Gender and Neocolonialism

This month, I am involved in one of the most exciting moments of my career since I returned home. I was invited by some undergraduate students to give 2 lectures on neo-colonialism on two different days. I have done the first part in which I did a survey of pan-African liberation struggles and imperial expansion over the last 5 centuries. Next week I talk about the various contemporary forms of neo-colonialism.

One of the issues that I intend to address is what I call "Gender Neocolonialism." The gist of my argument is that what we consider masculine and feminine in Africa today has been distorted by Western culture in order to continue Western hegemony in our continent. This is evident in the plethora of western-funded NGO's in Africa committed to women's empowerment by funding women's education, giving women loans to start businesses, or constructing shelters for women who are fleeing abuse such as battery and female genital mutilation. This is argument is not original but inspired by Patricia Hill Collins's book Black Feminist Thought, Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. Collins argues that racism continues its hegemony through distorting how blacks in America perceive themselves as men and women and how they express love and intimacy with each other.

While the women empowerment initiatives funded by NGO's are commendable, they fail to deal with the causes of the inequities and violence in the first place. The most fundamental of them is an insanely patriarchal culture and system of governance inherited from colonial rule, which our African male dictators are increasingly digging in their heels to protect - as is evident in Kenyan politicians' continued sabotage of the implementation of a new constitution. Even when America's ambassador to Kenya purports to support the reforms that Kenyans want, what he does not say is that America is a late arrival to a battle that was initiated by and paid for in the blood and sweat of Kenyans themselves. Moreover, he does not want an overthrow of the capitalist state in Kenya; what he wants is a public relations exercise that cleans up the reputation of the system, hence his concentration on what Kenyan politicians are doing and his covert sponsorship of motions in parliament.

The women-directed initiatives generally fail to deal with these issues. To do so would be to bite the hand that feeds them. Instead, they lobby for an increase in the number of women appointed in the very system that causes gender inequality, as if the gender of the oppressor makes oppression any more palatable. And the increase in the number of Kenyan women in corporate managerial positions - which remains grossly minimal in comparison to men - has simply asked Kenyans to rejoice in women capitalists who have entered the club of the Kenyan elite earning insane salaries while 10 million Kenyans starve.

But more than that, the campaign for the advancement of women coincides with  - but is not responsible for - the neglect of boys and the increasing vulnerability of men that Prof. Zeleza has mentioned in his post. Even in Kenya, the number of women in universities is beginning to catch up with men in some programs. I was told informally, but have no statistical evidence, that the number of women in the medical program of one of Kenya's universities has hit 50% and looks like it will go higher. I teach in a university where the majority of students are women. And whenever I hear of scholarships, many of them are targeted at women.

The issue of employment is roughly similar. While men remain the majority in formal employment, informal employment and income-generating initiatives are dominated by women. This is partly explained by the fact that over 60% of Kenyan households are now headed by women, and so the women are more likely to remain stable, whatever their preoccupation, in order to feed their families.

But despite these milestones, the reality outside the university is very bleak. While women are more stable when it comes to income generation and family support, and generate 70% of the nation's wealth, they own only 1% of the wealth in Kenya. While women may one day outnumber men in the universities, the fact is that the drop out rate for girls in the primary and secondary levels is still much higher than for boys, due to poverty, teenage pregnancy and cultural practices such as forced marriage and female excision. While women are rising in the corporate sector, most women have to struggle with poverty, malnutrition and poor maternal health. In other words, the women are only rising and competently competing with men in a miniscule section of Kenyan society.

And the same applies to men. Even though men dominate politics and ownership of property in Kenya, they remain a minority of the men who survive the age of 25, and by the age of 70, they are outnumbered by women by 1 to 10. Within their lifetime, men are likely to be destroyed by cultural and institutional structures. Just like in the US where, as Prof. Zeleza notes, black men are disproportionately incarcerated, in Kenya the lives of men are destroyed by extremely patriarchal institutions. If you get a son in Kenya, you hope that he will survive high school without succumbing to drugs and straying into crime. If he finishes high school, you pray that he will not inducted into a gang, or get shot dead by or as a cattle rustler or by Kenya's gun-totting police. Even if he becomes the polished doctor with whom you smile on his graduation day and wedding days, he is likely to be engaged in socially destructive behavior such as battering his wife, maintaining several women and fathering children whom he cannot raise because he thinks money and success are a substitute to being a husband and a father. Worst of all, he may become politician who voraciously consumes public resources and at election time pays young men to kill others and each other. That is if he does not die from the diseases of laziness and excess consumption because the wife does all the physical work at home. At each stage is this cycle, many boys are born without fathers to raise them or without healthy male role models to emulate. And so continues the cycle of male self-destructive behavior that wipes out huge numbers of men before the age of 50.

In other words, in both Kenya and America, black males are at high risk, increasingly dropping from the radar of scholarships and philanthropic investments in the youth. However, while incarceration that imprisons young black men in America is built in a racist judicial system, in brick walls and wire fences, incarceration of young Kenyan men is cultural and institutional. The current political system has convinced men that dominance in land ownership and the cash economy is "African," forgetting that it was actually colonial rule that came up with title deeds for land on which women worked and gave those title deeds to men, and it was colonial rule that sent boys almost exclusively to school and employed them when they graduated. And because this standard of "African" masculinity remains out of the reach of 90% of the population, men destroy and self-destruct in cut-throat competition or sheer frustration of not attaining the unattainable. In the process, destroy the women who love them and raise their children. And politicians who inherited and are fighting to maintain the colonial system stoke these fires by using ill-gotten resources built on the sweat of their own people to pay young men to destroy society. And it doesn't help that global images of distorted black masculinity and white alpha- masculinity basically associate male pathology with blackness and male social health with whiteness, thus bombarding African men every day with the message that they are more likely to fail than to succeed.

Meanwhile, the Western NGO's make us invest so much energy in singing that African culture is pathologically patriarchal in order to coax them into releasing money to raise one girl out of the one thousand others who are unlikely to get to university. And we forget that, as Mwalimu Zeleza says, private charity is no substitute in public investment in the health, education and prosperity of a country's population, both genders included. But Kenya is still ruled by a national bourgeoisie whom Fanon defined as lacking financial weight to build their own country or cultural independence to enable them to realize that improving tourism for the relaxation of Westerners is no substitute to building industries, improving infrastructure and providing social services. Only when public resources are invested in the public that produces them, will we begin to liberate women from physically debilitating teenage pregnancy, poor maternal health, female excision, rape and battery, and men from violence against other and destruction of themselves.

So what will I tell the students next week? That Western hegemony continues to oppress black people worldwide culturally, militarily and politically through patriarchy. Western culture distorts our sense of what it means to be an African woman or an African man. It maintains women in poverty through the IMF, World Bank and the World Trade Organization. It incarcerates men through prisons in America and gives support to poor governing systems in Africa. Finally, it has the audacity to throw a few pennies at us in the name of charity to solve the gender inequality it created and sustains.