Caribbean Women & Pan Africanism

Bonita Harris

Hello! This is about all any sensible female Caribbean person can say upon
meeting such a subject. After that greeting, you wait for it to say something and
hope for the best. I waited in vain but it said nothing, not even to friendly women
I tried to introduce it to — until I bumped into Mr. McKenzie. Then it began to
say all sorts of things.

In Search of Mr. McKenzie is a book  written  by  two black  England-born
Caribbean women about their quest for their father. Years of investigation by the
sisters  who were raised  in  children's  homes revealed  that Ernest McKenzie-
Mavinga was a dedicated activist of the Pan Africanist movement who travelled
from  his home island, Trinidad, to Britain and perhaps Africa.  The Caribbean
family he left behind (Trinidadian wife Catherine Eugenia and daughter Lynda,
the sole survivor of her mother's nine children) and his abandoned English family
(Lithuanian  Jewish  refugee  wife  Elsie; her daughter by a previous  marriage,
Sheila: and their four children  - Andrew Arthur Cipriani, Teddy Albert  [after
Marryshow], Thelma Mary and Jane who renamed herself Isha) knew nothing of
each other. Neither family knew of his Pan Africanist work and his comrades in
the movement seemed to have been unaware of the existence of the women or the
children. In the book there is a photograph of Caribbean delegates at the Fifth Pan
African Conference held in Manchester, October 1945, with Ernest McKenzre,
Lushington, Gittings, Rojas and George Padmore of Trinidad, D. M. Harper of
British  Guiana,  Ken  Hill  of  Jamaica,  and  a  single  woman,  Amy  Garvey.
(Mackenzie-Mavinga and Perkins 1991).

The recorded history  of  the Pan Africanist  movement  is adorned with  the
names of many outstanding Caribbean men. But one has to look wide and deep
to find the women. There is one notable exception: the Garveyite wing of Pan
Africanism  (the only place where masses were to be found, and which perhaps
permitted Pan Africanism  at that particular point in its past to be described as a
"movement") had a mass following of women: women's sections (such as the
Women's Universal African Motor Corps and the Black Cross Nurses), a Ladies
Division, women on the Board of Management  (Eva Aldred, Amy Ashwood,

African Journal of Political Science New Series Vol. 1  No. 1  June 1996

22  Bonita Harris

Gwen Campbell, Connie Phillips, Mrs. A. Peart, and Amy Aldred), and a ship of
the Black  Star Line named  Phyllis Wheatley after  the  18th century  African-
American poet (Cronon 1973).

Information is scarce on the women who would be the natural allies and the
round-the-clock secretaries of our leading Pan Africanists, those who would have
made it possible through their work in and out of the home for the work of Pan
Africanism  to go forward. Little is known, for example, of Mrs. Williams, wife
of the Caribbean Pan Africanist  Henry Sylvester  Williams, not even her name;
or about Dorothy, diligently colonised by George Padmore to further the cause
of  Pan  Africanism  during  his  lifetime  and  after,  except  that  they  were both
European women.

We find Mrs. Blyden by a process of deduction. Hollis Lynch, in his preface
to the biography Edward Wilnwt Blyden: Pan Negro Patriot, notes that helpful
information  came from  Isa Blyden "who at eighty-five still has vivid recollec-
tions of her father."  If there is a daughter, there must he a mother. She is found
(not in the Index) on page 38 in a discussion of the conflicts between "educated
blacks and the mulatto ruling class" in the USA. "Blyden himself had in 1856
married a mulatto - Sarah Yates - the niece of B. P. Yates, a wealthy merchant who
was at that time the Vice-President of Liberia. Their relationship turned out to be
uncongenial, and Blyden claimed that this was because her loyalty to the mulatto
clique Ux>k precedence over her loyalty to him as her husband; but at least part
of the explanation must lie in the fact that his wife was semi-literate and did not
share his intellectual interest, and that Blyden, who became an itinerant without
a regular income, was not a gcxxl family provider and far from an ideal husband."
In his account of why the Blyden relationship proved uncongenial, Mr. Lynch
unwittingly suggests that Pan Africanism is a matter of 'intellectual interest' for
a  clutch of  men  and not about  the millions of ordinary  literate  or otherwise
competent persons who comprise the masses of Africa and the African Diaspora.
"Not a good family provider and far from an ideal husband" — this seems an
apt description of Mr. McKenzie, whose daughters spent the better part of their
childhood  in  the  1940s  and  1950s  in  various  children's  homes  in  England,
because, according to him, his wife "found it wholly impossible to care for the
children," or as he wrote in another letter to the childcare authorities, "She is
affecting  that she is not feeling healthy enough to take care of them."

"She is affecting!" observed the man of the house. Yet, even from this distance,
it does not require much imagination to reconstruct life in bombarded, food and
fuel short wartime and post-war Birmingham for a woman, a refugee, a Lithuanian
Jew, with five children and a politically active black Caribbean husband who was
a herbalist, journalist, public speaker, preacher and frequently  away "on busi-
ness." Although deeply sensitive to racial discrimination and the plight of African
people, he was perhaps not unconscious of but not sympathetic to the burdens his
wife and children were forced to shoulder. This awful gap between theory and

Caribbean Women and Pan Africanism  23

practice, and the personal and public political realm remain unfortunately all too
common among many of our learned male reformers. (It must be noted, in fairness
rather than in criticism, that the daughters drew none of these negative inferences
from what they learnt of their father's life and work. They were very proud of what
he was and he is treated very sympathetically.)

C.L.R James, whom the sisters were able to track down and secure an audience
with, remembered him warmly "as a figure of authority who sat and directed
while the younger men did the running around." This male type is well known
among Caribbean women of all classes and ethnic groups. When infrequently at
home, they tyrannise the household, treating children as persons without rights
and the mother and other adult females as infantile.

The case of Catherine McKenzie, a teacher's wife, who watched eight of the
children she bore die, and brought up her surviving daughter until she was 13
years at which point she herself, as the euphemism goes, "passed away," leaving
Lynda in the care of her relatives, speaks volumes about the infant mortality rate
and health care for the mass of women in Trinidad at the time.

Before we go much further, a brief word needs to be said on the question of
race. Regrettably, people, even scholars, still speak of and treat the Caribbean as
if we were all of African descent. An activist friend Vanda Radzik pointed out to
a chagrined colleague and brother of ours, Clive Thomas, that even his very good
and well illustrated book, The Poor and the Powerless (Monthly Review Press)
managed to convey this impression. The fact that the publishing company had
selected the offending  (through the crime of omission) visuals did not save him.
It is surely careless of a writer as sensitive to these concerns as we know him to
be to leave these matters in the hands of publishers thereby running the risk of
having the images nullify the text.

Here, in Guyana, are some of the original Caribbean women of the Amerindian
peoples - the Akawaio, Arekuna, Arawak, Warrau, Patamona, Carib, Wai Wai,
Makushi  and Wapishana.  It is a shameful  thing  that geographical  and other
barriers still prevent women whose ancestors came from elsewhere from estab-
lishing  meaningful  contact  and  supportive  relations  with  more  indigenous
women.  Indo-Caribbean  women  (foreparents  from  India)  are  a  majority  in
Guyana and in Trinidad & Tobago, and exist in visible numbers in other parts of
our  region.  There  are  also  other  women,  including  Javanese,  Chinese  and
Europeans in our territories. Pan-oriented ideas and initiatives therefore have to
approach us in a way that does not exclude our sisters and does not extract us or
distract us from our mission of women's emancipation. And they must engage us
with African  women as they daily battle under conditions of crushing poverty,
domestic violence, desert, war and the exercise of male power in all places.

This paper started out with very modest intentions: an attempt by an activist
to find a nexus between Caribbean women and Pan Africanism. It soon became

24  Bonita Harris

clear that it was also an opportunity and duty to introduce a number of women who
bring to the topic a useful perspective.

The first of these women is Selma James. (For the record, at one time the wife
of C.L.R James, another of our leading Caribbean Pan Africanists.)  Selma,  a
lifelong activist in various liberation movements, eventually made her way to that
one thing which unites all women: housework. In so doing, she broke new ground
for all of us as well as enriched scholarship  for those who have eyes to see and
ears to hear. When the day comes, as it surely will, where waged housework and
childcare is as unchallengeable and commonplace as the eight-hour day for paid
workers, pensions for the elderly and retired workers and freedom from slavery,
we shall have to single out Selma for her pioneering work.

In March 1993, the Wages for I Iousework Campaign, started by Selma James
in Manchester (for those interested in life's little synchmnicities, also the site of
the  famous  Fifth  Pan  African  Conference)  was  twenty-one  years  old.  An
important milestone was passed when following the Nairobi meeting ending the
UN Decade for Women in  1985, the IJN agreed that "The remunerated and, in
particular, the unremunerated contributions of women to all aspects and sectors
of development should be recognised, and appropriate efforts should be made to
measure  and  reflect  these  contributions  in  national  accounts  and  economic
statistics and in the Gross National Product. Concrete steps should be taken to
quantify the unremunerated contribution of women to agriculture, food produc-
tion, reproduction  and  household  activities." When Pan  Africanists  adopt  as
theirs this campaign to have women's work counted we shall know that there is
a place for women in the movement.

The  second  woman  is  the  economist  Peggy  Antrobus,  who  has  worked
tirelessly in our region and abroad to wake up policy makers to the fact  that
Caribbean women are the poorest of the poor in the Caribbean. UNICEF, she
noted, was the first international agency to call attention to the negative impact
of structural adjustment on the poor, particularly on women, children and the
elderly. "However, given the fact that it is women who takerespoasibility for the
care of children, the elderly and the sick, it is only fair to acknowledge that it is
mainly poor women who bear the weight of these measures."

She had to point out that "throughout the Decade (for women), we spoke of the
need for 'integrating women in development' as if they are outside development.
What we should have discovered by now is that far from being outside, needing
to be integrated, women's labour, both paid and unpaid, is central to the equation
- but in a way which is highly exploitative."

Arguing for the recognition of gender as a critical variable in planning she
reminds  us  that  "(1) Women  make up slightly more  than  51 percent  of  the
populations of our countries of the Caribbean; (2) They are the key actors: in
agriculture, food production, marketing and processing; as providers of health,

Caribbean Women and Pan Africanism  25

education  and  other  services, both within  and outside  the fonnal,  monetised
sectors; in manufacturing and services in the fonnal sector of the economy; and
in the informal sector, where their activities represent a creative response to the
absence  of  opportunities  for  earning  an  income  in  the  formal  sectors  of  the
economy; (3) Women represent the majority of the unemployed, and the poor."
(Antrobus  1989).  This, of  course, is also true for women  who are the main
producers in Africa. In the parts of the continent riven by uncivil wars, the burdens
of production and reproduction  have to be bome by women and girls on all sides
of  the  conflict  while  negotiating  bullets  and  minefields,  nursing  wounded
warriors and non-combatants, coping with increased domestic violence, mourn-
ing and organising the wherewithal for the funeral rites for the many dead.

The  third  woman  is Andaiye, the Guyanese  women's  activist  and  gender
researcher.  In  Guyana,  where  all  the available  indicators  and  quality  of  life
indices demonstrate that Guyanese women and children are far worse off than
their Caribbean cousins, she called for the fight against women's over-represen-
tation among the ranks of the poor to be treated as "a human right, a political and
an economic imperative." For those who find 'pure' bread and butter imperatives
more compelling, she emphasised the economic argument: "Reproductive work
is critical to the economy because it is work which, at the level of the household,
shapes the human resources that are the base of all development."  (Colloquium
on Poverty organised  by the Institute of Development  Studies, University of
Guyana, March 1993)

A little unacknowledged stumbling block to Pan Africanism,  at least where
women are concerned, is the matter of how our concerns are mediated, translated
and communicated to us. What do we here in the Caribbean know of the concrete
lives of African  women (and they of us) except that which is informed by our
imagination and the television world powers where they penetrate?

Hear Awa Thiam. "For a long time," she explains, "African men delighted in
doing down their womenfolk, and indeed they still do. This campaign must cease.
The problems faced by African women have always been dodged, played down
in their own communities, both by the governments in power and by reactionary
or pseudo-revolutionary intellectuals."

She speaks for all of us when she rails, "There is no longer any question of
accepting excuses for disregarding these problems, least of all the excuse that is
most frequently put forward: that the liberation of Black people in general is far
and away more important than the liberation of women. At the risk of repeating
ourselves, we say that our wish to stand up as a race, with our own  specific
characteristics, confronting all other races, does not in any way involve brushing
aside the problems of the African woman's deplorable situation. We go beyond
the racial problem, since we are taking our stance, not only as Black women,
African women, but also as members of the human race without regard for any

26  Bonita Harris

ethnic considerations. As far as we are concerned, this human race consists of
social  classes  and  two  categories  of  individuals,  men  and  women,  whose
relationship  to each other  is that of dominating  to dominated."  (Awa Thiam
1986).

In January  1993, some male colleagues of ours organised a  high-powered
seminar "Environment and Development." It was hosted by the University of
Guyana and the Office of the President and funded by UNDP. In a five-minute
Viewpoint programme on the radio, "Wifing the Environment, In Other Words,
Nagging," Jocelyn Dow of the Red Thread women's  organisation illustrated the
divergence of our views:

"I wish to offend no one in this Viewpoint but would argue that if we are serious
about creating a new democratic climate we must debate our differing  views
publicly. But I want to say that present throughout the day were various notions
of environment which I contest. The first is that the 'environment'  is something
special and divorced from day to day life and activity; which resides in the quality
of air, water, quantity of trees, gold, pollution or the number of logs or wildlife
you can export and which is controllable by scientific intervention, government
authority and the 'big' companies. People spoke of Rio, sustainable development
and overarching institutions to control environmentally unfavourable behaviour."
"No one spoke of poverty, structural adjustment  and its adversarial relation-
ship to the environment; there was no framework within which we examined our
present state, what were the main concerns that needed immediate action, what
the new government has inherited that has major environmental consequences,
inheritances like Iwokrama, Barama, Demerara Timbers Limited, Omai, Hunt
Oil etc., a totally battered health care system, a destroyed educational system and
over it all, the policy of structural adjustment. That is what is overarching. It is
because of the  IMF structural  adjustment  policies that  we have  all  these big
companies with their big capacity to extract our wealth, their big concessions and
the small return they give to our economy."

"The discussions seemed devoid of any mention of people... whenever the
discussion in the workshop I participated in came to the question of a mechanism
for  environmental  policy  and  monitoring, every  imaginable  reason  why  this
authority would be better vested in a 'high calibre man,'  or a Minister, than in
people's organisations  was  given; reason  upon reason  was put  to limit  wide
participation  ...'do you mean that every time a company wishes to invest  in a
natural resource, you would have to consult people?'  . ..  If you mention that
women were the primary caretakers of the environment, that provoked facetious
comments... 'perhaps what we need is a group of three wise women and a man!'
There was an argument about whether indigenous peoples should have what were
described as 'super rights.'"

Then there is Sistren, the Jamaican Theatre Collective, which developed out
of the initiative of a group of working class women in 1977. In another kind of

Caribbean Women and Pan Africanism  27

world, their talent and skill in utilising popular methodologies for consciousness
raising  and organisation  building would  be remunerated  far  above the levels
presently  being  awarded university  political  scientists. After  eleven  years  as
Sistren's  Artistic Director,  Honour  Ford  Smith sent herself  on leave, saying:
"Founders  need  a  chance  to  take  structured  study  leave  and  grow  through
exposure to other women's  groups, organisations, theatre and general educa-
tion." (S istren 1988). This should be a rule for all leaders: mandatory study leave
at least once per decade.

In an interview in  the same issue of  the Sistren  magazine, she posed and
answered instructively a number of questions. About the origins of Sistren she
explained: "It came partly about through the opening of the seventies, the crash
programme and so on. But another part of it was a vision of women's popular
theatre,  which  came  out  of  feminism,  socialism,  experimental  and  political
theatre and education. Without this thinking, the organisation  would not have
been unique. This is often overlooked — the theory behind the work."

On  Sistren's biggest achievements she pointed to "The creation and develop-
ment  of  a  working  class popular theatre  and an  autonomous  (stressed in  the
original) women's organisation over the last eleven years, which has had national
impact on working class women in terms of helping to show an alternative to
oppression."

On one of Sistren's mistakes she highlighted "The move away from  using
personal  testimony as the basis of work. Instead, we got bogged down in old
fashioned processes of administration. We spent so much time in meetings we
hardly had enough time to get any work done. The meetings themselves depended
on abstract reasoning, debate and argument skills. Since not all of us were able
to do that, people became suspicious and bored and agreed to things they didn't
always  understand.  Then  when  they  found  out  what  it  really  meant,  they'd
'unwork."

"Why would personal testimony have helped? It would have helped us to deal
with our own creativity; given us a place to express interpersonal problems non-
verbally.  And  because  we are women  and most  women experience  political
problems in the so- called private area of life it would have made that link between
our social structures and our work."

This  last  statement  contains  a  truth  that  truly  grasped  can  make  all  the
difference  in organising for transformation:  Most women experience political
problems in the so-called private area of life.

The understanding, experience, methodologies and teachings of Sistren mul-
tiplied and applied throughout Africa and the diaspora could do infinitely more
to advance Pan Africanism than a mil lion conferences of the type already held and
possibly already planned for the future.

28  Bonita Harris

Although  women  have been  the backbone  and  the  guts  of  anti-colonial,
national liberation, independence and all freedom movements and the organisations
which led or supported them, in no place do any majority of women enjoy even
relative freedom. This stark reality is usually relegated to a minor point made in
passing by writers, theoreticians and observers of these processes who approach
their research without the necessary gender bias. Instead of la luta continua for
women, life is the continuing private and public colonisation, deepening impos-
sibly with structural adjustment. We see the mass raping of women in what was
once progressive Yugoslavia; skin and bones for what was once Somali women
and children; the battering of women on all sides of the Angolan tragedy; the
bottom  of  the  Atlantic  for  fleeing  Haiti-ins.  Where  on  the  agenda  of  Pan
Africanism are these matters which cannot wait? In what way will they sidetrack
the movement?  What is the relation of the fathers and the sons and the brothers
to the rest of African humanity?  What can Pan Africanism  as the  twenty-first
century approaches be about, if not, first and foremost, the fate of women and
children?

"We started campaigning for wages for housework, the unpaid labour that
most women do every day of their lives..." Selma James explains, "It was not just
a  demand  for  money,  but  a new  political perspective  which  was  especially
important for  the working class because it deals with power relations which
socialists and feminists  often  didn't see." (James 1992) Pan Africanists  often
don't see it either.

Look at us! Most of us who have escaped the cruder forms of poverty work at
low income jobs in the food, education, health, agriculture, export processing
zones, public and other service sectors. (We see the unpaid domestic work women
do as the root of all our problems because work done for no pay in the home is
responsible for the low pay similar jobs are awarded outside the home.) Where
we see women  in so-called non- traditional occupations, such as the security
services in Guyana, the explanation is to be found in the fact that they are low
paying. This world of work is dominated by unreformed men aware of the level
of dependency and prepared to exploit it to the fullest. Economic dependency
taken with the burdens of domestic labour drive those with spunk and possibilities
to migrate at the earliest opportunity. Many Caribbean women dream of migrat-
ing to a place where homes have running water, light at the flick of a switch, fuel
at the turn of a stove knob, laundry washed and dried at the press of abutton, food
purchasable around the corner for a proportion of the family's income instead of
hunted and gathered—and why should they not? It is after all the last decade of
the twentieth century! For us, motherhood is by and large compulsory, children,
the getting or aborting, our responsibility, hi short, it is not hard to have no time
for  Pan  Africanism,  especially  when it  has nothing  to offer  us but  ongoing
argument.

Caribbean Women and Pan Africanism  29

In Guyana, in the Working People's  Alliance, one criticism  raised against
leading women activists described as having "deserted" the "political" struggle
was that we had abandoned the fight for power for the fight for empowerment. In
the first place we did not abandon the party which we played a large part in helping
to shape and build. We kept more than one foot in the door and held one head in
key areas (finance, programme, propaganda, decision making) because empow-
erment requires that women with a gender bias locate themselves in as many
places as possible, and the place where political authority may be exercised and
political culture transformed would be a place to be. We simply rescheduled our
time and energies and extended the scope of our influence. In the second place,
the women activists who became women's activists saw their work as highly
political, work which had been neglected for too long in the narrow interests of
the broader political struggle.

While  we  lent  our not  inconsiderable  resources  to the Working  People's
Alliance bid for state power at the 1992  elections which were free enough to
defeat the attempts of the 25 year-old dictatorship to remain in office but not so
free that the WPA was able to win more than two token seats, some of us did utter
the heresy that, yes, we were actually more interested in the empowerment of
women than the achieving of state power by our party, especially if a choice about
where our minds and bodies would be had to be made. I should note here that the
WPA,  while  far  from  perfect,  was  remarkably  free  from  the  horrible  male
chauvinism  and  sectarianism  which  characterised  parties  of  the  left  in  the
Caribbean.

I recommend the reading of former Black Panther Elaine Brown's A Taste of
Power for those who want to understand something about the culture of male
dominated 'progressive' political organisations and armed struggle units. 'Beau-
tiful,'  one of the adjectives used on the jacket in a promotion blurb by Claude
Brown (Manchild in the Promised Land) to describe the Panthers, is not well
chosen. The book also supplies ample clues to an understanding of how and why
Winnie Mandela became what she is reported to have become and raises another
question: why is not the male institution where she won her spurs and which now
spurns her not being called to account?

The organisation which we formed in 1986 while remaining leading members
of the Working  People's Alliance was Red Thread. (Judging  from  the ethnic
voting patterns in the October 1992 elections most of the 200-plus women in Red
Thread  would have cast  their ballots, not  in favour  of the main party of  the
organisers [WPA] but for the incumbents or the opposition party which won.) It
was organised across party lines among  women in Indo-Guyanese and  Afro-
Guyanese communities and had the following objectives: 1) To organise women
to earn money through a process of self-management and collective endeavour,
2) To link income generation and personal development to community develop-

30  Bonita Harris

ment;  to  enhance  leadership  capacities  within  communities;  3)  To  provide
appropriate educational and skills training; 4) To increase the participants' self-
knowledge and heighten their consciousness of their shared conditions; 5) To
facilitate an experience of paid work which involves participdnts in decision-
making and does not depend on subservience of any kind. With the acquisition
of  a  heavy-duty  vehicle,  we  have  expanded  our  work  into  an  Amerindian
community not served by the coastal road system.

This  may  sound  very  NGOish  to  persons  raised  on  superior  political
organisational traditions. We are unapologetically anon-govemment organisation
but we do not make a fetish of it; it is simply a mechanism through which women
may move in a very practical way to self-emancipation,  which in our time and
place was articulated by Walter Rodney as the only real road to freedom for the
working people. The seven women who organised Red Thread (Andaiye, Jocelyn
Dow, Bonita Harris, Diana Matthews, Danuta Radzik, Vanda Radzik, Karen de
Souza) took the organising principle of collective leadership which distinguished
the WPA among political parties, a step further. We constituted ourselves into a
Resource Unit of the organisation and function in this capacity, rather than as
leaders. The membership of the Resource Unit is fluid as women move in and out,
depending  on  the  needs or  the riches of  the  period,  personal  passions  and
constraints.

Red Thread has become part of a growing network, not yet a 'pan' movement,
of Caribbean women of all classes where work goes on, visits are made by groups
and  individuals,  and  experiences  are  shared.  This  is  supported  by  similar
developmental  work  at  home  where,  for  example,  an  education  or  health
workshop team would make contacts in a community, visit house to house and
organise sessions. Recent research on survival strategies by a Red Thread team
conducting  surveys  in  a mining  town  caused  grumbling  among  male  trade
unionists when they discovered the women (who were from their community, not
the university) were being paid for their work! In another community, a sugar
worker  forbade  his wife  (a member of the Red Thread research  team)  from
carrying out a survey among male heads of households on the grounds that it
would shame him. (She was allowed to work in another community. She already
had his consent to carry out interviews with women in her village. He has come
a long way in five years.) We have also discovered, not surprisingly, that, for
example, women  more easily  see the link  between working  to end  violence
against women and the question of the rights of children; that is, more easily than
men making the concrete connections between people's liberation and the status
of women.

Think how protective a wide trans-tribal women's network could have been
in the former Yugoslavia which boasted traditional male-dominated,  well run,
well managed, well structured organisations such as parties and armies. Think

Caribbean Women and Pan Africanism  31

how our common survival can be assured in multi-ethnic Third World societies
such as Africa when women organise across race and ethnic lines.

Caribbean women may demonstrate  sympathy and  solidarity  with the Pan
African  ideal, but  as it stands today  it is not  sufficient.  The struggle for  our
economic independence, for the right to be paid for work, must take precedence
overall other struggles. This is not merely an expression of choice (which it is too;
freedom of choice, ranking high on any list of essential human rights), but also
an expression of good sense, since the free-Africa  goal of Pan Africanists will
never be won unless the unshackling of women, the producers and reproducers
of labour power becomes an absolute priority of all organisers, freedom  fighters
and would-be liberation parties.

How can women be expected to play an effective and genuine role in the wider
movements needing their talents and energies when they are hemmed in by life
itself? When they are constrained by multiple social oppressions which are not
the active concern of pan movements? Imagine a Pan Africanism  vibrant with
social truth and peopled with free women.

Until then, culturemongerers, tribalists, tyrannisers, famine causers and desert
stormers in all their guises will continue their dread works, unstoppable. Directly
under the noses of the McKenzie-Mavingas at the offices and secretariats of Pan
Africanism  are the patriarchal societies of Africa  which make a virtue out of
oppressing and traumatising women and  girls. Although much can be said and
needs to be said on the sacrosanct matter of culture, here are just two statements
from African women on it.

Medina, a Fulani girl relates: "When I was at the end of my second year in high
school, I was told that my grandfather, a marabout wielding absolute power in the
family and thought of as 'God-the-father'  by a great number of people including
my  parents,  wished  to see me. He had  so much authority  that  his  children,
nephews,  disciples,  and  all  those  surrounding  him,  never  argued  with  his
decisions. When I arrived at his house, accompanied by my parents, he said, after
the formal exchange of greetings and polite formulas: You have always been a
good and obedient child. I know that you are also a good pupil. I would like to give
you in marriage next Friday (this was a Saturday evening) to your cousin X, who
is continuing his studies in Saudi Arabia. You probably don't know him, but he
is a good boy and well bred... After the wedding, you will return to Saudi Arabia
with him and stay there till he has finished his studies.' I was thunderstruck."
".. .so inBlack Africa it would seem that males have forced women to become
their own torturers, to butcher each other. Women have rationalised excision and
infibulation,  associating these with prescriptive practices until they become an
integral part  of  their traditional or rilual body of customs. This would partly
explain  the  fact  that women  themselves take the responsibility  for tfieir own
The average man or woman in Black Africa does not give much
mutilation 

32  Bonita Harris

thought to clitoridectomy and infibulation,  any more than to the condition of
women generally. Within mass Black African organisations, whether of the  right
or the left,  these matters are avoided, on the grounds that they are not apt to
mobilise the interest of the masses. Who decides this? Who decrees it? Men, and
the dominating ideology of these organisations which, even when they include
some women in their midst, are fundamentally mysogynist." [Awa Thiam, Black
Sisters, Speak Out, p. 20,75,86]

For those who may feel that 'balance' is missing from this paper, that women
too plenty, here is a lengthy extract from C.L.R James, the sweetheart of Pan
Africanists. (We also love and respect him.) In his closing thoughts in an address,
'Towards the Seventh Pan-African Congress—Past, Present and Future" (1976)
he takes us to a book Child of the Dark by a Brazilian woman, Carolina Maria de
Jesus, "who sat down every night and wrote a diary about the kind of life she was
living in the Brazilian ghetto. It got into the hands of a Brazilian reporter... When
the book appeared in Sao Paulo, in less than six months, 90,000 copies were sold.
It has sold more than any other Brazilian book since the beginning  of Brazil
centuries ago. Let me repeat. The book that has had the widest circulation in that
huge area is the book by this woman whh two years of schooling. That is an
example of what can be done by the mass of the population when it is given the
opportunity to express its natural ability. Lenin was very much concerned about
that. He always said, give the common people a chance,  they have the energy,
they have the ability, they have the desire to change. But the ordinary society
suppresses them and keeps them down. If you free them you get energy, you get
initiative, you  get  forward-looking  policy, etc., which  can  be  a  tremendous
advance in the economic and social development of any country."

This is C.L.R's way of expressing Andaiye's point that "combating women's
'over-representation' among the poor is at once a human right, a political and an
economic imperative."

James then goes to George Lamming's Natives of My Person, to the discussion
among the wives of the men who made the Middle Passage... "The surgeon's wife
asks: 'Why did we follow them here? These men are no good and yet we have
followed them out here, why did we do that?' The steward's wife says: 'Yes, why
follow them here?' And the lady of the house, who was in charge, says: 'Because
we are a future. Because women are a future'... And the last lines of the book are
from the lady of the house, 'A future, I repeat: we are a future they must learn."
According to James, Lamming "has been saying in all of his books: that men
constitute an elite in relation to women, and women have got a capacity, which
men have got to learn."

CLR concludes his reflections:  "I believe that all these matters (and many
more) could be the material for a Seventh Pan-African Congress. And I believe
that it is not only Africans who would be able to understand that tremendous move

Caribbean Women and Pan Africanism  33

forward there posed, but people all over the world and in the advanced countries
would understand, with our repudiation of the national state, our repudiation of
the elite, our respect for the great mass of the population and the dominant role
that it would play in the reconstruction of society, our recognition that our elitism
is morally responsible for what is happening  to the ordinary man  (he means
person), our recognition of the capacity they have in them, our recognition of the
need to release the enormous energies of the mass of people, in particular in
women  and  the  peasants  —  such  a  congress  could  be  the  Seventh  for  Pan
Africanism but, for that very reason, the First of new worldwide social advance."
Throughout Africa and the diaspora, women birth, bring up and bury much
with desperately little—especially, it must be noted, in a place like Angola. This
paper has attempted to unearth a small portion of some of this labour to allow it
to speak directly to the question of Caribbean women and Pan Africanism. For
there to exist a nexus between us and it, especially when its leading spokespersons
continue to be male, it will have to come out uncompromisingly, for example, for
the disbanding of all the armies and the fiefdoms of Africa, for the turning of
weapons into washing machines, and, yes, for wages for all the unremunerated
housework, yard work and field work which women do which still remain the
basis of all our economies, modern or not. These are not unreasonable demands,
and we do not ask for backpay or compensation for injuries sustained in the past.

References
Antrobus, Peggy (1989) "Structural Adjustment—Cure or Cause? Implications
for Caribbean Development," Address to Outreach Programme of the Caribbean
Development Bank.
Cronon, E., ed. (1973) Marcus Garvey, NJ: Prentrice Hall.
James,  C.L.R.  (1984)  "Towards  the  Seventh  Pan  African  Congress—  Past,
Present and Future" in At the Rendez-vous of Victory: Selected Writings, London:
Allison and Busby.
James,  Selma  (1992)  "  Selma James  Speaking  to Dcnise  Searle," Socialist
Movement Newspaper, no.ll, February/March.
Lynch, Hollis (1967) Edward Wilmont Blyden: Pan-Negro Patriot, New York:
Oxford University Press.
McKenzie-MavingaJsha and Perkins, Ttelma.(199l)InSearchqfMr..McKenzie,
London: The Women's Press.
Sistren, Vol.10 nos. 2&3,1988.
Thiam, Awa (1986) Speak Out, Black Sisters, London: Pluto Press