MIAMI UNIVERSITY the Graduate School Certificate for Approving the Dissertation of Roselyn Chigonda Banda Doctor of Philosophy 2

Home , Sisterhood Is Global

MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School

Certificate for Approving the Dissertation We hereby approve the Dissertation

Roselyn Chigonda Banda

Candidate for the Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

______Director Dr. Lisa Weems

______Reader Dr. Denise Taliaferro Baszile

______Reader Dr. Peter Magolda

______Graduate School Representative Dr. Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis ABSTRACT EVERY WOMAN HAS A STORY: NARRATIVES OF SOUTHERN AFRICAN WOMEN IN U.S. HIGHER EDUCATION

by Roselyn Chigonda Banda

My paper presents the tensions between the concepts of global feminism and transnational feminism and outlines the difficulties and contradictions of inclusions that continue to be characterized by power and hierarchical relationships that present (neo)-colonial tendencies. Attentively listening to the stories told by six women who are or have been through U.S. institutions of higher education, I sought to establish the availability of what I termed “global spaces” where difference is not only tolerated but accepted. The research questions that guide this study are what stories do Southern African women tell about their experiences in U.S. higher education in this era of globalization? What space is available for a healthy conversation that does not perpetuate the “them” “us” dyad that has complicated the formation of a global sisterhood?

My theoretical foundations of transnational feminism and postcolonial theory challenge ethnocentrism, and implore curriculum to go beyond Tomlinson’s (1991) “zone of intelligibility” to learn, understand and accept our differences. My findings revealed that items of our “experience” are not in and of themselves unique phenomena in experience, but instead they are in relation to some other structures of meaning, in particular, location, space, and time. I also found out that identities can be ascribed due to stigma and stereotype, making it very difficult for some groups to claim a “global space”. Even though migration of women from Southern Africa, the so-called Global South, may cause a traumatic upheaval of dispossession of status, I argue for the possibility of locating oneself in a global context without erasing the cultural specificity of oneself. This study is particularly significant because these women speak of historicizing and denaturalizing the ideas, beliefs, and values of globalization such that the underlying exploitative social relations and structures are made visible. EVERY WOMAN HAS A STORY: NARRATIVES OF SOUTHERN AFRICAN WOMEN IN U.S. HIGHER EDUCATION.

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Faculty of

Miami University in partial

Fulfilment of the requirements of

For the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Educational Leadership

Roselyn K. Banda

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

2014

Dissertation Director: Dr. Lisa Weems

Roselyn K. Banda

2014

Table of Contents

Dedication ...... v

Acknowledgements ...... vi

Chapter One ...... 1 Prologue: My Personal Journey ...... 1 Introduction and Background ...... 4 Statement of the Problem and Research Questions ...... 9 So What? Significance of the Study ...... 10 Definition of Terms ...... 11 Chapter Summary ...... 17 Overview of Chapters ...... 17

Chapter Two: Literature Review ...... 18 Introduction ...... 18 Sisterhood as Global ...... 18 Intersectionality ...... 25 Globalization and the Power to “Other” ...... 26 Struggle for Definitions ...... 30 Identity Formation ...... 33 Theoretical Frameworks ...... 36 Chapter Summary ...... 37 Methodology ...... 38 Paradigm influences and methodology...... 38 Feminist methodologies...... 39 Narrative inquiry...... 41 Methods ...... 44 sampling...... 44 study participants...... 45 data collection...... 48 data analysis...... 50 Reflexivity, Ethics and Trustworthiness ...... 51 Limitations ...... 52

iii

Chapter Summary ...... 53

Chapter Four: Participant Narratives ...... 54 Introduction ...... 54 Participant Stories ...... 55 Zorro’s tune...... 55 Christine’s tune...... 64 Kondwane’s tune...... 67 Odala’s tune...... 72 Identified Themes ...... 82 Identity...... 82 power...... 84 knowledge...... 84 difference...... 85 agency and resistance...... 86 Emerging Themes ...... 88 self-identity...... 88 liminality...... 90 language...... 92 belonging...... 94 collaboration...... 96 Chapter Summary ...... 97

Chapter Five: Synthesis, Discussion and Implications ...... 98 Invasive Memories ...... 98 Exploration of Identified and Emergent Themes ...... 100 Implications for Education ...... 104 Implication for Difference, and Global Women’s Movement ...... 106 Concluding Thoughts ...... 107

References ...... 109

Appendices ...... 120

Dedication

For my dearest sisters, Josephine and Munetsitsi, true symbol of women’s resourcefulness and resilience. And my mother, Cecilia, whose guidance and leadership formed a strong foundation to the “I”!

Acknowledgements This dissertation signifies the academic foundation laid over many years by my elementary and secondary school teachers and university lecturers in Zimbabwe to my instructors and professors in the past six years at Miami University. The success of my dissertation is credited to all who have pushed me to greater heights beyond my own imagination. The time has come for me to take a bow and show my gratitude to all who directly and indirectly contributed to my academic success and development. It is impossible to name and adequately give credit to the many people who have walked and worked with me along the way, but suffice it to say my sincerest gratitude.

First and foremost I thank the Lord my God for keeping that promise in Joshua 1 vs 9 true to me and my family. I never, in my wildest dreams, thought I would be here today. Throughout this difficult journey, being a wife, mother, student and daughter to my father, that poster hung in my study room comforted and reassured me with the silent whisper, “Be still and know that I’m God”. And I will forever be grateful.

To Dr. Lisa Weems, you have been a constant pillar of strength through thick and thin. In addition to being a mentor and teacher, you became a friend, a great listener and a strong motivator for this research. You patiently walked with me throughout this research, reading my drafted manuscripts, sharing your insights, and pushing my thinking. Your belief in my abilities is astounding, and I hope one day I will understand what you see in me. I am both humbled and honored to have worked with you.

Dr. Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis, thank you for all that you represent. I might say serendipity brought us together, but as a believer, I feel the Lord had something to do with it. You have lifted me up, sacrificed so much time and effort to make sure I am prepared for the working world. Thank you for being so genuine and embracing me under your wings. I will eternally be grateful.

Dr. Peter Magolda, words fail me! You have been a friend, teacher, and mentor during my sojourn at Miami University. You have provided constant support, not only to me but my whole family. We will always be indebted to you. My deepest appreciation for your avid interest and academic acumen in this and all my other work. Thank you for being you.

Dr. Denise Taliafferro Baszile thank you for carrying me when I got a rude awakening

vi from culture shock. Even when I thought I was a burden, your eyes told me I wasn’t heavy because I was your sistah from another mother! Thank you for keeping your door open, and for providing the much needed space to achieve. I wouldn’t have done it without your leverage.

My sincere appreciation and love to the women who participated in this research. Your stories are etched in my heart, and thank you for trusting me enough to share them with me. Not only have I been enriched from your stories, I have also formed important relationships with all of you. Never underestimate the impact you have made and are making in academia. A luta continua…victory is certain!!

To the professors at Miami University (some have since left) who affected my academic growth and intellectual advancement, and sensitized me to critical issues which allowed me to apply a multi-disciplinary approach to this research, a big shout out and a round of applause: Dr. Richard Quantz, Dr. Dennis Carlson, Dr. Lawrence Booges, Dr. Kate Rousmaniere, Dr., Kathleen Knight Abowitz, Dr. Madelyn Detloff, Dr. Ann Fuerer, Dr. Fauzia Ahmed, Dr. Michael Evans, Dr. Thomas Poetter, Dr. Kathleen Mecoli, Dr. Steven Thompson, Dr. Michael Dantley, Dr. Mark Giles, Dr. Sally Lloyd, Dr. Catherine Herr, Dr. Nancy Hoffman, Dr. Peter Magolda, Dr. Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis, Dr. Lisa Weems and Dr. Denise Baszile.

To the staff/student family in the Educational Leadership Department, especially Cindie, Johnnie, Rachel, and Diane, you rock! Cindie thank you for your selfless help. Thank you Johnnie, Rachel and Diane for reading through my drafts. Your insights, comments, support and time were invaluable. Your friendship and love will remain treasures in my heart. To our dearest family friends, Moses and Naomi Rumano, thank you for believing in me. Your words of encouragement, prayers anywhere we met, uplifted and kept me buoyant. Your friendship is inestimable!

Our host family, Sandra and Jack Cotter, Debbie and Doug Ross, thank you for sharing your crib with us, providing us a home away from home. Your care, compassion, love and assistance have lightened our burden of starting anew. To the Oxford United Methodist Church family, Oxford United Methodist Women’s Circle, thank you for praying for me and with me.

To my siblings and your spouses, Doug, Jos & Zett, Good & Thoko, Sam & Rabecca, and Tsitsi thank you for being my cheerleaders. I am blessed to have your love and continuous

vii moral support. Natasha my baby, thank you sweets for our Wednesday chats. You are a great inspiration. To my father and hero, Aaron, you are my reason for being. Your value for education has inspired me to get to where I am at today. You always wanted the best for all of us, and I want you to be proud of me because you taught me well.

Lastly, but most importantly my family, Emmanuel, Anesu, Kundai and Taonanyasha. Emmanuel, the journey has not been easy. Thank you for standing by me through it all. Anesu, the sky is the limit. Accept the challenges and prove your capability. Kundai, I’m very grateful for the “attempt” to help with the transcription. Even though you did about one or two sentences, I hope it inspires you to explore further what that was all about. Taona, I stretched your patience to the limit sweetie. Constantly budging you for words, you told me “how about annoyed, because that is how I’m feeling right now!” Thank you my babies, and I will always beholden to you.

Siyabonga, ndinotenda…thank you…

viii

Chapter One Knowledge bears the mark of its producer

—Lennon and Whitford “Knowing the difference: feminist perspective in epistemology,” 1994

Prologue: My Personal Journey In this chapter I would like to start by introducing my theory, methodology and politics of this research by giving a brief life history, one that would focus on the ways in which my own modes of interpretation have been influenced by my lived experiences. I should start by outlining that I came to the United States in 2008 from Zimbabwe after I had already completed my undergraduate and masters’ degrees, and a professional qualification as Health Services Administrator. I worked in senior management positions for about twelve years as a Hospital Administrator and a District Inspector for the Public Service Commission. Dealing with about fifteen heads of government departments that included education, social welfare, registry, local government, health, agriculture, etc., not only meant that I needed to be aware of my area of operation, but most importantly I needed to be confident and assertive in all the decisions I made. This was not easy, considering that some of the people I supervised were of the older male generation. In a patriarchal society, I established myself as a female authority to be reckoned with.

As a role model, I was incorporated in women’s organization as a way of promoting gender empowerment. I remember that our definition of gender empowerment consisted of assisting women to be self-sufficient. The women’s organization I was involved with concentrated on programs of self-sustenance for women, especially those in informal employment. Hence we used the department of women, gender and youth development to distribute financing for micro-projects like small scale chicken farming, mushroom farming, or horticulture, dress-making and crocheting. Our idea of women empowerment comprised of self- help projects making women independent of men earning their own income. Their agency was more on fighting patriarchal structures that denied them ownership of a means of survival. Most probably taking off of the major global women’s conferences on Women and Development (WAD), (Snyder, 2004) our focus on issues of women narrowed to making them independent of their (usually) abusive husbands.

When I did a masters’ program in business administration (executive), the gender aspect of the course focused wider to include some parts of Southern Africa. The focus included policies and how gender mainstreaming could help in incorporating women’s needs. Reminiscing now, I see that our focus never included transnational migrant women. We would look at Botswana, Zambian, Malawian women in their “natural” habitat. We never went beyond how a Malawian woman could fare in a Botswanan environment, or vice versa. Now that I’m standing on a global pedestal, I see many holes that we failed to interrogate because of a limited focus. Somewhere in this project, I argued for people to look at the whole picture and avoid myopic visions caused by a limited “zone of intelligibility” (Tomlinson, 1991). The “whole” picture for me then included women’s struggles as defined by the first women’s conferences in Beijing, Copenhagen, or Nairobi. It’s interesting that the women we dealt with in the place I worked defined gender to mean women, equal rights referred to men doing all housework and women doing some heavy jobs like cutting firewood, and construction work. They did not define the inability to work similar jobs as inequality, probably because their immediate problems focused on food and survival. So women’s absence in managerial and decision-making jobs would be justified as under-qualifications and therefore no need for discussion. The few women in administration like myself, felt it more like serendipity than a bottleneck for women in general.

Coming to the U.S. broadened my “zone of intelligibility” a little bit more. Not that I went around looking for difference and complications, but it hit me like a bolt of lightning, so unexpected. My first aha moment came when I had just started a women’s studies theory class. I really could not participate because I could not “find” myself in any of them. I struggled to situate the area of study to my experiences, but to no avail. I questioned my abilities and capabilities. Later, I understood why Morwenna Griffiths (1995) argued that it is harder to understand theories that have been developed out of different contexts. She stated that in any society, theorizing is predominantly carried out by a very small, socially defined group (p. 35). And as I later realized, it is the systematic bias inherent in what could be referred to as standard theory due to the homogenization of the concept “woman”. But before I made that realization, my spirit, as in my confidence and self-identity, was marred by stares and whispers of my inability as a competent graduate student. Questions of my originality seemed to authenticate why I was not able to “perform” as anybody else. At one point I was arguing in that class that

2 some issues were not about choice, but opportunity. That alone incited sympathetic and pitiful stares and comments, not only from the students, but the instructor as well. My graduate student status in America, seemed to have happened by opportunity, because I could not have choices in a “continent of scarcity”. So it was viewed by many whom I encountered as a great achievement.

One of my very favorite instructors kept telling me “not to be a stranger” whenever we met. We would discuss a lot of things, and would tell me to spend time in the Women’s Studies department where space and safety were available for all and any woman. I immersed myself in “my lot” but still realized that I was sticking out like a sore thumb. I finally acknowledged what Baszile (2003) meant when she said in confronting identity and difference, safety is allusive. What does it really mean to be safe and to have space, anyway? What does “global” mean and how does one become a member of a “global” movement?

Hence in my effort to make sense of the world, to understand how power, knowledge and difference play out in a postmodern era, I embarked on this project. How do women from different nationalities, backgrounds, races, classes interact in global spaces? I also tried to especially make sense of where I fit in the grand scheme of things. Beyond the perspective of just a dissertation, I also set out to reconcile my own experiences with what my fellow kinsmen through nationality would say about their own experiences in academia in the U.S. And what I found out later in this paper is that where difference is indeed evident (difference by nationality and coming from Southern Africa and being a woman), the global space may be available, but very constricted by history, culture, and most importantly, location. Could there be a way of locating oneself in a global context without erasing the cultural specificity of that individual?

I have come to embrace my identity as an African, black woman in America. However, I would be lying if I pretended that this political stance totally coincides with my emotional identity. My blackness and experience are not the same as that of an African American woman, born and bred in the U.S.A. As an African feminist scholar, I am concerned of the alarming extent of the contempt of the African continent and its people, and the immense distortion of its experiences in the global era. This compounded my choice of carrying out my research through feminist lenses. It was particularly the experiences of U.S. African American women who include a large portion of African experiences that spoke to me. I understood some of what they were saying, but I could not hear and feel women from Africa in what they were describing.

Probably that is why I could not find myself in theory in the classes that I attended. Hence several sets of readings in various graduate courses proved to be particularly influential in the final conceptualization of this project.

Introduction and Background “Experience” is a contested, but necessary site of feminism. Teresa (1984) noted that “experience” signifies “that complex of habits resulting from the semiotic interaction of our inner and outer world, and the continuous engagement of a subject with social reality” (pg. 39). It is through stories that one can fully enter another’s life, and through storytelling I intent to use this project to penetrate cultural barriers, discover the power of the self and the integrity of other. Through feminist lenses, I am using stories narrated by six Southern African women to join the worlds of thought and feeling by giving voice to their experiences. “Feminism” (if it were singular) recognizes women’s experience as a category that mediates between the “raw material” data of life and its cultural construction as subjectivity (Donaldson, 1992). This is because, women judge the items of their experience not in and of themselves as unique phenomena in experience, but instead in relation to some other structure of meaning, particularly location, space and time (Teresa, 1984). The effects of globalization have constituted the grounds for a transnational feminist framework in the work of new definitions of self. The experiences narrated in this project expose the contradictions found between theory and policy, and they count because they provide something tangible to which second hand experience (media or hearing stories from someone) cannot be equated.

In this sense therefore, experience for each person becomes an ongoing construction, not a fixed point of departure or arrival from which one then interacts with the world. What feminists need to consider is the negotiation of the meaning of a feminist identity in relation to geopolitics, structures of language, race, class, sex, nationality, religion and so forth. Is it possible to present this in one bundle under the umbrella term “global” without excluding some people/women’s experiences? As the study participants and I argue throughout this dissertation, unless and until women understand the asymmetrical patterns of their “experiences”, it will be difficult to transcend our blindness and become listeners and speakers of each other’s’ histories without looking for a simple but complex unity (Lugonese, 1991). As different groups of women challenged mainstream feminist movement, (Collins, 2000; hooks, 2000) they acknowledged

4 their situated knowledge (Haraway, 1988) and uniqueness of their experiences. According to Gardiner (1983), Sondra O’Neal, an African American woman summarized this by saying that “we no longer have to feel bound by any hierarchical definition of feminism…Each of us is free to define ourselves and our feminist philosophies as represented by our own historical framework and by urgencies within our respective communities” (p. 39 ).

However, the concept of globalization has facilitated the incorporation of African women into the ambit of women’s movement in a global context where they are expected to appeal to some universal form of women’s movement. Globalization does not entail similarity of experience among diverse groups of women. The perspectives of women’s lives cannot be separated from the complex social structures shaping them, and the systems of meaning that make sense of the social relations (Harding, 1991). The inclusion of African women in global feminist scholarship has not increased their participation or presence on the global arena. Western perspective of “global feminism” advances an ideological apparatus that embeds their (Western) situated perspectives, concerns and experiences into African cultural vocabularies (Oyewumi, 2003). Given that the perspectives of women’s lives are situated both within and against hegemonic knowledge, African women have to struggle in rewriting and redefining the self (Oyewumi, 2003). African women continue to struggle with their invisibility in most studies of history and society (Nnaemeka, 1994) despite the well-publicized inclusiveness.

In a changing international context, issues and locations intersect on various levels, and we need to think of our social practices in more culturally interactive ways. Is it possible to get to a point where the privileging of one form of “experience” that has been naturalized is denied, and that each category of women’s story negotiate its position in relation to all other stories included within the movement, which in turn must recalculate their own positions? (Donaldson, 1992). Diversity feminisms have much to offer as they attend to the intersections of multiple identities, focus on the impact of power structures on experience, examine the impact of specific contexts on women’s lives, and provide insights about the complex dynamics within and between different groups of women.

The fact that geopolitical changes and the unprecedented movement of diasporic populations have radically transformed the sociocultural landscape cannot be underestimated. Tracey Owens Patton (2006) noted that diaspora represents transnationality, political struggles,

5 and historical displacements. These struggles contribute to the fluidity and fixidity of diaspora and the diasporic consciousness, which ultimately impacts one’s social and cultural inclusion or dislocation. The condition of immigration is first a condition of transit, of movement from an original home space to a new homeland, of giving up one society for another, of transformations (Li & Beckett, 2006; Okome & Vaughan, 2012). Embedded in the label “immigrant” is an “otherness” arising from a previous location, place of origin, social identity, ethnic or racial identity, and national identity. These forms of otherness manifest themselves in different ways, through language or accent, skin color, and epistemological construction. The “immigrant”, aware of new surroundings and self -knowledge, forms new identities that never quite manage to edge out the existing ones. As Ufomata (2012) poetically noted, “the itinerant spirit of the immigrant, when firmly grounded, grows strong wings, recognizing that when the drumbeat changes, the dance changes, but the dancer remains the dancer” (p.233). Is there a space for hybridity in the “global” women’s movement? (Grewal & Kaplan, 1994)

Contemporary dispersals of African populations diverge significantly from previous “population flows” from the African continent across the Atlantic (Okome & Vaughan, 2012, p.1). Earlier 17th and 18th century movements of migration resulted because of slavery. In the 19th, 20th and 21st century migration has mostly been voluntary and has occurred for further education or in search of a better standard of living. However, despite the differences in the reasons for migration, it still raises important questions about how we analyze politics, culture, and identity in national and transnational contexts. Physical relocations influence how people conceptualize their lived experiences, and as Samuel Zalanga (2012) observed, the historical moment, social location, geographical location, context, and opportunities influence the development of identities.

African women scholars, like other “scholars of color” in the United States, perceive themselves as the “colonized” who feel the consequences of Eurocentric, scientifically driven epistemologies in which powerful majority drown out issues of power and voice (Oyewumi,2003). Mainstream feminist theory has the presumption to speak about and for all women in supposedly universal generalizations that do not reflect the experiences and priorities of different categories of women (Li & Beckett, 2006). Mohanty (1991) noted that to define feminism purely in gendered terms assumes that our consciousness of being “women” has

6 nothing to do with race, class, nation, or sexuality. The perception of the African woman as illiterate, meek, and domesticated, has everything to do with the construction of women from the first world as knowledge constructors and morally pure. Universalization, which is rooted in power and privilege, is in itself ethnocentric and has dominated Western scholarly writings in probably the last two centuries (Mohanty, 2003; Oyewumi, 2003). Global feminism has, therefore, been viewed as a form of Western cultural imperialism, (Mohanty, 2003; Oyewumi, 2003; Nnaemeka, 2000) as it has denied the diversity of women’s agency in favor of a universalized Western model of women’s liberation that celebrates individuality and modernity.

Mohanty (1991) presented an interesting analysis of the state, citizenship and racial formation in the U.S. She cited Omi and Winant (1986) in that race in contemporary United States is the central axes of understanding the world. Although particular racial myths and stereotypes may change, the underlying presence of a racial system is still an anchoring point of American culture. She stated that a comparison of the history of immigration of white people and the corresponding history of slavery and contracted labor of people of color in the U.S., indicated a clear pattern of racialization tied to the ideological and economic demands of the state. White men, as free labor could take up any jobs, whereas black men and women were used as cheap labor. These relations of inequality created the context of entry into the U.S. Now considering another category of women from Southern Africa coming in for higher education, and seeking employment outside the naturalized context, presented complications. Therefore, within these oppressive, colonizing discourses, borrowing from Mutua and Swadener (2003), the impossibility of the construction of the African woman as intelligent thinking feeling being is clearly self-evident.

Prior to arriving in the United States to further their education, Southern African women have an almost equal opportunity to advance academically and to venture into any field of study they might choose. Despite being a patriarchal society, and depending on their desired career path, they occupy middle to upper class social status, irrespective of their marital status. They assume a role where they feel authentic as active citizens who contribute to the national development of their country. In their own countries these educated women become an elite group that is recognized as able and capable, without the aspect of gender playing in. Coming to the United States, subscribing to a global feminist framework, these women are perceived as

“outsiders-within” (Collins, 1994), a position occupied by groups that are included in dominant cultural practices, but are nevertheless and for various reasons unable to fully participate in them. The concept of Adrienne Rich’s (1986) “politics of location” can be used to highlight the shortcomings of the “universal sisterhood” model, as individual identities result in political positioning that affect the ways in which women relate to each other. Afshar (2012) argues that different stages in life in terms of localities reassign new duties, responsibilities and demands that involve the reconstruction of notions of self.

The consensus among most African scholars (Nnaemeka, 2005, Oyewumi, 2004) is that Western scholars writing about Africa has been racist and ethnocentric, projecting Africans as savage, subhuman, and primitive (Arnfred, Bakare-Yusuf, Kisiang’ani, Lewis, Oyewumi, Chioma Steady (2004). This Western stereotypical image of African began over a hundred years ago by travelers who recounted stories of the African people. Smith (2012) stated that the “tales and other anecdotal ways of representing indigenous peoples have contributed to the general impression and the milieu of ideas that informed Western knowledge and Western construction of the Other” (p. 78). Too often these scholars presented women as objects, invalidating their experiences. Stuart Cloete’s (1958) comments about African women described them as “without souls” (p. 51) guided only by instincts, thus perpetuating the marginalization of African women. Unfortunately these images and texts have become a part of the culture of a society and is the foundation upon which new images and words are created. When the African woman gets to the Western world, her status is defined by these historical misconceptions; views now taken for granted as facts and have become embedded in the language and attitudes of non-African people towards African people. Focusing specifically on the African woman, African women writers (Nnaemeka, 2002; Nzegwu, 2003; Oyewumi, 2003) argued that African women and feminism are at odds because despite the adjectives used to qualify feminism, it is Western feminism that inevitably dominates. The concept of “global feminism” entails a homogeneity that supposes a universal common experience for all women. What is taken for women’s “experiences” are some privileged and published accounts of what feminism has naturalized.

Although transnational feminist perspectives, as outlined by Grewal & Kaplan (2004); Levitt & Sanjeev (2008); and Mohanty, 2003, trouble hierarchical constructions of nations, knowledges and people, African women have narrowly made inroads in contributing to Western

8 scholarship in the academy (Nzegwu, 2003; Oyewumi, 2003). The context of my study involves an analysis of the intersections of history and location, power and displacements that make the search for global space difficult. Generally, women of color in United States higher education live their daily realities in suffocating spaces forbidding their perspectives, creativity, and wisdom. Specifically, the often unstated, unexpressed and unacknowledged assumptions about African women isolate and alienate them from faculty and peers. Most gain admission into institutions of higher education thinking and believing that if one tried hard, studied and focused, they will become part of the group. They buy into the hype of academic objectivity, disregarding the fact that nationality, ethnicity, gender, race and class are inseparable in understanding the experiences of minority women in higher education.

The problem could be that colonialism has made the lives of African women complicated in that they have lived it with the challenges of what Nnaemeka (1994) called “living with contradictions” (p. 31). This means that in this day and age of globalization where massive population and cultural flows that are increasingly blurring the line between inside and outside, African women do not have the luxury of contending with a distinct outside and grappling with a clear-cut inside. Nnaemeka (1994) argued that the internal and the external are ever evolving, “always contaminated and contested, mutually creating and recreating each other” making African women occupy a liminal space between belonging and not belonging (p. 31). However, Oyewumi (2004) argued that it is not colonization that is two, but forms of oppression that flow from the process. Thus, it is the relationship and effect of these forms of oppression that I interrogate as the women from Southern Africa narrate their experiences.

Statement of the Problem and Research Questions In this era of globalization, where boundaries have become porous, and global feminism assumes homogeneity, what stories do Southern African women tell about their experiences in U.S Higher education? This study is an interpretative analysis of Southern African women’s experiences in US higher education. I utilized narrative inquiry to examine the lived experiences of Southern African women to gain an understanding of their position within the Western discourses. As I engaged in conversational interviews, I specifically listened for the relationship between transnationalism, feminism(s), globalization, education, and Robin Morgan’s aptly but controversially claimed “sisterhood is global” concept.

As a way of understanding how location affects relationships, I intently listened to what these women had to say about these two critical questions:

1. Can we create a global feminist movement free of asymmetrical (unequal) power relations as a result of the histories of colonialism and imperialism that construct women’s lives and separate women from each other?; 2. Can these women come together and form alliances as equals disregarding “the politics of location”? In this study, I use critical feminist frameworks, such as transnational feminist praxis (Moghadam, 2011) and postcolonial theorizing (Mutua and Swadener, 2004) in relation to globalization and new imperial formations that resist and question the Western concept of global feminist practices. Critical feminist theories challenge social arrangements in order to establish fairer ways in which to fight exclusion (Mackinnon, 1983). Transnational feminist praxis and postcolonial theories challenge ethnocentrism of Western feminist scholarship by emphasizing on the oppressions of colonialism, neocolonialism, nationalism, as well as stressing the importance of exploring differences and interconnectedness of women throughout the world. Feminist critical discourses center on the uneven relations between power, cultural texts, practices and processes, and the varying effects on the lives of women. The use of narrative inquiry in my research provides an opportunity for ordinary Southern African women, whose ideas and experiences have until now only been known in their immediate social circles, to be heard. As Chase (2008) noted “…the voice that speaks to the reader through the text… (takes) the form of an “I” that demands to be recognized, that wants or needs to stake a claim on our attention” (p. 428). This is because the act of speaking to be heard references an “other” who needs to hear, to listen, to pay full attention: a form of empathetic listening in which they come to feel with the storyteller (Chase & Bell, 2008; Gergen & Gergen, 2007).

So What? Significance of the Study This research is necessary and unique for two reasons: First, there is relatively little to no scholarship that specifically documents the lives of women from the southern region of Africa in the United States. When most scholarship refers to African women, it is mostly referring to West African women who have made inroads in speaking for all women of Africa. Second, when women from Africa (versus women from specific countries within the continent of Africa) are

10 included in scholarship on women, gender and globalization, their “voices” (or personal narratives) inevitably get excluded from the theories that define them, including global feminisms (Oyewumi, 2003). Hence given this dominant narrative of “sisterhood is global”, the whole research process seeks to understand what stories Southern African women tell about their experiences in U.S. higher education.

It is imperative to consider that differences between and among women shape their lives and promote their differential access to resources and opportunities, even when we talk of equality on a global scale. Knowledge seeking requires democratic participatory politics so that the dominant will not continue to dictate the pace on how to determine societal narratives. It is therefore worthwhile to decolonize the Western academy and include an array of voices in promoting a movement that is inclusive of all women, irrespective of their ethnicity or nationality.

African women writers (Nnaemeka, 1998; Ogunyemi, 1985; Oyewumi, 2003) have observed that being omitted from theories that should include them is not only unfair to them, but to the academy as a whole. Despite the talk of global feminism, feminists of all magnitude must continue to question the narrative in which they are embedded, so (we) can compare multiple, overlapping and discreet oppressions rather than to construct a theory of hegemonic oppression under a unified category of gender. Western biases of Africa are informed by the West’s ignorance of Africa and her social institutions, it is imperative that these images be changed and re-focus African women’s realities and experiences, so that their situated knowledge is validated.

Definition of Terms In this part of the first chapter I will define most of the terms that I think will help in understanding this project. My study uses terms whose meanings are content-based, particularly for black women in the United States who have been actively challenging mainstream feminist views for a long time. The mainstream theories have been challenged by the likes of Alice Walker, bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldua, and a lot more. There are also a number of African women, particularly West African women like Obioma Nnaemeka, Oyewumi Oyeronke, Chikwenye Ogunyemi and Nkiru Nzegwu who have written extensively on “African feminisms”. All these women can be collectively referred to as women of color, which also includes the likes of Nina

Asher, Vandana Shiva, Chandra Mohanty, and all other non-white women. What seems to constitute women of color as a viable alliance is the common context of struggle, rather than nationality, color, or any other identification. For me, the term woman of color, fosters a false unity that the different categories of women are trying to move away from. It flattens diversity to the extent that the search for global spaces is unattainable (Grewal & Kaplan, 1994). Women of color becomes one-sided depending on who speaks and where, and for whom. As Nnaemeka notes, many African voices desire “not a monolithic, representative political voice, but the eagerness to recognize and promote a common ground while respecting the nuances that make the emergence of a monolith impossible” (Nnaemeka, 1998, p. 3). In a telephone conversation with Obioma Nnaemeka, she stated that African feminisms have to be pluralized because Africa is vast and feminisms are negotiated rather than a zero-sum game, calling African feminism “negofeminism”. Hence in this paper I will only refer to the term women of color when citing or quoting other authors. I will not use the term in my own capacity as it defeats the purpose of my scholarship which is to separate and acknowledge differences between and among different categories of women, particularly White, African American and African women. Even the Southern African women which I am writing about are not a homogenous group. Differences of experience are also exhibited by women in one particular Southern African country.

African women/woman is one term that I have interchangeably used to refer to the Southern African women that I write about in this project. The term African woman has become synonymous with one particular individual woman who comes from Africa, especially to the U.S. community. The women that I spoke to in this study stated that once they arrived in the U.S., they became African women. I realized that for them the feeling of being African first, and then their particular nationality, like Zimbabwean, Zambian, Malawian, or Malagasy, gave them the freedom or opened a window of opportunity to find a meeting point with different cultures, be they different African cultures or the hybrid (Grewal & Kaplan, 2006) that they have become. Hence when I use the term African women, I do not mean to downplay the inherent diversity of African societies and the complexity of its human condition. But why I do it is because over much of the continent there is a shared history of colonial and imperial imposition of external ideas and knowledge (Dei, 2000).

Through the voices of these women, it emerged that being an African woman is not a

12 defined point, but rather I would call it a journey stimulated by personal and global events which began in the past, are rooted in their different experiences, and continues in the present (Holt, 2012). It was interesting to note how these women took the labels attached to African and deconstructed them to introduce alternative interpretations and then transforming an imposed category into an emancipative weapon. Hence as I talked to and about Southern African women, I at times refered to them as African women, particularly where their agency and resistance show that it is impossible to lock up people within predefined categories, even in an era of globalization which has literally shrunk the world.

Much of the debate around globalization is structured around the problematic notion of homogenization. Cultural flow is perceived as unidirectional, from the West to the rest of the world. One of the most obvious ways in which globalization is understood is in terms of the production of “borderlessness” (Mohanty, 2003, p. 172). Termed the “engine for growth and development” (Adesina & Adebayo, 2009), globalization reigns supreme in worldwide matters. Mohanty (2003) observed how globalization has become a slogan that is overused, and under- understood, making it a guise to consolidate power relations in the world. I critique this notion of globalization, using the feminist critical frameworks to identify and challenge the politics of knowledge that naturalizes globalization. Hence, as Mohanty (2003) noted, this means being attentive not only to the grand narrative or myth of capitalism as “democracy” but also to the mythologies that feminists of various races, nations classes and sexualities have inherited about one another.

Despite its homogenizing aspects, I will use the term globalization to indicate the opportunities for communication and information exchange which have advanced the goals of feminism(s). I will still advocate for a plural version of feminisms because the concept of global feminism in the singular is tantamount to homogenizing the world according to some canon. Global feminism concerns itself with a forward movement of women’s rights on a global scale, purporting the creation of a global sisterhood (Bailey & Cuomo, 2008). It purports a one-size- fits-all type of feminism that revolves around issues of global patriarchy. In this paper I view global feminism as tantamount to mainstream feminism, because despite its inclusive language, it is the Western women who still provide the grounding for much of feminist theory. As Oyewumi (2003) noted, global feminism forms part of what she calls “Europology” which is an

13 elaboration of what is distinctly European phenomena into a human universal…which is then imposed on all cultures (p. 38). In addition, in this declaration of a universal subordination of women and male dominance, most Western feminists make no reference to history; the history of slavery, imperialism, colonization, and racial dominance of non-Western peoples, and the emergence of the Western hegemony worldwide (Oyewumi, 2004; Spivak, 2000). Through postcolonial lenses, I view global feminism as a form of Western cultural imperialism and I argue for the creation of a feminist movement which is non-hierarchical, mostly resulting from the histories of colonialism and imperialism that construct women’s lives and separate women from each other. My catch-phrase in this project is global space. This should be a transforming and shifting space that must allow all women, in any location, to be participants in that space. There is need for clear global spaces that allow everybody to bring their gift to a transnational table without a canon being used to judge it. As an African woman, specifically a Zimbabwean woman, I should bring to the table what I call knowledge, which is built on African culture plus aspects of my liminality without someone finding fault with it.

I also found myself using the term Third World women a lot in this project. I have always interpreted the term to mean someone spoken for in the third person. I also felt that in this era of globalization where nations have been integrated, the term should no longer apply. However, since my dissertation seeks to understand the lived experiences of women from Third World nations, it is imperative that I refer to them as such in order to understand how the effects of colonialism, imperialism, and postcoloniality have affected or enhanced their accommodation of a global space. I also agree with Lindio-McGoven & Wallimann (2009) who argued that disregarding the term Third World women, fails to recognize the uneven impact of globalization which has exacerbated gender, race, ethnicity and class inequalities. Consequently, I use the term Third World women as a conceptual category for women marginalized in the process of globalization, therefore appropriately recognizing the uneven impact of globalization on women depending on their own and their nation’s position and location on the global arena.

Borrowing from Nnaemeka (2005), the African voices in this research speak to the complexity of relationships among African American and White women by exposing it as a question of location, where one is coming from literally and metaphorically. The conversations showed that the hierarchy on which these relationships rested was not bipolar but multilayered

14 and more complex. They revealed how issues of race, identity, history, nationality, and the reasons for immigrating to the U.S. complicate those relationships. It was easy to deduce that both implicit and explicit comments made by classmates, instructors, acquaintances of participants emanated from specific locations. And as Chimalum Nwankwo (2005) discovered about the centrality of location, “imperialism and Western feminism share the same ancestry, the same pedigree” (p. 8).

As I understand and resist the Western concept of global feminism as an imperial formation, I concur with Cesaire (2000 that the global North/South divide is less a geographic division than a political and socioeconomic distinction between developed and developing nations. Women’s geographical locations are connected to the political and socioeconomic power associated with the broader world order. It is this hierarchical ranking of identities that results in privilege for some and limitations or discrimination for others through the operation of systems of inequality and privilege. In society many social relations are defined and differentiated in terms of power between the dominant and the subordinate or the oppressor and the oppressed. Foucault (1981) defines power as a force constantly in the process of exercising itself, moving from the least to the most powerful and exposing its privileges through repression. Hierro and Marquez (1994) claim that the majority of people’s desire for power stems not so much from a positive love of power, but from fear that without it they will not be safe or they would be impotent (p.176). It can also be viewed as a precondition for effective control and for limiting choices.

Obioma Nnaemeka (1997) defined power through the lens of African feminism as an item that is negotiable and negotiated. Power is assessed not in absolute but in relative terms. The relations of power, as referred to by Mohanty (1991), are not reducible to binary oppositions or oppressor/oppressed relations, but that it’s possible to retain multiple, fluid structures of domination which intersect to locate women differently at particular historical conjunctures. Although some of the women I talked to exhibited traits of having accepted the position of powerlessness, I deduced from my data analysis that hierarchical power is a power of groups, not individuals (Amoros, 1988). For example, men as a group have power over women as a group. An individual man, Peter, has power over Julie because he represents the patriarchal group. Likewise, could it be true to say white women, (and to some extent, African American women)

15 have power over African women as positioned by being from the First World? The participants refuted that they were born to occupy positions of power and prestige.

Clifford (1988) stated that “cultural difference is no longer a stable, exotic otherness, rather self/other relationships are matters of power and rhetoric rather than essence” (p. 14). As I worked on this project, I noticed that although the women I spoke to alluded their inability to fully express who they really were inside, they tried to negotiate power in the different positions in associations, or otherwise, that they held. And in as much as they were able to keep floating and positioning themselves in a new environment, the major theme that the participants kept bringing up was that of self-identity. The concept of identity has been discussed at length in the next chapter, so I will only briefly outline what I am referring to when I talk about self-identity.

Self-identity is an internal process that allows an individual to establish his/her sense of placement in a larger cosmos (Griffiths, 1995). According to Griffiths (1995), in feminist thought concerns with the self have been approached from two different directions. The first one concerns the problem with finding or creating oneself. This is often expressed as finding a real self, or a self acceptable to itself. The second one is expressed as a problem of dealing with the experience of a fragmented and changing self. She went further to argue that displacement/migration structures interact with “habits of mind” (p.79) which help keep the structures in place. In women who move from one place to another, it might be lack of self- confidence, or doubting one’s capabilities. “Habits of mind” can be as oppressive as the material structures which are easier to identify.

Minh-ha (2011) states that if identity refers to the whole pattern of sameness within a being, the style of a continuing me that permeates all the changes undergone, then difference remains within the boundary of that which distinguishes one identity from the other. However, the type of difference I speak about in this project is not opposed to sameness nor synonymous with separateness. It is the kind of difference that encompasses differences and sameness. Hegemony works at leveling out differences and standardizing contexts and expectations in women issues. Uncovering this leveling of differences is resisting that universalistic voice that ignores the importance of recognizing significant, power-structured differences among women. Through transnational feminist praxis and postcolonial theory I employ to view the concept of difference as a tool of creativity to question multiple forms of repression and dominance.

Chapter Summary This chapter provides the foundation of my study. I outlined my journey as a transnational, and how the relationship of the three categories of women, African, African American and White women influenced this project. This introduction problematizes the concept “global” and sets the tone for the reader. The aspect of “experience” is of paramount importance as it shows the possibility or impossibility of belonging to one global family. I also gave a sneak peek into the critical feminist theories that will inform this study. These theories not only identify how perceptions need to be changed, but also how transformations can redefine social institutions.

Overview of Chapters This dissertation includes five chapters. Chapter One chronicles my positionality as a Southern African student in US higher education. This chapter also provides an introduction to the vast fields of knowledge through the introduction of common terms and their definitions. This section historicizes the concept of power, knowledge, representation, identity, agency and resistance within a macro-context of globalization. Chapter Two provides a more select yet intensive review of the literature on transnational and postcolonial theorizing on gender and globalization that guide my research. It also incorporates a review of the small but significant scholarship regarding the experiences of women from Southern Africa. Chapter Three addresses the research methodology and design for the study, specifically the tradition of narrative inquiry within qualitative research in education. Chapter Four presents the results from the narrative inquiry I conducted with six women during 2013-2014 in terms of the representation of emergent themes. Chapter Five provides an interpretation of the findings within the contexts of transnational feminist and post-colonial theorizing in relation to the concepts of power, knowledge, difference, resistance and agency within local and global contexts. It will also be a concluding chapter mapping a way forward on global women solidarity in view of difference.

Chapter Two: Literature Review But invisibility is a dangerous and painful condition …. When those who have power to name and to socially construct reality, choose not to see you or hear you, whether you are dark- skinned, old, disabled, female, or speak with a different accent or dialect than theirs, when someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. Yet you know you exist and others like you, that this is a game with mirrors. It takes some strength of soul, and not just individual strength, but collective understanding to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which you are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard. — Adrienne Rich, Invisibility in the Academe, 1984

Introduction Since this research seeks to understand experiences of Southern African women in U.S. higher education and the relationship between and among three categories of women, African, African American, and White, I begin by problematizing the concept of global sisterhood. I then summarize literature on African women and why their “oriental” position has persisted throughout the centuries. My final discussion in this chapter will analyzes the concept of postcoloniality and transnational feminism in an era of globalization, and how that has created a new and more insidious form of domination. I align these narratives with the themes of power, knowledge, representation, resistance and identity.

Sisterhood as Global The global women’s conference on Women in Africa and the African Diaspora: Bridges Across Activism and the Academy in Nsukka, Nigeria in 1992 illuminated the concerns of global sisterhood. The conference organized by African women in the Diaspora, included the convener, Obioma Nnaemeka, who has spent considerable time in the United States, while maintaining strong Nigerian ties. Everything about the conference was jovial until cliques (e.g. African, African American and White women) broke out of the main group. African American women voiced their concerns in an open forum that the conference was “for them, and their African sisters; a return to their roots away from their current domicile where they felt unaccepted, dehumanized, and segregated…” (Nnaemeka, 1998, p. 422). African American women believed that the conference was about black women and the participation should be by black women and white women had no right to “present papers on black women experiences” (p. 419). One white woman who had lived in Nigeria for fifteen years failed to understand the logic behind this

18 argument because she had worked with African women for all those years and someone stepping onto the African soil for the first time claimed a more and better belonging just because of the color of her skin. As the story was being told through the writings of many feminists, (Nnaemeka, 1998) it appeared that the commotion started with African American women who objected with some force to the prominent role Europeans and Euro-American women felt entitled to play. The authors noted that the white women and the African American women had brought the race card to the table on the African continent. The questions then were: What sense of sisterhood is it that binds us together? ... Or binds us against? ... What is global sisterhood in the first place?

The concept of global sisterhood, as outlined by Robin Morgan (1984) implied a cross- culturally singular, homogeneous group of women with the same interests, perspectives and goals and similar experience. The book Sisterhood Is Global became the anthology for the international women’s movement, and many Women’s Studies embraced it as the discipline was starting to become institutionalized on college campuses, as most universities in the U.S. were beginning to recognize the importance of global citizenship (Lee & Shaw, 2011; Mohanty, 2003). Morgan clearly outlined patriarchal injustices across the world, and as Lee (2011) noted, “Sisterhood Is Global used local and global networks to include a wide range of women’s voices and was inspiring in its recognition of the vast resources of womenpower” that could transform the politics of the late twentieth century (p. 3). Despite all these supercilious goals and achievements, the whole project became controversial on three accounts that have served to inform contemporary studies of women in global perspectives. These include (1) the argument that Sisterhood Is Global advocated a “universal sisterhood that overstated women’s shared interests, and understated the power differences between women”, (2) the anthology’s reliance on Western politics ignored the process of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization that structure other women’s lives, and (3) that the premise of the anthology presumed the relevance of Western feminism imposed on women worldwide (Lee and Shaw, 2011; Mohanty, 2003).

Mohanty (2003) argued that Morgan’s notion of universal sisterhood seems predicated on the erasure of the history and effects of contemporary imperialism. When gender becomes the fundamental organizing principle and category of difference, the various ways that power and inequality are structured in different historical and cultural contexts becomes misleading (Grewal

& Kaplan, 1994; Mohanty, 2003). Global sisterhood make the racial, cultural, and economic relations of power among women invisible and privilege western women while marginalizing African women and other women of color (Lee & Shaw, 2011; Oyewumi, 2003). Although sisterhood has emerged as the dominant model for feminist intercommunity relations, there is need to articulate ways in which the historical forms of oppression relate to the category of “women,” and not to try to deduce one from the other (Mohanty, 2003). To render cultures as homogenous and coherent based on gender is to mystify and erase the sociopolitical forces that constitute them.

Nkiru Nzegwu (Oyewumi, 2003) argued that although sisterhood purports equality and homogenization of the position of women worldwide, the reality is that women are linked together in a variety of unequal power relations. As oppression took on, in Nnaemeka’s (1994) words, a human face, raising questions about difference, the issue of sisterhood, especially global sisterhood, assumed wider implications, transcending biology and genealogy. The belief that “sisterhood is global” became a political matter. Bell hooks (1995) wrote about “false sisterhood” stating that “sisterhood became yet another shield against reality, another support system” (p. 296). Although hooks does not condemn sisterhood, she views the problem with the concept as taking political solidarity for granted rather than as a goal to be worked at and achieved.

The African scholars in Obioma Nnaemeka’s Sisterhood: feminism and power, from Africa to the diaspora (1998) stated that their outlining of the controversy in Nsukka was not meant to excuse or pass judgment on any one, but to use it to raise questions about what it contributed to our understanding of the intersections of history and location, power and displacements that make the search for sisterhood so strained. Starting with Caren Kaplan (2011), she drew upon Virginia Woolfe’s famous metaphor “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world” (p. 137) to critique Adriene Rich’s concept of “politics of location”. The term “politics of location” emerged in the early 1980s as a particularly North American feminist articulation of difference, and more specifically as a method of interrogating and deconstructing the position, identity, and privilege of whiteness (Kaplan, 2006). She began by asserting that Western feminists have extended Woolfe’s words to justify the dream of global sisterhood of women with shared values and

20 aspirations. Kaplan juxtaposed Woolfe’s two images of a world of women and a room of one’s own, and showed that Woolfe’s concern was about space and location. She noted that the claiming of a world space for women raised questions of history as well as place. She questioned whether worlds could be claimed in the name of categories such as “woman” in all innocence and benevolence, or whether these gestures marked the revival of a form of feminist cultural imperialism.

The traditional understanding of the concept of ‘woman’ was based on Greek-derived essentialist logic, which led feminists to seek out shared, universal features of the instances of ‘woman’ and to ignore other characteristics of individual women as features of their own woman-ness (Curry 1998). Donaldson (1992) queried the possibility of arguing that Mrs. Todd’s experiences of motherhood in an imperialist and cosmopolitan American framework also speaks for the colonized tribal experience of an African woman. She noted that one would answer “yes” to this question by regarding reproduction as purely biological, that is, a naturalized function that is separable from any human consciousness of reproduction. This is precisely how most early feminists defined women’s experiences. O’Brien (1992) observed that “women’s reproductive consciousness”, that is, the knowledge of themselves as potential producers, was culturally transmitted and must be negotiated through the semioticity of all meaningful experience (p. 27). Lewis (2004) stated that in a seminal work published by Signs, Chikwenye Ogunyemi launched a radical critique of the extent to which white and western women have ignored the realities and locations of African women. Ogunyemi’s development of African Womanism became propelled towards being anti-Western and anti-African-American because they both overlooked African peculiarities (Ogunyemi 1985). Omolara Ogundipe-Leslie, another African scholar, alluded by saying that the African woman needed to be conscious not only of the fact that she was a woman, but that she was both an African and a third-world person; Third World only in the articulation of colonialism and imperialism. Thus she needed to be conscious of the context in which her feminist stance was made (Oyewumi, 2003).

The superficial recognition of “women’s conditions” of subordination and a commitment to the analytical centrality of gender drives feminist scholarship. Steady (2004) argued that to believe the universal subordination argument would imply ignoring how social location through race, nationality, ethnicity, class, and color confers power and privilege. Speaking on post-

21 modern theories, Kaplan (2006) argues that those theories that link subject positions to geopolitical and metaphorical locations have emerged out of the perception that periodization and linear historical forms of explanation have been unable to account fully for the production of complex identities in an era of diaspora and displacement. Hence any exclusive recourse to space, place or position becomes utterly abstract and universalizing without historical specificity. Kaplan is wary of the politics of location when it is used to naturalize boundaries and margins under the guise of celebration, nostalgia, or inappropriate assumptions of intimacy. Transnational feminists (Grewal & Kaplan, 1994; Lee & Shaw, 2011; Mohanty, 2003) were concerned when a social movement, defined as a sustained, collective campaign that arose as people with shared interests came together in support of a common goal, sought to speak for all women, advocating their shared interests in the name of a universal notion of global sisterhood.

Important regional differences between and among women that shape individual lives also arise as a result of location in either the Global North or the Global South. Critiques of the global feminist movement (Mohanty, 2003; Oyewumi, 2003) have argued that terms like Global North and South, First, Second or Third World and developed or developing nations are markers of identity. My friends, colleagues, classes, books, films, arguments and dialogues were constitutive of my political identity as a woman of color. These terms emphasized a political and socioeconomic distinction that reflected access to opportunities and resources. Lee & Shaw (2011) observed that most women in the Global North have greater access to education and communication technologies, and have generally more opportunities for participation in social movements, and thus gain a privileged voice in defining feminism.

They further noted that these women have benefited from the increased status of their countries of origin, and have therefore been able to establish priorities for social change, setting the agenda for a global women’s movement. In so doing, the priorities of white, middle-class, heterosexual feminists in the Global North are reflected in the name of representing the needs of all women. In addressing the “politics of location” Adrienne Rich (1994, p. 210) supposed that power and resources (or their lack) associated with individuals’ identities result in socioeconomic and political positioning that affect the ways women live their lives. Women’s geographical locations are connected to the political and socioeconomic power associated with the broader world order. It is therefore, this hierarchical ranking of identities that results in

22 privileges for some and limitations or discriminations for others through the operation of the “systems of inequality and privilege” (Lee & Shaw, 2011, p. 15) such as racism, sexism, classism and ethnicity.

The universalization and homogenization of women’s experiences happened by recreating all women in the image of the Western woman, who became the norm, the measure of all things, and is in itself ethnocentric which has dominated Western scholarly writings in probably the last two centuries (Mohanty, 2003; Oyewumi, 2003). Eryn Scott (1995) suggested that while feminists of all circumstances work against all forms of male domination and oppression, the socio-political reality of the capitalist structure inhibits universal sisterhood.

Majubaolu Okome (2012), defined diaspora as “a scattering, a forced dispersal, exile” (p. 30). She related it to the 1978 song Rivers of Babylon by Boney M. It depicted the identity crisis of African women in the United States, and explained it in terms of those driven by compulsion, maybe due to slavery or economic crises in their own countries to migrate to the U.S. Most of these women, she asserted, can be found in what she refered to as the miserable “hellholes of human existence” (p. 30) that have become part of the global experience. She vividly described that experience as similar to the Jewish experiences of captivity in Babylon; one filled with pain, alienation, dis-ease, uneasiness, anxiety, and depression. The song is based on the biblical Psalms 137 that depicts the yearning of the Jewish people in exile. As captives, they are being asked to sing a song.

The question of how one sings the Lord’s song in a strange land is significant. For Okome, this move was especially appropriate to describe the forcible snatching away of Africans from the continent into the orifices of the slave economy in a move towards globalization. Writing on difference and on the anthology of sisterhood is global, Lee & Shaw (2011) as well as Oyewumi (2004) argued that the Rivers of Babylon portrays a much more subtle but serious representation of women of African descent. The Rivers of Babylon, can be applied to women in the world, who are different culturally and inter-culturally, but are being asked to sing one song, for some in a strange language. A song that speaks of feminism as defined by one group of women that is privileged to define “universal” terms that purport to apply to the group “women”.

Bhabha (1994) spoke of the “unhomeliness”, where postcolonial beings experience “the

23 estranging sense of the relocation of home and the world, that is, the condition of extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiation (p. 9). Bhabha referred to this as the liminal space after Arnold van Gennep’s “rites of passage” which accompany every change of place, state, social position and age (p. 359). For Bhabha, this liminal space becomes a metaphor for the threshold between fixed identities, as an in-between space where the colonized subject is located between colonial discourse and non-colonial identities. He suggested that in this contested and unstable space, identities can be explored, interrogated, problematized, blurred and engaged with, and cultural change may take place. The colonizers and the colonized are “bafflingly both alike and different; becoming partial cultures-the contaminated yet connective tissue between cultures” (Manathunga, 2006, p. 22). Grewal & Kaplan (2006) mused about the pseudo-acceptance of difference arising from some Western feminist scholars. They argued that the politics of location can encourage resistance to hegemonic formations, becoming its own academic reification, or it could mark important shifts in discourses of location and displacement; depending specifically upon who utilizes the concept in what particular context.

Kaplan (2006) observed that Adrienne Rich formulated the concept of politics of location during her travel as a delegate from the US to a conference in Nicaragua in the early 1980s. It was only through this travel that she experienced the effects of this material displacement on her consciousness of power differences between countries and between people. The major bone of contention for Kaplan is that Rich’s politics of location “lies in her recognition that as marginal as white, western women appear to be in relation to the real movers and shakers of the world – white men – there are others made marginal by white, western women themselves” (p. 140). So Kaplan (2006) said Rich desired “us” to take responsibility for these marginalizations, to acknowledge “our” part in this process in order to change these unequal dynamics. Kaplan wondered how a feminist movement for change can de-westernize itself. Kaplan (2006) argued that de-Westernization should have started at “home” within the parameters of domestic conversations with different women she might have had with (Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, and other U.S. women of color) not in the aftermath of a trip abroad.

It was clear that over ten years of coalition work with women of color in the U.S. might have accounted for many of the ideas found in the politics of location essays. She concluded therefore that in its first articulation as a term, a politics of location could be seen as a

24 suppression of discussions of difference between white women and women of color within the geographical boundaries of the U.S. in favor of a “new” binary: North American white women and the victims of North American foreign policy (p. 141). Thus she remained locked in the conventional oppositions between global and local as well as Western and non-Western. Kaplan observed that Rich deconstructed the equalizations of “global feminism” by homogenizing the location of “North American feminist” (p. 141).

Central to the feminist agenda in contemporary times should be the understanding of difference and critically accounting for the inequalities (Zinn & Dill, 1996). The space of globalization, as Grossberg (1996) reminded us, is a space of struggle (p. 172). Thus scholarship in the multicultural context has to create theoretical spaces that engage politically with difference and not just confirm it descriptively (Hedge, 1998). In extending Rich’s concept of politics of location, Elizabeth Meese (1990) stated that “Feminism’s double bind is that it cannot speak “for” other women, nor can it speak “without” or “apart” from other women” (p. 23). Yet she proceeded to equalize aspects that may have historically distinct manifestations.

Intersectionality Kimberley Crenshaw’s (1989) theory of intersectionality suggests that and seeks to examine how various biological, social and cultural categories such as gender, race, class, ability, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, ethnicity etc, interact on multiple and often simultaneous levels, contributing to systematic injustice and social inequality. Hence in order to understand the circumstances of African women in the U. S. one must investigate the ways in which rracializiing structures, social processes, and social representation are shaped by gender, class, race, sexuality, nationality and ethnicinity.

Yuval-Davis, (1997) stated that race, class, and gender interact in the social and material realities of women’s lives to produce and transform relations of power. Considering the presence of Southern African women in diasporic regions complicates the relations of power as nationality and ethnicity interact with the already existing isms. These women have already complicated lives as they have been colonized and also still cling to what they believe to be their roots. As Bakhtin (1981) argued, “the colonized hybrid is not only double-voiced and double- accented…but is also double-languaged…two individual consciousnesses…two epochs that come together and constantly fight it out on the territory of the utterance” (p. 360).

Globalization and the Power to “Other” Globalization refers to the transformation of local or regional phenomena into global ones and describes the unification of people around the world into a global community (Lee & Shaw, 2011; Mohanty, 2004). It is interpreted as an “engine for growth and development” (Adesina & Adebayo, 2009, p. 17), but there is an insufficient revelation, in practice and in reality, of the several ambiguities embedded in this “engine for growth and development” analysis. Steady (2004) observed that globalization has become a new and insidious form of domination that has replaced the colonial project. She further argued that earlier theoretical distortions that have been criticized as biased, myopic or based on faulty methodologies, and faulty data, have become reinforced through modernization theory’s “stages of growth” (p. 44). And modernization theory expresses itself through neo-liberalism, the pillar of corporate globalization. This has led to conceptual frameworks applied to Africa being presented in Eurocentric dichotomies: rural/urban, developed/underdeveloped, traditional/modern, and so forth (Loomba 1998; Steady, 2004). Globalization is not often fine-tuned enough to capture cross-border agents, structures, and interactions that are not at all worldwide in scope. It often assumes convergence and homogenization that does not really occur because it tends to homogenize the culture. Women are the same and yet different cross-culturally (Burn, 2005; Lee & Shaw, 2011 Oyewumi, 2004).

The term “othering” as coined by Gayatri Spivak (1985, p. 5), denotes a process through which Western knowledge creates differences between itself as the norm and other knowledge systems as inferior. According to Kisiang’ani (2004) the imagination nurtured by European and American popular writing on Africa created a mythical Africa, and since every myth has a place and function in the society that created it, Africa was ruthlessly exploited by Europeans in the name of civilization. He further stated that the colonial agenda undertook to train Africans to hate themselves, their values and their uniqueness.

Since our knowledges are always situated, feminist scholars (Collins, 1990; Haraway, 1988) argued that the locus of enunciation, or the geopolitical location of the subject that speaks is very important. In Western philosophy, the subject that speaks is always hidden, concealed, and erased from the analysis (Grosfoguel, 2005). Ethnic location and epistemic location are decoupled, thereby producing a myth about universalistic knowledge that conceals who is speaking, as well as the geopolitical location in the structures of power from which the subject

26 speaks (Collins, 1990; Grosfoguel, 2005; Haraway, 1998). Hence by hiding the location of the subject of enunciation, Euro-American colonial expansion and domination has been able to construct a hierarchy of superior and inferior people around the world.

Spivak (1999) emphasized the role of cultural dimension of imperialism in the creation of The Third World. In the same wake, Said (1978) elaborated how the Orient becomes adjacent to Europe, how it is a place of “Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other” (p. 1). Edward Said (1978) observed that “the Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experience” (p. 1). Said presented orientalism as a male preserve, a discourse articulated exclusively by men that “feminized” the East by attributing to it qualities typically associated with Woman herself —irrationality, licentiousness, exoticism (p. 9). Recently, feminist scholars such as Billie Melman (1995) and Reina Lewis (2004) have augmented his work by examining the extent to which Western women participated in the construction of that discourse. Their attention to the ways in which gender and class mediated European representations of the Middle East during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has considerably enhanced our understanding of orientalism’s complexity. Whereas Said described a unified, monolithic discourse created by imperialist men, Melman and Lewis have shown orientalism to be multivocal and heterogeneous, open to inconsistency and rupture.

As the inferior “Other within” western societies, European women artists and travelers to the Middle East offered visions of the “Other without” that differed from hegemonic notions of the Orient, but that still affirmed the basic separation between West and East (Lewis, 2004, p. 25). During the Victorian era, for example, middle-class English women visitors “domesticated” the harem-- that archetypal symbol of unrestrained Eastern sexuality—by comparing it to an idealized, bourgeois home, a kind of female sanctuary. Such visions demonstrate, in Lewis’ (2004) words, that “there is room within the discourse for a feminine, and perhaps less virulently xenophobic, version of Orientalism that adapts and amends but does not remove the imperial imperative.” (p. 35).

African women still struggle to establish themselves as part of a global movement. In her critique of imperialism, Gayatri Spivak argued that colonialism started the process of global inequality and the socioeconomic impoverishment of Third World by incorporating the colonies

27 into the international division of labor, and that globalization is a continuation of this process (Spivak, 1999). The concept of colonialism, according to Bottomore (1983) can be viewed through two different historic periods. Earlier colonialisms were pre-capitalist, whereas modern colonialism was established alongside capitalism in Western Europe. Loomba (1998) noted that modern colonialism did more than extract tribute, goods and wealth from the countries that it conquered …it restructured the economies of the latter, drawing them into a complex relationship with their own, so that there was a flow of human and natural resources between colonized and colonial countries.

Aime Cesaire (2000) and Franz Fanon (1967) also argued that colonized people are not simply those whose labor has been appropriated but those in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its cultural originality. Cesaire (2000) further claimed that colonialism not only exploits, but dehumanizes and objectifies the colonized subjects, a process he refers to as “thingification” (p. 42).He elaborated “No human contact, but relations of domination and submission which turn the colonizing man into a classroom monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production” (p. 42). Kisiang’ani (2004) noted that the imposition of colonial rule in Africa was driven by its focus on the continuous emphasis on mythical stereotypes about Africa, and most of all on dismantling the African social, political and economic structures so as to create a European personality out of the African being. Power operates through normalizing relations of domination and systematizing ideas and practices that are then taken as given. However, although regarded as exploitation, colonialism was perceived as a necessary phase of human social development. Karl Marx regarded it as a brutal precondition for the liberation of poor societies (Loomba, 1998).

Referring to a process of cultural production and domination as the “worlding of the West as world”, Spivak (1999) berated the projection of the Western interests as the World’s interests, thereby becoming naturalized in the rest of the world. Kisiang’ani (2004) noted that post independent Africa is still in an intellectual crisis whereby its people can only study and understand the African man and woman through and from a European perspective. Efforts to interrogate the problems of Africa from an African standpoint continued to be frustrated by many European-tailored obstacles, including linguistic, political, economic and educational barriers.

Universalization has a common bias towards western or European influenced ways of thinking and approaches that disregard the intersections of gender, race, nation, class and other markers of difference (Bordas, 2007). For Spivak, this process conceals the construction and naturalization of Western dominance and supremacy, a process she refers to as “epistemic violence” of imperialism. She further argues that the outcome of this naturalization is a discourse of modernization in which colonialism is either ignored or placed securely in the past, so that we think it is over and does not affect, and has not affected, the construction of the present situation.

Alluding to Spivak, Baca Zinn & Dill (1994) observed that images and ideologies about women of color are used not only to control them but also to rationalize their subordinate position in society. Many African writers believed that feminist scholarship has created its very own African woman (Nnaemeka, 1994; Oyewumi, 2003; Sanjeev & Levitt (2008). The problem starts from the definition of feminism itself. Myra Marx Feree (2006) stated that activism for the purposes of challenging and changing women’s subordination to men is what identifies “feminism”: “it is a goal, that is, a target for social change” (p. 7). But most African women writers object to the use of patriarchy as the only form of oppression. Nnaemeka (1994) challenged the gap between theory and diversity, and argued that “theorizing and the subsequent ideologizing of feminism has culminated in the legitimation of the subject/object, self/other, center/margin dyads within the feminist movement itself” (p.302).

The perpetuation of binary opposition have persisted even in the so-called postmodern era. Grewal & Kaplan (1994) argued that some feminist practices continue to use colonial discourse critiques in order to equate the “colonized” with women, creating essentialist and monolithic categories that suppress issues of diversity, conflict and multiplicity within categories (p.47). Edward Said (1978) spoke of “flexible positional superiority” that puts one group in a powerful position, and, in his context, allows the Westerner never to lose the “relative upper hand” during all possible relationships (p. 8). He suggested that Orientalism operates with a purpose, as all representations do. For Said, the relationship between the occident and the orient is posited as the relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony (p. 5). Although we speak of equity as it relates to women’s issues, the main aspect is how Western women have put themselves in a position where they study other women they see as subordinate to them. For them, the lives of African women are not about how they live and

29 how their oppression manifests itself. Instead, they position themselves as privileged and want to act as saviors of these more oppressed women of the “Third World.”

Oyewumi (2003) argued that the burden from a feminist vantage point entails rescuing the exploited, helpless, brutalized and downtrodden African woman from the savagery of the African man and from primitive culture symbolized by barbaric customs such as female genital mutilation, women betrothal, and polygamy. This was evident by the way they position themselves as the creators of knowledge. Their capacity to create knowledge about Africa and Africans has been reinforced by their positional superiority.

When Western feminists take up the cause of “Third World” women they reinforce the subjugation of Third World women by denying them the right to articulate their own problems. They do not associate their position with the fact that they are from a first world, where the internationalization of a Western capitalist system originated. Oyewumi (2003) argued that what white women do not realize is that if they are motivated by women’s subordination in their own society to study “Other” women, it is their economic and racial dominance in the global system that make it possible. Western feminists take it for granted that it is a result of how far they have progressed as women in their society.

Struggle for Definitions The establishment of the Decade for Women in 1975 in Mexico City resulted in the laying out of an ambitious World Plan of Action on matters that involved women worldwide (Grewal, 1998). The goals involved the eradication of underdevelopment, the quest for peace, and the pursuit of equality for women in all forms of political, economic, and social life. Consecutive global conferences were held in periods of five years in Copenhagen (1980) and Nairobi (1985). The Nairobi Conference brought together women with diverse backgrounds as it was more represented, most probably due to proximity and costs for most Third World women.

The major bone of contention, according to Cagatay, Grown and Santiago (1986), was the recognition and acceptance that women have diverse perspectives, issues, and priorities. The questions that remained unanswered centered on whether or not women could speak of feminism(s) on a global scale and how they could understand the production and reception of diverse feminism(s) within a framework of transnational social/cultural/economic movements

(Cagatay, Grown & Santiago, 1996; Grewal & Kaplan, 1994). Cagatay et al. (1996) observed that most First World women advocated confining the forum to issues perceived as common to all women independent of nationality, race, and class. Conversely, a minority of First World and most Third World women argued that gender oppression cannot be separated from nationality, class, or racial oppression. Diversity and difference, not only by race and class, but also in national culture and policy, shape the interests that women define as their own (Feree & Tripp, 2006; Moghadam, 2005; Mohanty, 2003).

Nina Asher (2012) observed the irony that as the global North and South become closer and interdependent, it seems harder to cross borders and engage differences of culture, history, race, religion and nation. Kimberly Crenshaw (as cited in Wing, 2000) noted that the topic of globalization constitutes a racialized massive redistribution of wealth, power, and resources from the developing world to the developed; a form she called “economic apartheid” (p. 5). However, Moghadam, (2005) argued that most literature addresses globalization from different disciplinary, conceptual, and political vantage points, but rarely investigates the gender dimension of globalization. She advocates that globalization should be considered a gendered process, because it has not really explained the worldwide social movement of women in terms of globalization processes such as the feminization of labor, growing social inequalities, and increased access to the new information and computer technologies.

Said (1978) asserted that “we allow justly that the Holocaust has permanently altered the consciousness of our time: Why do we not accord the same epistemological mutation in what imperialism has done, and what Orientalism continues to do?” (p.xxii). Grewal & Kaplan (1994) argued that some feminist practices continue to use colonial discourse critiques in order to equate the “colonized” with women, creating essentialist and monolithic categories that suppress issues of diversity, conflict and multiplicity within categories (p. 47). Edward Said (1978) expressed the effects of hegemony as he speaks of “flexible positional superiority” that puts one group in a powerful position, and, in his context, allows the Westerner never to lose the “relative upper hand” during all possible relationships (p. 8).

Spivak (1999) asserted that the “beginning of Third World is post WWII, with “First” World growth patterns serving as history’s guide and goal” (p. 31). She further argues that this ideology fosters the discourse of “development” and policies of structural adjustment and free

31 trade which prompt Third World countries to buy (culturally, ideologically, socially and structurally) from the “first” a self-contained version of the West, ignoring both its complicity with and production by the imperialist project. The central position of the Western countries has set the pace of what is termed knowledge and reality as compared to other nation-states in the periphery. Marimba Ani (1994) noted “culture carries rules for thinking, and that if you could impose your culture on your victims you could limit the creativity of their vision, destroying their ability to act with will and intent and in their own interest” (p. 1). The ideological control of culture colonizes consciousness in ways that render historically arbitrary forms of class domination natural, normal, and in the best interests of the people who then assent to domination (Appelbaum & Robinson, 2005; Gramsci, 1971).

Hence, this sanctioned ignorance, which disguises the worlding of the world, places the responsibility for poverty upon the poor themselves and justifies the project of development of the Other as a “civilizing mission” (Andreotti, 2011; Said, 1978). Bailey & Cuomo (2008) argued that although we speak of equity as it relates to women’s issues, the main aspect is how Western women have put themselves in a position where they study other women they see as subordinate to them. The colonial power changes the subaltern’s perception of self and reality and legitimizes its cultural supremacy in the epistemic violence of creating an “inferior” other and naturalizing these constructs (Bhabha, Fanon, (1967) Said, (1978) & Spivak, (1999).

African women are arguing that when Western women speak simply as women, without specifying their location (e.g. white, middle class women) the meaning of what they say is often misunderstood and taken out of its context as representing all women. Spivak (1999) showed in her critique that attempts to “speak for the subaltern, to enable the subaltern to speak or even to listen to the subaltern, can very easily end up silencing the subaltern” (p. 70). She claimed that the subaltern cannot speak in a way that would carry authority or meaning for non-subalterns without altering the relations of power/knowledge that constitute the subaltern in the first place. Western feminists do not associate their position with the fact that they are from a first world, where the internationalization of a Western capitalist system originated.

Oyewumi (2003) argued that what white women do not realize is that if they are motivated by women’s subordination in their own society to study “Other” women, it is their economic and racial dominance in the global system that make it possible. Western feminists

32 take it for granted that it is a result of how far they have progressed as women in their society. Joe Kincheloe’s (2008) Politics of Knowledge suggested that we live in an era of disinformation, where self-interested data is distributed by those with most power and resources. It, therefore, warrants an understanding and an interrogation of the underlying structures that maintain the inequalities of power among different races, ethnicity, class and sexual orientation. The question that African women scholars ask is why the inclusion of African women in global feminist scholarship has not increased their participation or presence on the global arena (Nnaemeka, 1994; Oyewumi. 2003)

Feminist scholars of color (Collins, 2000; Harding, 1991) argued that gender, race and class are inseparable in understanding the experiences of minority women in higher education. Oyewumi (2003) believed that imperialism is gendered when the political, economic, and social character of dominance is constructed on racial and gender lines, when white women exploit racial and institutional privileges to racialize others, to claim advantages, and to assert authority over women of color. U.S. universities and colleges have become more diverse (Hune, 1997), but the culture of academe has changed very little in response to the new demographics. The argument has been that higher education is a contested and politicized space. “Its institutions remain uncomfortable with difference, especially with efforts to change student and faculty recruitment, curriculum, and disciplines” (Hune, 1997, p. 33). Nkiru Nzegwu, 2003 stated that “voice, gender identity, and most especially skin color are discursively dispersed and subsequently marshaled to determine whether one is worthy of speech, of respect, and even of admission” (p. 104).

Identity Formation J.S. Frideres (1981) distinguishes between self and personal identity. He defines self- identity as a cognitive developmental process that is partly maturational and partly socially influenced. As this part of the self can be referred to as “personality” (p. 2), it reflects how various dimensions of self make up a pattern of self-dimensions, such as self-image, self- confidence. He stated that the development of self-identity is an internal process that allows the individual to establish his/her sense of placement in the larger cosmos. Social identity, conversely, is that of socially constructed identity by others. Although related to the first, social identity is laden with “markers” and will make others begin to tag the individual with certain

33 attributes. The social world has an impact on personal identity which is devoid of social markers. Frideres (1981) noted that there is an importance in social definitions, the importance of labels and the power mobilized by those who are in a position to create, sustain, and delete labels and the meaning they confer.

The environment where one lives influences one’s identity over time. The adaptation may be conscious or it may be reflected in the more or less automatic cumulative experiences. As an example, one’s ethnic or racial identity will determine the relative closeness you feel toward other members of your group or the type and intensity of contact you have with members of your group (Jones, 1997). Frideres (1981) argued that a parallel creation of identity may come about through a “reactive” process, that is, the individual reacts to a time series of events that he/she experiences over time. During the process of identity formation, the pre-encounter stage has statuses not yet clear to the individual as to whether it is stigma or valued. Once an encounter takes place in the second stage, the individual begins to learn the value of the status. It is at this crucial stage when the individual must decide to immerse him/herself into the status and social group or remain apart from it. Hence identities are constructed and change as a consequence of both internal and external pressures.

As Helms (1995) pointed out, who one is depends, in part, on what group you belong to and what socio-political position that group has in society (and globally, too?) as well as how you are socialized into that group. As the individual continues to participate in society, he/she must make the decision to “internalize” the status and act accordingly, to reject the status, or attempt to take on a bi-cultural identity. However, it is important to note that there may be “master” traits (Frideres, 1981) that are primary sources of providing an individual with his/her identity and guiding others as to how to act and react to the individual. As Frideres, (1981) noted, these master traits could be those attributes held by the individual that are determined by historical events as well as external social actors that remain important traits no matter what the context is. The master traits thus become the first filters of other people’s actions. Some people have what Frideres calls “double or multiple jeopardy.” As an example, for me this would be Black and female; attributes that have high salience but low value in the society that I live!

Mead (1934) stated that “The self is something which has a development; it is not initially there, at birth, but arises in the process of social experience and activity, that is, it

34 develops in the given individual as a result of his/her relations to that process as a whole and to other individuals within that process” (p. 135). We all belong to many subcultures and we declare our membership to these groups in our everyday lives. Each group has definable values, beliefs, and outputs- stories, myths, and histories. Each person has multiple alliances and identifications with groups that shift through time and social context.

Women worldwide have formed a women’s movement based on the “universal sisterhood” model. This model is based on the belief that women everywhere suffer restrictions, oppression, and discrimination because they are living in patriarchal societies. Gender gets to be used as the sole influence on women’s lives. Jones (1997) predicted that group identification reduces feelings of marginality and produces a greater degree of psychological health for stigmatized groups. Yet differences of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, age, nation, geographic region, and religion shape women’s experiences. Recognizing that women are not a homogenous group raises questions about the grounds of affiliation among women. Is it easier for different groups of women to claim solidarity when living in different parts of the world than when coexisting in similar situations? Historically some groups are stigmatized and cannot be viewed as authentic knowledge constructors.

Frideres (1981) defined stigma as the identification of a trait or attribute of an individual that is used to differentiate individuals or groups into different categories or other boundaried social entities and has a negative value. One particular aspect of stigma is that is it negatively responded to by some or all segments of society, and one of the consequences imposed upon individuals who have stigmas is that they, either as an individual or group, become marginalized in the larger society. Immigrants by choice or coercion embark upon a sojourn that leads them into a circumscribed community; boundaried community by race, ethnicity, religion, and language. Women’s geographical locations are connected to political and socioeconomic power associated with the broader world order.

Global North/South divide is less a geographic division more than a political and socioeconomic distinction between developed and developing nations. It is this hierarchical ranking of identities that results in privilege for some and limitations or discrimination for others through the operation of systems of inequality and privilege… and this include the isms. A universal sisterhood implies the presence or occurrence of solidarity everywhere or existing in all

35 situations under all conditions. Bone of contention: can we create a global feminist movement free of asymmetrical (unequal) power relations as a result of the histories of colonialism and imperialism that construct women’s lives and separate women from each other? Can these women come together and form alliances as equals?

Theoretical Frameworks In my endeavor to introduce the Southern African women in the Diaspora, I used a transnational feminist framework and postcolonial theory to challenge ethnocentrism of Western feminist scholarship by emphasizing on the oppressions of colonialism, neocolonialism, nationalism and multinational corporations, and stressing on the importance of exploring differences and interconnectedness of women throughout the world. Postcolonial theory is about the need to challenge and even reject the Eurocentrism at the center as legitimate norms for all (Cesaire, 2000; Reilly, Russel, Chehay, & McDermott, 2011). Most postcolonial theorists (Spivak, Said, Bhabha) refer to postcolonial as a term that has emerged to help raise consciousness about the Eurocentric monopoly and its exclusion that have been formalized around privilege and authority. In this project, it is also about the recovering and reclaiming of knowledge and voices made silent by Eurocentric monopoly and related privileges (Reilly et. al., 2011).

I use postcolonial theory as a decolonizing methodology which deconstructs the operations of Eurocentrism in colonial and neo-colonial polities, that develops alternative analyses and propositions based on different ways of knowing (Hatch, 2002). Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) asserts that “decolonization is about centering our concerns and world views and then coming to know and understand theory and research from our own perspectives and for our own purposes” (p.39). Concurring with Donaldson (1992), there is need to decolonize feminism in order to produce a counter-narrative that does not reify and privilege the singularized hermeneutic truths that feminism’s imperialism has tended to articulate. Postcolonial feminist theories analyze the limits of modernist paradigms and deconstruct the naturalized boundaries that are presumed to be normative (Grewal & Kaplan, 1994; Kim, 2007). They then challenge and unravel these modernist frames, essentialist categories, including representation of women and cultures in binary terms (Kim, 2007; Mohanty, 2003). Feminist writers have shown that these condescending depictions lock African women, as well as other Third World women in “a

36 distinct temporal, spatial, and historical frame” as people who are assumed to have little agency or differentiation, and who are cast as being “special” others (Radcliffe, 1994, p. 27).

Valentine Moghadam (2011) defined transnational feminist action as involving feminism across borders, and entails recognition of different contexts and priorities (p. 18).Transnational feminist praxis tend to center issues of representation and discourse (Kim, 2007; Nagar, 2002). They emphasized the need to connect issues of subjectivity and identity with institutional, geopolitical, material, and cultural practices of power and privilege (Kim, 2007). Nagar (2002) stated that the challenge is the “epistemological dilemma” of whether and how women’s struggles in Third World contexts can be represented “accurately” and through which theoretical frameworks. She further argued that feminist scholarship in the United States has contributed to this inability to talk across worlds by avoiding these questions (p. 179). Transnational feminist praxis further illustrates the distinctive ways in which neocolonial relations of power and political economic structures of domination and subordination combine to shape gender politics of inequality, difference, and resistance in specific communities (Nagar, 2002). Hence, transnational feminist studies have recast their analyses on the lives and voices of the marginalized subjects situated in particular places rather than on the general process of economic globalization (Kim, 2007; Nagar, 2002). However, the challenge on women’s alliances across borders remains questionable in the face of unequal and hierarchical world systems (Mohanty, 2004). This is more so as the common feature of transnational feminism is international solidarity: the extension of support to “sisters” across borders (Moghadam, 2011).

Chapter Summary The discussion of literature highlights the problems and ambivalence universal reference to women under the ambit of globalization. The history of colonialism and othering has resulted in hierarchical construction of relationships which become based on nationality. Although a global women’s movements has been highlighted through the women’s conferences, not all categories of women have been able to table their concerns at these conferences. Depending on who speaks and from where, some groups become included, yet remain alienated in terms of meaningful knowledge construction on issues affecting them. This literature has attempted to provide the gap that is missing in the definition and meaning of global, and how imperialism and colonialism have become continue to perpetuate divisions among different categories of women.

Chapter Three: Methodology & Methods

The word itself, “research”, is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary

— Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 2012

Methodology Paradigm influences and methodology. Qualitative research provides information about the “human” side of an issue, that is, the beliefs, opinions, emotions and the relationship of individuals (Denzin & Lincoln 2000). Denzin & Lincoln (1994) defined qualitative research as a “situated activity that locates the observer in the world” (p. 3). Hence the researcher’s perception of the world and experiences in terms of what is considered knowledge affect the methodology chosen for the research. Qualitative methods identify intangible factors such as social norms, socioeconomic status, gender roles, and ethnicity (Lincoln & Guba 1985:21).

My interactions with colleagues in certain spaces continued to remind me of my many identities; immigrant, post-colonial, or even diaspora. Whatever the case, engendered in these identities, as Homi Bhabha (1994) notes, are undergirded by a “deeper sense of historical displacement … halfway between not being defined …” (p. 15). As a woman, and of color and coming from Africa, my encounters with colleagues in the academy have been complicated by judgments on what I can do or not do. I embarked on this research to listen to the stories that Southern African women tell about their experiences in U.S. higher education institutions. I chose to do a narrative inquiry to explore how we, as Southern African women construct our perspective realities in a society where equality is seen as prevailing. The study also assisted me in reconciling my own experiences and made sense of some controversies that have plagued my own conscience.

The epistemological and ethical assumptions of this qualitative study are inspired by critical and feminist epistemologies. Feminist critical discourses are concerned with the uneven relations between power, cultural texts, practices and processes, and the varying effects on the lives of women (Lee & Shaw, 2011: Mohanty, 2003). I employ a transnational feminist framework and postcolonial theory to challenge ethnocentrism of Western feminist scholarship

38 by emphasizing the oppressions of colonialism, neocolonialism, nationalism, as well as stressing on the importance of exploring differences and interconnectedness of women throughout the world. Feminist critical discourses focus on the uneven relations between power, cultural texts, practices, and processes, and the different effects on the lives of women.

In this section, I introduce feminist methodologies and clarify the way that it influences my methodology. I then summarize narrative inquiry, sampling, data collection methods and a brief description of how I analyze the data.

Feminist methodologies. Feminist research is a critical, political and praxis-oriented methodology as it involves a critique of unexamined assumptions about women and dominant forms of knowing and doing (Burns & Walker, 2005). They have a commitment to drawing attention to the deep and intricate connections between knowledge and power/privilege and to making problematic gender in society and social institutions in order to develop theories that advance practices of gender justice (Burns and Walker, 2005; Collins, 1990; Harding, 1997). Feminist methodologies arose as challenges to traditional research methods founded on the search for certainty and a refusal of the personal and the political (Burns & Walker, 2005).

Developments in feminist epistemologies (Harding, 1987), as well as historical emergence of diverse feminist theories (Hesse- Biber, 2007; Collins, 1990) have shaped feminist methodologies. Harding postulated her third stage of feminist postmodernism which included the concept of difference after standpoint theory was criticized for its unclear definition of “experience”. The same tools of positionality, voice, and experience that enabled women to critique male-centered knowledge, were the same tools that questioned the right of white, middle-class women to speak for all women (Burns & Walker, 2005; Hesse-Biber, 2007). The questions of who can know, and whose life experiences were included and whose were left out in informing the knowledge produced from a perspective of difference among women themselves were raised. Feminist researchers and scholars had to find ways to engage with difference and complexity while not losing sight of the broader issues around women’s oppression.

Many women of color in the U.S. (Anzaldua, 1987; hooks, 1990; Mohanty, 1988) argued that early feminist research failed to explore the important interconnections among categories of

39 difference in terms of gender, ethnicity, race and class. They also cautioned against the tendency to reduce all women to one category with shared characteristics, yet it was salient for research to give voice to women who had been left out of mainstream research models. The “other” and the knowledge they possessed needed to be validated. Patricia Hill Collins (1990) used the “matrix of domination” framework to conceptualize difference along a range of interlocking inequalities of race, class, and gender. She noted that it is only through collectively examining the intricately connected matrix of difference that we can truly understand a given individual’s life experiences. Hesse-Biber (2007) noted that in the first decade of the 21st century, feminists expanded their focus on difference to include issues of sexual preference and disability, as well as nationality and geographical region. There has been a growing interest among feminist researchers on the importance of women’s experiences in a global context with respect to issues of imperialism, colonialism, and national identity (Bhavnani, 1993; Hasse-Biber, 2007). The issue was that feminists working in a global context had to pay particular attention to power and difference.

I specifically selected critical feminist methodologies of postcolonial and transnational feminism for their concern in highlighting the importance of researching difference. The underlying assumptions of critical feminist theories suggest that, first, experiential knowledge of women or their unique voice is valid, legitimate, and critical for understanding the persistence of inequality, and that these unique voices are often demonstrated through storytelling and counternarratives (Mackinnon, 1983). Secondly, history and historical contexts must be taken into consideration in order to challenge practices that affect women (Mackinnon, 1983). There is an emphasis in including the “other” in the research which calls for the transformative process of research that lead toward both challenging the dominant forms of knowledge construction and empowering Southern African women in academia. As McLaren and Kincloe (2000) observed, critical methodologies seek to expose dominant power relationships and knowledge that oppress with the goal of “critical emancipation,” creating an environment in which the oppressed group “gain the power to control their own lives in solidarity with a justice-oriented community” (p. 282).

Within the context of globalization, it is necessary to draw important lessons about feminist epistemology and methodology that will enable making connections and linkages across variously differentiated communities and places. Issues of race, imperialism, colonialism and

40 nation/states are particularly important categories to be viewed in an era of globalization, yet they remain overlooked and under-theorized in mainstream feminist scholarship (Kim, 2007; Nnaemeka, 2004). Using a transnational feminist praxis, I favor an analytical focus away from issues of representation embedded in mainstream narratives and move toward comparing localized places and relations that are simultaneously affected by the same global process. In other words the African women’s voices in this research speak to the complexity of an imperialist project by exposing it as a question of location (Nnaemeka, 2005). Which still remains complex because, as scholars, we are aware of the challenges of transnational feminist dialogues where the speakers (usually from the Global North) continue to hear their own voices, and not those of their “interlocutors” (Nnaemeka, 2005, p. 5).

Narrative inquiry. Narrative has been defined as a distinct form of discourse; as meaning-making through the shaping or ordering of experience (Creswell, 2007; Hatch, 2002). It is a way of organizing actions and events over time (Chase, 1988). Clandinin & Connelly (2000) described narrative inquiry as “a collaboration between researcher and participants, over time, in a place or series of places, and in social interaction with milieus” (p. 20). Narrative inquiry is grounded in the understanding that humans make sense of their lives through story telling (Hatch, 2002). In saying that “narrative imitates life, and life imitates narrative” (Bruner, 1987, p. 31), Bruner is stating that people build their narratives around their understanding of the episodic and temporal qualities of lived experience, as well as that human beings live their lives in ways that can be understood and communicated narratively. Narrative inquiry is most suitable for my study as it affords my participants an opportunity to recount their subjective experience as well as provide a more complex picture of social life (Hendry, 2007). This sentiment is also shared by Hatch (2002) and Frazer (2000) who argued that narrative research presents opportunities of representing complexity of individual lives in text and a plurality of truths as people make sense of their experiences differently. Since individual experience is unique and the meanings that they attach to their experience is spatially and contextually determined, Sandelowski’s (1991) perceived narratives as stories that include a temporal ordering of events and an effort to make something out of these events; to render, or to signify, the experiences of persons-in-flux in a personally and culturally coherent, plausible manner” (p. 162). In tandem with Mutua and Swadener (2004), my attempt is to inscribe a new language of research that valorizes Southern

African women’s experiences, thereby positioning them squarely and actively at the center and apex of discourses that produce and/or define them.

Most standpoint theorists (Harding, 1991; Hartsock, 1998) observed that the marginalized groups of people have less interest in preserving the status quo and occupy a unique position from which to view the culture from which they are marginalized. Hence, for them, standpoint refers not to the perspective or experience, but to the understanding of perspective and experience as part of a larger social setting. The pleasure of narrative is that it seamlessly translates “knowing” into “telling about” the way things really happened (Hatch, 2002, p. 28). Because knowledge is often a matter of position (Collins, 1990), suppressing the knowledge produced by any suppressed groups makes it easier for the dominant groups to rule, because the seemingly absence of an independent consciousness in the oppressed can be taken to mean that subordinate groups willingly collaborate in their own victimization (Collins, 1990; hooks, 2000).

Hence, narratives also serve as counternarratives to the “master narratives" that have been produced. The aim is to construct social knowledge by “giving a voice” to those who have never offered their perspective. Giving a voice does not mean that these women have never spoken, but it refers to allowing their stories to be included in the narratives of a global women’s movement. McCorkel & Myers (2003) stated that knowledge emerging from the dominant class’s unique experiences and interests permeate our (marginalized groups) conceptions of the social world and influences how we interpret our lived experiences. Knowledge seeking requires democratic participatory politics so that the dominant will not continue to dictate the pace on how to determine societal narratives.

Feminist critical discourses are concerned with the uneven relations between power, cultural texts, practices and processes, and the varying effects on the lives of women. Culture can no longer be separated from politics, power and domination nor can it be studied outside of its relationship to everyday lives and social inequities (Collins, 1990; Mohanty, 2003; Oyewumi, 2003). Since African women’s voices are not projected in the theories that define them, it is necessary to provide this platform to make the voices of the marginalized be heard. Since narrative inquiry involves the interaction between the researcher and the narrator in meaning- making, the aspect of co-constructing knowledge cannot be underestimated. Interpretive discourses “refer to those discourses in which the main task of research is to understand how

42 others make sense of their world, with a further assumption that people construct their own worlds in some way” (Benton & Craib, 2001, p. 81). As I spoke to these women, I learned that they have their own language to talk about experiences of being discriminated against that center on being viewed from a Third World perspective. Some of the women I spoke to indicated that “friendship” with white western women was more maternalistic and condescending to be viewed as anywhere near equal.

This discourse claims that universal, absolute realities are unknown, and that the objects of inquiry are individual perspectives or constructions of reality. Hence, multiple realities exist that are inherently unique because individuals construct and experience the world from their vantage points. Understandings of the world are based on conventions, and that “truth, is in fact, what we agree it is” (Hatch, 2002, p. 15). In explaining the central idea of critical discourses, Hatch (2002) postulated that the material world is made up of historically situated structures that have a real impact on the life chances of individuals.

As the structures are perceived to be real, social action resulting from their perceived realness leads to differential treatment of individuals based on race, gender and social class. Feminist critical theories focus on exposing material differences gender makes in women’s life chances, and critical scholars focus on issues related to race, nation, ethnicity, and social class (Guba & Lincoln, 1994; Hatch, 2002). The purpose of this kind of inquiry is to raise the consciousness of those being oppressed because of historically situated structures of race, gender, and class. The idea of raising consciousness is both to demystify and provide direction and hope. Hence, when meaning has been placed on these women’s stories, critical feminist frameworks make use of such stories to raise awareness and promote resistance. These interrogate ways in which the subordinate groups resist and respond to structural and cultural domination (Brabazon, 2005).

In this era of global issues, there is a growing emphasis on the importance of understanding globalization from the situated viewpoint of oppression and resistance among the very people that are marginalized on the basis of race, gender, class and nation. In this case, the woman who leaves her “home” getting to the diaspora, in many cases loses “the room of one’s own” (Wolfe, 1989) that belonged to her in her home country. She attaches herself to an alien world, the new global space. Although they may find “friends” within the women of the world,

43 they still lose the “moral and political value intrinsic to home space” (Hierro and Marquez, 1994). Since critical discourses is one of many that possess conscious political intentions that aim toward emancipatory goals, it is worthwhile to decolonize (Arnefired, et.al. 2004; Donaldson, 1992; Mutua & Swadener, 2004; Smith, 2012) the Western academy and include an array of voices in promoting a global movement that is inclusive of all women, irrespective of their ethnicity or nationality.

Nnaemeka (2005) argued that works by Western women in the name of global feminism fail to fully engage in race, class and nation analysis of the colonial system. I make calls for decolonizing feminism in order to produce counter-narratives that do not reify and privilege the singularized hermeneutic truths that feminism’s imperialism has tended to articulate. As most African writers (Nnaemeka, 2005; Oyewumi, 2004) noted, the relationship between Western and African women should emphasize less what white women did or said they did, but what white women in the system represented. Since anthropological research has functioned as a discourse for producing particular research agendas and establishing interpretive frames for ongoing study and representation of African women, it is time to redirect the Foulcadian gaze and re-author experiences that have been only minimally presented.

Methods sampling. According to Miles and Huberman (1994), sampling, as it relates to research, refers to the selection of individuals, units, and/or settings to be studied. When I constructed my sample I considered the possibility of the small numbers of women from this region who might be studying in the US. I then utilized purposive sampling. Patton, (2001) stated that “the logic and power of purposeful sampling lies in selecting information-rich (emphasis by author) cases for in-depth study. Information-rich cases are those from which one can learn a great deal about issues of central importance to the central purpose of the research” (p. 169). In order to meet this criteria, I made sure to strictly confine my search to the individuals with the required criteria for the research, that is, Southern African women graduate students in or who have been in U.S. higher education for about a year.

Considering sampling difficulties when dealing with smaller and geographically diverse groups such as this, I opted to use a snowball or chain referral sampling to get to the number I

44 needed. Bhutta (2012) defined snowball sampling as a chain-referral technique that accumulates data through existing social structures, in other words, it identifies cases or people of interest from people who know cases that are information-rich, or who would be a good interview participant (Patton, 2001). My initial contact was from Zimbabwean, who in turn nominated others from various countries I interviewed. It was very interesting that participant two referred me to participant three that I was referred to by participant one. It just confirmed my observation that there are not many Southern African women in higher education. I also had to solicit the help of males from other countries in Africa who are in higher education to contact their women friends in higher education in the U.S. It paid off and I was able to find three very engaging participants. Two women, one from South Africa and one from Namibia, could not keep our skype interviews, and would not respond to my emails after that. But I was very fortunate to speak and learn from six smart, diligent women who have contributed so much to the academy. I will explain later why I refer to these women as “smart” and/or “diligent”.

study participants. My initial study population comprised of ten women from the southern region of Africa. I was able to be in contact with eight women, and only able to interview six of them as the two could not keep our appointment. My participants had to either be in graduate school for at least a year, or should have gone through graduate school. The major reason I wanted to talk to Southern African women in a U.S. higher education institution was two-fold. Firstly, when I relocated to the U.S., I had struggled with my own insecurity among a group of women who had made me believe that I could have a safe space in academia as a member of the global family. I was trying to make sense of where I fit in the grand scheme of things. So I launched this research project not only to listen to the participants, but to also understand my own craziness. Secondly, I was very concerned about the fact that when reference is made to “African woman” it mostly refers to West African women who have made in-roads in academia. In Mapping African Feminisms, Obioma Nnaemeka refers to issues affecting African women as multifold and cultural depending on where they are from; East, South, West or North Africa. For this reason, I aim to bring awareness to the absence and struggles of Southern African women in academia.

The focus of my study was to collect narratives from these women who are/were graduate students in United States higher education institutions for about a year. I was able to talk to 3

45 women from Zimbabwe, and three others each from Zambia, Malawi and Madagascar. Below I will present a brief profile of my participants including a sneak peek into the material and cultural condition of their countries.

Christine of Madagascar : Christine comes from The Republic of Madagascar, which is an island in the Indian Ocean off the coast of South East Africa. She has been working for her Ph.D. for six years now. She is a sciences major and her research interests are in microbiology. She has been in the US for quite some time, from when she started her undergraduate classes.

Madagascar was colonized by the French in 1883, and gained its independence in 1960. In 2012, the island had an estimated population of 22 million, 90% of which live on less than U.S. $2 per day. Like many African countries, Madagascar’s political transitions have been marked by problems since it gained independence from France in 1960. There have been several disputed elections, an impeachment, two military coups, and an assassination. And as the case, the political crises have detrimental effects to the local economy, international relations, and most importantly to the Malagasy living standards. Madagascar has one major university which has five regional campuses across the country. It is said to be overcrowded, totals about 40,000 students for a capacity of 26,000. The report referred to the quality of education in Madagascar as weak.

Odala of Malawi: Odala is a Malawian doing her first year nursing administration program at Ph.D. level. She did her undergraduate program in Malawi and has been in the US for more than six years now for her masters’ program. She is a strong advocate for her country folks to be allowed to participate and map their own destiny in areas of health and general decision- making. Her belief is that Malawians have so much to say about what they want but they are not given the opportunity to voice it out. She hopes to go back and teach nurses in her country about specific issues that affect Malawians.

Malawi, nicknamed “the warm heart of Africa” is considered one of the world’s least developed countries. As of June 2013, it had an estimated population of 17 million, 85% of who live in rural areas and depend on subsistence farming. Since it is land-locked, its economy is agro-based, with women and children providing most of the labor. Primary education is not compulsory, but children are encouraged to attend at least the first five years of school. Drop out

46 rates are higher for girls than boys, due to gendered roles where the girls are expected to be home-makers. There are four public universities in Malawi, but the enrolment of girls is poor. According to a UNICEF Report (2013) only 9% of women receive primary education. 5% complete secondary education and less than 1% have received tertiary education. The adult literacy stands at 44.1% for women and 77, 1% for men.

Kondwane of Zambia: Kondwane is a bubbly Zambian who came to the US for an undergraduate program in chemical engineering. She feels excited for breaking tradition, and she looks up to her father and brother. She works very hard and has received the highest honor for her undergraduate studies. Currently as a TA she lectures to undergraduate students on chemical engineering.

The Republic of Zambia is a land-locked, with its economy based on the copper mining industry. Agriculture, too plays an important role in the economy. It was a British colony that gained its independence in 1964. It is one of the urbanized countries in Southern Africa with 44% of people concentrated in urban areas. The rural area is sparsely populated. There are three public universities in Zambia, where students are selected on the basis of ability. Educational opportunities beyond secondary school are thus limited as the competition for places is intense. There has also been an introduction of fees in the late 1990s that has made education inaccessible

Zorro, Mati and Nya of Zimbabwe: Zorro was a teacher before she migrated to the U.S. She worked on her masters’ and Ph.D. in the five years she has been in the U.S. Her research interests center on the relationship between ethnic identity, perceived acceptance and sociocultural adjustment of African students in the U.S. She can recount her journey from the rural girl in Zimbabwe to a member of faculty at a U.S. university and how each day and each encounter make her a different person every day.

Mati is a chemical analyst who works night shifts. She did her masters’ degree in chemistry when she arrived in the U.S. more than ten years ago. She values the U.S. practical side of the theoretical foundation she gained in her home country, Zimbabwe. Her migration has taught her to appreciate her culture, resulting in her refusing to conduct our interview in English.

Nya is a chemical analyst and she has been in the U.S. since the late 1980s. She came to the U.S. for undergraduate studies in chemistry and then returned to Zimbabwe to teach for about

47 a couple of years. Then she returned to the U.S. for a master’s program and has been working in the U.S.

Zimbabwe is landlocked and was a British colony. She gained independence in 1980, and was nicknamed “the bread basket of Africa” for its agricultural production. All that collapsed in the late 1990s when the government embarked on an unorganized land reform program. This saw the minority white farmers who owned tracks and tracks of land being dispossessed and land being allocated to the majority black people who had no clue on what farming entailed. Thus most of the land was underutilized destroying the agro-based economy. Most people now live under the poverty datum line.

data collection. My source of data was solely narratives presented during conversational interviews with the six participants. After they were referred to me I sent the participants letters or recruitment (Appendix B). After their confirmation to freely participate in my research, I emailed them the consent forms which they had to sign, scan and return to me (Appendix C). We then agreed on interview dates, and I gave them preference to talk via skype, telephone or meeting in person, depending on proximity. I asked them to set aside at least an hour for the interviews, which I emphasized to be conversational. The emphasis was less on structured interviews and schedules to allow new and unexpected discoveries during the conversational interviews. I had skype interviews with three of the participants, Zoro, Kondwane, and Odala Then I had face to face interviews with Christine and Nya. The last interview with Mati was by telephone since she was always on the road to and from work. It was not just a great experience, but an opportunity to make lasting acquaintances with great women whom I would otherwise have never met.

I was particularly committed to the ethical principles as required by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) (Appendix A) regarding sensitivity to the population of my study who have received tremendous assistance from the same institutions that they talked about. The issue of consent to participate is of paramount importance, because the sensitive nature of the information requires that the participants willingly and knowingly get into this with informed consent. My idea of carrying out this type of research (narrative inquiry) is an attempt to pursue ethical research that decolonizes by not speaking for the affected. Carrying out decolonizing research stand at the center of what Homi Bhabha (1994) calls the “the beginning of presencing” of what

48 has been referred to as a “disaharmonious, restive, unharnessable knowledge that is produced at the ex-centric site of neo/post/colonial resistance” (Mutua and Swadener,2004).

At the beginning of each interview I emphasized again the consent issues and that they were participating voluntarily. I also informed them that the interviews were more of a discussion that I would be voice recording. I told them that the recordings and consent forms were all confidential, and I was going to use pseudonyms. Although I had semi-structured questions for all my participants, I did not use them in any set order. I asked some or all of them according to the flow of the conversation. At times some participants would touch into the next question and I would skip it, or they would say something that would raise a new question.

At the end of the interviews I always asked them to say anything that they might have missed or any additions or even their thoughts. I also informed them that I would contact them again most probably for clarification of any arising issues or for additional questions depending on what might arise during the data analysis process. I also told them that I would be sending copies of transcribed conversations for “member checking” to confirm that the conversation reflected what we talked about. After gathering the narratives, I then retold the stories of the participants by structuring them into a narrative chronology that captured their realities. (Frazer, 2004). And as promised, I destroyed all the documents and audio recordings to maintain my participants’ privacy.

I transcribed “verbatim” but I disregarded stutters and stammers of participants who were trying to construct a comprehensible English statement. I noted issues like a pause, a hesitation, something that had to do with the actual response rather than about the response. The reason I did this was because I took into consideration that English is not my participants’ first language and they would be struggling to find the right words, or as they did, kept restructuring statements to reflect what they meant. So I have my question and answers almost well-constructed from my own interpretation. One particular participant from Zimbabwe, Mati, refused to speak in English saying that she won’t be able to fully express herself. So as we interviewed we oscillated between Shona and English. The final translation of the conversation rested with me, although my participant did look at it and authenticated our conversation.

data analysis. Initially when I started working on this research, I intended to work around themes that historicize the concept of power, knowledge, difference, identity, agency and resistance within a macro-context of globalization. I even went further and tried to construct my semi-structured guide questions around those themes. However, when I started the interviews, asking additional questions that arose from the conversational interviews, more information was presented. As I analyzed the data through coding, new themes of liminality, language, belonging, self-identity, and collaboration in a global world emerged.

I discovered later that the analysis stage of a narrative inquiry project presents particular challenges. It took me some time and effort to find the most suitable method of data analysis and the presentation of the findings. Huttumen, Heikkinen, and Syrjala (2002) suggested that narrative research is not a method, but rather it is a loose frame of reference, amoeba- like…Speaking about her own struggles with a method of data analysis for her project, Myfanwy Maple (2010) noted the absence of a linear path in narrative inquiry as she highlighted an interactive, engaging, one-step-forward, two-steps-back kind of journey.

As I began the process, I concurred with Hunter (2010) that the theoretical underpinning of narrative inquiry is the belief that telling a story about oneself involves telling a story about choice and action, which have an integrally moral and ethical dimension (p.44). Whereas science concerns itself with the establishment of truth, narrative’s concern is to endow experience with meaning (Bleakley, 2005). Hence the aim of narrative inquiry is not to generalize truth but to “sing up many truths or narratives” (Byrne-Armstrong, 2001:112). As Liamputtong & Ezzy (2005) note about the social constructivist perspective, “narratives sit at the intersection of history, biography, and society” (p.132), because they are dependent on the context of the teller and the listener, and hence are not intended to represent “truth” with a capital T.

I finally settled on some of Chase’s (2005) five interconnected, analytic lenses used in narrative inquiry. The first lens focuses on the narrative as a vehicle for the uniqueness of human actions. The second is on the narrator’s voice and the verbal action and choices made by the narrator. The third lens focuses on the ways in which the narratives are constrained by social circumstances, whereas the fourth lens treats narratives as socially situated, interactive performances between the researcher and the participant. The final lens focuses on researchers as

50 narrators as seen in autoethnographic research. In this project I chose to lean on the second and third lenses, that is, on the way participants told narratives that described their thoughts, feelings and behavior in relation to their experiences in U.S. higher education, as well as on the way those narratives were constrained and influenced by the society they were in at the given time.

After each interview, I transcribed the audio-tapes and summarized each participant’s narrative in their own words. I listened to the audios several times to ensure that I captured my participants’ stories correctly. In the process I noted and coded the common themes arising from the participants’ narratives, as well as recording my own impressions of what was going on for the participants, for me, and between us as the narratives unfold. I recorded my thoughts and insights about the data in an interview journal and attached these to each participant’s file. As a data reduction process, I wrote memos on each theme and then later made connections among the memos according to how they relate to one another, and how they connect to the issues of experience I am addressing in the research. I was able to send transcribed copies to the participants as “member-check” (Hatch, 2000) to ensure that it was a reflection of our interview conversation. This culminated in a draft summary, putting those interpretations in my memos into a story that others will, hopefully, understand (Hatch, 2002).

Reflexivity, Ethics and Trustworthiness As a researcher, my positionality and experiences shape my research focus. While I ensured that women’s voices were heard, I also struggled to strive for self-consciousness through constant critical reflection about my own experiences as a graduate student in a U.S. higher education institution. Representing and interpreting another’s voice is not a simple task and needs to be done with respect and humility. I’m grateful for the trust bestowed on me by these women by letting me into their world.

My reflexivity, one of the fundamental concerns of a feminist ethnography, not only reflects important ethical considerations but also governs what knowledge claims I am make. Hatch (2002) noted that “the capacities to be reflexive, to keep track of one’s influence on a setting, to bracket one’s biases and to monitor one’s emotional responses” (p. 10), are essential to the integrity of qualitative research. For instance, the geopolitics of my movement from Southern Africa to the United States have influenced my own position. I have been in a U.S higher education institution during the past four years. Thus, the voices of the study participants will

51 always be in relation to my voice, and so my own knowledge claims will always be made from my situated standpoint. Guba & Lincoln (1994) stated that knowledge is always value-mediated in the sense that the researcher and the participant are assumed to be interactively linked, with the values of the researcher inevitably influencing the inquiry (p. 110).

Black women scholars (Collins, 1990; Moraga & Anzaldua, 1983) as well as Third World scholars inside and outside the U.S., stated that our knowledges are situated as we always speak from a particular location in the power structure. By acknowledging my position in this qualitative research, I am able to reveal my biases and think about how they affect the various aspects of the research, especially interpretation of meanings. As my reflection above indicates, I have to be aware and sensitive to the way my own history will shape this study.

Minichiello & Kottler (2010) stated that one cannot understand qualitative research without understanding one’s personality, that is, one’s own motives, interests and values. For me, the guiding principle was what exactly I was searching for and what that whole journey was about. As stated earlier in this chapter, it was not just about advancing knowledge and completing a dissertation. It was also about pursuing a personal agenda. Qualitative methods embrace and honor subjective experience not only for the participants, but also for me, the investigator (Minichiello & Kottler, 2010). Hence since all knowledge is socially constructed, (Collins, 1994) meaning that all assumptions and beliefs occur within a personal and cultural context, the topic I have chosen, how I located this study within the body of knowledge, the approach that I selected, and the procedure that I employed, are all influenced by my perceptions. Engaging in rigorous self-reflection became a strength for me as a researcher, (Hatch, 2000).

Limitations The major limitation I encountered was to engage my participants in a conversation, where I should not have talked too much, and yet maintain a conversational interview. In an effort to discuss, I realized that at times I offered a little too much information, or I laughed out too loud or spoke too soon obliterating some words from my participants. Yet I was trying to maintain the rapport so that I am fully allowed into my participants’ world. The other limitation consisted of translation. The problem was being able to understand descriptions of experience told in another language. The sample for this study was very small and considering the size of the U.S., I had to be very careful with the generalizations that I made.

Chapter Summary This chapter highlights the methodology and methods I applied to elicit data for this project. I started by highlighting my paradigmatic orientation of constructivism and postmodernism. Feminist methodologies explain the concept of difference and how that serves to look and listen to different groups of women. Narrative inquiry explains my choice of a decolonizing methodology that sought to emancipate the participants as opposed to the traditional forms of research that study participants. The major highlight in this chapter is the introduction of the participants and where they are coming from. Still persuing a decolonizing methodology, I collected data by listening to the participants’ narration of their stories. As we conversed, I allowed them to express their feelings, with as minimum prompts as possible in a conversational interview. I then explain how I conducted data analysis through coding. I also highlight the extreme care I took by ensuring my IRB was authentic and following all possible ethical protocols during the research.

Chapter Four: Participant Narratives A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song

— Chinese Proverb

Introduction Much has been said in the previous chapters, and in order to stay focused, I pause to revisit the purpose of this study. The goal of the research is to provide a platform for women from the Southern Region of Africa to voice out their experiences in United States higher education. The basic idea is to understand the individual experiences of a group of women who are considered part of a global movement towards women’s equality. I discovered that the most important aspect of doing qualitative research of this nature was establishing rapport with the participants. Fortunately for me, I got in touch with the most enthusiastic participants who had wanted to tell their stories for some time. I seem to have come along at the right time.

In this chapter I present narratives of participants in such a way that their individual voices are heard. I centered their responses on the semi-structured questions that I stated in Chapter three. As I mentioned, more and different questions arose from the conversation I had with each participant. Any response arising from such further questioning will be stated as such. The collection of the women’s narratives which I am about to share in this chapter provides a rich source to understanding how these women make meaning of their lived experiences. Experience counts and it can be viewed as the best teacher because it provides something tangible, to which second hand experience (from media, journals, or stories from someone) cannot be equated (hooks, 1992). Thus in synthesizing the findings, I first give a summary of each participant’s story with excerpts of what they actually said in response to the questions. I then gave a collective synthesis of my participants’ stories based on the themes of power, identity, difference, knowledge, agency and resistance at a macro-level.

The analysis of my findings will start with five emergent themes that arose during data analysis. These include liminality, self-identity, language, belonging, and collaboration in a global world. I will introduce them in this chapter then talk more on them in the last chapter.

Participant Stories Zorro’s tune. They saw me with a global perspective of a monolithic kind of like an ethnic group which was African.

Zorro came to the US in mid-2008 for a Ph.D. program in Educational Psychology. Currently is an Associate Professor doing administration work at a university in Missouri. She states that her reasons for coming to the US was to further her education, because in Zimbabwe the political and economic situation had deteriorated significantly leaving universities without human and material resources. Asked on what her challenges and successes were when she got to the US, she started out by outlining her involvement and participation in an educational environment that she was not familiar with. In singing her song, Zorro literally went through the life cycle of a butterfly, beginning with a more confined narration of what she has done to an outright openness about the meta-physical dilemma of being an African woman in a US educational system. She believed in the inevitability of change, as well as extending an olive branch to those around her in an effort to form alliances. However she mourns that even in doing so, it still did not produce the desired results she would want to see.

Zorro was born and spent her early years in rural Zimbabwe and has seen herself morphing from the time she set foot in Harare up until she relocated to the US in her early 30s. She believes that change is both conscious and unconscious, and no matter how people try to cling to who they think they are, they still have undergone change, “Like I said earlier, some of the change is conscious and some of it is in the sub-conscience. I have gained weight and changed complexion. And that is the same way our hearts and minds have changed as well.” Zorro admitted to have struggled in a US classroom with what she explained as my accent. It is interesting that she does not mention English as her second language, but argues that her colleagues had problems understanding her accent. She said:

“…when I participated in the classroom people struggled to understand me because of the accent. I was constantly asked to repeat myself.” She goes further to explain why she would argue that the problem was the accent.

Zimbabwe is an Anglophone country, a former British colony. We learn in English and I have always thought in English. I always thought I was competent. But not when I came here. I realized that I did not know English. People keep starring at you clearly showing they did not hear what you have said. It was a real challenge. And as you know, you pick an accent at the age of 12. After that it’s very difficult to change it. I tried my best not to remodify, but not changing my accent, but to speak slowly so that people could hear me. That was one of my challenge. Asked about whether she had that sense of belonging in her department and the new society as a whole, Zorro responded that to fit into a new society, one has to make an impact among the people so that the channels of communication are opened. She argues that change starts with you and me and the next person. “It was a lot of enforcement that I forced myself into this” (membership in organizations on campus). “They were very adamant to form relations with me but I forced my way into that organization, and that is how I got to know and openly talk about these differences.” In trying to make strides in forming relationships, Zorro did not hide the problems she had encountered in creating true trusting friendship:

I think the initiative is taken by ordinary people like you and me, and another black American. It’s a two way relationship, and it can never be a one way relationship. But then, in that two-way relationship you discover that if you ask an African American they will say they have tried to reach out to Africans but they have resisted them, you ask an African they say they have tried to reach out to African Americans but they have resisted them. So you don’t know who is resisting the other. This is indicated in the organizations that Zorro joined. Although there were “Americans” in some of these groups, she was affiliated to some because of commonalities that existed.

I was a member of the Association of Black Graduate and Professional Students and I felt a sense of belonging to that group, although predominantly it was 80% graduate African America students, with only3-4 Africans, but majority of them were African Americas. What tied us together were that we were minority students and we were trying to reach out to each other minority students to

transition into graduate school, and we were also tied by the fact that we were all graduate students, so we spoke the same language …So by the end of 2012 we came together as Africans, those real Africans who have been in the US for about less than five years who came to do Graduate School and decided to form our own group.

So our meetings were now focused on especially issues happening in the African mainland. Sometimes we would talk about the conflict going on in Mali when the rebels were attacking (inaudible). We were not really coming up with solutions as such, but we were just discussing, brainstorming and coming up with ideas. The land problem in Zimbabwe, what it means for Southern Africa, the implications it might have, talking about apartheid in Africa and S Africa, what aspect of apartheid has ended, I mean all those issues were discussed and Africa’s position in the global world. We really felt like we are Africans. We were all like fresh from Africa and we had experienced the real problems that we were discussing.

For instance I came to the US having experienced the 2008 political violence. So we were talking about issues that we really had survived. So I felt like I really belonged to this group. So besides our African issues, we also threw in some academic issues helping each other, for example when one of us is doing their dissertation and struggling with statistics, and one of us is stronger in that area we would come together and help each other. Lastly I was also a member of the International Student Group. I joined this group because as an international student I experienced a lot of challenges that most international students encountered. I felt that my membership in the international group, and I was also a Board member in 2011, I felt that representing international students was the best I could do for other people who had the same challenges as I had as an international student, especially when I started my Ph.D. Zorro also outlined why some organizations she joined did not work for her. She specifically mentioned the original African Union on campus:

When I first got to the University of Missouri I heard that there’s an African Student Association, I was very excited/happy that I finally found a group that I

can relate to. I asked about it and I got to know their schedule of meetings and I emailed the president to include me onto the list serve. I went to the meeting the first day and I was very enthusiastic to meet with other African students, but I was so much like put aback. I just felt lost in that group. Why did I feel lost? The reason is that that group was almost dominated by, I think there was like 100 students or more than that, almost 90% of them have never set their foot in Africa. All of them were Americans by citizenship, and of those who have been to Africa, they came to the US when they were 2-10 years. But the group itself, the scope of that group and what was done within the group, and also the age difference, all of them were undergraduates, and I was already in my 30s, and some of them were a few years younger than my son.

I tried to relate, and the kind of activities done there, the kind of Miss Africa, etc., It was good, but I felt out of touch with that group. I really appreciated them, I went there a little bit, but I just felt like everytime …because even when they were greeting me they said aunt, because they couldn’t see me like a colleague because of the age difference. We were so different in terms of age, most of them were half my age. If they had invited me as mother-advisor, it would have been a better fit, than the colleague I was trying to be. Everyone felt uncomfortable with my presence because they felt like they had a mother among them. So eventually I abandoned that membership. So in the end, I found I better belonged to the Association of Black Graduate and Professional Students than my own African Student Union, because we spoke the same language. On the question of how she perceived herself before she came to the US, and if the perception of other people of her in the US has altered how she now perceives herself, Zorro laid it out in such a way that the struggles within her as an individual were very visible. She stated that although she perceives herself as Zimbabwean, in the US she becomes an African.

I think, first of all, when I came to America I viewed myself as a Zimbabwean first of all. And then when I came here, I realized that people didn’t see me as a Zimbabwean, they saw me as an African. They saw me with a global perspective of a monolithic kind of like an ethnic group which was African. So I ceased to be

Zimbabwean and I became African. When I became an African, the name I was given here, a name that was attached with so many strings, so many other stuff attached to that African, I had to react to this new identity that I was given.

Some people get annoyed to be called an African, I really did not mind. I had to learn to solidify the new identity, and also to learn to come to terms with those aspects that are attached to that term, African. The term just doesn’t come empty handed, it has its own ties with it, ties like not very competent, backward, not intelligent, accent, etc. Assuming this African identity that I was given, I was also assuming all the strings that were tied to it. Sometimes when you have that track, you also see yourself in terms of how you are perceived, and you fall into a trap and begin to see yourself in those terms as well.

Zorro struggles to try to do what might be helpful to her, at the same it was like perpetuating the stigma that she alludes comes from being African.

Like for example, if somebody feels like ahhh, if there is a computerized exam, and they feel like you have not been exposed to technology, a professor can ask you if you needed extra time to complete the exam online. Then you also see yourself internalizing that, thinking you are also deficient in your speed. So you agree to extra time. I’m not giving this as an example, it really happened to me. I had told my professor sometime that with my speed I wasn’t very very fast. So he went on to every time he would always want to accommodate my deficiency, to such an extent that the deficiency he felt like I had, he wanted to accommodate it.

He was trying to do me a favor, I would say, but at the end of the day there was some element of stigma into it because he felt like every time I had to be accommodated, because I came from Africa and I was not so much into these things and every time I had to be asked if I was comfortable with these things because I probably had a disadvantage over everybody else, as I had a deficiency because of where I come from. Sometimes this has an effect in how you see yourself as well. You also begin to see the deficiencies in yourself sometimes. You sort of like internalize it before you realize it. And even sometimes when you try to reject that kind of identity that you are being given, but because this

perception is so deeply rooted into people that you feel like rejecting that identity is a sheer waste of time, because it’s so deeply rooted, it’s kind of like it’s in the DNA. It seems as if Zorro was having problems reconciling who she thought she was and the new identity that she had acquired as she started to settle in the US. She speaks of some questions that some people asked her and what answers she might have given but did not because she felt it was a waste of time as they would not have believed her anyways. She went along with what they assumed because the questions she states at the end of the quotation says it all.

This lady was showing me some earrings, earrings imitating animals. Like an earring looking like a giraffe, or some other animal. So I was saying this is so beautiful. So she said oh yeah for you it should be beautiful because you see animals at least every day. I told her I had never seen a giraffe in my life. I would want to see one. And she said isn’t it in Africa you always see animals? Isn’t it Africa is a jungle and animals inaudible (RB: laugh too loud obstructing words and said…like they live in the backyard). I said no you only see animals in the zoos. She refused and said no-no-no not in Africa. So she was sort of like so deeply rooted I felt like the argument is meaningless. So sometimes I encounter those arguments every single day.

Like somebody asks you in church; they say ohh how does it feel for you to just wake up in America, how does it feel to just suddenly (move) from Africa to America. It’s a huge transition for them. A very good friend from church asked me; how does it feel, like my husband and I before we came to America, we did not have a house of our own for sure, but we were renting a house in one of the affluent suburbs in Zimbabwe, we were living in Windsor Park. We had our five- roomed house, and a very big yard, and electronics. We were renting that house, we did not have one of our own for sure, but we afforded to rent that house. So when we came here, we couldn’t afford because we were both students, so we just needed to find an apartment.

My son was already almost 10 years and my daughter was turning three. We had two bedrooms, and we had to convert one of the closets into a bedroom for my

daughter. It was very uncomfortable because during summer it would get very hot. It was just terrible because we couldn’t afford a three-bedroomed apartment. So this friend of mine in church said so how does it feel like to get some space, to live spaciously when you used to live in crowded situations? Now you’ve some space in this apartment. And I was like this apartment is not even half or even a quarter of the house I used to live. I’m actually feeling very crowded here. But I didn’t say that. I just said I thank God. Because I feel like it’s a sheer waste of time to explain all that, because they cannot imagine that you could have a better house in Zimbabwe. If you had a better house, then why did you come? In her narrative, Zorro thinks that there are other people who ask with a genuine desire to understand the world outside their comfort zones, and for those she says she was willing to explain. What she does not clarify is how to distinguish those she says remain locked in their beliefs. She agrees that Africa is not all rosy, but that is just part of the story.

There are some issues, truly speaking, there are some issues in Africa we cannot hide behind the finger to just say, to just glorify, no no. There are so many issues, issues of bribery, issues of corruption, violence, famine, etc. Unfortunately that is the only story that is known here about Africa. The other story is not known at all, that’s the unfortunate thing. They just have one story about Africa and the story is not is not a lie. I wouldn’t say that story that is known here is a lie. It’s kind of exaggerated and unfortunately that’s the only kind of story that they know. (RB: It’s incomplete, they have a half story). Yes. Very incomplete. So to try to tell them the other side of the story, I try but I feel like the people are kind of locked in their perceptions such that to unlock you need a lot of energy. And sometimes I do not want to invest myself in that kind of energy. So I disengage. As a follow up question, I asked Zorro if by disengaging she was not perpetuation those stereotypes that she talked about earlier. She responded:

Yes, to some extend it does perpetuate those myths. Yes it does. Sometimes I explain but at other times I feel it’s a sheer waste of time. Sometimes I do try to explain and say I had a bigger house than this. They get so perplexed. But if one really wants to know I take my time and explain. But when sometimes people ask,

asking not because they want to know, but they want to justify their source, they ask you why Africans are killing each other, or why Africans are corrupt. It’s not like they’re asking to know, but they want you to endorse their perceptions. So that kind of questions and attitudes I don’t usually take it up. But there are really genuine people who really want to know ask genuine questions. With these people I engage and enlighten them about Africa. Usually with these people I don’t always tell about the positive story of Africa. The story is not always positive, because that would also be incomplete. So I tell them both sides of Africa, there is this Africa which is poverty-stricken, and there is also another Africa that is like any other big city in America. That Africa is not known at all in America. Unfortunately. And unfortunately, that kind of Africa is the one story that they have which determines how they perceive you.

Zorro goes further to show how that perception gets internalized and makes one start to question their identity.

Unfortunately it has an effect on how you perceive yourself sometimes. Because for example, in my case, when I came here I used to believe I am very competent. I used to be top of my class even when I did my masters I had some prizes and I was doing very well. Then I believed I was very competent until I came here. I realized that one is treated as somebody who had some deficiencies in some areas who needs a lot of help to reach where Americans are. So that help is like everywhere you go everybody wants to give you directions to go to a classroom as if you have never been to such a building ever. I mean the way they give you directions is as if they understand that because this is your first time to be ever in such a building and they have to be so explicit in whatever they are saying. So all those things and you also begin to believe, probably I also have those deficiencies. Maybe I do, you see. It really shapes the way you see yourself at times. But its really something that is in your sub-conscience. You don’t like make a decision that I want to see myself in the way people see me but its subconscious and you begin to question yourself how competent you are, and you look back and begin to review yourself, you begin to think that the way I see

myself has somehow been shaped by how people here generally perceive of Africans. However, despite all the internalized oppression, Zorro still believes in her competence as a student and she eloquently states who she is:

I feel that I am more competent than the way that I’m being perceived in terms of the academic arena and even my teaching skills. I feel like sometimes because of my accent, I’m judged. I feel judged when I’m teaching because of my language limitations in terms of my accent. I believe I’m much better than …I’m not saying I have been judged negatively as such. But I still believe that I represent much more than what people (do/know). She went further to explain how the impact of transnationality has placed her in-between who she has been and who she has become. She believes that she has become a different person from picking what she assumes to be the best of both world, her Africanness and her new identity as an African in America.

But I know for sure the way I see things right now is quite at odds with my upbringing, it also quite at odds with the community I represent. If I were to go back home right now, that are some of the issues that probably if I try to share what I have learned from what is called the so-called global village, I will be labelled a “been-to” that has become completely lost. But in terms of my own perspective, I don’t think I have gone completely lost. I think that I have just begun to see things from a different perspective.

What made me see things from a different perspective is that I have gone in this global world and got to see things from how the other part of the globe sees things, and adopted the way they see things. I feel like I have become somehow western. But I also haven’t abandoned my Africanness. I blend the two. What determines what I keep and discard from my Africanness, or what I pick or leave from the western world, is nothing specifically. I guess it just happens, but what I know for sure is that I have changed. I’m never the same African mother, or rural

girl, and probably I don’t speak the same, I’m more tolerant of diversity, different views, and political views. Overall, Zorro is very aware of what goes on around her and has been trying the best she could to make herself an authentic person who originates from Africa. The most peculiar part of her song is the acknowledgement of the dynamic nature of life, whether one stays in her country of origin or migrates to a whole new world. She also exhibits a thoughtfulness on how to balance the new changes in one person and the original person and her relationship to what she calls “my people.” “If I were to go back to Zimbabwe today, I would probably not go around saying to my people you’re lost on your perceptions about gays and lesbians. I will still however, continue to believe in what I used to believe in, and what some people believe about gays and lesbians is actually kind of an exaggerated view by those people.”

Christine’s tune. It’s really beating me down, like God, why am I so dumb?

Christine’s confidence has been knocked out by an unsupportive supervisor and has internalized her inability to achieve anything, even finding a job in the US. Christine has been to other universities for her bachelor and master’s degree before moving to the third US University to do a Ph.D. She points out at the start of the interview that she came to the US to further her education as a way to escape poverty in Madagascar.

So yeah umm, as a person from a poor country, you know, this is one way for us to escape poverty too, like you go to the big city, to study, you get your diploma. But then at the same time you think like you could get opportunity, you know, your life could be better than in Madagascar if you come to the US.

Unfortunately she was in a university that was last on her list of choices and the program she enrolled into was not the one she wanted. Whether it was because she was so desperate to escape Madagascar or trying desperately to stay in status, she did not say. All she said was:

I have been in it for like the past six years, like a really really huge, huge, umm, how do you say it in English? Like, not a depression but a (pause). I don’t know how to say it but it’s like things that you regret. Like a huge regret, like why did I come here, why did I do this?

Although she expressed disappointment at being at an institution and in a program she did not like, she emphasized that the problem could not be the place per se but the “environment” which she pronounced “inveroment” where she worked; “Miami is good but the environment where I’m working is really bad. And that was one of my biggest…well maybe if I went to Texas A & M, maybe I would face the same thing. But, who knows?” She vacillates back and forth, unsure of whether the “inveroment” at Miami can replicate itself anywhere in the US. It’s clear to see that deep down she thinks that someplace else would have received and treated her better than at Miami.

I tried, I feel like I did, but again, I’m not blaming people but feel also that since I came to Miami I have been treated like you don’t know anything, you know. No matter how hard you worked, you always get that, you know like, egos from your advisor, from people around you, like. So that really destroy the positive thinking. Again it’s not that American universities are doing this to me. It’s only the program here at Miami, because when I was at St Louis University I was one of the top student. When I came here to Miami I face a very different situation, because I’m always a dumb student to my advisor, and whatever I say or do is like stupid, you know. So it’s really beating me down, like God, why am I so dumb. Christine continued to lay out her problems with her advisor. She tried so many times to find an alternative school to finish her Ph.D. but was unable to move. She then tried to understand her situation through the eyes of other students and together with another student of color they agreed that she was not treating them well.

Yes, she, I had a conversation with one of her students. He is African American. And I really told him like this doesn’t feel right because I see how she treated an American student. White female. And I see how she treated me. That was three years ago. Now I don’t care anymore but the treatment, I thought was different. I’m now interpreting things but I thought it was different the way she treated the other female student compared to me. But..we, I and the African American student, thought that she is a little bit racist. That is what we thought. Umm, but we may be wrong…umm.

It seems that Christine spends a lot of energy trying to understand and get the approval of her supervisor. The way that she is treated by her supervisor alone, has led her to define herself as “dumb”. She acknowledges to have a wonderful relationship with her colleagues, her fiancé and some instructors.

Ah yeah, no. The students are really nice. There’s competition among students but there is not like people trying to put others down, to, you know, make themselves better. There’s nothing like that with me and my classmates or my umm…. I have my fiancé, my husband. He is very supportive, but again I feel like I need more support from other people around me, especially people who work with me to…I’m not trying to say I need people to push me but in order for me to be productive I want to be in an “inveroment” I feel comfortable. She feels that the relationship between her supervisor and herself is not the typical mentor/mentee relationship. It’s more parent/child with more instructions being given out than teaching to educate for a lifelong induction into the world of academy and work.

This is my six year and final year as a Ph.D. student but she treats me like I just started. Like no, you shouldn’t do this, no I told you to do this, no, no, no. It’s like always she has power over me. I was being controlled. I was never being told like here’s the goal we need to reach. You know, and it’s natural that I should have that mindset, like here’s what I need to get to. But because of the control, I don’t have that mindset anymore. What I have in my mind is what does she want me to do next. There was a time when I like wanted to do a project, like continuation of my masters. I was really excited because she has a lab. So I asked her if I could do my lab here because I brought samples from Philippines and I want to do this. She was like you can’t just do analysis in the lab it needs money. I was very disappointed. She could have said why don’t you write the proposal so we get the money, not just saying something like that. I feel like the whole thing is no respect for me. I understand because, you know, I’m not like, I don’t have the level of knowledge she has, but umm I think a lot of it is like umm, there is no respect. I asked Christine if she thought that the changing global landscape could help her

66 supervisor understand that as women in higher education we needed to work together at par. She was adamant and shaking her head vigorously she said, “I don’t think that will happen. That will never happen that she and I will be colleague. And I don’t think that, you know, this colleague thing will happen between me and her.” Christine couldn’t just stop at bringing the issue of race into the picture. She also viewed the way she has been treated through the lens of her nationality.

Being poor, being from a poor country really really make even how people look at you all the time like you’re ignorant, you don’t know like technology, you don’t know. That hurt because I would say people from my country are very very smart (chuckle). I’m comparing because I know lots of successful students in Europe, umm, and even in the US. They don’t live in a situation like this, very stressful like this. So I think they are really like the fact that you are from a poor country, from Africa, people look at you as something ignorant, do not know evolution, can’t …which is really bad but well…

Kondwane’s tune. One thing I constantly go through but now I’m not going to fight it anymore is where I was always the bigger person…

Kondwane immersed herself in an American system of education when she came from Zambia for an undergraduate course. I asked her why she wanted to study in the US and she responded that her purpose of coming to the US was because she had no trust in the education system in Zambia as it was “too competitive” and would not give her back what she expected to get from her schooling.

“So one thing that I was discouraged by was the education system, particularly the tertiary education system. Back home you have the University of Zambia which is great, you know, it’s a great school, but you never have the facilities and it was just hard to get into, and it was more like, I don’t know if it’s the same thing, but it was just so hard and competitive …”

When I asked whether she got into the program that she really wanted she seemed unsure of whether her choice to study in the US was hers or influenced by family and friends. She embarked on science subjects, which she claimed was because her father and brother, particularly, encouraged her to study engineering,

I decided to come to…wait it wasn’t even my own decision. But I realized that one of the reasons I wanted to do medicine was pressure from parents, but not really parents, because I consider my parents to be very liberal, but I just felt that pressure because I was working so hard and almost everyone was saying you’re going to be a doctor one day. But then I started to realize that my personality, my character doesn’t actually go with medicine because I was more of the type that wanted to change the world…

I was never really into business, but then after (inaudible) the year, my professors saw my potential and they said you do very well in chemistry, you do very well in (inaudible) , why don’t you just pursue a complete chemical engineering degree. After a certain time I took, I think it was micro-economics. I loved the class but I wasn’t enthusiastic about it. It wasn’t like a chemistry class that I could say this is what I wanted to do. So with all that I switched to chemical engineering. I can say it was a very hard decision for me, very hard. I definitely cried about it called my mom, called my family and tell them that I didn’t know why I was doing engineering…

My dad is an engineer as well, and just being able to say I can do it too. So I got so much support from my dad and my brother. That just also helps, it helps a lot. I’m sort of grateful that my parents are very supportive... Responding to the question on challenges in the classroom, Kondwane attributed her classmates’ mixed reactions to a number of issues,

I don’t know but I really can’t speak for them but it was just one of those things that where we look different and they just judge you like you don’t know that much, and it was also a tendency where my American classmates would take over a group project, like in the beginning of my freshmen year, and I probably still spoke with a heavy accent as well, and I felt like they would say, ok she’s a part of our group but we will take over. Usually I remember that when we did a project they would just say do the introduction or do the conclusion that would be fine. And I would just say ok. So yeah, I feel like it was a bit hard. It was more like we don’t know who you are, we don’t know what you can offer, and I also

feel that in some cases it was like we don’t want to offend you, we don’t want to step on your toes. However, even though Kondwane alludes to the challenges above, she still believes that cognitively women in higher education should be viewed as equal. I asked her whether the aspect of globalization and interchange can qualify to remove the inequalities brought in by different nationalities and she emphatically states that through interaction it was very possible.

It’s sort of interesting when you have a cross-cultural friendship especially strong bonds with people from different cultures. That’s one thing I have noticed. When people don’t interact with other people from different cultures there’s that buildup of stereotypes, buildup of competition, which like for me it’s something that I’m so grateful for having friends of different cultures, which was encouraged because I did not have Zambian friends or my Zambian family around me. So yeah, it’s kind of interesting but it is possible and it requires interaction. But interaction also requires that we need to overcome stereotypes or whatever, which buildup if you’re not communicating.” Although she believes that educationally women from around the world can be equal, she expressed a problem in fitting in with the rest of her American friends.

…just that discrepancy of not having Zambians and family around me taught me to make friends with American girls, and I actually ended up realizing that we are similar, we do go through life similarly in some ways, although society puts us in brackets we do go through similar things… Ah definitely I (hesitates) do feel part of the group. But I would be lying if I said…, periodically I go through these periods I feel like I am not part of the group. It’s very hard because I think if you are the majority in a situation you always think that everything around you is just normal and what you expect to see. But when you are like that one person, like for me I’m the only black girl in my grad department and the only Zambian in my department, sometimes I do go through periods of where I’m like I really do not know if I’m part of the group. It’s just very personal, it’s not like there’s something that I see. Everyone treats me nicely, my professors treat me nicely, and appreciate my work, you know, but sometimes it’s just myself. I just don’t

feel like I’m part of the group. And that’s where, I don’t know, but that’s just how I feel about that.” Kondwane kept emphasizing her studious nature back in her home country, Zambia, and how that helped her navigate a new educational environment. However, it was interesting to note that she could not answer a question on whether the perception from others had affected her definition of herself, “Ahh!! My perception of myself, wow! Ok, let me think about it. I think I will divide it in different categories. For example, ahh that’s a hard one.” She also showed gratitude for the British that colonized her country for giving her the legacy of English which she believes has catapulted her to greater heights, “You know the funny thing about it is I always talk about it to myself. I always say thank God Zambia was colonized by the British, because I can speak in English. (laughing, RB: That is a positive aspect but I’m sure there are also negatives, right?) I know but one thing that I wanted to address is for sure, like for me sometimes I don’t know how far I have come and sometimes I don’t know whether I’m underestimating myself.” She feels that being where she is at right now can only be explained spiritually. She also indicates that she is working more here than she did back home, but the good thing is that her hard work is rewarded through accolades and appreciation

“I don’t know why I was put in this situation, but it’s interesting how I look at it through God. God has put me in this situation that I would not have technically chosen to be in. For example in undergrad I became an RA for a sorority dorm which was way out of my comfort zone. It’s one thing to be in a school in America, it’s one thing to be in a school that is not diverse, but it’s another thing to be put in a dorm with sorority girls, you know sorority girls, you know, it’s a whole new dynamic thing… One thing that has surprised me after having been here for a long time is that when I was back home, the people who traveled out, and my dad has also traveled, would talk about how the American system of education was weak, right?

Maybe that will be the case with high school, or the lower levels of education, but when I came here I worked harder than I did in high school or in school back home. Which is very interesting because the curriculum back home is hard, it’s really hard. When I came here I felt like I was working 26hours in a day, like I

was losing sleep, which now I’m getting used to, for some reason, it’s now more like whatever. There’s just more work here, and people are like oh yeah it’s easier… Here I realized that, like I mentioned, people might not say you are smart enough because you are coming from Africa, as what they say, but when I came here and as I said the American education fueled my old habits in the sense that I was able to be studious, I was able to work hard and the good thing is I was able to get accolades and awards for the hard work I did and in that sense being appreciated.” Kondwane also expressed the effort she put in making friends. For her it was not just like mutual attraction. She had to work hard to create what she referred to as “multi-cultural” relationships. I asked her if that dream of equality is far away since she kept mentioning that to be understood as an equal she had to keep pushing until her colleagues understood her.

No, I think, to be honest with you, like I mentioned earlier, for me I, I, umm, for most of my friendships, I have been the bigger person. Most of my friends I made them because I put myself out there. They did not come to me and say Kondwane I want you to be my friend, they had this barrier. I opened up and said hey, I’m just a normal person and there’s nothing different about me. Yes my hair is different, my skin color is different, and my voice and accent are different, but I’m just the same person, I’m just like you, we were just born in different regions and something like that, and maybe different cultures but I still enjoy the same things that you do. I think it requires effort from both sides, because for me, it has been really hard to just approach people. But maybe because I have been doing it more often its open nature, and people say that girl is very nice! It’s just like a nature now because I understand that it will be harder for people to approach you and say hi, you know. Most of the people that have said hi have probably lived out of the country for a long time to understand that, you know, we’re just the same. It’s part of the thing where people have to either travel out or and see that life is just the same or they have to interact. But interaction is much harder because nobody wants to make the first step.”

Odala’s tune. I would rather be trusted as a Malawian.

At the time of the interview, Odala was a second year graduate student at Duke University. She had been in the US for about four years since she came to study for her masters’ program. Prior to this, she had worked as a nurse in her country of origin, Malawi. In responding the question on her purpose of coming to study in the US, Odala highlighted that her country has very limited masters’ programs. Her only opportunity to do a masters in her field was to leave the country. She was fortunate to get to the US on a Fulbright scholarship for her program in nursing administration.

First of all I wanted to do a master’s program to advance my studies. In my country we do not have a lot of master’s programs in my field. Basically it was about finding a scholarship that would fund my studies and upgrading myself in the field that I wanted. So I came on a Fulbright Scholarship the first time I came here. Odala did not mince her words when she highlighted the challenges she experienced being in a new educational environment.

The first challenge that I faced, was that my country was a British colony and coming here the system is different, in such a way that I had to keep in mind that British English is different from American English. They were correcting me on spellings, grammar etc, all the time. It’s a good thing that some of them were not really sensitive about it. I had to learn to adapt to the way they wanted things done. Coming from my country, we come from a situation where professor- student relationship is different. Professor’s position is higher than that of the student. In this situation, coming to the environment where you are treated as colleagues, can be sometimes a little bit intimidating because you don’t know how to behave or if it’s appropriate, even though they assure you it is appropriate. You keep feeling like you were being impolite. We don’t argue with our elders, teachers, and discussions are not a big no. We do discuss in my country, but here people are constantly interacting each other when they’re speaking. It feels like

back home you have to wait until someone finishes their point before you interrupt them. That was my major challenge, because in the end I ended up not speaking at all as I was waiting for people to stop but they were not stopping. Odala admitted to have questioned her identity when I asked her whether other people’s perception of her had changed the way she viewed herself before moving to the US. However she claims that other people’s perception of herself should not change who she is.

I looked at myself as a person who was kind of extrovert. Like I was a person who took risks. I wanted to go out there and do things and creative. That’s how I viewed myself. Coming here I still view myself the same way , of course, but I felt a little intimidated because I couldn’t speak English as much as I thought I would. I think my view of myself was challenged in the first few months, whether what I thought was me was really me. I was forced to accept that I was different around people here, but still that shouldn’t change who I am. In responding to the question on whether her colleagues were comfortable with her in class in terms of interaction, Odala admitted that at first they doubted her capacity, but later were able to be supportive, and treated her like someone who “knows”. I then probed further to explain why she thought they “doubted her capacity or knowledge.” She responded,

First of all, like I said, initially you do not know how to express yourself in a way that they would understand. I don’t know but sometimes I felt maybe, I’m black (laughs) and that I’m African. They just look at you and think that I don’t think she knows as much as I do. But until you share your experiences and what you know, they are like Oh, okay. And they start viewing you differently. So it’s true that often if someone is African you have to prove yourself to be accepted. But if you’re not you’re just accepted by virtue of not being black, sort of. Odala struggled to define and explain the relationship she has with her colleagues in the classroom. Asked if all her classmates accepted her for who she was, she seemed to have issues with African American colleagues. However, she tried very much to downplay what she was saying by continuously referring to how things are fine now.

It’s not all African Americans who are accepting of Africans. That is how I felt. The few that are challenged may have their own perceptions of Africa. I felt like where they feel that way they feel like they’re getting displaced by someone else from somewhere. But we had an understanding later with time getting along with each other, trusting each other and also with any other student in the class. But at first we did feel like we weren’t trusted in what we had to contribute. And people did not pay attention if you tried to say something until they realized later on that oh you had a point. In this section I am going to add my own voice to indicate questions that arose from our conversation. I asked Odala to elaborate what she meant by “challenged”, and she said,

Odala: “Oh Ok, what I mean is in every society people have their own social status, right? Then someone from somewhere come here and they feel like other people trusts me more than them.”

RB: “So when you talk about the “Other people” you mean the white people?”

Odala: “Yeah, I mean white people. They feel like they are trusting you more than them, but you also view it as they are trusting them more than you. Later on you realize you are at the same level, you only need to work hard to get that recognition that you need.”

Odala is fixated on going back to work in her home country. She explained it clearly when asked if she was interested in working back home or staying in the US after her Ph.D.;

Odala: “I would love to work back home honestly, because I’m the kind of person who thinks that when everyone comes to study in the US they all want to stay in the US. I know financially its good and people think they have more opportunities here. I’m the kind of person that wants to work back home, because there has been a lot of research done in the US and the developed world, but less has been done in the countries back home. But even the people who do research back home come from other countries. Not that I’m saying they can’t do research there, but I feel if a native does research in their countries they might have a better understanding than someone who has to learn things from scratch. It would be easier if they will collaborate with the native people and work together than them working on their own. So I just have a feeling that I would want to work home, probably with an international organization. I feel I would implement

74 things better if I’m stationed home than out of the country.”

RB: “When you say better, is it about understanding the culture or better where people will appreciate you more with your knowledge or better in what terms?”

Odala: “Both, in that first of all they will appreciate my presence. They don’t have many people trained up to my level. Having someone trained up to my level in the system is something they will really appreciate. It is different from here where there are already people trained to that level. Of course there is a lot of competition than back home, but the fact that back home they will appreciate the contribution I make and use it makes a difference. And also that I understand the culture there, I know the problems that are there better than the problems that are here. I feel I understand how the people think, and if I’m to help in like behavioral changes, I will know what factors will influence them to change or not to change. So my understanding of the people back home are at a deeper level than I understand the people here in the US.”

Odala has big dreams not just about knowledge construction, but that which originates from her home country, Malawi.

“I would want the knowledge that has been constructed in my country to make an impact on the global world. So even if I do research, implement and even test it there, I would want to share the substances with the whole world and for them to see that they can learn from our models or from the way that we think or do things. I would want to share that with the global world, and possibly collaborate that with people from different countries to see if they can learn from the way we do things, and also to see if we can learn from the way they’re doing things and implement them in different contexts.”

It was interesting to note that Odala was wary about the aspect of equality among different groups of women. She said a lot about collaboration, but equality for her would always be elusive.

Odala: “I would say at first I have never seen an equal relationship. Of course, I can learn something from you, and then there are also times when it gets upsetting for someone to ask you something and then go to someone, like an American student to validate because they do not trust what you said. So it makes you like, why did you ask me (laughs), like you just wanted to

75 confirm something that you already knew. So that’s where it gets really upsetting. But besides that I would say it’s been fine and I wouldn’t say it’s at an equal level.”

Odala also struggled with the problem that fellow African people/women still have issues in doing their own things. Asked if we as African women are a part of the women’s global movement, she felt like they have been affected by colonialism and cannot trust their own capacity to do things. She also referred to African American women and White women as the “higher two groups” in reference to African women;

Odala: “I don’t know, I really don’t think that African women are a part of the group as much as I would hope they would be. I always think that they are in the shadow of other people. I always think that you unless you to publish with someone else from the first world, then you will never be known. I feel like you have to network with the higher two groups (African American and White women) because as Africans we’re kind of at the bottom, so we need to connect we the two groups to be known on the global world. … I would probably say that, I know Zimbabwe was part of the British colony, the British made us obey them. They made us feel less than them. So we really didn’t have a say against them. They became our superiors. We didn’t even trust ourselves to take care of ourselves, we always had to check with them. So because of that we have not been confident that we can do it on our own.”

Odala had issues with pedagogical skills that we as Africans and women from Africa impart to our children, even after studying out of the continent of Africa.

RB: “So do you think if we were to go back and change our way of teaching, making students think, not just tell them this is what happened and make them maybe do stuff, you know. Would that change who we are?”

Odala: “I would say the problem is people come and learn in a system here and they’re given the autonomy to make decisions, but when we go back home they still use that hierarchy of oppressing people. We don’t change, and I feel if we could allow autonomy and responsibility on our young people, they will trust themselves more. They will trust their own decisions and will not have to depend on you to feel good about themselves. They don’t have to depend on something to feel they can do it, whether it’s great or otherwise. I know it’s a competitive system in our respective countries, so they should know that you do not have to be first position to be

76 better. In my country they are changing the system to segment students into four sections; one is either high level, or average level, but at least it’s not as stressful as before. They still know autonomy, and our marking guides are so rigid they have only one expectation, even for essays. Subjects like math, 1+1 =2 is understandable since it’s only one answer to something, but we need more of…let them think then we can know what they want. Give them that responsibility to decide what’s good for them. If we allow them, then we can break the bond of making them under somebody’s control. For instance when I was little I made a choice to choose the field that I did, but (inaudible) can’t choose a program unless someone says it’s good. Some of them cannot even pick a program of their choice, their parents have to do it for them. So it goes beyond the education system to how we were brought up!!”

RB: “So in terms of the impact that you’re hoping to make when you go back home, what are you hoping to change?”

Odala: “I have always looked for innovative ideas from people. I always want to hear the people’s voices of the people. What do they think is good for them or what they think can help them. In my field I have always argued that most of the intervention have been developed from the first world and we just implement them, but we have never really tested them in our countries to see if they are really useful. So my goal is to start testing and ask do we really need what we thought we needed. Is that what people expect to see in our hospital system. If only I can hear their voice and let them experience their voices, and if they feel good about it, then they can see that they can do it on their own. If my students can believe that they have the potential to get to whatever level they want, they can be more independent than they are now. If we could have more discussions than lectures. I’m the sort of person who loves discussions more than lecturing, because I want to hear what my students have to share.”

At the end of our conversation Odala had laid her out argument clearly by asserting that as Africans, women or men, we still need to get out of the bondages of colonialism and neocolonialism and start doing something about who we want to be.

Odala: “Yes, I feel people have to contribute to their policies, not me thinking what is good for them. If I can help people it should be in asking them what they need included, and then be part of developing that policy after getting these views and after making people see the need

77 to have that new policy. We are going to be stronger than what we have been doing. We keep changing policies now and then before they are even approved somebody feels we have to change it into something else. So it means we are not there yet.”

RB: “So you’re also painting this dark picture of Africa. When you say we’re not there yet, how then do you expect some people to accept that I know and do not judge me by the continent that I come from which is not there yet, but I’m there already… You get what I’m trying to say?”

Odala: “Yes, but I think the problem is we are living a lie that other people are deciding for us. Unless we stop doing that… [RB: Who is deciding for us now that we say we are independent?] I don’t think we are independent at all if we rely on donors to make decisions. I really don’t think any of our policies are made by us. They are made to attract donors [RB: It’s because we do not have the money for investment. How then can we do that if when we don’t have the capital?] So I have always said that as much as we are independent on paper, I really don’t think we are.”

RB: “And that bondage keeps us tied even when we move out of our comfort zone. For instance when we move from Africa, we’re kept tied to that bond of colonialism?”

Odala: “Yes, and that is why we think living here is better than living at home. (RB: Does living here make us more independent?) No not all!! Maybe we feel that people view us as up there, then we feel good even though we are not really ourselves, we are still down there. …But I would rather sell my country than sell any other country. That is why I want to work back home. I’ll still be on the global market or world and share with people try to make a difference But I want to be attached to my country because I think that’s gonna make people value me and value my country better. I don’t know if that’s true, or it’s going to make any difference (laughs). I don’t want to be known as an American.

RB: “Why? Do you think it has connotations in how they perceive and acknowledge you?”

Odala: “I do know that if I were to get an American citizenship I would probably be more trusted on the global world, but I would rather be trusted as a Malawian.”

Nya’s tune.

I used to refer to myself by my name, or in my Shona culture by my totem. I was now being referred to by color.

Nya currently lives in a city in Ohio and works shifts overnight. She came to the US in the early 20th century for an undergraduate diploma in Chemistry when she was only about 19 or 20 years old. Asked why she decided to come study in the US, Nya stated that her home country, Zimbabwe, then had only one university, and the chances to get in a very slim.

Nya: “My main reason for studying in the US was mainly driven by the lack of opportunity for higher education in my country at that time. In the late 80s we did not have more universities to go to. As a result I got ah ah scholarship information for the schools in the United States through a Catholic nun who I was associated with from school. So that’s how I came otherwise if I had an opportunity to go to a university in Zimbabwe I could have gone.”

Nya mentioned racism as the challenge that she faced when she first started schooling in the US.

Nya: “There was, Wisconsin is a little different from Ohio. The area that I was more so the people there are Caucasian. There are none Africans, I mean nobody is of African origin so I experienced racism for the first time. So those were some of the challenges, and as a young person I did not know how to handle. As an example, one day we were in the cafeteria and the people were talking about this lady. She was a former teacher of the school at this particular school. She was African American. Now I know African American. Back then I just saw her as a teacher and I did not think anything. So they were saying oh this black lady she used to teach here. So that word was the first time for me to hear it. At age 19 I never referred to myself as of color. I used to refer to myself by my name, or in my Shona culture by my totem (laughs) or something like that. I was now being referred to by color, because people would say “no since you are a black student too you might want to talk to her”. So reference to me by color instead of by my name was one of the main biggest challenge I saw for the first time. It was like a bulldozer (laughs) yeah, it was like wow.”

RB: “And then in the classroom?”

Nya: “In the classroom there was one class that the teacher, most of the teachers because it was a Catholic school they tried to not to be racist. But one teacher was racist. She would say I don’t like black people in the front of the class, and I was the only black student in the class. As a foreigner too I did not know the process of how to file a complaint about it. So I had to endure the whole thing. It was a sociology class and she would say oh you know how sometimes it’s very difficult who you associate with. So for me I’ve got a 12-year old son I don’t want him to associate with black people. They are stupid, they are this, they are this. So for me I never heard anybody put it down in front of anybody like that. And the bad thing is that she was considered as a top person in the educational division. And so that kind of like wow.”

Even though Nya talked about her discomfort in what she referred to as a racist classroom, she still did not generalize that everyone agreed with those few individuals who made her feel segregated.

Yeah, but I just think its personality, type. Yeah I guess she probably had some problems before with other people of African descent/origin, I don’t know. She’s still there, the lady is still there. Sometimes I feel like I need to visit her one time and so she knows that or write her something because that was very wrong.

As someone who had been in the US system of education for a long time, I asked Nya if she felt comfortable and a member of the larger group who commands respect like everyone else. She stated that there was some kind of respect, but went further to relate it, again, to a person’s attitude. She continued:

Yeah, the fact that I’m from another country, 1, and 2 I have an accent, and 3 because of the fact that a person is different; that also is a block for most people. Yeah, it’s a blockage for most people. I had that issue when I was writing my thesis. So yeah, that also is a problem because some people they just look at a person like (sucks breath in!). So it’s really about us coming from another country. Yeah. Nya highlighted that she felt misunderstood by the people who are supposed to value difference. She was particularly unhappy about the fact that she needed to “prove” herself worthy to be accepted, yet all the other Caucasians around her did not have to.

Yeah, there is like when people see a person like this from another place they assume that you don’t know what you’re doing. The assumption is that you don’t know what you are doing, until you prove yourself. Whereas for the other type of people the assumption is they know everything even if they don’t know what they are doing.

Most of the time you have to prove yourself to get the trust, whereas for the Caucasians, their fellow Caucasians they will assume that they know everything. Sometimes they might even be coming to me (laughs) asking what to do, but the assumption is they know everything. So the problem is the assumptions. So I always have a one pager of how I need to be related to. The first one says I don’t want people to work on assumptions, if you want to know something ask me. That doesn’t always help but at least they know I don’t want people to assume because the assumption is never like oh she’s really good. It’s always she doesn’t know. Nya expressed the above sentiments because she had established what she called “a space in the community” for herself. Nya expressed that she had started to define herself as someone when she returned to the US to pursue a masters’ degree.

Yeah, yeah, I was, because what I did was when I did my undergraduate I worked for one year or two then I went back to Zimbabwe. Then I worked at a school for four years then I came back. I was teaching at a mission high school. That kind of helped me to define my space in the community as an African woman, a Zimbabwean woman who is educated and so on and so on. So when I came back to do my master’s degree I had that space within, that this is what I can do, you know, nobody would tell me otherwise because I had these four five years behind me to show the result. So then when you get here you have this image about yourself and (laughs)… And so it was back to proving herself worth of what she can do.

With work one thing I have realized is that whatever work I have been given, I just had to be excellent. Once you are excellent the people give you the title that you deserve. If I had to be making something, I had to be a master at it, to know it in and out. And that’s when people say

81 oh yeah, she knows exactly what she is doing. And then I have gotten so much respect for the work that I do after I demonstrated what I could do. But before then you don’t really get anything. Then they can say oh ok she’s excellent. So I have managed to get respect because of what I could prove.

When asked on whether she thinks that after being in the US for a long time, navigated a similar educational terrain with American women (black or white), she can be considered to be equal to them, she did not hesitate in her response. “No, I don’t think so, no. Even if I get an A and she gets a C, the treatment is always different. It’s like she’s always five steps ahead because of the differences. That’s what I’m thinking, yeah.”

Identified Themes Identity. The aspect of identity featured dramatically during the conversational interviews I had with the participants. Even before I asked them how they defined themselves before studying at a U.S. higher education institution, they had mentioned somewhere during the conversation that they did not know that being in a U.S. classroom would make them question themselves that much. Zorro was concerned that although she had learned English under a colonial system, she admitted that when she got to the U.S., her English, particularly her accent, became sub-standard. She explained that she had always thought she was competent, but the fact that nobody understood what she was saying half the time, she sought of got a rude awakening and started to look into herself. She noted that a person picks an accent before age 12, and after that it cannot change. Hence her accent, more than her English, was one of her worst challenges in school. Surprisingly, it was not only her who had difficulty communicating with her instructors and peers, she too could not understand what everyone else said because of the accent. Hence she was only able to grasp about 45% of class content.

Odala, Zorro, Mati and Nya alluded to the problem of thinking in their language first, then translating to English. By the time they were done and ready to participate in class, the discussion had moved on. They admitted that they began to question whether they were really who they thought they were. They mourned how the professors kept correcting their British style spelling and grammar which made them feel stupid. Odala also mentioned that the class proceedings were so “informal” in that anyone was speaking at any time. She was used to a

82 structured-form of classroom, where the teacher has the authority to control the students. Hence she said she stopped talking completely waiting for the conversations to stop, which they never did. She began to feel inadequate as a graduate student because she could not participate in class discussions. Christine was most affected by her supervisor’s control on her to the extent that she lost all confidence of even trying to find a job. Mati and she noted that the first time they were in classes their instructors were so impressed by their performance. They asked them “what type of schooling” was in their countries to have made them so smart. They both considered this a compliment.

The women outlined that their personal identity suffered major set-backs because the personal identity they had established before moving to America were severely questioned. Their definition of themselves changed drastically when as they started to view how other people perceived them. Odala assumed that because she was black and a woman from Africa, her colleagues thought she did not know as much as they did. Christine gave an overview:

Here’s how I see it. Umm, poverty is bad, yes it’s bad but people think that if you’re poor your mentality is poor too, right. So judgment, I guess, start from that and I notice that when I talk to other American they are like Oh my God I did not know that we have like same, like we were raised in the same way. And I was like what did you expect? I was raised in a savage way? Because I am from Africa? They were really surprised that my mindset was the same as how they had been raised here. Mati, as hilarious as she was, stated that she grew up being told that you do not look at respectable people in the eye. Her instructors were indeed respectable, and she said instead of earning a trophy for her respect, she was chastised for it. She was described as lacking confidence and not able to fully stand up to the challenges of graduate school. Kondwane summed up what these women were going through, “It was more like we don’t know who you are, we don’t know what you can offer, and I also feel that in some cases it was like we don’t want to offend you, we don’t want to step on your toes.”

power. Christine struggled to acknowledge herself as a graduate student because her supervisor controlled every aspect of her education. She was not allowed to carry out experiments in her supervisor’s laboratory because she had not applied for funds for it. She felt that in her sixth year as a Ph.D. student, Christine was still being treated as a first year. It was heart-wrenching to hear her speak. She would say, “I was never being told like here’s the goal we reach. You know, and it’s natural that I should have that mindset, like here’s what I need to get to. But because of the control, I don’t have that mindset anymore. What I have in my mind is what does she want me to do next.” Conversely, Kondwane experienced her grad school in a totally different way. Kondwane, being vivacious, she went an extra mile to work extra hard, earning accolades, and working “26 hours a day,” to the extent that she was giving lectures to undergraduate students. She felt empowered as she said, “It’s sort of interesting though how I’m using my Africanness to break down those stereotypes. One of my professors has given me a chance to lecture his class. Which is very interesting because it’s like this Zambian girl had come to teach American kids about engineering. I feel like I use that to my advantage to sort of like break down the stereotypes of how people think about Africans.”

Most of these women, however state that some of the way they were perceived and described, the questions they have been asked and the comments that have been made, make them so powerless to explain the real situation to the extent that they just “leave it as it is”.

knowledge. All of the women acknowledged to have had their knowledge base questioned because of, especially where they come from. The most thing that incapacitated these women was their inability to speak English, followed by being in a strange environment where they experienced a number of culture shocks. Zorro refers to it as a different “accent”. She does not believe that she cannot speak English, neither would she say she speaks bad English. This issue of inability to participate and converse with faculty and peers put the African women’s knowledge construction to test. Kondwane admits that the mostly males in her engineering classes gave her the simple roles of giving an introduction or a conclusion during a presentation. She felt that they did this mostly because it were the first days and she still had a “heavy accent”. In other words, all these women’s knowledge base was questioned until they had to “prove” their worth by either doing

84 extremely well in their academic endeavor. They noticed that to be acceptable, they needed to go an extra mile to prove it.

difference. Most of the women I talked to were mostly the onlys. Kondwane was the only Zambian and African girl in her department. Zorro, although she had many other Africans with whom she started the African Student Union (2), she said that she was the most senior, not in age but in getting to the US. She felt that having experienced some discomforts with the people around her, it was her duty to ensure that those who came after her were well informed. She put herself out there to form organizations that would assist new African students to settle and fit in. Nya struggled with what she referred to as racist remarks when some of her instructors made comments about how they felt about black people. The instructor said of her son, “I’ve got a 12- year old son I don’t want him to associate with black people. They are stupid, they are this, they are this. So for me I never heard anybody put it down in front of anybody like that.” The worst thing that bothered Nya was, of course, reference to her by the color of her skin. Odala questioned her capability after she started to recognize her difference. The interesting thing is that all these women discovered that they were not citizens of their respective countries anymore, but they all became Africans. When we were conversing, they mostly referred to themselves as African more than Zambian, Zimbabwean, Malawian or Malagasy. Kondwane and Christine kept struggling to bring awareness to their colleagues that there was nothing odd about coming from Africa. Kondwane said:

So that’s when they started asking questions like what food do you eat? So most of the times that’s how I ended up making most of my friends, because I had to be the one to open up and say that I’m just the same as you. I may come from a different culture but I do love certain things, I love candy, I love to eat, you know, I just do the same things that you do, it’s just that I’m coming from another culture. And then people would open up and say she’s just the same, she’s cool. And Christine had this to say, here’s how I see it. Umm, poverty is bad, yes it’s bad but people think that if you’re poor your mentality is poor too, right? Christine also made a discovery of how colonialism has affected the mentality of Malagasy people in terms of difference. She observed that their colonizers, the French, instilled

85 in them the concept of race. There are light skinned and dark skinned people in Madagascar. She outlined the consequences of a light skinned person marrying into a dark skinned family. The French had created a hierarchy of power, with the light skinned being superior to the dark- skinned. She felt sorry that they discriminate, oppress and hurt each other in Madagascar, but if they were to come to the US, they would all qualify as black. Christine continued, “What I tell people is like you think you’re better in Madagascar, but go to the US and you will see how people treat you. You are all the same. There’s no white, there is no straight hair. If you are from Africa you are from Africa. All of you are the same.” As if to add on to Christine’s comment, Zorro stated that:

When I became an African, the name I was given here, a name that was attached with so many strings, so many other stuff attached to that African, I had to react to this new identity that I was given. The term just doesn’t come empty handed, it has its own ties with it, ties like not very competent, backward, not intelligent, accent, etc. Assuming this African identity that I was given, I was also assuming all the strings that were tied to it.

agency and resistance. Agency and resistance have always been inextricably linked to a strong sense of who one is. The women that I talked to indicated that although they felt a sense of powerlessness in the beginning, once they realized what was happening they became aware of what was going on around them. It is interesting how most of them used silence as a way of resisting labels and stereotype. Zorro indicated that she would only explain anything concerning her background to someone she believed was genuinely asking. So most of the time she would keep quiet. But although she was visibly quiet, she was making analyses and comments unto herself.

So this friend of mine in church said so how does it feel like to get some space, to live spaciously when you used to live in crowded situations? Now you’ve some space in this apartment. And I was like this apartment is not even half or even a quarter of the house I used to live. I’m actually feeling very crowded here. But I didn’t say that. I just said I thank God. Because I feel like it’s a sheer waste of time to explain all that, because they cannot imagine that you could have a better house in Zimbabwe.

I asked Zorro if by not saying anything she would be perpetuating the myths and stereotypes. She indicated:

I try but I feel like the people are kind of locked in their perceptions such that to unlock you need a lot of energy. And sometimes I do not want to invest myself in that kind of energy. So I disengage. But if one really wants to know I take my time and explain. But when sometimes people ask, asking not because they want to know, but they want to justify their source, they ask you why Africans are killing each other, or why Africans are corrupt. It’s not like they’re asking to know, but they want you to endorse their perceptions. So that kind of questions and attitudes I don’t usually take it up. But there are really genuine people who really want to know ask genuine questions. Kondwane and Odala exhibited agency in the way they conducted themselves. Odala refused to be defined by her limited English language and kept telling herself that that shouldn’t change who she was. Agency, as defined earlier, denotes a subject position, instead of the expected object position that these women might have found themselves initially. Agency also denotes the ability to act. Kondwane “put herself” out there to prove that she was capable of performing like anybody else. She acknowledge getting accolades and awards for her hard work in an environment where she was supposed to be told what to do. Although Christine presents as a broken-hearted student who has been degraded, she still exhibits the charisma of someone acutely aware of what is going on around her. In response to one African woman from Nigeria who has established herself in the US she said:

I don’t know if you have heard about this but there is a different way of saying it in English, like they put someone into high rank not because they really want to but to cover their racism. So it’s like oh let’s put this person at a higher rank so that people will see that we are not racist. We don’t have that mentality like African are savage, African are like this. So this person, when you say she was invited in Britain and all that, maybe she is really smart, maybe she’s easy target too to make other people since she’s already here so that people will see that we don’t have that kind of mentality. We love them we do this. Christine understands perfectly well that she cannot work and finish because someone responsible for

that intends to keep her much longer than is necessary. She states, Well, umm this is the kind of thing I’m doing actually trying to work with as much people as I can. Just to (pause) it’s not like a show-off but it’s like trying to prove to people too that just because I’m from Madagascar, a poor country doesn’t mean I cannot perform.

Emerging Themes As I highlighted above, this piece presents the emergent themes derived from the participants’ narratives through the process of data analysis. As I spoke to the participants, common issues kept creeping into almost all conversations. To me, it sounded like a chorus that although they may have individually sang about different issues, they all came together to sing the chorus. Here are their choruses.

self-identity. The ultimate result from the conversational interviews zeroed in on self-identity. Even as I discuss these emergent themes of liminality, language, belonging, and collaboration, the participants were really talking about their identity in all these spaces. I have viewed self-identity through El Bushra’s (2000) lenses. She perceived it as that which concerns the “social process whereby individuals come to identify themselves with a particular configuration of social roles and relationships” (p. 67). The question is how their position, language, and relationships have shaped and been shaped by their personal and social experiences at home and in their new spaces. During the conversations, the participants expressed the theories of home, displacement, and integration, and what these say about their hopes and desires. As will be discussed, these issues had a strong impact on their identities and power in their new homes.

The participants narrated their experiential journeys from who they were in their original countries to who they had become in the U.S. The past and the present mingled with the personal, local, and global events to create complex and unique life narratives. This seemed to assume traits of bridging identities that allowed them to balance their loyalties and achieve some inner aspirations. As stated in chapter 2, the social world has an impact on personal identity (Friederes, 1981). Different stages in life, such as changes in age or locality, new professional or familial duties and responsibilities all involve the reconstruction of notions of the self. As I conversed with the participants, they all highlighted that they all assumed one identity of African

88 women, irrespective of where they come from in Africa. This indicates that identities are not merely choices, but can be ascribed.

The women realized that the term African woman, was not just a term, it came with “markers” (Friederes, 1981) that are associated with the perception of Africa. As Zorro summed it up:

When I became an African, the name I was given here, a name that was attached with so many strings, so many other stuff attached to that African, I had to react to this new identity that I was given. Some people get annoyed to be called an African, I really did not mind. I had to learn to solidify the new identity, and also to learn to come to terms with those aspects that are attached to that term, African. The term just doesn’t come empty handed, it has its own ties with it, ties like not very competent, backward, not intelligent, accent, etc. Assuming this African identity that I was given, I was also assuming all the strings that were tied to it. Coming to terms with an ascribed identity could be an act of defiance or an internalized oppression. Christine was broken in spirit because of how she perceived these ascriptions. She spoke in that defeated tone, and was unable to pull herself up to challenge that stigma:

This is my six year and final year as a Ph.D. student but she treats me like I just started. Like no, you shouldn’t do this, no I told you to do this, no, no, no. It’s like always she has power over me. I was being controlled. I was never being told like here’s the goal we reach. You know, and it’s natural that I should have that mindset, like here’s what I need to get to. But because of the control, I don’t have that mindset anymore. What I have in my mind is what does she want me to do next. The major reason she crumpled so easily was because the closest person she worked with, one that she looked up to for approval of her capabilities, was the very same person who crushed her. Her spending longer time in a program that she felt she could have done in a shorter space of time, internalized in her that belief that she was incapable. Whereas most of these other women were able to negotiate their new identities because the social worlds that looked down on them were not what they may consider important people. When the social world seem to

89 comprise people who seem not to have too much diversity and knowledge of what made these women value themselves, the impact of the stigmas were bearable.

They even chose to or not to explain who they were or not because it did not really matter. Christine and Nya found it difficult to authenticate their beings to the people who had the responsibility of making them overcome that stigma. As identities changed due to both external and internal pressures as indicated in the women’s narratives above, these women either felt valued as different or devalued as incapable candidates.

In an effort to move beyond the stranglehold placed on them by such ascriptions, the women invented different coping mechanisms to enable them to retain agency. They formed organizations or simply groups comprised of similar people where they would feel welcome. With each other’s support and encouragement, they were able to move fluidly between identifying themselves as knowledge constructors to being identified with the markers that stereotype African women and accommodated the demands of a new foreign place. They discussed problems facing African countries, with a perspective of keeping in touch with their past. These close interrelations helped built and nurture an important role in the survival and functioning of them in their role as graduate students.

liminality. The most common chorus the participants echoed together was being in an in-between position (psychologically, socially and culturally) of Africa and the U.S. academic and social systems. They all expressed the problems of being viewed as Zambian, Zimbabwean, Malawian, or Malagasy by their American colleagues, yet in their own countries they were viewed as Americanized. They kept questioning “where the new me” would really fit, in the U.S. system of education, or in their native countries where they would be “more appreciated”. At the same time they worried that they had embraced some concepts unacceptable to their “own people”. One example given by three of the participants was embracing homosexuality after they have worked, conversed, taught, and learned with people from various sexual orientations.

The women in this study learned that sexual orientation is a form of difference that is similar to national identity, and that gays and lesbians yearn for acceptance in society and the academy just as they did. But given the fact that the generality of African countries and its

90 people chose not to recognize what they term abnormal behavior (Aarmo, 1999), the women struggled with their exact position (regarding sexual orientation) in the grand scheme of things. I basically found them stuck in Van Gennep’s “liminal stage” (1960). It became a source of cross- cultural tension as they could not fathom the idea of going back to doing things the old way, neither could they completely immerse themselves in their new selves.

The most peculiar aspect of the liminal stage is its ambiguity as it eludes the network of classification that Van Gennep used to locate states and positions in cultural space. As Turner (1969) summed up, they are “betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial” (p.359). Bhabha (1994) further stated that this “unhomely space and time” captured at “culture’s borderline” disturbed mainstream feminist logic of universal experience of oppression (p. 31).

In addition to the disruption of the women’s values internally, they also voiced a state of, in Nnaemeka’s terms, visible invisibility (telephone conversation). They felt a sense of detachment from who they used to be, that is, a state where they could be classified as intellectuals, as scholars, to a state where they felt they were better than before, but they were yet to be classified. The position of the U.S. in terms of power and privilege lured most of these women to attend higher education in search of status as scholars and that ability to contribute to what might be referred to as global conversation, where their voices would stand out as unique. All of them stated during the interviews that their reasons for coming to the U.S. was school related.

Their assumptions could have been that armed with a masters or doctorate degree from a U.S. institution of higher education, it would be easy to present their worldviews from their own standpoints. However, their description of the in-between status shows an entrapment in a place where their hopes and aspirations remain unfulfilled. Their scholarship still struggle to make that equal impact, not as exoticized, but a legitimate inclusion in academic curriculum so that their perspectives are understood, discussed and accepted within the larger women’s movement group. They yearn for their own countries where they would be, in their words, appreciated, yet the content of what they are armed with may not be what their own people and country want or can use.

Christine and Kondwane stated that the programs they were doing had no job opportunities in their own countries. Both of them lamented that their choices were influenced by faculty in the U.S. based on their performance in those fields. Kondwane even went to the extent of explaining how she cried because she did not want to be in that field. However, the incentive she got out of it was a number of accolades, as well as a recognition and appreciation from the faculty for her hard work. She felt that her hard work would not have been recognized in her own country. She thus described herself as a “global citizen”, justifying that the local can be superseded by the global. I struggled to understand why these women would embark on degree programs that they were not happy about. A potential point could be that U.S. universities claim they want more diversity and seek it out. Yet when international students arrive, they face misconception and barriers, such as what they are assumed to know, that can limit their choices, and sometimes their ability to succeed within these universities.

language. All the participants chorused problems to do with language. They stated that being African women, they spoke with accents, with Kondwane referring to hers in the early days as a “heavy” accent. They found problems with being misunderstood by their peers and professors due the way they spoke. All of them stated that they were English speakers, with Kondwane again stating that, “I always say thank God Zambia was colonized by the British, because I can speak in English.” This indicates how English’s privileged status is still prized in most of postcolonial Africa. Yet, even though some Africans can and do learn the colonial English language, this does not mean that there is shared understanding and community among English speakers. I remember in class at one point during a discussion of Chandra Mohanty’s (2003) Feminism Without Borders with my group. There was one white lady who shared my passion for feminist studies, and we were hoping to find a lot of common ground. I started arguing that Mohanty’s solidarity was a bit myopic in the sense that when I sit at the same table with different categories of women, my communication is limited because I cannot use the language that I was comfortable with. At the same time, if I were to write my story in my language, I would not be able to make those people whom I want to understand my predicament read it. So I was stuck trying to relate my experience in a language that is foreign to me.

Mati was fortunate that she could use her native language for the interviews because we

92 were of the same nationality. I could not do the same with Kondwane, Christine or Odala. The only commonality we have is that our countries share the same continent. So as I explored the complications of language, it was easy to find problems of communication in a second language, where culture differed. I leaned heavily on Fanon’s (1967) argument that “to speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture…” (p.18). Hence, for Fanon (1967) language is a culture, and he also conceded that “mastery of a language affords remarkable power as it affords the speaker the opportunity to possess the world expressed and implied by that language” (p.18).

The construction of experience, and the ability to articulate it is differently marked by language. Although the women I interviewed expressed an inability to understand and be understood because of different accents, the issue of language was more than that. When people speak to communicate, it is more than just an exchange of words. Griffiths (1995) notes that expression and communication are much more important than particular words or grammatical structures (p.156). She highlights that families, social groups and nation states develop their ways of understanding each other in dialects, slang and jokes in their artistic and cultural expression. Thus for an effective communication to take place, it really depends on shared knowledge and attitudes.

The issue of what Griffiths (1995) calls a “public space” (p.158) also affects communication. When the ladies who participated in my research talked about their challenges, they noted the difficulty of keeping pace with classroom discussions. They all agreed that the class proceedings were so informal that they found it difficult to just jump in and converse. This was also compounded by the fact that they had to think in different languages, translate and then were ready to participate. But the problem was that the conversation had already shifted and therefore they would remain silenced. “Public space” for Griffiths (1995) is created between the participants in a conversation. The public space is established through the notion of “conversation rules”, that is, the conventions which govern who may speak, when, about what and for how long. Since public space in most classrooms was controlled by the curriculum, which remained Eurocentric, the Southern African women had to struggle to fit in the public space.

The women’s conversations showed that even if individuals or groups of individuals tried

93 to overcome norms of the society in which they find themselves, the language aspect will always set them apart. Language plays an increasingly important role as a means of control and domination. Skutnabb-Kangas (in Mutua, 2004) coined the term “linguicide” and has referred to English as a “killer language”, given its growing global hegemony and power to further marginalize indigenous languages (p.14). Loomba (1998) asked whether the colonized speak in their own voices or in accents borrowed from their masters (p. 193). She also asked if the “project of recovering the “subaltern” can best be served by locating her separateness from dominant culture, or by highlighting the extent to which she molded even those processes and cultures which subjugated her? It remains difficult to assess whether by giving voice to these women, yet making them speak within the context of subjugation emancipated and empowered them. Maybe persistence will eventually manage to dismantle the master’s house using his tools (Lorde, 1984).

Groups can develop languages of their own if they share particular social, psychological, and linguistic experiences. It’s clear therefore that once a group of people, like the ones that these women belonged to, develop and legitimate their own language as a source of knowledge, they begin to develop ways of speaking about shared experiences, understand them better, and in the process are able to change the language used to describe them. As this happens, it will change the way the members of the group understand their experiences and use it as a form of resistance. As Ngugi Wa Thiong’o aptly puts it, the choice of language and the use to which language is put is central to a people’s definition of themselves in relation to their natural and social environment, and indeed in relation to the entire universe.

belonging. When I was conversing with my participants, I couldn’t help but noticed a yearning in their description of their experiences. They showed a great love of being where they were at, yet they felt rejected by a society that they expected to be embrace by. Griffiths (1995) notes that love, acceptance, resistance, and rejection are connections of belonging, deciding whether to belong and of being given or refused permission to belong. Their acceptance in the classroom was on condition they “proved” their worth. All of them highlighted that they had to first prove that they were capable to perform for their colleagues to be inclined to welcome them as peers.

The conversations also indicated that the women’s dilemmas meant they had more

94 decisions to make once they decided to be members of the graduate school groups. They have had so many ambiguous questions regarding their origins, some with racial tones, and others belittling them. Joining these groups meant deciding to act as if racist stories and all were insignificant. Kondwane and Odala stated that they felt fully accepted but they underwent episodes where they just felt they did not belong. They argued that it was really nothing to do with their peers or instructors, it was just them. I felt like they were unconscious of how the system alienated them and made them divided against themselves.

The most traumatic realization for these women was that they could not leave the larger group that they had become part of… graduate student group. They came from their respective countries, looking forward to be one of an elite group and raring to prove their capabilities. Along the journey, issues of race, language, and nationality that they had not anticipated surfaced and caused rejection. The women in this study realized these issues when their group members chose easy tasks for them in the case of Kondwane, or when they wouldn’t be chosen to participate in some groups, therefore beginning to question their capabilities. Even if they get “A”s in the classroom, other markers of their identity has caused them rejection. Choosing to belong to a group is a process, and when that process fails, alternative means of survival have to be found.

It was not difficult to notice that some of the resistance and agency the women exhibited was born from the rejection they experienced. Kondwane’s statement here elaborates how she solidifies her new identity where other means have failed to make her part of a group. She continued:

Despite all these accolades and awards, there was still this idea that oh you are African. So despite you being successful in your career, you are still African, and that’s something that I had to deal with, and still deal with. You know, they still put you in that bracket of being African and for me personally I have embraced it. It is one of those things where people are like, it’s sort of funny and I will give you an example like I’m TA here at this university. I’m the only black girl here. This university is not diverse. How can I put it, even white people say it’s not diverse. That’s how bad it is.

So like I said, right now I’m a TA and I’m the only black girl in my class and I am the TA of the class. It’s sort of interesting though how I’m using my Africanness to break down those stereotypes. One of my professors has given me a chance to lecture his class. Which is very interesting because it’s like this Zambian girl had come to teach American kids about engineering. I feel like I use that to my advantage to sort of like break down the stereotypes of how people think about Africans. That’s a very hard question to say have they defined you, basically what I’m trying to say though is that my education has defined me in a positive aspect, you know being able to do things I thought I would not or ever think of doing.

But society around me still views me as black and African, and so that’s another aspect that I need to deal with. But what I’m doing is using my educational success to break down those stereotypes and say I might be African but I can do all these things just like any of you. You see that’s the point I have reached of trying to link the two. I’m not trying to avoid being African, I don’t think it works. All of the women acknowledged that they had to accept they not only have to accept being African women, but to also acknowledged the negatives that come with being African. Since the experience of belonging or not belonging is very important to self-identity of the person concerned, these women have learned to accept their new-found self-identity through a process of accommodation (Griffiths, 1995).

Politically, these women’s lives have been transformed by the discovery of their exclusions. They have embraced and negotiated identities of being African women, Third World women, postcolonial beings in their construction of self-identity as graduate black women in U.S. higher education. They realized that they were not the same persons as they had become in their own countries in terms of self-identity. Hence the continual construction of self-identity in the face of acceptance and rejection which have to adjust to new inclusions and exclusions.

collaboration. The women I spoke to emphasized the need for collaboration with women of the world. Odala was upfront with arguing for doing research in her own country, then collaborating with

96 other different groups, comparing notes and learning from each other. The argument these women made was that their input in terms of knowledge construction was being omitted. As Nnaemeka (2005) noted, collaboration will earn Western women a place in Third World struggles. She argued that it was unwise for Western women to think that they are very capable of solving their own problems, whereas Third World women need help because they are totally incapable of taking care of their own problems. Such thinking causes problems and breeds resistance. Obiora (2009) stated that a crucial dimension of collaborative schemes and viable strategies entail developing reconciliation with the affected population, tapping into the indigenous perspectives about rhythms of change, and conceding the local women the right to take the lead in identifying their needs and formulating solutions. In this way, as a women’s group, we will avoid approaches that shun and bode ill to marginalized groups, hence avoiding reducing reformist efforts to little more than “intellectual masturbation” (Nnaemeka,2005:15).

Chapter Summary This chapter epitomizes the participants’ narratives. I presented them as verbatim as possible to indicate their feelings of outsider-within. As stated, I indicated the sections when I included my voice for clarity, or to show an assitional line of questioning. I then explored the identified and emergent themes in line with what the data analysis revealed. As much as identity, power, knowledge, difference, agency and resistance played a part in the identification and definition of African women, liminality, language, belonging, collaboration, and self identity also indicated a matrix of domination and stereotyping that need education curriculum to address.

Chapter Five: Synthesis, Discussion and Implications “Reading between the lines”

This chapter presents a synthesis of the findings and analyses gathered from the conversational interviews. I also present the conclusions and recommendations for future research that aim to promote difference, inclusion, and collaboration in the academy. I embarked on this research particularly to assess how Southern African women make sense of their lived experiences in U.S. higher education. In a way, my intention was to understand the possibilities of what George Sefa Dei (2002) calls “academic decolonization” (p. 3), where indigenous knowledges are valued on a global stage. I intented to demonstrate how these findings have implications for:

1. education as they speak to Dei’s assertion that “indigenous knowledges have a place in the academy” (p. 4), 2. African women as they maneuver to find global spaces. My use of the sub-heading “reading between the lines” as a text is two-fold. First, for the women that I interviewed, it encompasses agency and resistance as they refuse to take what they see as given. Everything they are told, hear or what they said is worth scrutinizing and critiquing to get to a deeper understanding. Secondly, for the readers of this research, specifically non- Africans, there is need to avoid the common issues of misrepresentation and misnaming of what lies beyond your “zone of intelligibility” (Tomlinson, 1991). It’s worth remembering that there is always something unsaid in a statement.

I also provide the recommendations and conclusions in this chapter which may provide for further research in global collaboration and solidarity among different categories of women.

Invasive Memories Chimamanda Adichie stated that our histories cling us. We are shaped by where we come from. When I began graduate studyI had believed that I was familiar with the education arena, and would just perform as I knew best. The terrain was a little different. I was not in Zimbabwe anymore. I was in the U.S. The curriculum were drastically different. The expectation to read and cram my teachers and lecturers notes and then regurgitate them word for word in the exam

98 was replaced by a discursive environment where one said what they wanted, relevant to the topic or not. I began to think that the wealth of knowledge I thought I possessed was irrelevant in this society. As I adopted a critical stance to what I felt and what was happening around me, I realized that consciousness emerged within the context of social struggles. This project culminated in an effort to consientize Americans (black and white) that Africa is more than the pictures of animals that obstruct the myriad of human activities that take place there. Through these stories it emerged that stories matter. They can be used to dispossess and malign. But they can also be used to empower and humanize.

Now as I understand the state of things, my whole world has transformed greatly. As Angela Davis said in one of her many speeches, I have refused to attribute any permanence to that which is, simply because it is. Through the conversations that I engaged with the participants, we became aware of ourselves as potential agents of social change in creating a new world. Through constructivism, we realized that although things were the way they were, this was not how things had to be. As we collectively took a critical stance, we believe(d) that they will not always be this way. A thorough analysis of our conversations revealed the urgent need for changes in the curriculum to significantly incorporate our aspect of knowledge construction.

As I talked and listened to the participants, I figured it was time to create proactive spaces rather than the current reactive spaces from which to speak and interpret African women’s position in the global arena. As the women spoke of the need to prove their worth, it was clear to see that they were/are viewed to occupy historically and sociopolitically a position of unimportance. This then inevitably dictates that whatever point is made about such a low status group gains credibility, validity, and reliability only as it can be redefined through the lives, lenses, and contributions of others more credible, more legitimate and more salient. An example is when an African woman can make a contribution in class about issues that affect her. Instead of focusing on her contribution, class discussion assessed her statements against their own experiences and since there is a wide gap, it is thrown out because it cannot align to what the rest (or most) of those in the classroom know as valid. Hence the uniqueness of African women’s experiences and standpoint from such a view becomes a sign of weakness.

The concept of sisterhood should not be solely based on “common oppression”. It disguises and mystifies the true nature of women’s varied and complex social realities. Instead of

99 taking solidarity for granted as a way of supporting a feminist movement that in more exclusive than inclusive, it is time to create new spaces through shaping scholarly tenets that hold both sound scholarly practice and ethical behavior. When we create forums for discussing marginalization, let it not be limited to what we are used to such as disability, sexual orientation, slavery, or African Americans. We need to incorporate situations of some of our colleagues who hail from elsewhere and what that means to them as well as us. bell hooks (1986) observed how the feminist movement has not transformed woman-to-woman relationships, particularly between women who are strangers to one another or from different backgrounds. Thus as curriculum for different disciplines is prepared, there is need to acknowledge that knowledge gets produced in other sites as well. Language and vocabularies need not erase the contribution of others.

Exploration of Identified and Emergent Themes In this study I gathered and analyzed the narratives of six women from Southern Africa regarding their lived experiences navigating higher education in the U.S. Their individual stories have centered on identified themes of power, knowledge, difference, identity, agency and resistance. The above themes revolved around the question of identity. The major two questions I felt the participants were trying to answer were “who am I?” and “what can I do?”. Before they moved to the U.S., these women did not question their capabilities.

Hence their voices in this research speak to the complexity of identity by exposing it as a question of location. The way they were perceived, the assumptions of what they were able or not able to do, and the way their knowledge construction was valued, can be identified as emanating from a mindset in a specific location, Western epistemologies. Conversations in classrooms or elsewhere between the women and their American hosts, with exclamations like really!, no animals in your backyard? You had a bigger house? etc, elaborately or subtly demanded proof or their (our) worth, with a suggestion of the listener’s own needs to contain, limit, or control authenticity and the rights to interpretive authority. Such intonations of declaration of inquirry expected us to fail in making our cases, rather than succeed in establishing our viewpoints as reasonable, and indeed valuable. As women in higher education in the U.S., and being both different and alike, it seemed that it is the differences that are highlighted. Differences, noted Crosby (1992), are spoken everywhere in the academy, but the

100 recognition of difference as if it were a static, forecloses “the possibility of thinking differently about differences” (p. 140).

As a researcher writing from critical theories of postcolonial and transnational feminist perspectives, I would do injustice if I did not “build bridges between the reader and the text….developing a form of cultural criticism revealing power dynamics within social and cultural contexts” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000, p. 286). In order to discern what continues to disempower Southern African women in the contemporary world, the analyses of the stories need to be placed within social and historical contexts.

As introduced in the early chapters, African women were presented as inferior and speechless beings, housekeepers and breeders (Kasiang’ani 2004). Kasiang’ani (2004) also noted that European biases about Africa are not only informed by racism, but also fueled by the white man’s ignorance of African social institutions. African women gained prominence as they aged. The fact that most activism and resistance by women has not been recorded makes them unworthy of scholarship since written scholarship is valued than oral. As Etter-Lewis (1993) noted, values asigned to orality and literacy are culturally based. The speechlessness of African woman arose due to lack of written literature. Hence, even as these women tried to clarify certain issues, they were confronted with a “so what” factor which seemed to emerge in a guise of questions related to importance of evidence. As Royster (2000) puts it, it is a question of “how instructive African women could possibly be in the grand scheme of things” (p. 250). It then becomes controversial and misleading to be part of a women’s group when contributions are invalidated How then can there ever be real justice in an environment of inequality?

According to Cornel West (1997) identity relates to a desire for recognition, a desire for affiliation, and a desire for security and safety. Through the narratives presented in this study, I have come to understand self-identity as that which springs from personal history and social location, and are linked to social processes and cultural narratives.As a group, African women now need to write and express their position so as to challenge discourses that reify hegemonic power. What human beings do with writing is an expression of self, of society, and of self in society (Royster, 2000). The time is now to define our own mandates, and establish an interpretive viewpoint that clearly places African women at the center of our own stories. If others are worth listening to, then so am I. Listening to self and others becomes a contribution to

101 to the creation of a theory which is not blind to difference. The question is do we only want to listen and understand some people only if they make an effort to speak to us? How much are we willing to initiate these conversations?

The narratives display that by acknowledging and refusing to be identified in certain ways, the narrators were transformed into inter-texts. They shaped the original texts by providing meaning to why and how they came to be viewed as such. The negative aspects of how they are perceived, their past good life, and alienation as women of Africa, act as enabling experiences that bridge between the present and the past in order to shape the future. As noted, identity is not so much a map of experience, or a set of fixed coordinates. As the women in this project showed, people negotiate a place in the new social order, and challenge it through the meaning-making activities they partake. The women negated being mirror images projected or reflected by others. They evolved, created and recreated themselves in a wold with others. By stating and reflecting on who they are, they refused to be filtered through the experience of others. The narration of their stories helped to repair their broken dignity as they subverted being filtered through the experience of others.

The themes that I identified through data analysis also serve to emphasize the aspect of self-identity. The liminal position the women found themselves in not only brought about disorientation, but also the possibility of new perspectives. According to Thomassen (2009), “liminality not only served to identify the importance of in-between periods, but also to understand the human reactions to liminal experience: the way liminality shaped personality, the sudden foregrounding of agency, and the sometimes dramatic tying together of thought and experience” (p. 14). The women changed the perspectives of their identity after it was disrupted from who they thought they were to who they thought they had become.

The in-between status has not been able to transition to the new state where the individual becomes a perfect fit, neither could they go back to the old structure where they were a perfect fit. Turner’s (1967) theory that all liminality must eventually dissolve as it cannot exist without some sort of structure to stabilize it cannot apply in this case. Bhabha’s (1994) suggestion that the liminal space, between fixed identification opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without assumed or imposed hierarchy fits best in what I refer to as the global space. Identity construction must be understood in respect to a larger social process which

102 is marked by relations of power that can be collaborative. In this instance, it was not only the women from Southern Africa whose identities were defined and questioned in their new surroundings, but Western women’s (African American and White) identities were also profoundly changed and impacted upon their engagement with the African women. Hence these groups, although being strangely alike and different, they still have to function and collaborate within the larger space of academy. There is need for curriculum to include a critique of deficit theories on non-Western society, which deliberately ommits their worldviews. The problem of universalization of the feminist theory has the effect that African woman’s struggles, negotiations, and resistance to different forms of oppression and domination are very likely to go unrecognized. Hence the need to produce education that is contextually relevant which will lead to healing the “spirit injury”, the community, and the larger socio-cultural context. Discussions and debate in the classroom need not center on discrimination or on simply adding to the dominant culture the experiences of African women, but to disrupt what has come to be known as legitimate knowledge.

The discussion of language has shown that language is more than words and grammar, it is who we are as a people. Identity constructs and is constructed by language. Etter-Lewis, (1993) questioned what happens to identity when language styles, which constitute a group’s culture, are removed from their cultural contexts? According to Norton (1997) every time a language learner speaks, they are not only exchanging information with their interlocutors. They are also constantly organizing and re-organizing a sense of who they are and how they relate to the social world. These women in the study also occupy complicated positions. I have classified them as the elite, not only based on their class privilege, but also their academic standing and the position of status they occupy (ied) within their communities before coming to the U.S. Unlike most of their uneducated sisters, these women had access to power and influence. Their positions were complicated in that they have made some significant progress in African contexts that have a culture of orality, respect for elders, salient gender differentiation; yet they were educated in a colonial system that has made them accept some Western defined terms of what it means to be a feminist. So then how do we define a language that can specificically identify them as a people?

In most instances the participants kept saying that when some things that they did not agree with were said, they “kept quiet.” They also highlighted the liminal space they occupy,

103 which should be used as leverage in the classroom to reconcile that aspect of postcoloniality and migration.I came to understand that although silence can be used as agency, or like a weapon of resistance to being defined, it could also be a sign of inability to understand the culture through language. During the interview I asked four of the participants why they couldn’t explain to their colleagues some stereotypes that surfaced during their conversations. Their argument was that it was a waste of time to explain, but I viewed those as missed teachable moments. Teachable momemts are missed when we tend to be reactionary rather than creating forums to discuss what is important to us as different groups. The issues these women discussed showed the dilemmas that are a part of everyday existence of a postcolonial subject. Like Geeta Verma (Mutua and Swadener, 2004) said, “I did not realize that being a woman and a person of color would have strong implications for my successes, failures, and alienation in the perceived inherently neutral space of the academy” (p. 16).

Implications for Education Through their lived experiences, the participants claimed their social position by expressing the need to be recognized as important parts of themselves that were often silenced and ignored in terms of knowledge production. The women showed that their ways of knowing remained unvalued and under-valued through their participation and through content of the curriculum. Many educational writers have noted that no education is politically neutral. Teaching methods, course curriculum, and the ways we learn, reflect a particular political perspective of whose voices are included and what is considered knowledge. In my introductory chapter I highlighted my dilemma as I could not find my own experiences reflected in the theory class I was taking. The concept of change and inclusion of differences has only gone as far as probably racial differences whereas the structures in U.S. higher education remain Eurocentric. It was very sad to note that as the women started school, they do not mention in any way if their courses had anything to do with where they would want to work, or if at all, it would be beneficiary to their own countries. Most of them were very appreciative of the fact that they got to know a different perspective, mostly the aspect of discussion and including voices of students in classrooms. They struggled to prove their capabilities because their achievements as African women/people and their knowledge, both in their own right and for the contribution to academic scholarship on a global scale were missing.

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To not introduce other ways of knowing and other ways of thinking is to do a disservice to the people whom we are trying to educate. Transnational should reflect the nature of cultural flow. Hence as cultures flow into one another we need to pay attention to locations from where we speak. A feminist pedagogy at this historical juncture should be driven by a commitment to decolonize representation through universalizing experiences, and open up global spaces for talking about difference. Due to inter and intraculrural convergeence, the West and African are not descreet entities anymore. Rather, as Sangari (1990) noted, have shaped and reshaped each other in specific and specifiable ways. Hence there is need for curriculum to interrogate perspectives and methodologies that mystify our differences.

In a global world, we will encounter people from multiple cultures, especially those different from our own. It is also intellectually dishonest to assume universality. As Dei (2002) aptly puts it, “knowledge does not sit in pristine fashion outside the effects of other knowledges” (p. 7). Dei (2002) argued that knowledges are contested in terms of boundaries and spaces. Therefore there is need to call to academic knowledge to speak to the diversity of histories, events, experiences, and ideas that shape human growth and development.

The major issue I discovered during the process of this project was that even as we talk of globalization and collaboration as a larger women’s movement, the them/us concept still plagues our discussions. Defining Third World women in terms of their “problems” or their “achievement” in relation to some imagined free liberal democracy, effectively removes them from history, freezing them in time and space. It’s clearly a question of definition and context which are overlapping. In a transnational age of diasporic movement, we need to recognize that it is no longer about the African woman, or the Zimbabwean woman. As we mix and mingle, there is no one “authentic native”, be it from the West or Africa. We need to recognize the flux, ambivalence, and hybridity of cultures and allow each other the space to articulate our positions (Grewal & Kaplan, 1994; Hedge, 1998).

Even though the Southern African women I spoke to described their lived experiences, it should always remain in question. Such questioning is only possible for a reader who thoroughly understands the context. Questions of understanding others across contexts and in conditions of inequality should be based on who should speak and who should listen. If the academy includes what Dei (2002) has called “indigenous knowledges”, it will provoke some kind of critical

105 dialogue that will require serious listening. Without such dialogue a listener is liable to interpret words, gestures and action through the lens of her own previous assumptions and value positions, hence justifying stereotypes as discussed by Friederes (1981) and reifying rather than displacing the colonial gaze (Hedge, 1998). The complexity of lived experiences is that rather than seeking generalizations, we must look for the local, specific, and historically informed analyses grounded in spatial and cultural contexts (Dei, 2002).

Implication for Difference, and Global Women’s Movement The stories that these women have told have made me realize that imperialism is really not a thing of the past. By focusing on contemporary debate on sisterhood, it indicated that imperialism is a will to dominate that haunts us even today. There is a pretense to the homogeneity of experience covered by the word “sisterhood” that does not exist. The conversations indicated that the group that these women were supposed to gravitate towards was the one that rejected them the most. The need to feel included within the academic professionals shaped these women’s identity. Their feelings of outsider within also shaped their identities. Their social position, particularly in terms of class, also gave them another identity. The issue of identity was not only personal, but had also become political.

As Hedge (1998) queried, how can we talk about identities in a changing world without addressing the power of a worldview that has seeped into the lives of people globally due to the geopolitical conditions of colonialism? The challenge is in developing a feminist perspective that can travel transnationally and confront the challenge of representing the marginalized others. Hedge succinctly stated that “The global revisioning of feminist theory is about democratizing the production of knowledge and laying the epistemic basis for a genuine multiculturalism.” The concept of difference has become very popular in feminist studies. However, it has not been thoroughly explored to get to an understanding of those differences. I enjoy the story by Rumi about the blind men and the elephant, where the blind men describe each part of the elephant as they felt it. Although this has often been framed as an issue of perspective, we have to look beyond it. As I have stated in previous pages, it becomes an issue of misrecognition and misnaming of what lies beyond one’s “zone of intelligibility” (Tomlinson, 1991).

The women in this project told of being seen through deficit lenses because of their difference. As they were defined as the inferior other, it depended on them to stretch out, in

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Kondwane’s words, to be the bigger person, and bridge the gap between the actualities of their lives and the consciousness of the members of their new environment. The six Southern African women in this study all had to learn the language, intonation and manners in order to be accepted. Their “hosts” maintained their position and evaded responsibility for their actions. There was no pattern for relating across differences, with Christine hoping that when she gets her Ph.D., then probably equality would prevail. There are the real differences of race, class, nationality and ethnicity, which are not being recognized and examined so as to rectify the distortions that result from the issues that lie beyond our comprehension.

Concluding Thoughts As I represented experiences of Southern African women in U.S. institutions of higher education, I realize that together we have re-contextualized our role in a space of agency by discussing our identities in the context of marginality. As Southern African women, we are marked most overtly by our dark skins, accents, and physical features. Inside our emotions are screaming that we are able, we are smart, and we can be anything we want to be, yet the system says you are not capable, you cannot even speak fluent English. And the unfortunate part is that the system has power of mainstream culture behind its views. It has something backing it up. However, the power of being witness and of testifying to the vicious inhumanity of discrimination, reinforces the belief that one can not only survive this system, but change it.

What we need to do is to change the center so that we look at issues from a global perspective in order to make spaces available for different groups of women. According to Grewal (2003), unless we interrogate such essentialist concepts and categories, our analyses remains nationalist and blind to complex cultural considerations, which works against the formation of links and coalitions between and among diverse groups and people beyond the borders of the nation. Spivak, (2000) suggested that the point is to negotiate between national, the global and the historical, as well as the contemporary diaspora; meaning that there is need to move the discussions of domestic/national ethnicities and instances of colonization outside the nation. In so doing, she continued, the diaspora cannot be romanticized as the primary practice of postmodern hybridity or claimed as the exclusive state of being for any one people.

The women in this project yearn for all feminist educators, scholars and activists to face the task of historicizing and denaturalizing the ideas, beliefs, and values of globalization such

107 that the underlying exploitative social relations and structures are made visible. This means exposing the mythologies that feminists of various nations, races, classes and sexualities have inherited about each other. This has made genuine critical dialogue across differences become competitive, fraught with tension, and most of all very painful. We need to collaborate so that we become fluent in each other’s histories (Grewal, 2003). The greatest challenge thus is for feminists to face the task of recognizing and undoing the ways in which we colonize and objectify our different histories and cultures thereby colluding with the hegemonic processes of domination (Grewal, 2003).

Having gone through this project, conversing and forming strong relationships with the participants, I emerge not the same person. I had struggled with my own insecurities, my own problems of being a transnational woman. I spoke to these women from Southern Africa and I understood their struggles as well. We have come to (or some of us are still in the process) depend on our sense of otherness, as it gives us something around which to organize our sense of self. As outsiders to the U.S., we appreciate that the inclusiveness is partial. But as outsiders we have also stepped inside. We are no longer mere outsiders, we can look in from the outside while also looking out from the inside. We have become not quite the same, not quite the other. We are in that threshold place where we constantly drift in and out. Minh-ha (2011) succinctly states that differences do not exist only between insider and outsider. They are also at work between insider herself or the outsider herself. In no way can one speak of her story without speaking of them.

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Appendices

Appendix 1: Recruitment Letter

Dear …………………………………

My name is Roselyn Banda, and I’m Zimbabwean. I came to the United States in July 2008 and now I am a fourth year doctoral student in the Department of Educational Leadership at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. To have someone constantly speak on your behalf is frustrating and disappointing, especially if you feel you have a different perspective to present. The purpose of this study is to provide a foundation for thinking about the ways in which the experiences of Southern African women, who have experienced colonialism and neo-colonialism, challenge dominant feminist narratives that exclude these perspectives. Being women of African descent who have been overshadowed by dominant narratives from Western feminism as well as West African feminism, this research seeks to provide an opportunity for us as women from the Southern Region of Africa to get on the global map. I am interested in listening to personal narratives from fellow Southern African women so that we can construct a social understanding from our own experiences. It is my understanding that as Southern African women we are capable generators, interpreters, or validators of knowledge, especially when that knowledge pertains to our own experiences. This marginalization has not only hurt us as Southern African women, it has hurt the academy as well. Let me know if you are willing to share your personal experiences. Information gathered in this study will be treated in the strictest confidence and used entirely for this study. You may contact me at [email protected] or on (513) 461 4571. I’m looking forward to travel this journey with you.

Yours Faithfully,

Roselyn Banda

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Appendix 2: Informed Consent

Dear prospective participant, The goal of the research is to provide a platform for women from the Southern Region of Africa to voice out their experiences in United States higher education. The basic idea is to understand the individual experiences of a group of women who are part of a global movement towards women’s equality. The normative research question of my dissertation is how the effects of colonialism, postcolonialism, or neocolonialism play in being part of a global movement (where terms are defined by persons who have no experience of them) towards women’s equality? Participation involves engaging in a conversational interview with the researcher, at least one time, with a possibility of repeating the process for clarification. Interviews should not take over an hour. Note-taking and recording will be done during the interview.

“By signing below, I understand that my participation in this project is voluntary, and I have the right to refuse to participate, and that my right to withdraw from participation at any time during the study will be respected with no coercion of prejudice. I voluntarily agree to be audio-recorded during the interview with the belief that the recordings will be securely stored by the principle investigator.”

I would like to thank you for your time and kindness for participation. If you have any additional questions you may contact me at: [email protected] or on (513) 461 4571. You may also contact my advisor Dr. Lisa Weems at [email protected] or on (513) 529 6825; or mail to 304 McGuffey Hall, Miami University, Oxford Oh 45056. Should you have questions regarding your rights as a participant in research, please contact the Institutional Review Board at [email protected], or on (513 529 3600.

Participant Name (Please Print)

Participant Signature Date

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Interviewer’s Name (Please Print)

Interviewer’s Signature Date

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Appendix 3: Interview Protocol

What were your reasons for coming to study in US? Was there any particular reason you chose your field of study? What expectations about school, schooling (and life in general) did you have before coming?

Tell me about your first few months in school, include any challenges and/or successes you faced. How does your experience as someone from an African state enhance or hinder your process of learning?

What might you say are some facts about you that your colleagues do not understand or misunderstand? How does that affect your definition of yourself? Do you think your colleagues have the same view of you as you have of yourself? Would you say the perception of yourself has changed from the time you arrived in the US and started schooling? How much might you say the perception of others influence the way you perceive yourself? (Probe: are there any particular groups that make you redefine yourself?) Do you feel like you are a part of a large group of graduate students and are able to do what everyone else in your cohort does in terms of job application, being in organizations that promote your interests, etc? Do you plan to stay and work in the US after getting your diploma? Why or why not?

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