Feminism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians. 
— Pat Robertson

Women can be popular and admired by most men until they begin to talk gender equality, and then you hear that no man wants a revolution in his kitchen!  
— Molara Ogundipe-Leslie

African women in general need to know that it's OK for them to be the way they are - to see the way they are as a strength, and to be liberated from fear and from silence. 
— Wangari Maathai

Traditionally women do not argue with men here in Liberia; that needs to change.  
— Ma Morris

Monrovia Women

Monrovia women . . .
Here they come!
You see their colorful faces
before you know their hearts.
Shining, red lips, red cheeks,
painted eyelids and lashes.
Perhaps they would like
to paint their pupils, too!
Their eyebrows take to various routes
to suit their longing hearts.

Aye, Monrovia women . . .
Look at their necks!
You could build a mansion
from jewelry a single woman wears.
Sometimes, like Indians,
their noses wear gold rings,
while their ears themselves
wear several others too.

You have yet to see their hands . . .
Long nails painted
to match the various hues
their eyes and cheeks wear.
Fingers held apart
by heavy gold rings.
Oh, you should see them
walking down the road.

Monrovia women . . .
In evening gowns and dresses,
lappa suits and costly coats,
on their way to work.
You should see them at work!
They nurse and paint their nails all day,
and guide their skirts from hooking
on to a rusty nail.

Monrovia women . . .
Strolling in the humid sun
in high, expensive shoes.
If you would stop
to ask their toes
how much fun it really is,
walking in such heels,
I’m sure you’d say aye-yah,
for our poor Monrovia women.
         — Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

Wahyo/Hobojo/Watapoli . . .

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley's poem "Monrovia Women" bears witness to sad truths, accentuating female self image and constructed identity as aesthetic representations of pseudo-modernity within the perverse universe that is Monrovia.

There are bars and nightclubs in Monrovia on every street and bypass where girls in gaudy make-up, tight clothes and stiletto heels sit all day into the dawn sucking on bottles, smoking jahma, talking and laughing in high voices waiting for 'customers.' The girls prefer foreigners who understand the explicit terms of the business deal and pay higher rates.

Who owns these establishments?

Any political economic analysis of prostitution and trafficking in women and children must take into account structural discrimination, uneven development, and the hierarchical relationships between imperialist and dependent countries and between men and women. In recent years under the impact of structural adjustment and economic liberalization policies in numerous countries of the Third World, as well as in the ex-USSR and Eastern Europe, women and children have become "new raw resources" within the framework of national and international business development. Capitalist globalization is more and more characterized by a feminization of migration. The growth of sexual tourism over the last 30 years has entailed the "prostitutionalization" of the societies involved. (Poulin)

Another girl used to be her elementary school beauty. The male teachers wouldn't leave her alone. They undressed her with their eyes, squeezed her buttocks and breasts, and openly propositioned her promising all A's. She capitulated to the bullying of one when threatened with failure, and soon her name was spoiled. She then discovered how to use her sexual powers for her own benefit to make demands. Yet another girl ran away from an arranged marriage to a gray-haired old man with seven wives, only to end up fooled by her boyfriend and homeless, after he got what he wanted—her virginity, and still another, a dazzling beauty who grew up in a hut on a rural farm, was brought to Monrovia by the wealthy farm owner to be his 'housegirl,' and soon abandoned when another young beauty caught his lustful eye.

Each girl has her story. Some were forced to fight for one rebel group or another, routinely raped, beaten, passed around. Mats Utas, in his study, "Victimcy, Girlfriending, Soldiering: Tactic Agency in a Young Woman's Social Navigation of the Liberian War Zone," presents a piercing testimony of self-disclosure from Bintu, "one young Liberian woman's 'social navigation' of war zones," describing rape, torture, control, manipulation, and economic and sexual exploitation: "Her war experience had numbed her so completely that she spoke of going to the battlefield as a 'relief'"(423):

. . . soldiers used their guns to love to good, good girls. (415)

You had your family, and they did not have any food. If you did not have a relationship with a commando, how would your family survive? (416)

You could not just get rid of them by saying, "I don't want you" . . . they would just force you. They could have more than fifty women, but as long they saw you and their heart cut for you again, they would force you. They would only leave you alone if your new boyfriend had a higher rank than the old one. Then, maybe, they would respect that person but not you—because they would never respect a woman. (425)

They beat me and raped me, more than more, and I lost everything I had. Any commando who was ready to see a woman for free would come and rape me with my sabou. I did not have clothes on. They did not even want to know that I was a human being—they did not want to know. (418)

Many of these girls of "colorful faces" and "red lips, red cheeks, painted eyelids and lashes" wearing "high, expensive shoes" live in the filthy, sprawling slums without lights or water, sleeping ten-twelve-fifteen to a small single room unfit for one, where a bucket, jar or plastic bag used in the corner is the toilet, where the smells congregate and the rains seep in and the heat asphyxiates and the small battery-powered fan on the battered dresser crammed up against the bed and sleeping mats rolled up in the day circulates body odors, stale air, human waste, perfumes . . .

         "Wan go to my room?"

He's home from America for the first time since 1991. His fantasy is "iron titties" pressed against his chest. The girl unzips his pants and kneels before he even steps inside the dark, dank, smelly room. Right away he's turned off by the smells. He really sees her now: the youth under the make-up, the toughness, the stains of poverty, the self-erasure, the mechanical skills . . .

He steps back from her grasping, puckered lips, fishes in his pocket for a few dollar bills, turns away from the keen desperation in her liquor glazed eyes.

She's not so drunk she doesn't understand or feel the rejection. Her inferiority complex makes her aggressive. Her defence mechanisms translate into a sudden rage. She grabs a bucket of dirty water to drench him, to make him as unclean as he thinks she is. He runs, cursing. Bitch! Wahyo! Hobojo! Watapoli!

She says defiantly to his receding back, "Go to hell! You nah bellor den me! Think you bellor den me! This is what I do for living!" She reaches for her medicine, self-medicating: the bottle.

It is the dance she knows.

You Can't Separate the Dancer from the Dance

All writers know, or should, the precision of Kløn: that which is known by different names in African ethnophilosophy: the power of the Word. Words can seed the poisoning or flowering of a human spirit. And in our country, Liberia, where a person’s mere surname or ethnicity has the power to categorize them instantly as an enemy to strangers who know absolutely nothing else about them, where the rise of post-colonial Africanist consciousness during the seventies inspired many to reject Euro-American imposed names of coloniality and reclaim their ethnic names, it's clearly evident how names and rituals of naming hold profound authority. A name, fused to culture and history, shapes a person’s identity, personality, maps their fears and beliefs, molds their sense of self and informs their social consciousness. The dance of the soul through the days of life becomes stunted, impeded, and/or fortified by the naming it personifies and receives.

In confronting the question of female identity, how females are named and defined, it is necessary to anchor this focus within a specific framework as relates to socially constructed identities. For example, the word or name “feminist” is detested by many Liberians. Feminism for them denotes bitter, combative, westernized/bourgeois women with a separatist orientation. To avoid a circuitous chore then, the less well known but more exacting and appropriate Africanist term “womanism” or “womanist” will be used.

Those of us who publicly identify ourselves as womanists but sometimes use the term feminist for its familiar value have been accused, abused, demonized, spied on and slandered for speaking out against phallocentrism (male worship/male domination), pedophiles, sexual violence, second class status, and the emotional, verbal, and physical abuse and sexual exploitation of women and girls. For speaking out and identifying the interrelationships between systemic sexual assault, female self image, and the sexist hierarchies deeply rooted throughout our society, we’ve felt the backlash and heard the echoes and the buzz. We've been called man-hating-hysterical male-bashers out of touch with the common people. We’ve been lectured on how manipulative, wicked and/or sexually depraved some women are. Conversely, we’ve been told of empowered rural women who wield formidable power and command respect. These reasons and others are constantly promulgated to overturn or obfuscate the colossal evidence of entrenched sexism and misogynistic cruelties in our country. Dissected, this "paradigmic patriarchal blindness," as Sara Hlupekile Longwe names it, simply collapses under scrutiny.

It must be said that one who exemplifies passion and unrelenting commitment in all spheres to women and girls who have experienced a cruel double standard and extreme psychotic treatment at the hands of men is fully engaged in solidarity with Liberian female reality. Tethered to the psychic strangulation and structural surveillance that renders females stigmatized and warped and maimed of spirit by sexual violence, the rape of prepubescent girls by grown men is so endemic a practice that it’s become almost normalized to the extent we have become desensitized to the obscenity and what it actually means.

Any Liberian who purports not to know how girls and women from infants to grandmothers were hunted and targeted during the war(s), sadistically and emotionally brutalized, kept naked in chains to be gang raped daily by dozens of men, eviscerated, slaughtered for resisting, forced to use their bodies as currency for survival, and even now are sexually and economically enslaved in brothels, shipped as cheap exotic pornographic objects to foreign ports, enslaved as “bush wives” and coerced into street prostitution before the age of maturity is either willfully blind and prejudiced against females, in staunch conformity with the sexist status quo, or in support of a deliberate anti-female agenda. When a girl who is brutally raped and impregnated by that act of violence is refused an education by some convoluted moral standard out of touch with her realities, but the rapist gets to go to school, there must be an outcry against this insanity.

There are always grave risks when confronting dominant power, but there are certain risks one has to take to be able to live with oneself and stand for something that is at far greater risk and much larger than the individual self. We cannot flinch from naming mutilating realties. To put it plain without ambivalence in our vernacular: bad sore need bad medicine. The infection is deep, has metastasized, spread to the very heart of the nation and become gangrenous. This writing is not about privileging gender over race. We know oppressions feed off each other and mangle the souls of its victims. This is the crux of this writing. It is a fact, the African slogan of total liberation, paraphrased and extended: we can never be free as a people and break the chains of imperialism and mental slavery while the women of our nation are degraded, brainwashed, deluded, and oppressed.

Some precise definitions and connections are in order. Africanist womanists situate the analysis of women’s oppression within specific historical contexts linked to present-day realities. Womanists are not only concerned with gender equality and full social and political rights for women and girls. Womanists are also concerned with analyzing the correlation of gender experience to racial/colonial oppression, domination, and subjugation; how patriarchy (male domination) mirrors enslavement; how females are socialized, conditioned, set-up, brainwashed, and played; how females are named and acculturated; the complicity of women in perpetuating sexism and the betrayal of women by women under patriarchy to win male favor, male approval, and social, political and economic power; how integrated societal structures perpetuate the gender-specific sexual exploitation, marginalization, degradation, and dehumanization of females in society; and how the brunt of the blame falls on women.

We depart from both mainstream and gender biased debates on governance and from advocates of gender justice who limit their analysis and advocacy to concerns with the under-representation of women in the world of institutional politics. A good governance discourse that is based on a procedural conception of democracy conceived as separate and apart from socio-economic rights and structures . . . has extremely limited transformatory potential for a new and gender just Africa. Based on the lessons learnt by women from post-independence Africa, we attempt to demonstrate the gender specific limits of choiceless democracies.
— Zenebework Tadesse

Patriarchal control is the system of male monopoly or domination of decision making positions, at all levels of governance, which is used to maintain male dominance and gender discrimination (for the continued privilege of males). Patriarchal belief is the system of belief that serves to legitimise male domination and gender discrimination. Typically it relies on patriarchal interpretations of biblical/religious texts, beliefs in male biological superiority (sexism), entailing claims that the unequal gender division of rights and duties is either natural (biological), God-given or too difficult to change (claimed to be hopelessly and irretrievably embedded in culture).

Gender concerns are those needs, which arise because of the gender division of labour. Therefore examples of women’s gender concerns arise from their more domestic location and their concern with childcare and food production and preparation. Typically, too, women are more dependent on the natural environment, and with gathering of food and medicines from natural vegetation or forests. For this reason, too, women and men have a very different perspective on development problems, and a different identification of problems that need to be addressed.

Gender gap is the observable (and often measurable) gap between women and men on some important socio-economic indicator (e.g. ownership of property, access to land, enrollment at school), which is seen to be unjust, and therefore presents the clear empirical evidence of the existence of a gender issue.

Gender discrimination is the different treatment, which causes a gender gap. A gender gap is never accidental, but is caused by differential gender treatment. In a patriarchal society, this is almost always the different treatment given to girls and women that cuts them off from access to opportunities, facilities and resources. Such discriminatory treatment may be part of social custom, or may be entrenched in government administrative rules and regulations, and even in statutory law. Even when residing in religious practice or custom, these discriminatory practices may well have the status of law in many countries.

Coercion is the even more ugly side of male domination, relying on violence against women to keep them in their place. Such violence may be domestic or institutionalised within schools, police, army etc. Where women’s acceptance of patriarchal belief begins to waver, physical and sexual violence is the fallback method of control and subjugation.

Conscientisation is defined as the process by which women realise that their lack of status and welfare, relative to men, is not due to their own lack of ability, organisation or effort. It involves the realisation that women’s relative lack of access to resources actually arises from the discriminatory practices and rules, which give priority access and control to men. Conscientisation is therefore concerned with a collective urge to action to remove discriminatory practices that impede women’s access to resources.

Mobilisation means women’s collective action to analyse and identify the discriminatory practices that stand in their way, and collective and strategic action to remove these discriminatory practices.
— Sara Hlupekile Longwe

The industrialization of the sex trade has involved the mass production of sexual goods and services structured around a regional and international division of labour. These "goods" are human beings who sell sexual services. The international market in these "goods" simultaneously encompasses local and regional levels, making its economic imperatives impossible to avoid. Prostitution and related sexual industries - bars, dancing clubs, massage parlors, pornography producers etc. - depend on a massive subterranean economy controlled by pimps connected to organized crime. At the same time, businesses such as international hotel chains, airline companies, and the tourist industry benefit greatly from the sex industry.
— Richard Poulin

The current backlash against feminism, and the consolidation of power in a neo-liberal globalised world, mark a new intensity in the way threatened ruling elites are marshalling knowledge and information to endorse the persecution of oppressed peoples around the world. Such information and knowledge are increasingly threatening to drown out liberatory expression. This partly explains why many radical feminist writers today insistently affirm new ways of thinking and speaking, and the pursuit of what is “visionary” and “imaginative” . . .
— Desiree Lewis

. . . women are valued as people by many men in parts of Africa, not just as personal stock or animals and owned things, as the stereotyping of Africa goes. A woman, named Y for instance, can be a girl-child who then goes through puberty, becomes a wife but is also a sister, an aunt, a trader or house help who could become a chief in later life as her life progresses as she ages. She can proceed to be an elder, a family leader, a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, a prophetess and seer at her church and a relatively well-to-do woman. How do we measure the gender oppression of such a woman in her society? We need to move away from the dichotomous evaluation of the woman's identity in diametrical opposition to a man's that occurs in Western studies. We need more refined and perceptive analytical tools.

We must also not forget that marriage could concomitantly be oppressive to men in pre-colonial Africa. Not all men wanted to marry many women, could afford to, or wanted to marry them. They did so to observe the priorities of political and kinship politics. Not all the men at all times wanted to have the responsibility of sleeping with all the women willy-nilly and by a home calendar. Some of the men also had preferences. Moreover, men often had to take up many tasks and duties, financial and otherwise, in order to have their women. This now standard position of seeing African women as sole victims, a view perhaps inherited from foreign and missionary perspectives, clouds our perceptions of women in pre-colonial Africa. In a systemic analysis, we can also see points of oppression for men, points that our men cleverly often try to change to their own benefit. What we must confront is that our men usually want to move into the future by using what is advantageous to them in pre-colonial cultures while wishing that women stay in the past. Women are expected to be bound by negative cultural formulations while men move into modernity without the tasks and duties of their cultural pasts. (Lewis)

It creates an atmosphere of fear, uncertainty, and general suspicion. The worst thing is that it uses the local people to enforce itself . . . The question I often asked myself in later years, when I thought about how Black nationals are leading our country, is whether a person schooled in an atmosphere of such abuse can actually lead with compassion, justice, and wisdom. My experience was not uncommon. Today, Africa’s leaders are mostly people who were educated in this manner. Is it surprising that there is so much instability in so many African countries? (95)

We grope for and wrestle with language and identity as colonized peoples, grappling with the complexities of dispossession, repossession, and for women this becomes another oppressive space within our own communities conjoined to the varied forms of discrimination we encounter within the colonial domain. Edith Kohrs-Amissah posits, "African women writers vocalize their simultaneous experience of multiple oppressions . . . gender is (only) one issue out of many. Consequently, an African feminist theory cannot only deal with the ‘male-female’-problem because abolishing one of the oppressions will not solve the problems facing African women. Achieving equality between African men and women will still leave the problems of neo-colonialism, racism and imperialism” (10). In her book, Recreating Ourselves: African Women and Critical Transformation, Ogundipe-Leslie articulates her strategy "to bypass the combative discourse that ensue whenever one raises the issue of feminism in Africa," explained here in the Feminist Africa interview:

I have named myself as a Stiwanist to pinpoint my position within feminisms, which I define as a cluster of ideologies or as movements for gender equity and democracy . . .

I advocated that we needed always to speak of feminisms rather than "feminism", since there were so many perspectives and differing social needs that we needed to articulate and address. Stiwanism or Stiwanist comes from the acronym STIWA - Social Transformations in Africa Including Women. The reason for the acronym was to move us away from defining feminism and feminisms in relation to Euro-America or elsewhere, and from declaiming loyalties or disloyalties. I felt that as concerned African women we needed to focus on our areas of concern, socially and geographically.

I am concerned with critical and social transformations of a positive nature in Africa, positive meaning, "being concerned with everything that maximises the quality of life of Africans and their potentials, too." At that time, when I introduced the word, I was trying to take our discourses away from arguments about being or not being Westernised and imitative. The implication of that title seems self-evident - that my analysis of gender problems is systemic, that we needed to transform the continent structurally within states and within families, and that this historical activity should happen with the collaboration of both men and women.

Some critics felt that the term was not strong enough. But I am not about adversarial relations with men or about men hating. We give birth to men, we raise them too (sometimes and unfortunately to oppress other women), we marry them and are related by blood to them, so it would be pointless or sick to hate them. I am saying that we are indissolubly linked with men; therefore, we have to work out ways of co-existing harmoniously and effectively, if not joyously, with them . . .

My work, as a scholar, feminist, and intellectual in and from Africa is indissolubly tied to the teaching and reconstruction of self-esteem in Africa, in addition to whatever one can do to help save the continent from material extinction . . .

Regarding self-esteem, no one needs this work more than African women, who have to work through the various overlays of historical distortion, religious influence, male manipulations of history, culture and traditions to reach a sense of themselves as women. The subjectivities of African women therefore concern me in their natures and constructions. (Lewis)

Male Power & Control

Why is a 'middle-class' woman who divorces her husband for infidelity ostracized and subjected to public gossip as if she's reduced to nothing post-divorce outside the shadow of a man – despite the fact that the man is abusive? Is this why so many women keep the names of their abusers (their verbal, emotional or physical abusers), to validate their existence in society? If she leaves to preserve her self-respect, it is said "he kicked her out." In fact, these women rarely leave their husbands. They suffer abuse, head high, content with being "the wife" in a society that measures a woman's worth primarily in relation to men. The praxis of their long-suffering acceptance of abusive marriages is fear of societal humiliation, loss of class and economic status, and masculinist/patriarchal ideas about God, duty, and self-sacrifice.

How often have we heard it said by both men and women that a woman who is beaten by her husband 'looked for it,' or 'likes it,' or he beat her 'to make her hard head soft'? Other than masochists, no one enjoys being beaten except there is a disconnect somewhere in the brain about what it means to be treasured and loved.

A Liberian male from Suehn, Barclayville District, Grand Kru County, tells of seeing his widowed grandmother beaten by his community, covered with biting ants, and made to stare at the blinding noonday sun after the disappearance of a neighbor. He describes his grandmother as being a strong and dignified woman, loving toward him and his siblings, open-handed in helping others, but clear about her boundaries and self-worth. It was obvious, he said, that she was targeted as a witch who supposedly had eaten the disappeared person because she would not agree to marry her husband's brother after her husband's death. She rebelled against the custom which dictated that she marry into her husband's lineage, where custom decreed she forever belonged. However, he explains, it was not that his grandmother arbitrarily chose to transgress custom. While her husband had been a gentle man and good provider, his brother was known to be a wife-beater, lazy, greedy and power hungry. He had his eye on the prosperous farms that were in her husband's name, though it was she and her co-wives along with her husband who had worked the land. Her decision to rebel was as much to protect all of her husband's children and wives from his brother's sadistic nature and greed as it was to protect her birth children and herself. She was also very good-looking, which accounted for her lack of female support, as he recounts, "a pretty woman in my town is often stigmatized and called a witch."

Under patriarchy, a system that compels women to compete for male attention and turn on each other in jeolousy, women participate in the oppression and fuel the demoralization of other women. Women will flatter and engage in repartee with men they know to be abusive as long as those men are putting down a woman they don't like. The powerless always turn on the equally powerless to feel powerful. The grandson recalls how frightened he was, paralyzed with terror and helplessness, unable to help or comfort his grandmother, knowing that he, too, might be accused of witchcraft if he tried. That injustice against women is acceptable when a man decides a woman should be punished for her rebellion is among the first cultural messages we recieve which shapes our thinking about the place of women in our land. This has to change. To force a young person to watch the mother who has suckled him suffer abuse, to force him to negate that primal bond and instinct to give her aid is a searing initiation into gender roles which creates a psychic fissure and crystallizes why women have so few male allies willing to speak out on their behalf. This is also an explicit example of why so many women remain passive, to avoid this grandmother's fate.

A certain mother of Monrovia whose twelve-year old daughter was raped put it this way: “I don’t want trouble so I told my daughter to leave it, just leave it, because we can’t do nuttin' to that man.” Testimonies from village women reveal how men of prestige, based on their status, get away with kidnapping young girls, even after being identified as perpetrators. The psychological resonance of these realities is demonstrably evident in the ways in which many Liberian females have internalized the construction that they are no more than sexual objects. Passed around from man to man like objects—things—toilet paper, they have come to swallow whole the conceptualization and traumatic consequences. In the classic paradigm of internalized oppression, the external definitions and destructive patterns, which is the spine of their devaluation, is accepted as the way it is, the way things are, and circumscribes the sexual behavior and self-awareness out of which they operate. Compliance escalates the expectation and degradation until it’s open knowledge now what pornographic acts some young Liberian girls will do to satisfy some sick man's twisted fantasy. Who is to blame when she acts out what she's internalized and has been named and been defined within the parameters of a rape culture?

That child who through no fault of her own is raped by “Pa,” is usually treated with contempt by "Ma," when Ma instead should shout aloud about Pa's sick and criminal behavior, and do all she can to heal and protect that child. What usually happens, however, is Ma in her misdirected rage revictimizes the victim by sending the potent message that she is a worthless, amoral seductress. The child is named "hot," "fast," "loose," etc., and these names become the second skin by which she is defined. Ma either sends the child away, gets vexed with Pa until he buys her off, or Ma pretends that what is going on under her roof isn't happening. Ma might unload the wrath she feels about the situation to a few close friends and relatives, who usually rake the victim with scathing looks and blame her for demonstrating the presumed deviant and innate treachery of women. The classic blame the victim paradigm is central to the drama. It hardly occurs to Ma that the child has been molested, taken advantage of, and overcome in an unequal power relationship. Ma's silence and complicity protects Pa, who continues to prey, and the cycle continues.

In another scenario, Ma knows what is happening, feels sorry for the child, but Ma herself is under Pa's power and control. He has social and political power, well connected friends, and enjoys a good reputation. The sick monster he is in the privacy of his home is a well-kept secret. Ma might be completely dependent on him economically, or she might face ostracism from the larger society for “lying on a good man,” or trying to “destroy his good name and reputation” out of 'spite' or 'plain female wickedness.' And the cycle continues. Rendered mute and powerless by sexual violence, male authority, and class position (she may be a 'ward,' an 'outside child,' or even born of the marriage), the child may very well come to internalize feeling worthless. She may engage in self-destructive patterns of behavior arising from the lingering trauma and scars of rape and devaluation. Like any physically and psychologically enslaved subject branded by violence, through her experience, she might easily become what she has been named and what men expect. She may even have a child to whom she teaches the art of seduction under the tragic belief that she can do nothing to change the way things are, so she may as well position herself to have some measure of control and financial benefit. But we know that thinking they are in control of their lives does not protect women from being brutalized and treated like sub-human beings.

Rape and all other forms of sexual violence are about power and control. We see this in operation in the 'male honor' paridigm, where to humilate a man, you debase his woman. The dominance of men over women and the interlocking systems of power and control that favors males over females transcend all class and ethnic boundaries and demarcates the ambiguous space Liberian females occupy at the bottom of all hierarchies in our society. Only in a country where having a “photogenic wife” is criteria for leadership can we chart how the perception of women as property crosses ethnic and class boundaries to extend into the ruling socioeconomic and political orbs. Aside from the shallow, stereotypical implication, this kind of thinking is classically symptomatic of the objectification of the female body in our society. To objectify is to sexualize; to sexualize, the thinking human being is erased and becomes invisible except for being physically visible as a sexual presence. In a society where men prey on children with impunity as if children are fresh meat to be hunted, trapped and sexually devoured, the powerful initiatory message sent and received is you exist to be submissive and subservient to my needs. When is child is sexually assaulted by a powerful man, whether in the rural domain or urban setting, the abuser is protected and upheld by a culture of silence produced by fear. The shame that should be felt by the abuser instead becomes the victim’s shame. Out of this paradigm emerges the so-called 'shameless' don't-give-a-damn woman of today.

The intensity of women's experiences often leaves us feeling psychically battered, emotionally whipped.

A recent newspaper report:

Daily Observer
Lover Held For Assault
By L. Welemongia Ciapha, II
Published: 20 September, 2005

MONROVIA – A 25-year-old man, George Davis, appeared in court yesterday on provisional charges of aggravated assault.

A warrant that led to his arrest alleged that Davis cut off his fiancée’s private parts on Sunday, September 11, 2005 at Chocolate City, Gardnersville.

He was arrested on the basis of a complaint filed to the Criminal Investigation Division (CID) by Ms. Oretha Davis. She had told police investigators that her boyfriend allegedly used a sharp instrument to cut off her clitoris during a fight.

One can only sense the physical agony and emotional anguish Oretha Davis is going through. Jabbeh Wesley asks, in her poem, "What Dirge," how do we share such sharp, throbbing pain; how do we grieve and lament such gashing experiences?:

So what shall I use to wipe my brow?
To bring back a life
snatched away in its prime?
What shall I say, and what shall I lay hands
so helpless upon to wipe the sorrow
from my brow?

What shall I wear to mourn a life
whose end has dealt us this blow?
Shall I wear black, so when our townswomen,
hearing the drums, come wailing, wailing
they shall see the sorrow
of my heart on my dark Lappa
Shall I tie a string around my forehead?
Shall I lie prostrate on The Mat?
Shall I cry tears for those you've left us to feed
when we ourselves cannot feed ourselves
in a land where the hungry, forever hungry,
keep the faith?

What dirge shall I sing?
Shall I recount the battles fought at Nganlun?
Shall I sing of blood shed at the cracking of a gun
when I myself am so afraid of the gun?
What shall I say when the women,
hearing my song, come wailing
and knocking at my door?

The Black Marketplace of White Conquest & Exploitation

A daughter's body traded for medicine? Your wife's body bartered for food? Your sister's body in exchange for a tent to keep you out of the rain? Some of the new gods, the NGOs, sometimes demand these human sacrifices:

In February 2002, The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and Save the Children released a report on their investigation into allegations of sexual abuse of West African refugee children in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Their interviews with 1500 women, men and children refugees revealed that girls between the ages of 13 and 18 were sexually exploited by male aid workers, many of whom were employed by national and international non-governmental agencies (NGOs) and the UN, and also by UN peacekeepers and community leaders. “They say ‘a kilo for sex,’” reported a woman from Guinea about the rampant extortion of sex for food by aid workers who abused their positions of power over the distributions of goods and services. A man interviewed stated that without a sister, wife or daughter to “offer the NGO workers,” one doesn’t have access to oil, tents, medicines, loans, education and skill training, and ration cards. The sexual exploitation of girls, fueled by the disparity between the relative wealth and power of the aid workers and peacekeepers and the poverty and dependency of refugees, was most extensive in camps with large, well-established programs. (Hynes)

The following account by Devanne Brookins, an African American woman visiting Guinea, is enacted every day somewhere in Liberia, but in a much more crude and visible manner, and with children below the age of sexual consent:

One of the men approaches me . . . he places his hand on my side . . . his hand remains pressed to my body . . . This older white man just put his hand on my body not actually expressing verbally, but still communicating his interest. This non-verbal communication to me is clear. He is not interested in talking, he is looking for a companion for the evening, something to do . . . I never like it when a stranger feels at liberty to touch a body not his, mine . . . I feel dirty, like a child when an adult touches them, they know something is wrong but cannot articulate exactly what . . . My dark skin and African features . . . indicated to this man that my body is available to his non-verbal suggestion . . .

Hotel Camayenne is one of the most expensive hotels in Conakry. Only ex-patriots are able to afford their exorbitant prices, but opt to stay there due to its re-creation of the Western resort: tropical plants, ocean side view, satellite cable from France, air conditioned rooms, tennis courts, and the pool. Never mind that the entire service staff is African and the guests are almost exclusively European or of European descent. They work for non-governmental or UN organizations and often consult, moving between continents, between countries and their former colonial powers, between racial realities . . .

. . . the White minority is a financially empowered one, as in most other African countries. And sometimes, not always, this means that they avail themselves of certain privileges. The best housing available, luxury vehicles, chauffeurs, maids, cooks . . . Meanwhile, neighbors live in abject poverty while the Whites’ every whim is met, creating a neo-colonial atmosphere. They come to develop, improve, spread democracy, spread religion, spread their version of civilization and acceptability to the rest of the world (read U.S. and Europe – same old motives, new song). Apparently today my Black body figured into those privileges.

For some reason behaviors that are considered unacceptable in the Western world, are acceptable in places like Guinea. Racialized and sexualized behavior is not taken very seriously here. As a consultant you can, for example, come into the country, stay at one of several hotels, find a young willing partner to spend your nights with for a low price, maybe even just dinner. High class prostitution, meal ticket, international development, or just getting to know the locals – read it through your own lens.

The ease with which this man communicated his intent made me incredibly uneasy. I knew . . . more advances were sure to follow, including perhaps a dinner invitation, where he would make polite conversation, attempting to illustrate how much he knew about my African country and culture. And then to his room. The thought made me sick because I knew that if I were White or if he knew I was American he probably would not have approached me or at least with a minimal degree of respect. But today at the pool I was just the African other . . . Black, woman, and available for exploitation. (Brookins)

While prostitution is synonymous with women in our societies, the vicissitudes of surviving in a post-war African environment has induced young boys to willingly offer their bodies to sexual predators for the basic needs of food, shelter, clothing. Male Liberian students in Germany, Holland, and other parts of Europe and America who sleep with rich white women to gain citizenship and financial assistance are simply called struggling students. One such student actually saw no connection between the racist big black dong fantasy and the predatory sexual exploitation practiced by older white women who roam the nightclubs and bars of these countries and the cities of the black world searching for black men to "buy" for sex. Logically, the act of prostitution should cover both seller and buyer, but in the language of patriarchal thought that privileges males, females bear the brunt of public censure and diminution. This is the power of language to invert, mask, and brainwash. Society holds women to a higher standard, some people might say, which is as it should be, they may say. Despite this social construction, the "prostitutionalization" of young boys mirrors that of girls in our society, linked to societal neglect, classism, poverty, lack of education, the disruption of traditional mores, the craving for the material goods of modernization, the commodification of human beings and the ongoing Euro-American slave trade in black flesh.

Perhaps our view of women, and women's internalization of it, has something to do with our belief that abuse is confluent with power; that one who has power and does not abuse it is not strong; that the very people—our colonizers, the imperialists—who feed off our miseries and suck our lifeblood are saviors and protectors; that those foreigners who live among us whom we love have no moral or ethical obligation to speak against the destructive practices perpetrated against us by people of their race. Those wonderful radical white teachers we had who knew deep things were always so vocal about the ills of Liberians, about the crimes of Liberians against Liberians, but strangely silent when it came to criticizing white people, including those predatory, monopolizing Syrians and Lebanese who, for their substantial weekly offerings and fat monthly tithes, were given special pews in churches. No one ever talks about the priests and others that lured children to their beds with candy and other manufactured fruits of the west. No one reports white priests, white men, white people. Whiteness is deified in Liberia not because of color but because of the power factor and the fear of backlash.

Sexual trafficking. There can be no supply without demand and the demand is stratopheric off the graphs. University of Ottawa professor and sociologist Richard Poulin's in-depth research and analysis is quoted here at length:

The sex industry, previously considered marginal, has come to occupy a strategic and central position in the development of international capitalism. For this reason it is increasingly taking on the guise of an ordinary sector of the economy. This particular aspect of globalization involves an entire range of issues crucial to understanding the world we live in. These include such processes as economic exploitation, sexual oppression, capital accumulation, international migration, and unequal development and such related conditions as racism and poverty.

Another factor, which confers a qualitatively different character on the current sex trade, is the fact that prostitution has become a development strategy for some countries. Under obligations of debt repayment, numerous Asian, Latin American, and African States were encouraged by international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) to develop their tourism and entertainment industries. In each case, the development of these sectors inspired the development of the sex trade.

Over 30 years, we have seen an extremely profitable "sexualization" of many societies based on social domination. We have witnessed the industrialization of prostitution, of the traffic in women and children, of pornography, and of sexual tourism. This once marginal market is an increasingly central aspect of current capitalist globalization. Sex multinationals have become independent economic forces quoted on the stock exchange . . . sexual exploitation is more and more considered to be an entertainment industry . . . and prostitution a legitimate job . . .

Inversions

Women, being human, are as heterogeneous and imperfect as any male human being can be. Jibrin Ibrahim's essay "The First Lady Syndrome and the Marginalisation of Women from Power: Opportunities or Compromises for Gender Equality?" discusses "the dynamics of marginalising women from political power, and the ways in which 'First Ladies' have sought to intervene through their special position as spouses of men in power." Using the works of African womanist scholars, Ibrahim analyzes the ways women betray women by operating out of the same familiar abuse of power model:

In many African countries, the First Lady phenomenon has opened doors for women that had previously been closed. At the same time, it has created a dynamic in which political space has been appropriated and used by the wives and friends of men in power for purposes of personal aggrandisement, rather than for furthering the interests of women . . . This phenomenon has been christened femocracy . . . femocracy is:

an anti-democratic female power structure, which claims to exist for the advancement of ordinary women, but is unable to do so because it is dominated by a small clique of women whose authority derives from their being married to powerful men, rather than from any actions or ideas of their own . . . Femocracies . . . exploit the commitment of the international movement towards greater gender equality in the interests of a small female elite. In so doing, they end up reinforcing patriarchal social systems. After all, the basic assumption of the femocrats is that they should have power because their husbands are in power . . . the basis of their power promotes the idea that women can exercise authority or be considered successful and worthy of respect only if they marry well . . .

So if one of the others had strengths more than his favorite girl then she would beat the hell out of her when the man was out. When the man went on a mission and returned with all those things he would give most of it to his favorite girl. But if she was weak the other girls would beat her and take every goddamn thing from her. ((417)

The 'First Lady' and 'Social Navigator' truisms do not negate the genderized oppression of women and girls. Leslie-Ogundipe relates the West African wisdom proverb which points out, If a man finds a snake and a woman kills it, it does not matter as long as the snake is dead. Carrying the world on their heads and their backs, the legendary strength of African womanhood is shattered, but still aglow, and deserves to be—must be—individualized.

This writing ends with a quote from male Africanist womanist, Horace Campbell, charting the trajectory of the struggle, and the entrenched economic power of the forces allied against women's true empowerment.

The World Bank and the external exploiters have recognised the vibrant place of African women in the struggles for peace so there is a conscious effort to mobilise the energies of African women for ideas of petty ventures (e.g. microcredit schemes) that do not fundamentally challenge the integration of women’s labour into the global system of injustice. African feminists are extending the discussions on peace from the victim paradigms of the women in development discourse. In focusing on the agency of women who struggle in their day to day lives, the construction of social relations at all levels are explored: the homestead, the village community, urban communities, the school, institutions of spiritual reflection, in cultural activities such as dance, in the bureaucracy and in the coercive forces and in economic relations.

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