Gender Fluidity and Women’s Colleges, Part I

When I was a student at Wellesley College in the late 1990s, the MIT Africans would shake their heads at us Wellesley Africans. They said we were living in a bubble incongruous with reality. We were coddled. We were protected. The main issue was that we were made to feel entitled to occupy space as women. Spaces that in the real world were not readily available to us. We were encouraged to think we could do or be whatever we wanted regardless of our gender.

However, Wellesley was not an idyllic garden of Eden where we all held hands and sung kumbaya. Don’t get me wrong, I for one enjoyed my time there, and I would say that that is true for most. It’s just that we were opinionated and driven women and there was always a person or a group or another protesting a perceived injustice. Our online community, first known as Sallie then First Class (now Community) was rife with various people and groups voicing their opinions on a wide range of topics. You were bound to offend somebody. It was an eye-opening experience for this conservative woman to see the many ways society was stepping on the freedom of others. It was a crash-course in political correctness.

Back then the organization that African students belonged to was called African Awareness Now (AAN). The name had come way before my time out of an attempt of the few African students and non-African sympathisers and alumni to draw attention to the apartheid movement in South Africa of the 1980s by persuading the Board of Trustees to divest from all companies with ties to South
Africa. I was told that was the reason there were no Coca-Cola products on campus as the company was a large supporter of white South Africa and apartheid. Wellesley had become so anti-apartheid that they had created a special scholarship for Black South African students funded in part by the annual South African Benefit Concert.

By the time I was on campus, we the African students felt that the name AAN was too militant and we changed it to Wellesley African Students Association (WASA) to reflect what we were – an organization of students from Africa, continent-born or US-born, coming together for cultural celebrations over delicious food and peaceful discussions of topics concerning us and the African diaspora. We were in for a rude awakening. Come to think of it, that  move reminds me of the New Black movement that thinks it can transcend racism by just being. It didn’t take long for us though to realize that as members of a minority group, we couldn’t just be, we actually had to stand up for ourselves. Indifference gets you nowhere.

It was autumn one year and our calendar as always included the South African Benefit Concert where we tended to perform a gumboot dance. The gumboot dance has its origins in apartheid South Africa where ill-treated Black South African miners found a way to communicate with themselves and maintain sanity through a series of taps on the gumboots worn, rattles of the chains that bound them, stomps, and claps.  It is a dance to honour those who worked and suffered in the South African mines. It’s loud, powerful, and energetic. The neighbouring college’s African student associations (MIT, Harvard, Northeastern) had their own series of moves, calls, and ululations and the dance was always a highlight of our cultural shows. Ours included singing Shosholoza, a traditional song sang by Ndebele miners from Zimbabwe which is now essentially South Africa’s unofficial national anthem sung in celebration of South African unity. Push forward. Strive. It’s absolutely chilling.

So here we were busy teaching the first-years the moves so they would be ready to dance the gumboot. Except the invitation to participate in the South African Benefit Concert never came. That year, the powers that be, also decided to just be. They did not need the input nor presence of Africans in a concert to benefit South Africa. They decided they wanted a serene performance of European violin solos, piano recitals, and alto vocals to be held in the grand Alumnae Hall to raise funds and awareness for South Africa. Apparently, they did not think our wild African dancing and singing, steeped in South African history fit with the ambiance worthy of such a cause.

We felt as if we had been slapped in our faces. It felt as I imagine it feels today to be let’s say a Rwandan doctor sitting at a table of global philanthropists, physicians, and scientists who are discussing let’s say HIV in Rwanda where not only are the experts American or European people who maybe have spent a week on the ground in Rwanda but where no one really wants to hear what you have to say as a Rwandan doctor full-time in the trenches. 

It stung particularly harder because those were the years immediately following the genocide in Rwanda and Burundi where we were holding vigils by our lonesome selves to raise awareness. In the end we did not perform at the South African Benefit Concert that year. The show went on, leaving the small group of us and a few sympathisers out in the cold protesting.

All this to say that I know what it feels like to be in a space that claims to be all-inclusive and diverse and yet be a disenfranchised outcast. So much for the Wellesley bubble. Safe and protected space. Yes. Driven personalities. Yes. Apathy. No.

But this gender fluidity matter is not exactly the same. Gender fluidity at an institution whose mission is to empower members of a single sex, in this case female, can only be an end to said institution founded in an era when gender was binary – male or female. Read on, Part II.