  The atmosphere was fabulous, the music was great and the crowd was a true rainbow.  There was everyone from a glamorous drag queen via a butch lesbian to a couple of boring white heterosexuals whose movements you could barely call “dancing”.**  Everyone was accepted for who they were, nobody was aggressive or judgmental and the point was just to have a good time.  We had some drinks, we boogied and we met a few nice people.  What more could you ask from a party?  It was so amazing to see how these people, who face intolerance every day of their lives, were themselves so accepting and tolerant.  F said afterwards that it made him believe in our LGBT project again, as these were people whose rights were worth fighting for.  I think human rights belong to everyone, not just nice people, so I can’t subscribe to that statement, but I couldn’t help being uplifted by the very inspirational bunch of people.  There was definitely a pot of gold for me at the end of that rainbow party.

So I will keep ranting until the human rights of sexual and gender minorities are given full recognition, in Finland, Namibia and elsewhere.

You have been warned.

*I have recently discovered that LGBT is not quite the widely known acronym, like the UN, HIV or CIA, I assumed it to be.  Thus for the sake of clarity: LGBT stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (or Transsexual).  Sometimes you will see it also as LGBTI (“I” for Intersex) or LGBTIQ (“Q” for Queer).

**Us.

Rant about African Women Part 2 - Josephine Baker

 

 

The second stereotype of an African woman is the wild and erotic “Josephine Baker”.*  Her whole being is mystical and sexual, and since sexuality is scary it must be contained.  One of the first things the colonising Europeans did in the 19^th century in many parts of this continent was to impose western, puritan dresscode on semi-naked tribeswomen.  Nowadays this seems so ridiculous.  The Himba women, for example, in their traditional outfits are beautiful, but not particularly erotic.  Most modern Europeans (the same can’t be said for Americans … the nation of the “boobgate”) can tell the difference between nudity and sexuality.

 

I began to get an idea of the power and scariness of the Josephine Baker, though, when I spent just over a month frequenting a Windhoek gym.  Again, this is not “Africa”, it is just Windhoek, but there were women from different tribes, of different ages, shapes and sizes there.  They all appeared to have one thing in common, though: they were admirably at ease with themselves.  The whole atmosphere in the changing room was just very different to what I have seen and experienced in any part of Europe.  The self-consciousness that a white woman does not seem to be able to escape was almost entirely lacking.  So I began to think that the power of Josephine Baker has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with self-confidence.

 

I wondered why that was.  We are supposed to be more emancipated and aware of our rights in the North.  Yet the bombardment of images of how we should look like – and do not look like – is so relentless that it it nearly impossible not to be self-aware, and consequently ashamed of our imperfect bodies.

 

The tabloid press is a lot less developed in the parts of Africa I’ve been to.  The images of perfect women that ARE portrayed are likely to come from Hollywood, where the pictures are either those of white women or of black women whose beauty adheres very closely to white standards (think Beyoncé or Halle Berry).  Maybe this has less of an impact on the self-confidence of a woman who just looks very different.  Recently the standards of beauty have been ever so slightly relaxing, when women like Lupita Nyong’o have entered the common consciousness.  Ms Nyong’o is strikingly beautiful.  However, her beauty is of such different kind to what I could ever be that I can just admire it, without her images on some sub-conscious level chipping away at my confidence.

 

So maybe that is partly it.  While women in many African cultures are traditionally supposed to be less assertive, and subject to male authority, once they can break away from that and enter the public sphere, they do so with confidence in themselves that is not constantly being undermined by a bombardment of insidious messages of how inadequate they are physically, and how important it is to be physically more adequate.  Hence they are less held back, less apologetic of who they are and what they are capable of.

 

I therefore have come to think, tentatively, that Josephine Baker is in fact Mama Africa.  They are the two sides of the same confident coin.  I have also come to appreciate my time at the gym changing room.  Comments about time spent looking at other people at the gym changing room can come out the wrong way, but even at the risk of that I must conclude that I hope some of the chuzpah those ladies had rubbed off on me!

 

 

*Yes, I know Ms Baker was not from any part of Africa, but French-American.  Her “brand” is fitting for this post, though.

 

Rant about African Women Part 1 – Mama Africa

 

I ranted earlier about the western “exoticiation” of everything “black” and the consequent blindness (including my own) to differences within Africa.

 

One area where this has manifested itself very clearly is the creation of the stereotype of the “African woman”.  In the western collective imagination a woman from any part of Sub-Saharan Africa is one of two types.  She is either a physically and mentally imposing matriarch, the “Mama Africa”,* or an oversexualised semi-wild creature, who I will call the “Josephine Baker” for short. 

 

I will rant on this occasion about Mama Africa, and return later to Josephine Baker.

 

Based on my limited experience of spending in total just over half a year in two Sub-Saharan African countries, I would tentatively suggest that there is some truth to the Mama Africa stereotype.

 

Taking as a starting point the undeniable fact that due to structural sexism there are not many women who have managed to make their mark on the world stage to begin with, the European ones are likely to be somehow still soft and “feminine”, no matter how “tough” the job, situation or decision.  This is for example how Angela Merkel or Christine Lagarde come across.  Even Margaret Thatcher would fall into this category, as would Finland’s own Tarja Halonen.

 

This is not the image the impressive African women have.  They are more like Wangari Maathai, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Fatou Bensouda or Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.  It is hard to pinpoint the difference, but these women appear to have an aura that their northern counterparts lack.  It is not just because they are physically more imposing (partially undoubtedly due to their wardrobes – it takes bucketloads of charisma to pull those outfits off, and they always do), but you will have no trouble imagining them taking charge.  Of a situation, of a family, of a country.  European women have to battle much harder to achieve that appearance that instinctively invites confidence.

 

The other thing is that, on a continent many parts of which suffer from more sexism than most of Europe, it was easy to come up with several examples of such impressive women who have put their stamp on the world.  So with the same or lesser opportunities, African women seem to be better at achieving positions of power.

 

There has been no shortage of examples of Mama Africas here in Namibia.  I do not want to belittle the problems arising from sexism that this country is still facing (such as high levels of gender-based violence, traditional roles, lack of educational opportunities etc.), but you see powerful women everywhere.  They are on boards of companies and they run government ministries.  Admittedly I have also met women, like a young university student who told us that she hated studying and really just wanted to marry and become a housewife,** who do not fit the stereotype of Mama Africa, but there are enough Mama Africas (to varying degrees of course) for me to notice it.  The first among equals is Libertina Amathila, whose memoir I am currently reading.  She is an inspirational figure for Namibian as well as other ladies.

 

I have been racking my brain over the past few months to try to understand why this is.  I’d love to be able to export some of that back to Europe, as the sisterhood could and should learn from best practice everywhere.  I don’t want to make any facile and racist assumptions that these women have been molded by their difficult childhoods, since in most cases I know nothing of their childhoods, which may have been overwhelmed by privilege and love.  Probably they have been on very different journeys and would have different stories to tell.  But something about the way capable, bright African women are brought up, or educated, appears to create confident, all-imposing Mama Africas that rock the world.

 

 

*I hope nobody takes this as an offensive term, it is certainly intended with the utmost respect.  I got the idea for it recently when reading a book called Mama Namibia by Mari Serebrov.

**In a weird way this young lady exemplified a positive development from a feminist viewpoint.  It really should be for everyone to decide on their own dreams, and (a) this means that wanting to be a housewife is a permissible future plan, and (b) it is a plan that should be available to women in Windhoek just like it is in Geneva.