Mohanty in her article on feminist scholarship and colonial discourse talks about the production and construction of the “Third World Woman”. The central idea that shines through is that the identity of the first world woman is relational in nature; it exists because there exists a third world woman, and is essentially founded on and structured on binaries. The complexity lies in the fact that the construction of the third world woman is also carried out with this unconscious attempt to define them. She talks about the process of self-presentation that is carried out through the representation of these women by first world feminists; this binary logic can be seen as parallel to the logic of the colonizer in the construction of his identity: the colonized were savage, barbaric, backwards. This was essentially to say that they, the colonizers, were therefore not – not barbaric, not savage, not backwards. They stood as the other, the other that could then deem people as such, that could fit people into these created categorizations and moulds.

There are several exemplifications of this process employed by first world feminist scholarship, whereby they attempt to superimpose their existing structure onto the third world and its people, its women. Husten’s studies in Egypt fail to take into account the multitude of other factors that go into decisions regarding a woman’s place or role in the economic sphere – she boils the problem down to women’s absence in work outside of home. However, the studies are negligent of the complete lack of social freedoms and choice that form an integral part of these women’s realities. These studies of the third world also do not take into account how developmental and economic processes will have different effects and consequences on different women. The idea of “sisterhood” effectively attempts to eradicate the spectrum within which women, their histories, their identities and the forms of oppression they are subjected to exist. Blanket terms such as “economic emancipation” are not of much use without proper operational definitions that define and explain the underlying historical/socio-economic reasons within which women’s struggles are founded, instead of merely providing descriptive accounts of these issues.

Finally, there are certain pre-existing moulds and structures within which first world feminism operates, and these extend into their scholarship of the third world. These are evident in their fixation with abstractions such as development and progress: but what is it that constitutes as progress? Is progress to be understood as an emulation of everything that the West represents and embodies? Or does it carry meaning that transcends the structure within which they are operating? These are evident, too, in their attachment of value judgments and presupposed connotations to the veil, and their generalizations in understanding sexual relationships and the dynamics prevalent within societies that are structured on kinship ties. Any sort of choice or thought is denied to the third world woman; she is a product of the society she lives in and nothing more. Her contribution to that society is also decided for her by others: whether is it a sexual one if she is unmarried, or a socio-economic one if she becomes a part of the family structure, becoming a wife or a mother. Her existence is studied as an external fact and that only. The third world woman is essentially studied as an object: passive, without agency and without voice. It then becomes the job of the first world feminist to grant them this agency, this voice. It is through this granting and this definitional process that the first world woman defines herself. It then becomes the moral duty of the white feminist to uplift, to inform and to engage. It becomes her burden.

Chandra Mohanty’s article is a response to feminist scholarship in the west  that is complicit in what Gayatri Spivak terms ‘epistemic violence’. This epistemic violence is rooted in the discourses about the third world women in the works of many feminist academics. This discourse enables viewing third world women as a static category that is ahistorical and treats them as a coherent unified group with no differences amongst them. The production of knowledge is immersed in the power relations that exist between the first and the third world. Mohanty’s article is an attempt at decolonising that knowledge production by calling it into question and highlighting the power imbalance.

These discourses have implications in real life affecting the way third world women see themselves and how they view other women who are different than them within their own society. This formulation of the third world women who are in need of being saved from the veil amongst other rituals, from the family, from Islam who are oppressing them. It has allowed for the west to justify invading Iraq and other places. Laura Bush publicly declared that they are intervening to save the women of these areas. This reflects how this reductionist singular view can be harmful and ethnocentric. 

Such saviour complexes also manifest themselves within third world feminists when they want to save the rural or working class woman. In the case of the third world, these binaries are reproduced in the way elite women view themselves as empowered, as opposed to the working class women who are oppressed. Such a binary does little to help the cause of women but rather supports a similar binary as the western feminists construct. The elite women then define themselves on the basis of what they are not and what the working class or rural  women are: uneducated, not having decision making power, traditional, backward.

Mohanty refers to the process of framing the third world women as a unified oppressed category as colonisation and as a postcolonial thinker, her article raises important questions about how there is a need of coalitions across race, class and ethnicity, and nations but those can only happen when there is an understanding of differences and historicity. Viewing women as lacking in agency reduces them to objects which are acted upon by patriarchy, family structure, religion, colonisation, male violence, etc.

Mohanty is careful to not engage in the same practice in her critique as she points out that she does not speak of the western feminism as a monolithic category, and thus avoids implying the same sort of heterogeneity in warning us how third world women might themselves engage in the production of these static categories.

I argue that empowerment is viewed as a destination rather than a journey in these western feminist texts, and that it can be injurious as it allows for the western woman to be posited as on the end of progress and the third world woman as not yet evolved enough. I question that if a transnational feminism is even possible if women are located or exist in very different contexts with different needs, interests and priorities differ.  

Chandra Mohanty’s article has been deeply important in analyzing intersectionality within feminist theory. It criticizes the work of First World Feminists which view the Third World Woman as perpetual and monolithic victim who has static wants and but be liberated by the enlightened Western Feminist. Through Mohanty’s analysis, one can understand both the dangers and the necessity in having feminist works that keep in mind historical contexts but also unifying ideas of struggle and liberation.

She highlights her objective for writing her paper every early on in the text: “…to create international links between women’s political struggles.” If the First World and Third World are bound together by historical, political and economic networks then there are political implications of how women of the West look at Third World Women. The crux of her argument comes in the end when she states that the Third World Woman does not exist as a baseline of all women but as a peripheral Other which allows the Western Feminist to take the centre of all matters concerning women’s liberation. One does not see the Third World Woman as sister to be liberated from her own struggles, but a gauge or worse, a living fossil for the First World Woman to remind herself of how far she has come. But what it means to be liberated in practical terms differs from discursive liberation on the basis of historical and cultural contexts. For example, Mohanty uses the example of how the veil came to represent liberation, defiance and oppression within different time periods of Iran’s history.

But by focusing too much on the contextual differences, one jeopardizes the existence of an overarching theory about oppression and liberation. Mohanty herself has no unifying theory and in an attempt to be creative, she risks committing the same mistake as First World Feminists i.e. being too simplistic in what constitutes as liberation or struggle. For example, Mohanty criticizes Hosken’s study of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) as the study treats women as perpetual victims and men as perpetual accusers. However, the issue of FGM will never be simple, especially when one assumes a moral argument, because there will be women and men who will both support it and be against it. Additionally, cycles of prohibition and uniformity has the potential to treat First World Feminists as imperialistic perpetrators even if they do acknowledge and incorporate the work of indigenous feminists within their work (something that both Third and First World Feminism needs to be aware).  

Going back to her initial aim, it is still important to have some consensus on what feminist liberation and struggle look like. She is allowing room for a new kind feminist discourse which takes into account a sameness in oppression but also the difference in historical and cultural circumstances. Not only does this help escape simplistic binaries and vicious cycles but also allow room for agency on the part of women. Mohanty’s comments on Cutrufelli’s study of Bemba women is a great example of this. Mohanty argued that through certain ritual practices women had agency and the opportunity not just to overpower but to live in harmony with their husbands. Earlier, Mohanty herself admits that this kind of framework can be useful for any discourse that creates cultural Others. The issue of finding pockets of agency and resistance is particularly pertinent in contemporary situations which involve gender fluidity, migration or race within first world contexts.

The path to breaking out of this simplistic and problematic cycle is complicated and difficult to solve, but must be done anyway. Western Feminists maybe concerned with liberating their Third World sisters, but Western Feminists must understand their privileged positions is rooted in a theory which was created under “the hegemony of Western scholarly establishment” as Mohanty phrases it. To allow the existence of such a complication creates space for indigenous feminists to express her concepts of feminism without inadvertently using the Western feminist as an Other (thereby reinstating the same vicious cycle which fell on them) and perhaps bring about new concepts of what it means to struggle and to be liberated.

How important is culture to Cabral’s view of national liberation?

The liberation movement must besides achieve a mass character, the popular character of the culture, which is not, and cannot be the prerogative of one or of certain sectors of the society.

In his speech “National Liberation and Culture, Amilcar Cabral gives a nuanced and multilayered view of culture and the role it plays in national liberation movements.   Amilcar Cabral perceives culture as one the main amour against foreign domination, stating the imperial rule cannot sustain without “permanent and organized repression of the cultural life of the people in questions”. 

According to Cabral, for total imperial rule, the colonizer has to either liquidize entire population of the colonized country to prevent any form of cultural resistance or by “harmonize political and economic subjugation of the people with their cultural personality“. As the latter has yet to occur, Cabral sees the colonizers attempts to assimilate the native people and culture into their own as a way to subjugate the people and strengthen their own power without having to resort to complete annihilation. This so-called assimilation was simply another attempt of cultural colonization, to erase native history. Hence, for Cabral, if foreign domination is brought on by the subjugation of native culture, then national liberation is in fact, an act of cultural resistance. It is through recognizing and rebuilding their own culture that the colonized can hope to fight against the colonizers and their own destruction.

But that begs the question, what is culture to Cabral. From a superficial point of view, Cabral’s views of culture match Gandhi and Nyerere’s way of thinking. They too called for a rejection of Western mode of thinking as a method of opposition.  But once, we go a bit deeper, Cabral view is more nuanced. Not to take away from their vision, but both Gandhi and Nyerere were harking back to a timeless past; a utopia where colonization never occurred and the natives (be it Africans or Indians) lived in simplicity and harmony. For Cabral, not only is that a futile endeavour, but it is also regressive and ultimately harmful to the national liberation struggle itself. For him, culture is a “vigorous manifestation of the materialist and historical reality of the society”. African culture is a dynamic, changing entity to Cabral. It is shaped by economic and political activities and the relationship between man and nature and between different social classes and group. It isnt free of class struggles but in fact produced out of it and is tied to the means and forces of production According to him:

“If history allows us to know the nature and the causes of the imbalances and conflicts (economic, political and social) which characterise the evolution of a society, culture teaches us what have been the dynamic syntheses, structured and established by the mind of society for the solution of these conflicts, at each stage in the evolution of this same society in the quest for survival and progress”.

While he does not believe in assimilating the cultures of the foreigner and the native, he does believe that in order to truly fight for liberation, one had to assert for the cultural personality of the people while at the same time acknowledging and rejecting the regressive aspects to that same culture. To him, a national liberation movement that is based on “blind acceptance of cultural values” and the “systematic exaltation of virtues without any criticisms of faults” is doomed to fail. Thus Cabral’s believes and shows that African cultures are not monolithic but in fact, capable of evolution and development, a feat granted solely European cultures.

For Cabral, the basis of a national liberation movement is the profound knowledge of all cultures of the different social categories of the nation as well an appreciation for the uniqueness of each element of the culture. The struggle must he believe achieve not just a culture with a mass character but also that of a popular culture that is representative of more than just the petty bourgeoisie and rural and urban elite of the land who have become culturally alienated to the rest of the society. It should representative of all categories of the society as then and only then would the masses be interested in fighting for revolution.

Ultimately, Cabral’s view of culture and national liberation are intimately tied to another. While culture acts as the basis for the liberation movement, the movement also results in the development of popular culture. Cabral acknowledges the numerous different cultures in Africa and calls for a movement that incorporates them and evolves into a culture that rejects exclusivity by skin colour or gender or class and welcomes and gives equal weight to all the different elements of that new culture.

Amilcar Cabral answers this question in his text, defining national liberation as “the organized political expression of the culture of a people undertaking the struggle against colonialism/imperialism”. The first two-thirds of Cabral’s essay can be understood as an explanation of the definition stated above. Systematically, he explains that the expression and affirmation of culture is simultaneously the source, the spirit and the end of any national struggle to overthrow foreign domination. To explain this, he answers three questions: What is the culture of a people? How does it threaten colonial rule? How can one systematically organize a political expression of culture to then resist colonial rule? The first two theoretical questions are what I shall engage with in this post, and in so doing, I will seek to summarize his main argument and so, provide a thorough answer to the question “how important is culture to Cabral’s view of national liberation?” In short, very.

What is Culture?

Cabral’s argument rests on his materialist understanding of culture. For him, culture is a reflection of a society’s mode of production.  Two factors, he argues, determine a society’s mode of production:

1. the level of development of the productive forces of society – the manner in which people relate to nature/their capacity to act or to react in response to nature
2. the system for social utilization and distribution of the products made by productive forces, which determine relationships between individual men and different social classes and groups.

These two factors, which together constitute a people’s mode of production, reflect the way the society is ordered – it encapsulates a people’s entire mode of relating to the world, to others, and to themselves – which, when expressed, is known as culture. Cabral’s definition of culture thus is “the conscious result of the economic and political activities of a society – the dynamic expression of the kinds of relationships that prevail in that society, on the one hand between man and nature, and on the other hand, among individuals, groups of individuals, social strata or classes”. It is the “vigorous manifestation on the ideological or idealist plane of the physical and historical reality” of a society – an affirmation that this society is real, there, and present! 

Cabral further argues that a people’s mode of production also determines their history and evolution.  “The mode of production, whose contradictions are manifested with more or less intensity through the class struggle, is the principle factor of the history of any group, the level of the productive forces being the true and permanent driving power of history”. Change, progress, time  – these ideas are charted through changes in a people’s material relationship towards their mode of production – the result of challenges and oppositions amongst the people on how to effectively and efficiently channel their productive forces and distribute and utilize its rewards. To chart this is “to speak of these is to speak of history,” Cabral asserts, “ but it is also to speak of culture”. Culture encapsulates these changes, or rather, the lessons learnt from these changes into the character of the culture it represents. Cabral argues that “if history allows us to know the nature and extent of the imbalance and conflicts which characterize the evolution of society, culture allows us to know the dramatic syntheses which have been developed and established by social conscience to resolve these conflicts at each stage of its evolution, in the search for survival and progress”. Culture holds within it the means of a society’s perpetuation, it’s survival, it’s progress. The metaphor Cabral employs of culture as a flower is now clear – it both represents a culture and is responsible for its continuity, its evolution, it’s growth.

How does it threaten colonial rule?

Having understood what culture means to Cabral, his claim that the affirmation of culture as imperative to any national struggle for liberation becomes clear. Foreign domination, Cabral asserts, is “the negation of the organic historical process of the dominated people by means of violently usurping the free operation of the process of development of their productive forces”. In taking control, they usurp the means of production for their own ends, and cut off a society’s personal relation to that which orients their sense of self, of each other, and of the land. It is their culture that they can turn to – therein resides the seeds to affirm and ensure the safety and continuity of their indigenous way of life, and so, therein resides the seeds to generate resistance against foreign intervention and usurpation of what is theirs. Culture is an affirmation of a way of being specific to the land, specific to the people, and if affirmed during a period of domination, keeps people empowered despite their material subjugation, and so, is threatening to the colonizer, the dominator. If the dominator does not simultaneously arrest and oppress the cultural life of the people it has taken over then “foreign domination cannot be sure of its own perpetuation.” Thus, how Cabral starts his essay, referencing Goebbels pulling out a revolver whenever culture was discussed is poignant – domination, true domination and control over a people can only be maintained if culture is liquidated. This results in the creation of racist theories and systems of thought that seek to negate the existence or the value of the indigenous culture in favor of that of the oppressors – it is fed into the people and emphasized as superior, or, at least, obedience to their own culture is demanded and enforced. If culture is not affirmed, or re-learnt, it can result in self-hate, cultural alienation, and stunted development for a people – removed from their means of production that no longer serve their ends, but to the benefit of the foreign power. 

The foundation of national liberation, to Cabral, rests in “the unalienable right of every people to create their own history…to reclaim the right, usurped by imperial domination… the liberation of the process of development of national productive forces”. If liberated, then the people will be allowed to determine the mode of production most appropriate for their collective well-being, and so allow for organic cultural development, growth, and progress, suited to their needs and desires. “A people who free themselves from foreign domination will be free culturally if they return to their upward paths of their own culture, which is nourished by the living reality of their own environment, and which negates both harmful influences and any kind of subjection to foreign culture.” Cabral highlights how many national liberation struggles are preceded by an increase in expression of culture, to affirm the cultural personality of the dominated people as a means of negating the oppressors culture. Thus, his definition is clarified: “it may be seen that if imperial domination has the vital need to practice cultural oppression, national liberation is necessarily an act of culture…the organized political expression of a colonized people”. Culture, thus, is the source, the spirit and the end of national liberation.

 

“Culture plunges its roots into the physical reality of the environmental humus in which it develops, and it reflects the organic nature of the society, which may be more or less influenced by external factors.”

Cabral writes of National liberation and culture as intertwined concepts inseparable from one another. For Cabral, the importance of culture to national liberation movements is rooted in its importance to domination. His text is thus an exercise in showing the interrelationality of modes of production, history and culture. In all, of Africa’s image of itself. Here I will read the text closely in an attempt to show the relationship of the modes of production/class struggle to culture and how Cabral sees this understanding as instrumental for the making of national liberation movements.

Cabral outlines the relationship of cultural domination and material extraction from the start of the text. He describes this as inherent to the Imperialistic project,  stating that the material ambitions of Empire could only be actualised “by the permanent, organized repression of the cultural life of the people concerned.” Here, it is important to ask what the material allows for the cultural and vice versa? Cabral identifies the modes of production as the method through which a nation knows its material relationships. “of relationships between man and his environment, among men or groups of men within a society, as well as among different societies”. By controlling the modes of production, which Cabral outlines as “the true and permanent driving power of history”, Imperialism demarcates the material relationships that (wo)men can have and can not have within their own country. How (wo)men are allowed to interact with certain segments of society is prescriptive to how its history and culture will develop. While Cabral states that history allows for us to know the nature and extent of the disparity and conflict caused by Imperialism it is in “culture there lies the capacity (or the responsibility) for forming and fertilizing the seedling which will assure the continuity of history, at the same time assuring the prospects for evolution and progress of the society in question.” He further states “it is generally within the culture that we find the seed of opposition, which leads to the structuring and development of the liberation movement”. By limiting the material relationships of these countries, Imperialists effectively stunted the development of both histories and cultures. This proved instrumental in how native populations processed and reacted to foreign domination. The control of culture meant that native populations were subjugated into material domination. Thus, for Cabral the “seed of opposition” needed for national liberation movements could only be reversed by the effects of culture.

“Thus, it may be seen that if imperialist domination has the vital need to practice cultural oppression, national liberation is necessarily an act of culture.”

The commitment and attitude towards a national liberation movement was also determined by the varying levels of culture present within society. The fact that material conditions underlied the formation of these varying levels is a comment on culture and how intrinsically tied it remained to imperial forms of domination. The “horizontal and vertical distribution of levels of culture” and the bolstered local elite was the product of Imperialism. For material  domination to be successful, Imperialists recognised the need to develop a system of ‘cultural alienation’ that removed the local elite from the concerns of the masses. As a result of the social distance created, the local elite continued to reproduce this system of inequality long after the colonists had left. Cabral points to the danger of assimilating these men into National Liberation movements precisely for this reason and states the process of Re-Africanization as the only remedy. This serves as an example to the kinds of culture that need to be at the centre of the movement: “the liberation movement must, on the cultural level just as on the political level, base its action in popular culture, whatever may be the diversity of levels of cultures in the country. The cultural combat against colonial domination–the first phase of the liberation movement–can be planned efficiently only on the basis of the culture of the rural and urban working masses, including the nationalist (revolutionary) “petite bourgeoisie” who have been re-Africanized  or who are ready for cultural reconversion.” Cabral qualifies what culture is dangerous and what isn’t for the liberation movement.

For Cabral, culture was rooted in the material which could not be separated by the implications of Imperialism. How he situated culture at the centre of national liberation movements was tied directly to how he viewed them as invariably manipulated by imperial domination.