The Black African Body

THE WIDE MARGIN

THE BLACK AFRICAN BODY ISSUE 02

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THE WIDE MARGIN

The Wide

MARGIN ISSUE 02

THE BLACK AFRICAN BODY The Wide Margin is for African feminisms by African feminists. A space on the internet, vast as it is, is as good as any other, to be claimed and filled with our feminisms. We write and read African feminism because we must.�

Editor in Chief

- Varyanne Sika

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CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

by Varyanne Sika

THE WOMB

by Felicity Okoth

YOU SEXY AFRICAN!

by Kagure Mugo

SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN ZIMBABWE

by Anthea Taderera

Cover Art / Image

JOHN MARKESE Illustrations

NADDYA OLUOCH

Design & Layout

ZACK ADELL.

BODY AND I

by Anne Moraa

IN MY SKIN

by Dorothy Kigen

NATIVE TONGUE

by Ola Osaze

I AM FROM THE FUTURE

by Fungai Machirori

TRANSFORMATION OF BODIES

by Zahrah Nesbitt-Ahmed

MIRROR

by Murewa Olubela

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

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THE BLACK AFRICAN BODY Editorial by Varyanne Sika

“There are thinkings of the systematicity of the body, there are value codings of the body. The body as such cannot be thought.”

– Gayatri Spivak

Our bodies are central to our existence. They signify our presence or absence in/from material and ideological spaces, and are integral to our corporeal experiences. Our lived experiences throughout life are as varied as life itself, unconfined to or within a singular context. We eat, dance, use our bodies for labour, for art, for pleasure, for reproduction, to communicate and to embody our different material histories. Our bodies bleed, hurt, age, menstruate, break, limit us, propel us in varying ways, and deprive us of or afford us certain liberties.

Women’s bodies specifically are often discussed in feminist and other discourses particularly in relation to sexuality and reproduction.

Discussions on the body focusing on sexuality and reproductive health illustrate that those are the points of contention and have greater vulnerability in body matters. This focus illustrates the areas in which power and agency struggles are mostly manifested and visible. Feminist Africa’s “Sexual Cultures” issue in 2005, recognized that African sexuality is addressed by proxy in the literature available on the global market.

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In this recognition, Feminist Africa took on the opportunity to “deepen and further inform the ongoing debates and struggles around various aspects of sexuality [in Africa].” Buwa!’s issue, “Sex and Health” shared African stories and experiences in sex and health to challenge Africans to “loosen the lid that has been kept tightly shut for decades to prevent sex and sexuality form being openly discussed…” Pop’Africana’s current call for contributions to their “Sex & the Female Body” seeks to “create a new anthropology of exploration and understanding of the African female body with a focus on erotica, beauty and traditions.” These issues all constitute an important foundation for thinking about the systematicities and value codings of the black African body.

In the past few years, there has been more effort to include discussion and exploration of black African bodies outside the context of sex, sexuality and health. For instance, platforms such as ‘Inkanyiso’ which centers African LGBTI persons in visual media, and Hola Africa which is a ‘Pan-Africanist queer womanist collective that deals with African female sexuality...’ have created space for LGBTI in discussing the black African body. Africanah gives an overview of body politics in African women’s art, there is more discussion of black African bodies in film, (more) literature and poetry, sports, and labour. In Buala’s second call for their images and geographies issue, they intended to “reinforce the need to design bodies as sites of essential and full performance and not as mere surfaces of discursive enrolment.” These different discussions and many others unmentioned are the kinds to which we are interested in contributing.

In this second issue, the Wide Margin is interested in following the line of thought as in ‘Feminist Theory and the Body’ (edited by Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick); the body matters. This issue covers in a few essays, sexuality, abortion, identity, language, transformation, and the varied experiences with our bodies.

Felicity Okoth invites us to discuss abortion and dares those who hide behind religion and law to recognize the desperation of women and girls who resort to dangerous means of terminating pregnancies, and openly discuss the subject.

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Assumptions are made about the binary often drawn in abortion debates, “pro-choice” and “pro-life”, such as one being religious and the other atheistic, and subsequently that one is moral and the other amoral, but these assumptions are limiting and false and do not contribute to the discussion, false binaries rarely do. Women of all races are affected pregnancies they choose not to keep, but women of colour are the most affected. Economic factors are impossible to ignore when discussing abortion, similarly and very important is the matter of power and autonomy in the hierarchy of bodies, but we are reminded that the goal in the abortion debate should be to seek liberation for women.

African eroticism is contemplated by Tiffany Kagure Muge referencing Nzegwu Nkiru’s essay ‘Osunality, or African Sensuality: Going Beyond Eroticism’, published by Jenda in 2010. Tiffany’s discussion offers a look at sexuality and culture while challenging the norm which seems to dictate that it is contrary to African culture and traditions to enjoy sex or to be sensual. A proposition is made, that sex in Africa [on the matter of traditions] .

“should be about invoking traditions so as to surface their sex positive foundations” The essay by Anthea Taderera on sexual harassment in Zimbabwe was prompted by several incidences, particularly the widely discussed and reported ‘mini-skirt march’ in Harare, Zimbabwe. Sexual harassment is commonplace and often dismissed with victim blaming without considering the glaring lack of safety for women navigating masculinised spaces. Morality rears its incessant head again on this subject and respectability and compliance with the norm is peddled as a solution to the perceived immorality, but this is also a political strategy to reduce the populace of women who rock the boat as it were.

Anne Moraa shares her experience on coming into and accepting her body while providing accounts of the black body moving and being in the world, performing, creating art, resisting and fighting oppression, selfdoubt, and self-consciousness. A sense of detachment from the body in the early years growing up is later followed by bravery, boldness and a more profound self-awareness and confidence. One gets the sense that everything that can be thrown at the black female body often is, and more than survival, thriving remains a possibility.

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Another experience of living in one’s body is shared by Dorothy Kigen on colourism living in Kenya and being biracial. Grappling with prejudices based on one’s skin while simultaneously aware of the implications of being in possession of skin with high cachet in Kenya is by no means a pleasant experience as illustrated in the discussion. Colourism and Eurocentric beauty ideals motivate skin bleaching and perpetuate division among women as it pits them against each other, an issue that does not to apply to men.

Ola Osaze writes about language longing for Yoruba and Edo, his native tongue but for which he lacks the words. A modern day polyglot speaks a mix of register and language as they navigate the different parts of the society they live, all the while recognizing that ‘speaking English fluently is a cultural capital’ that enables economic survival in a predominantly English speaking society. A body moves through society through various ways but cannot avoid communication. Ola shares an experience of movement in the society and across borders through exploring not only his language but his evolving relation to his own language.

Looking different from what people expect, curiosity leads to questions on one’s origins and presumably their identity. Fungai Machirori says she is from the future which ‘defies rules and conventions on who I should be and accepts who I am.’ Hope that such a future is within reach is a shared one particularly by those people who would like to go about living with a complexity and intersection of identities without constantly being questioned wherever they turn.

In this issue we have a review of A. Igoni Barrett’s Blackass by Zahrah Nesbitt-Ahmed. Zahrah thinks about the black African body in literature and leaned towards Igoni’s book by the surrealist nature of transformation of bodies. Depending on one’s race in Nigeria, as in many other countries on the continent and beyond, opportunities are presented or challenges met. Zahrah discusses the two types of transformations that occur in the book; racial and gender transformations. Our attention is brought to Frantz Fanon’s declaration in Black Skins, White Masks (1967), that ‘For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.’ Is it possible to take a close look at identity and write creatively about bodies and identities beyond the commonplace categories?

Murewa Olubela writes a poem in which a body is observed, appreciated and accepted, an apt way to end this round of discussions on the body.

There is much more to be said and thought about regarding the body, this issue of the Wide Margin offers a continuation of other discussions before it and further more contemplation on the black African body.

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THE WOMB

by Felicity Okoth

Abortion — A word from which Africans have often shied away. We, as a society, have not been able to grapple with it in a way that protects the health and life of all women despite one in every five people having procured an abortion or know someone who has. We could continue to hide behind Religion and Law or discuss the subject openly and candidly to address the desperation of the myriad teenage girls and women who resort to backstreet clinics and end up infertile or dead.

Populist fears of the breakdown of the traditional family structure and the disintegration of our culture have been played upon with regards to the word “abortion”. These fears have permeated public discourse and legislation often in a strategic manner. Mainstream religions, being highly patriarchal, have predicated social norms on biological determinism in a manner that has, more often than not, reinforced demonstrably false assumptions about women’s bodies.

The terms “pro-choice” and “pro-life”; which are core to the abortion debate have gained significant attention due to the much publicised proand anti- Planned Parenthood activism on the streets and on social media globally. The two terms have often been used as binaries with the latter misconstrued as deriving from religion and the former from antagonistic atheism. Within this binary, it is assumed that an individual cannot be religious and pro-choice or an atheist and pro-life. The debate has drawn in women and men of all races, but the women who are most adversely affected by unplanned pregnancies are women of colour.1

1 Bachiochi, 2011.

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Some cultures ostracize a woman who conceives a child outside of wedlock, and sometimes such a woman is exiled from her community.

Religion similarly stigmatises such women. In some churches, members are excommunicated from the congregation if found pregnant. Women have even been stoned to death: For the crime of conceiving a child outside wedlock, in March 2002 Amina Lawal was sentenced to death by stoning by a Sharia Court in Nigeria.2

2 Ibrahim, Hauwa. “Reflections on the Case of Amina Lawal�.

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The working woman usually finds herself losing ground on the career ladder as a result of a pregnancy. Anecdotal evidence abounds about conspicuously pregnant women being rejected during job interviews due to their condition. Unfortunately, the law in Kenya is not very vocal about discrimination against pregnant women in the workplace. This relegates women to the position of second-class citizens who, as a consequence of being pregnant, are barred from participating fully in society and enjoying the common life prevailing in it.

On the other hand, a woman who fails to get pregnant is shamed for being apparently infertile, incapable of mothering, a travesty of womanhood, and a disgrace to the society. This amounts to a total objectification of her womb and her body, subjecting her to a sense of self that is overdetermined from without.

Abortion then becomes a political act of resistance to the dominant social order that militates against a woman’s subjectivity. It becomes one of the tools of women’s survival in a society that cares little about how the child brought forth or the child’s mother will survive. As an act, it is a disassociation from what is set for her, before her.

Most women who choose abortion, however, do so not out of a lack of respect for human life or because they assign no value to motherhood but because they appreciate that carrying a pregnancy to term not only yields a baby but their baby, and that birthing turns one into a different person, a mother. Most of these women have a clear idea of what it means to be a good mother, and they are honest that at the time of their predicament, they fall short of such an ideal or are not willing or ready to become one.

They understand the duties and responsibilities of motherhood and their abilities in that regard. A woman aborts because she understands that gestation will reshape her body and soul, transforming her into a mother biologically and emotionally as well as socially, and it is precisely that transformation that she consciously chooses not to undergo.

Being pro-choice however should not be presented as promoting abortion as the best option for all women facing an unplanned pregnancy. Far from it, being pro-choice is about three things: ensuring that women have access to safe and legal abortion if they choose to; ensuring that a woman’s choice to abort really is a genuine choice of her own accord and free will; respecting and supporting any choice that a woman makes in regard to her pregnancy whether that be abortion, adoption, or parenting.

Pro-choice advocates consistently and correctly argue that abortion is never an easy decision. Pro-choice affirms the validity of a woman’s decision to abort, both by acknowledging the reasons she aborted and well as the difficulties she may have experienced in reaching that decision. It also affirms the validity of a woman’s decision to be a mother. This helps draw a distinction between being pro-choice and being pro-abortion. The latter refers to being in favour of the medical provision of abortion and abortion-care.

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Whilst there are pro-choice advocates who do not regard abortion as a moral issue and who disagree that foetal life is valuable and worthy of some degree of protection, there are feminist pro-choice advocates who, while fervently arguing in favour of abortion rights, also express care about the welfare of foetal life. A feminist need not completely negate the life of the foetus from moral consideration in order to defend abortion rights. Foetal life matters to many women, including women who defend the right to abortion. Their voices need not be erased from public debate.

The question around foetal life — whether a fertilized embryo is a bulk of organic tissue or inchoate life — because it is emotive, takes the focus away from the deep, structural issues around women’s agency and wellbeing that are yet to be addressed. There is need to shift the emphasis of pro-choice discourse from its perceived incompatibility with expressing respect for foetal life to one that demonstrates a fuller respect for those women who have functioning uteri, are the only humans capable of bearing life, and must make decisions regarding that potential life embodied in those cells as well as their own actual life.

The African woman’s greatest enemy has always been systemic poverty which disproportionately affects her. The effects of this systemic poverty are felt at the intersection of all possible social categories of gender, culture, religion, ability, fertility, age, and so on. The reality facing a single young African woman should she decide to bring an unplanned pregnancy to term is often dire which is why so many such women decide to abort.

Women who live below the poverty line are about four times as likely to obtain an abortion compared to those who live above the poverty line.

On average, single women have a higher poverty rate than single men, a phenomenon described by Diana Pearce as the “feminization of poverty”.

3Children born of teen mothers face a host of difficulties including increased risks of failure in schools, poverty, and even of incidences of physical and mental illness. The main reason women choose abortion is financial difficulty4.

This should concern pro-choice advocates because aborting for such reasons compromises genuine choice. One of my favourite feminist writers on this issue, posits that;

If poverty is the reason she is terminating the pregnancy, if in fact she wants the child but cannot afford to have it, she is actually being coerced into abortion. She does not, in fact, have a choice at all […] Feminists should make our positions clear that when we talk about the “right to choose”, we are not talking about women having abortions solely because they can’t afford the child. Obviously, if we are going to work for choice in our reproductive lives, we also have to work to bring about the conditions — social, economic, cultural — that will make it a real possibility”.5 Thus the struggle does not stop at the right to choose what we are going to do with our bodies but extends to how we can change the system to accommodate us when we eventually feel able to choose motherhood.

3 Pearce, Diana. “The Feminization of Poverty: Women.” Work (1978).

4 Manninen, Bertha Alvarez. “The value of choice and the choice to value: Expanding the discussion about fetal life within prochoice advocacy.” Hypatia 28.3 (2013): 663-683.

5 McDonnell, Kathleen. Not an Easy Choice: Re-Examining Abortion (1984):

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Pro-life as a movement gives primacy to the sanctity of life and its protection from the moment of conception to natural death thus shunning abortion and euthanasia. The movement has its roots in religion but is not limited to the religious. I know of pro-choice feminists who would never themselves opt for abortion and are thus also pro-life just as there are deeply religious individuals who are pro-life and who have themselves procured abortions.

For years, the mainstream media, pop culture and the conventions of liberal politics in the developed world have jammed pro-life politicians and activists into a box with claims that an embryo is mere organic tissue and not life as such, thus a woman should be able to do away with that tissue if she so wishes. I find problems with this because a human embryo is biologically alive if we go by the criteria needed to establish biological life, that is: metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction.

6The same criteria are used by scientists to categorize bacteria as life in Mars. Arguments I favour are those that question if the embryo is a person which has less to do with biology but everything to do with each individual’s own morals, politics, and philosophy. It is into this emotive space that religion and personal conviction enter.

Beyond debating when life begins, the pro-life movement in its pursuits to protect life from conception to natural death has been less vocal with regards to the welfare of this same life between conception and natural death. It would be unfair to generalise about all pro-lifers as I know of many hospitals, orphanages, schools run by various churches who are all concerned with the quality of a life as it is lived; these good deeds are however overshadowed by conservative rhetoric by people who identify as pro-life yet seem not to care about the welfare of their fellow citizens.

Why would an embryo’s life matter so much to an individual who has little regard for the poor or those different from them with regards to race and religion? This paradox, is described by Sister Joan Chittister:

I do not believe that just because you are opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don’t? Because you do not want tax money to go there. That is not pro-life. That is pro-birth. We need a broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.

In Kenya, we cannot persecute women for opting out of motherhood when under the watch of the executive we squander the little that would help make maternal care financially manageable. The National Youth Service is reported by Kenyan media to have lost 791 million Kenyan Shillings under the watch of a few corrupt officials. The National Youth Development Fund is also is reported to have lost money to the tune of 500 million. In total we are talking about money to the tune of 1.291 billion Kenyan Shillings.

6. Sagan, Agata, and Peter Singer. “The moral status of stem cells.” Metaphilosophy 38.2-3 (2007): 264-284.

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This is half the amount set up for the Affirmative Action and Social Development Fund (KES 2.1 billion) in the 2015-16 National Budget. One cannot fail to see that the money lost could go a long way in improving maternal care, reproductive health, youth employment and development.

These are the same issues that have been found to cumulatively contribute to a woman’s decision to terminate a pregnancy in one way or another.

Beyond research, these issues call all who claim to be pro-lifers to political action, seeking not merely limits to abortion, but strengthened maternal care policies, child-support laws, compassionate maternity-leave policies, and adequate accessible medical care for all women. If these issues are not given the attention they deserve, it will be futile to attempt to stop a girl, by law or religion, from heading to a quack for an unsafe abortion.

Beyond abortion, the discussion of safe and accessible methods of family planning that would protect African women’s health and allow them to control their fertility has been mired with allegations of population control by critical political theorists and religious clerics, the most vocal being the Catholic Church. The notion that family planning programs have been designed as a component of development projects aimed at population control makes it more difficult for African women to wholeheartedly adopt the programs. Such programs have instead aroused strong suspicion and opposition among women. It has so far been impossible worldwide to separate birth control programs from oppressive population control policies.7 I strongly believe that African women would desire to control their fertility but are often unable to access medically safe alternatives. Young women who seek contraceptives often either lack sufficient information or are unfairly judged by those with the expertise to assist them. During my undergraduate studies six years ago, a friend was turned away, on moral grounds, by the school nurse, when she sought long-term contraceptives. I do not believe that she was the only one. Young African women are having sex and at an early age. We could choose to embrace the reality or we shall collectively perish. In Kenya, during the World AIDS Day, statistics released revealed a sharp increase in HIV infection rates among teenagers, with the girls being over-represented.

Countries that have not made talking about sex a taboo have the fewest incidences of abortion. Such countries have implemented comprehensive sex education programs and access to contraception in addition to offering social support programs that provide financial safety nets for their citizens and residents.8 Such support makes coming of age less perilous for both teenagers and their parents. The very lack of such social welfare programs and high rates of child poverty in Africa contributes to escalating rates of birth among teenagers. Without adequate support systems and education these teenagers are drawn into the vicious cycle of multigenerational female poverty.

7. Çaǧatay, Nilüfer, Caren Grown, and Aida Santiago. “The Nairobi Women’s Conference: Toward a Global Feminism?.” Feminist Studies 12.2 (1986): 401-412.

8. Manninen, op. cit.

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Of course this will not eliminate abortions entirely as contraceptives will and do occasionally fail, even with perfect use, and some women simply do not want to be mothers despite their affluence, neither at the time of their pregnancy nor ever. Moreover as long as sexual violence exists against women, access to abortions is needed for the women who cannot bring their pregnancy to term after being victimized.

If the pro-life goal is to reduce abortion, criminalizing it without offering concurrent social support will be ineffective. Rather, a genuine effort to reduce abortions would include implementing social policies that would offer prenatal and postnatal care for both mother and child, quality and affordable childcare that will enable parents complete their education or obtain full-time work, and support for victims of sexual and physical abuse. It is also paramount to ensure that certain aspects of the society, for instance discrimination against pregnant women in places of employment, overlooking mothers with young children during job promotions, school and work premises that are hostile to nursing mothers, and so on are restructured through national affirmative policies. This way, fewer women will feel coerced into choosing an abortion out of fear that having a child will force them to compromise other worthwhile goals.

As a pro-life feminist, I believe that it should be our duty to show a respect for both freedom of choice and freedom of conscience for those who see life, but not an actual person in a human embryo. It possible for one to disagree with anyone who sees neither human life nor the potential for human personhood in an embryo and at the same time respect the dignity of those who in good conscience hold that view.

When a state deprives women of control over their own reproductive capacity through abortion restrictions, it is making a social statement about women’s roles and status in the community. Having female bodies and the physical ability to bear children does not mean that all women share a nurturing nature that makes them alone inherently fit to care for children; nor is it the case that men lack the capacity for such caregiving.

Work-leave policies that differentiate on the basis of gender (offering lengthy maternity leave but brief paternity leave) reinforce the pervasive gender-role stereotypes that caring for the family is a woman’s work while the man is expected to work more and entitled to earn more. Such stereotypes produce a self-sustaining cycle that reinforces women’s role are primary caregivers while discouraging men from such roles. Such a situation prevents women from determining the course of their lives and from shaping their own destinies. They most certainly deny them the freedom and equality so prized by democratic peoples and inscribed in the Kenyan Bill of Rights.

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The gender equitable argument implies that just as men do not have to get pregnant as a consequence of the sexual act, women who do, should sufficiently be supported. The professional and personal lives of men are not usually interrupted by an ill-timed pregnancy, or are not interrupted to the same extent that women’s lives are, and neither then should women’s lives be so disrupted. Consequently, the law should recognize that women who wish to have “non-procreative sex” are as entitled as men to constitutional protection of their right to define their own destiny.

In other words, women should be equally entitled to remain detached from the potential consequences of sex.

There is need for the invitation of pro-lifers to expand the morals arguments of their position as opposed to relying on arguments from authority, emotion, fear, or threat. Pro-choicers, on the other hand should also think of articulating a moral argument rather than merely rightsbased ones, given that the African context and Kenya, in particular, is extremely hostile to the ideas of abortion and pro-choice. The feminist movement in the region needs to continue to lead an open discussion about the moral, ethical, physical, and emotional complexity of abortion that would be more likely to resonate with young African women; a contextualization that takes into cognisance culture, religion, class, preand post- abortion care for women who have opted to terminate their pregnancies.

Finally, in this pro-choice, pro-life debate, we must focus not only on who has the power and autonomy in the hierarchy of bodies and who is deprived of them, nor on who has the right over the body or who is forced to be subject to the will of power. We must rather seek the patterns of liberation for women, together, that emerge from this debate. Discourse transmits and produces power, reinforces it, but also can subvert and expose it, render it fragile and makes it possible to thwart and change. The goal is always to ensure that all women everywhere are safe, healthy, free, and enjoying expanding range of possibilities their lives have to offer.

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YOU SEXY AFRICAN!

by Kagure Mugo

One could be forgiven for thinking that Africans are sexually conservative; that at some point between our freeing pre-colonial toplessness and the strictures of neo-colonial pastors praying for us to stop “chronic masturbation”, we lost our collective inner sexual freak. We lost that thing that allowed us to enjoy sex as part of religious rituals and have schools that taught men and women how to unleash the pleasure found in the their bodies’ connection to the cosmos.

Now we have seemingly become a people who, under the rubric of a warped morality, have bachelorette parties in which you are told you shall stay on your knees in prayer; who judge or attack one another for wearing miniskirts, or for mentioning that you and your husband may indeed have sex outside of the three times required to conceive the three children you have.

One needs only look at how churches speak about “virtue”, how a girl is raised to not even look sideways at a boy until the day she must bring a good one home.

One needs only watch a good Nollywood film in which any woman who is even slightly “loose” ends up either dead, struck with a strange disease, or plagued by demons.

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The vagina has become that which is supposed to signify all that is pure and wholesome within society. Yet it can easily be defiled through something as natural as having your period and unnatural as being raped. It is the source of good when used well and mass evil when not. It is policed to the extent that it is now even tied to bursaries awarded in order to reduce the spread of HIV. It is a kind of Pandora’s Box, a source of both life and shame.

Women who have decided that they are not going to put up with bad sex and have their voices grow hoarse from faking orgasms, who instead choose to seek out the sex they feel they deserve are labelled hoes (whores), THOTS (That Hoe Over There), thirsty, or simply dismissed as being too wild. Such a woman’s sexuality makes her both desired and damned; @Beeyroyce pointed out this irony when she said,

“you may call me a slut now that we have broken up, but you can never un-eat this pussy.”

Women owning their sexuality are characterised as destructive, incapable of following society’s rules, or stereotyped as having emotional issues (often tied to their relationships with their fathers — the so-called daddy issues — and possible trauma in the form of hypothesised prior sexual assault). Only the most righteous of women ostensibly ever truly deserves to be referred to as a “good woman”. Those who cover up are seen as balanced, confident women while those who expose their bodies are seen as neurotic, exhibitionist attention seekers.

There are still more insidious ideas wafting around the continent, polluting our minds and tainting our sex lives. Misconceptions such as women being mere vessels from which to extract pleasure or as receptacles for men’s semen; thinking that women are machines into which if you put enough friendship coins, sex will fall out; women as incapable of articulating whether they want sex or not; women as incapable of knowing what they want or when they want it; women as not permitted to change their minds before, during, or after sex; women as incapable of insane heights of pleasure (There are some who still consider female ejaculation to be a myth. It is not). It is still necessary for us to continually (re)understand sex and pleasure from a woman’s perspective and re-examine notions of sex, desire, consent, and agency.

Nkiru Nzegwu provides a corrective to these forms of misogynist sexual conservatism in an analysis of the African erotic in her “Osunality”. 1 Nzegwu wants us to understand the various historical contexts that had an impact on the ideas we now accept as given. These ideas about sexuality, agency, and pleasure have evolved over time but are now often accepted as “the way things always were.”

1. Nzegwu, Nkiru. “Osunality (or African eroticism)” in African Sexualities: A Reader, pp 253- 267.

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When Nzegwu advocates for a modern way of understanding sexuality she is urging us to think of new ideas not merely based in “modern western ways of thinking” but rooted in our own African contexts.2 One needs to only look at the kitchen parties and bed-dancing in Zambia, the aunties from the coasts of Kenya, ssengas who have set up stalls to teach sexual skills in the streets, and even the (slightly too heteronormative and patriarchal) African sex safari based in traditional medicines and healing practices one can experience in Alexandria Township in South Africa.3 Despite being steeped in modernity we, as Africans, have a tendency to fall back on culture and tradition either consciously or unconsciously in order to entrench power relations. One sees a man within polygamous communities such as South Africa speaking of his need for multiple women without any understanding of the context of pre-colonial marriage practices, merely because he wants more than one moist place within which he can rest his weary penis. With bride price and lobola, for which men take out loans to “pay” for their future bride, the notion of a man owning a woman is symbolised and recapitulated.

When challenging oppressive ideas about women’s sexual agency, we can look to cultural-historical ideas as well as modern ones: In the same breath that one speaks of a vibrator one can speak about the vagina’s awesome mystical power in a cultural sense, and show that African mysticism and an African woman’s orgasm have a meaningful, shared context. Reclaiming women’s sexual agency happens both by going forward creatively — as seen in some of the sex-positive African women’s spaces like Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah’s Adventures From the Bedrooms of African Women — but also critically, by taking the argument back to the pre-colonial context and traditional context right to the place of those who argue against women’s sexual agency like to take refuge.4 The regressive traditionalist cultural argument against sex positivity and sexual empowerment is that they are neither cultural nor traditional; but, as African feminist know, they, in actual fact are a powerful and important elaboration of African culture and tradition.

Although cultural and traditional rituals may not be performed every day, they are internalised as received ideas by many and thus inform contemporary daily interactions. A man does not need to believe in cutting off the clitoris of a woman or understand the diverse histories of the practice to misinterpret it as an endorsement of the primacy of his pleasure, even at the expense of hers; or that his masculinity is assured only by the symbolic mutilation of her femininity. A woman does not need to believe in polygamy to justify being cheated on because “men should not be starved of sex.5” The average African man under the age of thirtyfive who has barely been to the village will nonetheless tell you about the putative cultural role of women. He does this based on fabulations of the village “where men are men and women act right” rather than his personal lived experience.6

2. Tsanga, A. S. Dialoguing culture and sex: reflections from the field in “African Sexualities: A Reader” pp 57 -71.

3. Tsanga, op. cit.

4. Nzegwu, op. cit.

5. Nzegwu, op. cit.

6. MacKinnon, Catharine. Towards a feminist theory of the state (1989).

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“Culture has a rich, diverse and fluid meaning.”7 A look at culture allows insight into the lives of a particular group and hearing the views of those within the group illuminates power dynamics.

8 There’s a hierarchy of who has control over their sexuality based on cultural ideas: the coital duty of the wife, practices such as Female Genital Cutting, breast ironing, and so on. When such ideas are advocated by female (and male) members of communities, they speak to sexual power dynamics. When a man and woman, man and man, or woman and woman confront each other, such ideas choreograph their sexual interactions.

What do men and women talk about when they talk about sex and how do these conversations play out between the sheets? 9 A conversation with a group of men once came to the mind blowing conclusion that if women said “no” then men would not cheat. The assumptions were that men had no control over their genitalia and women’s vaginas were a vortex from which no man could escape, and thus they must do their damndest to keep that kitty under control for the good of all. This conversation gave women a sort of negative agency whilst also perpetuating the idea of the strong penis that will not be controlled. This again centred the man as the prime mover during sex whilst the woman was a crucible for his virility, either checking it or allowing it to spill forth.

From her reflections on the sexual practices of Luo people, Tsanga gives an example of the practice of widow cleansing, which continues to this day in some communities: When a woman’s husband dies she must be cleansed by a jakowiny in order for her to be passed on to the man who shall eventually inherit her (Ter).10 The jakowiny is an outsider and sometimes sought after because of his limited mental capacity, often having been a jakowiny for many other women. Even when a woman dies uninherited she must be inherited in death showing that a woman, even when she is dead, must belong to someone sexually. Widow cleansing not only has repercussions for the prevalence of HIV/AIDS but also raises questions of sexual agency and ownership as well as the violation of a woman’s body. Widow cleansing is a cultural practice that occurs in other African contexts, for example in Southern African countries such as South Africa and Zimbabwe. Arguably a universal theme, that a woman’s vagina is public property is one that is deeply entrenched within an array of African traditional and cultural contexts. Participants in the study emphasise that “sex in Luo culture brings order to society.” Tsanga argues that there is a need to explore how cultural and traditional notions seep into the greater society, which I completely agree with. One cannot act as though we date and shag in a silo, the notions which inform other interactions will inevitably inform activities we engage in between the sheets.

7. Giles, J. and Middleton, T. Studying Culture: A Practical Introduction.

8. Tsanga, A. S. “Dialoguing culture and sex: Reflections from the field” in African Sexualities: A Reader, pp 57-71.

9. Bennett, J. “Subversion and resistance: activist initiatives” (2011) in African Sexualities: A Reader, p 80.

10. Bennett, J. “Subversion and resistance: activist initiatives” (2011) in African Sexualities: A Reader, p 80.

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One of the alternative reparative narratives is that of the African eroticism exemplified by the goddess Osun, and philosophies of the African erotic described by Nkiru Nzegwu. Nzegwu entices us to engage in a shift of the mind (and body) to a different cognitive framework, that is, from a Western one that is based on Greek phallocentric ideas of sex to one based in African philosophies and understandings of the sexual act.

The resultant European/Western conception of eroticism underwrites theoretical, literary and fictional narratives of sexuality from a phallocentric position that emphasises and legitimizes the privileging of men’s needs, desires and fantasies.

She challenges us to throw off the cloak of the argument that “this is African tradition” which is used to defend a male-centric paradigm of sex, because it is not how we, as Africans, historically got sexy. It is from a European context that we have derived manichaean juxtapositions of the Madonna and the whore, where a woman can only either encapsulate frigid purity or be wildly, insatiably, disloyal and promiscuous when it comes to sex. This is “the sexualised gender hierarchy of the West [which] eroticises male dominance and female subjugation as sexual.”11 The influence of the West must also be seen in how a great deal of our own history is forgotten or lost.

The African context, however, is thus one that not only recognises but also unites the power of the penis and the command of the clitoris, a fact we must remember.

Jane Bennet says in her paper on subversion and resistance, that “what can be understood (remembered) of the diverse paradigms, activities and performances that comprised sexual being within the lives of our ancestors is minimal.”12

11. MacKinnon, op. cit.

12. Bennett, op. cit. 80.

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This obscured history needs to be re-placed within the consciousness of post-independence African citizens who continue an engagement with Christian colonial values (alongside Islamic religious ideas in some parts of the continent), which include the disallowing of same sex practices, public displays of desire, the concept of a clean sexuality as well as “the erasure of the sexual power of people gendered as women.” Furthermore, there was the hyper-sexualisation of the African body by colonial libido, with the naked and revealed body becoming something to be both feared and desired.

Nzegwu points out that “imperialism radicalised sexuality worldwide and colonialism, apartheid, and global capitalism reconstituted only white women into paragons of purity and beauty […] deserving of love and affection and fetishized non-white bodies as dispensable and worthless.”

Thus a contemporary policing of women such that we are unable to dress as we please for fear of being attacked, and we see instances of corrective rape as men seek to put women in their place as women, and we have execrable social media memes such as #Mollis, which was a circulated audio recording of what sounded like a woman being raped and which was found risible simply because she, her voice inflected by her ethnicity, mispronounced her attacker’s name. The meme trended because of the classist claim that she did not have a mastery of English in spite of the more important fact that she sounded like she was being sexually assaulted.

Nzegwu asks this question to cosmopolitan Africans:

…what is the justification for embracing a notion of eroticism that is steeped in an ideology of gender inequality, that construes the bodies of African women as undesirable?

Again, Nzegwu urges us to return to the philosophical roots of certain threads of African eroticism. She argues that a relocation to an African ontological schema as well as closer look at the foundation on which it rests could highlight the flaws of the modern understanding of sexuality as well as paint a different picture of sexual desire and passion.

Ancient Egyptian erotica are extant in the form of paintings, texts such as The Instructions of Kagemni, and songs that spoke of love and sexual desire. Although the Egyptians are but one example of the ancient erotic, their philosophy shares certain elements with other beliefs from various others within the continent including that of Yoruba religion. One such overlap is in the Yoruba goddess Osun. Although Osun is the sole female divinity amongst sixteen male deities, she is the one in whom “the Creator-God placed all the good things in earth…” 13 She is the epitome of sensuality and sexual pleasure and her existence speaks to female sexual knowledge and agency. In turn, women who embody this cosmic force wield their sexuality “openly and unselfconsciously.

13. Nzegwu, op. cit.

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“Osun’s force outlines a sequential energy flow from desire, arousal, copulation, pleasure, fulfilment, conception, birth and growth.” However, this whole process does not need to culminate in the creation of life.

The principle of pleasure is at its core. The principle of pleasure for both partners is at the heart of sex. Osun, like other female African deities, does not exert her power and reinforce female sexuality by negating male sexuality. It is understood that the two must work in conjunction with each other to truly realise the transcendence of sexual experience.

This is contrary to contemporary thinking that says a woman who shows she is sexually equipped to handle herself and her pleasure is not someone who enjoys a God given right (see “The Song of Songs”) but is a threat to the order of society; that such a woman’s presence can only make things sticky and slippery in a way that makes all around her uncomfortable as they have to deal with their own repression. The contemporary gendered parlance of “conquering” a woman, “smashing the pussy”, and other phrases speak to an adversarial idea of sex that means the woman must eventually submit. Within this rhetoric there is no partnership, only a sexual battle. (About this conflict, Saul Bellow asks:

“In times like these, how should a woman steer her heart to fulfillment? […] Man and woman, gaudily disguised, like two savages belonging to hostile tribes, confront each other. The man wants to deceive, and then to disengage himself; the woman’s strategy is to disarm and detain him.”14) The message amidst this sexual antagonism is that you, as a woman, shall spread her legs and be beaten with the putative magic stick.

There are still traditional spaces in which women are taught to embody these ideas of the erotic and the sensual. Sexuality schools such as those seen among the pan-ethnic Sande and Bundu, in which they have kpanguima, taught women the potency of pleasure as well as “the value of controlling and taming the spouse.” Nzegwu says that Sande instructors focus on moulding young girls into self-assured women. Such schools recognise sexual power and pleasure as a social good that can, and must be, taught and harnessed all within a paradigm of what is culturally acceptable.

14. Bellow, Saul. Herzog: 232.

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24 THE WIDE MARGIN Remnants of these sorts of practices can be seen amongst the ssengas of Uganda or even the “aunties” of the Kenyan coast. Instructors focusing on sexual pleasure and the sexual empowerment of women are present in Ghana with the Dipo of the Adangme, Chisungu of the Bemba and Tonga in Zambia, and the Olaka of the Makhuwa from Yao and Makonde in Mozambique, among others.

Sex in Africa should be about invoking traditions so as to surface their sex positive foundations as they truly were and are before they were stripped of their sensuality. Great sex is not a Western notion; the freedom for a woman to experiment and explore her sexuality is not for, and does not even originate from, the “foreign feminists” but is something deeply ingrained in African spirituality and eroticism. Take a good look at the vagina, at her secrets, her depth, the fact that she has the only human organ that is designed purely for pleasure. It may be time to wonder what else can emerge from there other than a baby. Get a mirror and a friend to help in the journey of ecstatic discovery, feel your merry way, and submerge your lovely self in something different.

END

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04

SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN ZIMBABWE

by Anthea Taderera

Sexual harassment in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital city, has become a part of popular conversation following the public stripping of a minor by men, an incident that provoked the #MiniSkirtMarch. The protest prompted heated debate on the internet and within mainstream media. Dominant opinions were that women were merely trying to get away with being “whores” and that women’s bodily integrity and safety in public spaces couldn’t be considered a significant issue.

“Our bodies are our primary means of participating socially, economically, politically, spiritually and creatively in society. They are the beginning point of the practical application of rights; the place in which rights are exercised, and for women in particular, the place where rights are most often violated. Without knowledge of and control over our bodies, including our sexuality, women’s rights can be neither fully exercised nor enjoyed.”

- (Horn, Jessica. “Re-righting the sexual body” (pdf). Feminist Africa Issue 6.

2006: Subaltern Sexualities.

1. Articles I wrote on the Miniskirt March: • “Unlearning Modesty Culture: Mini Skirt March, Harare, Zimbabwe” • “Why I marched in Harare’s miniskirt march” Media coverage: “Mixed reactions to mini skirt march” The organiser’s thoughts: “Reflections on the Zimbabwe mini skirt march” 2. Bodily Integrity: Being able to move freely from place to place; being able to be secure against violent assault, including sexual assault, marital rape, and domestic violence; having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and for choice in matters of reproduction. (Nussbaum, Martha C. Sex and Social Justice. Oxford UP, 1999. 41-42.)

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Sexual harassment in public spaces is commonplace for many Zimbabwean women. We get whistled at, catcalled, shouted at, and physically assaulted simply for having made the decision to leave the house wearing whatever we wanted. Unfortunately, sexual harassment is not a new problem.

Over twenty years ago, Zimbabwean women — students at University of Zimbabwe (UZ) held a massive protest after men at the university decided that they were entitled to strip women whether they were wearing miniskirts (the quintessential clothing of the immoral) or trousers. During November 2015, UZ students continued to experience sexual harassment on campus with no repercussions for the perpetrators. On 13th November 2015, women students from UZ organised a protest against the unabating sexual violence they experienced on campus.3 The students were beaten and sixteen of them arrested by riot police.

3.. “16 female varsity students arrested”. News Day, November 14, 2015.

THE WIDE MARGIN Public spaces become “masculinised” spaces that women must learn to navigate.4 Such spaces are marked by men’s aggressive behaviour towards others. In them, sexual harassment and sexual violence become normalised. Women must then learn to mitigate their fear and develop mechanisms which permit safe passage through unsafe spaces until they are back in their own safe spaces. This is what feminist geographer, Gill Valentine, describes as a “spatial expression of patriarchy.”5 So when women leave their homes or other spaces over which we are presumed to have some sort of control, we are thought to have implicitly consented to the harms that we may experience outside of them, and to have accepted that the onus of dealing with those harms is with us individually, not with society collectively.

The oppressive framing of sexual harassment is based on the idea of an immoral, disruptive woman, a Jezebel who is “asking for it”, who distracts honourable God-fearing men from going about their daily lives, and puts “real women” at risk. Therefore the good people of Zimbabwe must resort to violent discipline in order to discourage such reprehensible dressing and behaviour. Women who do not wish to be considered immoral and who would like to be safe from harm or supported in the event of their being harmed, have a societally enforced obligation to dress “modestly”.

Modesty as a solution to sexual harassment encourages victim blaming.

When the solution is modesty, the problem is women failing to dress appropriately and failing to conform to unsafe, masculinised public spaces.

It obscures that ideas about women’s emerge from the way that women are consistently perceived (and experience themselves as perceived) and consumed (and experience themselves consumed) as sexual objects to which men imagine themselves entitled. But when women enforce their bodily integrity, exercise their autonomy, and deny men their perceived birth-right entitlement to our bodies, we often suffer violence. When we complain against this violence and the conditions that support it, we are further victimised either through victim-blaming — that attempts to explain how we clearly brought this harm upon ourselves — or through the deployment of state violence against us when we take to the streets.

Victim blaming is a logical recourse for a society unwilling to confront the fact that it has a vibrant rape culture that normalises the sexualised harm of women. The insistence that if a woman is modest she will avoid sexual harassment is predicated on the misguided belief that society cannot be changed and that sexual harassment is an inherent part of the experience of womanhood.

Often, modesty is proffered not only as a solution to sexual harassment, but also as a formula for getting men to like you in the right way, to get consumed as a good woman. Women’s bodies are still objectified as sexually available to men’s advances which we are automatically imagined as desiring at all times and from all quarters. Modesty then ties into the way society regulates how and with whom women should engage in sexual or romantic relationships: women must be passive recipients of men’s attention, with no ownership of our bodies or our sexualities.

Consumption of women’s bodies remains, male entitlement is reinforced, and objectification is continuously normalised as an inherent part of relations between women and men, a fact that women must learn to live with.

4.. For a discussion of this, refer to Don Mitchell’s Feminism and Cultural Change: the Geographies of Gender.

5. Valentine, Gill. The Geography of Women’s Fear.

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28 THE WIDE MARGIN The idea that women’s sartorial choices are contingent on what men will find acceptable and attractive, continues to be reinforced. As a result, women cannot simply choose to cover up or not because of the ingrained patriarchal demand that women live for male desire. Sexual harassment and sexual violence is framed as the correct response to transgressing patriarchy’s demands.

Black women in Zimbabwe — and under the white supremacist global order — continue to bear the burden of being imagined as hypersexual.6 Racist reading of our bodies means that our bodies are perceived as sexually deviant with the implication that it is impossible to rape women who, by definition, are always already sexually available. We are perceived as inherently promiscuous and sinful,7 such that the mere presence of our bodies in certain public spaces is interpreted as solicitation (with sex workers being regarded by the state as unsavoury and immoral characters), leading to the arrest, detention, and fining of many women, and the institution of a de facto curfew for all women.

Every few years, a police operation ostensibly targeting sex workers but actually targeting all women, is launched. In 1983 it was Operation Clean-up which led to the formation of the Women’s Action Group as a response to the mass detention, by soldiers and police, of about six thousand urban women in three days. More recently it’s been Operation Chipo Chiroorwa (operation Chipo Get Married). Women have to go out of our way to counter the damaging effects of hypersexualised messaging and to establish recognition of our capacity to be victims of sexualised harm. This labelling of black women’s bodies by colonialists continues to haunt Zimbabwean society where many people profess some form of Christianity and where a lot of moral conservatism has been subsumed into our various cultures under the misleading banner of “Africanness”.

My own class privilege and access to classed public spaces keeps me safe(er) because I am usually perceived as one who belongs to them. I have access to legal and communal recourse should I be harmed in them.

Different rules govern these classed spaces. I am able to frequent them because I can afford it and because, in them, I feel relatively safer. In the more affluent areas of Harare women can bare a lot more skin and will merely be ogled rather than attacked. In spaces that are ostensibly accessible to the entire public class dynamics still play a part because men tend to hesitate to harass a visibly privileged person; whereas I’ve been whistled at, spat on, and cussed out as I walked through downtown Harare or got off a kombi, other women have been groped and stripped, and otherwise assaulted.

Whilst modesty is the patriarchal standard for all women, the way in which it is enforced is affected by the class to which we are perceived to belong. For the pedestrian or passenger in public transportation, chances of sexual harassment in public space are high. Those of us who have access to private transportation are free from the anxieties of walking through public space or using public transportation to get to destinations outside our homes. Having the luxury of a vehicle reduces occasions of sexual harassment in public spaces simply because we aren’t interacting with people which sometimes creates the illusion that sexual harassment is a rare occurrence caused by the harassed woman doing something provocative and wrong.

6.. Hobson, Janell. “Black Female Too-Muchness: Between Hypersexual Norms and Respectable Exceptions”.

7. “[A] group of Black women enjoying an evening at New York’s swank Standard Hotel were harassed by security, who told them bluntly that he believed they were soliciting sex work.” (Kali Nicole Gross, “The Criminal Unrapeability of Black Women”)

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29

After the stripping of a minor last year, the Katswe Sistahood, called for a protest, the Mini Skirt March. The goal was to have a diverse group of women show up in miniskirts or whatever they felt comfortable wearing and assert the fact that women have the same right and access to the city as men do, that regardless of what we wear, we must be able to walk around without fear of harassment and harm and that we have a right to bodily integrity. On October 4th, 2014 there were about two hundred women, each decked out in clothing of her choosing, who were ready to sing, dance, and give statements of solidarity. I remember wondering why there was such a low turn-out because, in my mind, sexual harassment is a problem that affects us all, and surely we could all come together to put our foot down and say enough. But as it turns out there were quite a number of objections to the way the march was going to be carried out: forthright, in-your-face-protesting combined with women showing their skin. This approach presented a version of womanhood that is coarser than the clean image of good, hardworking, morally upright, respectable womanhood often relied upon to push through necessary legislative reform. This created a tactical disconnect within the movement.

Respectability as a political strategy requires that those who are marginalised or oppressed show that they can meet the standard of objective goodness which is set by the oppressor. Those who become respectable people gain moral authority and political legitimacy which can then be parlayed into hitherto unobtainable rights. In Zimbabwe, women perform respectability by indicating that they are willing to be, and capable of being, hands-on mothers and fantastic wives to men.

Respectable women promise that the extension of political/economic/ social rights afforded to us will not rock the boat, that we will manage to fulfil our roles and do more to feed ourselves wonderfully into the system, helping to make it more economically productive. To be sure, there is nothing wrong with wanting to be a good mother or a wife, rather there is a problem with there being a mandatory societal expectation that all women perform these roles and only these roles in order to be considered “real” women.8 The reasoning goes that the system cannot retain its coherence while still denying respectable women their basic human rights. Concomitantly, it is easier to push through reforms if the system does not perceive you as a threat but rather as possible collaborators conforming to the values underpinning the status quo. If a group can present the ideal of righteous discontent or erroneous exclusion, then, the argument goes, the systems of oppression will be more likely to fall away. In Zimbabwean women’s organising, respectability politics emphasises a need for good wholesome womanhood as characterised by heterosexism, muted sexuality, marriage, religious affinity (preferably to Christianity) and reticence in nuanced discussions about our culture. Controversy is to be avoided in order to do the practical work of improving women’s lives by meeting immediate needs. Women in miniskirts, wreaking havoc over their rights, ensuring that it is not business as usual in the central business district, subverts the image of respectable womanhood.

8.. Hungwe, Chipo. “Putting them in their place: ‘respectable’ and ‘unrespectable’ women in Zimbabwe gender struggles”.. Feminist Africa Issue 6. 2006: Subaltern Sexualities.

30 THE WIDE MARGIN Modesty as a solution to violence against women feeds into respectability politics because it presents an image of a woman who has done her utmost to avoid being harmed in public spaces and who then needs help dealing with a few “bad apples”, perhaps through legislative attention or the arrest of touts who strip women. This is a story the public can get behind because it does not implicate wider society in a rape culture. This strategy does not allow for deeper conversations about the denial of women’s personhood and bodily integrity, nor does it confront the reality of men’s feelings of entitlement to women’s bodies.

The premise of respectability politics is that of oppressive institutions: that basic human rights can and should be earned. Contrary to this is the idea that the human dignity inherent in all persons is what guarantees our human rights; otherwise rights become contingent on ‘good behaviour’, that is, women have the right to walk in public spaces safely as long as they are ‘appropriately’ dressed, it’s not too dark, they are accompanied by a man who is their husband or other relative (lest they be suspected to be soliciting). Our behaviour and protest tactics are policed by those within marginalised communities to ensure that we don’t make each other look bad. While some of us are asserting our right to be able to walk around wearing as much or as little as we like, others propose a ‘less antagonistic’ way to engage that will not compromise their legitimacy in the eyes of the state.

We need a conversation about women’s personhood because the majority of the Zimbabwean society seems to struggle with the idea that women are, in fact, human.

Women are people. We are each of us human beings with human dignity deserving of all the rights that are accorded to persons.

This includes the right to bodily integrity, autonomy, and the freedom of movement that ensures our access to public goods, as enshrined in our constitution.

Women continue to be objectified and infantilised — blamed for being harmed, not believed when we complain about the violence that we endure day-in-day-out. In having a broader conversation about personhood we can put an end to the idea that there is a specific form of womanhood that is worthy of being safe, accorded basic human respect, and imbued with basic human rights while other forms of womanhood must not only be met with derision but must be stamped out violently. If we can recognise that women are human, the rhetoric that bolsters the advocacy for and granting of conditional rights that come with good behaviour clauses becomes patently ridiculous and never pragmatic. We come to realise that certain compromises merely engrain our complicity with an oppressive system and contribute to the continued structural exclusion of those women who are perceived as ‘bad’. We need to really, finally, come to believe, that women — all women — are people.

END

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05

BODY AND I

by Anne Moraa

“Funga miguu, Moi anapita” (Nairobi, Kenya. 1999 -2014)

The first time I remember being told to “close your legs,” I was an eight year old in Standard 3. A male teacher said, “Funga miguu, Moi anapita” (close your legs, the president is passing by). He said it loudly to twittering laughter. He said this after he dropped a piece of chalk and bent down to peer between my legs. He said this as he looked between my legs.

Even then it felt wrong. I can say this now, I can speak on the absurd sexism that a girl’s open legs are an invitation, while a boy’s are not. Now, I can question why a grown man actively sought to stare at a young girl’s panties.

But then, I was eight years old.

An eight-year-old girl has few choices. An eight-year-old Kenyan girl in a school which enforces corporal punishment has even fewer. An eightyear-old girl with a teacher staring between her legs, a teacher with a penchant for smacking girls on their tidy whities, a teacher who is known to like little girls, who held her from behind and lifted her up the stairs on her way to class, has none.

I closed my legs.

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THE WIDE MARGIN There is more to an education than facts; a good education teaches you to be a lady. A list of lessons:

1.

Move carefully.

2.

Body is not yours: This is the most important thing. Live

in Body, like a driver drives a car. Step out of it when bad

things happen. Pay the toll.

3.

Let go of crying when sad, laughing when happy,

screaming when angry, dancing in supermarkets,

feeling grass between your toes, hugging strangers,

rejecting lovers, moving clumsily and stumbling.

4.

Always, always, Body’s back must be straight.

5.

Body cannot show too much skin, or you will be raped.

6.

Body cannot show too little skin, or you will be unloved.

7.

Body must be attentive to every threat. Body must tune

everyone out. These are contradictory. Figure it out.

8.

Your hair, girl, your hair…

9.

Speak but only when spoken to.

10.

Be silent.

11.

Be strong. Be very strong.

12.

Be humble.

13.

Be brave.

14.

Be beautiful.

15.

Be quick.

16.

Be fuckable but stay unfucked.

17. Sashay.

18. Cook.

19. Smile.

I was not a good student. There are many lessons I have forgotten, and others I never learned. I still can’t make good chapati (Rule 17) and I cannot sashay (Rule 16). I missed the lessons on makeup and flirting. It’s not that I didn’t try. I did. I studied hard. A male classmate, who later came out as a gay, tried to teach me to sashay when I was nine and spent his break-time laughing at me. My chapatis came out square and I ate them alone while reading. When you read you are silent; I was great at Rule 9.

I tried to follow Rule 2 but I was a bad driver in an old-school car with a manual transmission. I’d shout at Body in the mirror, this awkward chubby thing that didn’t understand the word grace. I’d will it to move but Body and I didn’t speak the same language. Body and I worked well only when listening to others. My body wasn’t smart; I was. My mind was well-read, a student, quick wit but my body was clumsy, picked last for games, a mystery.

Body and I grew older.

My body tripped then fell in front a crowd at school and I cursed it for being so clumsy. Rule 4, Body! Rule 4!

Aged sixteen, I went to rave with a far too low cut a shirt emblazoned “Gorgeous” in diamanté across burgeoning breasts. I wanted to be loved, so Body had to be adorned. Body’s ass was grabbed but I was too busy dancing. I danced with my friends and pretended the hands, plural, branded only Body.

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Aged seventeen, I went to university in the UK and used my Zimbabwean friend’s fake ID because all black girls look alike. And I heard “your hair girl, your hair” so I couldn’t bear to allow my hair, as it grew out of my head, to show. Instead, unable to afford regular braiding and unable to manage a weave, I let braids hang well past their sell-by-date, each braid literally hanging on the two inches of hair I couldn’t stand. I’d later trim the braids into a desperate bob.

I wore heels.

I only kissed boys in foreign cities and countries, when drunk. Sober, I couldn’t stand the new mix of desire and distaste I saw in the eyes of white British men.

Do you have a place where you live so deeply in your own skin, like you did when you danced on grass before you turned eight? At seventeen, I found one. Between six tequila shots and a handsome Spanish man, between the pen and fingertips, between the rhythm and the step, somewhere in the cracks between Rules are places you can live. Body and I were one, only sometimes, and only at night, and only when I danced.

Aged twenty, I came back home. I knew I wanted to write and went for it mindlessly. Maybe Body led then, a brief moment in my life when I stopped trying to live by the Rules and just did. And I did. Body and I worked well with written words between us. Hand would move and type seamlessly, almost before I knew what I was thinking. We’d stand together, Body and I, on a stage and speak loudly, and I would hear the husk in my voice and I would feel the sway in my hip. It was special. It wasn’t every moment, but I’d give my life for those moments because then it wasn’t Body and me; I simply was.

A year passed. I’m not sure which failed first, Body or me. Me perhaps, due to the pressure, the failure, the inability, the lack of immediate success and love; or Body, rounded, clumsy as usual. The same body, unchanged.

(Why wasn’t it better?)

Another year passed. It was Body that betrayed me.1 I didn’t, no, couldn’t leave the bed. I would scream, “Get up, get up, brush your teeth, do something, anything!” But it had been a long time since Body and I spoke to each other without words between us, and words weren’t coming. Hand tremored, like a blinking cursor. I was screaming and yelling and praying and crying, but that was me. Body didn’t move. Body didn’t sound. Body didn’t hear. I gave up. Body led for months — Eat. Drink. Shit. Sleep. Eat. Drink. Shit. Sleep.

It was terrifying for me to be so weak that Body had to take over, to feel failure coursing in my mind and lethargy following, again, and again, and again. I think therefore I am, I told myself. I breathe, therefore I am, Body responded. Body was in control. I got up one day, eventually, but this period was a reckoning, an understanding that my body can fail to listen, that the same voice that told it to close its legs wasn’t strong enough to tell it to walk.

1.. Moraa, Anne. “24 Hours of the Day”. (In)Sanity: What ‘Crazy’ Looks Like, Brainstorm Kenya Quarterly #2

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Saartjie Baartman (Not her real name) (Edinburgh, Scotland, July-August 2014)

To confront your own body: “Are you okay being nude?”

“How nude?”

“Well, topless. You’ll have this skirt thing round your waist, and red paint all over.”

“Is it hypoallergenic?”

“What?”

“The paint. I have sensitive skin.”

I replayed this conversation between myself and Brett Bailey, the artist behind Exhibit B, over and over again. I was to be a performer, a model, my breasts bare save for the paint. I’m still uncertain about why the nudity didn’t bother me much. Perhaps because it was the first time I was going to use Body for something that I believed in, instead of being limited to navigating the world as deemed appropriate; or it was the first time I would use Body, not try and inhabit it or ignore it or trick it, but use it, like a tool or weapon; or because it was the first time I understood Body could be transgressive art; or because I wouldn’t have to follow the bloody Rules; or because I didn’t have to be sexy or tall or flawless; or because I’d play a character and that I didn’t have to be “me”.

Still, I would be a black girl, performing as a pygmy in an installation designed by a white man.

Exhibit B centers on the dehumanisation and exploitation of the black body from colonialism to the ­­present took and the tableau of the “human zoo”. Even that phrase, “human zoo”, is enough to spark some valid questions. Critiques of the exhibit argued that it, at best, did not subvert but only reinforced the white gaze, and at worst, it was racist, particularly as it was run and designed by a white South African artist.

To an extent, I agree. Bailey cannot experience what it is to live in a Black body; empathise perhaps, but not experience. There were thousands of visitors, some of whom, well, are the reason Body is bound by Rules: White, British – Scottish mostly – and with the same desire/disgust in their male gaze they would look over my body. Some visitors were hopeless. Some, frankly, I hated. The ones who can’t see a woman behind her tits. The occasional sociopath who looked at me with blank curiosity, like one glances at a sink, with nothing behind their eyes.

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And they weren’t even the worst. No, worst were the “save your soul” breed, the hypocrite humanitarians who cast themselves as God; the type who come to Africa to save the children and relate so deeply to your struggle, the same way they relate to dogs at the Society for the Protection and Care of Animals. They saw this pain and cried for us, not with us, and left feeling good about themselves. To them I was an animal trapped in a zoo.

Yet, to me, my performance wasn’t about them.

I did, and still do, believe the art was delicately handled and did challenge perceptions, as did many of the performers and critics. My favourite exhibition was that of a man bound with duct tape to airplane seats, representing the asylum seekers harmed by British authorities.

Still, why did I do it? I love to perform but there were spoken word shows and plays. Why choose to stand perfectly still for hours with nothing but cracking red paint between Body and world? It wasn’t even about the people who did understand, those whose perceptions were changed, those who were moved. Those who cried, and those who didn’t know, and those who couldn’t know. The obnoxious Scottish couple who, I believe, made the one black person in their village feel terribly awkward as they rambled on about what they learned at the Exhibit when they’d invite him over for tea. I imagine they felt all warm inside, welcoming him into the community emphatically while loudly chastising anyone who dared say anything about it. Simple, small but honest change. They might have made the exhibit worth it yes, but it wasn’t about them. It wasn’t about the audience. It was about the relationship between Body and me.

We would stand perfectly still, together, not moving for hours, thinking of how not to move, of how to be someone else, of being in Body. I played an Ogiek woman. I didn’t know her before I played her so I imagined a character:

She is strong, awake, no memory of the life she lived before. She is standing, trapped in an enclosure. A dead and badly stuffed monkey is nearby. It smells. People stare at her, endlessly, surprised she isn’t a statue. She isn’t afraid. She decides she must be there to judge them, to stand still, be an impartial observer. Let them look at my body, she says, let them stare at it at my dangling breasts and hint of a smile, let them, and I will see who they are. I see you.

As I applied my red paint, I saw her. As my skin became the shade of hers, I became her. I was more confident walking as her. On the sand, with the animal noises and scenery that she found farcical, I was strong, because she was. When I would step down from the stage and notice my paint had cracked and my robe was covered in her skin, I would get scared again.

When doing my warm-up routine, as myself, in the company of men, I would grab the robe carefully and press my arms against my breasts in case they jumped too freely.

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When we went out for dinner and drinks, and one of the boys would flirt I’d be by turns embarrassed, repulsed, and surprised. Did they want me or did they want the red painted woman who stood in her body? Did they use that as a yardstick? Were they like the men who stared at the statue with curiosity and lust before they saw the woman?

Did they see me? I still don’t have an answer.

Three days after I first performed, I asked to play Sarah Baartman. Her exhibit was…challenging. She would stand in the middle of the room on a rotating platform, surrounded by glass, a ballerina in a cage. Painted in all black, still, she was sculptural. She needed nothing but lights and eyes on her. I wanted to be that powerful. I painted myself black. I went, I stood, I tried.

A man stared at my breasts. My legs shook. Another tried to peek up my skirt. Someone brought a chair. I think a man winked at me, and I knew they couldn’t touch me but I swear a hand grabbed my thighs and saliva drooled onto my hip.

Body’s legs were trembling. Shaking again and again and again. My mind pleaded. I was crying inside. I could not. Body could not. We could not so I could not. Furious, I returned to the changing room. I did not understand.

I nearly cried. I could not play Saartjie because my job was to play a human being. I spent the night researching her.

Saartjie Baartman was not her real name. No one knows her name before she was taken from her home. She was named Saartjie or Sarah Baartman.

“Saartjie Baartman” was not human. “Saartjie” was a body, black skin, big hips, and big arse. “Saartjie” was a body as proof that blacks were more simian than human. “Saartjie” was a displayed curiosity, and for a little bit extra, they could poke her with a finger or a stick. My job was to humanize the dehumanised. My body refused to play a mannequin. My body needed a person.

I had to imagine her body when it was her own, before it was theirs to poke and prod and kill and dissect and display. I asked again. I stood again.

Yvonne Owuor writes in Dust that “to name something is to bring it to life.” I imagined her name. I won’t tell it to you or say it out loud because it wasn’t true and I will not add another untruth. I will tell you her name wasn’t Sarah. It was the name she had before Saartjie or Sarah. It was her name when she was surrounded by girls her age with hips as wide as hers, and she could move in her skin without eyes boring into her. It was her name, in her body, in my body. It was me, as her, fully embodied in my body. Unified, I — we — stood tall.

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“Black from the waist down” (Gwangju, South Korea, September 2015) At this point in my life, more than a year after the first Exhibit, Body and I have been getting along. I listen to her more often. Yes, we argue, but like best friends do on who’s the best member of a boy-band.

Now, there are new rules.

Rule 34: Go somewhere now, where you don’t speak the language. Imagine everything they say is a blessing.

Rule 20: Imagine being yourself.

A group of twenty or so black people being utterly themselves can become both terribly and hilariously cliché: The bus driver who learned to arrive twenty minutes after the official pickup time because we were never on time; the big hair; the laughter ringing across streets and roads; the late nights.

I was there to do the Exhibit one more time, this time playing a Pygmy. A dead lion was now part of the Exhibit in a claustrophobic hallway. Half the troupe was French so we communicated poorly but moved together well.

My Korean friend told me that Koreans can be racists, but I don’t speak Korean. The black body doesn’t have as much weight here, negative or positive, much like the Asian body in Africa (at least until the recent more increased involvement of China on the African Continent). I was not expected to be late or stupid, baboonish or promiscuous. The clichés I represented didn’t seem to be clichés here. We were never on time not because black folk are never on time, but because we were never on time.

Rule 5: You are who you are, cliché or not.

Nothing was expected of me as far as I could tell. There are new relationships forming between East Asia and East Africa, but their histories and textbooks are written in different script. We both speak a dialect of English. South Korea was colonized by the Japanese, so we share a grappling with colonial history, and genetic memories of trauma. Our bodies look different but they move with a similar sense of reclamation and sadness. There was gravitas and humour.

There is an intensity of body here, an intensity of self-care: The hotel’s bathroom had more products than I could count, including some kind of foam that I still don’t understand. I was told that the skin here is flawless, and the fashion impeccable. I walked in shorts and stood in the sun, pockmarks and all. I watched a girl stand twenty feet from a crossing on the road, squeezing her body into the shadow of a lamppost. Others held umbrellas in the beautiful late summer sun. It was to hide their skin from the sun; pale is beautiful. This was familiar. They were uncomfortable in their skin. I could relate. I smiled. These bodies of ours move in their own societies, with their own intricacies but we are all shielding ourselves from the sun. We are similar.

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The Korean language, with its gorgeous script, lends itself to politeness: there are several different ways to address someone, each indicating their societal status and the level of respect accorded. Women, of course, must employ strategies (rules) to be even more polite. Only native-born Koreans fully grasp the intricacies. I remember Tambudzai in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel, Nervous Conditions, debating the intricacies of washing hands: whose hands should be washed first, whose hands are more worthy?

The week flew by. Perhaps because there was less introspection and more being. Eating kimchi and dried squid. Seeing the ocean lap at the mountains. Falling asleep alone, happy. And hours and hours of standing still. It was new, but quick, that week. The whole week was a Scottish hour.

I asked, when I got back home, why it had been so quick. In fact, the entire year had passed swiftly. I spent a lot of time with Body. I wasn’t fully myself, but I was getting to know myself. I still am. I was understanding Body’s language; that when it needs to sleep, I should sleep; that when it wants to dance, I should dance. The rules, designed to protect me, were Body’s gag. It was choking, Body was saying.

I could never stand straight, but I can flare my nostrils see? No. I can’t catch a ball, but this voice projects across concert halls. No, I don’t remember what the rules are in what order but I am still ticklish so I can laugh just because of a feather. I am frisky and loud and regular. I feel warm in the sun.

I felt the difference more when we danced outside a restaurant having eaten fried chicken (being the cliché) and being filmed by Korean restaurant goers (the propensity to filming being their cliché). Because I did not understand Korean, their words couldn’t hurt me. When I heard “Black from the waist down”, an English lyric in a South Korean club anthem, I cringed. The rumours of the mandigo have come here too. Only one step away from the lazy and the stupid, the promiscuous and baboonish.

But remember Rule 34: Imagine everything they say is a blessing. Close your eyes. For the moment, just for the moment it doesn’t matter what they think.

I danced.

I danced because my body loved the beat and my ears could shut out noise.

At least until it got too loud. At least until the song ended.

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40 THE WIDE MARGIN “Take my dress and give me your trousers” – Mary Muthoni Nyanjiru (Nairobi, Kenya, Now.) In Wambui Mwangi’s trenchant essay on the body, “Silence is a Woman”, a phrase in particular rang out to me as I wrote this piece: “Without a body, Wanjiku is only a name.”

Without a body, I am just a name.

There are still moments when I hear that teacher’s voice and feel his eyes lick my thighs. “Funga miguu, Moi anapita”. At the age of twentyfive, I still instinctively close my legs. The attempt to detach myself from Body when I was eight years old didn’t protect me as much it left me floating, unanchored. I had to separate Body from self to make sense of what happened, but it has become gravely important to find ways to live within myself, to inhabit this body, not to simply be me, to be whole and not divided. But how do you reconnect? How does this strange body, this vehicle you’ve been driving, become you again? Body and I aren’t one yet, not really, but, like any failed relationship, it begins with a conversation.

It’s a painful thing, relearning the language of the body. I should have it innately, but I forgot it or lost it, or had it stolen. I want to live in my body like a dancer or a boxer does in theirs, aware of where their strength lies.

To find Mwangi’s words, to find women in harmony with their bodies, women stripping naked as a political act, women refusing to have their bodies owned by others, women painting and sculpting and performing, creating art through or of the female body, redefining it, weaving;2 women writing out their desires, women shouting #MyDressMyChoice knowing it’s not about the dress, but the body and mind, the I, that lives in it, even women taking selfies so you see their bodies as they see themselves.

Women can be in their bodies. I, maybe, can be in mine.

It is helping to realise that the Rules were never mine, not Body’s, not really.

Read the rules out again, even the good ones, the new ones. The rules won’t stop your rape or assault or harassment. They won’t raise your salary or make you feel beautiful. They won’t stop the casual comments and grave dangers. They won’t stop your need to eat, shit, sleep, fuck. I can’t help but overthink the Rules, analyse, write, rewrite, reframe, reconstruct and, and, and…all these tasks…The rules are a chokehold.

“Take my dress and give me your trousers,” says Mary Muthoni Nyanjiru.

I love that quote because it demands stripping and redressing. It’s about being in full possession of your body, understanding its femininity and instead of rejecting it, owning it. It is impossible to say you are not your body if you are a woman, or black. Your body is you.

It is about discarding the rules.

2..The Weaving Kenya Women’s Collective. “Weaving Pan Africanism at the Scene of Gathering” (pdf). Feminist Africa 20. 2015: PanAfricanism and Feminism.

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These days we talk, Body and I, and we talk often. “Be,” she says. My Body, yes, my body is telling me to simply be.

Body — the pockmarks from acne, the cramps that rage through me, the lonely unruly hair that grows on the nipple, the pendulous breasts, the wide nose, and wish-they-were-wider hips; the near imperceptible scar on my right wrist when I fell off my bike when I was eight years old, and ran home crying, and was hugged and felt loved, and stood up and rode again and again and again; the brain it houses that thinks it’s in control but has learned to eat when hungry, to sleep when tired, to laugh when happy, to cry when sad, to be alone, to be with others, to be within — this body that isn’t anyone else’s but is mine.

I recently discovered something new about Body; it has begun naming itself.

I won’t tell you those names, because they aren’t yours to know. I will tell you that Body began its naming, to my joy, with its most feminine parts.

Body named itself with the aid of my friends. Body was not named by you.

Body will not turn when you call its name for only I can call it. Body will rename itself as it ages and shapes itself, and I will try to listen. We will curl up together with a good book, like we always did.

END

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06

IN MY SKIN

by Dorothy Kigen

I am biracial: mixed, half-caste, mlami, mzungumwafrika. My features make curious people ask me: What are you? Where is home? Where are you from? My response depends on who is asking, why, and when; but usually, I simply say that I am Kenyan.

If pressed to be specific (Are you sure? You don’t look Kenyan. Are you married here?) If I’m not offended by being interrogated this way, I elaborate that my father is Kalenjin, my mother Hungarian. Even so, “are you Kenyan?” is a question they ask me very often. I want “Kenyan” to be enough, I want that to be all that needs to be said, but it is not.

I recall the discussions that followed the London Olympics opening ceremony in 2012, where the Kenyan team was led into the stadium by a swimmer named Jason Dunford who, though Kenyan-born, is no representative of the term Kenyan as many understand it, that is, as a matter of race and ethnicity.

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44 THE WIDE MARGIN Ideally, the world would indeed be post-racial and we would all see beyond race and colour. Though I wish this for the sake of my own comfort and sense of belonging, I suspect the same impulse is at the heart of a lot of apologist racist and ethnicist rhetoric. Indeed, the terms “post-race” and “colour-blind” are often used in defense of behavior that some find offensive, and it’s usually white behavior: An American’s faux-pas, a race incident usually involving an expatriate and locals, or a complaint about behavior of white patrons of Art Caffe — “Yeah, but he’s not being racist.”

It is strange how ready we can be to deny racial prejudice, how optimistic we can be when confronted with the shadows of our histories.

It’s not comfortable to admit, but that’s it: I want race and ethnicity to not matter because I want to live unscrutinized, uninterrogated. Light skin in Kenya is hypervisible. It comes with its own set of stereotypes — that she must be stuck up, spoiled, shallow, weak; and if the skin in question is so light that it suggests foreignness, specifically a Caucasian foreignness, then one is quickly summed up as a gullible target, a mark whose pockets are ripe for the picking. Sometimes I come up against the former, sometimes the latter. I have been told I have no right to my own surname, that I am a half-breed, and a violation. It always hurts to hear such. Such spurious claims embarrassed me when I was younger, and they anger me now. I am angered by every put-on twang, every colour-coded label; I’m unable to take them as anything other than an insult. These things are said to me over and over again.

Yet, with this anger is also the knowledge of certain advantages. I was always vaguely attentive to so-called light-skin privilege but was, of course, much more sensitive to the disadvantages. To be human means that that which hurts is remembered far more vividly than that which helps. So here I am, unhappy because of a nebulous residual guilt during a primary school history class where I learnt about the evils of colonialism and felt somehow complicit; unhappy because I sometimes find myself in the company of people who think my opinions on issues about black femininity, Africanness, or nationality are never valid because of what the colour of my skin signifies to them. It is frustrating to be constantly misrecognised, but it happens for reasons I started to understand differently after I started thinking deeply about feminism: reading, mostly online, the articles and critiques of contemporary culture, the tweets and discussions with the women behind the tweets. It is this that enabled me to really consider the larger systems in which we all exist, trapped.

Living with one particular form of oppression teaches you the syntax and the patterns of it, opens your eyes to see the imbalances of power and how it works, as well as how oblivious to the system those favored by it may be.

A lot of feminist conversation online is sidetracked by people demanding to be taught, to be told exactly why they’re wrong. For this reason I believe a lot of formative discussion has to take place in the absence of men, so that less time is wasted trying to point out what is so obvious to everyone else — the numerous small inequalities, the little multiplying damages that never cease wearing us down — and focus on what we really need to work out — the forces that motivate them, and what is to be done about them.

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Any feminist who has men in her life — and this is most of us — has probably expended a lot of energy and time engaging in #NotAllMen conversations - patiently explaining that yes, not all men, but in actual fact, enough men.

The patriarchy is a gender-based system of oppression I understand, one whose nuances I see clearly, having lived each day mired in it. I see male privilege clearly, and see that the beneficiaries of this privilege do not readily accept that it exists. They do not want to accept that being dealt a certain hand of cards can in fact make you a part of the problem, whether you intend it to or not. I see this easily. Because of this, I am learning to see the imbalances of power built into colourism.

Colourism is an expression of racism which normalises certain physical features, designating them as signifiers of higher forms of humanity, an essential purity that is unattainable by those who look different from the norm. In Kenya, the cachet of light skin is undeniable. Ng’endo Mukii’s short film Yellow Fever explores the efforts many women go through to become desirable, which light skin ostensibly guarantees. The implication is that desirability is performed for an audience — in some cases one’s dissatisfied self, a self that desires to be desired — and how does one learn to be unhappy about her skin except by the people she desires continually rejecting her because of it while they cherish those who look different?

Light, lustrous skin and long, flowing hair — men, we are misled to believe, will love us if we possess these. Thus, the fetishisation of mixed-race babies, particularly little girls. Some men have told me they want my skin or hair for their daughter, so that they will have their own pretty little things decorating their life. Not necessarily for their sons, though.

Vera Sidika — “Kenya’s Kim Kardashian” so-called — is very frank about her decision to lighten her skin, and how this decision improved her ability to earn money.1 She has said as much in local and international interviews and on the reality show Nairobi Diaries. The marketing of the show was, in fact, centred on her, with teasers and clips of her comments on the same issue. Sidika was widely criticized for this in another one of those perplexing situations where society condemns the results of the demands it places on women.

On January 31st, @Dexxe shared a series of screenshots showing a casting call posted to Facebook for aspiring TV show hosts and the commentary that followed beneath the post. The very first requirement specified “a light complexion, African or mixed race”. The post went on to defend this requirement in the comments: “Has it occurred to you that the target audience goes wider than just for black Africans? [... ] It is actually the light skinned, mixed race, and white models who get fewer opportunities for ads […] only for some Pan-African or global ads.” By their own admission, the lighter models get potentially more lucrative opportunities. Similarly, in a country known internationally for running, Skechers sells athletic shoes using stock photos of light-skinned people, with nary a Kiplagat or Jepkosgei in sight.

1..“Socialite Vera Sidika’s new look.” #theTrend, 6 Jun 2014. NTV Kenya.

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46 THE WIDE MARGIN Bleaching skin is often harmful to one’s health.2 It is a social practice that raises many underlying issues.3 Still, we only condemn the women who do it and not the society that creates and sustains the perception that light skin is inherently more valuable than dark skin. A pretty face, slim waist, thick thighs — you are not supposed to work towards attaining any of these ideals, it seems, but should be born with them. Surgically enhanced women are demonised. The use of cosmetics is described as women “lying” to men or “false advertising”.

Colourism is harmful to the women who suffer under and struggle with it daily. It is particularly insidious as another way to pit women against each other, another way to insult and tear each other down, one more way of alienating us from each other and from ourselves, so that we are forced to try to find inconstant comfort and support from the very people and institutions that perpetuate the system that demeans, damages, and destroys us.

END

2..Anekwe, Obiora N. “The Global Phenomenon of Skin Bleaching: A Crisis in Public Health”.

3. Bakare-Yusuf, Bibi. “Yellow Fever, NKO?”

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07

NATIVE TONGUE

by Ola Osaze

It was the summer of 2010 at the height of World Cup fever on an unusually slow afternoon at Festac Grill, a Nigerian restaurant sandwiched between an empty lot strewn with refuse and a car repair shop. This working-class Brooklyn neighborhood, whose streets were desolate at night, was busy during the day. At the repair shop, black and brown men in blue overalls peered into hoods of cars and slid underneath them to poke at their bellies.

A man and I were waiting for our takeout in the dim restaurant. Its peachcoloured walls were lined with haunting carved wood masks and canvasses drenched in vivid hues of blues, reds, and yellows. The aroma of goat meat pepper soup and ogbono thickened the air. Through tall black speakers sequestered in the corners of the oblong room, 9ice serenaded us with Mu Number. On one side of the room, mounted at the centre of the wall, was a giant flat screen on which a football match was live. A few male patrons sat facing the screen, their fingers poised in midair clasping soup-soaked balls of iyan.

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“Ah ah! He should have scored, abi?” said one of them, dark like me, with a silhouette that reminded me of my father. Our conversation began in pidgin, inflected with more and more Yoruba.

“What do you mean you don’t speak your language,” he asked, a shadow of pity darkening his face. “You should know how to speak your language. Didn’t your parents speak it at home?”

He raised an incredulous eyebrow and rested his hand on the counter.

When I didn’t answer right away, he turned to face me and get a good look at the Yoruba and Edo kid who could barely carry on a conversation in either language. I did not know what to say to him: Do I say what I usually said, that, yes, my parents spoke multiple languages at home, but only to each other and not to us kids? That we were discouraged from speaking our languages? That we were discouraged from even speaking pidgin because, according to them, “that’s how bush people communicate”?

Do I talk about how, despite spending the first fifteen years of my life in Nigeria, I barely know the place? That during that time, when I wasn’t away at boarding school, I only ever saw the compounds of our homes, the interiors of our chauffeured cars? Do I tell him about the vice-like grip our parents, particularly my mom, had on us, and the paranoia undergirding it?

“No, I don’t speak Yoruba.”

The man shook his head, his pity looking more like sorrow. He grabbed his plastic bag, in which were tupperware containing fufu and egusi, off the counter and sauntered out of the restaurant. I looked at the slim, dark woman at the cash register. Her ponytail was slowly coming undone and sweat beaded her forehead. Just beyond her was the kitchen where, through the glass panel of the door, I could see two older women in head ties, bent over the sink washing something. The cashier placed a bag of tupperware filled with my goodies on the countertop. I felt certain that she was silently judging me. “$14.62 please?” she said.

Her eyes seemed to ask me the same questions the man had. I stared back for one second, trying to summon an unashamedness I did not feel.

Failing, I lowered my gaze and fished money out of my pocket to pay her.

Yoruba, the language of my father’s people who are from the western region of Nigeria, is spoken by more than twenty-two million people within Nigeria and in other countries like Benin, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Togo, Cuba, Saint Lucia, Brazil, Granada, UK, and USA. This language — spoken by the people in his village of Saki and those of Lagos, Oyo, Ogun, and other Yoruba states in Nigeria — is part of the Niger-Congo group of dialects.

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My mother’s people are of Edo state in southwestern Nigeria. They are a people who can trace their lineage back thousands of years, a people that used to be called Igodomigodos, before being renamed the Edos by Oba (the Edo word for ‘King’) Eweka I. Their language, also called Edo, is of the Volta–Niger subgroup of languages also within the Niger-Congo family.

The eyes through which I see the world, my habits of thought, and the languages with which I dialogue with the world are an amalgamation of my parents’ ethnic and personal histories and a reality which mandated that English take precedence in our household.Though I was born in Port Harcourt, my family bounced around a lot during my childhood. Dad’s job took us from Port Harcourt to Warri to Kaduna to Kano to Abuja to Lagos to Ibadan back to Port Harcourt. Through all these geographic changes, the one constant was language; between my parents and their children, that language was English. This is why I later had to learn about the prevalence of Yoruba-speaking peoples worldwide, and Edo’s position in the world of African languages, from the pages of Omniglot.com and Wikipedia rather than from the mouths of my mother and father.

I spent much of my time in Port Harcourt, a city of thousands of ethnic groups and tens of thousands of expatriates. Two worlds collided in my home. In one, we were similar to an aristocratic British family where children were banished from the dining table for such atrocities as holding the fork in the right hand instead of the left or resting elbows on the dining table while eating. In this world, good little girls, such as I was supposed to be, curtseyed or prostrated themselves when they greeted their elders.

Good little children, such as I was instructed to be, only played with other good little children of similar or higher socioeconomic status. You said “yes, please” and “no thank you,” not because of an inviolable respect and reverence for others, but because “that’s how high-class people address each other.” You were admonished if you didn’t speak the Queen’s English. Beethoven, Michael Jackson, ABBA, and Madonna comprised the soundtrack of our lives, instead of King Sunny Adé, Brenda Fassie, Tshala Muana, or Fela Kuti. Absent from our library were any books about PanAfricanist movements and liberation struggles. Bleaching creams were stacked on dressing tables as part of an ongoing battle waged against encroaching blackness, which also included staying out of the sun and doing all manners of things to rid ourselves of the natural kinks in our hair.

Ours was a world riddled with the persistent fear that our wealth invited the envy of all around us, and their envy brought with it untold threats and made others dangerous and unpredictable. Mother, the perpetual worrier and the one, being a woman, with the responsibility of maintaining our household, was also the steward of this wealth, her wary eyes always surveying our surroundings for danger. Any harm that befell us, the children, reflected badly on mother and spoiled her standing in the rigid social class strata in which we found ourselves.

“Don’t eat when we get to the Obbot’s house. Those bush people are so jealous of us they will poison us,” she would caution, with fire in her eyes.

“I don’t ever want to catch you playing with Idemudia. He’s below our class,” she warned about my close friend in primary school.

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But it was never just Idemudia or the Obbots. It was also the Osas, the Ntuens, and many others, some of whom lived as comfortably as we did.

All were suspect because in Nigeria “man must wack.” A person must survive at any cost.

Class was everything and being “high-class” represented the zenith of accomplishment. It meant the ability to bribe your way into and out of any circumstance, limitless access to the best hospitals and schools, the safest places to live, and so on. With the use of your own personal generator, it meant freedom from frequent ubiquitous power outages. Anyone endangering our social quotient in any way was cut off. These included relatives of whom we had many who lived in Benin City, their complexions that of the ochre colour of the soil of mom’s hometown, and others from dad’s village of Saki with its surrounding jagged gray mountains.

Omniglot.com tells me “Yoruba” is spelled like so: Yorùbá. From Genii Games’ Yoruba 101 app, I learn that the Yoruba Alufabeeti is comprised of twenty-five letters, though Omniglot disagrees, stating there’s a twentysixth. The alphabet contains letters familiar to English speakers and some that are not: “G” (sounds like “ghee”) exists as does “Gb”, which is a difficult sound to describe phonetically.

“O” and “Ọ”, with the former sounding like “oh” while the latter is pronounced like “uh”.

“S” is distinct from “Ș”, with the latter sounding like “shhh”.

Of all twenty-five (or twenty-six) my favorites by far are “gb” and “kp” because of how one has to say the first letter-sound in the hollow of your throat then roll that sound into the utterance of the second letter-sound.

“Gb” sounds like the echoing of a drumbeat, while “kp” sounds like reverberating cymbals.

When I run into Yoruba people on the streets of New York where I live or in the Nigerian restaurants dotting the city, they greet me in my language.

“Bawo ni?”

With great pride I utter the correct response memorised from the recent Yoruba language website I was poring over.

“Mo wa daadaa, o ̣se.”

Sometimes they ask me my name.

“Ki ni orukọ rẹ?” and I am ready with the apt response.

“Mi ni Ola.” Wanting to know just what type of Yoruba I am, they ask where I’m from.

“Nibo ni o ti wa?”

I stumble over my answer.

“Lati Oyo State,” is how I eventually respond even though Oyo State only speaks to half of my lineage. The other half, the maternal part is Edo, but Nigeria is a patrilineal society and I’ve grown used to saying Oyo first and Edo second, if I bring up the second at all.

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52 THE WIDE MARGIN Sometimes the exchange of hellos, of names, of places of birth would be enough to establish my Nigerian authenticity and bring these exchanges, these brief moments of recognition and connection, to a close. At other times, they were merely the ice-breaker; as my interlocutor would launch into more complicated phrases, the singsong dialect pouring out of their mouths rapidly, my lack of fluency would become evident and my longheld shame would manifest a grim smile. I’m almost forty now, practically middle-aged, and still that grim smile is the best I can do when reminded of this cultural failing, this foreign-ness of my own native tongue.

For me, the inability to speak the language of my people represents the distance between the Nigeria I was taught to see and the one I want to see.

The Nigeria I was taught to see was one that was out to get us.

It was the world just beyond our tall cement fence, capped with sharp shards of green and brown glass. In the mornings I was chauffeured to primary school and in the afternoons I was deposited at home, back to the gilded prison of our big house and all the wealth that supposedly inspired jealousy and murderous intent in the hearts of everyone else.

“Don’t go anywhere. Come straight home,” my mother always instructed me in her clipped English, her eyes perpetually brimming with the fervour of the fearful.

She needn’t have worried because I had nowhere to go, no friends to see after school, no after-school activities in which to engage.

“It’s dangerous out there,” she’d say and I’d nod, scared witless.

Nigeria, this great, big populous mess of a country, was the “out there”, while our home was an island all on its own. Mine was a fear I didn’t understand, with all its hidden or erased histories of who and what we were; and always, always, the refrain was “distinguish yourself from the riffraff out there. Speak English. Speak it well.” So my siblings and I spoke it well and nothing else. The Nigeria I’d love to see? One in which I wander and maneuver the streets of Port Harcourt, Lagos, Ibadan, and other cities with ease. One where I can say with the wisdom and instincts of someone enjoying the familiarity of home: “You know that marketplace by…?”

Or “I remember that bookstore next to the…”

Or “I miss that buka on that street where we used to…”

The Nigeria I was taught to see was one of oil, of “how much” and “dash”.

Father was the Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation — the largest oil corporation in Nigeria at the time — in Port Harcourt. Mom owned many entrepreneurial ventures, like her Hotel Mona Lisa, one in Port Harcourt and another in Warri, both catering to the German, Lebanese, British, French, American oil expats and aspiring ogas.

In contrast to our relatives visiting from the village or the so-called family friends whom mom regarded with suspicious looks, these expats were treated to our suya and our stout, and allowed to sit on the plush green sofa in our second living room — the one reserved for “distinguished” guests, people like Chief Fawehinmi, who, every time he arrived in his gleaming black Benz, clad in a flowing brocade agbada, was accompanied by a fair-haired European, an air of entitlement wafting in with them.

THE WIDE MARGIN Afterwards, the guests would scurry away in the aftermath of a brokered business deal. Mom and dad would retreat into their haven where the second world in our household commenced. Here, the lingua franca was not English. Here dad’s Yoruba met mom’s Edo, their mingling sounds a symphony of heavy consonants and long vowels. On a bad day, which was most days of their marriage, these sounds clashed and rang through our household. They fought in these languages. They shared secrets through them and locked us out of their esoteric world.

As a child, I never questioned the predominance of English in our home.

After all, the same values were reflected in every aspect of Nigerian society including schools, media, government, film, literature, workplaces, and in everyday interactions with strangers on the streets, market places, offices, and so on. The languages we were taught in school were typically French (or Latin in father’s time), not even Edo or Igbo or Hausa or Ibibio or Yoruba or any one of the more than five hundred languages my people speak.

Because of this nationwide complicity in the denial and relinquishing of our mother tongues, I can’t blame my parents for their choices.

Father had the backbreaking pressures of being the first member of his family to go to school. “To get there I had to travel very far. Sometimes I had to swim there,” was the story he’d often tell. “But my father wanted me to go. He wanted a better life for me and he wanted me to make a better life possible for the rest of the family, which is why I didn’t have to work on the farm like my brothers and sisters did.” With the benefit of a scholarship, he left Nigeria in the 1960s, swapping a newly independent country on the verge of a civil war for its colonial parent, Britain. In black and white pictures of him prior to his emigration, father’s slanted tribal marks shone, his cheeks and chin were always clean-shaven, and a shy smile lifted the corners of his lips. The pictures he later took in Birmingham showed a sullen man, his beard covering up those marks that linked him with his people. His small awkward smile only ever appeared in photographs when we were also with him.

Even after returning to Nigeria in the 1970s and ascending the ladder of oil-fueled success, he never shaved his beard again, never revealed the patterns his father, a Sango Priest, had etched into his cheeks and packed full of herbs while chanting prayers.

“You don’t know how good you have it,” mom always said to us.

She’d regale us with stories about being poor, about the father that stood in the way of her education, about traveling far from home to somewhere in Igboland to serve as a house girl for another family. She made it to the UK somehow — we were never told how — only to be looked down upon by the whites there, only to experience the type of poverty that forced her to eat canned cat food because it was all she could afford. By the time she met my dad at a student dance in Birmingham, rage had hardened her. “You have to be better than them, always,” she’d say to us in the rare moments when she wasn’t screaming at us or beating us.

“Them” meaning white people.

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“Better than” meaning mastering things like English at the expense of our own languages.

It was in search of the better-than life that my mother brought me to America in 1991. I spent a portion of my first year in a strict Christian high-school in High Point, North Carolina. There were white students everywhere. It felt almost overwhelming to be surrounded by such uninterrupted whiteness, equally so to have to contend with the Christian curriculum (with, for instance, the prioritization of creationism in biology class) and the subtle or overt hatred of black people that was the backdrop to my day-to-day interactions with students and teachers. The principal mistook my Nigerian accent for a symptom of deficient mental capacity and decided to hold me back a year, so into the tenth grade I went. It was on the day we started reading Hamlet when I discovered that those white kids had a mangled grasp of the English language, that Africans were being forced to place a higher premium on the language than these people whose lips were fashioned to utter it in the first damn place. When we read Hamlet, I was the only one in my class who actually understood what was happening in it.

“What does it mean, Ms. Eubanks?” the students cried out, befuddled to the point of frustration, biting their tongues and cheeks in vain attempts to read the dialogue aloud. With a smirk on my face, I showed them how. The only foreigner in that all-white class and I was more adept at the language than they were. But inevitably, every day after school I came home to a mom who roared into the phone in Edo or Yoruba, her words colliding one into another at rapid pace and not one of them meaning anything to me. She’d communicate in a cascade of indecipherable phrases, her face contorted by the familiar rage which revealed more to me than her train of words. When I wasn’t cowering in fear of her, I was mystified by every utterance, desperate to unlock their hidden meanings.

I can recognize this concerto of hard and soft tones anywhere. I’ve heard it float above the din of noise on Harlem’s 125th street in the height of summer and the force of recognition has stopped me mid-stride. I’ve heard it behind me at the vegetable aisle of the grocery store and whirled around to find a full-bellied, head-tied, round-faced, cocoa-brown woman picking her way through a pyramid of navel oranges, chattering away, regaling the person on the other side of the phone with stories in Yoruba. The gb, kp, and eh sounds, even though I don’t always know what the words they form mean, as familiar to me as air.

After twenty-four years in the U.S., I realize my parents were right: speaking English fluently is the cultural capital that, in a lot of ways, has made my economic survival possible. When I was undocumented, it meant I could pass as an American and, especially in the years after 9/11, made finding employment possible. Speaking English fluently gained me access to middle- and upper-middle class circles, and helped me navigate the interlocking worlds of academic, leftist, activist, and white spaces with relative ease.

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But really I am an embodiment of myriad tongues.

In my everyday life, I speak the English the Brits brought to Nigeria, the English of the African immigrant on U.S. soil that alternates between rolling Rs and hard Ts (‘water’ versus ‘warra’), the pidgin English that is a marriage between our native tongues, urban slang and a deconstructed English, and the little bit of Yoruba and Edo I’m picking up from websites and apps. How I employ these languages of course depends on the setting.

With my Naija friends, with whom I’m usually more at ease, pidgin flows out of me unhindered: “How body?”

“Body dey inside cloth.”

“You dey see am?”

“I dey see but I no ‘gree. Story don get k-leg, abi?”

“I no know wetin do am O. Mumu” [sucks teeth] Speaking with co-workers — who, given the relatively few African immigrants in the U.S. nonprofit world, are usually not African — my language is American English all the way. This never feels completely comfortable. Yet I’ve had over two decades of practice: “Hey there! How’s it going?”

“I’m doing alright.”

“Did you see that post last night?”

“Yep! And I disagree completely. The author doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”

Speaking with my best friend means we blend Urban English, and three different types of patois — Hawaiian, Japanese and Nigerian — creating a whole new dialect in the process: “‘Sup” “Not much.”

“Aiyah! Can you believe that shit? I read it and I jus wanted to maka.”

“Wahala. I dunno wetin dat person was thinking posting such ridiculousness. Onuku!”

With a rich donor — whose generosity is the life-blood of the nonprofit I work for — the formal politeness and aristocratic good manners my mama taught me informs my speech: “Good to see you again!”

“You as well. How have you been?”

“I have been well. Thank you for asking!”

“I have been meaning to check in with you about the confusing post I read on my feed last night.”

“Yes, Mr. ---, I am so glad you brought that up. Please rest assured, it is completely inaccurate and we are dealing with it.”

“Oh what a relief!”

As much as I appreciate possessing this mix of register and language, I long for Yoruba and Edo, the familial ways of speaking for which I lack the words.

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In the years since my interaction with the man at Festac Grill, I’ve been teaching myself my languages gradually. What I do know is how easily the words roll off my tongue, how deeply soothing it is to pronounce them: Ẹ ku abọ Vbèè óye hé? Ẹ ku aarọ O ye mi Kpẹlẹ Koyo I say these words to dig deeper into who I am, a child of the red soil of Benin, the grey mountains of Saki, and the ocean city of Port Harcourt.

These Edo-Yoruba words ground my shaky identification with the country into which I was born yet still barely know. They allow me to picture a different life for myself, one in which we kids were granted access into our parents’ polyglot world, and where at night I dream in Edo and during the day — one day — I write in Yoruba.

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08

I AM FROM THE FUTURE

by Fungai Machirori

“Where are you from?”

asks the man at the front desk, with a kindly smile.

During the past week and a half of struggling to adapt to the inclement New York weather, I have walked into the building with my nose running and my gloved hands clenched. On this day, I am wearing my purple Rwandan earrings so large they could serve as coasters. On my wrist is a set of beaded bracelets — orange, blue, white, and red — purchases from the Maasai Market in Kenya. On my back is my satchel made from a bright patchwork of African prints from Ghana; my dress, from Nigeria, is a vibrant olive. I tell him that I am from Zimbabwe. He says that it is the vibrant colours and textures I wear that have made him curious enough to ask about my ethnicity, but as I walk away, I wonder if I have become his exemplar for Zimbabwean culture.

None of the artefacts that I wear — the beads, bangles and scarves which, for the man in New York, might now come to signify the place from which I come — are actually redolent with the Zimbabwe I navigate. Rather, they add an ineffable layer of otherness to me so that people often ask me within Zimbabwe- if I am ‘really really’ Zimbabwean. I think about this as I punch my floor number into the elevator, leaving the man at the front desk to his work. What does it mean to inhabit space such that your body, and the different ways in which you express yourself through it, betray a perpetual otherness?

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Perhaps it is because I do not reflect the dominant idea of a Zimbabwean woman: married, highly religious, and wearing Westernised styles of hair, dress, and so on. I stand at almost six feet and I wear a size ten shoe — my unusually large size sets me apart as a ‘giant’ woman, a gonyet.

Colloquially, ‘gonyet’ is also used to describe haulage trucks. Gonyet is what I’m often called when walking along the streets of my natal city, Harare. When I hear the word uttered as I pass by, even when I don’t know who has said it, I know that it is to me that the speaker is referring. Does my body lend itself to erasure by its excessive visibility in any space?

In New York, it is the flamboyance of what I am wearing which marks my otherness while simultaneously marking me as exotic and privileged — a certain type of African. Yet, this place, the imagined Africa of my provenance, is a place and no place at the same time, for it is a microcosm of highly individualised experiences unique to my own navigation of the world.

As a result, I am simultaneously from somewhere and nowhere; in one place, I’m part of the dominant culture, elsewhere I’m Other. How does one adapt to this double consciousness?

A few years ago, a friend came up with a simple answer for the othering she experiences as a result of her non-conformist identities; experiences often represented by that simple-but-not-so-simple question, “Where do you come from?”

“I come from my mother,” she’s taught herself to respond, disengaging from further interrogations about her race, sexuality, or nationality.

I remember laughing out loud when she first told me about this response she now gives out quite casually. But still, I fully understood the reason for it.

“So where am I from?” I ask myself.

I like to think that I am from the future, from a place which defies rules and conventions on who I should be, that accepts who I am. With multiplying identities, the healthy interplay of certain intersections seems almost unfathomable. Perhaps I am from the future, from a place that defies the rules and conventions around who I should be or accept that I am. But I remain hopeful that I am from a time that is coming soon, that soon, I will be able to say that the future is here.

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TRANSFORMATION OF BODIES Reviewing A. Igoni Barrett’s Blackass

by Zahrah Nesbitt-Ahmed

No one asks to be born, to be black or white or any colour in between, and yet the identity a person is born into becomes the hardest to explain to the world. (126) When thinking about the black body in African fiction, I initially gravitated towards reflecting on the reproductive female body and the conflation of womanhood with motherhood. But I wanted to go beyond reproduction to illustrate the other ways in which the body can be discussed in African literature. I was fascinated by the surreal transformation of bodies in Blackass, a novel by Nigerian writer, A. Igoni Barrett that is set in contemporary Lagos.

There are two types of transformation of bodies in Blackass. The main character, Furo Wariboko, finds himself transformed from a thirty-three year old black man into a red-haired, green-eyed, pale-skinned white (Nigerian) man who eventually becomes known as Frank Whyte (he chooses this name while watching “a music channel showing a 2pac and Biggie video” — most likely their posthumous track Runnin’ (Dying to Live) — and Hip-hop heads might recall that B.I.G referred to himself as “the black Frank White”, a name he in turn took from cult-classic gangster film, The King of New York (1990). The second metamorphosis is the transformation of the male writer, Igoni, into a woman, also named Igoni, a transformation that occurs after Igoni meets Furo.

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A man fell asleep black and woke up white, thus the opening paragraph: Furo Wariboko awoke this morning to find that dreams can lose their way and turn up on the wrong side of sleep. He was lying nude in bed, and when he raised his head a fraction, he could see his alabaster belly, and his pale legs beyond, covered with fuzz that glinted bronze in the cold daylight pouring in through the open window. He sat up with a sudden motion that swilled the panic in his stomach and spilled his hands into his lap. He stared at his hands, the pink life-lines in his palms, the shellfishedcoloured cuticles, the network of blue veins that ran from knuckle to wrist, more veins than he had ever noticed before.

His hands were not black but white ... same as his legs, his belly, all of him. (3) A black man with a degree in Lagos today has to contend with the likelihood of being unemployed. A welter of graduates try to eke out a living in a country where around 1.8 million young people are said to enter the labour market every year (National Bureau of Statistics Nigeria, 2011:7), all of them competing for extremely limited job opportunities.

Furo represents a certain kind of young black male today in Nigeria — unemployed and educated. Such a young black man might be single and living at home with his family. We do not have his full personal history, and so he becomes an everyman exemplar. The glimpses into his past are those that we get from his sister’s online persona later in the novel when she takes to social media to search for him while he is simultaneously deleting his online presence, erasing all traces of his former self, and reimagining then rewriting his past.

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A white man in Lagos might have to confront stares as becomes a sort of invisible man who is seen by everyone but recognised for who he is by no one:

[…] people whom he had lived beside for many years, joked with, been rude to, borrowed money from – and yet no one had recognised him (10).

He might also have a certain level of privilege: he might join the long queue of unemployed Nigerian applicants for that oversubscribed, lowpaying, entry-level job, only to hurdle it and be offered a higher, senior management position within the same company. Being white could signify a change in location, from a less affluent middle-class part of Lagos to the more posh Island — the haunt of the returnees, the expatriates, the foreigners, and wealthy Lagosians. It also means the benefit of a lot of other people’s assumptions: wealth (when it does not exist), power (when it is lacking), and status (when it is non-existent). On the flipside, white bodies need not necessarily represent privilege, they can also be marginalised. They do not quite fit in the contemporary landscape of Lagos where whiteness is not always a benign novelty: whiteness could mean being thought of as naive or lacking in street smarts, which means being charged higher fares for a taxi ride or being conned outright repeatedly.

Furo, as a white man, has access to things he would not have as a black man. He is able to find a home on the ‘Island’ with the young Syreetta, who becomes his ‘sugar mama’. The transactional relationship that occurs between Furo and Syreeta is supported by Syreeta’s own relationship with her wealthy Nigerian sugar daddy (“Tuesday [is] Bola’s day”). In this relationship, we are introduced to another difference between the black and white male body. Where young women often have to sell their bodies to make a living (“And you’re a white man. You don’t have to fuck anyone for favours,” Syreeta says to Furo when he insinuates that she is a kept woman), and a wealthy black man can fund Syreeta’s lifestyle, but the white body is more desirable as it puts her in possession of powerful status symbols and possibilities — a white lover and a mixed-race child — which can give her greater personal agency and access to a higher standard of living. The black male body, even when wealthier, has less cachet.

Blackass tells us that race matters in Nigeria, but offers a different perspective from what we’re accustomed to reading in African literature (critic Aaron Bady notes that Blackass is “a photo negative” of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah). Being a white Nigerian man may open doors, but it brings with it new challenges, even with its opportunities, and it’s their entangled specificity that constitutes what it means to be white and Nigerian. Furo did not choose to become white, he woke up that way. He is forced to navigate society with his new identity but this navigation is only coherent, even possible, because he was recently black and is assuredly Lagosian. (His driver says about Furo/Frank’s moodiness that “[t]he dude dey vex like full Nigerian.” —not the first time that a Nigerian points out Frank’s authentic Naija-ness.) His transformation is thus less a metamorphosis than an amalgamation. Yet, while he initially struggles with his transformation, never once does Furo desires a return to his former self:

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And in this state of naked grace —stripped of the past, curious about the present, hopeful about the future — he strode to the tall mirror over the vanity table and stared into the face of his new self. A face whose features had altered less in dimension than character, and whose relation to the selfie in the newspaper was as close and yet as far apart as the resemblance between adolescence and adulthood. His face had sloughed off immaturity.

Then again, the unexpectedness of his skin shade, eye colour, and hair texture was the octopus ink that would confuse his hunters, as even he wouldn’t have recognised himself in a photo of his new face, and so neither would his parents nor anyone who based their looking on his old image. He knew at last that he had nothing to fear. He was a different person, and right here, right now, right in his face, he looked nothing like the former Furo. (178-9) He literalises Frantz Fanon’s declaration in Black Skin, White Masks (1967), that, “For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white” (10). However, Barrett suggests that blackness is essential and indelible. In Furo’s case, he still has his black arse which he tries to eliminate through the use of Syreeta’s skin-lightening creams. It says a lot about the burden of blackness that Furo would abandon his family, his friends, and the person he was for thirty-three years for the guaranteed wealth and status that comes with him being white.

But in this war of the selves, I had switched sides. Despite the snake of the maleness that still tethered me to the past, I was more than man, interrupted.

(191) The male writer, Igoni, first meets Furo while he is still in his early days as a white man, at a cafe in “The Palms, the largest mall in Lagos.”

Igoni is fascinated by this white Nigerian man and decides to learn his story. He uses Twitter, through which he discovers Furo’s sister, Tekena (@pweetychic_tk), whom he befriends. However, with time Igoni too undergoes his own identity change into a woman. Although she jokes that Tekena should “call me Morpheus.” (In the film, The Matrix (1999), Morpheus, a black man, is a hacker who has spent his whole life searching for “the One” who turns out to be a white man who is able to remake the world as he sees fit.) Weeks later, Furo sees Igoni again, but this time as a different person.

Furo remembered. He remembered Igoni. He remembered their meeting at The Palms, and their chat in the café, and the favour he had asked that Igoni refused … And this woman, this Igoni, wasn’t that man. Not any more. Furo felt like laughing and crying. It had happened to Igoni, too. (261) Furo is also curious as to what “blackassness was hidden underneath her skirt”, curious to know if, like him, she is not totally transformed. Igoni desired the transformation or had at least thought about it: she notes that she too deleted her Facebook account “after I started receiving homophobic messages over my personal essay on wanting to be a girl” (89).

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Similar to Furo’s transformation, this change is unexplained and we do not know why it has happened. Unlike Furo, Igoni seems less surprised by his metamorphosis:

I was more relieved than surprised by this happenstance. The seeds had always been there, embedded in the parched earth of my subconscious. I had heard their muted rattling in the remembered moments of my sleeping life; I had seen their shadowy branches overhanging the narrow road that wound into my future … Long before Furo’s story became my own, I was already trying to say what I see now, that we are all constructed narratives (95-6).

This question of male-to-female identity is, for Igoni, a new story she tells about herself in order to become an authentic character in it. Furo’s story illumines and clarifies her own, making it legible by its contrasts and similarities to hers. In discovering how this man, forced into a new story reconstituted himself within it, she is able to make what was unconscious conscious and exercise powerful agency. Igoni, having known the relatively privileged position of masculinity for much of her life, chooses to enter into womanhood in a world where women — who didn’t chose to be women but found themselves born as such and perhaps, had they known what horrors, degradations, and tragedies awaiting them might have chosen to be born otherwise — so often find their agency suppressed in sex, daily life, work, travel, and so on. But why the decision to transform from man into woman? Igoni hints at the philosophical aspect and ineffable potential of femininity: “Pity the man who never becomes the woman he could be,” she thinks. In his idealised androgyne, Barrett recalls James Joyce’s Ulysses in which “Bloom is a finished example of the new womanly man,” of whom Joyce scholar Declan Kiberd writes in the introduction to the Penguin edition that “he [Joyce] was left to conclude that at the root of many men’s inability to live in serenity with a woman was a prior inability to harmonize male and female elements in themselves. In Ulysses, the mature artist set forth Leopold Bloom as the androgynous man of the future.” 1 Furo’s external transformation is racial but his internal one is that of a masculinity that would obviate that of his father, whom he perceives as a failure. (Again, Ulysses asks the question both Furo and Igoni wrestle with: “‘Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?’ […] A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary evil.”) Whiteness allows Furo to move himself psychically away from the broken black masculinity to which he was doomed by his father, and this emancipatory reworking of his masculinity is about access to power and possibility while for Igoni, the transformation is towards the maternal, into the feminine.

1. Editor’s note: We do not want to emphasise reading Igoni’s/Barrett’s androgyny through Bloom’s/Joyce’s too aggressively. After all, Barrett, in a Q&A with the Financial Times, said that James Joyce’s Ulysses has been lying by his bedside, “but it’s been lying there so long that it’s now part of the furniture.” He might have meant that he’s constantly re-reading it, as we do, or that it remains neglected and unread. We prefer to believe he meant the former and shudder to imagine that he meant the latter.

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He [Igoni’s father] left when I was eight. My mother stayed to be condemned to failure in raising her son. Because the success of a man, our people say, is the father’s doing. You are your father’s son – you follow in your father’s footsteps. Manhood and its machismo are attributed to the seed, which then follows that the failure to make a man is the egg’s burden. ‘Your papa born you well’, they will sing to a man in praise, but when he disappoints so-andso’s expectations of XY manliness, it becomes ‘Nah your mama I blame’. My say is this: when you live in a worldwide bullring, bullshit is what you’ll get. If they say I cannot be my mother’s son, then it must be that I’m her daughter. (186) When Igoni meets Tekena in person to watch a movie, Igoni experiences unwanted sexual attention from a man at the cinema. The man sees Igoni, not as a person, but as an object he can ogle and touch without her consent. Igoni recoils from this experience:

We were waiting in line to buy our tickets at the box office when a man walked up to us. I had seen him coming, and I suspected he was trouble, though I’d thought his trouble was my companion’s to rebuff. I was wrong.

It was me his potbelly was jiggling towards […] I was already irritated by the way he smirked at me, and I was tense on account of how close he was standing, but when he said, ‘I like your hair o,’ raising his hands at the same time to stroke my locks, the violence of my shudder shocked me as well (188-9).

Tekena defends Igoni, who is unable to do so herself as she is still coming to terms with a feeling that may be new to her. Tekena has most likely experienced this kind of unwanted attention on more than one occasion as a woman. Igoni observes:

Womanhood comes with its peculiar burden, among them the constant reminder of a subordinate status whose dominant symptom was uninvited sexual attention from men. I hadn’t foreseen this fact of my new identity.

Bus conductors whistled at me on the street; drivers pulled over to offer me rides to bars; and when I went shopping for my new wardrobe in Yaba market, the touts grabbed at my hands and laughed off my protests. All manner and ages of male called me fine girl, sweet lips, correct pawpaw, big bakassi … A woman is not expected to live alone, to walk alone in peace, or to want to be alone. (190)

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At sunrise, I discovered his blackass. And when he awoke, after he called me back to bed and slipped his hand between my legs, he, too, found my secret.

It’s easier to be than to become. Frank should have known that. (301) Furo’s fascination with Igoni’s genitals on one hand falls under a typical trope in transgender storytelling: the demand to “show me your genitals”. Yet, at the same time, Furo’s self-centredness and insecurity throughout Blackass makes his fixation on what is underneath Igoni’s skirt unsurprising. Indeed, Igoni notices, “his lack of understanding for our shared fate […] and his unchanging selfishness” (301-2).

Igoni’s transformation works an important theme in contemporary African literature, that of transgendered identity, the T in LGBT that often gets left out. This exclusion could be due to the larger invisibility of trans people in the LGBT discourse where gender identity is often not discussed alongside sexual orientation, a lack of understanding of the diversity of identities that fall under the broad category of transgender, as well as the fear which tends to come with a lack of understanding of non-conforming gender identity. Thus, this inclusion of a second transformation in Blackass in itself can be seen as progressive, especially as trans people are still misunderstood and disproportionately subjected to violence in many societies, especially African ones. However, Furo, who knew who Igoni was before she became a woman, does not fear her. It is interesting also to note that in an interview with Vice, Barrett says:

I’ve had people react strongly to the book, but [no one in Nigeria criticised] the transgender character in the novel. I’ve had people think it’s weird, it’s crazy, it’s funny, but because it was so outlandish, they could empathise with the character without thinking it was a threat to their beliefs.

That a trans woman is written into a Nigerian story without it being seen as threatening from the perspective of (Nigerian) readers could also be seen as progress. Yet, this could have more to do with the way the character is written. Blackass is, after all, about transformations whose conditions of emergence are left unquestioned. A first transformation is introduced in the shape of Furo/Frank, that can already be said to be outrageous or even impossible; as such, the reader is spared from thinking of Igoni’s transformation as anything outside of the fiction of this fantasy.

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It is perhaps easy for it to remain as something that is only possible in this strange book that Barrett has written about a black (Nigerian) man who becomes a white (Nigerian) man.

What does trans literature currently look like in African literature? There are, of course, gay, lesbian and bi-sexual narratives in African fiction – I once wrote about mainly lesbian and gay literature in Africa, and there is a list of ten fascinating gay, lesbian or bisexual characters in African literature, but what about the “T”? Transgender literature has traditionally fallen into two categories: memoir and theory. A non-fiction work such as Trans: transgender life stories from South Africa (2009) includes more than twenty stories from the trans community in south Africa. There are also narratives from the Proudly African and Transgender Exhibition, where ten transgender activists wrote a short story on being transgender.

What about fiction? I must admit I am only aware of Diriye Osman’s short story collection, Fairytales for Lost Children, which includes a story about a trans woman nurse in a psychiatric ward. Yet, I cannot help thinking that the African speculative fiction genre must have trans characters even though I may not be aware of many of them. Blackass provokes us to be attentive to the presence and absence of these characters and narratives in African literature. Blackass makes it possible to think about black and white bodies, male and female bodies in ways that make them less threatening, due in large part to its humour which makes the tensions of race and gender into a way of playing with who and what we are. This also allows for a look at bodies beyond that of biology, reproduction, or health, and beyond the constricting narrative of human rights. This enables a closer look at identities (racialised, seuxalised and gendered) as different narrative forms which we can read and write in a multitude of ways in order to shape and reshape our lives and pasts to find pleasure and freedom in living.

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10

MIRROR

by Murewa Olubela

The slabs of my midsection, the protruding arches of my sides, the map bumps.

In the dark, my form’s perfect, my shape’s distinct, my face a tale of failed old money, not fat.

Lights on, I trail my hands to my mound, hovering above the triangle devoid of curls.

I pull— it extends. Fat. My gaze drops to my stomach.

The visible demarcation, a trophy of three years relapse from years of fitness. Not too nice fat.

The soft contours cries for help.

I stare at my breasts. The one fat that makes sense. A handful instead of the perky titsbud it once was.

I cup my right, feeling its weight.

It fits perfectly, full, good fat.

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CONTRIBUTORS FUNGAI RUFARO MACHIRORI - Fungai is a Zimbabwean feminist with interests in media and journalism, research and documentation. Her work has been published across different media including the Guardian, the Mail and Guardian and Chimurenga Literary Magazine. She runs a personal blog, Fungai Neni, where she shares a variety of personal reflections.

KAGURE MUGO - Kagure Mugo is the intoxicatingly scary gatekeeper of HOLAAfrica, an online Pan African queer womanist community dealing with sexuality and all things woman. She is also a writer, media consultant and freelance journalist who tackles sex, politics and other less interesting topics.

During weekends she is a wine bar philosopher and polymath for no pay.

FELICITY OKOTH - Felicity is a Tutorial Fellow at Moi University. She is keen on conversations revolving around the deconstruction of hegemonic power structures.

Gender and immigration are central to her interest.

OLA OSAZE - Ola is a trans masculine person who grew up in Nigeria and now resides in the US. Ola is a Voices of Our Nation Arts workshop Fellow, and has writings featured in HOLAAfrica, Autostraddle, Apogee Journal, Black Public Media, Black Girl Dangerous, Black Looks and anthologies, including Queer African Reader, and the soon to be released Queer Africa II and Outside the XY: Queer, Brown Masculinity.

ANNE MORAA - Anne is a writer, editor and creative. Holding an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh. Her works focus on feminism, ‘otherness’ and the importance of voice. Her performances have been seen in South Korea, Edinburgh, Nairobi. A founding member, contributor & Associate Editor of Jalada, she currently develops content for girls at ZanaAfrica Foundation. Contact her @tweetmoraa

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MUREWA OLUBELA - Murewa is a writer who has been published in Klorofyl Magazine, YNaija, among other publications. She is the founder of The Single Story Foundation and co-founder of Fund It.

DOROTHY KIGEN - Dorothy is a Kenyan health care worker whose interests include literature, feminism, and contemporary culture. She hopes to one day publish an anthology based on the Nairobi night.

ZAHRAH NESBITT-AHMED - Zahrah is a researcher, writer and blogger with experience in gender, urbanisation and international development. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex.

When she’s not researching on women’s rights, women’s economic empowerment and cities, she is blogging about her true loves - African literature at bookshy (http://bookshybooks.blogspot.co.uk/) and book covers (http://africanbookcovers.tumblr.com/).

ANTHEA TADERERA - Anthea is a third culture kid and black afro-feminist who loves feministing, pondering law and reading the things and the stuff preferably whilst eating snacks. Follow her @TCKFeminist and read her blog: thirdculturefeminist.wordpress.com

VARYNNE SIKA Founder and editor-in-chief of the Wide Margin. Varyanne is a feminist, researcher, reader, writer and editor.

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THE BLACK AFRICAN BODY

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