The role of activism in shaping the future young Africans want

 Who is Marion Kirabo?

Marion is a law student at Makerere University, a feminist and women's rights activist, founder of Present Woman, an organization that increases women's participation in politics but at the institutional level.

Credit: CivicSpaceTV

Who was Kirabo as a child?

As a kid, I was a talkative and argumentative person. Perhaps even stubborn or a little rebellious. I remember my parents constantly complaining about the fact that I didn’t want to do housework. And it was mostly because I didn’t understand why the rest of my brothers were allowed to go out and play and just be kids while apparently, I had to prepare to be a good wife, wash utensils, and learn how to cook. So, there was a kind of frustration with them. But I was also a loud and proactive kid in school who participated in plays and dramas. However, because I had dyslexia, a learning disability, I did very poorly in school.

What kind of household was home like? Did your parents draw a distinction between what roles boys and girls did? Or was the notion of gender roles held lightly?

My household was quite a gendered one. It was a typical African family. Whereby girls are brought up being aware that they are girls and future mothers and future wives. Where like I said, my brothers got a free pass while I was constantly hounded and pressured into learning how to cook, wash, and do house chores. They simply could be boys and were not required of the same thing.  It was actually my first experience of gender roles and I think it was my first time to see that. It was quite unfair to me as a kid I must say. I quite did not understand why. Sometimes I remember hating being a girl because I felt it was too much pressure and yet nothing was required of my seven brothers. For a long time, I was the only girl so I got to feel the impact. I had no one to share with that kind of burden of being a girl. We almost shared the same age with my brothers and yet for some reason, we were not treated the same.  

Did this shape your stance toward women's rights, feminism, and the career path you chose to pursue?

Yes, I must say, it largely shaped my views. I always described my feminist journey as one of rebellion against what society thinks I should be and what I want to be. I decided at a very young age that I was going to determine my own path in life; who I choose to be, who I choose to marry, how I choose to approach any relationship because I had grown up in such a gendered home and seen how women around me were mistreated and could not question power or authority of their husbands which it felt almost like a cage to me.

And so, I vowed that’s not going to be me. That I’m not going to be that submissive woman who people step all over, who has no agency, who has no control over her life. And I was going to make sure that I become the woman I set out to be. It really played out even in my career path and also, as a student leader.  I remember I wanted to be a prime minister at one point when I had just joined politics because no other woman in my short time at university had done it. I hadn’t heard of women Prime ministers and I wanted to be the first. I was determined not to let anyone stereotype me to any gender. Even when what was offered to me was Gender minister, I rejected it because I wanted to upset the status quo. Later, even when I had to take it on in my work, I kept on questioning patriarchal norms and power.

You rose to prominence in 2019 at the height of Makerere University’s #FeesMustFall? Stepping up after your comrades had been picked up by the men in uniform was a brave act. Is activism something you always felt deeply drawn to or was it out of circumstance?

My activism was borne of circumstance. I wouldn’t say that I’ve always been an activist or anything like that. I felt passionate about that particular campaign and we organized with my female friends to make sure that we stand against it. I remember we had a meeting at Café Mamba along Lumumba Avenue. And we were thinking about how we can contribute to our society as female student leaders. And at that time, we all agreed and the hugest problem was the 15% fees increment. I therefore suggested that maybe it’s time that we take a stand against it. And that maybe it would be good to see women at the forefront of fighting for student issues.

I wouldn’t say that I’ve always been an activist apart from maybe in my role as Gender minister which put me in a place where I always had to get involved in advocacy. I remember dealing with a case of sexual harassment in Olympia hostel where a custodian was constantly harassing girls and yet they had refused to dismiss him. So, I held press conferences, organized students to storm the place and we did everything to get him dismissed. So, my activism was a result of there being a problem and my need to solve that problem.

The last few years have seen a surge in youth protests across Africa. We saw this in Sudan, in Nigeria with #EndSars, and recently in Ghana with #FixTheCountry? It seems there’s been an awakening in the minds of young Africans from being bystanders to actively participating in the transformation of their countries. Do you see this approach bear fruit?

Yes, it’s true that there seems to be an awakening in young people. Just like pre-Independence where there was different organizing in different countries that bore fruit only when they came together and started talking about certain issues. Before, their organizing had been independent and everyone was doing their thing, but then they came together to talk about how they could work together, train warriors to attain independence.

The same needs to happen to the current young people organizing around in Africa for it to have impactful change. For us to have a widespread kind of change just like our forefathers’ generation did, there needs to be a deliberate effort to bring these voices together as young people to assist each other bring about a larger impact. Whereas we can organize and have little speckles of change in our different countries, if we really want impact, there needs to be a concerted effort across the continent of young people to make this change.

There are so many similar problems that we face like dictatorship, militarization, neocolonialism, IMF laws and economic policies that do not benefit us, poverty, disease, poor health care. Our problems are all similar if not the same. So, there must be someone engineering that to make sure we hold our hands together and say, how are we going to help these countries to create impact just like it was during the pan-African movement, during pre-Independence.

Ghana that we thought was the poster child for democracy on the continent just showed cracks when citizens took to the streets to bemoan the country’s state of affairs. Is democracy the solution to our problems as a continent or would we rather channel our effort elsewhere, say to economic transformation?

Democracy might not be a perfect system. It might not even be the best. But to me, it is the most conducive. Even if we look at other forms of governance, they have utterly failed. I would say democracy has survived the longest. Even in its imperfections, there are always those small wins we have. Whether it is human rights, making progress on labour rights, women and minority rights. We are always sure that even if today you have a bad ruler, you can always be sure that after five years, you have a chance to change them. Of course, in Africa, we might not have a democracy and most of our countries are ruled by a dictatorship. But even in that dictatorship, when you go to the lower level say MPs in Uganda, we are sure that we can change an MP or LC 3 after five years. We keep on changing until we get it right.

Maybe what we should ask ourselves is, how do we reconceptualize democracy to work for us. Because we have seen it work for America that even when you have people like Trump in power, you know that after four or five years you can get rid of him. However, the issue of African countries and why it has not worked for us is that we transplanted a foreign system that was finetuned for another country, a system which has grown in a different nursery bed, in a different country, with a different climate, environment, and maybe a different type of soil. And we just decided to uproot this little seedling and put in also into a different climate, different demographic, different soil. The same with the law that governs this system. So, we just got a culture without modification and put it in our own culture and we forgot that we a different people, in a different society. We needed to find a way to redefine democracy in the African society.

I will give an example - feminism. Many would argue that it is a foreign concept, but if we go down to African culture, you will find that there were societies in West Africa that had female armies, and battalions of female warriors. In fact, historians say that the only existence of female warriors is found on the African continent. We have women who fought against colonialists and led armies against colonialists, we have women who ruled in their own right. So, if that is not feminism, what is feminism? Denying that Africa was actually progressive and denying that Africa actually had feminism, we make it seem like actually equality between men and women is a very foreign idea and yet our forefathers were already practicing it even when they did not know that there was a Europe or another continent that existed.

So, the same thing goes down to democracy. When you look at Africa, can you see glimpses of how democracy was practiced? In Europe, and in London they have a constitutional monarchy - it is still democracy. When say you go to our clan systems, do you see democracy when clans come together to votes on decisions for their people? Can we define democracy in the African terms that works for us using our own traditions, using our own culture? Can we modify it to suit our particular climate? I think that is what is lacking.

We have to be alive to our colonial background when we are transplanting this thing that we call democracy. Say the oppression that was left behind by the white man, and how it was practiced in our country vis-à-vis how it was practiced in their countries. Whereas England has a jury attached to its court, when the colonialists practicing law here, they made sure that we have no jury. That you could not be tried by a court of your peers. So, there were double standards in how democracy was applied in the Western world versus the African continent. We need a deliberate action to reexamine our democracy to change the system to work for us. I think there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the idea of democracy itself but in application. That’s where the loopholes are.

Schools in Uganda have been closed for over 80 weeks now, the longest time in the world. What does this spell for the country’s largest demographic - the youth? And how best can we as a country ensure we don’t lose out on this future generation?

As a country, it's really unfortunate that we risk losing a whole generation. Young people especially young girls have been grossly affected by this pandemic. Teenage pregnancies have skyrocketed. There has been a lot of gender-based violence and sexual abuse against women and young girls. And of course, with teenage pregnancies, it means that most of these girls will not go back to school because in most of the cases up their parents are not able to take care of one kid and now another, but also the stigma that will be meted to them by society. We are at risk of seeing continuing effects in the future like high levels of poverty because if a girl does not go to school it means she has limited opportunities and she continues a cycle of poverty.

 

I think that the ministry of Education needs to get its act together and put in place measures that can allow these girls who have been affected by the pandemic to, first of all, access school and be protected. Because the schools that do not allow pregnant teenagers are many so government needs to put a ban on that. Also, because of the economic situation there is need to subsidize schools so that they reduce their fees to enable parents who have struggled financially to be able to still take their kids to school.

 

The gospel of sex education is so relevant today than it was ever before because the truth is that they are having sex. Our young people are curious and want to explore, and so we need to start talking to them about sex and how they can have safe sex. I also think for most of them we need to rethink contraceptives – making them available and informing young women and young girls they are available and they are safe. We should also reconsider the law on abortion because how long can you sustain as a nation having kids that you cannot take care of? We should look at it from the young mothers’ perspective because, at the end of that day, none of us is going to be able to take care of that child. It will still come back to this teenage mom. So, she should be given a chance to have that baby or not according to her circumstances.

 

Finally, let’s talk about the Africa we want, how best can young people play a part in making this a reality?

I think firstly young people should get politically conscious about the issues in the society. There’s a lot of apathy amongst young people when things come up in parliament, say, conversations about taxes or education. Even recently with the conversation about medical interns and them not getting paid. We don’t seem to care about things that affect our daily lives. We have left all the fight to the politicians and have failed to understand that for these things to move we need to be part of pushing.

We need to be politically woke and conscious to things moving. We need to interest ourselves in how we can make Africa better for us and for generations to come. We need to start loving our continent enough to fight for the things that matter and make sure it is a continent we are proud of and want to live in. We need to fight to make sure that we have a brighter future, to be conscious enough to know the things that affect our country and how to solve them, and to have that love for our country, our race and our continent.