Literature of advocacy

There is a lot of literature of advocacy at the moment especially in Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. Literature of advocacy as a genre is now being given a standalone status in universities in these three countries.

Loosely, it is a kind of literature, including fiction and nonfiction, which contributes to the resistance of political tyranny or a literature that helps create sociopolitical awareness.

Literature of advocacy is designed to garner support from readers regarding a specific belief or cause in society. Literature of advocacy could be used as a call for action or intended to simply raise awareness on a social issue. It is also used by special-interest groups, such as women’s groups, to define their causes and their importance.

In Namibia, in 2008, an organisation called Women’s Leadership Centre work shopped women across Namibia so that they are able to write narratives, short stories and poems based on the challenges women and girls leading to them being infected with HIV, including the culture of silence surrounding sex and sexuality in Namibia.

The workshop was attended by 250 participants from all over Namibia. The workshops took place in Caprivi, Kavango and Khomas regions. This resulted in a voluminous collection of narrative, poems and short stories entitled; We Must Choose Life: Writing By Namibian Women on Culture, Violence, HIV and AIDS. The book was compiled and edited by Elizabeth IKhaxas. It runs for 328 pages. It carries a foreword by Becky Ndjoze-Ojo, the then Deputy Minister of Education of Namibia.

Literature of advocacy can be pointed and hardly literary, going specifically for the matter being targeted in a quick and brusque way! A piece by Nellao Hashiyana is a good example. It goes:

“There was once a headman who treated women very badly. He was never good to any woman in his village. No matter how beautiful or ugly those women were, he treated them in bad ways that pleased him the most. One day, the headman decided to have a meeting with all the people from his village…”

In the end the women disagree with the headman and all their men and go away to form their own village made up entirely of women and they started to enjoy their own independence. It is a story that supposedly helps women to realise that they can, if they wish go through life without men.

Literature of advocacy can also be rendered in a well calculated and well rounded pure short story, entertaining, literary and proding with the sense of understatement as in Taati Nilenge’s “Angel.”

It goes: “My name is Rachel and everyone who knows me calls me Angel. I’m six years old. I just got back from school and now I am playing with my friends. Their mother takes care of me while daddy is at work. A man is calling me.

He lives in the block of flats where I am staying. Wow! He wants to give me two dollars, but I must first walk with him. We are walking out of the yard, walking and walking. Now we are entering my dad’s workplace, the sewage plant.

But Daddy is not here; there is nobody here, only us. What are you doing, Uncle? I don’t want to take my pants off, it’s cold. What are you doing, Uncle, and what’s that? I do not want to see that. I think that’s wrong…No, No! Uncle! It hurts, what are you doing? What are you pushing inside me? No, Uncle!”

By the end of the story an uncle has raped the girl and worse he murders her and it is her spirit that narrated the story from beyond death. The story is horrifying and shocking. It is meant to help shock people to a clear awareness of how girls often fall prey to close relatives like brothers and uncles.

Mothers are not supposed to leave their girls with male relatives because so many strange things may just happen. Because this is literature of advocacy, the plane may be very-very narrow and targeted. In nearly all of these stories, it is the male member of the family who is abusing girls and women relentlessly.

In one story a father impregnates his very own daughter enticing her with sweet snacks at the shopping mall. In another piece, it is a grandfather who plans to forcibly marry his fifteen year old granddaughter to a sixty-five year old man who happens to be HIV positive.

In yet another story, a father tries to do the same to her daughter. In all these stories, the man is necessarily the enemy. Tekla Katjiveri story is actually told on her behalf by somebody. It is not a story but something that runs from start to finish like a police report: I knew I was HIV positive.

I had known for about four years. During this time I had no boyfriend. I was afraid to get into a relationship with anybody. And then I met a man and fell in love with him. How do you tell somebody you love that you are HIV positive? I just wanted a little bit of love to come my way…Did I know that I was killing him? I don’t know. At the moment of lovemaking, I could have stopped and I could have said, “Let’s use a condom.”But I did not…”

These stories spread the critical gospel of using the condom or abstaining and they educate the reader about the continuous and consistent use of ARV’s. Some of the poems re-enacts what happens in the mind when the individual is sitting by herself waiting for her HIV test results.

The women are betrayed by the men they love. You give your heart to a man and you catch him in bed with another woman and you walk alone in the lonesome dark back to the dark alleys of Windhoek.

Kariurua Jos Katjiteo’s poem is the most painful piece in this book. It goes:
“Life I Africa
you are very hard
hard as a rock
no one can soften you up
you are hard to change.
Africa, turn your face towards us
Look at us and see
How your children suffer…”

In the works of Phillipeni Karii, Florence IKhaxas and others, there are even suggestions that only the comfort of the company of other suffering fellow woman is the only answer that a woman needs.

On the other hand in Zimbabwe, literature of advocacy for women’s issues has been championed by the Zimbabwe Women Writers. Formed in 1990, the Zimbabwe Women Writers (ZWW) is an arts and culture trust, concerned particularly with the promotion of women’s literature in Zimbabwe. The organisation has grown over the years and has opened eleven branches in different parts of the country.

The idea has been to groom women writers and publish them or help them publish. To date ZWW has published fifteen books in various subjects from creative writing, scholarly books and even recipes. Some of these books have been incorporated into school syllabi while others are reference texts in institutes of higher learning.

For some time now they have been winning national literary prizes, sometimes ahead of some very established authors and established literary houses. These include Zimbabwe Book Publishers Awards, National Arts and Merit Awards.

For instance they won the NAMA Best Published Research work on Arts/ Culture with their book A Tragedy of Lives in 2003. In 2004 their collection of short stories in Shona, Masimba was recognised as one of ZIBF’s 75 best books.

Their collection of poems, Ngatisimuke won the 2005 second prize in the ZBPA literary Awards for Best fiction Award. Their Totanga Patsva won the 2006 National Arts Merits Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Fiction category. The same book also won the ZBPA 2006 Best Shona fiction Awards

The Zimbabwe Writers Union (ZIWU) that existed and still exists to cater for the needs of all writers did not quite meet women writers’ expectations. There was no animosity between men and women writers in ZIWU really, but for instance, meetings would be held in spaces that were not very women friendly.

The meeting times would also be out of the question – say 7pm after work. Women have multiple tasks as mothers and custodians of their homes. When it came to workshops and publishing, the men being the decision makers, obviously had an edge over their female counterparts.

As a result women founded an association that would specifically cater for their needs through writing, publishing and providing the forum for moral support, among other things.

Some of the founding women are prominent Zimbabwean writers like Barbara Nkala, Tawona Mtshiya, Chiedza Msengezi, Collette Mutangadura and Virginia Phiri. Even women from abroad, then resident in Zimbabwe, helped a lot. These are writers like the Ghanaian, Ama Ata Aidoo, the German scholar; Flora Veit-Wild and lawyer, Mary Tandon.

One of the earliest books by ZWW is the series called There is Room at the Top (1995 to 1999). This five-book series, that targeted lower high school readership sought to explore the biographies of women who had scored firsts in male dominated spheres. This project was key in building role models for the girl child in a context that she can identify with.

Then there are short story collections; Masimba (Shona) and Vus’inkophe (Ndebele) both of (1996). They were compiled in acknowledgement of the Convention of Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Among Women (CEDAW).

ZWW also published a special book called Women of Resilience (2000). For this book, ZWW interviewed women combatants and non-combatants from the Zimbabwe war of liberation. They set out to write the history of the liberation struggle from a women’s perspective and also to portray women not only as collaborators, but as actual participants at the battlefront.

One of the major highlights of the book is the stigma that the women who went to war have had to live with after the war. While the men are celebrated as heroes, the women tended to be ostracised because somehow it is thought that they ‘went beyond femininity’ by joining the struggle.

It is amazing and encouraging that almost all the interviewees in this book seem to concur that 1980 was not a destination, but perhaps the starting point for women’s struggles in other areas in life.

A Tragedy of Lives is a book that tells the experiences of some women prisoners in Zimbabwe. ZWW members, through various experiences with prison in different capacities, felt that prison was an untapped area.

They set out to explore society’s attitudes towards a mother, wife, daughter- in-law and sister who had been incarcerated. A Tragedy of Lives is generally considered to be ZWW’s most successful book.

ZWW have seen spin offs from the book as a project. Through it, they have persuaded society to look at the driving force behind crimes generally committed by women. Partly as a result of this book, the conditions in prison (which by the way, were designed for men) have been reviewed.

Female prisoners’ children who in the past, would literally serve the sentence with their mothers, have since begun attending a play centre, which was constructed by a Christian organisation on reading our book.

ZWW produced three fictional titles on AIDS related issues from their members in 2005. These are Totang Patsva, ValaSingafohleli Lesisilo and Light A Candle. They felt that that there was need to write books that are disguised as light reading, to explore the issue of HIV/AIDS.

The short stories explore the importance of opening up the HIV/AIDS. The European Union(E.U.) in Zimbabwe has since purchased 5 000 copies each of the three titles to furnish libraries in schools that receive EU support through the Education Transition Reform Programme. These were record-breaking sales in the history of the Zimbabwe book industry.

Kubika machikichori (2007) is a recipe book that incorporates traditional ways of preparing food. This is a collection done by women members around Goromonzi District.

ZWW is arguably the most successful and prolific writer’s organisation in Zimbabwe if one considers the impact of their publications and their membership, which comes from nearly every sector of the Zimbabwean community.

They have given a platform to a lot of marginalized women to voice their opinions. More than a thousand women have attended writing skills workshops organised by ZWW.

Memory Chirere