WUNRN
Unique
Societies Where Women Are In Charge
By
Mehru Jaffer
Vienna (Women’s Feature Service) –
Nadia Ferroukhi, 38, a Paris-based photographer, is mad about matriarchy and
spends much of her time travelling around the globe in search of dying
societies where women are still in charge.
A photgraph of Tumai, Kenya,female
residents taken by Nadia Ferroukhi, on display in Vienna, as part of the recent
exhibition, Fragrances of Light. (Credit: Nadia Ferroukhi\WFS).
Most recently she spent time at Tumai,
a village 300 kilometres north of Nairobi, Kenya, and returned to Europe with
stunning stills of women like Chile, Naliapu, Consalata, Namjal and others, who
decided to clear away acacia bushes with their own bare hands to build an
entire village only for women.
About 30 women from the indigenous
tribes of Samburu and Turkana led by
35, decided one day to leave their abusive husbands and begin life on their
own. The village was registered in 2001 under the name Tumai, which in Swahili
means hope.
already had experience of living in a woman-only community from the days she
had spent at
first female village founded in 1990 by 15 Samburu women. The founding
residents of Umoja, which in Swahili means unity, were women who had been
rendered homeless after their husbands had rejected them because they had been
gang raped. Today, both Tumai and Umoja have been declared as
violence-against-women-free zones.
The rules at Tumai are very simple. To
live here, women have to be divorced. The women can live with their children,
regardless of whether they are boys or girls. However sons, once they attain 16
years of age, will have to leave the village either to find jobs for themselves
or migrate for higher studies. Even the daughters leave Tumai once they marry.
The 150 residents of Tumai hunt
together for roots that they use as food, build mud homes, rear chickens and
cows and train dogs to guard the village from both jealous men and wild animals
like hyenas.
Most of the money earned by the women
is from tourism. Tours to Tumai are common. Women stage song and dance
performances for tourists and also sell traditional artifacts, wood carvings
and jewellery. Best-selling handicrafts include gourds, small carved stools
propped under the neck while sleeping, shields, spears, wrist knives and
traditional swords called simis. Some women make clothing from local fabrics,
including the typical blanket in red blended with black and blue colours that
is used to keep warm during an early morning African safari.
Each woman gets to keep 90 per cent of
her total earnings for the day, while 10 per cent of it goes into the village
treasury. The decision to buy more chickens or to repair a home is taken
unanimously. Even when an idea is vetoed there is little dissent and never any
violence.
But despite liberating themselves from
men, these women do not wish to be labelled as man haters. Clarifies Ferroukhi,
“These women are not against men. They are against cruelty and often
violent attempts by the husband to dominate them.”
During the photo shoot, Ferroukhi found
time to talk to
mainly because she spoke English, a language she had learnt in primary school.
However,
was unable to receive higher education. Now, she runs the only primary school
in Tumai.
When she was about seven years,
underwent genital mutilation. The memory of the fear that she was drowning in
her own blood and the excruciating pain she experienced at that point still
remains fresh in her mind. Although she is a mother of three,
does not remember ever having enjoyed sex. What she did long for sometimes when
she was younger – as she revealed to Ferroukhi – was physical intimacy based on
love and affection.
One day Ferroukhi asked
to take a ride with her to the nearest town. “We went to the local market
and bought vegetables and other food items for all of us and spent a night in a
hotel. Throughout that trip to the city,
looked like a faded flower. She walked with her head down and did not speak
much. The minute we were back, she cheered up and was back in harmony with the
environment she had created with her hands,” recalls Ferroukhi.
In Tumai, Ferroukhi found residents
actually practising the principle of sharing. Whatever little there is in the
village is distributed equally between everyone. Everything that is the reverse
of patriarchy is the norm. The women are gentle with their male children who,
even after leaving the village, return for visits. The girls are encouraged to
study and don’t have to undergo genital mutilation.
In effect, Tumai is not a traditional
matriarchal society but a very modern idea of women who have made a conscious
decision to take their life into their own hands despite the hardship and
poverty this entails.
Stills from Ferroukhi’s visit were
recently displayed in
exhibition entitled Fragrances of Light. It was sponsored by the OPEC Fund For
International Development (OFID) at its headquarters in the city.
It is Ferroukhi’s sensitivity to the
ideas of social justice that inspires her to study matriarchy. What really
helped her was the fact that she happened to have stumbled upon some important
literature about societies where neither men nor women dominate. She read about
pre-historic societies before the practice of monotheistic religions which
tended to be more egalitarian simply because women were in charge. “I am
most interested in social issues like injustice,” she says.
Most of her photographs are focused on
immigrants who are forced to earn a living far away from home. Born of an
Algerian father and Czech mother, Ferroukhi is unable to get over the fact that
in a naturally rich country like
the majority of the people remain very poor. Says she, “Out of
total population, 70 per cent is under 25 years of age and is mostly
unemployed. In
where I live the salary of a woman is often less then a man’s for the same job.
These ‘man-made’ injustices in life make me unhappy,” she says.
Ferroukhi’s first foray into the
workings of matriarchy was in the faraway province south of Shangri La in
southern
where the Mosou live. Here it is an ancient custom – as old as 2,000 years – to
remain loyal to mothers, sisters and daughters. During the two months she spent
with women who live on the shores of the
concept of marriage is unknown in that society.
Women and men stay together for as long
as they are in love. Words like jealousy and rape are not part of the
vocabulary here and women keep the children. Women are also the
decision-makers. They control household finances and pass on their family name
to their children. A family can be a clan of three generations of women and men
directly related to each other. No person gets to own goods and property and no
one accumulates more wealth than another. The relationship of father is not
important and the mother, along with male members of her family, look after the
children.
Some women in Mosou did tell Ferroukhi
that they yearned to live in modern societies and sometimes dreamt of a nuclear
family. “They look upon their way of life as old fashioned and
unexciting,” she reveals.
This adventurous lens-woman has also
visited the Khasi tribe in Meghalaya,
where property is passed down from mother to the youngest daughter. When
marriages do not work out among the Khasis, couples are allowed to separate and
marry other people.
Revealing, indeed, is the lens of
Fearless Nadia!
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