I have spent the last two days on buses. It wasn't a total loss, I was traveling with four other volunteers for most of the journey, so the long and weary hours were wiled away with conversation, and when one of the buses broke down, we could stand together at the side of the road and I impressed my companions with my ability to flag down rides. I also impressed them with my inability to speak Kiswahili when we were discussing the Elder Gods and how to preach about them. I accidentally described Shub-Niggurath as the Black in the Woods with a Thousand Goats (Mweusi kule Porini anaye Mbuzi Elfu) rather than the Black Goat in the Woods with a Thousand Young (Mbuzi Mweusi kule Porini kwa Watoto Waelfu). Oh well.
Another volunteer was telling me about a girls conference some volunteers organized in the Iringa region. Their speaker was a lawyer from Dar that one of the volunteers had met on a bus and invited on grounds of fabulosity. Normally, the main catchphrase of girls conferences is "Wanawake Wanaweza!" meaning Women Can, a la Rosie the Riveter. This lawyer, however, spent a long time teaching the girls, not that women can, but that women deserve. He started by teaching them the Kiswahili for that. I certainly don't know the word for deserve, and that native (well, maybe. Kiswahili isn't necessarily the first language in Tanzania) speakers don't necessarily know that either says something. We can lament the sense of entitlement among Kids These Days, but darlings, there are things we deserve and should fight for. From the telling, this speaker just got more and more awesome as he told the girls that brideprice is horrible. They are not things to be bought from their fathers and sold to their husbands. When discussing gender-based violence, he didn't stop at the obvious, but gave them an example of a man and a woman walking to the field. The man carries a jembe (hoe), while the woman has a bucket on her head, two bundles on a stick across her shoulders, and a baby on her back. This is a typical division of labor and a form of abuse. I like the sounds of this girls conference, and particularly the message of deserving. Women deserve better than what they get here. Possibly having a man deliver this message isn't necessarily the most optimal approach, but on the other hand, people are socialized to think a man's voice is delivering the important and interesting messages. When, after all, was the last time you heard a movie trailer voice over spoken by a woman?
This is not to say that the catchphrase of Women Can! is unnecessary or bad, despite being a bit vague. As far as I can tell women are not only responsible for all the manual labor performed in the country, they are at the same time told that they are lazy and weak and unable to perform exercise. As an example, one of my more favorite students came over to talk to me while I was doing silks, and I invited her to join me. She replied that she was too fat, because like all the women of Africa, she was just too weak and lazy.
Much as I hate hearing from people that they think their body shape prevents them from being beautiful dancers, I was more upset by her claim that African women are weak and lazy. I started telling her that no, women carry water and farm, and clean and do laundry*. She agreed, but then claimed that only village women are strong, more affluent African women are lazy. I completely disagree, and I hate that this is not the first woman who has had a low opinion of women as a group. At my homestay during training, a girl who I don't actually know who she was in relation to the house (she just showed up, hung out for a week, did all my laundry and taught me some children's songs and then left. It is typical for a Tanzanian house to have transient people that the clueless American guests can't figure out who they are.) told me that girls don't like to exercise. Well, let's see, at the end of a day that includes fetching water, cooking, doing the laundry, taking care of babies that they are handed and told to play with, and also doing school work, who would want to exercise? The boys can hang out and practice the kung fu and break dancing they see on television, but they aren't expected to do anything for themselves. The girls who cook for their families get tired, and even if by some miracle they don't, it's hard to exercise well in skirts which are ideally tight around the rear and thighs in order to be aesthetically pleasing to men.
On a completely related note, a friend of mine who has started giving typing lessons at a girls secondary school told me that the girls have almost no manual dexterity. They are very strong, but, using their fingers individually is very difficult for them because they do brute manual labor, not fine work.
All good conversations must come to an end, at a junction town where we split into different buses. For the final approach to Mbeya I traveled only with one other woman, and not five minutes after we had taken our new seats, a man came up to us and said "Hi, beauties" in English. I told him in Kiswahili he should address us respectfully because we are teachers and he should show respect/mind his manners (literally hold his discipline, shika adhabu, it's a bit idiomatic). He asked "why?" which is absolutely the wrongest question to reply with, so we yelled at him to go away. Feminism: we needs it.
*If you don't think doing laundry is work, you have never washed clothes by hand in a bucket.
Hear, hear!
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