Revisiting “ Educate An African Woman, You Liberate A Nation”

 By Takura Zhangazha*

One of the most complex and limitedly explored subjects in Zimbabwe is Feminism.  If you want a definition from me of the same, I will easily reply that I have only read texts on it as my claim to understanding it.  But my view of it is that I have no wherewithal to argue its case to broader society even as I support it as a liberatory ideology. Mainly because I am not a woman. Even if I am born of a woman. I can only support feminist struggles on the basis of human equality struggles but I have to be cautious of the anecdotal fact that I cannot cry more than the bereaved. 

And I will start from my own beginning in interacting with feminist ideology.  At least from a liberatory political level.  

I once wore a Mbuya Nehanda t-shirt that I had purchased from an African curio shop in Kwame Nkrumah Avenue in Harare, Zimbabwe.  It had on it inscribed the words, “ Educate An African Woman, You Liberate A Nation.” With an iconic image of our legendary national hero Mbuya Nehanda and based on a quote from Kwame Nkrumah.

I innocently wore this t-shirt in the departure lounge of the newly refurbished and renamed OR Tambo International Airport in South Africa.

Because of the financial crisis in Zimbabwe at that time (2007-8), a lot of comrades were shopping in South Africa for basic commodities such as cooking oil, rice, pampers and alcoholic beverages. 

One iconic female comrade asked me to add her luggage to mine for the flight back home.  And there I was with my Nehanda t-shirt.  In the queue behind us was a middle aged white Zimbabwean woman who could read and understand Shona, my own tongue. 

She did not know that we were together with the comrade who just wanted to push her commodities beyond the borders with my assistance.  But she asked what she considered a pertinent question about my t-shirt logo concerning why and how ‘educating an African Woman would liberate a Nation?”

I replied that she should crosscheck her knowledge of Nkrumah’s speeches. She got slightly upset and sort of replied that “All Women should be free”. 

With hindsight she was correct.  Except for her desired appropriation of black women’s rights and struggles to equate these with those of white women in post-colonial Southern Africa. 

The key point however is how educating a black woman is quite literally the equivalent of liberating a nation in an African context.  Nkrumah was correct. 

It is Zimbabwean women, mothers that shape the national consciousness. Even in the most conservative of senses.  They teach our children/offspring how to react to society, what to value and what to believe.  With or without our permission.  And this is not just within our children’s infancy but through to which schools they go to and what religious beliefs they eventually ascribe to as adults. 

These days, we are in a dilemma.  We have to deal with emergent forms of feminism that are contradictory. 

Even if you are in support of feminism you have to consider ‘agency’.  The key issue being arguing on behalf of the bereaved. 

I once asked a very critical comrade about Simone de Bouvouire and the latter’s arguments about the ‘Second Sex’.  She drew a blank.  And then I asked about the import of Bell Hooks and her impact on contemporary civil/social activism.  Again I drew blanks.

A key lesson that was learnt in the process was that ‘feminism’ and women’s equality across the board is an existential struggle. It means more than what it appears to mean. But you sometimes have to realise that you cannot own the struggle.  Except to support it.    

While as men we can consider ourselves as feminists, we would do well to understand that we are only both intermediaries and contradictorily perpetrators of gender inequalities. 

If you ask me why does this matter, I would easily ask you in return, “Do you have a daughter?”

And finally back to the Nkrumahist issue of “You Educate a Black Woman, You Liberate a Nation”.  He was correct.  Our national consciousness and liberation resides in what our mothers, sisters, aunts and grandmothers teach their children. Everyday. They are the harbingers of initial societal and historical knowledge for young Zimbabweans.

If they are in Africa, based on colonial history, despite arguments of cleanliness via the missionaries, and with the relevant liberation struggle consciousness, then they will liberate us.

*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity (takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com)