Gender and Rights

G. N. Devy, Geoffrey V. Davis, G. N. Devy

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000177381
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Part of the series Key Concepts in Indigenous Studies, this book focuses on the concepts that recur in any discussion of nature, culture and society among the indigenous.

This book, the second in a five-volume series, deals with the two key concepts of gender and rights of indigenous peoples from all continents of the world. With contributions from renowned scholars, activists and experts across the globe, it looks at issues of indigenous human rights, gender justice, repression, resistance, resurgence and government policies in Canada, Latin America, North America, Australia, India, Brazil, Southeast Asia and Africa.

Bringing together academic insights and experiences from the ground, this unique book with its wide coverage will serve as a comprehensive guide for students, teachers and scholars of indigenous studies. It will be essential reading for those in gender studies, human rights and law, social and cultural anthropology, tribal studies, sociology and social exclusion studies, religion and theology, cultural studies, literary and postcolonial studies, Third World and Global South studies, as well as activists working with Indigenous communities.

1
Writing and re-writing indigenous human rights in the African laboratory

Michela Borzaga

‘Indigenousness’, intended as a ‘rights-bearing sign’ (Povinelli 1999: 32), is and is not a recent phenomenon in Africa. If, by indigenous rights activism, we mean the transnational human rights network, whose work culminated in the ratification of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, Africa’s involvement in and contribution to this movement is a fairly recent one, dating back to the early 1990s. If, instead, by indigenous rights activism, we mean the struggle against Western colonialism, then, of course, we are dealing with a much older phenomenon. The first land claim on behalf of the Maasai, for instance, was filed in the High Court of British East Africa in 1913; the first Maasai Association was founded in Kenya in 1930 (Hughes 2006). As Steven Robins has shown in his magisterial study on South African indigenous activism, organizations set up to defend Nama groups were already present at the time of the anti-apartheid struggle in the 1980s (Robins 2008). This, then, suggests that the unprecedented number of indigenous rights movements, which have proliferated across the African continent since the early 1990s, did not fall onto an empty stage.

This chapter concerns itself with the first of the aforementioned phenomena, with what we could call the ‘second wave’ of indigenous activism in Africa. Obviously, this second wave is not a linear or progressive extension of previous anti-colonial struggles. On the contrary: a whole new context has unfolded, with new actors and new power holders in place. When comparing anti-apartheid movements and more recent indigenous rights movements in South Africa, Robins speaks of a ‘seismic shift’ (Robins 2008: 3), both as far as the political agenda and as far as the political lexicon are concerned. He argues that anti-apartheid struggles were led by revolutionary militant groups. They unfolded at a time when a socialist vision was still feasible. They represented a class struggle against structural injustices and racial capitalism. Today, many of those who contributed to these revolutionary movements have become part of a privileged ruling elite. They find themselves enmeshed in neoliberal economies in a post-socialist, hyper-consumerist world, which, for some commentators, has led to the ‘depoliticisation of politics’ (Comaroff 2001; Robins 2008). This means that tamer struggles are being fought and are under new rubrics. Robins argues that, in the case of South Africa, political discussions no longer revolve around structural inequality and economic justice; they are all about ‘citizenship’ and ‘liberal democracy’ and, within this context, ‘human rights’ has emerged as the new language of political claims (Robins 2008: 6).

The second wave of indigenous rights activism emerged in Africa in the early 1990s. This time span coincides with the decade in which most African countries decided, with the support of foreign aid agencies and institutions like the World Bank, to open up to multi-party politics, to embrace de-centralization and democratization processes and to accept development adjustment programmes as well as neoliberal economic reforms. As a result of this changed scenario, indigenous groups were faced with a paradox. On the one hand, predatory development programmes targeted their resources and lands; on the other hand, empowerment programmes were being offered. In any case, a new space opened up which facilitated the emergence of vibrant and dynamic civil society and civic rights movements. Thus, the development of the indigenous human rights movement in Africa, as Dorothy Hodgson suggests, is the product of multiple factors: visionary, well-travelled and experienced leaders such as Parkipuny, who recognized structural parallels with other subaltern ‘indigenous’ groups, as well as external interventions, donor aid agendas, adjustment programmes and failed political projects, contingent encounters and chances (Hodgson 2011: 4–5).

This chapter is divided into two main parts. In the first, I contextualize the rise of the indigenous rights movement. Instead of providing a taxonomy or a list of movements across the African continent, I concentrate on contexts, as well as seminal issues, such as questions of terminology and definition, different positionings and reactions, on the part of both NGOs and states. Since indigenous rights activism is, to a large extent, the product of Western humanitarian organizations and aid agencies, this raises the vexed problem of Africa as a privileged site of humanitarian intervention. In the second part of this chapter, I present a few case studies. The aim is to show the different trajectories and forms indigenous rights activism has taken in Africa. Obviously, the scope of the topic is such that I could not possibly cover the entire region. I focus primarily on Eastern and Southern Africa but, again, not on every single state in these huge regions. The selected case studies mark interesting contrasts which enable a certain complexity to be highlighted: the different positionings indigenous NGOs assume towards the state, and the state towards them, and how the inner divisions and the inner intricacy of certain indigenous groups and agendas cut across national boundaries, creating interesting fields of tension and action. These case studies have also been chosen based on the degree of documentation, research and scholarship available. I summarize here key texts, arguments from the fieldwork of anthropologists and academic activists without whom this piece could never have been written. In particular, I am indebted to Robert Hitchcock, Nicholas Olmsted, Steven Robins, Sidsel Saugestad, Jacqueline Solway, James Suzman, and Renée Sylvain as far as the Southern African region is concerned, and to Elliot Fratkin, John G. Galaty, Dorothy Hodgson, Jim Igoe, Felix Ndahinda, Rob Nixon, and Xavier Péron for Eastern Africa. I conclude with a brief discussion of Wangari Maathai’s world-renowned women’s environmental movement. Her ‘intersectional’ (Nixon 2011: 138) approach to social, gender and environmental violence allows us to compare it to the indigenous rights framework and to draw some conclusions as to the gains and successes but also the limits and pitfalls of this phenomenon.

‘Indigeneity’ in the age of finance capitalism

So-called indigenous populations are subaltern, oppressed communities which, when confronted with the brutal politics of their constitutional states and their predatory economies, have decided to ‘become’ (Hodgson 2011) indigenous and have found a lifeline – albeit (as we will see) a very tenuous and ambiguous one – in supranational legal organs such as the United Nations, in an attempt to stop dislocations, decimations, resource alienations and the destruction of their eco-systems.¹ The emergence of this transnational advocacy network cannot be grasped without first understanding the logic of finance capitalism, an aggressive form of capitalism which, since the late 1980s and early 1990s, instead of producing value has aimed at maximizing profits and accumulating capital by extracting value and by transforming states into mega-managerial companies. Luciano Gallino (2011) has described finance capitalism as an irrational system based on debt and non-transparent flows, forms of macro-transactions and shadow economies in the hands of hedge funds and capital companies. As a result, the world has been transformed into a ‘more fluid, market-driven, electronically articulated universe’ in which ‘geography is perforce being rewritten; in which transitional identities, diasporic connections, ecological disasters, and the mobility of human populations challenge both the nature of sovereignty and the sovereignty of nature’ (Comaroff 2001: 633).

According to Achille Mbembe, the predatory logic of this regime has led to a new form of colonialism, namely the militarization of borders, the privatization of resources, of lands and of common goods, triggering an unprecedented political and ecological crisis (Mbembe 2000). War resources and economies of extraction have led to the destruction of eco-systems. Gallino, for instance, estimates that human beings are consuming the equivalent of one-third of another planet Earth and that if all countries were to consume on the same scale as the US, we would need at least four ‘Earths’ to compensate for the loss of resources. Each year 13,000,000 hectares of forests are being felled (equivalent to half of the UK), with the disastrous side effects of soil erosion, alterations to eco-systems, the pollution of air and seas, the increase in toxic drift and upward-spiralling global temperatures (Gallino 2011).

It goes without saying that it is not possible, in a few paragraphs, to describe the impact the recent neo-liberal order has had on the African continent. Africa has 53 independent states and each state has its own unique and complex political system. Colonialism, a term we tend to use in an undifferentiated manner, has left behind diversified scenarios and variegated state formations. As Alex Thomson suggests, ‘there is no such thing as a typical African polity’ (2010: 3). What can be said, however, is that after independence in the late 1940s and early 1950s, many African states that strongly hoped for autonomy and economic growth found themselves ‘freighted with an impossible tale of debt and dependency’ (Comaroff 2001: 632), a situation which worsened in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the wave of democratizations that were demanded locally but also internationally through liberal reforms and adjustment programmes. In those decades, Jean-François Bayart explains, Africa lost its competitiveness and diplomatic importance; the continent remained cut off from market investments and technological developments alike, becoming more and more dependent on Western aid donors, an active strategy on the part of African states to retain part of the global flow of capital and to compensate for unequal power relations with the West (Bayart 2009). In order to remain competitive and active at a transnational level, Mbembe explains, African states, instead of employing foreign investments and information technologies, resorted to ‘new extractive mechanisms, the aim of which was to convert territories into resources and power’ (Mbembe 2001: 4). As a consequence, Mbembe speaks of an increasing ‘material deconstruction of existing territorial frameworks’ (2000: 284), the formation of new enclaves, sites of sovereignty beyond the state with new actors at play such as parastatal actors and new militias aiming at exploiting raw materials and decimating what they deem ‘superfluous’ or ‘disposable’ populations (Mbembe 2000, 2003; Bales 2012).

‘Indigenous’: An ‘(in)convenient category’?

What line demarcates an Aboriginal subject from a national ethnic subject?

(Povinelli 1999: 41)

Within the African context, ‘indigenous’ is an extremely loaded, contested and ambiguous category which has created divisions and passionate debates on various levels and within different discursive fields ranging from the legal to the anthropological. Sidsel Saugestad, for example, considers ‘indigenous’ an ‘inconvenient’ category (qtd. in Hodgson 2002b: 1043). The most telling sign of its inconvenience is perhaps the fact that when, finally, after decades of negotiations, the Declaration of Indigenous Rights was ratified, in 2007, the countries that refused to sign it were those where, one would think, the term was less contested and ambiguous: Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. When African groups started to become involved in the negotiation process, a legal and epistemological crisis followed.² Until then, ‘indigenous’ had a fairly clear meaning; it meant ‘aboriginal’ or ‘native’; it was used to refer to the ‘First People’ of Australia or Canada or the United States. In Africa this could hardly be the case. Given the complex colonial history of the continent, and its inner migrations, it was and still remains impossible to define who is ‘indigenous’ in Africa and what precisely the criteria should be. Obviously, indigenous cannot refer to those populations preceding white colonialism, otherwise almost the whole continent could claim indigenous status and the category would lose its heuristic potential. As Renée Sylvain suggests, the history of indigenous peoples in Africa is the history ‘of a concept of indigeneity that continues to be crafted for the African context’ (2017). Given the complex history of the continent, it could be the history of ‘Africans’, of ‘all Africans prior to colonisation’ or ‘of all Africans before the great migrations that dispersed and mixed languages and cultures’ (Sylvain 2017).

When indigenous minorities started to claim indigenous status, African governments reacted in a hostile manner, fearing that accepting the existence of ‘indigenous’ groups and granting them collective rights or rights to self-determination would threaten the already labile integrity of states and foster ethnic conflicts, including cases of irredentism and separatism. On the other hand, local and international NGOs read this hostility not as a genuine concern but as a strategy to delay processes of democratization and to monopolize resources and territory. African states famously answered by arguing that ‘all Africans are indigenous to the African continent’ and that, given the history of the continent, there was no way to distinguish between ethnic minorities and, strictly speaking, ‘indigenous populations’.² As a result, the ratification was postponed and negotiations prolonged; the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights organized a task force to investigate the state of indigenous populations in Africa and to evaluate the compatibility of this framework with the African Commission’s Declaration of Human Rights. The African Commission concluded that the term ‘indigenous’ could be applied to the African context, albeit not with the original meaning of ‘first people’ but, rather, to signify a larger pattern of oppression, the marginalization of those minorities that had remained excluded from mainstream cultural, political and economic developments and which were risking cultural and economic extinction on the continent at the hands of local and foreign actors.³

As Peter Geschiere and Francis Nyamnjoh as well as Armando Cutolo have rightly observed, the problem lies in the protean, indistinct quality of the term ‘indigenous’ (autochtone in French) (2000, 2008). In their original inception, the terms ‘indigeneity’ and ‘autochthony’, no matter whether in ancient Greece or during the time of colonization, have drawn their meaning through their ghostly flip side: the ‘Other’, the ‘allochtone’, the ‘non-indigenous’, the ‘non-Greek’, the ‘barbar’, the ‘newcomer’. Automatically, in one form or another, Geschiere argues, ‘autochthony always demands exclusion’ (2011: 323). This is a term that arouses strong emotional reactions. According to Mbembe, autochthony is about creating a dangerous and seamless equation between skin and geography: ‘The spatial body, the racial body, and the civic body are thenceforth one, each testifying to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Writing and re-writing indigenous human rights in the African laboratory
• 2 Indigenous rights in Latin America: repression, resistance, resurgence
• 3 Gender justice and indigenous women in Latin America
• 4 Gender in North America
• 5 Indigenous human rights in Canada
• 6 Constitutional geographies and cartographies of impunity: human rights and adivasis/tribes in contemporary India
• 7 Empowerment: Gaddi women of Himachal Pradesh, India
• 8 Gender in Australian indigenous literature and Maori and Pacific Island literatures
• Index