Looking from the South, Speaking from Home: African women confronting development
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Thematic Section
Looking from the South, Speaking from Home: African women confronting development Reprinted from Development 43 no 4: 32–39 JESSICA HORN
ABSTRACT Jessica Horn interrogates the discourse and practice of development in the post-independence, globalized world. She argues that development, defined in Euro-American forums, has been unresponsive to the varied needs of African women. She shows that it is African women themselves who are now confronting the Euro-centric presumptions of development, and are working to better the lives of women on the continent through place-based coalitions and culturally sensitive activism. KEYWORDS difference; equality; meeting places; politics of place; post-development
Looking from the South Developmenty. This word defined from the West, it sets with the sun. And so when I looked to the West I could not quite find myself in defining this word. And everywhere I searched in the South, I saw people and people and more people. And these people never left the centery. And I rememory [sic] in the footsteps of Toni Morrison that [the African] woman’s herstory is itself development. For she has not participated in raping Africa of its resources. She has not participated in creating the corrupt governments that exist on the African continent today. Only when she is on the periphery. Only when she is being used (Mugo, 1999).
I begin with these words of Kenyan writer-in-exile Micere Githae Mugo as a means of expressing how profoundly disruptive the experience of the past half century of ‘development’ has been for African people, and particularly for African women. Not only in the sense of structural upheavals with adjustment policies, heavy industrialization and mono-crop agriculture that have widened the gaps of economic inequity, commercialized communal lands and marginalized the production of subsistence foods. But in the social and cultural dislocations created by silencing the complex systems of science, agriculture, environment management, language, medicine and trade already existing in the spaces of the so-called ‘underdeveloped’. I re-examine the ‘culture’of development and its historical partner, neo-liberal globalization, as a means of exposing the silencing power of these discourses for African women. I examine the possible strategies for securing more stable livelihoods proposed Development (2007) 50(S1), 109–116. doi:10.1057/palgrave.development.1100352
Development 50(S1): Thematic Section by post-development theorist Gilbert Rist (1999), and by African women themselves. Turning towards the African continent I look at howAfrican women are redefining development and the terms of their empowerment through a ‘defense of place’ (Dirlik,1998), reaffirming the importance of their particular cultural and historical locations in the midst of a trend to erase these particularities under the amorphous discourse of the ‘global’.While exposing these silences my intent is not to frame African women as voiceless, but rather to point out developers’ deafness to the innovative a
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