SheMurenga: The Zimbabwean Women's Movement 1995-2000

Charter

Introduction

A GLIMPSE ON THE GROUND

On 8 February 2001 representatives from the Zimbabwean Women's Movement gathered at the popular leftist venue, the Book Café, in Harare to try and answer the question: ‘Does Zimbabwe have a women's movement?’ As the meeting progressed, I became intrigued by the spectrum of views that embodied the debate.

Some questioned whether Zimbabwean women's organising actually constituted a movement and called for a stocktake in quantifying its concrete achievements. Others suggested that the movement had been so weakened ideologically that it was merely propping up and perpetuating the patriarchal status quo that it was trying to overturn. Muted voices recognised a movement but saw it as weak and dismantled.

At the outset I found this deeply problematic. I had lived through some of the most creative and assertive women's rights based organising during the period 1995-2000 when I worked for the Zimbabwean Women's Resource Centre and Network (ZWRCN)¹ and this kind of interrogation seemed to discount and negate my experience.

I knew that the trajectory and terrain of women's organising in Zimbabwe was rich and deep² and that women's participation in the nationalist struggle for independence³ served to provide the impetus for post-independence demands that sought gender equity and disrupted pre-existing gender relations and cultural norms. Initially, the most tangible gains came in the form of legislative change, the most significant of which was the passing of the 1982 Legal Age of Majority Act (LAMA), which saw women being granted majority status at the age of eighteen, paving the way for women's further political and economic empowerment.⁴

On the other hand, patriarchy had reconfigured itself and the political will to meaningfully address gender inequality in Zimbabwe diminished rapidly, being replaced by the desire to regulate and control women both in the private and public sphere. This was done through the very sophisticated and powerful invocation of counter-revolutionary nationalist and cultural discourses that tended to interpolate any women's organising as feminist and feminism as being anti-nationalist, and pro imperialism.

I could site Operation Clean-Up⁵ as perhaps the most blatant example of this discursive move, but it was by no means the only one. Another example can be found in the repeated attempts to repeal LAMA, and assert the denial of property and inheritance rights to women under customary law. Yet another example involved the stripping of women who wore mini-skirts in the streets. All these manoeuvres were met by concerted and directed action from women activists: action that was planned in the streets, in offices, around dining-room tables, under trees, and in large city halls.

Furthermore, as Zimbabwe plunged into socio-economic and political upheaval in the late 1990s, the conditions under which women were organising had become increasingly challenging. By this time, the state's unvarnished hostility to gendered discourses meant that women activists became the target of state-sponsored violence. On the other hand the ‘deeply uncivil nature of civil society’⁶ with regards to gender meant that alliances across sites of struggle, in order to further women's rights based agendas, were tenuous and had to be carefully negotiated.

With this in mind, sitting at the meeting on 8 February, the issue for me was not whether or not Zimbabwe had a women's movement. It was more inflected. Instead I found myself asking: given the current national context, what form and shape does a movement have to take in order to survive and deal with the challenges it faces whilst seizing opportunities to further the struggle for gender justice?

Thus, given my positioning as an activist and academic, my aim became twofold. I wanted to capture the herstory of women's organising in the period 1995-2000, and through this process I sought to develop an analytical understanding, to theorise the movement and its experience of itself as ‘weak’ and ‘fragmented’.

1 Based in Harare, Zimbabwe.

2 Traceable to pre-colonial and colonial times. See Schmidt, E. (1992). Peasants, Traders and Wives: Shona Women in the History of Zimbabwe 1870-1939. Portsmouth: Heinemann; Barnes, T. (1991). ‘Differential Class Experiences Amongst African Women in Colonial Harare, Zimbabwe 1935-1970’. Paper presented at the conference: Women and Gender, University of Natal; Barnes, T. (1999). ‘We Women Worked So Hard’: Gender, Urbanisation and Social Reproduction in Colonial Harare, Zimbabwe 1930-1956. Portsmouth: Heinemann.

3 Staunton, I. (ed.). 1990. Mothers of the Revolution. Harare: Baobab Books.

4 See Appendix 1.

5 Over the weekend of the 28-30 October 1983 when soldiers and police swarmed through the major city centres of Zimbabwe making arbitrary arrests of women. Its purpose was to round-up single women, who were out alone, and charge them with being prostitutes. See Chapter 4.

6 Mama, A. (1999). ‘Dissenting Daughters? Gender Politics and Civil Society in a Militarised State’. In CODESRIA Bulletin 3 & 4, p. 31.

Chapter 1

WOMEN'S MOVEMENT LITERATURE:

PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES

Historically, Western feminists largely initiated the contemporary interest and subsequent writing on women's movements in the 1960s.¹ The initial body of work aimed to recover the hidden history of female activism in the North, whilst suggesting that women's political involvement was of a distinctive character and significance. It went on to suggest a somewhat naïve commonality in the forms of women's oppression and women's movements worldwide with its forays into the experiences of women in Southern contexts.

This myth of ‘homogenous sisterhood’² was soon challenged through the research and writings of Southern feminists. This critique generated a new corpus that shifted the thinking around women's organising in two ways. It highlighted the heterogeneity of women's struggles. It also suggested that in a post-colonial context, women's abilities to form collective identities to articulate their demands are shaped by political processes: these involve shifts in state power, whether they occur through democratic, anti-imperialist or nationalist struggles.³ Within the trajectory of women's movement literature one has to acknowledge the importance of this re-orientation, and the political message it embodied in challenging Northern hegemony and knowledge production.

Under the rubric of ‘third world studies’ a body of literature emerged that aimed to explore regional similarities in Africa and elsewhere,⁴ but by necessity this leads to the trap of generalisation. As such, this body of work tends to raise more questions than answers as to the particularities of specific contexts and their influence on women's organising and gender politics, thereby outstripping its usefulness. Nonetheless, this perspective did pave the way for deeper contextual case-studies of women's organising, which I will discuss later in this chapter.

Categorisation of Movements

Much time and space has been devoted to categorising women's movements. Many such attempts have drawn from mainstream/malestream social movement theory. This, it can be argued, has obscured the unique features of women's organising, and precluded treating them in their own right. Needless to say there are contrasting views as to what constitutes a movement, but in sum, the literature would suggest that while a movement may be characterised by a diversity of interest, forms of expression and spatial locations, to speak of a movement implies:

A social or political phenomenon of some significance, that significance beinggiven by numerical strength, but also capacity to effect change in some way or another be it in legal, cultural, social or political terms.⁵

This criterion denotes a particular kind of movement, yet, in reality, this is not the only, or even the most important, kind. Sonia Alvarez⁶ in her work on Brazil goes a long way in showing forms of ‘female collective action’ which are, in effect, marked by the absence of one or other of the criteria outlined above. This broader understanding seems more likely to resonate with the diverse manifestation of women's mobilisations in Zimbabwe. Indeed, it is quite possible that the narrow definitions typically found in the literature, which are familiar to Zimbabwean women activists, may have influenced their own conceptions of the movement.

The point I am making is this. If definitional boundaries are going to lock us in and blind us to alternative manifestations of movements and organising, then we not only have to ask where the definitions come from and whose interests they serve, but we also have to challenge them, precisely because our lived reality tells us that forms of mobilisation excluded from consideration as ‘women's movements’ actually make up a large proportion, possibly a greater part, of women's organising and solidarity around the world today. We need to re-claim the term ‘movement’ and re-define it to our own ends through a process of local critical reflection and engagement with received definitions.

There is also a body of literature, largely generated by the technocratic demands of the development industry, intent on typologising women's organising from community-based welfare organisations and church-based women's interest groups to developmental non-governmental organisations, spanning a range of frameworks from Women in Development (WID), Women and Development (WAD), and Gender and Development (GAD), addressing a range of practical and strategic gender interests.⁷ In Zimbabwe, women's organisations can and have been categorised in this way, but to what end?⁸ What value does such a categorisation bring to our understanding?

If in the Zimbabwean context the conceptualisation of movements has blinded us to the possibility of recognising our own strength and valuing our organisational forms then categorisation has been operated as a strategy to weaken. It has reinforced the urban = elite = modern = strategic / rural = poor = traditional = practical divide that is manipulated and deployed to weaken and undermine.

In addition, the uptake of these frameworks point to the sophisticated way in which the global development industry has served as a double-edged sword for securing women's rights. It has appropriated politically powerful concepts and used them to its own ends, to facilitate planning and training by ‘experts’ who are often not versed in the specificities of a context, but are looking for that one recipe which can be applied across the board. In complex ways, language can be used to obscure and water down the critical political edge and dynamism of a movement.

When women's liberation is replaced by ‘women in development’ or when mobilisation is replaced by participation in development’, or when political militancy is replaced by lobbying and advocacy skills, … more than words have been exchanged. A deal has been done and this has consequences.⁹

I would, however, like to return to the work of Maxine Molyneux¹⁰ who draws on the Nicaraguan experience in her discussion of women's movements. For my purposes her work is of value in that it stretches the boundaries of the literature in the direction in which I would like to move. It was Molyneux who initially applied the concept of women's interests, as drawn from political science, in her 1985 study of Women's Interests, the State and Revolution in Nicaragua.¹¹ She argued against certain constructions of women's interests and critiqued the notion that sex was a sufficient basis for assuming common interests.

The idea of women's interests was diffused into planning contexts through its uptake by the World Bank.¹² This resulted in a rather schematic and simplified model of women's interests that was oblivious to the more nuanced understandings. In a paper largely aimed at a reclamation of the initial dynamism embodied by these concepts, Molyneux combines feminist political theory with development studies, and comes to an understanding of women's movements as ‘variant forms of collective action in pursuit of common goals.’¹³ She considers the relation of women's movements to ‘projects of general political import’ be these of an authoritarian or democratic character. Molyneux asserts then that:

Discussion of the broader implications of women's politics remains a relatively unexamined aspect of the development literature. There have been some recent attempts to address this absence, yet it is as if the debate within feminist political theory and the field of development studies have pursued parallel paths with little real engagement with each other. This is all the more remarkable given the impact of women's movement on policymaking and politics in the developing world…¹⁴

She goes on to explore ways in which contemporary debates about