Belief + Doubt = Sanity

It took going through a whole day’s worth of a meeting to realise just how acutely I have missed myself.

The questions posed to me were more along the lines of, “What do you think, Fungai?” as opposed to the refrain that has become a normal part of my life this past year, “What does Her Zimbabwe think/ have to say/ want to do?”

I am attending a meeting this week that hasn’t much to do with new media and where no one knows what Her Zimbabwe really is. And it makes for a necessary change for me since the last year has been all about Fungai and Her Zimbabwe, and not just Fungai.

At first it was a really great feeling when Her Zimbabwe continually featured in my conversations with people. It meant people were taking notice. It meant Her Zimbabwe was having the impact that I had hoped it would have. But I want to be real here, just so that anyone out there who is the founder or instigator of a vision gets a sense of what kind of thoughts may brew in your mind as you find your way around implementing innovation.

One of the great joys of Her Zimbabwe has been documentation of living.

The fact that I did not plan for Her Zimbabwe has made my path that much more of an interesting road. As I have said before, the idea of Her Zimbabwe came to me one evening after an intense session of information exchange with other young people using new media in their work. At the back of my mind was my dissertation (which was giving me hell to complete)! which looked at how Zimbabwean women’s organising was taking place within Zimbabwe and communities of Zimbabweans abroad.

The two topics – young people’s use of new media, and Zimbabwean women’s organising – made a logical link within my mind that evening, something I will call a bit of an “aha moment” to borrow from Oprah’s wisdom.

So compelling was the idea to me that I could not, would not let it go. I began to work incessantly, obsessively even, on turning the idea into something more. Four months later, Her Zimbabwe made her entry into the world; screaming and kicking for attention. To this day, I am still not quite sure how I managed to complete a Masters degree, return to Zimbabwe, set up connections and get the show running in those four months. This was dogged determination that I had never before known in my life.

You would think that the launch was the culmination of the joy of it all, the fruits of a long labour. And it many ways, it was. Enough people had believed in it to see it come to life, which was humbling and exciting.

But that was just the beginning.

In fact, I distinctly recall sitting at my desk on March 13, a few hours after the launch of Her Zimbabwe, and watching my inbox swell with new emails by the minute. By the next day, my inbox had over 100 new emails with people excitedly asking for more details about Her Zimbabwe, requesting interviews and yes, even proposing areas for collaboration.

Surges of panic went through my body. What had I just unleashed?! How was I going to deal with all of these expectations?!

Upon realising just how much time and effort went into editing articles, responding to emails, posting onto social media and preparing talks,  the content strategy that I had neatly devised on a large piece of blue manila paper in the build up to Her Zimbabwe was soon thrown out the window. Post five articles every week? No, not possible!

Life became a lethal cycle of work around the clock. And as the platform grew, so too did the pressure and expectations.

I stopped taking care of myself. I ate Danish pastries and Chelsea buns for breakfast and lunch every day. I slept when I heard the first birds tweeting in the early morning. I stopped caring about my hair (a wild mangle it became). Writing and blogging stopped coming naturally to me, and one day, I realised that I hadn’t talked to one of my best friends in over a month. My whole personality was consumed by my work. And everywhere I went, talk – all well meant, was about Her Zimbabwe as though everything else I had done in the 28 years before this moment had ceased to be relevant.

In a few short months, I was built up as some sort of expert on women’s organising. I would know the right answer to why the Domestic Violence Act was not working so well, why Maneta on Big Brother Africa was either a saint or villain depending on how you saw things, how to bring women together across the digital divide, and how to fix any number of things plaguing the women’s movement.

This was the part I had not bargained for, or even planned for; the unchartered territory of being regarded as an expert on questions that I was struggling to answer for myself.

And there were moments when I felt like setting up Her Zimbabwe was the biggest mistake of my life. Was I really prepared to knuckle down and do this sort of work day in and out? Was I ready to share the vision with others who would hold me accountable to my words, especially since I had ever-changing ideas about what I was doing? Did I want to set permanent roots to the idea, or did I just want to dwell in ambivalence and uncertainty until I could make sense of it all?

On many occasions, I felt trapped. Surely being a visionary didn’t entail feeling like this. Once, just a few months in, I wrote an SOS email to a friend who also runs a startup. The email subject was “The tank is running empty.” I am sure you can guess what the email proceeded to sound like.

I wondered if things would have been more tolerable had I taken the time to think my life through a bit better before jumping into this work head first. Perhaps if  I knew where I was going personally, I wouldn’t feel like everyone was demanding an action from me that I wasn’t quite ready to take

I recall meeting an acquaintance of mine in Cape Town in May, barely two months since the launch. I am sure he meant well, but over dinner that evening, he walked me through a very intricate strategy for Her Zimbabwe’s growth which entailed setting up a clothes line and all manner of activities that only served to make me shrink into my seat.

“I need headspace to clear my thoughts,” I could feel myself wanting to scream out as he rattled out suggestion upon suggestion the whole night through.

‘Setting up shop’ is not something I have taken lightly with Her Zimbabwe as the action has an impact on a lot of things. Was I deciding to stay put in Zimbabwe indefinitely? Being a free and roaming spirit, I felt like this would stifle me. Was I deciding to make money from this activity? Having worked jobs where I felt like I didn’t do enough to change people’s lives, I strangely felt the need to give back to people without demanding money for my work. It was my own way of absolving myself of my past, which earned me the label of a ‘ hopeless hippie’ with one of my friends.

Was I deciding to put a structure to this vision? I had a strong resistance to that for the reasons I have just stated and because I had seen enough people become entrapped by their work by making quick and fast decisions about things without fully understanding the consequences. Last month I met with one of my mentors – a woman who taught me how to blog – who has been running a start-up for almost five years. I was amazed when she told me that she wished she hadn’t rushed into long-term decisions in the first year of her work because some of it had backfired in a way that hindsight could only show.

Wow, I thought. I am not a weirdo after all!

The mid to late 20s are a strange enough period of life. As I was reading in a book recently, at this time of life many people are well-educated but poorly paid (or not paid as much as they think they are worth), they are either recently married or on the cusp – or wondering why they are not on the cusp, they are new parents, or worrying about their biological clocks, they are discovering that friendships which may have worked previously now no longer serve any real purpose, and a whole lot of other things. In short, this period of life is about massive change and upheaval.

Add to it a U-turn in career aspirations and you get even more of a maze of confusion. In a life that is all too often modelled around commitments, I simply wanted none for once.

Yet, no matter how much I procrastinated or cowered into my corner in fear, I grew deeper in love with the work, with the conversations, with the followers who so proudly stood up in support of Her Zimbabwe. I understood the responsibility to serve these people and felt myself grow through the conversations and exchanges taking place. When even the last muscle in my body ached, it was for this reason that I would wake up each day to meet the challenges and joys of this work. The work had to continue regardless of what I felt like.

In the last couple of weeks, I have finally allowed myself to slow down and take stock. There have been good things, bad things, good lessons and bad lessons. I am learning as I go along what works and what doesn’t. I am seeing my own character strengths and weaknesses in a starker light than I ever felt that I would be comfortable to experience.

In less than 2 weeks’ time, Her Zimbabwe will celebrate its first year of life.

And when I look back, I can understand why it happened. I needed it, and so did other people around me. Every person who has interacted with the project has taken away whatever lesson it is that we each had to learn along the continuum of progression.

My mentor took me to an exhibition happening in Washington DC when I visited with her. We both needed it after trading notes on start-up challenges. As we made our way through the hall, there was one exhibit that stood out for the both of us.

It read, “Belief + Doubt = Sanity”. We smiled at each other knowingly.  Sanity, for many others like us, seems to be more a version of insanity than anything else. Hard to define and hard to grasp because it fails to follow the order of ‘normal’ life.

Photograph by Fungai Machirori

I am not ashamed to admit to my doubts, weaknesses and fears anymore. They make me who I am, the imperfect and sometimes reluctant leader. And as I interact, read and learn more about leadership and activism, I learn that I am not alone. Just this past week, I learnt of a condition referred to as ‘imposter phenomenon’ from a book written by feminist activist, Megan Seely, who reveals that though being heavily involved in high-level feminist organising for decades, she was secretly fighting an eating disorder.

As she describes it, imposter phenomenon is “the notion of hiding your true self from others while fearful that people will find out that you are not what you seem, that you’ve had them all fooled.”

I thank women like Seely for such honesty for it allows us fellow mortals to be truthful too. This terrain of work is not easy and one is constantly plagued with questions about whether they are the right person for such an important task.

And while I admit to my faults, I am not ashamed to admit to my strengths. I have the will, the determination and the passion to see a thing through even when it is the hardest thing to do. I have learnt just how much I can push myself, even suppressing my deepest doubts. I have abandoned my comfort zones and exposed myself to vagaries of life for once. For once in my life, I chose braveness.

To you, struggling in the dark, searching for the light, I am here to say this; you are not alone. To you, with your doubts, regrets and frustrations, I am here to tell you this; you can rise above them. Learn from each one, but rise again.

Take care of yourself. Love yourself enough to keep yourself healthy and passionate about all the other facets that make you you. And no matter what the final outcome of your work might be, you succeeded because you dared to try.

Aluta continua. We will get there one day.

Does development work develop us?

I am continuing with the theme of activism because I am having so many awakenings on my own path, and I feel like someone else out there would benefit from some of my introspections.

In my previous piece, I positioned activism within the rubric of money and monetisation. I asked if activism should take on a professional and financial value, or whether this corrupts what it is meant to be. At the same time, I played my own devil’s advocate and asked how the activist is supposed to survive if activism does not provide for his or her financial needs.

It is such a complex issue I am still thinking through for myself and trying to come to a point of peace about.

One comment in the feedback to my article really stood out for me and made me think more deeply. Asks babs; “… exposing young people to aspects of life without their consent. Is this really fair, and are we curtailing their personal choices by so doing?”

That question struck such a deep chord with me that I had to unpack it immediately.

You see, in my last article I mentioned how I got into activism; not by choice, but by way of a prescriptive internship programme. And I dare say that this is the way many young Zimbabweans find their way into the development field which has erroneously and rather simplistically become equated with activism; not really sure if they are passionate about the cause, not articulate or overtly expressive about a stance on issues, heavily under pressure to complete their degree programmes and thereafter, under more pressure to get a job and start helping with family needs.

How many young Zimbabweans are getting into development work for passion, and for pay? Photograph from http://www.psu.edu

I remember meeting a young woman last year who was keen to work with an arts and culture company that was offering the possibility of an internship. It was quite self-evident that arts and culture was not where her real passions lay as she spoke exuberantly about women’s rights and development issues. She had fire in her eyes for social justice and yet had come to a point of deep desperation for something to do that even working as an administrative assistant at this arts company was better than risking failing her degree for having had lack of industrial attachment, a prerequisite for some local university courses.

While she didn’t get the placement in the end (she was even trying to get a placement at a financial bank after some time) I don’t doubt that whatever she ended up doing killed some, if not all, of her fire.

I would have taken her in but for the fact of my own lack of resources; no office space, no budget line for a stipend and no clear vision of what Her Zimbabwe was, and what it would need, at that point in time. The girl did not even have regular access to a computer, so we were literally at square one.

What irony to find a girl passionate about women’s rights locked out of the system when others sat idling about, trying to milk the system for all its worth.

I understand that these are not situations peculiar to Zimbabwe. Many people the world over are out on good fortune. And the privilege of working a job that one loves remains just that – a privilege. For the majority of the masses, selling their souls, or at least compromising their ambitions for a pay cheque, is standard fare.

I think, however, that in Zimbabwe the situation is out of hand.

We are an economy that has largely been buoyed by the ability of NGOs to thrive amid the urgent humanitarian crises in our nation. Within an imbalanced terrain where the private sector is on the wane and unemployment rates remain perilously high, it is no wonder that many young people feel more guaranteed of a job if they study social sciences. In the mid-1990s it was en vogue to do a diploma or degree in HIV Management. In the early to mid 2000s, people were jostling to get into Population Studies programmes. Today, NGOs are abuzz with employees who have studied, or are studying, Development Studies.

I will not point the finger at others on this because my UK-sponsored Masters Degree is in Development Studies. My first choice of degree was International Communication, but my scholarship programme chose to send another student to my preferred university (where I would have studied the said course) to study some special branch of medicine I can no longer remember. And so they offered me my second choice, Development Studies, at another university. While this institution was higher in prestige and academic track record, I still came away somewhat disappointed.

I haven’t regretted the choice since because ironically, it was my studies that cemented my belief in the fact that the current structure of development work is deeply flawed. I had frank western lecturers who weren’t afraid to deconstruct aid, donor dependency, gender and women in development discourse, multi-lateral and bi-lateral institutions and agencies, neo-liberalism, neo-colonialism, capitalism, elite capture… and the list goes on!

Discussing scenarios such as this was not peculiar in my course. Photograph from http://www.flickr.com

We debated, vented, questioned, queried, introspected and became far more conscious of our roles in the greater scheme of development work. It felt as though our lecturers were giving us that last chance to really think about whether we wanted to enter the system… and urging us that if we did, we at least represent the change that is needed, knowing well that the most important change remains ideological.

One thing that also struck me about my degree course was how African and Asian our department was. Of all my regular course classmates, I recall about five or so Brits, two Americans, and a few other Europeans (but from the ‘PIGS’ group of ‘developing’ economies – Italy and Greece particularly). The rest of us, about 75% of the enrollment, were from Asia and Africa.

It always perplexed African and Asian peers in other departments just how racially and geographically dominant we were in our department for they found themselves always in the minority in comparison to western student ratios.

But it makes eerily simple sense.

As Africans and Asians coming from countries with heavy NGO and government influences, we have it imbibed into our way of thinking that development work is the elixir to our problems, and the gateway to financial security. And also, the flawed way in which western altruism is often constructed is such that a scholarship sponsor usually only feels assured that their funds are being used ‘responsibly’ if the recipient studies a narrow range of programmes which fit with a prescriptive notion of saving one’s country from itself, while at the same time not providing much challenge to the status quo, or trying to birth new paradigms.

What do they say about religion being the opium of the masses? Well, think of education and a good, solid, conservative development job in the same light, and you will get the drift.

I can laugh at this reductive thinking sometimes. But at other times, it makes me miserable for it is the inertia of most development work that is keeping innovation stuck in a docile lull. Effectively, the more development workers we are churning out, the more longevity we are providing for our workshop and Powerpoint activism (a contentious point, I know, as development work is much broader than I depict it).

And also, the more one becomes immersed in this paradigm of work, the harder it becomes to think otherwise. So yes, you may note the flaws of it all, but if you have never been exposed to another way of thinking about things, you don’t even have the vocabulary or real world experience of something else to even articulate yourself, or your concerns.

One of the reasons why I got out of full-time employment in the HIV and AIDS sector was because it wasn’t really me. Yes, I learnt a lot from my work, met a lot of great people, got to work on some amazing projects. But at the end of the day, it didn’t fit my character right. I despised rehashing stale statistics every time I wrote an article; “According to the latest findings from XYZ, sub-Saharan Africa remains the hotbed/ epicentre/ breeding ground of the global pandemic, etc etc”. I got so tired of writing the word ‘epicentre’ all the time that I had to get creative and find other ways of saying it… HIV and AIDS was generally becoming a hackneyed subject with the public anyway, so one had to call on imaginative sources constantly.

You could be forgiven for mistaking ‘Jargon’ for a language… (Photograph from http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com)

 I didn’t much enjoy giving presentations because a quick skim of my audience usually revealed that I was talking to less than half of the people in a room(can you blame them though, since I was almost always with the same people at different events; I was telling them things they already knew!). It frustrated me that when we went away for workshops, participants organised themselves into taskforces and steering committees to carry work forward, only to fall silent afterwards and never bother to actually implement their great ideas. And then there was all the jargon – MARPs, MIPA, GIPA, MSMs, PLHIV, PrEP, PEP, OIs – which made it all too easy to sometimes forget that these acronyms referred to real human beings!

It didn’t sit right with me. And now that I order my interest in HIV work in a very different way, I don’t feel that I can earn a regular living from what felt, to me, like personal exploitation of a circumstance.

But how many of us actually have that luxury to change tack? To sit down and reflect and say, “This is not the best use of who I am, so I am changing direction.”? How many of us have the financial cushion to even imagine that? The gall to walk away? And since I know that that isn’t easy – or even wise sometimes to do – what is it exactly that I am asking anyone who reads this to do?

Well, I am asking you to take a step back from your work and evaluate it and your position within it. It’s easy to see only what you want to see. And believe me, selective perception is sometimes necessary, or else you will suffer a nervous breakdown trying to understand this world of contradictions.

I don’t expect you to quit your job, abandon your studies, or decide to live on nothing more than passion. That is naïve and irresponsible, given our present economic climate.

And more importantly, I do not wish to appear as though I am trashing in development work and saying that it’s of no benefit. I am not. I am simply positioning it within the context that it has grown. More power to you if you are doing the work that you really want to be doing and creating crucial impact in people’s lives.

Regardless of which side of the fence you sit, I hope by writing this that we begin to feel more open to give more honest accounts and representations of who we are, and the work we do. And I mean for those accounts and representations to be given first to oneself. When we are honest with ourselves, we begin to get somewhere. When we become conscious of our circumstances, we become aware that we can change them.

Maybe today, we can only change them by just acknowledging that they exist. Maybe tomorrow, we can change them in bigger ways we never knew possible.

But we must be conscious as activists, practitioners and implementers… lest we become a part of the living dead.

When activism becomes a job

Long before I had a dream of setting up Her Zimbabwe, I worked in different HIV NGO jobs which allowed people to assign me the title of ‘activist’, or rather, ‘gender activist’ because of my overt stance on gender issues and their interrelationship with HIV, AIDS, sex and sexuality.

It is true that I carried out my work  – largely documenting cases and stories – with passion and diligence. Having been aware of gender injustice growing up in a single mother household, the issues were not altogether new to me. But still, I had never wanted for food, clothes, education, good health or any other fundamental resource, even given my mother’s single salary support stream.

I distinctly remember the first time that I was confronted by the urgency of the atrocities that women in Zimbabwe suffer.  It was 2006 at the public hearing of the then Domestic Violence Bill (it was soon passed into law) and woman upon woman came up to the podium at the Rainbow Towers in Harare to recount her excruciating story of physical violence suffered at the hands of men and patriarchy. Some of the women even came with blood-soiled T-shirts still bearing the brutal memories of the violence they had suffered.

Photograph from http://www.panafricannews.blogspot.com

Just into my 20s, my sheltered world was shaken up and my naivety upended by these all too real encounters.

Once, I did an in-depth interview with a woman living with HIV who recounted a story so personal and painful to bear, that even the pen in my hand felt intrusive for committing her story to words and paper. At one point, she took off her blouse to show me the endless sea of warts populating her back, a result of HIV denialism peddled by her husband who refused to allow her to get onto ARVs for such a long time, that opportunistic infections began to ravage her body.

She wore a bright red summery shade of lipstick and 1980s style chunky monochrome earrings. She looked like she had it together, but in that tiny room, she revealed to me what she had kept so well-hidden from public scrutiny and then broke down in tears, pleading for my help.

Another time, I visited a rural village in Chiredzi where seven women had been infected with HIV by their philandering husband (he admitted to his ways when we interviewed him). The man, now sick and unable to walk further than a few paces, sat outside his village hut all day looking into space almost ruefully. Most of his wives were now dead, and two had run away with their children, probably into South Africa.

Only one wife remained. His first wife. Bitter. Sick. But resilient.

She was left to care for her husband when the others had fled. She was also left to care for some of his dead wives’ children. Many had died and some had been taken in by relatives.

As we sat in this woman’s hut, she told us how her marriage had always been abusive and how her husband had flaunted his new wives in front of her, diminishing her self-esteem to nothing. She told us that she only looked after him because he was sick and that all the other women had left her this responsibility; that he and the wives who had died had refused to take ARVs, but that she had heeded the words of the home-based care centre in the area and enrolled onto the programme at the local hospital.

The one thing that stood out for me remains the meal she served us. This was 2008 when all manner of food shortage was prevalent all across Zimbabwe, when the delight of tea with milk, sugar and bread and jam was a fantasy for 99% of the population. And yet here was this woman serving us samp, rich tomato and onion stew and tea with powdered milk and sugar.

How?

Someone had gone to South Africa and with the little money she had, she had sent her to get her a tin of powdered milk , tea bags, cooking oil and some sugar, among other things. The samp and stew ingredients were from her fields.

As she served the tea, she made sure to cover up her kitchen door. Stealthily, she crept to one side of the hut and unearthed the sugar and powdered milk from a cloth behind the rack she used to store her pots.

“I only take care of my children and myself. That man has hurt me too much in this life. God help me, but I am done with taking care of him. Let him drink black tea!”

This is a small glimpse into the sort of work that I began doing seven years ago, work that – by virtue of being a documentalist – has earned me the title of ‘gender activist’, a debatable issue that I will discuss later in this article. I must add that I didn’t choose this work; the supervisors at my university used their discretion to assign students to internship programmes. This placement was the doing of influences beyond my control.

And so it was that without reflection or much choice, I became known as an activist.

But the term always sat uneasily with me. What was I doing that was changing lives beyond documenting them? What did each of these women substantively gain from my efforts to write them into being? Did society change for the better? Did their gendered issues get the immediate recourse to justice that they required?

A meme from Kony 2012, taken from http://www.jeffzelaya.com

Moreover, I began to look at all the other people around me who, by virtue of working in NGOs or women’s organisations, were labelled activists. Sometimes all they seemed to do was attend conferences and workshops, give Powerpoint presentations, give out business cards and speak the language of ‘mainstreaming’, ‘sensitisation’, ‘gender budgeting’ and ‘rights-based approaches’. To me, it seemed activism was a suited, manicured business that took place in luxurious hotels.

The challenges became harder for me when I began to earn a salary from my work. For the first year of my foray into this world, I was an unpaid intern provided a transport fee to go to work and return home. And so I could rest assured that when I stayed back on some evenings, or made my way to the office on weekends, it was because I really wanted to; I had nothing to gain (well, a good reputation as a hard worker never killed anyone!) and more to lose (my time and rest!).

But money. Money corrupts everything.

You learn that someone who you think doesn’t have as much gusto gets paid four times your salary. You realise that your benefits are half a drop in the ocean compared to some other ‘favoured’ people in your office’s pay bracket. At once you remain passionate, but yet at the same time frustrated that you aren’t earning what you think your work is worth. What is your work worth anyway if it’s passion-based? Is passion quantifiable and remunerable?

You become resentful.

You wonder if you have become the office rag because you will show up when everyone else says they can’t and yet you earn but a fraction of what they do. “They are wiping the floor with me!” you grunt under your breath.

With your ego wounded, you decide that the only solution is to curb your enthusiasm. Do only what your job specs demand, not all the other unpaid work that someone else is gaining from. You decide that you won’t bring all your ideas to the table anymore, leave the office in good time and repossess your unpaid weekend time. You know that women’s stories still need telling, but you aren’t going to break your back doing it for someone else’s glory.

Let’s be honest here; money is a well-known inflator and deflator of motivation and effort.

It is upon making these simple and real deductions that I then ask; should activism be paid work? Given the challenges that I have already put forward about internal conflicts that one endures, money only serves to exacerbate the complexities.

At this point, you may be calling for me to first define activism so it’s certain that we are all on the same page. I really don’t wish to define it for you because my romanticism leads me to believe that , “Once you know, you know.”

Sounds corny but I think it also opens people to seeing activism in another light that is as a deeply personal, consciousness-meets-emotion-meets-spirituality experience and not as is narrowly defined or understood as people marching on the street with megaphones chanting. That’s activism too, but it’s not the sum total of it.

All manner of work can be seen as activism. Some think it is only work in social sciences or humanities that qualifies but think of the medical student who decides to study oncology because there aren’t enough doctors tackling the growing rates of cancer in his or her country. Think of the fashion designer who holds top brass events every so often where all proceeds go to a social cause. An academic studying film theory recently told me that she sees her work as activism because it documents the theory upon which action and change is premised.

Activism or corporate social responsibility? Are they two different things? We can have another discussion some other time.

And then there is what I call ‘latent activism’, the activism you don’t even know you are carrying on. I remember once telling a young woman that she had to check herself about going out with the married man who she fallen for. She seemed so entrapped by his wiles that I didn’t think I was getting through to her. But a month or so later, she called to tell me that she had ended the relationship after our long discussion, and that she was now going to think about continuing her studies.

Did I think she would leave him when we spoke? I hoped she would, but it seemed improbable. What was the activism component of this all, you ask? The fact that she left a man who kept her under thumb with money and power… the fact that she took herself back from him. Isn’t this what the protests and megaphones are towards bringing about?

With all of this to think through, one needs to look at oneself and ask; “Is my activism a form of work, or is it something I would do given no personal security, financial or otherwise? Should it be something that I do with no safety net to break potential falls?”

Writer and womanist, Alice Walker, once stated that activism is the rent we pay for being on this planet. So if it is our rent, surely it should pay the bills too?

Great! But will it pay the monetary rent I owe my landord/ lady? Taken from http://www.crunkfeministcollective.com

So how do we value activism equitably, especially for the activist? Can the roles and functions of activism be outlined in a job description, a strategic plan, an organogram or call for applications?

Given that activism is volatile (as the situation changes, the needs or strategies change) and exposes the activist to emotional, verbal, psychological, sometimes even physical, harm – how can such work ever be equitably costed and remunerated? Should we have budget lines for mental and emotional care (activists, by the nature of what and who they are, internalise their work)? How should an activist’s working hours and days be structured to show a conscious understanding of their needs? Where and how is self and communal care factored into the work environments and conditions they work under?

Is change the pay off? And since change is never complete – and sometimes never happens – what then becomes the pay off?

Activism has become all too easy a word to bandy around, and I realise that the examples that I have offered make it all the easier for anyone to claim to be an activist. I guess the difference is that where one act may be a once-off thing, activism is about consistency, constant introspection and retrospection, the moral inability to disconnect from a circumstance and to act – through the means that one can best employ – to be a part of effecting change around the circumstance.

There! You have made me define activism though I didn’t want to!

I wrote this piece because ‘activist’ is an uneasy title I have worn for almost a decade of my life. It has taken me to places far and wide that I never imagined; my body has lined the beds of luxuriant five star hotels, I have visited four continents of this earth, I have been in the presence of noted dignitaries and have won accolades and adulation alike.

And yet is rare that I have seen ‘a fire in the eyes’ to tell me that there is a real conviction for change happening around me. All too often, it is sanitised work in which activism has largely become about power and a self-interested status quo that thrives on the powerless’s plight.

When activism gains a monetary measure, the lines become blurred.  Bureaucracy and self-preservation take over. The ego interferes. And yet when no such measure exists, the fact that you know what should be done but have no money to do it, or to survive, means that nothing gets done. Either that, or you are forced at some point to compromise so as to be able to get things running and have enough to eat from your work.

And once you eat, gluttony is the risk that you expose yourself to.

From http://www.readwriteread.co.za

My friend, Koketso Moeti, wrote a piece about clicktivism which I urge you to read. In it, she discusses how activism has become, for too many, a simple click of a button to send/ share / like/ sign. She asks activists to search themselves to find answers to the following questions;

– Am I doing this to create a certain perception of myself?

– Am I doing this to ease my guilt?

– Am I doing this to prove my superiority?

– Am I doing this to market myself and create a brand that’s about me?

– Do I expect a pat on the back for doing this?

– What are my expectations of those I am assisting and are those expectations fair?

– If at any stage my presence threatens the existence of the project, am I willing to step back from it?

– Who really am I doing it for?

Food for thought indeed for us all who call ourselves activists, or have been given the mantle.

Thank you for being honest…

Over time, I have started to notice a regular refrain in my communication with different people; friends, colleagues and family alike. “Thank you for being honest,” they say or write amid responses to questions or thoughts they have put forward to me to think through or assess.

At first I didn’t take much notice of this trend, but it seems now, on a weekly basis, that someone says or writes this to me. And for that reason, I can no longer consider it a simple coincidence, but rather, a part of something forming within my character.

Honesty.

It is one of the hardest traits to pursue within adulthood because life socialises us to exercise extreme cautiousness with other adult human beings. Life will throw at you backstabbers, opportunists, bridge burners and those who are of a plainly evil disposition.

In the song ‘Forgive Them Father’, Lauryn Hill sings

Beware the false motives of others

Be careful of those who pretend to be brothers

And you never suppose it’s those who are closest to you,

They say all the right things to gain their position

Then use your kindness as their ammunition

To shoot you down in the name of ambition, they do 

She goes on to sing;

A friend once said, and I found to be true

That everyday people, they lie to God too

So what makes you think, that they won’t lie to you?

These are sobering, perhaps even macabre, lyrics. But they reveal a truth about human interactions that I remain amazed that a woman of 23 had already figured out in her short journey into adulthood. I keep the words of that song close to me.

And I refer to them when they ring true from disappointments I experience with human beings. But while I remain conscious of the self-interest and machinations of the human condition – I suffer these faults myself too, of course, – I remain steadfast in my belief that we can only progress as people in relationships of whatever nature, really progress in ways that are meaningful, if we retain our ability to be honest while also open to sometimes hurtful truths.

Of course, I do not call for child-like, no-bars-held honesty; that is a sure recipe for people to exploit and feast on your vulnerabilities. And I am also not talking away white lies as we are all, at one time or the other, going to have to call in sick from work to run some private errands, or concoct some such other fallacy.

Come on, let’s be honest about that!

But I do believe that when I am asked to give opinion or thoughts on something of substantive weight (that is a subjective measure, of course), it is only decent and right to be honest. If you really care about something or someone, it is your prerogative to be honest. What comes after that honesty is simply out of your control.

I will throw a spanner in the works and say that it is only your prerogative to be dishonest when honesty will exacerbate an already disastrous or uncontrollable situation… But we’ll discuss that train of thought another day!

The only problem, of course, is that we are not socialised to be ‘honest’, or rather to fully disclose who we really are; it is a dangerous practice, because can anyone handle who we really are beneath the layers anyway? And – as I have already mentioned – laying yourself open to truth sometimes exposes you, like the intestines of wounded prey, to a pack of vultures.

So what ought you do? Allow the vultures to feast on you? Or rather, join the vultures and prey on those who cannot conform to the standard? Or maybe just keep yourself to yourself?

Image taken from http://www.theillegalgal.wordpress.com

I choose, as many people tell me, to be more honest than most. This has cost me relationships, financial stability, opportunities and a host of other things. It has given me sleepless nights and has turned people away from me. But still, I would rather persist in this honesty than buckle under the social expectation of being and becoming that which I am not.

It is along this long dark corridor of social pressure and expectation that many have hung their coats of truth and chosen to wear gowns of deceit. It is in that corridor where plots to backstab and brew hearsay in the interests of position, acclaim, self-aggrandisement and other pursuits are hatched. It is in that corridor that the wheeling and dealing of souls is conducted and the ego inflates, bloating up to fill out the empty spaces within.

It is in that corridor that we choose what we become.

What are you hanging up? The truth for a coat of lies? (Image courtesy Getty)

I don’t write all of this to sit on a moral high horse or to seem perfect, because I know that sooner or later, I will also be exposed for my own misdeeds. We are all fallible and the truth is that we humans are a mass of contradictions. Our motives shift, views change, circumstances evolve. We are never fully the same person we were or are, or will become.

And that, my friends, is about as honest as it gets!

However, if nothing I have said is comprehensible or even plausible, I wish to leave you with this lesson I continually learn; Honesty is all well and good, but it has to start within. If you cannot be honest with yourself, you can never offer this to another person. It is a hard proposition, I know. Sometimes, the easiest person to run away from is yourself.

But yet, it is only in such honesty that we find who we really are, and more importantly, who everyone else really is.

The problem is you are not listening to me!

Last week, someone I had held in high regard for many years lost my respect. This man, a social commentator and activist for progressive masculinities in Zimbabwe, had written on my Facebook wall that the mainstream women’s movement in Zimbabwe was increasingly becoming an irrelevant entity and that big western funders were “counterproductively funding an elite of women’s organisations who are extremely conservative, middle class and urban.” In essence, he was calling for a ‘new way’ through a group of breakaway organisations, including Her Zimbabwe, which he had identified as being ‘progressive’.

Photograph from http://neditpasmoncoeur.blogspot.com

I honestly appreciated his critique as it brought up real issues that plague Zimbabwe’s women’s movement in ways that many are not honest enough to acknowledge. I responded to him informing him that Her Zimbabwe was not a self-identified movement but rather a space for women which is still negotiating its way through the torturous terrain that is women’s organising. I added that at just eight months of existence, it was unfair to foist prescriptive revolutionary expectations on the platform when I, as its founder, and the team around me, were grappling with collective and personal concerns about our work and how best to articulate these and our stances on a variety of issues. I also challenged him to see that Her Zimbabwe was just as middle class and urban as the other initiatives that he was berating and that this qualified us for the same critique he was giving to other entities.

His response to my honesty was to tell me that it was, “Disappointing but there is no middle ground left and you’ve decided which side you are on! I wish you luck in your endeavours, I’ll let the others know you are not up for it.”

At this point, I began to lose my cool. Disappointing?! So honesty is disappointing? Having an opinion different to yours is disappointing? Now I am the bad guy on the bad guys’ side because I didn’t agree with you? Oh, and you will let the others know? When exactly did you consult me within this planning of your revolution prior to posting on my wall and telling me where things stood? The fact that he would “let the others know” implied that he had been having conversations about this without my knowledge. In essence, he was simply co-opting me into a pre-hatched plan.

You have to understand that I take no pleasure in recounting this story, but the fact that he chose to drag it through the public space of my Facebook page means that he chose to make this a matter for the public domain. You have to also understand that I have watched and commiserated with this man over many years, and taken seriously his growing despondency with Zimbabwe’s women’s movement and its alienation of certain voices and sectors.

But the approach he took to settling his despondency with me was simply unacceptable.

As he dished out his words, I wondered if he forgot that he was a white man originally from Europe. Did he forget that he was born of the most privileged and unchallenged species of human life? Did he forget that I was a black African woman, one of the most unprivileged peoples of this world? Did he forget that he could never see or understand my struggles in the same way as I experience them because his white skin and maleness afford him latent privileges knitted into the fabric of his very being?

The answer to all those questions is NO, for all I felt from him was coercion to take up his stance, or else be labelled a ‘non-radical’ by a movement which he had defined without prior consultation with me.

Did he really understand how neo-colonial, denigrating, paternalistic and infuriating this was for a young black woman working her damndest to contribute to dismantling the stereotype of the pliant and compliant African who doesn’t question jumping, but simply asks the master how high to go?!

I have since began to question what progressive forms of masculinities he stands for if his is a brand that coerces and bullies others into accepting his stance, or else passes negative judgement on dissent.

I was disappointed, but sadly, I was not surprised. This half- blind paternalism and coercion disguised as solidarity is all around me.

And slowly, I am learning that keeping silent about it only allows it to fester to the detriment of the self-determination of Zimbabwean and African women, a state that so many social and political factors continually work against.

Having been in the US for a few months this year, I have become acutely conscious and articulate about my disappointments with global feminist solidarity movements. A lot of these white-led liberal movements working with women of the global south confuse me. They seemingly make no efforts to collaborate with women of colour within their own localities in the west (except for movie stars and semi-conservative and therefore ‘safe’ women of colour) but somehow feel comfortable within the slums of Africa, South America and Asia amplifying the ‘voices of the oppressed’.

How is it this credible?

Photograph from http://www.mysticpolitics.com

Surely the best conduits to entry and understanding of women’s issues on those continents is through building solidarity and working with western feminists of colour (Asian, Carribean, African, Latina) and others who have greater contextual grounding in their issues, and through whom the women of the global south can begin to see their faces reflected and represented. I hasten to add that the lived realities of an African-American feminist activist are markedly different to my own, but within the sea of whiteness, her black skin and her voice in support of me, and with me, means something significant; she understands what life is like in a skin that is  ridiculed and abhorred by so many.

Where is that woman in all these programmes? I know she exists. I have seen her, I have spoken to her. So why is she invisible?

And where also are the women from the global south on boards of governance? You see, you can’t authentically own power if you have no say at the table where decisions are made. And I do analyse organisational structures and mostly find no women from the global south in my analyses; we only seem to sprout at the tail end of processes, the implementation phase.

To me, it feels like we are co-opted into activities and programmes after all processes and plans have been made. To me it seems we are a means of validating projects through the roping in of ‘grassroots voices’.

It pains me that the strategies that global women’s networks use to engage women of the global south still resemble archaic developmental models where strategies and evaluations thereof are conducted somewhere out there – New York or London perhaps – with little attention paid to how contextually and culturally different women of the global south are. This global south is made of continents with countries and cultures, sub-cultures and counter-cultures. To define it as one site of struggle is to essentialise and triviliase the plights of individuals and collectives in various settings. What works in India  has no guarantee of working in Indonesia, and what works in Harare has no guarantee of working in Bulawayo. These are people for whom the prescriptive does not apply wholesale as if there is homogeneity among them. We know well that there is diversity among western women, so why is this not understood and respected for African women or Asian women?

But does anyone really care about what I have to say about such approaches, or should I keep quiet and simply be glad that I have even been engaged, that someone wants to hear my opinion (mostly when it conforms), that someone cares about my continent when no Africans seem to be taking up the responsibility, that someone has cared enough to even fly me to workshops, pay a good stipend and put me up in a swish hotel?

Are these the concessions that I must make so that the status quo is maintained and everyone is happy?

My answer?
YES.

And yes, I admit to failing to speak up for myself on several occasions because it cost too much to do so. Yes, I admit to enjoying the luxuries of silence. Silence means that you are likeable and workable with. As long as you smile at the right pauses and say and do all the acceptable things, you are like “one of us” because you understand that we are helping you, not harming you in any way at all.

Silence means that you have the right sort of radicalism, the type that understands things from a western perception of what that means, never mind that for you wearing a skirt an inch above your knees might be the most radical thing that you do each day to claim your own version of the word.

I tried to explain this to an esteemed feminist and opinion leader recently, telling her how I have a Zimbabwean friend with visible tattoos all over her body who shares my anxiety at wearing shorts outside the house; not because of her tattoos, but rather the way she was socialised to see her body. She (the feminist I refer to) called it ‘absurd’ and hastily moved the conversation on to something else.

She didn’t listen to me.

Radical to her wasn’t about such struggles. Radical was beyond this challenge my friend and I shared as products of our socialisation who had had it soaked into our beings at adolescence that good girls cover up. This was a part of our struggle for radicalism and she could only see it as fickle and trivial.

Real radicalism was about saving women in war-torn zones in Africa. After all, that’s where the authentic realness of women’s stories is found, not with a sometimes gauche 28-year-old (me) who has suffered a love-hate relationship with her “kiss madolo” (kissing knees) since some vendors on the street followed and heckled her about it in her early teens forcing a flood of tears and self-condemnation of her body.

My story doesn’t fit the predominant lens used to understand an African woman’s struggle so it is labelled absurd and irrelevant; it is not worth talking about.

And it is in such ways that the western feminist gaze over the continent is cast; a gaze that eliminates some narratives and illuminates others.

I don’t doubt for one minute that my knees are not the most important issue that the feminist struggle has to look at, but I would appreciate it if my encounters with patriarchy would not be shooed aside. Or is it that my story won’t measure up against funders’ expectations of an authentic African patriarchal struggle? Because if that is what it is, it would make it easier for all if I knew to not have to speak and let the ‘real women’ have their say.

I assure you that I am not the first person to voice these concerns and neither will I be the last. It’s high time that well-meant western-initiated (and yes I think a few of them do come from a genuine desire to be of assistance) programmes and implementers thereof ask these searching questions of themselves.

It’s not that African women are not thinking all of these things… it’s just that sometimes we keep silent for fear of retribution.

And what is often worse than silence is speaking up and being condemned for exercising one’s right to have an opinion formed from individual interrogation.

Can it get more paternalistic than that?

In our deeds, we find life

When I started writing this, it was going to be about something else. Sometimes I do that. I just get on my laptop and start writing anything that comes to mind. And then after a few lines, all the rambling makes sense and moves in a coherent direction. I guess that’s what’s happened here.

I think a lot about the impermanence of life (I think a lot about a lot of things – in that regard, Fungai wasn’t such a bad name to be given!) and sometimes it saddens me no end. But in other moments, it allows me to reflect; yes, life is not forever, but in many ways, it is about forever. Our physical bodies may not live forever (depending on what you believe in spiritually, or otherwise) but I do believe that what we do, our deeds, do live on. Just as I am alive, so too are the deeds of many who are dead who impacted my life.

Life is not wasted.

The great William Shakespeare once said of life;

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

From reading this, it would appear that Shakespeare was a pessimist. But I beg to differ. He seems to have understood it perfectly; life is a shadow of the spirit and the self. It is vapid, formless, signifying nothing. And yet it is a reflection of what is substantive and eternal, which is living. Once more, I invite you to use whatever spiritual or aspiritual lens you choose to understand this.

Besides thinking, I am also blessed with a fairly good memory. And this is where the thoughts expressed above meet with the article you will read below – the memory of a man who every so often visits my thoughts. Today, I just thought about him and couldn’t shake off the desire to remember him. You see, in this world where the heroes of the day are men and women who do something mighty and momentous, I just want to remember a simple soul who did something that still warms my heart almost 20 years later.

Through his deeds, he lives beyond his death. And through my words, he can live for you too. So here goes the story;

———————-

I am not sure I ever knew his real name. Even when I speak of him with my sister, we refer to him ‘Mr Cheapway’, which is a bit funny. He was a taxi driver when I was a little girl many years ago. He had a battered old Datsun with the words ‘Cheapway Taxis’ printed across its sides, hence his nickname. That Datsun chortled and coughed along its way almost as much as Mr Cheapway, a man in his 60s or 70s; a heavy drinker and smoker, but always somehow dependable to pick you up on time should you need his services.

In my child’s mind, I thought of him as a granddad. An animated, cynical yet funny sort of granddad who complained about anything he could, from traffic to prices of food to life. I always enjoyed my rides around town with him and he became our family’s favoured cabby in times of emergency.

Once, when I was 10, I left my school bag at the bus stop. I had fallen asleep while waiting for the bus and when the juddering of its engine roused me from my dreams, I managed to get excited enough to board the bus and forget my bag; yes, my most precious lime green and pink backpack containing all of my exercise books, text books and stationery. I was mortified when I made the discovery and even more mortified when the bus driver refused to make a U-turn to return to the bus stop.

Drenched in tears, I got off the bus upon its arrival in town. My mind wasn’t quite functioning right but rather than run to my mummy with this (I reckoned she would either be in a work meeting or fall into a fit of rage, or both), I chose to run to Mr Cheapway.

“Hesi mwana,” he croaked when I materialised at his car door. He always parked his car in the same spot so it was easy to find him. As usual, he was sucking on a cigarette with a newspaper spread across the dashboard.

I heaved out my story and cried some more as I told it, imagining what my mother would have to say about me losing so many things in one go.

In no time, it was resolved.

I was in the back of Mr Cheapway’s car and we were driving off to the bus stop just outside Townsend High School. He didn’t reprimand me or ask how it had all happened, or even how I could have been so careless. I suppose being who he was, he’d had many similar incidents in his own life. He simply drove, his eyes focusing on the road from behind his thickly rimmed glasses, his foot pressing insistently on the accelerator.

But his heroic efforts were in all in vain; by the time we arrived, the bag was gone. And there was only more misery to be had.

Mr Cheapway wasn’t the emotional type but from my wailing, he knew I was hurting. And that’s when he called one of the sweets vendors sitting at the bus stop and paid for a few lollipops for me. He must have accompanied the sweet treats with some words of consolation, but I forget the details now. I just remember the tear-blurred memory of red rectangular lollipop heads, wrapped in clear cellophane, drowning with his tobacco browned palm.

He then drove me back into town, all the way to my mum’s office, telling me to clean up my face and forget about crying. The walk upstairs to my mum’s office was long and lonely but she didn’t scold me when I told her the story. While this was a relief, it still wasn’t comfort for my little aching heart.

But later that evening, a girl called our home to inform us that she and her mum had found my bag with all my books and pens and pencils intact! My mother called Mr Cheapway to inform him of the good news.

We travelled with him the next morning to get the bag.

It only occurred to me after everything had been resolved that he hadn’t gotten paid for running around the previous day. He’d simply acted. My mother insisted on reimbursing him for his efforts, but he declined, reassuring her that I was as good as any of his other grandchildren.

Mr Cheapway died a few years later. But I always remember that Thursday afternoon, especially when I am in Bulawayo and pass the taxi rank where a battered Datsun – filled with the smell of alcohol and tobacco – used to always be parked.

Thank you Mr Cheapway for setting the challenge to a young girl to do the same for another person in need one day.

We shall always live, if we choose to live within our deeds.

ZESA cuts cut women most!

It’s winter in Zimbabwe; the days are short and the nights reach brutally low temperatures close to the zero degree mark. There isn’t a time of year when Zimbabweans need electricity more than during this harsh season. Yet its painful absence is felt most during the long, cold and dark nights as candles flicker uncertainly throughout millions of forlorn homes.

Power cuts have become a feature of Zimbabwean life; one only needs hear the excited screams of children, a routine event, to know that the long-gone power is back. Yet with the debt of the national parastatal, the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA), running into its millions of US dollars, it doesn’t look like this  generation of children will live to understand how mundane a day of uninterrupted electricity supply should feel.

Recently, the Ministry of Energy and Power Development stated that ZESA owed the Mozambican power utility US$80 million. At one point Mozambique threatened to cut off power supply to Zimbabwe because it has been servicing its debt slowly.

Outdated machinery also continue to cripple local power stations based in Hwange and at Kariba Dam. It is estimated that Zimbabwe needs about 2 200 megawatts of electricity daily at peak winter consumption levels but only generates about 1300 megawatts, almost half of the nation’s need.

As Mernat Mafirakurewa, writing for the NewsDay newspaper recently opined, “Zimbabweans across the country and in all spheres, from housewives to businesspeople, have a sad story to tell about the power cuts they experience every day in their homes and in the factories.” Mafirakurewa aptly captures the woe that has become ZESA power cuts which are generally not selective in how they affect ordinary Zimbabweans across a range of professions and locations.

But a special thought must be spared for women and how lack of access to electricity affects the dual productive and reproductive functions that they often perform within Zimbabwean society.

In every society there are activities, roles and responsibilities that are assigned to women and men largely on the basis of sex. These roles generally fit within two categories, productive work (production) and reproductive work (reproduction). While productive work entails production of goods and services for income generation, reproductive work meets domestic needs, such as maintenance of household order through cooking, cleaning, bearing and taking care of children.

While both areas of work are important to maintaining society’s functionality, productive work generally receives wider and better recognition than reproductive work. For that reason, productive work is often well-paying labour pursued by both men and women, while reproductive labour usually represents free labour ‘offered’ by women. In other words, this means that many women already involved in gainful employment endure a double workload schedule as they still have to return home and carry out domestic chores.

The dual roles that women play and that erratic supply of electricity affects the effectiveness of these women most needs to be acknowledged.

Imagine Chiedza a 30-year-old secretary in Harare with two young children. She is a single mother and cannot afford to hire a maid and has to, upon picking up her children from crèche, get home to cook a meal for the small family. On rare occasions, there is power when she gets home. But usually, she is not so lucky and has to start a fire to be able to cook. Once done cooking, she has to heat water for her children’s bath and then bathe them. After these chores, she has to then wash up the dishes by candlelight. Chiedza knows that generally, the electricity comes on around midnight; she didn’t have a chance to do some ironing over the weekend due to urgent family commitments and now neither she nor her children have pressed clothes to wear the following day.

She decides to stay up and wait, lest the electricity come on earlier than she expects it to. She is wrong and the electricity only comes on just before 1 am. She spends an hour-and-a-half doing some ironing and then tiredly retires to bed at 2.30 am knowing that there might not be any electricity when she gets up at 5 am in preparation for the new day. She is correct, and once more, she has to wake up in the freezing cold dead of the morning to make a fire to heat bath water and cook morning porridge. By the time she gets to work, she is already exhausted as she had enjoyed no respite from work in all its guises.

This is, unfortunately, the untold life story of many Zimbabwean women; women whose lives are controlled by the erratic nature of power – and often, water – supply. It seems a glaring omission within women’s organising, that this lack of access to power, electrical power, that is, has not taken up its rightful position as an issue for advocacy and activism. Without access to electrical power, how are women to be empowered; how is the dual labour function of the nation’s women being undervalued and undermined?

At the beginning of winter, the Zimbabwe Electricity Transmission & Distribution Company, a subsidiary of ZESA holdings, released a winter load shedding programme for 2012. While it seems like a well laid out plan which codes and provides load shedding schedules for suburbs in major Zimbabwean cities and provinces, the programme has thus far, been poorly adhered to. For instance, where the programme can tell you to expect to have electricity in your area from 1pm onwards on a Wednesday, the opposite of this may be true and the electricity many only come on after hours.

Women’s labour is not exclusive to the office or the home; it is usually supplied within both spheres

Thus poor scheduling and implementation render planning impossible for most ZESA subscribers, save those privileged to own generators. And when planning is vital for so many women in Zimbabwe, the inability to do so creates a variety of complexities – not only for women such as Chiedza, but women who get beaten up for not cooking their men’s meals well, women who damage their eyesight studying by candlelight in efforts to secure a better future for themselves, women who have babies who require heated baby food all hours of the night; women whose lives are ruled by the incompetence of a power supply authority.

Due to erratic supplies of electricity, the media has reported on women giving birth by candlelight at major hospitals in the past. Surely, the women of this land deserve better for the work, acknowledged, and unacknowledged, that they conduct every day in Zimbabwe.

What are we going to do to make access to power – in all its forms – a feminist issue?

This article first appeared at http://www.genderlinks.org.za/article/zimbabwe-no-zesa-power-no-power-for-zimbabwes-women-2012-08-02