Patricia McFadden, an African feminist, delivered a lecture on Africa, its people’s destitution and the ongoing conflict between African countries’ exploitative governments and impoverished citizens.
The lecture was titled “Plunder as State-Craft: Militarism and Resistance in the Restructuring of the Neo-colonial African State in the Age of Neo-Imperialism.” The talk was part of a two-year project sponsored by the Center for the Study of Women in Society and the Women’s and Gender Studies program at the University.
CSWS Director Sandra Morgen told a small crowd that McFadden brings a “heightened level of dialogue about power relations intertwined with militarized practices.”
The lecture began when McFadden asked the small audience in the Knight Library Browsing Room if she could sit rather than stand at the podium.
“Radicalism has to be active citizenship performed in all kinds of ways,” McFadden said. “I watch CNN, and then I tell them to go to hell.”
McFadden jumped into a discussion on U.S. politics and said U.S. citizens are so embedded in the country’s politics they can’t distance themselves to critique the government’s handling of the war in Iraq.
The U.S. has a “creeping fascism” she said. Morgen added that “the concept of security in the U.S. hasbecome very militarized.”
McFadden also tried to debunk the presumptions people learn from textbooks and media regarding Africa. People may incorrectly perceive Africans as lazy, undirected and inept without considering their history of political violence.
“For 400 years, the colonial state treated us as no one,” McFadden said. People must recognize that most African governments are a partnership of militarism with elite ruling classes if they are to understand fully the circumstances in Africa, she said.
“The plunder and consolidation of the state is essential for ruling classes to exert highest control,” she said, explaining how African residents are not truly citizens because the governments refuse to grant them basic human rights. Africans lack the ability to situate themselves in a country that is obligated to protect them, she said, recalling how Africans used to be forced to work as slaves without pay.
McFadden spoke about two countries in Africa specifically, Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to illustrate the plunder and danger many Africans face today. The DRC is the richest country in the heart of Africa, she said.
“It produces colton, the rare mineral crucial for cell phones and modern telecommunication,” she said. But the wealth simply creates a dangerous divergence between the state and its residents because the ruling class refuses to use the money to better the country’s economy.
Angola, which she described as one of the poorest countries in the world despite its natural surplus of diamonds, has the highest rate of amputees anywhere because the government, backed by U.S. support, constructed and took the profits from 1,500 mines.
McFadden proposed a solution for the neo-colonial African states: a class system where all Africans would engage with their state rather than live as unrecognized individuals. Her research and analysis focuses on the “interface of this disjuncture.”
McFadden, who has taught in many African countries and in the U.S., was an activist in the anti-apartheid movement for more than 20 years and has engaged in feminism and politics since the early 1970s.
Above all, she seeks to “incorporate women’s empowerment into nationalist agendas,” said Laura Fair, associate professor of African history.