By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

THE Chronicle of June 25 2014 carried a misframed and therefore misunderstood story: ‘Female civil servants shun promotions’.
The opening paragraphs proceeded as follows:
“The Government’s efforts to attain gender balance in the civil service is (sic) being hampered by the unwillingness of female civil servants to take up senior positions that are away from their families, lawmakers heard yesterday.
“Civil Service Commission Deputy Commissioner, Steven Ngwenya, said they (CSC) had invited female civil servants for interviews for vacant senior posts, but most of them developed cold feet once they heard they would be relocated to a different place from their (families and) spouses.”
One of the female civil servants was quoted as declaring, “I will not leave my family” in exchange for an elevated civil service post and in pursuit of the policy of constitutionally mandated “gender balance”.
What is striking about this exchange between the CSC and the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Women’s Affairs, Gender and Community Development is the failure of both sides to recognise the clear conflict between the Eurocentric theory of human rights of which the abstract notion of gender balance is part, on one hand, and African living law based on African relational philosophy and its definition of human life and human development in real relationships, in real places and in real time.
This failure produced a narrative in which spouses and families were automatically devalued or taken for granted while ‘vacant senior posts’ were automatically elevated and highlighted as most valuable.
The story confirmed the persistent observation from the point of unhu that the linear and contractual doctrine of human rights as expanded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) of 1948 is wrong because it assumes (without any basis in reality or in human history) that human beings are born into rights and endowed with such rights by nature.
In the CSC case rights are linked to promotions to singular posts for individuals, but not to spouses and families.
This is not true and it is wrong; first of all, because what the UDHR calls rights are just fragmented, individualistic and even antagonistic claims of entitlement whose main achievement is the provocation of counter-claims or even opposite and opposed entitlements: gay rights; lesbians rights; rights of the girl child; rights of the boy child; students’ rights; women’s rights; journalists’ rights; artistic rights; rights to self-expression.
The result, as shown in the exchange quoted by The Chronicle on June 25 2014, is that African mothers and wives in the civil service are redefined by this Eurocentric doctrine as female individuals who must prove that they are ‘progressive’ by opting to abandon real space, a real place of their own and all the protocols, rituals and relationships of home, family and community associated with that real place and space… they must abandon all that in order to take up just one ‘senior post’ in pursuit of some salary and to fulfil an ambiguous abstraction called ‘gender parity’ or ‘gender balance’ which like ‘cyber space’ has no room for family or communion and cannot produce a totem or flowers, or any lasting rituals.
In African relational philosophy, autonomy is the capacity to come and go and to relate to others in one’s own space and place at one’s own pace and in one’s own time.
Land is critical for such capacity to be achieved.
Sovereignty is the capacity to define and defend that place, that space, that time and space within which one is able to come and go and to relate to others.
This space, the place of relating, is not defined and defended for its own sake, but because it affords the individual the means to realise the basic practices of unhu: I relate, therefore I am.
This is done through repeated protocols and rituals of place, space and family. Our existence and survival are neither guaranteed nor protected by declared ‘rights’.
They are guaranteed and protected by the human relationships into which we are born as well as those relationships we choose to build and sustain.