Post-colonial Feminism

As Kenyans celebrated a well lived life of a fallen heroine; Prof. Wangari Maathai, I think it’s good to share some of her snapshots written and spoken biographies that would reflect this week’s reading on postcolonial feminism. According to Nidhi (2009), the only changes that women have orchestrated involved long-drawn-out and violet protest, through mobilizing collective action both locally and internationally.

For her to receive the Nobel Prize in 2004, she was a prophet (postcolonial feminist) who could not be honored in her own home (country). First, because she was a human, environmental and political rights activist who didn’t only exchange her identity as a learned fellow to a poor foolish women in the eyes of political elite but also challenged the 1^st president of republic of Kenya not to convert a city park (Uhuru Gardens) to a government land for construction of the tallest building (Times Tower) in Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya. Second, she almost lost her life during a protest rally at the same park from a thorough beating by police. However, even after the Nobel Prize award, she never received much attention by the government of Kenya compared to international organizations and leader because she continued to challenge corruption and poor governance.

Below are the 2 biographies

1.1. Wangari Maathai and political activism

BY ANI JOZEN

1st October 2011

News of the passing away from a cancer complication of Nobeal Laureate Wangari Maathai sent shockwaves around the world, with many of the current generation of rather youthful activists mourning one of their iconic leaders and world figures.

Apart from executed Nigerian writer and political activist Ken Sarowiwa, no one on the continent had succeeded to place environment at the centre of political action, and unlike Sarowiwa, the late Prof. Maathai did not have an oil logged river delta as her ammunition. She collected the pieces herself, from ideals of environment and social justice.

The work of Prof. Maathai inspired both the local environmentalist and gender movement, and in a number of cases for instance in Envirocare, the two aspects were put together as integral and incapable of being separated. Indeed, Envirocare leader and herself a university professor, Ruth Meena of the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of Dar es Salaam, was more than a passive follower of her icon.

She also took to be seen more in some sort of dreadlocks of plaiting her hair, precisely the image of the late Wangari, an image she did not appear to seek to alter.

This aspect alone brings to the fore some of the more profound elements of identity – and even a bit of contention of identity – in the life programme or existential disposition of the late environmentalist, arguably the most effective organiser that civic groups in Africa have ever come across.

While other political actors in the country were anchored in physical interest groups like business and ethnopolitical alliances, she angered almost everyone across the political landscape, and emerged with the victims of pursuing political change. Yet the tiger didn't lose its spots, and in 2007 she was squarely in PNU camp.

The place of environmental politics as well as gender mainstreaming in African politics was the renewal in activism following the collapse of the Cold War, where most energies were spent fighting imperialism, that is, perceived western encroachment and diktat on African affairs.

Radical persuasion of this sort had a rather limited impact in Kenyan politics; its early post-independence personification, Marxist intellectual and trade unionist Pio Pinto was assassinated, a murder that was never resolved. Ex-vice president Oginga Odinga developed a radical view of things, but he was drowned into ethnicity.

Like others in the activist movement in Kenya, the late Prof. Wangari Maathai was firmly anchored in radicalism as a background, and her take up of environment was a synthesis of radical academic pursuit and proper political activism. She never took her eyes off the environmental core of her engagements, and since her own native central province had little land reserves left, and encroachment on most other public lands was in full swing, she took up an issue that transcended ethnic loyalties. Environment rose to become a key political issue that drew hundreds of thousands, helping to chart a new political order, the focus of which became the enactment of a new constitution, where powers of the provinces have been enhanced. In that case it will not be that easy for 'land grabbers' to just get a

State House memo....

How far the Green Belt Movement changed the political attitudes and helped create 'social federations' as Italian Marxist and political prisoner Antonio Gramsci used to say, that is, the formation of 'political blocs' with environment and justice at the core is hard to say. It will be a matter for research to gauge the proper influence and degree of the environmentalist's impact and transformation of the political agenda from ineffective radical ideology and predominant ethnicity blocs on the one hand, to political accountability on the basis of environment and justice on the other. It was a personal handiwork of hers.

As Marx used to say (in Theses on Feuerbach) social change cannot come about unless the society is put to education, that is, by an educator – in which case the problem was 'who is going to educate the educator.' The response that Marx gave was that it was 'praxis,' that is social practice on a day to day basis, the real problems people meet in life and business, politics etc which would lead to the necessary political action to bring about change. In that case change was tied up with theory, as it alters what is known as 'consciousness,' as people realise the falsity, iniquity, of an existing order of things, and fight.

That sounds like a bit of a biographical note as the much younger university lecturer was going through a new book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator and icon in much the same way as idealist social democrats and Pan Africanists around the world saw in the late Mwalimu Nyerere an iconic figure and role model.

Yet Mwalimu belonged to a period where Africa was coming into independence, and it was expected that the new leadership would fashion a path, act responsibly on the basis of ideals of justice, and take Africa forward. It was the period of the 'Burning Spear' in Kenya.

Kenyan nationalism had largely settled for the 'Burning Spear' phenomenon as espoused by imprisoned and tried leader Jomo Kenyatta, the independence hero of Wangari Maathai and most other people in the Central Province, and quite broadly within the whole country.

Thus 'Burning Spear' was of course a colossal threat to colonialism, but as the name suggests, it was fated to burn out and on its ashes would remain a conservative nationalism, seeing land grabbing as a reward for the struggle for independence. That is of course where Wangari comes in, awakened by Jaramogi, with 'Not Yet Uhuru' autobiography.

The autobiography was a cry of despair the veteran independence fighter and supporter of imprisoned Kenyatta, battling those who sought to ignore Kenyatta to gang up with colonial interests, who found an ally in Kenyatta after he was freed. He turned against his radical supporters, a huge letdown.

Yet, as 'blood is thicker than water,' those whose psychological mould was bound up with Native Associations which colonialism extensively used to hinder the growth of nationalism properly speaking could only express disdain within this psychological framework. In this, Wangari Maathai wasn't a big exception.

There is another aspect in which the late Prof. Maathai could have won another Nobel Prize if there was such a prize, that is, one of huge contributions to covering the gap between the genders, that is, as a real champion of women's emancipation. While she sought to emancipate women by her environment and justice programme, it was actually her environmental political activism, imprisonment under second phase president Daniel arap Moi, and putting up her own political party and list of candidates. She became a deputy minister, not since she was less famous but because she could scarcely mix with her colleagues.

It is also possible to say that this achievement, getting party activists into Parliament on a Green Belt movement ticket, but having to be allied with the business interests in the Party of National Unity (the president's embattled majority) was a 'kiss of death' to her erstwhile valiant activism. She would from then on toe the line of minister and finally her parliamentary whip. Not much was heard of her since.

While there is no dispute that a cancer is something that grows in the body against anyone's expectations or wishes, there is an uncanny manner in which the programme that is called life reaches its own logic, and isn't ended 'prematurely' by cancer. When a disease crops up in the body, medication and the body's own metabolic and immunity systems help each other to combat this intrusion into its logic of function, but at times there is a 'live and let live' from a profound anchor in the mind, or an organ in the brain which the individual or medics won't be aware of its function. It dictates that the disease stays.

The human body, like political systems, has a suicide element embedded in its survival character, that it retains a right to die, even if it is programmed to fight for survival, in which case when an environment activist starts being ashamed of attending anti-government meetings, or has to shout them down, or stay silent, she no longer feels it is herself.

She may even start having premonitions of death, medication more or less refuses to work, not even an application from the very natural environment she dearly battled to preserve. She did not want her disease to be made public and then she has to receive crowds of sympathisers – not quite the valiant fighter in her, having been scarcely at all a woman; all they could is to mourn, later.

SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN

http://www.ippmedia.com/frontend/index.php?l=33942

Below is her second brief biography on YOUTUBE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VVz54pwlF4