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Chapter 11 Working with Feminists in Zimbabwe A Black American’s Experience of Transnational Alliances Carolyn Martin Shaw In the fall of 1983, I joined with black, white, coloured (mixed race), and Asian women in the Women’s Action Group (WAG) to protest Operation Clean-Up, an attempt by the Zimbabwe government to rid the capital city of prostitutes and vagrants. During Operation Clean-Up, thousands of men and women were picked up in urban areas throughout the country by the police, army, and the Youth Brigade of the ruling party as the government sought to contain what it saw as a social and moral blight. Though some report that an equal number of men and women were picked up, the roundup of women was especially indiscriminate: in addition to actual prostitutes, those arrested and detained as prostitutes included women domestic workers, homemakers, teachers, nurses, secretaries , schoolgirls, and factory workers (two hundred women workers at one factory were picked up on their way to work, leading the manager to believe that there was a strike). Most were black women. In an article without a byline in a Zimbabwean newsmagazine, Zimbabwean sociologist Rudo Gaidzanwa asserts that “Overall, the number of men detained and held probably equalled that of the women.” She goes on to describe the conditions in the detention camps—tin huts surrounded by barbed wire with minimal facilities, little clean water, and rampant disease. She also reports that a pregnant woman released from one of the camps “told us that soldiers were sexually abusing women.”1 In this article, Gaidzanwa relates the story of the manager who found his workforce being held in a football stadium. Unaccompanied women in bars, but also women walking down the street, at bus stops, and in movie 250 theaters were arrested. Some women accompanied by men were arrested, and women were even arrested in their homes: coloured women especially complained of this abuse. The headmaster of a primary school told me of going to the aid of one of the teachers from his school when she was being arrested during the intermission at a movie theater. He was successful in preventing her arrest, but when he walked across the lobby to tell his wife of this success, he found that his wife had been arrested. Once arrested, women were held in police stations or in compounds erected for this purpose in rural areas. Under an emergency powers act which allowed the arrests, detainees had no access to courts or to legal representation. Women put in detention were released only if they presented marriage certificates or proof of employment. The indignity did not stop there: some women were evicted from their homes, lost their jobs, husbands, or children because of the taint of having been arrested as prostitutes. “Marriage Certificates Required for Women’s Release from Jail” read the headline of an article in a U.S. newspaper, which explained that under Operation Clean-Up thousands of women from all walks of life who had been arrested as prostitutes were released from detention or imprisonment only if they presented valid marriage licenses or documents certifying that they were employed. In this chapter I describe the founding of the Zimbabwe WAG, now a strong nongovernmental organization (NGO) with offices throughout Zimbabwe, and highlight problems of international and interracial feminist organizing in Zimbabwe during that period. I also tell my story. The story I tell is, in part, a personal one, recounting what it was like for me as a U.S. black feminist to work with feminists in Zimbabwe. I did not feel an immediate affinity with Zimbabwean culture. My feminist politics and humanist empathy led me to become active there. I found many women I could identify and seek solidarity with—from the factory workers who worried that the manager would demand that she have sex with him to keep her job, to the new wife smarting under the demands of hostile sisters-in-law, to the young woman who asked me in halting English only minutes after we met, “Is it better to marry the person you love or the one who loves you?” There are many ways to form alliances of feeling with women in other countries, to hold hands across divisions of race, class, education, religious faith, and sexuality. The problem is, how does a reluctant representative of the United States make a contribution without being charged with cultural imperialism? In this I was not successful. But the movement I participated...

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