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Practical Feminism

Written by Daniel Waweru

Thursday, 19 February 2009

It's odd that no one takes lawyers who've suffered injustice - or doctors who're ill - no longer to be lawyers or doctors. So it's unobvious why Kaasa takes stories about the troubles of famous feminists - a feminist's being assaulted by her husband; another's waster boyfriend - as proof that feminism is false, or that (Western educated) feminists are clueless or whatever. Actually, it reminds me, just a little, of those who celebrated the assault on Maria Nzomo. All told, Kaasa's is a fine example of a recent and growing trend: the casting away of feminist goals for cultural-authenticity reasons. Interestingly, this is probably only a special case of a more general trend: Kenyans really do seem to have lost the ability to identify with anything other than their ethnicity.

So the story is that Western-educated feminists have the theory and sometimes the practice; ordinary (presumably uneducated) women have to content themselves with the practice. Fighting an enemy you don't know is surprisingly hard, so I'll take my theory, thanks.

All that book learning brings things like the introduction to Trouble Showed the Way, where Clare Robertson shows how women really were considered property in precolonial and colonial Kenya. And there's a story, in Tabitha Kanogo's African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya, about the pawning of a woman, which has to be read to be believed. Women in precolonial Kenya had a very raw deal; colonialism, bad as it was, was actually an improvement, at least some of the time, for women.

All this theory leaves me completely unsympathetic, basically, to the new anti-feminist tendency. That it's now de rigueur to use 'Western' and 'feminist' together is a mark of the trend. There's no authenticity on offer; even if there were, female life in precolonial societies was so deeply unpleasant that no sane person would want to return. As for the present, authoritarian tribalism is patriarchal, so we'll have to do without. Liberal(ish), and therefore western, feminism wins by default - although its achievements aren't to be sneered at -- it's no accident that Wangari Maathai was educated abroad, at an all-girls' school.
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