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Patricia A. Made
In her now classic work on psychological theory and women’s development, In A Different Voice, Carol Gilligan states that ‘to have a voice is to be human. To have something to say is to be a person. But speaking depends on listening and being heard; it is an intensely relational act’.1
Throughout Southern Africa, as in many parts of the world even today, women still struggle to exercise the basic right to have a voice, to speak in order to be seen as persons in their own right, and to be listened to and heard.
Even within emerging democracies in the region, the spaces for women’s voices are still limited and silenced in both perilous and pernicious ways. And since women comprise about 52% of the population in Southern Africa, their restricted voices are a threat to real democratic change since the right to communicate is central to meaningful democratic participation in all spheres of society, especially in the public space:
‘It is now widely accepted that the respect for the right to freedom of expression is central to democracy and sustainable development. Conversely it is clear that the violations of the right to freedom of expression in a particular country or region are an important ‘early warning’ indicator of potentially more serious conflict and violations of human rights in the future.’2
While it is critical to think of the right to communicate and freedom of expression in the broader sense of being central to the tenets of a democratic society, we must also be mindful that this right should be granted, safeguarded and protected for women and men, girls and boys.
The restriction on women’s right to communicate, to speak, is intricately linked to their inability to exercise and claim their other rights. Without the power of a voice that is listened to, women are kept within the confines of the second-class citizenship status that they endure in many countries within the region.
‘Women are not empowered with the knowledge of many of their basic rights, and especially the right to communicate,’ said Sinikiwe Msipa, Director of the Federation of African Media Women-Zimbabwe (FAMWZ). ‘Women are socialized to assume a second-class citizenship by giving to men first preference to speak and to view men’s opinions as more important.’
‘The right to communicate is not really articulated in our constitutions,’ said Barbara Lopi, head of the Women in Development in Southern Africa Awareness (WIDSAA) Programme at the Southern Africa Research and Documentation Centre (SARDC), located in Zimbabwe.
‘Women need to be able to speak on public issues in public spaces. But the public is formal, official and established according to male rules and norms, which make this space uncomfortable for women. Women fear that when they speak their words and issues will be trivialized, or they fear a backlash which comes in various ways to send the message that if women speak in the public ‘this is wrong’,’ Lopi said.
One of the largest public spaces where everyone should have the right to speak and communicate is the mainstream media. But global monitoring and research studies continuously show that women’s access to expression in and through the media is low.
Recent research
The 2003 Gender and Media Baseline Study (GMBS), coordinated by Gender Links (GL) and the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA), provided the most comprehensive research to date on gender in the Southern African media. The quantitative and qualitative findings of the research (25,110 news item monitored in 12 countries), clearly provides empirical evidence of sexism in the media.
One of the major findings of the study was on who has the right to communicate, and who does not. If unknown sources were excluded, women, on average, constituted 17 percent of news sources in the 12 countries for the GMBS. Women, however, are 52 percent of Southern Africa’s population. The majority of women in the region, therefore, have no voice in and through the media.
‘At many public meetings, conferences, journalists may not even seek out the women who are there for their views and perspectives, or they will interview many men and then only one or two women. Then, when the article is edited, the women are left out during the editing and gate keeping process. What appears in publication or in a broadcast are only the voices of men,’ Lopi said.
Women throughout Southern Africa, both inside and outside of the media, have been active since the 1980s to break through the gendered nature of newsrooms and the gender biases and prejudices within media to open the space for the voices and perspectives of women.
But in addition to trying to gain greater access and the right to communicate in and through the media, in order to participate in the public discourse on political, economic, social and development issues, women activists have often created their own spaces to exercise their right to communicate. ‘Women have had to turn to alternative spaces, because the mainstream is closed. Within the space of women’s civil society, you find that women speak, because it is less official, not formal, comfortable,’ Lopi said. ‘The absence of men opens the space here for women to freely communicate.’
These spaces range from the creation of newsletters and publications within the women’s civil society movement; creative uses of ICTs when accessibility is easy; as well as media located closer to the communities where women live. ‘Community radio, for example, has been one medium where women have exercised their right to communicate, to talk freely and even speak in their own language,’ Lopi said.
The following examples from Southern Africa illustrate how women in various ways have created spaces for women to communicate - the Development Through Radio (DTR) in Zimbabwe initiative by the Federation of African Media Women in Zimbabwe, and the Cyber Dialogues and ‘I’ Stories initiated by Gender Links in South Africa.
Development Through Radio (DTR) - Zimbabwe
The Federation of African Media Women-Zimbabwe (FAMWZ), now in existence for some 19 years, initiated one of the most successful media for development programmes, which empowered rural women to use their right to communicate.
The Development Through Radio (DTR) project began in partnership with the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) in the early 1980s, and led to the creation of Radio Listening Clubs (RLCs) in four of Zimbabwe’s nine provinces. By December 2001, there were 55 listening clubs with an average of 20 members in each.
FAMWZ provided the women in the clubs with cassettes and recorders to speak on tape about the issues they strongly wanted to convey to public officials and to get answers. ZBC producers collected the tapes, sought out the appropriate officials to listen to what the women had to say, and then put together programmes, which aired at times known by the clubs so that they could listen for a response or reaction.
The DTR provided the means for rural women, especially, to express themselves on issues and by exercising their right to speak the women became empowered to become participants in the decision-making process on issues that affected their lives. ‘Through the creation of alternative spaces such as the DTR, women were empowered to know that they have the right and the obligation to communicate,’ said FAMWZ’s director Msipa.
‘But it did even more,’ Msipa added. ‘The DTR also empowered women to challenge the status quo because they also were given information which helped them to gain various types of knowledge to do more for themselves. They shared information among themselves in the clubs across the different provinces. Over time, these women began to address the institutions that worked against women and that wanted to stifle their voices. The DTR sought to remove the rural woman from the domestic sphere and to put her as an active participant and player in the public space.’
The DTR project, which has been adapted in various forms in Zambia and Malawi, for example, enabled rural women to also set the agenda on the issues they wanted to speak on. ‘Women participating in the DTR saw themselves not just as recipients of information but as responsible for what was happening in their communities and the nation. They gave their personal opinions on national issues.’
But while the DTR gave rural women a voice in public discourse, it did not ‘strengthen their perception that this (right to speak and to communicate) is an absolute right,’ The FAMWZ director reflected:
‘We focused on empowering women with information to speak on development issues, and as women’s civil society, we focus (now) on empowering women to understand gender and the unequal gender power relations. But we have not linked these efforts to women’s overall right to communicate.’
This is important to note, because when ZBC suspended the broadcasting of the DTR programmes in 2001, following the enactment of the Broadcasting Services Act of 2001 and restructuring within the national broadcaster, Msipa said the women moved back into the community sphere where they continue an information exchange among the clubs, but do little to continue to speak and raise concerns in the public domain.
As long as the women’s voices were broadcast by ZBC, the DTR gave women in rural communities access to the mainstream media, thereby lifting the clubs from just community media focused on community problems to a place of national relevance. ‘When women’s voices are pushed within a more localized space, as is the case now, this is one way in which their ability to exercise their voice and participate in public discourse is limited,’ The FAMWZ director said.
Using IT for gender justice
During the 2004 16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence, Gender Links, a South African-based non-governmental organisation (NGO) which advocates for gender equality in and through the media, opened up a unique space for women to exercise their right to communicate.
Chat rooms, which are among the most popular spaces in the realm of the Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) revolution, gave women across South Africa from varied walks of life, the opportunity to say what was on their minds.
The cyber dialogues, coordinated by Gender Links, developed through a partnership between the government, private sector and NGOs. A combination of face-to-face discussions held at 66 centres in all of South Africa’s nine provinces, and daily lunch time chats, gave women the ability to discuss issues of gender violence with 55 experts and decision-makers who took part in the cyber dialogues on different days. On every day of the dialogues held under the banner of ‘Making IT work for gender justice’ at least one person came online to say that they had been raped.3 Women not only told stories of rape, but also spoke of the violence perpetrated against them that had become part and parcel of their lives.
The cyber dialogues, which had provided South African women (as survivors) and men (as perpetrators) with a safe space to talk about gender-based violence went global during the Beijing+10 review held in New York in March this year. More than 50 networks worldwide facilitated discussions and Internet access for women not attending the conference to speak on the Critical Areas of Concern in the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action which directly impacted on their lives. Their voices were then fed into the mainstream of the conference through a daily paper produced by African women at the Beijing+10 Review, GEM News. And, in August 2005, the cyber dialogues gave women in Southern Africa once again a space to speak out on their issues and concerns as activists lobbied the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Heads of State to upgrade the 1997 SADC Declaration on Gender and Development to a Protocol and to commit to 50% women in decision-making in all sectors by 2015.
Speaking out on gender violence
Another innovative way women spoke and were listened to during the 2004 16 Days of Activism was the publication of ‘The ‘I’ Stories’. Seventeen voices - from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Mauritius- speak out in this publication, which grew out of a writing project with survivors of violence. Some wrote their own stories, while others told their stories to journalists.
Several women in this publication tell their stories for the first time. And the act of writing became the first step for these women to find the courage to speak publicly. ‘There was another challenge that came after writing my story…speaking out in public. When I was writing I was alone so I didn’t feel like I had anything to be afraid of…but this was different. But I also knew that it was important for me to speak, to tell people what I had done, and why I had behaved in that way,’4 wrote one young South African on how writing and speaking about her experience with violence was a step to finding her voice.
These stories also moved into the public domain as many were published by the mainstream media in South Africa and other Southern African countries as part of Gender Links Gender and Media (GEM) Opinion and Commentary Service.
Claiming the right to communicate
The examples of the DTR, cyber dialogue and ‘I’ stories illustrate that when the spaces, channels are freely open and women are given access, they do use their voices to talk about issues that greatly affect their lives and of the people living in their communities; and issues of national importance.
For example, in the DTR project the common areas identified by women to speak on in the late 1990s included the prevalence of HIV/AIDS; the redistribution of land and the position of women; health issues, especially women’s reproductive health; guarantees of gender equality in the constitutional review process that was underway at the time; among others.
In the cyber dialogues women spoke out on everything from politics to the role of the media in ensuring gender justice. And the ‘I’ stories gave women the space to speak out about gender violence, which is still shrouded in silence.
These three spaces enabled women to speak freely and openly, despite their low social or economic status, because the women were empowered with information, given access to the technology that could carry their voices far and wide and the women were able to affirm themselves as active and valued participants in public discourse. But it is also important to note that gender and media activists, who found women’s voices absent from the mainstream, created these spaces.
The right to communicate, however, should not be about the alternative. Exercising the basic function that is unique to humans, the ability to speak, should be the norm that is not denied to any individual. As Msipa of FAMWZ said, ‘We need to empower women with an understanding of their rights, especially the right to communicate. Women give men first preference to speak and value men’s opinions more on issues like politics and economics. We must work harder to give women information and knowledge to change this.’
Notes
1 Carol Gilligan, In A Different Voice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1982, 1993, p.8
2 Report of the Seminar on Freedom of Expression and the African Charter, African Commission in collaboration with Article XIX – The Global Campaign for Free Expression, 22-25 November 2000, p.8
3 ‘Chatting up change: how IT can work for gender justice’, Colleen Lowe Morna in Amalungelo, Volume 8, January-February, 2005, p. 17
4 Thapelo Rahlongo, ‘Overcoming the Challenge’ in Amalungelo, Vol, 8, January-February, 2005, p.21
Patricia A. Made is a Zimbabwean-based editor and media trainer who has been involved in many training, policy and research initiatives on gender in the Southern Africa media as well as working for Inter Press Service.
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