By Kgalema Madopi
Edited by Imaan Moosa
Women Hold Up the Sky: Nurture through Mother Nature.
When faced with adversity, a journey of resilience is what conquers the conquest. A passion for humanity and harmony between mankind and nature creates a centre of peace, not only in the world but in the spirit.
Those whose struggle continues are formidable in the quest for peace, truly understanding the union between Mother Nature and her children — beautiful and moving aspiration of the WoMin African Alliance.
The WoMin African Alliance, launched in 2013, creates a haven for activists and organizations determined to restore and recreate the beauty of nature and people.
WoMin acknowledged the disheartening disparity between the lack of support provided to women and the perspectives held by the environmental industry of women and local communities.
WoMin sought to address this inequality and exist as an ecofeminist African alliance working towards the exposure of the detrimental consequences of extractive-driven development.
At the launch of the organization, a gathering of 60 activists from across Africa came together under the banner of solidarity. WoMin is connected to 37 sites that are facing struggles across 13 countries in Africa. Thus began a powerful movement that has made great strides to connect revolutionaries fighting for climate justice.
They are the voice of many women and communities on the frontlines protesting against injustices perpetrated by state organizations and corporations on the environment.
Knowledge for Change
WoMin is dedicated to its vision of an avenue to allow women of Africa to have access to resources for the needs of life for their communities, families, and themselves… and able to exercise control over their bodies, land, resources, and choices.
The conception of research and education comes from a rooted system of injustice and the complexity of a racist, patriarchal, and capitalist reality.
Margaret Mapondera, the Press Coordinator for WoMin African Alliance, told To EmpowHER: “Capitalism has done a lot to destroy the naturally dependent relationship that people have to nature.”
As a species, humans have dissociated themselves from natural elements and resources, creating an apathetic response to its ruination. People have lost their humanity, not only through their mistreatment of others but the desecration of the environment.
The synergy between humans, animals, and the environment is the virtue of life. Those who are alive, live for the present and prepare for the future.
Rural and peasant communities teach us that humanity and nature are linked, and so in protecting and defending their territories from destructive projects that destroy ecosystems, we are completely obliterating ways of life that have existed in harmony with the environment for centuries.
You are in fact destroying people, as well as their lives and livelihoods.
To reclaim this relationship, humans need to understand that our place on earth is not a superior and dominating purpose to control and possess the natural world. This narrative is a false one that has led to the colonial domination of land, territories, possessions, and people for profit.
The capitalist value has highlighted monetary success over the value of sustaining life.
Source: Provided.
WoMin has contributed greatly to the fight against climate issues, such as the confrontation of the Grand Inga project in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the contestation of the Sendou coal station in Senegal, coal extraction and coal-fired power sites in South Africa, and promoting the Save Lamu campaign in Kenya.
Inspired by the spirit of justice, the movement has tackled the challenges of human mistreatment of the environment.
Activism at Play
The campaign Women Building Power: Energy and Climate Justice communicates the climate crisis that impacts low- and middle-income social groups, particularly women and children communities.
They are crippled by climate challenges including floods, droughts, and famine. Additionally, they also fall victim to mismanagement and low-quality energy projects that exploit and expropriate energy resources — oil, gas, coal, dams, forests, and fisheries — for capitalist gains.
Many of these local communities do not get the energy generated on behalf of these companies. An example of this is the Grand Inga Dam Project.
The project, which racks up to $14-billion aims to use hydropower to generate energy in the Democratic Republic of Congo. South Africa has expressed interest in acquiring energy from Inga for its Integrated Resource Plan (IRP).
While the Grand Inga Dam project may appear a win with its 50,000 MW of electricity to the largely unelectrified Congolese, the reality on the ground tells a different story.
The project threatens the displacement of Congolese living in and around the Inga Dam site, which has resulted in a flare-up of protests.
As is the case in the Congo, we see that education is pivotal to understanding climate change. Communities may have the knowledge but not the resources to sustain and safeguard the environment.
Phola-Ogies in Mpumalanga has experienced increasing levels of air pollution and the destruction of the natural environment, in addition to energy poverty.
“It's double violence,” says Mapondera.
The climate crisis is bigger than all of us. Working in solidarity can help reform a system that has long subjugated women and indigenous communities.
Listen. Learn. Resist. Dismantle. Rebuild and reclaim. And be in solidarity.
The Right to Say NO campaign is a pivotal mobilization to give a woman’s right to conserve and preserve their land and resources against damaging energy projects.
These oppressive systems have the greatest impact on women because of their roles as caretakers and nurturers, who are constricted by their limited access to employment opportunities and resources due to historic cultural gender imbalances.
The climate crisis is not coming, it is here. It has been here and real for many communities for decades and even longer. Those communities will speak about the many metres of land they have lost due to rising sea levels.
They will speak about how the land doesn't yield the way it used to because of the change in climate and degradation. They will speak about droughts and increasingly erratic weather patterns that impact their harvests. They will speak about communal water bodies that are drying up or have been polluted to the point of becoming poisonous to them because of nearby coal mines, oil fields, or gold extraction sites, and more.
These are the communities who have been resisting for many years and with whom we must all be in solidarity because their struggle is the struggle all of us should be fighting.
We are all entitled to a location that provides safety, security, and overall well-being in harmony with the environment.
How Women Hold Up the Sky
Source: Provided
The recent WoMin African Alliance is a powerful and compassionate film known as Women Who Hold Up the Sky (2019). The film is centered around three major injustices in Africa, namely the communities of Somkhele and Fuleni, KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa that are challenging the encroachments of a coal mine that threatens their environments, and exploitation of their resources.
Women conservationists, in particular, face immense hardships.
Communities that are in the vicinity of these projects and communities that are resisting face high levels of violence, and women in these communities face specific kinds of violence, including rape, sexual assault and sexualized violence.
Women play significant social reproduction roles in communities, as they are often responsible for gathering water each day, for example. These statistics state that women spend up to eight hours a day collecting water in Africa. This means that destructive projects and environmental crises impact them in specific ways where they carry that added burden.
There is an urgency for resurgence, and many are encouraged to join the fight. When asked why it is important to unionize in the battle against climate injustice the WoMin says:
“The Earth is being so wantonly destroyed and gouged out. Sadly this is what the youth are going to inherit. I will not lie, it truly does suck that generations of the future are going to be paying the price for all of this, just as we are paying the price for everything that has come before.”
In summation: RESIST. RECLAIM. RE-ENVISION.
For more information and donations, visit:
Website: https://womin.africa/
Instagram: @womin.africa
Twitter: @WoMin_Africa
Facebook: WoMin African Alliance
LinkedIn: WoMin African Alliance
YouTube: WoMin African Alliance
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