A Disorderly Reflection on ICAF 2023 Conference
Emilie Diouf leading 'Creative Approaches toEnding Gender-Based Violence' Workshop at ICAF.
Photo Credit: Armine Avetisyan
By Kitche Magak, professor of literature at Maasai Mara University, Kenya, IMPACT board member
As a scholar of nearly three decades, I have attended a little more than a few conferences and workshops all over the world, not countless, but enough for memory to start playing tricks on the actual numbers. Virtually all these conferences are bespoke events cut from the same cloth, fitted and professionally-tailored to fit the occasions with ruthless efficiency. That, in my considered opinion, makes these conferences hardly memorable. There are rare exceptions to this rule. The International Community Arts Festival (ICAF) 2023 was one of them. But allow me to get back to that in a moment.
In general, scholarship has a love-hate relationship with the word community. On the one hand, scholarship regards the very concept of community as “basic,” something that does not demand or claim much academic exactitude. On the other hand, it views community as a lower entity to be loved and served by higher knowledge gleaned by scholarship. The ICAF 2023 Conference flew right in the eyes of this popular condescending notion of the community. For me, what made the ICAF 2023 Conference memorable was its genuine humanness that transcended a mere conference where scholars and other experts converge to display their brilliance and force attention to their hallowed contribution to humanity. In ICAF 2023, and I presume previous ICAF Conferences, the participants saw and heard each other, a seeing and hearing that created a safe, humane and therapeutic space. It was my singular pleasure and privilege to drink from its social alchemy.
Even under ideal circumstances, it was not possible to attend the plethora of great presentations of the ICAF 2023 Conference. My participation in the Conference, and indeed that of members of the IMPACT Board,[1] was less than ideal because we were also to attend to Board matters on the sidelines. Aah, the IMPACT Board meetings! Those went swimmingly. In less than two weeks, the Board managed to achieve what it could not (achieve) during over a year of intensive online engagements. There is still something to be said about analogue (old-fashioned face to face engagements) meetings! The physical engagements were also an excellent opportunity for Board members to bond into one cohesive vision to drive the organization forward. That is not to say everybody saw everything the same way, but everybody agreed to walk the same road to an agreed destination for the organization.
One event at the Conference made a huge impression on me – Ending Gender-Based Violence: African Women’s Perspectives on the Role of Theatre/Community Art, which was facilitated by Emilie Diouf. This event was a roundtable discussion on the place of community theater in engaging “violence against women, gender justice and their impact on conflict transformation work across African contexts.”[2] But before I dive into the reasons that made this event have such a lasting impact on me, I have to dispense with a confession first. I attended this event for a number of very personal (you are allowed to read “selfish”) reasons. One, Emilie Diouf is a colleague with whom I have interacted online over the years without physically meeting. There was no question in my mind at all that I owed her collegial support. Two, Boniface Beti, a Kenyan based in South Africa and a fellow IMPACT Board member, was on the discussion panel … you can see where I am going with that one! Three, I am a Kenyan and the discussion focused on the African continent, with specific reference to a number of countries, including Kenya. How could I let my country and continent down in the middle of Europe?! Fourth, and most importantly, the topic spoke to me directly because I have years of community sexual and reproductive health programming experience in Kenya.
Back to the roundtable event. I am not sure whether it was by design or default, but the discussion inexorably veered towards the southmost part of Africa and spotlighted the mind-boggling sexual violence that has seized post-apartheid South Africa. In the discussion panel, there was a group of five extremely articulate young South African women who identified themselves as community artists, activists, and scholars. Their eloquent portrait of sexual violence in South Africa brought tears to many eyes in the audience. They described how absolutely besieged the South African woman is everywhere – at home, in the streets, at school, in the workplace. They described how sexual violence has totally upended their world. I did not cry. I was angry, very angry. I was scandalized. I was ashamed. I was impotent. And then I was angry again at my anger, scandal, shame and impotence. I was extremely angry, scandalized, ashamed and impotent because I am a son of a woman, a brother of sisters and a father of daughters.
Sexual violence is not a race issue as it afflicts all societies, but my beloved continent seems to have more than its fair share of sexual violence. It’s not a coincidence that African countries, especially southern African countries, feature quite prominently in the Rape Statistics by Country (RSC) reports.[3] Some better informed quarters blame it on culture. I do not. What the young women described, which is supported by statistics, is worse than the sexual violence witnessed in war zones, places like eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Ukraine. South Africa is not a war zone, yet it is a permanent fixture in the top five (5) RSC reports. This is the home of ubuntu, but rape is totally barren of any vestiges of ubuntuism! How do you rape and at the same time advance the very deeply humane concept of ubuntu – I am, because we are? The art and conflict transformation interest of my very good friend, Dr. Cynthia Cohen, is currently focused on the increase in authoritarianism globally. I cannot help wondering if gender-based violence, especially sexual violence, is the longest running authoritarianism in human history. Maybe all those who are doing something about gender-based violence in South Africa require a healthy dose of complexity theory to gain more complex insight into what ails this society.
I have known about South Africa’s sexual violence for years, but I have never been so close to its ugliness until the young community artists, themselves victims, brought it home with such traumatising eloquence. I have no answers to the very complex situation that has given birth to the South African gender-based violence situation, but I am absolutely convinced that answers must be found sooner than later because this society is in a self-destruct mode. In a country where one out of four men interviewed confessed that they have committed rape,[4] the very soul of that nation is on trial. In a deeper sense, I feel that the sexual violence situation in South Africa is only comparable to apartheid, probably much worse because now it is “we on us.” Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country[5] seems more eerily relevant today than ever.
[1] The IMPACT Board had several meetings on the Conference sidelines. These were the first physical/in-person meetings of the Board since its formation.
[2] Quoted from ICAF 2023 Conference Website: https://icafrotterdam.com/festival/
[3] World Population Review. Rape Statistics by Country 2023. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/rape-statistics-by-country
[4] The Business Standard Report, 13 October 2020. https://www.tbsnews.net/world/countries-highest-rape-incidents-144499
[5] Alan Paton. Cry, the Beloved Country. Vintage Classics, 2002.