To women, with love, from Africa

Maputo, Mozambique

On International Women’s Day, one cannot but help ponder over the dismal state of gender justice in India and how entrenched the patriarchal order is in our country. By most reliable rankings of gender equality, India is one of the laggards which has made minimal to even negative progress on empowering the fairer half of its population and on bridging the power gap between male and female. Take, for instance, the widely respected gender equity index compiled by the consortium of international civil society networks, Social Watch.

India, which otherwise prides itself as an emerging power in the ratings of nation states, comes in at the tail end of this index at an unenviable position of 145th in a list of 154 countries. We are even behind Bangladesh, which many Indians derisively dismiss as a conservative Islamic society, and far below much of Africa, which some in India label as “underdeveloped” and unworthy of attention by a rising giant in world affairs.
Social Watch’s index is compiled using three composite measures of women’s relative standing in a society, viz the gap in education, the gap in economic activities and the gap in empowerment. Where India is particularly egregious is in the gap in economic activities, which is calculated by the extent of female participation in the labour force and in estimated income. While the immersion of women in the economy tends to be universally inferior to that of men in both quantity and quality, India is a shocking case with just 33 points out of 100 on this score. We can be put to shame by countries such as Rwanda (72 points), Angola (73 points), Brazil (75 points) and China (76 points) for discounting female labour and keeping the fairer sex confined to home and hearth.
I have been spending this week in the southern African country of Mozambique (gender equity rank of 103) and have been struck by the ubiquity of women as vendors, distributors, sowers and reapers in markets and farms across the landscape. The producers of anything of value here are women, who frequently outnumber men in public spaces and wherever there is work. Women here are tough negotiators and savvy entrepreneurs who cannot be shortchanged by virtue of being “mere” women. They may be poor but not bereft of self-confidence and a sense of social equality which is totally missing in India.
Upon closer inspection, it is evident that Mozambique’s relatively better gender equity indices have to do with the legacy of its independence struggle against Portuguese colonial role and Cold War era proxy wars. Women were at the forefront of the liberation movements across Africa and took on leadership positions as guerrillas and non-violent agitators. African women scared European and American colonial masters because they were gritty, defiant and capable of upsetting the techniques of manipulation of gender identities for state and corporate domination. The revolutionary process unleashed by a long walk to freedom has had a positive impact on relatively recently decolonised societies like Mozambique, Angola and South Africa. Although the Indian Independence movement has inspired Africa’s own journey towards self-determination, the latter has harnessed female power and ideas far more intensely than was the case in India’s Gandhian movement.
In fact, it is worth noting that even in China, which has an overall gender equity ranking of 81, the Maoist legacy has left it more socially equal in terms of gender. The revolutionary wrenching that China underwent in Mao’s time was violent, but it also sowed the seeds of a more gender egalitarian society in which old Confucian patriarchal values were supplanted by a new system in which women were seen as producers and contributors to national wealth.
Across black Africa, one sees even more progressive historical gender parity despite the onset of patriarchal domination since the dawn of capitalism. Northern Mozambique has fairly widespread matrilineal descent systems. Such arrangements are purely of exotic and exceptional nature in remote, non-modernised regions of India. When I met and spoke to young Mozambican women, they were conscious of their lineages and spoke with a natural fearlessness that owes to what the Nigerian feminist Ifi Amadiume calls the “goddess principle”, which underlies the matricentric production unit of pre-colonial and pre-capitalist Africa.
We in India, of course, have goddesses in the Hindu pantheon who are worshipped and propitiated by both sexes with fervent devotion. But the carryover from the religious to the social sphere of the notion of superiority or equality of women to men is rather poor in our society. The attitudinal deficit in terms of accepting that the two sexes are equal in status and dignity is profound in India and does not seem to be eroding one bit despite the modernities that are arriving courtesy rapid economic growth. It is supremely ironic that the gender equity index of Social Watch reveals no correlation between per capita incomes, economic growth and the status of women. Some of the world’s poorest and even authoritarian countries fare better than India on respect for women.
Apart from historical legacies, the other major factor that has given women a strong footing in many countries of Africa is affirmative action at the top of the body politic. Mozambique has the good fortune of high levels of intra-party gender democracy, wherein both the ruling Frelimo party and the lead Opposition Renamo have reserved over 30 per cent of candidates fielded in all elections to women. The results are there for the naked eye to see. Mozambique’s Parliament has a healthy 34.8 per cent women in the Lower House and its local government institutions have 36 per cent women holding office. The contrast with India on political representation of women is overwhelming, as we currently continue to block reservation of parliamentary seats for women and have an abysmal 10 per cent of women in the directly elected Lower House. With relatively strong political parties that rule without the crutches of coalition partners, countries like Mozambique are able to ram through necessary gender sensitive policies from the top even as we have embroiled the question of female representation in Parliament through diversionary arguments about caste and religion.
Any form of improved female representation in political and economic institutions of power is preferable to no representation at all. On International Women’s Day, we are being reminded of the gross injustices being perpetrated on women in India. Both in the polity and in the economy, we are permitting naysayers and obstructionists to brush the central question of gender equity under the carpet using pretexts of identity and ethnicity which have been set aside in other multi-cultural societies around the world.
I met the First Lady of Mozambique, Maria da Luz Guebuza, recently and asked her what her message was on International Women’s Day. A former revolutionary who fought in the bushes against colonialism and an ardent advocate for gender equality in southern Africa, she said that the world needs attitudinal rethinking not only on the part of men who consciously or unconsciously benefit from patriarchy but among women who need to “know who they are really are”. We, in India, must learn from such wisdom and experience instead of hiding behind the economic growth miracle or alibis about caste and religion. India can give a lot to Africa, but must also take emancipatory ideas from this advanced and evolved continent in gender equity.

The writer is vice-dean of the Jindal School of International Affairs