(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
I get picked up by Faulka at the Cape Town airport. She is a member of Women in Black – a worldwide network of women who have dedicated their lives to the struggle for peace and justice. We immediately go to the Castle of Good Hope, where slaves from across the continent were gathered before being transported to the rest of the world – the white world. Faulka goes in hijab and drives us around in a rental car. She explains to me that the conference organized by Women in Black takes place at the castle – today one of the city's foremost tourist attractions – and the choice of meeting rooms is no coincidence. She and the other initiators of the conference want us as foreigners to feel the pain and humiliation that screams from the walls. Hundreds of years of slave trade have characterized the city and left a bitter legacy. The meeting actually starts with a healing ceremony where some female shamans from different ethnic groups ask the spirits for forgiveness and encourage us to feel connected to our ancestors.
Cape Town officially hit by drought
The castle – which was built by the Dutch East India Company – became a symbol of one of the first capitalist companies in the world, where the Dutch, Scandinavians and Germans joined forces to control the slave and spice trade in fierce competition with Spaniards, Portuguese, English and French. .
Hundreds of years of slave trade have characterized the city and left a bitter legacy.
Faulka – who is a Muslim – lectures in linguistics at the University of the South African city of Stellenbosch. She has clear blue eyes on a brown face. She laughs: “It makes me a typical citizen of Cape Town, because we're all a mix here. I had an Irish grandfather who married my Indonesian grandmother. From him I got my blue eyes. "
This is exactly what Cape Town, [ihc-hide-content ihc_mb_type = ”show” ihc_mb_who = ”1,2,4,7,9,10,11,12,13,14 ″ ihc_mb_template =” 1 ″] is a melting pot for many immigrant groups. Right now the city is officially hit by drought, and in every single public toilet we are asked to wash ourselves with disinfectants instead of water.
Skeptical of Israel
The rich, says Fauka, get their water directly from Table Mountain. They retrieve the water from the mountain using machines. But the poor have no such equipment, and there are those who live without access to clean water.
50 liters per day and per person are distributed at 200 different ration stations around the city. The state has asked for international aid, and Israeli companies accustomed to working with seawater desalination have offered their services. But South Africa is wary of cooperating with Israel, a country that has worked closely with the apartheid regime. The latter received Israeli weapons and military technology worth billions.
In fact, South Africa has a very strong BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions), working to end international support for Israel's oppression of the Palestinians and trying to pressure Israel to follow international law. BDS is currently nominated as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Support for Palestine
Cape Town is a melting pot, a hybrid, and a city characterized by its spirit of resistance. During apartheid, hundreds of students and ANC activists were killed here. This is one of the reasons why Women in Black decided to organize their 17. international congress in Cape Town. The movement is young. Thirty years ago, a group of Israeli and Palestinian women decided to fight the occupation of the Palestinian territories.
Occupation called into question Israel's right to be a nation and, according to the women, was a mockery of Judaism's beliefs and teachings. Among the women was Hava Keller, who survived the Holocaust and spent the rest of his life defending young Palestinian women in Israeli captivity. She visited them, organized legal aid and financially supported their families.
Women in Black has been inspired by Argentina's "Madres de la Plaza de Mayo", among other things, and demonstrates like them in black and silence. They chose a non-violent form of resistance and began printing posters in both Hebrew and Arabic, and kept watch nights outside government buildings in Haifa and Tel Aviv. Passersby angered them with angry words and called them traitors. In addition, they were bombarded with stones and rotten fruit. The women's example spread to the rest of the world.
The white participants received help from their embassies, while they themselves were locked up in cages without access to lawyers or interpreters.
Me Too: for the white female middle class
Fighting violence against girls and women is one of the main purposes of Women in Black. During the Cape Town conference, several workshops were organized to discuss the Me Too movement. The drafting and support of laws that defend women's rights were included in the final resolution of the conference. Hearing testimony from women from Congo and Rwanda was very poignant.
It is not easy to find the similarities between the Me Too movement and Women in Black. The Me Too movement started in the United States and spread to Europe, but is not strongly represented in Africa. The South African participants at the conference said they perceived the Me Too problem as more relevant to the white female middle class. In Africa, hundreds of thousands of women are raped in various wars, and no one is held responsible. In Africa, women are seen as part of the war.
Rebecca Johnson, who is active in Ican – the organization that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 – told us how important it was to put the UN peacekeeping forces to account. Because they have immunity from prosecution, many of them have been able to punish rape and buy sex with minors.
The racial divide still prevails
The South African participants were thus skeptical. "What have you done, white women and men, to fight slavery? Much of their wealth has been created by our ancestors. How are you going to pay it back? They are not enough with beautiful words, and it is their weapons we buy to fight our idiotic wars. We have heard about the UN for a long time, but nothing ever happens. The Me Too movement feels inadequate to us. ”
A participant from Yemen tells us that she was on a fleet to Gaza that had a purely female crew. Among the crew were several female winners of the Nobel Prize. She and a Malaysian parliamentarian were separated from the other participants when Israeli soldiers boarded the ship and arrested them.
The white participants received help from their embassies, while they themselves were locked up in cages without access to lawyers or interpreters. She felt that their comrades had failed them. "White American middle-class women also appear to invoke the right to define the content of feminism and its strategies. They don't listen to us and feel that their own reasoning is the only valid one, "she continued.
In Africa, women are seen as part of the war.
White men's servants
We are welcomed by some activists in District Six – a quarter that became famous when all black and colored residents were thrown out to make way for a completely white neighborhood. People who had lived there for several generations were moved to no-man's land. After the abolition of apartheid, they were allowed to apply to return. “When we were young, everyone was playing with everybody – Muslims, blacks, Christians; no one was different. We organized parties and participated in each other's religious ceremonies. But later we became refugees in our own country. We worked as servants to our white masters, and they deprived us of all our dignity. "" You complain about the refugees coming in large numbers to Europe, but this is a result of their colonial wars and their sale of weapons to our states. "
No righteous warrior
One woman who was particularly upset was Fatumee Ugbur – a representative of Western Sahara. "We are the forgotten refugees. We have lived in tents in no-man's land for several generations while traveling to Morocco as tourists. Morocco has managed to make the world forget. We are as occupied as the Palestinians and it is Israel who built our wall – the wall of shame – which is one of the largest in the world. We encourage you to boycott both Israel and Morocco. We must stop the violence of the colonial powers. "
Women in Black will hold its next congress in Armenia. The experiences from Cape Town are many. It is about non-violence, resistance to all oppression and solidarity with refugees and the persecuted. This should be the platform of the movement. Combating weapons also forms part of the movement's core, as there are no righteous wars.
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