African Women in Diaspora

African Women in Diaspora

 When a friend asked me to write an article on my opinion on African Women in commemoration of the World’s Women’s month for a while I was lost for something to write about yet I always have so much to share. It’s hard to imagine that celebrating African women could be accommodated within a page. Why? Because our history is as broad and as varied as the many countries that compose Africa, therefore, writing on African women within a page is almost impossible. However, I will address a few issues that unite Africa women from Cape to Cairo and Libreville to Mombassa such as; the economic struggles, oppression, underdevelopment, human rights abuses, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. None of which is new, but these have been promoted and talked about globally and seem not to matter anymore. There is a species of African women who are struggling in the Diaspora. These represent the forgotten ones; they do not belong neither here nor there. Why? The answer is because they dared to dream.

Do you know that African women who make it in the Diaspora are among the strongest in the world? These women had many odds staked against them right from birth, but somehow they managed to live their dreams and turned them into reality. Most of them have worked as professionals yet whilst living in Diaspora is forced into menial jobs that subject them into paucity. Not surprising because African women are used to working hard and poverty. It is rare that you find African women in line for food at food banks, nor handouts at any social services. Whilst they know about these services they are systematically excluded because they are not nationals! In such cases systems render them indirect services whilst disserving their nationals. As Africans they believe in working for themselves and families and proud by nature; therefore, they do not expect anything to be handed to them on silver plates! Why do international leaders make it so hard for them to access jobs in order to keep families together? Why not enable them through friendly policies to live where they choose to live as free human beings?

Yes, why not? Because their stories feed the media frenzy as they narrate and relate about the oppression in these far away countries that are in the back of beyond.  As a result African women reinforce the stereotypes that have already been conceptualized in people’s minds, through the media- The African Women -the ones to be pitied; the ones to compare Western lives to; the others different from us. African women are not lazy, they do not need pity, and they have high ambitions, and have dared to dream. Many times I picture in my mind these lands (Western) and all they have to offer if miraculously resources were exposed to African girls how they would utilize them and take advantage of the opportunities!

is writin. Admittedly I can not deny that there is dehumanizing poverty in Africa but show me a country that does not have people living beyond the poverty line. If I had not been here during last season’s wave of hurricanes surely I would not have believed that the West still subjected its people to such circumstances. In 1997 I witnessed the floods of Mozambique and Zimbabwe and a woman giving birth up in a tree, like a wild animal! That could not be compared to the magnitude of negligence I witnessed during Katrina! I had never seen the negligence of a government that has everything imaginable under the sun yet abandons its nationals to conditions worse than death. The tears of those people, the wailing voices of women and their children are indelible and will never be wiped from my mind and took that me right back to Africa! During those days I cried myself to sleep every night and then it dawned on me that the rich can conceal their weaknesses by highlighting the weaknesses of the poor. The poor are the same the world over as they could be invisible. As women we are human beings, we count, and we deserve to be protected by equal human rights the world over.