BESPOKE FREEDOM AND HASHTAG
FEMINISM
Sitting
at London’ Borough’s Market, just near the London Bridge, thinking of today’s
elections in South Africa. May 7th
marks an historic occasion for the “freeborns,” those born after the end of
apartheid in 1994, those who will be voting for the first time. I am recalling
something one of them told me as I was working with our GlobalGirls in the
streets, interviewing young people about the upcoming elections. “Not yet
Uhuru…not yet free…” he said, “But I am free in the sense that I have my own
mind, and can choose to vote or not to vote.” We called the campaign “FreeBornFreeMind,”
gave it a hashtag, and started posting short burst “vox pops” every day leading
to the election.
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| Interviewing FreeBorns in Soweto |
So now
here it is May 7th, and I am waiting for a triple shot latte as I mull
over the month’s events. I arrived in London in the middle of tube strikes,
with international news and social media raising a global, vuvuzela outrage over
the disappearance of hundreds of Nigerian girls, kidnapped by Muslim religious
extremists. Grey suits and silence engulf me as I am rocked awake this morning
on the tube, on my way to my meeting with Reuters Foundation. London is so contained,
polite and proper. After the chaos of township traffic and getting lost in the
dizzying maze of Jozi neighborhoods, I am relieved as I walk through the
impossible wealth of Knightsbridge, row upon row of brilliant white Georgian
mansions, their white columns seem to be holding up a bygone era. The fact that
on bank holidays, chaps in tennis whites still say things like “40- love”
behind locked gates in private gardens in Belgravia while drugged-up warlords
invoke Allah to justify selling young women into slavery requires deeper
reading.
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| London Cityscape |
I want to
know more. I want to know what is in-between. I want to know why there are no
more than these awful polarities…where is the grey? I hope it’s not just in the English gentleman tailor shop windows on Oxford Street, beckoning with the eponymous word, “bespoke…”
I keep
bumping up against this word here” “bespoke.” When I first overheard it on the tube, I
thought it meant spoken for. Then I saw it on the storefronts of bakeries,
tailors, cleaners and even an eyeglass store… (!). It actually means “made to
order…” or “made especially for,” as in, for those who order. Those who can…for
an orderly society, one that knows what it wants and demands what it wants,
ahead of time. The privileged, the few, the “spoken for.”
Do the
youth of South Africa really know? Our girls are interviewed by Al Jazeera TheStream
and the CBC The Current Radio show of Canada, everyone is curious if they carry in them the
weight of their country’s history. Will they go to the polls with this heavy
burden? Do they feel “spoken for?” The
sad truth about the current political global space is that leaders have
forgotten about accountability, competency, about being accountable to the
younger generation, the new voters. And these voters are frustrated, isolated,
they don’t want to be “spoken for,” as they certainly have something to say.
A recent Al
Jazeera article by Rafia Zakaria over the online fervor of the Nigerian
missing girls gets to the heart of the matter: we need to be careful about who
we are speaking for. By cloaking the “saving” of these girls as a pretext for
military intervention and an oversimplification or reduction of the very real
danger women face globally.
How is it
that most of the interviews of Nigerian experts on the news channels make them
look like inept buffoons, reinforcing the dominant narrative of global
inequality? So it’s Michelle Obama and
Ellen Degeneres that are the real saviours?
As
Zakaria notes, “ The positioning of a
grownup, liberated Western feminism against the simple, naive schoolgirl
feminism of brown and black lands, where the girls are imagined as just
beginning to scramble for an education and awaiting Western liberation” speaks to why GlobalGirl Media encourages girls to break down
these hierarchical narratives and speak directly to each other.
Don’t get me wrong, the
kidnapping, abuse and torture of these girls is inexcusable and needs world
community support, but instgramming and hashtagging does little to help
contextualize the larger American and European-owned multi-national oil
interests in Nigeria that have created irreversible environmental damage and
influenced a broken, corrupt leadership. The Nigerian’s state’s failure to
bring Boko Haram to justice will not be solved by an outraged international
drone-like intervention, ignoring sovereignty and local rule of law.
It will work only as we say in
the media industry, as a “one-off,” trending for a few months, while the conditions
through which women and girls are repeatedly violated, degraded and relegated
second class citizenship will persist until the next “school-girl crisis.”
The world loves a rescue
story. It’s the stuff that sells.
Perhaps the real hijackers are the media, and all of us tweeting and twittering
along, like birds of a feather, unable or unwilling to address the broader,
stickier narrative of Western do-gooders doing little more than driving our own
personal narrative. How can we, the makers of story, and the pushers of culture
make space for the silenced? How can we
help local stories find a global audience without our simplistic stereotyping
of the “other?” Maybe we need a "bespoke” media, where we don’t so much allow
the other to speak, we just listen.
