Thinking Through Lesbian Rape: The silence is deafening, crippling and deadly!

July 7, 2012 by Leave a Comment

June 2012: raped, mutilated, shot, killed and murdered

Phumeza Nkolozi

Thapelo Makhutle

Sasha Lee Gordon

Sana Supa

Hendrieeta Thapelo Morifi

May 2012 Geneva

Navi Pillay spoke loudly against Hate Crimes in South Africa and Africa.

February 2012 Present on Hate Crimes in South Africa at CSW55

Minister  of Women, children and people with disabilities Ms.Lulu Xingwana

Minister of Correctional Services Ms Nosiviwe Mapisa-Ngakula

Minister of Social Development Ms Bathabile Dlamini

Deputy Minister of Police Ms Maggie Sotyu

2011 stoned, stabbed and murdered Noxolo Magwaza

2010 raped, murdered and raped again: Nontsikelelo Tyatyeka;

2010-raped, strangled and living Milicent Gaika

2009 beaten to a pulp and later died Girly Nkosi

2008 raped, stabbed and murdered

Eudy Simelane…list continues…

 

Why are our Women leaders silent…when children are being killed like animals in South Africa?

As I write this article, the silence of women, mothers, and women ministers is deafening.  I feel crippled and my bones are no longer strong to stand and I ask for mothers of South Africa and women to stand and fight now to end this massacre.

The list above is nothing to celebrate after Youth Day events on June 16th -celebrating the memories and strength of resisting oppression that lead to the Sharpeville massacre. The above list of youth who have lost lives in the same month we celebrate many youngsters, by year and women we are counting on to take this agenda on and stop killing your children and you to be here and fight for lives of women you know and do not event know.

How could we have celebrated Youth Day when there is again a massacre! Where are the  women loving women, lesbians and gay men in my country to stand and stop this gendercide?  Who is writing about us and telling the world we are being killed? We need to take stock and action as see fit to be the ones to make a change. Our sisters, mothers, aunts, lovers and women are being raped, murdered, raped again and savagely cut under the gaze of the world.

Ms. Lulu Xingwana in February 2012 she presented at CSW55 on taking action on LGBTI issues of hate crime. Three months later we have bodies of LGBTI people-killed brutally- and No word Ms Minister! The time isnow!

What has happened to women leaders in our country who have not shed a tear or been seen or heard to condemn these crimes? As many mothers cry for their murdered and watch brutally severed bodies- that are not even recognizable many appear to console and give sympathies.

So we wait for the next one and then the next and go for after tears drinks and wait for the next.

It that how we are living, by the gun so to speak?

How many lesbians, women who love women and gender-free people are in line? What are we doing? This is a war declared on our bodies and we Must Stand together and there is not time to shine as individuals. We work together or divided we are falling. Fast into the dust.

Just this past Sunday, we marched in Paris with many women who had the opportunity to be in France from South Africa, at that time bodies were found, women shot, raped and I fear that the silence of our women leaders is serving our deaths. We are in danger with no choice to life.

We marched in solidarity with the world and all people who know of humanity-mothers, fathers, and brothers. Muholi  also remarked that the march was for all  LGBTI individuals who can’t because of homophobia, lesbophobia, queerphobia, transphobia, xenophobia… all the phobia that are there to be. We made a mark and our presence was clearly heartfelt by those who were there and yet the reality back home is just too scary to imagine, she said.

Muholi said, “Rape has made us powerless, though we threw our hands in the air and said ‘Amandla’ it is a pity that power we supposed to claim is imaginary as we continue to lose our LGBT people along the way”. Muholi, who brought her all women football team Thokozani to participate the Foot for Love Games said she was feeling destroyed inside at the silence of women ministers in particular, those stood in at the Commission on the Status of Women to protect our rights to life. We are worthy women too!

“They read newspapers and none of them have said a word. It is disheartening and I feel crashed at the thought of families who are going through this pain”, she said. And yes we all hear it and it is time that we stand and speak to our mothers and save lives that are falling so fast to dust as we weep and mourn for another life lost.

Mothers, mothers who is protecting your children when they  are being attacked and raped and no voice speak to say enough! The men, who are allowed to rape, kill and rape at will -as they please at their pleasure. Is this the freedom we talk about?

We cannot be silenced any longer and those in power that we all vested for you to represent us Stand Up! I am standing! Are you?

This is not JUST to brutally take lives as though they are free for taking! We will not be silenced and-if you choose to remain silent and unheard- then you have blood on your hands! Justice must prevail for all and I call you, you and you to end violence.

Glenda Muzenda

This post first appeared here: http://www.blacklooks.org/2012/07/thinking-through-lesbian-rape-the-silence-is-deafening-crippling-and-deadly/. Thanks to Glenda and to Sokari Ekine for this collaboration.

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The picture we paint (over)

May 28, 2012 by Leave a Comment

The picture we paint

The picture we paint (over)

The picture we paint (over)
that which we differ with
civilized as we are right
here in Africa down South

The picture we paint (over)
did liberation before education
beget us a begging bowl nation

(drawers of water and hewers
of wood Verwoerd-style as
apartheid so cruelly intended)

The picture we paint (over)
a nation-state of book-burners
disrupters of (school) learning
(we harm African nationals too)

(call back the not-too-distant past
of Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia
not to mention Pinochet’s Chile
and other US-sponsored despots)

Nearby there is a demand
to stone a human being to death
in these bigoted post-1994 times

The picture we paint (over)
all things being equal before
for all the world to see
all but own ourselves

“Zuma painting’s an attempt at satire, says Brett Murray (Cape Times, May 22 2012); whilst his work is defaced (ETV 7pm E-News), and a group faithfully calls for him to be done in (SAFM 11pm news) – all in one evening’s sitting

 

(Photo Credit: iol.co.za)

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You are not alone (Metrorail style)

May 8, 2012 by Leave a Comment

You are not alone (Metrorail style)

You are not alone
between your place
and the next in life
in the middle of

You are not alone
at the mercy of
the public transport system
between Metro stations
Ndabeni and Maitland

You are not alone
in hearing no apology
for any inconvenience
this may have caused
(and no journalist is in sight)

You are not alone
commuters evacuate
braving the quick drop
from carriage to ground
(many do a cancer-stick first)

You are not alone
me now Bellville-bound
in another cattle-truck
a Book Launch out UWC-way

(“Feminist Popular Education
in Transnational Debates”
trying to change the world)

You are not alone
a differently-accented traveller
now at the raw end of
Metro’s Protection Services
checking commuters’ tickets

What might scholar-activists
and adult and popular educators
reflect on life Metrorail-style
“in the grand narratives of revolutions”

You are not alone
or are you

(I wend my by now weary way to the university campus, courtesy of what is politely called a “public transport system”, 5 May 2012. A journey of Lifelong Learning, I suppose!)

(Photo Credit: YouTube)

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Hopelessly devoted

February 27, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Hopelessly devoted

Hopelessly devoted
actually utterly hopeful
and positive, they are

Hopelessly devoted
the Earth Children
from Rustenburg Girl’s High
(passionately green are they)

Hopelessly devoted
right here down South
in their vegetable garden
recycling at their school

Hopelessly devoted
an assortment of girls
enthused with their earth work

Hopelessly devoted
to their healthy vegetables
and farming worms too

Hopelessly devoted
eating flowers
reducing their carbon footprint
and fund-raising for our rhino

Hopelessly devoted
doing the each one teach one
(a collective consciousness)

Hopelessly devoted
might they re-energise
all of us out yonder
in the material world

[Hopelessly intrigued am I by the Earth Children down Rustenburg Girl’s High-way (“Earth Children passionate about all things green” – Tatler, February 23 2012).]

 

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My mother’s habits

February 12, 2012 by Leave a Comment

My mother’s habits

Leaks and not leeks
I declare, mortally offended
by a young British student
and her English (as she is spoke)

I excuse myself, though
whilst correcting her mixing
her vegetables with the state
of a little wooden structure
donated to a poor community

My mother’s habits
tea-drinkingly English
of nature as it were
in a manner of speaking

My mother’s habits
a teacher-mother who
inspired shaped liberated
and decolonised the mind

She who (once) jested
over a weekly paper’s title
on our Shaik-like Selebi
Me and Mbeki come from far
said he, his face on straight

My mother’s habits
teacher activist and librarian
retired her mind now
discharged from itself
somewhere (and somehow)

My mother’s habits
knowing her leaks
from her leeks
and the other way too

After all, such-like
and the Oxford comma
is what separates us
humankind from the beasts
who daily put our women
and children at risk

I find a moment in a TWC (The Women’s Circle) meeting to tease a British student and TWC volunteer, around and about the linguistic leakage in her mother’s tongue, Feb 9 2012.

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Women do not haunt the State. They occupy it.

January 25, 2012 by 3 Comments

 


Around the world, women are taking to the streets in great numbers, to protest, to take charge, to transform. In the past couple weeks, women have led and populated mass protests and marches in Malawi, Uganda, Lebanon, Argentina, Romania, Chile, Haiti. Women have occupied Wall Street, Nigeria, and beyond.

Women have been the bearers, in every sense, of Spring … in Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain. Today, January 25, women are returning to Tahrir Square … and to every square in Egypt. This is nothing new for northern Africa. Women, such as Aminatou Haidar, have born `spring’ in Western Sahara now for decades.

For women, the street does not end at the sidewalk. It runs, often directly, into the State offices.

Women are everywhere on the move, changing the face and form of State.

In Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner returned to her office today, after a 21-day health related absence, to resume her activities as President. On Thursday, January 5, Portia Simpson Miller was inaugurated, for the second time, as Prime Minister of Jamaica. On Monday, January 16, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was inaugurated to her second term, of six years, as President of Liberia.

These are precisely not historic stories or events, and that’s the point. Women in positions of State power are women in positions of State power. Not novelties nor exotic nor, most importantly, exceptions. That is the hope.

But for now, that struggle continues.

In Colombia, women, such as Esmeralda Arboleda, helped organize the Union of Colombian Women, fought for women’s rights and power, and was the first woman elected as a Senator to the national Congress. That was July, 1958. Fifty or so years later, in January 2012, women in Chile launched “Mas mujeres al poder”, “More women in power”.  In tactics, strategies and cultural actions, Mas mujeres al poder builds on the work of student activists in the streets. Women are saying enough, women are saying the time is now, and women are pushing their way through the electoral process, with or without the political parties, into the provincial and national legislatures.

Meanwhile, in Bolivia, Gabriela Montaño was named President of the Senate and Rebeca Delgado was named President of the House of Representatives. Women are everywhere … and on the move.

On Tuesday, January 10, voters in Minnesota, in the United States, elected Susan Allen to the state legislature. Allen is the first American Indian woman to serve in that body. She is a single mother, and she is lesbian. Many firsts accrue to her election.

Across Europe, Black women are struggling and entering into legislative bodies with greater and greater success: Manuela Ramin-Osmundsen, originally from Martinique,  in Norway; Nyamko Sabuni, originally from the DRC, in Sweden; Mercedes Lourdes Frias, originally from the Dominican Republic, in Italy. The struggle continues … into the national and regional legislatures, into the political structures, into the cultures of power as well as recognition.

Across the African continent, women are on the move. In Kenya, women, such as Charity Ngilu, are set to make their marks in the upcoming elections … and beyond. Meanwhile, South Africa’s Minister of Home Affairs Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma is running, hard, for the Chairpersonship of the African Union Commission. She would be the first woman in that post, and some say she would be the most powerful woman in Africa.

And in South Korea, four women, Park Geun-hye, Han Myeong-sook, Lee Jung-hee and Sim Sang-jung lead the three major political parties. Together, their three parties control 262 seats of the National Assembly’s 299.

This barely covers the news from the past three weeks. Everywhere, women are cracking patriarchy’s hold on and of power, in the streets, in the State legislatures, in the political structures. Today, and tomorrow, women do not haunt the State. They occupy it.

 

(Photo Credit: BeBlogerra)

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In Lahore, in Johannesburg, there was no stampede

January 10, 2012 by 5 Comments

In the past two days, four women have died in what the press has called `stampedes.’

There was a concert Monday in Lahore, Pakistan. It was organized by a private college. The crowd was mostly young people, college students. At some point after the concert, something happened, the crowd tried to leave, there was only one door and even less organization, and … three young women—Farah Nawaz, Maheen Naseem Abbas, 17 years old, and Sadia Batool—were crushed to death. It’s a common enough occurrence, around the world.

On Tuesday, in South Africa, universities registered students who, for whatever reasons, had missed the earlier registration dates. Often the reason is students come from historically disenfranchised communities where there’s little or no expectation of their successfully pursuing further education. That too is a common enough situation, around the world.

As in past years, the lines were endlessly long, but the number of available slots were finite. Painfully, tragically so. Excitement, tension, anticipation, apprehension, were high. When the gates opened at the University of Johannesburg, the people rushed forward. In the rush, people were injured, and one woman, the mother of a prospective student, was killed. There were many mothers in the crowd, assisting their children. Many mothers, many children were injured. At least 22 are counted as injured, but those are only the visible injuries.

Both incidents, and especially the South African incident, have been widely, even universally, described as stampedes.

What exactly is a `stampede’, and how does a crowd of people, of human beings, morph into a stampede? And why is it the case that women and girls are more often than not those who suffer the violence of so-called stampedes?

Stampede is a relatively new word, and it seems to be a North American invention, another gift the United States has bestowed upon the world. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was coined early in the 1800s. Cowboys in the United States borrowed the Mexican word, estampido, which means crash, explosion, or report of a firearm, and estampida, which means a stampede of cattle or horses. It was an early example of transnational vaquero cowboy culture.

Stampede, or stompado, was a “sudden rush and flight of a body of panic-stricken cattle” or horses. Later, stampede came to mean a “sudden or unreasoning rush or flight of persons in a body or mass”.

At its inception, stampede meant a thundering, powerful, dangerous herd of animals. Today, when referring to people, it means a mass of people who are threatened and in flight. At the beginning, a stampede was about virility, big roaring animals and big riding cowboys.

When people stampeded, that was panic. In fact, the Spanish translation of human stampede is pánico. Panic. Sudden, wild, unreasoning, excessive, at a loss and out of control. And the term for mass panic is hysteria, the women’s condition: “Women being much more liable than men to this disorder, it was originally thought to be due to a disturbance of the uterus and its functions”.  Hysteric: “belonging to the womb, suffering in the womb”.

It doesn’t matter who is trampled in the event called a stampede. What began as an articulation of masculinity, the enraged capacity to destroy all in its path, has become the helpless, or `feminine’, implosion of self. What began as a roar has become somehow a whimper. When you read that a group was in a stampede, know this. Stampede is not a neutral word. Stampede is gendered, and the gender is woman.

There was no stampede in Lahore, there was no stampede in Johannesburg. Words matter. In both instances, educational institutions failed … and women died … again.

 

(Photo Credit: Adrian de Kock/thestar.co.za)

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Young women refuse to be sacrifices

January 3, 2012 by 4 Comments

Welcome to 2012. The Arab Spring, the Occupy Spring, the Indignado Spring continue. In Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, and beyond, women are on the move, on the march. In Saudi Arabia, women are on the drive as well. Young women.

Across the United States and Canada and beyond, young women are leading and expanding the Occupy movement. In Chile, women high school and university students are pushing to end the privatization of education, to open the schools to freedom, democracy, universal opportunity.

In India, young rural women are leading resistance campaigns to stop major land grabs.  In Afghanistan, teams of young women athletes are punching their way through centuries-old as well as recently devised glass ceilings.

In Kenya, young women are entering into local electoral politics. In Mauritius as well.

Women everywhere are on the move, keeping on keeping on, filling spaces with their voices, their bodies, their energy, their aspirations, their collective and singular power.

At the same time, women struggle with a master narrative in which they only function as sacrifices. In India, two farmers sacrifice a seven-year-old girl, Lalita, in order to ensure good crops. In Afghanistan, a fifteen-year-old girl, Sahar Gul, struggles to survive, and to live with dignity, having fled the torture inflicted on her by her husband and his mother and sister. When she first fled, the State actually returned her to `the family.’

In the United States, girls like seventeen-year-old Nga Truong, are routinely forced into confessing crimes they didn’t commit and then are sent off to prison. In the United States, seventeen-year-old girls like Samantha L. are sent to prison for life, without possibility of parole.

In Australia, teen-age girls, like Danielle Troy, have to plead for compassion rather than punishment. Their crime? Being mothers.

And in South Africa, two teenage girls are attacked by a crowd of 50 or 60 `adult’ men. Why? Because one of them was wearing a mini-skirt. Four years ago, another young woman, Nwabisa Ngcukana, was stripped and assaulted for exactly the same `crime’, at exactly the same taxi rank.

From domestic violence to more general sexual violence to mob violence to State violence and beyond, the patriarchal story of young women is the story of being-sacrificed. If a man is told, by no less than God, to sacrifice his son, we are told that is a tragedy. A moral and ethical crisis. But where is the mother of that son in the story? And what if, instead, the father was told, by no less than God, to sacrifice his daughter? Would that too be considered a tragedy? An ethical and moral crisis?

Not by the patriarchs, it wouldn’t, as the Biblical tale of Abraham and Isaac so aptly demonstrates: “It is difficult not to be struck by the absence of woman… It is a story of father and son, of masculine figures, of hierarchies among men… Would the logic of sacrificial responsibility within the implacable universality of the law… be altered… if a woman were to intervene in some consequential manner? Does the system of this sacrificial responsibility and of the double `gift of death’ imply at its very basis an exclusion of woman or sacrifice of woman? A woman’s sacrifice or a sacrifice of woman? Let us leave the question in suspense.”

Women, and in particular young women, are saying, “No.” They reject the story that excludes them and the  `suspense’ that reduces them. They are saying – with their bodies, voices, actions and deeds – women and girls are not to be sacrificed. If `the Law’ says they must be, the Law is wrong. Women are making a better Law, living out a better story, and creating a better world. Another, better world is possible.

 

(Video Credit: WBUR)

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The world is a ghetto

December 21, 2011 by Leave a Comment


The world is a ghetto

The world is a ghetto
right up your very street
softball on a world scale
in little Belthorn Estate
(the local stadium filled)

(A neighbour is aghast
at the non-coverage
of the 2-week-long event)

The world is a ghetto
Junior Women’s Softball
a first in South Africa
a first out Africa-way
here on the Cape Flats

The world is a ghetto
reportage in local papers
restricted to group areas past
(is media self-censorship at work)

World Championships
Young Women
International Guests

What additional tick-boxes
do bureaucrats require
post-16 days of activism
of no violence against women and children

No footballing galacticos here
spitting and cussing and
abusing women on the side
(it’s just not cricket)

(This little revolution
will not be televised
not newsworthy enough
for the evening news)

The world is a ghetto
The global village is here
Where are we????????

The morning after (after I had teased a few Canadian softballers about drinking Canada Dry), a neighbour and I have an “over the wall” tête-à-tête, 18 December 2011; me with War and George Benson’s old ditty “The World is a ghetto” in mind.

 

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They are neither mules nor witches. They are women.

December 16, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Janice Bronwyn Linden

Amina bint Abdul Halim bin Salem Nasser. Janice Bronwyn Linden. Sixteen elderly women, unnamed.

On Monday, Amina bint Abdul Halim bin Salem Nasser was beheaded by the Saudi Arabian government. The charge was witchcraft and sorcery.

On Monday, Janice Bronwyn Linden was executed, by lethal injection, by the Chinese government. The charge was drug smuggling, of being a `mule.’

On Monday, it was reported that, in one district of one province in Mozambique, from January to November of this year, sixteen elderly women had been accused of witchcraft and then were murdered.

Witches. Mules.

Amina bint Abdul Halim bin Salem Nasser was arrested in 2009. She was in her sixties. The charge was that she engaged in unorthodox healing methods. She charged people as much as $800 a session for … the claim of a cure. There is no way of knowing if this was, indeed, a fraud or if Nasser believed in her methods. She was never given the chance to explain. Instead, she was deemed “a danger to Islam”, and that was that.

Janice Bronwyn Linden was a thirty-five year old South African woman, from KwaZulu Natal, who was arrested in 2008 for smuggling three kilograms of crystal methamphetamine. The South African government tried to intervene, tried to appeal to the Chinese government for clemency. As is the practice in China, Linden was not informed of her impending execution until the morning of the day she was to die. Her family is distraught and despondent. South Africa, at least according to discussions in online forums and newspapers, is divided as to the execution. Many feel Linden deserved her fate. Why? She was a mule. She smuggled drugs into China. She should have known better. She `chose’ her path. She was a mule.

In Mozambique, in the district of Marromeu in the province of Sofala, women elders are under attack. A group of women elders, mulheres da terceira idade, women of the third stage, explained that when young men encounter failure, in work, in school, in life, they blame the elder women, they charge them with witchcraft, and then, filled with righteous indignation, they murder them. The women asked: “Estas situações estão a ser frequentes na nossa sociedade . Será que possuir 50 anos de idade deve constituir motivo para a idosa ser considerada feiticeira e condenada à morte?” “These situations are becoming common in our society. Is being old sufficient reason for being considered a witch and being condemned to death?”

Witches. Mules. These are terms that legitimate the murder of women. And they are terms of the current period, our period. They are the names of what is becoming common in our society. The real story is not crime but women’s power and audacity, “the struggle between orthodox men of the Establishment and an unorthodox woman making claims on forms of social power and authority. Ms. Nasir was low on the social hierarchy but making claims to high status by virtue of magical gifts. She posed not so much a danger to Islam as a danger to the authority of the clerics.”

The real crime is the witch-hunt. Amina bint Abdul Halim bin Salem Nasser. Janice Bronwyn Linden. The sixteen women elders. They are neither witches nor mules. They are women. Remember that.

 

(Photo Credit: South Africa History On Line)

 

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