From Pretoria to Paris, women’s bodies are still a colonial battlefield, writes Suraya Dadoo.
In October 1989, three French Muslim schoolgirls were expelled from school for wearing headscarves. The principal and teachers interpreted their refusal to remove the scarves as an attack on secularism in state schools.
By 2004, the headscarf was banned in all French state schools; full-face veils were outlawed in 2011. Until last weekend the burkini - a full-body swimsuit that allows Muslim women to swim with most of their bodies covered - was banned.
We were still absorbing images of Muslim women being told to uncover themselves by armed police on French beaches when reports emerged of a black pupil at Pretoria Girls High School not being allowed to write her exam, another forced to do detention, others verbally abused and humiliated - because they wore their hair as God intended.
France’s burkini ban and the PGHS hair policy spring from the same colonial well. The French fixation with unveiling Muslim women originates from French colonialism in Algeria in the late 1950s. Frantz Fanon’s 1959 essay Algeria Unveiled reveals how French colonisers believed unveiling Algerian women would destroy Algerian resistance to French colonialism.
They asked nicely at first. “You’re so pretty, you should unveil yourself,” posters told Muslim Algerian women, urging them to be like French women. The veil, a potent symbol of Algerian national existence, was also forcibly removed by French forces and called “liberation”.
For centuries, black girls have grown up believing their hair, in its natural state, is something that needs to be fixed. The Afro was seen as “uncivilised”, initially by white slave masters and later colonisers. It needed to be transformed into straight hair - an attribute of white women - for it to be accepted and considered beautiful.
What we’ve seen in the past week is that from Pretoria to Paris, women’s bodies are still being policed according to the rules of white colonialism under the guise of multiculturalism.
Writing this week about the PGHS issue, social commentator Khaya Dlanga argued multiculturalism is a myth in Model C schools. These schools are seen as a collection of students of all races and cultures, learning together in harmony. “What schools mean by multiculturalism is assimilation and domination of all other cultures by one to form a monoculture.”
For black women, that means we’ll accept your body, but only if it fits our norms of acceptability. Muslim women in France will be accepted, but only if they fit white feminist specifications of suitability.
Scarf-wearing Muslim women weren’t even invited to meetings of France’s established feminist groups. Muslim women are not regarded as women in that feminism. With that strip of cloth on their heads, they surely couldn’t be feminists, could they?
Most French feminists saw no problem with the 2004 headscarf ban in public schools, which violated scarf-wearing Muslim girls’ right to education. French women’s rights groups were silent on a 2011 ban of the face veil in public, denying those Muslim women who choose to cover themselves access to public spaces. Over the past decade, hundreds of Muslim women have been fired from their jobs because they wear a scarf. Throughout it all, mainstream French feminists gave their tacit approval.
Yet these same feminists have devoted inordinate amounts of time and energy deconstructing and denouncing the restrictions placed on women in Saudi Arabia and Iran. Is it oppression only when brown men tell women how to dress? Why is it called “liberation” when white men in a liberal western democracy police women? Is the morality of police in Paris or Cannes more moral than those in Jeddah or Tehran?
We’re tired of having colonial feminism imposed on us; telling us that our hair is not straight enough, our skins not fair enough, our clothing not revealing enough. We will choose how to wear our hair, and whether we want to cover it. We don’t need anyone to save us from our hijab or our hair.
* Dadoo is a researcher for Media Review Network, a Johannesburg-based advocacy group. Find her at @Suraya_Dadoo.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Weekend Argus