Introduction, Africa Court of Women, Africa Social Forum, (lives, livelihoods, lifeworlds)

The Africa Court of Women was held on December 10, 2004 at the Mulungushi International Center, Lusaka Zambia at the Africa Social Forum. The occasion also marked the International Human Rights Day. The Court, which brought together over three hundred women and men from different parts of Africa , listened to testimonies of pain, survival and resistance.

The Africa Court of Women that focused on the economic crimes against women was heard in three sessions: Wars without borders, Wars against Women and the Gathering of the Spirit (Voices of Resistance). The Court listened to live and visual testimonies of pain and of resistance to the myriad forms of modern forms of colonization. The issues before the court were in the context of globalization as genocide. The specific testimonies were related to the impoverishment policies of the IMF and the World Bank, structural adjustment programs, wars and armed conflict, patents and genetically modified organisms, created scarcity, debt, female genital mutilation and other forms of cultural violence against women.

Each session was preceded by a powerful and poetic visual testimony and the testimony of Expert Witnesses – both of which combined to give the context to the personal testimony.

The testimonies were received by the council of wisdom; a jury comprising of wise women and men who after listening to the sessions of testimony, expert analyses and resistance, gave their insight and proffered an alternative vision to the challenges and effects of globalization and neo-liberal policies in Africa.

The court ended with lighting of lamps, a ceremony of hope and against forgetting, in commemoration of the many women who continue to endure situations of violence in the Continent.

The Africa Court of Women
Lives, livelihoods, lifeworlds
offers you through testimony, expert analyses, poetic visuals, dance and drum the situation of women in this violent globalized world. The violence, as we will read and listen is not only escalating, but also intensifying:
the forms are becoming more brutal.
The concepts and categories that we are using in the dominant discourses whether of development, security, human rights, have become insufficient: we are unable to grasp the violence of our times.

The Courts of women invites us to create a new alternative space:
and infuse these spaces with a new political vision: a vision that will challenge the truth in all the universals – of war, of globalization, of violence.
It invites us to rewrite history.
a history from the margins.
It asks us to challenge the master narrative, the master imaginary.
It cautions us that the master's tools can never dismantle the master's house.
We need a new imaginary,
an imaginary located in the discourse of dissent for the dominant discourse is a discourse of exclusion and violence.

Drums, gathering of the story tellers

Kamato Community Arts

Levy Sakala, Sakala brothers

Dance: Listen to the women

Jean Shamende - Zambia

Senzeni Na , What have we done (Visual)

African queens

Ndungi Githuku , Kenya
Githii Mweru, Kenya

Welcome

Sara Longwe, Zambia

Introduction to members of the Jury

Rabia Abdelkrim, Algeria/Senegal

Women, the gift economy; an
alternative paradigm

Opening Ballad: Mother Africa (Visual)

Our memories, our history

Wahu Kaara, Kenya

Courts of Women as new political imaginary

Corinne Kumar, India/Tunisia

Wars in Africa

Veneranda Nzambazamaria, Rwanda

(visual testimony)

Original poem "GREAT QUEENS" by Mutabaruka

Africa had great queens and queens u should know
search your history it will show
if you don't know from whence you come
then you are doomed to live in shame

great queen Nzinga of Angola
she who when the Portuguese attacked
all she did was to spit back
she fought like a soldier
in Africa

Africa had great queens and queens u should know
search your history it will show
if you don't know from whence you come
then you are doomed to live in shame

Africa had great queens and queens u should know
search your history it will show
if you don't know from whence you come
then you are doomed to live in shame

what about queen Sheba:
brought forth Haile Selassie forefather Menelik I
in Africa

Africa had great queens and queens u should know
search your history it will show
if you don't know from whence you come
then you are doomed to live in shame

lets talk about queen Julia Chikamoneka of Zambia
Julia demanded freedom and when it got delayed
she stripped naked at the Lusaka international airport
and Zambia got free
in Africa

Africa had great queens and queens u should know
search your history it will show
if you don't know from whence you come
then you are doomed to live in shame

Africa had great queens and queens u should know
search your history it will show
if you don't know from whence you come
then you are doomed to live in shame

what about Mbuya Nehanda of Zimbabwe
great queen who made Ian Smith tremble
on his borrowed time
in Africa

Africa had great queens and queens u should know
search your history it will show
if you don't know from whence you come
then you are doomed to live in shame

queen Mekatilili wa Menza of Kenya
queen of the Giriama people
she who was arrested by the British and taken
1000 km to Kisii land
great queen Mekatilili broke out of prison
she walked all the way back and continued the fight
in Africa

Africa had great queens and queens u should know
search your history it will show
if you don't know from whence you come
then you are doomed to live in shame

now when i was young i thought Cleopatra looked exactly
like Elizabeth Taylor!
now am wiser, i understand
Cleopatra was really an Egyptian
in Africa

Africa had great queens and queens u should know
search your history it will show
if you don't know from whence you come
then you are doomed to live in shame

great queen Muthoni Nyanjiru, mama yetu
she who led men in protest against
the jailing of Kenyan freedom fighters in 1922
great queen who dared the men to remove their trousers
and give them to the women if they were not ready to fight
and the colonialists shot her in the heart
and her blood mixed with the soil of our land
germinating the seed of the mau mau struggle
in Africa

Africa had great queens and queens u should know
search your history it will show
if you don't know from whence you come
then you are doomed to live in shame

I am pleased to welcome you all to the Court of Women on behalf of the organizing committee of the Court.
The song and dance we just saw, as you know, is some of African way of dealing with pain and energiszing oneself for resistance, lest one ends up defeated and crying helplessly!

What you are about to see is like a "tribunal", though presented differently. Some of you may have previously been to such events as testifiers or as members of the audience or the jury or analysts. We shall listen to live personal testimonies and see some video clips of women telling stories of some of their experiences in their lives.

This is the first time that the Africa Social Forum has held a Court of this kind. The idea to have a Court of WOmen was agreed at the July planning meeting of the Africa Social Forum Council, held in Cairo. Corinne Kumar of El Taller International was invited to the meeting, at which she debriefed the meeting about the work around the Courts of Women. We agreed to try this new method to look vividly and analyze everday effects on African lives of neoliberal economic globalization – through women's pain and strife for survival.

We hope that we'll get inspired at this Lusaka Africa Social Forum by the Court of Women, so that we fight back, otherwise the women's strife woiuld have been in vain.

This is the time for African women and men to work together and fight back neoliberalism and patriarchy!
This is the time!
This is the time!

Our history, a history of misery and hopelessness as told by others gathers us here today, to tell the story of our history of happiness, hopes, our aspirations that is never told but is living with us.

It is this thread of history that locates Africa's voices in the voice of Africa in the capacity of life sustenance which is a strong foundation for alternatives that are in making for another world.

The history of the African people is the history of exploitation, dispossession and most important of resistance. It is the role of the Africa Women has taken all through from slavery, colonialism to today, that ahs enabled the African Woman to stand out with a capacity to continue life within the much spoken experience of denial of a good quality of life.

The alternative ways she has found to provide health care to the sick without health facilities – this capacity that threads the love and respect for life by African people is the strength and capacity to overcome the brutality of the market paradigm which has failed to respond to the needs of life.

(Visual Testimony)
The Genocide in Rwanda was an extreme case which calls upon each one of us to do something about it. The armed conflicts continue to prevail in our continent. The wars in Angola, Somali Ethiopia Eritrea and in the regions of the great lake, Sierra Leone to mention a few.

There are other aspects like ethnic violence, fundamentalism. In many countries there are half wars and half peace. The testimonies that follow shall illustrate these aspects.

Ninety percent of the decisions at the global level are decisions taken buy men. Decisions to buy weapons, manufacture arms that trigger off wars, to organize political systems which cause marginalization and lead to ethnic violence. Eighty percent of the world resources are produced by women while they possess merely twenty percent of these resources.

I ask you to listen to the women who come from these countries that have been torn up by wars of genocide, of ethnic violence, marginalization and exclusion.