Dan Moshenberg

Dan Moshenberg is an organizer educator who has worked with various social movements in the United States and South Africa.

How the women of Burkina Faso turned lemon into shea butter

November 2, 2012 by 1 Comment

The forests of the world are under attack, `thanks’ to consumer demand for food, fuel, and fiber. The people who live in, and depend on, forests are also under attack. In Burkina Faso, a group of over 4000 plus rural women forest dwellers have taken the lemon they were dealt and turned it into … shea butter. And by so doing, they are transforming the world.

That dealt lemon has many components. First, life for rural women is often one of severely limited education, income, and hope. Second, the labor market in rural Burkina Faso relegated women to collecting and processing shea kernels. Collecting is arduous work, and butter production is even worse. The profits were less than meager. Third, the sales of shea kernels and butter were controlled by more powerful multinational companies that would buy the vast majority of kernels and ship them to Europe or Japan, for processing there. 95% of shea butter went into chocolate, margarine, confections. The rest went into cosmetics.

That was before.

In the late 1990s, women in Burkina Faso and a French cosmetic firm, L’Occitane, teamed up. L’Occitane understood that the market for organic and sustainable and fair market cosmetics was growing. The women gatherers in Burkina Faso knew there had to be a better way to live, for themselves as women, for their households and for their communities.

So, with some assistance, in 2001, about 600 women got together and formed l’Union des Groupements de Productrices des Produits du Karité de la Sissili et du Ziro (UGPPK/S-Z), the Union of Women Producers of Shea Products of Sissili and Ziro. By 2009, they numbered almost 3000. Today, 4,6000 women are members of the cooperative, now called the Nununa Federation. And their ranks are growing.

The women set themselves to understanding the economies of scale, certification, market, and cooperative development. When they had to, they diversified. When the time seemed right, they moved into semi-industrial production. At each step, they have been a model of transparency and democratic and shared decision making. International bodies have certified their product as organic and their processes as Fair Market. They are committed to sustainable development, and they have largely succeeded. They are also committed to a better life. They redesigned the production processes so that no woman has to endure the kind of pain that went into `traditional’ gathering and butter-making processes. From the forests of Burkina Faso to the faces of Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan, the women of the Nununa Federation are leading the way to a better world.

The Nununa Federation is the first organization anywhere to invest successfully in the semi-industrialisation of shea-butter production based on churning. As such, these women are literally breaking new ground. This organization of women has successfully increased its members’ income, increased their autonomy, increased their spare time, improved their health and wellbeing, and increased their stature … at home, in the marketplace, and around the world. And it all begins with the political education of standing up at a meeting and asking hard questions and getting direct answers. The Nununa Federation is simply “the best example in terms of organization, high quality service and products, and ingenuity.” They are a model of democratic, transparent governance.

Today, they say they “are filled with hope to continue the struggle.” The struggle continues.

 

(Photo Credit: http://rsr.akvo.org)

 

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We need Dayamani Barla

October 28, 2012 by 11 Comments

Dayamani Barla is back in jail, and the State won’t say why.

Dayamani Barla lives in Ranchi, the capital of Jharkand, in India. There she runs a small tea shop. That is not why she’s in jail. That is not why the State `released’ her on bail, only to put her back in jail immediately. It’s not tea that has placed Dayamani Barla in a  revolving door of jail – jail – jail, always accompanied by thunderous State silence.

Dayamani Barla is a journalist, according to some the first Tribal journalist from Jharkand. She is a women’s activist, tribal activist, and anti-displacement activist. She’s a popular leader who has refused to be intimidated by either multinational corporations or by the State. She has been described as “Iron Lady” and as “a woman with a steely resolve.”

Actually, she’s not made of steel or iron, but rather of flesh and bone and commitment and action and vision. Transformation and liberation come from ordinary people engaged in ordinary practices. Real change is and must be ordinary.

Dayamani Barla organizes, teaches, and writes in the realm of the ordinary. In 2008, she famously opposed construction of an Arcelor-Mittal plant in Jharkhand. Between 2005 and 2008, the State of Jharkhand signed 112 memoranda of understanding with multinationals. Development was booming … at the expense of those who lived on, nurtured and cherished the land. Dayamani Barla opposed the displacement of those who take care of the land, and of the Earth.

The Arcelor-Mittal plant would have involved 12,000 acres and would have displaced over 70,000 people from some 45 villages. For those people, land is not an asset. It is heritage. Ironically, officially at least, the Indian government agrees. This land is protected, and so cannot be sold for non-agricultural use. And yet, repeatedly, it is.

Dayamani Barla listened to her neighbors and helped them organize. Her neighbors understood the essential truth of displacement. Once displaced, you never return: “We will not allow the Arcelor Mittal Company to enter into the villages because one can not be rehabilitated if once displaced. The lands, which we cultivate belong to our ancestors therefore we will not leave it”.

The “simple” folk of rural Jharkand already knew what the International Red Cross and Red Crescent would only `discover’ four long years later. As the World Disaster Report stated, last week: “Development is a major, but often ignored, driver of forced displacement.” And where’s a hotspot for development-driven displacement? India. The poor of India `bear the brunt’ of development, making up one of the largest populations of internally displaced persons anywhere … ever. And, as is so often the case, there is actually little data concerning those displaced through development. This is ironic given that, unlike all the other drivers of displacement, such as natural disasters and conflict, development is always planned. And yet … the data is `surprisingly’ missing.

But the cost of development to the poor has not been ignored by the poor, by the marginalized. Dayamani Barla has not been surprised by the lack of information, by the ignorance. Neither the State nor the multinational corporations nor the un-civil society made up of journalists, academics, ngo’s and so on, know how to or care to listen to the people actually on the ground.

Since 2010, Dayamani Barla has led a movement to stop government acquisition of farmers’ land for three schools, one of management, one of information technology, and one a law school. Villagers have gone on hunger strikes. Others mobilize. They are not opposed to `knowledge’ or to schools being built. They want consultation. They want a say as to which plot, or plots, of hundreds of acres will be used. They want an end to military occupation. And they want answers. For example, they want to know who decided that Jharkhand needs a knowledge triangle of technology-management-law, rather than, say, basic healthcare or primary education?

Many answer, What Jharkand needs is Dayamani Barla. The Gandhian activist Himanshu Kumar agrees. In a recent poem he asks: “Why do we need Dayamani Barla?” Here’s the beginning of his answer:

“It is a grave danger now to be Dayamani Barla
It is a danger to be an adivasi
It is a danger now to reside in the village

There is land in the village
There are trees in the village
There are rivers in the village
There are minerals in the village
There are people in the village
There is also Dayamani Barla in the village”

There is also Dayamani Barla in the village. We need Dayamani Barla, and not just in the village. We need her in the world. We need her writing. We need her organizing. We need her reminding us that women are the shakers as well as the bakers of revolutionary action and praxis: “The participation of the adivasi women in our struggles has been more than that of men. They are more vociferous as they have to bear the major brunt of the economic and cultural destabilization. Adivasi women in the villages facing the threat of displacement … have clamped a people’s curfew. They equally participate with men in blocking any project-related vehicles, machinery or personnel inside their villages. Women ploughed up the roads and sowed seeds. Volunteers stood as watch guards to see that no one tramples upon their sown fields. Organizations involved in the struggle cannot take any decisions or make any settlements without consulting women’s groups.”

Women tear down walls of `development’ and plant saplings of self-determination and autonomy. We need Dayamani Barla.

 

(Photo Credit: India Resists)

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It’s a great day for Edith Mmusi and her sisters and her sisters’ sisters

October 12, 2012 by 5 Comments

Five years ago, four women elders, four sisters – Edith Mosadigape Mmusi, Bakhane Moima, Jane Lekoko, and Mercy Kedidimetse Ntshekisang – decided enough is enough. Today, the High Court of Botswana agreed. Today, four sisters and their sisters opened the door for women across Southern Africa.

Here’s “the story”:

A couple had one son and four daughters. The father had another son in a previous relationship with another woman. At some point prior to the distribution of the inheritance, the younger son told his half-brother that the half-brother could inherit the family home, when the time came. The time never came. Both brothers died in the intervening period. When the time did come to distribute the inheritance, the half-brother’s son, Molefi Ramantele, showed up and claimed the house.

Edith Mmusi had been living in the house all along. She and her sisters had paid for the upkeep all along. But customary law, the so-called law of male primogeniture, said that the youngest male would inherit. He told Edith Mmusi and her sisters that they had to go.

That’s when Edith Mmusi and her sisters had enough. They went to court.

In 2007, the Lower Customary Court ruled in Ramantele’s favor. In 2008, the Higher Customary Court held that the home belonged to all of the children. In 2010, the Customary Court of Appeal argued in favor of Ramantele. Edith Mmusi and her sisters then decided, again, that they’d had enough, and appealed the decision to the High Court.

They were supported by Priti Patel, of the Southern African Litigation Centre, based in Johannesburg, as well as other women’s rights activists across Southern Africa. They were also supported by the earlier Attorney General v Unity Dow, a landmark women’s rights case. Unity Dow found that Botswana law denied citizenship to children born to a Botswana woman married to a non-citizen, while extending citizenship to Botswana men married to non-citizens. Dow then did what women do, she did what Edith Mmusi and her sisters did. She said enough and took action. She took the government to court and, in 1992, won. Her actions opened a door for women in Botswana, across Southern Africa, and beyond.

The story is the actions of Edith Mosadigape Mmusi, Bakhane Moima, Jane Lekoko, Mercy Kedidimetse Ntshekisang, Priti Patel, Unity Dow and thousands upon thousands of women whose names go unrecorded. It was not the rule of law that won today. Women won today: women pushed and pushed again, women said enough, women organized, women persisted. Upon leaving the High Court in Gabarone today, Edith Mmusi said, “It’s a great day for us.” It is indeed a great day for Edith Mmusi and her sisters and her sisters’ sisters across Botswana, across Southern Africa and beyond.

 

(Photo Credit: BBC)

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The incandescent women of Marikana

September 21, 2012 by 24 Comments

The women of Marikana are marching tomorrow, Saturday, September 22. They have had enough, more than enough, and, as one reporter notes, they are beyond angry. They are incandescent with rage.

They will march as they have marched before, to create a space in which they will be heard, to create a space in which State violence against women, against poor working women, against poor working women’s communities, will end. They will march for peace, they will march for justice, they will march for the incandescent power of their own voices, stories, visions, songs, lives.

Paulina Masuhlo, also known as Pauline Masuthle, will not march with the women. It will be the first time she does not march with them. In the past month, Paulina Masuhlo was often the public face of the women of Marikana. She led the first women’s march after the Marikana massacre.

Masuhlo was an ANC Councillor. She took her job seriously. When the massacre broke out, she met with women in Nkaneng, a cluster of shacks close to Wonderkop. Masuhlo was meeting with women in Nkaneng, when the police swooped down and through the informal settlement. According to eyewitnesses, the police fired rubber bullets, indiscriminately and without provocation. It’s called `a police operation.’ Masuhlo was shot. She died in hospital on Wednesday. The ANC is `shocked’. Others find it `ironic’ that she was shot by the government she represents.

Masuhlo was shot because she was a woman talking with women in Marikana, where everyone is suspect.

This Saturday the women of Marikana will march. Testimony after testimony by Marikana women reveals the fear they live in, they swim and breathe in, as women in Marikana. That same testimony expresses the courage, commitment and organization it takes to tell one’s story … if one is a woman living in Marikana.

Tomorrow the women of Marikana will march, and perhaps incandescent rage will light a path away from death and murder, will light a path to justice.

(Photo Credit: Greg Marinovich/Daily Maverick)

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End the war on children living with disabilities. End it now.

September 10, 2012 by 5 Comments

Over two years ago, we wrote about `seclusion rooms’. These are solitary confinement spaces in schools across the United States. More often than not, they’re closets or utility rooms, anything small and tight with a lock on the outside. That is not seclusion. That is torture.

And of course, `of course’, the subjects of this practice are overwhelmingly children living with disabilities. Children like Jonathan King, who, at 13, hanged himself in a Georgia seclusion room. Or the 12-year-old girl living with autism, or the seven-year-old girl living with autism and bipolar disorder.

Or, as described in yesterday’s New York Times, Rose, who, in kindergarten, was locked into seclusion rooms for hours … at five years of age. Her `problem’? Rose had `speech and language delays’. For which she was thrown into a closed, dark space for an hour or so at a time.

Rose’s father reports she was deeply traumatized. The school system, in Lexington, Massachusetts, has agreed, or been forced by a lawsuit settlement, to pay for Rose’s treatment.

Seclusion rooms, screaming rooms, school based solitary confinement can be found in Connecticut, Kentucky, New York, Florida, Ohio. Georgia banned seclusion rooms … `thanks’ to Jonathan King. How many children? How many children must suffer? How many children must then be given `the gift’ of post-traumatic treatment? For how long?

While this issue addresses all children, and all people, it strikes at the heart of citizenship for those living with disabilities. Billions of dollars of profit are generated every year from the care provided for those living with disabilities. Those who care for those living with disabilities are overworked, underpaid, and always under-esteemed. Billions are stolen from their labor and lives.

At the same time that billions of dollars of profit are generated, there isn’t enough money to provide decent, humane treatment? No. This is the production of vulnerability writ large on small bodies. In the United Kingdom, Ellen Clifford, of Disabled People Against the Cuts, DPAC, knows this lesson all too well. In Nigeria, Patience Ogolo, of Advocacy for Women with Disabilities Initiative, AWWDI, does as well. So does Marsha M. Linehan, a psychologist at the University of Washington who, as an adolescent, suffered and barely survived seclusion rooms. Only now, many decades later, can she finally share the stories of her life in the cells.

These women know that the State that treats any group as disposable is worse than a failed or a rogue state. It’s criminal.

The claim of State poverty as an alibi for physical, emotional and psychological harm against people living with disabilities is a crime. The suggestion that there isn’t enough money or resources is a lie and a crime. And the lie and the crime are framed within a political economy of vulnerability, in which it is presumed that the vulnerable cannot speak or act for themselves.

They can, and they do. And they know that the question of who lives and who dies has been taken over by the question of who lives well and who lives in hell, under constant attack.

End the war on children living with disabilities. End it now.

 

(Image Credit: Ward Zwart / New York Times)

 

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The United States steals $450 billion a year from elder caregivers

August 29, 2012 by 2 Comments

Earlier this month, AARP launched a new ad campaign meant to address the situation of elder caregiving in the United States. The campaign is based on thousands of accounts, and on longstanding research, such as the report that AARP released last year, “Valuing the Invaluable: The Growing Contributions and Costs of Family Caregiving, 2011 Update.”

Much of that report is, sadly, unsurprising. Caregivers are largely unpaid, largely family members, generally overworked and overtaxed, isolated, at a loss, often confused emotionally as the stress mounts. As a consequence of all of this, and more, caregivers generally suffer declining and deteriorating health. The majority of these careworkers are women.

Here’s the news, and it’s staggering: “The estimated economic value of their unpaid contributions was approximately $450 billion in 2009, up from an estimated $375 billion in 2007.” As AARP poignantly notes, that’s not only a 21 percent increase in a mere two years. $450 billion is also “more than the total 2009 sales of Wal-Mart, America’s largest company, and more than the combined sales that year of the three largest publicly held auto companies (Toyota, Ford, Daimler).”

The stories told by individual caregivers are important, as are their lives. They are crucial, and we must listen to them and, even more, learn to act on what they’re saying and what we’re hearing. At the same time, those stories beg to be contextualized. In one year, the national economy stole $450 billion from US residents. Whether that labor was a labor of love or a labor of obligation, the value of that labor was stolen. And, as the years 2007 – 2009 demonstrate, it’s a growing market with a growing profit margin.

Caring Across Generations is one answer, an important and even crucial answer, to the problem. Of equal importance is re-creating a State that doesn’t regard its citizens and residents as clients and customers. In this year of high political rhetoric, one hears a great deal about the United States being `a wealthy nation.’ Wealth built on the predatory extraction of $45 billion dollars in a single year is not wealth. It’s poverty. Ask the women who care for their elders; ask the elders who are majority women as well. Ask yourself.

(Image Credit: AARP.org)

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The Women of Togo call for Spring

August 28, 2012 by 4 Comments

Isabelle Améganvi

The women of Togo have had enough. Like the women of Sudan two months ago, the women of Togo have had more than enough. More than enough of the same family ruling Togo for decades. More than enough of a political climate that doesn’t change. More than enough of men finding alibis for why things don’t change. Not just men. Their men. Their partners. And so, the women of Togo have called for a one-week sex strike.

In so doing, Isabelle Améganvi, head of the women’s wing of the Collectif Sauvons le Togo, or Let’s Save Togo Collective, invoked the experiences of Liberian women in stopping the war and the violence, first, and, more profoundly perhaps, calling everyone to act on their collective and individual responsibility. State violence doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Decades long State violence doesn’t happen without the cooperation and collaboration of the citizenry. Togolese women know, and are teaching, that lesson, as did their sisters in Liberia … and Kenya three years ago … and Italy four years ago … and Colombia seven years ago … and before that in Poland and in Iceland and the list goes on and on.

The call for a one-week women’s sex strike was issued at a mass demonstration over the weekend. The women were supported by traditional leaders. They marched to free political prisoners, held in deplorable conditions. They marched with thousands of others to end the regime; they marched to save Togo. And so they called a strike. By so doing, instead of declaring war, the women threatened to wage peace. As women across the centuries and around the world have done repeatedly, turning their bodies into … their bodies.

The political climate in Togo is built on oppression of women and sexual violence. Discrimination against women is common, domestic violence as well. Women make up 11% of the Parliament and 14% of the Ministerial positions. Women have little to no access to land ownership rights. Women have `born the brunt’ of political violence, especially in the 2005 elections during which targeted sexual violence against women was rampant. That violence has yet to be properly investigated.

So, the women of Togo, disobedient, insurrectionary, have had enough. They call for climate change. They call for Spring.

 

(Photo Credit: BBC)

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Domestic workers demand dignity, respect, and power

August 24, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Earlier this week, the Sunday Nation described the `ordeal’ of Kenyan domestic workers in Arab `slave markets’. The story focused on Mwanaisha Hussein, a Kenyan woman who left her home to work in Jeddah.

The story is in many ways typical. Mwanaisha Hussein had a job in Kenya, as a store clerk, and wanted something better. She heard about jobs in Saudi Arabia, and signed up. Signing up involved raising funds, going into debt. The promise and allure of better jobs, and better pay, were strong.  When she arrived in Saudi Arabia she found, first, difficult to terrible working conditions; second, extreme and intensifying physical and emotional abuse; third, almost absolute confinement. Desperate, she jumped from a third floor opening she created by breaking through the air conditioner vent. She was taken to hospital, where police took her report … sort of. They would not listen to any accounts of torture or abuse. Finally, with some assistance, she made it to the Kenyan embassy and, somehow, made it home to Kenya.

Today, she says, “The conditions are poor, and there is little food. It’s just horrible. I left a job here in Kenya and wasted eight months of my life. Not only that, I nearly died. I’d never go back. I’d never recommend it for anyone. I’d rather make Sh100 a day in my country.”

It’s a typical story.

In June of this year, the Kenyan government barred Kenyan women from seeking employment in Saudi Arabia. This month Nepal banned women under 30 from working in Gulf States. These bans are typical State responses. Indonesia at one point this year banned women from working in Malaysia. The Philippines has imposed bans at various times.

So, how is Hussein’s story typical?

First, Mwanaisha Hussein is not one of the poorest of the poor. Quite the opposite, she is an ambitious woman worker who sought to improve her lot. She is precisely not a pathetic participant in the narrative of the plight of the domestic worker.

Second, Mwanaisha Hussein is not a domestic worker in Kenya. Most transnational domestic workers aren’t domestic workers in their own home countries. In Kenya, for example, domestic workers are among the lowest paid workers in the land. Further, they are paid approximately 3.5 times less than domestic workers in South Africa. South African domestic workers are paid five times less than in the United Kingdom. From London to Johannesburg to Nairobi, it’s not so much a chain or ladder as a precipitously slippery slope. Kenyan domestic workers would be very hard pressed to come up with the $3000 plus it takes to get a job in Saudi Arabia or anywhere else overseas.

The story of transnational domestic workers must always be placed alongside the story of national domestic workers, especially when the State suddenly claims to care about women workers.

How does the State claim to care about its transnational women workers? By `protecting’ them from entering into `perilous’ labor markets. Does the State consult with domestic workers? No. It simply proceeds to a politics of protection.

That politics of protection is profoundly gendered and gendering. It is the virile State protecting the vulnerable woman worker.  In ancient Roman law, according to Yan Thomas, women could not exercise the `virile office’ of autonomous actions. Later, in the quickly changing world of twelfth to fifteenth century Europe, as women entered into more and more public spaces, male leaders worked night and day to `educate’ women into their basic vulnerability and need to be protected. As Carla Casagrande notes, “We do not know how many Western women in the Middle Ages lived quietly within the home, church, or convent walls, obediently listening to learned, loquacious men who imposed all sorts of rules and regulations on them…. All we know is that women had to deal daily with these men, entrusted by society (and supported by a precise ideology) with the delicate task of supporting their bodies and souls. Part of the history of women lies, therefore, in the history of these words, spoken arrogantly, affectionately, and sometimes anxiously.”

When it comes to `protecting’ women, not much has changed in the last thousand years. Today, we do not know how many Western, African, Asian, Latin American women deal daily with these men. The scale of our not knowing has expanded exponentially.

Let’s change the story. Stop talking about protecting women workers. Don’t protect domestic workers; protect domestic workers’ rights. That’s a major point of the International Labor Organization Convention Concerning Decent Work for Domestic Workers. Domestic workers’ rights should be protected because workers’ rights should be protected. Period. Not because women are vulnerable or need protection.

Domestic workers want dignity, respect, and power. That’s the lesson this week of the campaign in California to pass the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights. It’s as well the lesson, in Namibia, of the recently formed Domestic Workers’ Wages Commission. And it’s the lesson Mwanaisha Hussein teaches. Slavery is wrong. No one knows that better than the worker herself. As Mwanaisha Hussein explains, death is preferable to death-in-life. Decent work is the only option. That only happens when women workers organize themselves.

 

 

(Photo Credit: A Celebration of Women)

 

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Lonmin: Massacre is never justified

August 17, 2012 by 8 Comments

 

Police, armed to the teeth, kept the peace at the tumultuous Lonmin platinum mine in Marikana, Rustenburg, in the North West province of South Africa. The reports differ as to the price of peace. Some claim nearly 50 dead, others 30 some. Killed by police bullets.

Striking miners had occupied a hill, Wonderkop, ostensibly because “it is not mine property and the police would not kill us here.” They did. The police came, surrounded the hill, and, at some point, opened fire on the protesters. The police opened fire with live ammunition.

The State claims to have claimed to accept responsibility. What could we do, it says, when the miners were so violent, when protests have become so violent? `We’ could show up with some other than live bullets.

There’s more to the story … and there’s less.

Massacre is never justified. In the very many, eloquent, passionate, and often persuasive analyses that have followed the massacre that occurred just yesterday, one thing is being missed. Massacre. The existential thing that massacre is.

Massacre is not just another word. Massacre is when language stops, when reference and when representation stop. It is an absolute rupture of all. One doesn’t `explain’ massacre. One simply stops. Because massacre is absolutely impassable.

The question of how the massacre occurred will be debated and, hopefully, answered. Hopefully, the answers will lead to humane policy and practice.

But first … stop. Remember, massacre is never justified. No peace follows massacre. No justice emerges from massacre. Nothing emerges from massacre.

And now?

“A hundred women danced in a dirt road on Friday, singing protest songs amid ramshackle wooden and corrugated metal shacks sitting over one of the world’s richest platinum deposits. These songs were once directed at South Africa’s white apartheid government, but these women were singing to denounce their own police who fired on their striking menfolk, leaving 34 dead, the day before. The police came here to kill our husbands, our brothers. Here. Our children!” said 42-year-old Nokuselo Mciteni.”

Nothing emerges from massacre. Nothing.

(Photo Credit 1: AFP)

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The political economy of vulnerable

August 9, 2012 by 5 Comments

Around the world, women, children, men, are humiliated and abused as a matter of public policy and widespread practices. When the practices are finally reported, the women, children, men are described as `vulnerable,’ as if vulnerability were a state of being. It’s not. Vulnerability is an active verb, as is violence.

In the past week, in the United States, reports have shown that pregnant school girls are kicked out of school or refused schooling. Why? Across the country, children living with disabilities, and especially Black children living with disabilities, suffer extraordinarily high school suspension rates. Why? In New York City, it has been `discovered’ that the stop-and-frisk practices that target Black communities are particularly humiliating for Black women. Why do these policies exist? To produce vulnerable populations and individuals.

I thought of these as I read about Happiness Mbedzi. Happiness Mbedzi lived in Diepsloot, a “sprawling informal settlement north of Johannesburg”. Sprawling … and notorious for its desperate conditions as well as innumerable popular mobilizations and organizing efforts. Diepsloot: water-less, info-less, service-less … but not without hope?

In Diepsloot, Happiness Mbedzi tried to maintain her household, herself, her husband, her son. To do so, she took on debts. The debts had crushing interest rates. Happiness took out more loans to pay for the interest on her earlier loans. Finally, she borrowed money from her young son, went to the shops, bought poison, and killed herself.

This is described as a tale of the `vulnerable.’ Happiness Mbedzi was not vulnerable. She was under attack. Local banks, community stokvels, neighbors are all reportedly charging predatory rates. How is it that stokvels, which traditionally supported women like Happiness Mbedzi, are now as predatory as the banks, at least in Diepsloot? How is it that no neighbors are around who would lend money to a neighbor woman in desperate straits?

For Happiness Mbedzi, as for young women students, the Black students living with disabilities, the Black women of New York, institutions ostensibly designed to assist and even improve one’s situation have been transformed into lethal weapons. Schools target particular young women. Schools target particular Black women and men. Police target Black women. The result? Targeted impoverishment that goes under the name of development and the common good. And those who are assaulted, who are wounded simply because of whom they are, they are then reported as being `vulnerable.’ It was destiny that struck them.

Vulnerability is not a status nor a class nor a caste nor a rank. It is not a state of being nor is it synonymous with weakness. And vulnerability is not inevitable. Vulnerability is a political and economic power relationship. Individuals and populations are designated and then produced, and reproduced, as vulnerable. Happiness Mbedzi was not vulnerable and she was not part of a `most vulnerable population’. She was turned into a `vulnerable woman’ by public policy and by State practices that have constructed Diepsloot as inevitably `vulnerable.’ It’s not.

(Photo Credit: Daily Maverick / Reuters)

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