Some images of boys' lives in Africa

When prejudice is peddled as ‘tradition’

When prejudice is peddled as ‘tradition’

Reposted with permission from Melanie Judge over at http://queery.oia.co.za/ 

Posted on: 10-7-2011

 

There is a long tradition of institutionalised prejudice and inequality in South Africa related to class, race, gender and sexuality. The power structures required to keep prejudice in place are still a prominent feature of the post-apartheid landscape. Certain institutions of ‘tradition’ and ‘culture’, like that of some religions, continue to perpetuate discriminatory social systems and practices. One such institution is the National House of Traditional Leaders (NHTL).

In its recent submission to the Constitutional Review Committee of parliament, the NHTL unashamedly proposed that Section 9 of the Constitution, the Equality Clause, be amended to remove sexual orientation as a ground for non-discrimination. Section 9 (3) and 9 (4) of the Bill of Rights prohibits both individuals and the state, respectively, from discriminating against persons on the basis of sexual orientation. The NHTL’s submission to parliament is that gays and lesbians no longer be afforded constitutional protections from unfair discrimination. This is a reactionary manoeuvre and reflects the continued intention of the NHTL to chip away at principles and institutions aimed at dismantling historical prejudice and discrimination.

In 2005, ahead of the then imminent legislation to enable same-sex couples to marry, the NHTL stated the following at its annual conference: “The practice of same-sex marriage is against most of African beliefs, cultures, customs and traditions, and this in turn goes against the mandate of traditional leaders which is to promote and protect the customs of communities observing a system of customary law. Traditional leaders have vowed to make it their mission for the coming five years to campaign against this wicked, decadent and immoral Western practice”. As their recent parliamentary submission suggests, the NHTL has kept that promise.

In response to the NHTL, parliament’s legal advisers argued that the removal of sexual orientation from the Equality Clause would be in contravention of the values of human dignity, equality and the advancement of human freedoms that are protected and promoted by the Constitution. It’s a no-brainer really. Whilst the NHTL thumbs its nose at constitutional imperatives, the Constitution itself expressly requires that customary laws, practices and institutions are consistent with the purport and objectives of the Bill of Rights. This requirement is directly challenged by the NHTL’s call for a constitutional amendment that in effect seeks to expunge gays and lesbians from protection against homophobic discrimination.

The NHTL, and its bedfellow the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa, claims a monopoly on defining ‘African traditions and values’. In assuming the right to define what constitutes ‘tradition’, and what not, these ‘traditionalists’ seek to be arbiters of ‘legitimate’ cultural expression. In doing so, they aim to hegemonise particular concepts of ‘African culture’. According to this cultural script, homosexuality is ‘unAfrican’. Both queers and other non-conforming genders and sexualities are disavowed within such an exclusionary manufacturing of culture.

The traditionalist lobby would wish for a social order that is re-rooted in immutable apartheid and colonialist categorisations of black/white, man/woman, gay/straight. It’s no coincidence that these are the very planes of difference upon which power and privilege have been historically enacted, and which continue to mark the frontiers of current day inclusions and exclusions.

Centralised traditional authorities, like the NHTL, are a powerful political force with significant economic interests. They often function in alliance with ruling elites seeking to centralise governance powers. The Eastern European journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, in his 1970s study on Ethiopia under Haille Selassie, describes how traditions can be mobilised in support of autocratic rule. In reference to the Selassie regime at that time, he states that, “While affecting to preserve the past, they [the regime] were constantly devising new ‘traditional’ institutions to strengthen their control”. This echoes Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani’s analysis of traditional chiefs as ‘decentralised despots’ in his 1996 book ‘Citizen and Subject’. Related to this is the work of Mazibuko Jara, from the Law, Race and Gender Unit at UCT, on the “retribalisation of the countryside” by centralised traditional authorities and how this undermines citizens’ access to constitutional justice and gender equality.

Unsurprisingly, the NHTL’s submission to parliament also proposes that its powers be extended through constitutional fiat. More specifically, that traditional authorities “be under Parliament and the Provincial Legislatures to enable them to function as proper parliament [sic] of traditional leaders”; that traditional leaders and councils be included “as intergovernmental structures, to facilitate intergovernmental relations”; that “traditional courts be included as one of the courts”[1] prescribed by the Constitution; and that “local municipalities be disestablished (sic) and be replaced by traditional councils as service providers within traditional communities.”

The Constitution, with its checks and balances for accountability, enables citizens to resist groups that seek to reinstate undemocratic measures – whether invoked in the name of ‘Africanness’ or ‘whiteness’. Ironically, the NHTL is reliant on precisely the inequitable power relations (sexual, gender and economic) that constitutional principles challenge. Drawing on such principles, a tide of gender and sexual rights claims have contested traditional authorities’ versions of culture. Women who legally challenged the discriminatory aspects of customary law[2] and African advocates for LGBT equality and an end to homophobic discrimination, are cases in point. Their advances in gender and sexual freedoms contradict essentialist notions of tradition and their associated gender power relations.

Cultural practices predicated on discrimination, directly undermine the pursuit of equality and freedom. This equally applies to the construction of ‘Western culture’ with its oppressive whitening impetus. In opposition to this, plurality and diversity act as powerful leverages to shift oppressive cultural formations and practices and to pry open spaces for inclusiveness and democratic possibility.

Cultural leaders and institutions do not passively bestow fixed cultures onto unsuspecting recipients. Rather, cultural subjects are made and remade, in and through practices that are named and marked as cultural. This dynamic process shapes contemporary iterations of what is deemed traditional, and what not. This is an ever-changing course.

What would it take for non-discrimination to emerge as a shared cultural value, an honoured tradition, owned by all who live in South Africa? Perhaps there is just too much at stake for those leaders and institutions that continue to peddle prejudice in the name of “the people”.

[1] The mooted Traditional Courts Bill effectively proposes a dual system of law, with those who fall under tribal authorities being subject (and perhaps ‘subjects’) to traditional courts.

“[2] See the Bhe case: When the father of two women died under customary law their house became the property of their grandfather. As a result of the womens’ legal challenge to this, the Constitutional Court (in 2004) declared that the rule of primogeniture rule as applied to the customary law of succession cannot be reconciled with the current notions of equality and human dignity as contained in the Bill of Rights. The judgment asserted the following “As the centrepiece of the customary law system of succession, the rule violates the equality rights of women and is an affront to their dignity. In denying extra-marital children the right to inherit from their deceased fathers, it also unfairly discriminates against them and infringes their right to dignity as well. The result is that the limitation it imposes on the rights of those subject to it is not reasonable and justifiable in an open and democratic society founded on the values of equality, human dignity and freedom…In conclusion, the official system of customary law of succession is incompatible with the Bill of Rights. It cannot, in its present form, survive constitutional scrutiny.”

An edited version of this blog was published in the Mail and Guardian (7 October – 13 October)

Silencing traditions

I have been thinking about silence a lot recently. I have no firm conclusions for sometimes the right to speak is not always as democratic as it seems. Sometimes those who speak most and most convincingly should really have held their tongues. I can think of a Hitler, a Verwoerd, a Bush, and the list goes on, right down to that annoying clerk at the grocery store, the man who beats his wife, the woman who abuses her child. Petulant masquerades of hatred and fear and let's not forget greed, for these zero-sum economists, carefully couched as concern for those select few who are considered people, in the fullest sense of the word.

If we think about histories of silence and the remaking of those histories and the way silence figures almost as a character itself, one gets a startling and somewhat dystopic sense of humanity. And yet, these histories of silence and silencings are ones we live with ourselves. Sometimes speaking is just too hard, and I don't mean the noise we make sometimes to fill those silences when you are not rubbing together comfortably against your other/s. I mean speaking, or communicating or I don't know ... I don't have the language.

Being open is the trite way of putting it or letting oneself be seen or admitting your vulnerability or you know ... that thing one can do with total acceptance, where fear does not circulate in the intersubjective exchanges with others, where who you are, whatever that fluid state means, is just okay and speaking whatever the little truths and large dramas of the self are, is not to bring shame or disrepute or judgement on the self nor is it to court pride or cultivate arrogance or push for respect, it is just the possibility of sharing the fullness of your humanity in a given time with someone who shares theirs with you. Well I know what it feels like, its harder to describe and even rarer to produce the conditions under which it flourishes.

I was not raised in a world where that was possible, it was something I had to learn and still am, a tradition of intimacy I had to cultivate. Not speaking feels more natural, it is easier and as I have learned is so much harder, it costs more, silent, heavy costs. Well, lets not mistake not speaking for talking, I do talk ... a lot. The traditions of silences I was raised in, encompassed the individual, the family, the community, the national. There were things you bore but didn't speak about, things you rewrote in silences.

The family and community histories that went unanswered because the questions were not allowed to be spoken, the private life of the family and its wreckages you did not share, the individual traumas you held close as if they defined you and somehow all those silences coaelesce, into a big dark mass, sometimes volcanic in its insistence, sometimes its miasmic qualities blinding one, sometimes an oppressive weight holding arms and limbs and thoughts and actions captive, sometimes a spur to action just any action to silence the insistence that which should not be spoken.

Now I don't know which came first. The silences of Apartheid repressions, an inescapable facet of totalitarian goverments where speaking truth to power and unwilling silences is not possible, well for many the fetters of the mind cannot even conceive the possibility to speak dissent or witness vocally, for why speak that which is and which we all know and make ourselves understand, where bending one's knee and lowering one's eyes is the natural order of things, why speak what is? I don't know if this state-cultivated tradition of silence finds its home in the family or whether the traditions of the family made the silences enforced by the state possible?

Well, we know one of the first post-apartheid acts of concession to the past was inculcating the right to speak, to break the silence and thus we had the TRC. Well, now we know that this therapeutic right to speak does not equate the right to equality or make one the recipient of distributive justice. It is just the right to speak a tale that will be retold in so many genres until the blood, sweat, tears, shit and fear and pain and love, never forget love that signalled life or death of the human bodies, hearts and minds the tale circles is elevated to high art and the refrain of never forget is meant to be its own solution, memory and stories for food, memory and stories for dignity, memory and stories for medicine, memory and stories for work, memory and stories for light, heat, the quotidian pleasures of the haves. Bah, to speak is not always such a great thing, a necessary thing but not always a great thing, especially when its promises are not always fulfilled.

It is a careful process this speaking, this breaking the silence, though it is not the silence that is broken, really it is you who breaks. In the learning to speak, it breaks you, breaks that morass that breeds itself in the darkness of silence. It unchains the pasts that hold you captive, the pains that glued you into a patchwork person of light and deep deep shadows. Just going boo to the darkness, does not do much, it is the magic of the right words, in the right moments and the actions to back it up, that make the breaks that heal. I wonder if this is so for a country, a nation. I wonder if we didn't just go boo to the darkness that lurks at and poisons our heart.

I wonder if that painful healing speaking, of deep revelation and trite fears, and unappeased sorrows, and wondrous laughter and caring and gentleness and tenderness that underlie the thorny carapace of a weighty silence still needs to be broken. I wonder what intimacies can be found when we are brought into a condition of philia, love with each other that speaks and does what we want for our best selves for our our others, what new traditions of intimacy we can found when the silences are broken, when we are broken open to face each other, naked, unashamed, accepting of the frailty our humanity.

How do we raise happy, confident, kind and caring men? Boys in Africa Roundtable at University of South Africa, 25 October 2011

Boys in Africa Roundtable

Date: 25 October, 2011

Time: 10h00 – 16h00

Venue: Library, Seminar Room 1, University of South Africa

How does one parent boys to become good men?

How do we reconnect boys with their fathers?

How do we teach boys and their parents to share the burden of domestic labour?

How does one raise boys to believe in equality?

How do we keep boys at school?

How do we teach boys not to respond to problems with aggression?

How do we keep boys alive?

How do we teach boys self-love?

How do we raise happy, confident, kind and caring men?

African boys and men are pathologised and stereotyped either as hapless victims or as inveterate criminals. While it remains important to keep challenging such representations, it is surprising that relatively little work and discussion has been presented on raising boys to become good men.

Especially given the conditions of poverty, oppression and violence the African continent continues to be subjected to, what does it take to raise a healthy, happy, confident and caring African man?

African boys are not a monolithic group, of course. Their life-chances and development are influenced by a range of factors. Race, class, neighbourhood and the concomitant infrastructural opportunities or lack thereof, their emergent sexualities, their able-bodiedness or otherwise, and very importantly the socioeconomic and historical burdens and triumphs of their parents are all necessary in thinking about how to raise well-adjusted, joyful, secure and kind men. 

It is self-evident to state that the experience of being a white, middle-class boy is very dissimilar to being a poor, black boy or even a middle-class black boy in South Africa. Regardless of other identity markers and the differences between boys, however, to be a boy is not to be a girl; and gender is constitutive of the expectations and socialization of boys.

Raising good African men obviously requires us to look at the boy first. Building positive masculinities that are generative of social well-being, responsive to egalitarianism, desirous of resolving conflict in productive and nurturing ways for whom toughness, violence and bravery are not the ultimate masculine ideals demands a focus on boyhood.

To this end the Roundtable will centre on the series of questions. We hope the question provokes fertile discussions and start a durable generative conversation within and outside the university towards building young positive masculinities and further engender democracy in the public sphere and the home.

Boys in Africa Roundtable is hosted by UNISA’s Psychology Department and the Institute for Social and Health Sciences’ Programme on Traditions and Transformation. The Roundtable is the second of three events of the Changing Traditions Project and will culminate in the biennial travelling pitso in Ethiopia on 28-30 November 2011.