Acrobat PDF - Kubatana

“How do I hold hands with my sisters in the North without also
remembering that for 500 years an estimated 100 million Africans,
most of whom were women, were brutally dragged across the world
and scattered to every corner of the ‘empire’, while millions more -
my fore-parents in the widest sense of the word - slaved on
plantations and mines across this region, producing the very wealth
that made it possible for European women - of all classes - to renegotiate
the distribution of critical resources between themselves
and the state through the mechanism of the welfare state. And yet,
in this new and very interesting time of the 21 st century when the
very same forces that invented racial and location difference among
and between peoples and women as an exploited and oppressed
group, have, through the further entrenchment of social inequality
and difference, begun to threaten those very essential bonds that
women worked so hard to emphasize during the past hundred years.
Clearly, globalization requires that we interrogate more critically
those things that have kept us apart - among which most
importantly is the issue of white privilege between women in a world
divided into North and South.
Pat McFadden. The Challenges of Feminist leadership vs racism July 2001 (on-line
conference posting)
In Southern Africa, race plays itself out in its own unique ways, as
the articles that follow will indicate. An area of interest is the
absence of minority groups from the feminist activist agenda,
leaving activism to indigenous black African groups and creating a
fallacy that womens’ rights for racial minority groups are
garanteed.
Certainly, it cannot be that women from racial minority groups in
Southern Africa are not abused, or that they have access to all
their rights, that those issues that continue to bedevil women of
other racial groups do not affect them? The story from Zambia
negates this and highlights the way in which culture has been used
to ‘protect women’, but in effect keeping them in subordinate
positions and denying them their rights. The culture is so strong
that women within the Asian community look down upon the efforts
of the rights movement. Therefore, it is rare to conceive of a white,
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