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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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“In Our Culture”
| Panel |
31. Sexuality and Politics in Africa
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| Paper ID | 689 |
| Author(s) |
Christiansen, Lene Bull
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | On 4 October 2006; a Domestic Violence Bill had its second reading in the Zimbabwean Parliament. Statements were made during these debates, mourning the loss of a patriarchal dispensation in society. In the parliamentary debates, and the subsequent media storm that the Bill caused, they sparked an outcry by Zimbabwean feminist activists and a debate among Zimbabweans as to the justification for a Bill that would criminalise Domestic Violence, but also, undermine men’s privileged position of in society.
By following this debate, the paper discusses the negotiations of gendered power relations in Zimbabwe in the context of the struggle to tackle the crisis of HIV/AIDS and the social chaos caused by economic meltdown. This context might have overshadowed the gendered nature of the debate. However, while a number of feminist organisations did use this discursive space to point out the social consequences of failed social policies on women’s lives, and men, from the other spectrum of the debate, called for a social and economical reform ‘before issues of gender equality could be addressed’, nevertheless, the bulk of the debate focused on issues of gender, culture and tradition.
The three main currents in this debate were, firstly a neo-traditionalist point of view, mainly male, that scolded the bill and the feminists supporting it for westernizing the cultural values of the African family, promoting immoral behaviour of women and thus corrupting the social fabric of society. The second current was an official line of support for the bill. Here established politicians and institutions in society attempted to steer the debate away from issues of culture and tradition by arguing that the bill represented nothing more than common sense, and represented a continuation of cultural values and norms already present in African society; thus trying to debunk the neo-traditionalist arguments. The third current in the debate was a feminist; culturally pessimistic defence of the bill. Here the numerous cases of wife and child battering were described as ‘culture gone bad’, attacking traditional gender roles as being the ‘root cause’ of gender based violence. In this line of argument, the social fabric in society was described already corrupted by the patriarchal power men hold over women, which was seen as undermining women’s access to social justice and their human rights in general.
There emerges out of these debates not only a struggle over the definition of the relation between gender power and culture, but also profound differences in the prescribed value of culture. Traditions and cultural institutions are used as the battleground through which one can claim authenticity; either as the defender, challenger or institutionalised custodians of ‘our culture’. Defining the contents of ‘our culture’ becomes a discursive struggle over the definition of gender power, but also in the same process of the value of cultural institutions, that are from all sides of the debate regarded as symbolizing ‘our culture’, and are thus the institutions that must be rearticulated, defended or challenged as a means of claiming legitimacy in the gender power struggle.
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