Radical Feminism Comes to the Fore in Nairobi : Parley Completes Week Beset With Confrontations, Accusations and Impasses

If events taking shape Thursday at the University of Nairobi proceed as planned, the non-governmental Forum ’85 will end today with a march on the U.N. World Conference on Women being held several blocks away at the Kenyatta Conference Center.

That is not on the U.N. agenda, but hundreds roared their support to Nawal Saadawi, a radical feminist from Egypt, when she proposed that the women of the forum “go out marching” today at 1 p.m.

Decade’s Themes Echoed

“Let’s go to the people who have the power. Let them hear what we do here. There is no peace without justice, no development without justice, no equality without justice,” she called out, referring to the three themes of the U.N. Decade for Women.

Forum ’85 has seen an estimated 12,000 women from around the world gathered at the university since July 10, apparently the largest gathering of its kind in history. As the non-governmental forum ends today, the overlapping “U.N. World Conference to Review and Appraise the Achievements of the United Nations Decade for Women: Equality, Development, Peace” completes its first week. A meeting of government-appointed delegations from 159 countries, it will continue to meet through next Friday. Those 159 delegations are completing a week beset with confrontation, accusation and impasses. Added to this, they will now hear from the Forum, a group representing far more radical feminist positions than those of any national government or international body.

At the Forum, there have been dozens of activities happening simultaneously--workshops, discussions and demonstrations. People have despaired of being unable to be in three to five places at once, and some have the look of those who may have tried, anyway.

Instead of signs of burn-out and flagging interest, however, the past two days have seen a gathering sense of “so little time to do so much.”

The campus lawn is spotted with clusters of women literally hawking their causes and issues, spreading posters and pamphlets in circles around them--”Imprisoned Ukranian Women” halfway across the lawn from “Iranian Women and Islam.” A few feet from “Islam and Women,” where American Black Muslims were speaking, “D.E.S., the wonder drug you should wonder about” was on one side of a portable billboard, while behind it a Japanese woman knelt among tiny paper cranes as she spread out a banner against nuclear war.

By Thursday noon, the clusters had turned to hundreds, as people turned out to demonstrate in support of Nicaragua and against U.S. intervention. It had been publicized as a two-hour vigil and fast but turned out to be a fairly noisy mix of singing, chanting “Si a la paz; no a la guerra” and testimonials of support.

It eventually was upstaged by a hastily organized “NGO Unity Celebration” at which Saadawi put out her appeal to march on the conference.

A table was set up on the lawn, wired for sound, and as the crowd swelled, they listened to impassioned statements by feminists from India, Japan, France, Nicaragua, the United States, Zimbabwe, SWAPO (the South-West Africa People’s Organization) and the Soviet Union.

Acknowledging “we have some political differences that the men aren’t solving,” Betty Friedan (shakily making her way to the table top and calling herself a creaking grandmother) called on the women’s unity of strength.

And they expressed their unity for an end to apartheid, to do away with war and nuclear weapons, and to have another women’s conference in 1990. (Yvette Roudy, French minister of women’s affairs and head of her country’s official delegation, came by from the conference, got up on the table and called for meetings every five years.)

“This is not the end of a decade. This is the beginning of a whole new movement,” Freidan said.

Although the week has been fraught with clashes, especially over the Arab-Israeli conflict, which came up briefly at the rally when Saadawi called for the Palestinians to “return to their home,” the crowd held together.

Men in Power Denounced

An Indian woman, Ranjana Kumari, appealed to them “whether we are from the U.S. or U.S.S.R., from India or Pakistan, from Lebanon, Nicaragua, or Israel,” to realize that the problem was “it is they (men in power) who create war; it is they who are destroying our children.”

In many ways, and with many appreciative testimonials, it has been something of a love affair between the women and Kenya, but one that has had its stormy moments, each of them headlined in the local press.

Dame Nita Barrow of Jamaica, the Forum ’85 convenor, has been caught in the middle of all of it, an intermediary between the women and the Kenyan government. She has defended the government publicly, chiding the women for being too demanding. Some women have chafed at being “put in their place” at the women’s conference, but others praised her for quietly and steadily protecting their interests.

First there was the hotel crisis, wherein women refused to give up their prepaid hotel rooms for governmental delegates, as the government had directed. No sooner had the government solved that by accepting the women’s compromise solution of doubling up and releasing some rooms, then they had a lesbian uproar to deal with. Homosexuality is illegal here, and for a short time it looked as though, out of deference to the Kenyans, Barrow would order lesbians to leave. That died down, and there have been lesbian workshops and press conferences all week.

Next, women got wind of the rumors that Nairobi’s prostitutes and disabled beggars had been forcibly removed from the streets, the prostitutes being detained in jail, the others being “temporarily relocated.” The rumors were denied.

Prostitutes Collective

This was the wrong group to protect from such people. Led by the English collective of prostitutes and the International Wages for Housework campaign, which organizes and supports prostitutes (regarding them as working women and often single heads of households), a petition went around the forum. It protested the removal of “women, children and men who make their living off the streets.” This includes prostitute women, street vendors, people with disabilities, children doing service work, the homeless and others.

More meetings followed with Dame Nita Barrow. After one such meeting, Margaret Prescod of Los Angeles, a member of Wages for Housework, reported Barrow had been concerned lest the women unfairly come down on the Kenyans when it was common practice for a city hosting an international conference to resort to such measures.

“She urged us to think of Kenya as a Third World country suffering economic exploitation and said it was more important to protest the root causes of the poverty,” Prescod said.

While Prescod was sympathetic to Barrow’s position, they were going ahead with their petition.

“We’d protest it no matter where we were,” she said.

‘We Want Our Films’

Meanwhile, late Thursday afternoon, a group of about 50 women, most of them Asian, was seen marching across the campus, fists in the air, snaking its way through the crowd, chanting, “We want our films. We want our films.” They were protesting the censorship problems a feminist film festival has been having with some of its 300 entries.

As the official conference has gotten underway, the mood has been described as one of controlled optimism. It is a less lively exchange, often bogged down in bureaucratic procedures and language, and longstanding divisive issues.

Many of these issues have tended to pit the United States, against much of the rest of the world. Neo-colonialism, militarism, the international monetary crisis, intervention in Central America, apartheid in South Africa and the fate of the Palestinians have made their way onto the agenda of this conference, as they have two earlier ones.

For several years, the United States, looking at the experience of the Mexico City and Copenhagen gatherings that launched the Decade for Women in 1975 and assessed its progress midway in 1980, has been looking toward the Nairobi conference as an event likely to be diverted by “political” issues at the expense of women’s issues.

Reagan Press Conference

Maureen Reagan, the leader of the U.S. delegation, arrived in Nairobi last weekend in an expansive attitude, willing to act with a spirit of compromise on certain procedural issues, but armed with a few caustic political points of her own, thinly veiled in the language of diplomacy.

“I understand there are women of the world who do not have a platform to speak on issues other than strictly women’s issues,” she said at a press conference. If there is no other place than this to do it, than this is the place to do it, but that document (Forward Looking Strategies--a set of goals and plan of action) must reflect what we all care about.”

On Tuesday, in her formal statement to the conference, she assessed the progress American women had made and singled out four areas of special concern--illiteracy, domestic violence, women in development and women refugees.

She then met head on the concerns of other countries, agreeing that apartheid was especially demeaning and destructive to women, and that the effect of the situation in the Middle East upon women concerned some people greatly. She said her delegation was prepared “to work constructively with those delegations in a spirit of consensus building to arrive at results that we can all accept.”

Earlier, Jane Jaquette, a political science professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles, commented on the role Reagan might be expected to play at the conference.

An acute observer of the whole decade for women and all three conferences, Jaquette was spending a week in Nairobi at Forum ’85. Whether Reagan would actually champion women’s issues as she had been calling on the nations of the world to do “depends on whether the delegation is interested in feminist issues or decides to respond politically to the political challenge of politicization.” The week seems to have put just that challange to Reagan.

The day after her opening statement, Vietnam and Afghanistan delivered scathing attacks on the United States.

On Thursday, the African National Congress, the banned South African opposition movement, attacked what it called U.S. “destructive engagement” with the South African government and argued that Americans “in growing numbers are opposing this policy of the Reagan Administration.”

The Syrian delegate lashed out at U.S. “gunboat diplomacy” in the Middle East, and charged that American policy was responsible for “the destruction of Lebanon.”

‘State Terrorism’ Assailed

The speaker from Nicaragua, deputy foreign minister Nora Astorga, said, “Our heroic mothers are again feeling the pain of seeing their children assassinated by mercenary armies equipped, created and financed by the Reagan Administration in an illegal and immoral war which can only by described as state terrorism.”

Wednesday night, at an embassy reception, Reagan had told a group of reporters the U.S. delegation was planning to invoke its right to reply to Afghanistan and Vietnam. The delegation wanted to be sure, she said, that other nations got the message, “if you kick, you’re going to get kicked back.”

By the end of the Thursday session, a U.S. representative said time had been requested to reply to the other speeches as well.

Somewhere in all of this crossfire, however, the conference is going about its business.

Late Thursday, Margaret Prescod of the International Campaign for Wages for Housework said that the drive to include the unpaid work of women in national economic statistics had received a boost when a draft of the organizaiton’s proposal was accepted into the Forward Looking Strategies document which will later be considered at the conference.

The proposal’s summary stated that “concrete steps should be taken to quantify the unremunerated contribution of women to agricultural production, reproduction and household activities.” It added that “appropriate steps should be taken to measure and reflect those contributions in national accounts, economic statistics and gross national product.”

The draft paragraph passed, Prescod said, without the expected objection from U.S. representatives, after being put forward by Sierra Leone and seconded by Jordan and Uganda.

Prescod has been working on this issue for the past 10 years.

“I’m thrilled out of my mind,” she said.

Charles T. Powers contributed to this story.