"I hope that with the current generation or with the next generations, we will experience a revolutionary revival" - Awa Fall-Diop (Senegal) 3/4
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This is the third part of our conversation with Awa Fall-Diop, Senegalese feminist activist, educator, and specialist in gender justice and social movement building.
We've learned about her childhood in a working-class neighbourhood in Senegal (Part 1), her involvement in Marxist and pan-Africanist organizations, and her fight for women's equality in education (Part 2). Now, we turn to her analysis of the impact of the Beijing Conference (1995) on African women's rights and the challenges facing feminist movements today.
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This year, there's a lot of engagement about the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Conference. Were you at the Beijing conference or involved in the conversations when it took place?
The Beijing Conference in 1995 was my generation. I took part in the conversations. The African regional conference on women, preparatory to the Beijing World Conference on Women, was held in Dakar in 1994 and I participated in that.
Did you feel at the time that the specific concerns of African women were being taken into account in the 1995 Beijing conversations?
Yes, for instance, at the African Regional Conference on Women, in preparation for the World Conference on Women in Beijing, we said that we Africans had other concerns than those of European and American women. We said, for example, that the question of girls' education, the status of the girl child, and the question of girls' schooling were a challenge, a matter of development, of rights, and a priority for us. And so, with this battle waged by African women, the issue of the girl child was added to the Beijing Platform for Action. Every time I see the platform and I see this point linked to the girl child, it warms my heart because it's our imprint. It's the imprint of our struggle as African women.
Thirty years on, do you think things have changed?
I believe they have. But not enough. Too slowly. Since Beijing, other texts, tools, and legal instruments have been adopted at the regional level in Africa. But why are the same demands still being made? How can it be that the same forms of violence and denial of rights are still taking place throughout the world? What have States and institutions done with these resolutions and declarations? How is it that the demands we were making thirty years ago are the same ones you're still making in your thirties? To me, things have evolved too little. Things have evolved too slowly concerning the promises made by international institutions, and too little concerning the promises made by the African Union, ECOWAS, and our various countries.
Feminists say that the Beijing Conference and subsequent processes have become institutionalized and reformist, even co-opted by neoliberalism and Western agendas. What's your take on this?
Let’s be honest. We live in neoliberal times. International institutions come from neoliberalism. We haven't had a revolution. We're not living in a revolutionary situation. So, we're trying to move within a neoliberal straitjacket. And that's something we need to be aware of. There have been revolutionary initiatives in the past. But our time, the historical time in which we live, is the triumph of capitalism in its neoliberal phase over socialism and communism. We are living and working in a neoliberal capitalist context, which is certainly in turmoil and deep crisis, but which has yet to be confronted by a social alternative of change and progress, a revolutionary alternative.
I hope that with the current generation or with the next generations, we will experience a revolutionary revival. I hope so and wish so because this can bring us closer to states and institutions with a human vocation and characteristics.
This is an informed analysis of the current situation!
The United Nations, as long as it is in this format, can only be made of neoliberal institutions because they were born in a context - and are the result - of processes stemming from neoliberalism. And we need to understand this objectively. Otherwise, we're going to lead fights thinking we're fundamentally changing things, but we're not.
What we're currently doing in the feminist movement is reformism. Sure, we're challenging patriarchal structures, but to what extent are we challenging them? We're still reformists. And that's something we're going to have to acknowledge if we're to enter a new revolutionary era. Personally, I don't yet sense the theoretical, practical, or organizational beginnings of a revival, of a challenge to capitalism and neoliberalism.
Do you think there are key political issues that African feminism isn't addressing that we should be paying attention to or focusing on more?
Yes, the issue of neo-colonialism. I think that, until now, our analyses have focused on women, forgetting that, however much we may be women, we live in a social, political, and economic context and that we live in countries that have not yet reached their economic and political autonomy. What's happening in the Sahel region, with the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), precisely shows that in our analyses, there are political aspects that we don't sufficiently take into account.
Another example is what's happening today in South Africa with the land question, issues that should be linked to our analyses. Today, in this policy of land consolidation and redistribution, to what extent are the needs and concerns of Black South African women taken into account?
Not to mention what's happening in Sudan.
Yes, we need to broaden the political scope of our demands, linking them to issues much broader than the immediate condition of women. We need to take an interest in any situation or law that impacts our lives.
Even relations between the North and the South, relations between Senegal and France, and relations between the DRC and Belgium, when we analyse them, are issues that should interest us as feminists. Because there are still repercussions if we analyse what's happening in the DRC right now. These are still recollections of neo-colonial relations, of the colonial period. How do we analyse these facts? We need to take an even greater interest. And we don't do it enough. We need political education on these issues, because many feminists don't understand the specificities of the times we live in.
How do we push this political education within our movements? One argument I often hear when these issues are raised is, "We already have enough problems in our own contexts."
All these questions are interrelated. It's like saying your whole body is dirty, but you’d rather wash your feet and hands, your head and neck, because that's what's most visible to people. Others will say: no, the most important thing is to keep your sexual parts clean, because that's what counts most. No. You can't dismember women's lives; it's not possible. Maybe we can have a focus, but we can't ignore the fact that there's an interrelationship between all aspects of our lives, whether cultural, political, social, economic, religious, etc. There's an interconnection. I'm sure that if we pushed the political question, we'd see that within our movement, we still have cracks in our political awareness. If we didn't ask ourselves the question, we wouldn't know.
Do you think this affects our movements?
I tell myself that so far, we're winning on one side, but all the while, there's another side that we don't consider to be urgent yet. And when we win on the right, we realize that the left side is gangrenous. We tell ourselves that we must stick to the left side, and we forget about the right. And before we've even finished the left side, the gangrene has spread to the right. I give the example of what is currently happening in Senegal with the Family Code. The Family Code was adopted in 1972, a consensual code, albeit based for the most part on the Islamic religion, but which at least allowed progress in terms of conjugal rights for women.
What happened next?
Once the code was passed, we put it aside. From time to time, we'd talk about it, but we felt that there were more urgent matters, such as gender-based violence and rape, which are essential issues that we need to address. But in the meantime, we forgot about the Family Code. Muslim religious organizations, on the other hand, have continued to work on this code. Recently, they organized a major demonstration for a revision of the Family Code based entirely on Sharia law. Everyone was scared. There was an uproar. We made financial contributions and organized a workshop to define our own proposals. But the others had beaten us to it. And now we're trying to catch up. This means that our ability to anticipate is something we need to work on.
There's this idea that we're always reacting instead of organising deep resistance.
What enables us to have this capacity for anticipation is precisely understanding the global movement in which we find ourselves, and every aspect of which has an impact. For example, I wouldn't deny it if someone said there was a link between the election of Donald Trump and the vitality of Muslim religious organizations in Senegal. I wouldn't say there's no link. Because we know where Donald Trump stands on the issue of abortion, on the issue of gender, on the issue of identities and sexual orientation, on the issue of marriage, on the issue of the family.
And I'm sure that - well, it's not just in Senegal - that if we interviewed other feminists across other countries, we'd realise that the fact that Donald Trump is in power is having an impact on organizations that generally weren't as active but now feel truly reinvigorated.
His election and his comments about people of diverse genders have raised a wave of homophobia and transphobia in our region and online.
And so, in the spirit of anticipation, we can tell ourselves: with Donald Trump in power in the United States, what repercussions could this have in our lives, in our organizations? The damaging capacity of anti-rights and anti-gender organizations is their ability to anticipate. On our side, the weakness is our blindness to global issues and their repercussions in our own lives.
Sometimes things happen, initiatives exist, but we don't know. Do you think the lack of connection between the different parts of the movement creates this?
Precisely. Since we don't know what's being done elsewhere, we get the impression that nothing is happening. You're right to bring that up. We need to talk to each other more, communicate more, and have a platform for conversations. We need to map out our interventions. At least to be able to identify areas, claims, and strategies deployed by others. Everything we do has to consider the connections between different aspects that are happening even outside our country. And, of course, within the limits of our capabilities, given the limited resources at our disposal.
The question of resources has a major influence on what we do and what we can do.
Exactly. Somewhere along the line, the responsibility of the funders is involved. Our organizations are so deprived, so precarious, that we don't have the strength to resist a funding proposal. As soon as we know that funding is available in a certain area, we sometimes even try to reformulate certain elements of our strategic plans, what word to add, what qualifier to change so that our mission and objectives fit in with this or that funder. And this is precisely due to the weakness, the financial precariousness in which we live as organizations, as activists, unfortunately.
In any case, I wouldn't criticise anyone or any organization for having this attitude. But we must realise that it weakens the impact of our actions and that it would be interesting to develop our capacity for political analysis. Because if we don't, we’ll never come to grips with the issue but keep on searching for its trail.
In the fourth and final part, Awa Fall-Diop shares her thoughts on topics such as the plurality of African feminisms, sisterhood and the importance of intergenerational relations in activism. Read more here.
