Dialogical subjectivities for hard times: expanding political and ethical imaginaries of subaltern and elite Batswana women

Abstract

Tracing the careers of three Batswana women leaders, two of them trade unionists and one a public servant who became, first, a politician and then an international civil servant, the article explores ideas of ethical leadership in Botswana and argues that leadership is to be understood as essentially dialogical, linked to notions of dignity and responsibility, while activism has created an impetus for the women to expand their cosmopolitan political imaginaries. The article responds to feminist poststructuralist arguments regarding the possibility of gendered agency and ethical subjectivity. While rejecting Michel Foucault's ‘negative paradigm’ in favour of a more dialogical understanding of subjectivity, it argues that an alternative reading of Foucault's later work may provide insight into an ethics of the other, beyond the self.

Keywords:

• African trade unions
• cosmopolitans
• subjectivity
• Botswana
• civil society

Acknowledgements

This article is a revised version of a keynote address presented at the conference on ‘Self and Subject: African and Asian Perspectives’, 20–23 September, 2005, Ferguson Centre, Edinburgh, and to a workshop convened by the ESRC Programme on Non-Governmental Public Action (NGPA) on 14–16 March, 2006. I am grateful to participants in both events for the comments and encouragement, and to the ESRC for its financial support. The article also responds to comments from reviewers in JSAS and CHHS.

Notes

 1. See, in particular, Foucault (1972, 1977, 1980).

 2. McNay argues that Bourdieu's notion of embodied habitus allows for the capacity to change in the encounter with the ‘field’, a complex and changing social formation. She also appeals to Ricoeur's notion of narrativity and Castoriadis's notion of the radical social imaginary to spell out the possibility of agency outside discourse.

 3. Butler argues that there is no subject prior to discourse so that: ‘The paradox of subjectivation is precisely that the subject who would resist such norms is itself enabled, if not produced, by such norms. Although this constitutive constraint does not foreclose the possibility of agency, it does locate agency as a reiterative or rearticulatory practice, immanent to power, and not a relation of external opposition to power’ (Butler 1993, p. 15). Foucault in fact sees resistance as invoking power: ‘if there was no resistance, there would be no power relations’ (1997, p. 167).

 4. Attention to this dimension of Foucault's work would have enabled Mahmood to incorporate aspects of her ethnography left untheorised, in which she describes the emergence among pietist women of leaders (diyani), experts in the interpretation of Koran and Hadith, who claim the (hitherto masculine) right to lead the prayers, in some cases even when male imams are present. These women also lead active lives in proselytising and fund-raising for philanthropic purposes. One of them even filled the place of a male leader while he was jailed, and later she herself was jailed. Pious women also claimed far more authority within the family and one told Mahmood she would divorce her husband if he prevented her from engaging in pious activism.

 5. Women and slaves were of course excluded.

 6. Foucault appears to fudge the relation of the ethical Self to the Other in an interview in 1984 as well as the transition he identifies from the Greek to Hellenistic period, arguing merely that mastery of one's desires guarantees that a person will rule with moderation and not become a tyrant. Nor does he ever fully theorise the cosmopolitanism of the Stoics and Cynics (see Foucault 1994). Elsewhere (1983) he argues for individual autonomy through ‘self-fashioning’ in isolation.

 7. On the global negotiations surrounding the right to free medication and health see Petchesky (2003).

 8. On the dialogical see also Bakhtin (1984). Bakhtin means by dialogical the fact that personal worldviews always contain implicitly a consciousness of others' views in a never fully resolved argument, which arises in response to moral ordeals and crucibles (see Holquist and Clark 1984). Jeffery Nealton (1998, Chapter 2) compares this to Emmanuel Levinas's dialogics which – like the present article – posits the necessity of subjection to alterity along with responsibility for the other.

 9. Lonsdale (2000) thus rejects Fanon's sceptical view of agency in Wretched of the Earth (1970) based on his belief that only violent revolution would free the self from mimetically reflecting the colonial master.

10. Anthropological examples include Shostak (1981)

11. Often interviews are combined thematically, as in B. Bozzoli (1991).

12. In San Salvador and throughout much of Latin America, women moved into the public domain to protest against the disappearance of sons, daughters and husbands, kidnapped by the military dictatorships. In Israel, Northern Ireland, Cyprus or the former Yugoslavia, women entered the public sphere to protest against their exclusion from decisions about war and peace, and the terror and injustices that occupation and ethnic violence were causing. In England in the nineteenth century, Christian women initially entered the public sphere as philanthropists, concerned with the plight of the poor and destitute. Without ever being feminists, they became experts on matters of social welfare and fought for major legal reforms. Through their activism they created a much expanded public sphere in which matters of personal welfare were included, and were increasingly debated by political parties and financed by the state. In my own work on political motherhood among diasporic Pakistani women in Manchester (P. Werbner 1999a, 2002, Chapter 10), I traced the way male resistance to their philanthropic fundraising drove charitable women into the public sphere. From defining themselves as privileged do-gooders, the women became self-conscious anti-war activists who demanded the right to have an independent voice in the diasporic public sphere.

13. See Wells (1999) on early women's campaigns. For a recent review of feminist movements in post-independent Southern African countries see the special issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies, ‘Women and the Politics of Gender in Southern Africa’ (Walsh et al. 2006).

14. Recently, the union has amalgamated into a single federation with the Civil Service Union BOPEU. In 2005 the Union's name, the National Amalgamated Local and Central Government and Parastatal Manual Workers Union, was changed, dropping the ‘Manual’, to allow it to recruit workers from a wider range of occupations, but the name did not stick and during most of my visit in 2007, the Union was exclusively for industrial class workers and was still called the Manual Workers Union for short.

15. For a comprehensive review see Berger 1992, J. and R. Simons 1983, also Good 2002, pp. 175–176, 182–186.

16. On the strike in Pikwe see N. Parsons et al. (1995, pp. 320–322); on civil servants organising see R. Werbner (2004, p. 168–174); on unions generally see Selolwane (2000) and Molokomme (1989).

17. See, for example, Peace (1975) on the mutual stereotypes of different classes of African workers and then sense of factory shop-floor unionists that they were the true opposition to oppressive management. Peace (1979) argues that low-paid workers in Nigeria were far more closely embedded in and hence aligned with the peasantry and urban masses than they were with the more highly-paid salariat in Nigeria.

18. Perhaps not coincidentally, Unity Dow challenged the state on the new citizenship law in the High Court on 4 May 1990, in a landmark case for women's rights in Botswana.

19. The strike is discussed by both Mogalakwe (1997) and Maundeni (2004) who both recognise its significance in the development of civil society. Their instructive account has laid the foundation for future studies. It should be noted in relation to their accounts that although the Union did not win its appeal in the Court of Appeal, the court reprimanded the government for not honouring agreements negotiated between the Union and State representatives, and reinstated all the workers with full rights. Second, that government attempts to lure workers away from the Manual Workers Union into the civil service (which at that time was prohibited from unionising) with the offer of pension rights, failed, with most Union members preferring the five-year gratuity system.

20. A pseudonym.

21. Minutes of meetings were written in English after the event.

22. I interviewed Motsediso in his home in Palapye in 2005. He is a prominent member of the Botswana National Front, an opposition party with, in the past, Marxist tendencies.

23. I speak of my own youthful experience as a member of the youth labour movement in Israel, who had witnessed the passion with which such ideologies were celebrated in the past.

24. On this symbiotic relationship between the Methodist church and the labour movement in another context see Thompson (1963).

25. Virtually all studies of trade unions mark the passage of time via a union's historically significant strikes. This seems unavoidable, if repetitive, since these remembered mobilisation events shape members' consciousness.

26. This was negotiated by the National Joint Industrial Coordinating Committee (NJICC), a negotiating mechanism set up in agreement with the government. The final decision lay with the Ministry of Finance, who had rejected the agreement that had been reached by the Committee.

27. In fact, she worked in the offices of one of the other ministries.

28. I was in England at the time.

29. In November 2006, however, as mentioned, she was excluded from the Executive Committee, and, after she went to the Press, from the Union. In her view this was because she had been questioning and challenging the lack of transparency in the financial decision-making process and strategies adopted by Union officers (see the Monitor, 20 November 2006, pp. 1–2). She intended to join the rival, breakaway union and to carry her ‘region’ with her into the newly-established union.

30. See, for example, Simons and Simons (1982), McCracken (1988), Cheater (1986, 1988) and, for an overview, R. Werbner (1988).

31. On this in Southern Rhodesia, see, for example, C. van Onselen (1976), who argues that, cumulatively, over time, ideologies of worker resistance came to be established, rooted in the industrial landscape despite a labour repressive system and the failure of individual strikes.

32. On ethnic minorities see, for example, Solway (2002), Durham and Klaits (2002) and Motsafi-Haller (2002); on the marginalisation of the disabled, Livingstone's exemplary study (2005); on the intersection of gender and class see Griffiths (1997).

33. ILO Conventions 48, 87, 98 and 151 on freedom of association and the right to unionise give unions the right to strike and the civil service to unionise. Although ratified by Botswana in 1997 and 1998, conventions 98 and 151 were only passed in Parliament in an amended labour law in 2004. They were published in mid-2005 after some delay, and were being implemented in 2006, with several major ‘associations’ (such as the Teachers and Civil Servants) unionising. Unions in Botswana may employ full-time administrative staff but, until the change in the law, elected union officials were required to work full-time in the industry that the union represented. This rule severely limited union leaders' professionalism and effectiveness, and was criticised by the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). The law also severely restricted the right to strike. Legal strikes are theoretically possible in Botswana after an exhaustive arbitration process, but in practice none of the country's strikes has been legal. Sympathy strikes are prohibited. After much delay, the Trade Unions and Employers' Organisations Act was changed to limit the Minister of Labour and Home Affairs' powers in labour issues.

34. The government owns 51% of the shares in Debswana.

35. It is beyond this article to discuss seriti here in all its complexity. It differs, however, from the Gikuyu notion of wiathi described by Lonsdale, which refers to moral value attributed by Kikuyu to control over their labour in self-mastery, a precondition for gerontocratic rural sub-clan authority, and secondarily to freedom (Lonsdale 1992, p. 356), a notion which later, in the context of labour migration and struggle for independence, was expanded to include worker strikers' ‘struggle for self-mastery’ (p. 416) Mau Mau fight for self-mastery and freedom (p. 446) and even the wiathi right to vote (p. 461). Seriti, by contrast, is, like charisma, an embodied notion of the self as inherited ‘shade’, protected by the ancestors, which stresses dialogical features of respect and self-respect, compassion, and generosity, as well as vulnerability to attack by others (see R. Werbner and P. Werbner, forthcoming).

36. In 2007, she was appointed Assistant Director to the World Bank in Washington.

37. For a further portrayal of Joy Phumaphi see R. Werbner (2008).

38. See Petchesky (2003). Athough she was involved in the Doha negotiations in 2001, her conviction of the need for universal free ARV preceded these.

39. Botswana was the first country in Africa to implement a nationwide anti-retroviral programme. Four years later, 95% of patients, including those using the private sector, are reported to be receiving treatment, and the programme is often held up as a test case for the rest of the continent. Teenage pregnancies are down by 70% and life expectancy rates are rising. In a study on treatment adherence and drug resistance, researchers at the Botswana-Harvard AIDS Institute found little evidence of treatment fatigue – becoming less vigilant about taking the pills over time – and patients are said to have so far demonstrated better or at least the equivalent adherence of their western counterparts. Universal testing has also been introduced. See a recent presidential press release and http://www.plusnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId = 39685

40. My husband and I happened to be in Botswana during the early part of this struggle for hearts and minds in 1999 and 2001, and I have subsequently interviewed her about it, though there is much still left to be told.

41. Schapera (1956, p. 139) notes that great chiefs were supposed to be ‘easy of access’.

42. On African intellectuals, nationalism and pan-Africanism see Mkandawire (2005).

43. It subsequently left the BFTU and helped establish a rival federation in 2007.

44. In Botswana, the women's movement is mainly concerned with rights issues. See Selolwane (1998, 2000), Geisler (2006). Legal rights do, of course, have economic implications. However, as most of the contributors to the special JSAS issue argue, despite highly progressive constitutions and legal reform, implementation is still a challenge across the whole spectrum of family law reforms. Moreover, few of these movements outside trade unions significantly impact on the economic circumstances of poor women. In South Africa, for example, the demand for inclusion of domestic workers in the Law on Unemployment Insurance, likely to have huge benefits for women, was spearheaded by the South African Domestic Service and Allied Workers' Union, who joined a coalition organised by the Commission for Gender Equality as Jennifer Fish (2006, p. 107–128) shows.

45. Lilian, who had once been one of his most loyal supporters and admirers, had lost faith in him.

46. Her mother subsequently died, in 2007.