This article originally appeared in T&S Issue 39, Summer 1999.
Mary Margaret Issaka works for an NGO in Ghana — CENSUDI — which aims to move women towards resisting their oppression. In this interview with Linda Regan, she recounts her own story of struggle and describes her current work.
Linda Regan: Can you start by telling us about the organisation that you work for?
Mary Margaret Issaka: My name is Margaret Mary Issaka. I come from the north eastern region of Ghana and I’m from a town called Bolgatanga. I work for an organisation called the Centre for Sustainable Development Initiatives (CENSUDI). It was set up by a former government minister who found herself in very difficult situations whilst in government as a woman, not having enough knowledge to deal with some situations, like getting resistance from the men even accepting her ideas, and helping women to be active participants in various bodies. The resistance was always there and she very often got frustrated so after five years in the government she decided that she would found an organisation that would be committed to educating women, first of all to know their rights, also hoping to equip them with skills that would enable them to actively participate in whatever committees or management positions. She wanted to make sure other women didn’t have her experiences — that every time she wanted to do something she just didn’t know how to go about it, she didn’t have anybody she could talk to, to get advice, so a lot of her ideas just didn’t go anywhere.
Fighting for women’s rights
So CENSUDI was founded on that basis, I am the director of the organisation. All my life I have also found myself to be, if you want, innocent, and maybe to a certain level ignorant, because I also didn’t know what skills and knowledge you needed to be able to fight for women’s rights. But, for instance, I started as a teacher in a secondary school and with girls, boys were asking them to be their girlfriends and if they refused and the boy was a senior boy, he would do everything to taunt her in every situation and every place that he met them. Sometimes these girls were raped — now I know it is rape — at that time which is about 20 years ago I didn’t know it was rape, but at least I knew they were forced to have sexual relationships with the boys against their will. Some of these girls came to me, some even got pregnant, and I found myself having to deal with all these different things. I was having to fight with the individual head master to make sure that the girls were given the chance to go back home and deliver and that the school would take it as their responsibility to find another school for them after the delivery. I should say that I’m catholic and at that time I was not allowed to help them to abort; abortion is not legal in Ghana in any way
Linda: Sorry, can I interrupt, is it still not legal in Ghana?
Mary Margaret: Yes as far as I know it’s still not legal in Ghana. So I was always fighting face to face with the senior house master or the head master, who would say ‘well we cannot allow this girl to stay with the pregnancy’ and I would say ‘sorry but you see already we don’t have many girls who have the chance to go to secondary school especially in the north and if we are going to say that this girl should go away, first of all we would not prevent her from going through the back door to have an abortion, and then her schooling too would have been stopped’. So why didn’t we do something to help? I must say I always got through because I never gave up. But I also found it a very big stumbling block because in trying to find another school for this girl after giving birth to the child the other schools would say ‘oh no she may get pregnant again’. I had to use all the knowledge and the information at my disposal to convince the new school to take these girls. So back then that’s how I found myself working with violence against women without really knowing it at that time.
After teaching for about ten years I went to do a course in radio journalism and again I was to make programmes for women and children. It was a new station and the resources were not all there, so after the training for about two years we were not doing anything and I’m not that type who can just sit doing nothing go to the office every day and read papers or whatever. So I moved into the health field because there was a catholic sister who was working in the health department for the diocese of my area. She was giving a talk one day to a group of christian women, somebody was doing the translation, it wasn’t going quite right and I found myself interrupting you know with the translation. The nun got hold of me and after and said I have to work with you. I jumped at this opportunity and we worked mostly with rural women on how to generate income, how to feed their children on a balanced diet with few resources. I had studied home economics in school so I was quite handy there. The nun had to leave to come back home to England and highly recommended to the bishop that I should take over the work. There again we found ourselves having to give refuge — not physical refuge but in the form of counselling — to some of the women that we worked with. Most of them weren’t being given what in Ghana we call ‘chop money’ by their husbands, so if we were demonstrating a dish that was good for them, some of them had no source of income. One of the things we did was to try and help them with some form of grants or loans so that they could be selling something to be able to make an income for themselves.
Any time a woman came and looked very unhappy we made a follow up only to realise that somewhere along the line the husband was making her get pregnant at a rate that she didn’t like but she didn’t have a say because traditionally she is the property of the husband. Also many of the children were dying. Some men were beating them for committing an offence that the husband thought they had committed. You know although traditionally it’s allowed for the man to beat the wife, the women realised it was not right for him to be beating them all the time. They said that even if she had committed an offence, at least the man should talk to her. At that time I would say all we managed to do was to try and find the man without even letting him know that it was the wife that had sort of reported him, and in some informal way make him say himself what he did to the wife if the wife offended him. Sometimes we were able to make the men themselves see that it wasn’t right for him to beat the woman or to refuse her the grain of the day or whatever punishment he meted out to her.
I was in this field for another ten years and I often had to talk with men to convince them to send their daughters to school instead of keeping them to get four cows if they gave them up for marriage. I was doing these things but little did I realise that I was working in the woman’s rights area.
Gender as usual
My next work was in the water sector, I was a liaison between some selected communities involved in planning and establishing a particular water system that they wanted and then managing it themselves. Our role was to keep the link between the communities and the project, and to facilitate the process of communities forming a committee of some sort. Again I happened to be the only woman among the liaison officers and in facilitating the formation of the water committees realised that again the men wanted to be there alone. Meanwhile water, at least in my country, is synonymous with women; women are the carriers of water, they are the managers of water. I don’t say, like some do, that women are the users of water, because when they fetch the water or they carry the water to the house about 70 or 80% of it is used for the benefit of the man — in feeding, bathing, washing his clothes, then the children. The woman is the last, the least user of the water. So I don’t agree when people say women use more water than anybody else, I prefer the terminology ‘managers of water’ because that’s exactly what they do. So again I found myself taking on this — should I call it self imposed role — of making sure that women were at least put on the committees. The project agreed a quota system, that 30-50% of the composition of the committees should be women. But that was in itself a big hitch, because what we found out was that the women had much less knowledge and skill compared to their male counterparts. So even though they were put on the committees, they had nothing to contribute. Then the men turned round and said ‘well you see why we don’t want women on the committees they can’t talk they can’t think’. I said ‘look something has to be done, it is true the women don’t talk, they don’t contribute, but let’s look at it more critically. Why don’t they talk, why don’t they, as you say, think, why don’t they contribute or attend the meeting’. The response would be ‘well they just don’t come they are not interested’. I disagreed, they were interested, but the education gap between men in general and women, especially in the north, prevented them. I argued that we needed to find some extra resources so that at least the women had an orientation on how to even be on the committee — skills of participation, skills of getting knowledge or information, skills on how to negotiate, how to make a presentation.
There is always this talk in so many projects about ‘mainstreaming’ gender in their project but it’s only talked about; when it comes to the reality there are never any resources to make it happen. For me, to mainstream gender means to recognise the limitations that women have, and if you say women should be part of projects then resources should be made available to give training so that women can be effective participants. But that’s not what happens.
For instance, in the water project there was a very brilliant gender and development strategy, but when it came to implementing some of the recommendations, the bottom line was that there were no resources. To such an extent that I only managed to fight to get one training session for the women members of the water and sanitation committees, and in fact I only succeeded in getting this because I kept on fighting. The women came out with a lot of wonderful recommendations and we wrote up a very big report. It ended there, we never we never went further than that. Some women did take part in the other training we offered the committees, on management, finances and technology. But again because the men were already advanced in knowledge and skills it was not easy for the women to catch up.
Moving on
I was in this water sector for six or seven years. I had already planned to leave the by the year 2000 and to get on to this organisation that I’m now working for. But as fate will have it the project decided that they didn’t need my services, so I had to leave earlier. Again as fate will have it Womankind Worldwide, which had been working in the north of Ghana for the past ten or so years with women’s groups on income generating activities, were looking for somebody who would co-ordinate their activities in Ghana. They came to Ghana in June 98 and I was approached by them to take up this co-ordination work. I accepted because CENSUDI has no core funding so I’m working for my lunch really, and I needed some source of income that I could at least feed myself and get the energy required for me to go on with my work. So I accepted the Womankind position and the agreement is that I will work three days for them and two days for CENSUDI.
CENSUDI is committed solely to doing whatever is needed — be it training, campaigning, running seminars — whatever that we can do to make sure that women know not just their rights, but how to exercise those rights. Especially in an area where what I always call this so-called tradition and culture is so deeply ingrained in the society, to such an extent that the men make us feel blame. They always blame us for whatever wrongs happen, so much so that women don’t even sometimes see that their rights are being trampled on.
Culture and tradition
Linda: Tell us a little about the traditions in Upper East region in northern Ghana, I know it’s a very poor area and polygamy is common isn’t it?
Mary Margaret: It is geographically the driest area in the country and with the least amount of rainfall, and not just the least amount but also unpredictable. I always say that everything is to the extreme — if the rains come sometimes they don’t come at the right time and when we don’t need it the rain, the rain will come in torrents and wash away everything that we have done including our homes, when the sun is going to shine as I always put it you can cook an egg in the sun.
It’s what the English people call a patriarchal society, men are the bosses of everything. In marriage it is men who bring women to their villages and men pay dowries. The dowry makes them feel women are their property, it’s part of the language — an acceptable norm — that women are the property of men. So polygamy is allowed because as long as the man can pay the dowry he can have as many women as he thinks he can get. The polygamous way of life is quite often not a very happy one; because every good polygamist will use divide and rule tactics, in this way each woman will do whatever she has to do to get his attention. The attention can mean even just sexual attention because in a polygamous home every woman has her room, so if the man decides not to come to your room and decides to be going to the other woman’s room all you would know is that he doesn’t come to your room, that’s it. You can’t ask him why are you not coming, you dare not, it is his decision not yours. You have no rights, because he’s not your property, you have no right to find out if things are not going the way that you want them to go. It can create very bitter rivalry among the women, the wives, to such an extent that in very horrible polygamous families you see the women fighting each other, and I mean physically fighting each other, because the man has paid some particular attention to one of the women to the total neglect of the others. Women have nowhere to go, they can’t go back to their father’s family because the dowry has been paid and the father wouldn’t like to be asked by the husband to bring back the cow. It’s a whole cycle of violence at various levels that the woman finds herself in the middle of, I call this a cyclone — she can’t go anywhere. She can’t go back to her father’s house she goes back to the husband’s house and the husband says well sorry but you are my property and you just stay here and you don’t go anywhere. It’s very rare to get a monogamous marriage especially among those who worship in the traditional religion.
Linda: So polygamous marriage tends to be in those communities who are still practising traditional religions?
Mary Margaret: Yes, but in reality some of the christians, who are not supposed to be polygamous, are. I know some christians who have more than one wife — they would have would have gone through the marriage ordinance and married one woman in church and then they will marry another woman and perform the customary rite which is also recognised in Ghana.
Linda: Would most of the polygamous marriages be customary marriages?
Mary Margaret: Yes because when you are married under the ordinance in Ghana it is a crime to have a second wife. What I’m saying is most men do that — they marry one of the women under the ordinance or in the church and they also marry another woman. It was only quite recently when I was giving training to women on their rights that I discovered that is wrong for a man to even perform the customary rites on a second woman if he has contracted marriage under the ordinance. But the men do it, and they take advantage because we the women, we ourselves don’t know. The men know, but because they know we don’t know they take advantage. I would say it’s about 60/40 in terms of polygamous marriages: 60 for the polygamous and about 40 not. Because in the upper east Islam is quite a strong religion there in addition to Christianity, the moslems too are allowed to marry more than one wife so as for them it’s a very common thing to find there’s always more than one woman belonging to one man. I’m not too sure but looking at it on the ground that’s how it looks.
Linda: What about education of girl children?
Mary Margaret: Primary education, even I would say where I live is the region where we have the least number of girls having access to formal education. A female child is viewed as the future property of another man, so traditionally it’s unwise to invest in her because she will carry all that you have invested in her and the husband’s household will benefit. Based on this belief, if there is a choice it is the boy who will be sent to school. Recently some organisations like mine campaigned that girls should be sent to school, but it’s very very slow. Now it’s about 50/50 for girls and boys starting school but the drop out rate is outrageous and it will be the girl who has to drop out. This is not just because the family can’t afford it, but maybe an arranged marriage, or she’s being asked by the father to go and live with another relative to help them, the mother of the girl might have a new baby and needs help. Girls with helping their mother at home and also going to school, it has a negative effect on her progress in school — if for instance if she has to be in school by eight she will be lucky if she is in school by ten by which time something has happened she has missed. Then again the blame will be put on her ‘well she’s not brainy enough’. So the excuses and the reasons for girls not being in school are complex, there are so many reasons.
Linda: You said something about arranged marriages. At what sort of age do girls get married in your region?
Mary Margaret: I would put it about 17 or 18, but in the case of arranged marriages they can start as early as 5, 6 or 7 years old
Linda: Is that a promissory marriage?
Mary Margaret: Yes, what happens is that the father of this child claims that they are desperately in need of money or cattle to dowry a son’s wife, and the assumption is that girls grow very fast after they are 5 or 6. So this man would promise this little girl to a family where there is a young man who would need a wife and would say ‘OK if you can give me one cow or x amount of money then you can take my daughter and when she’s old enough you can marry her’.
Linda: So does the girl stay in her father’s house until she’s old enough to marry or does she have to go when the cow is given?
Mary Margaret: Oh when the cow is given. They don’t take chances. She has to go to another man’s house as young as 5 or 6. But the man is supposed to wait until she’s grown enough. But experience has shown that is not what happens, because when the girl is about 12, 13, 14 and you see the signs of the girl maturing into womanhood, the man usually becomes afraid that if they don’t have a sexual relationship this girl will run away, and they have in fact ‘bought’ her. So what we are finding out is that in especially the rural areas 14 and 15 year old girls are mothers. When you trace the history she was probably given up to marriage.
Marriage between women
I saved one little girl. There was an old woman, may she rest in peace now, who was living in the same compound house as me, and there was this little girl I think she was just about 12. The father said he was poor and was going to offer her up to a man who was ready to give him two cows because the girl’s mother’s parents were threatening to take their daughter away because he was too poor to pay the dowry, so he had to do something otherwise they were going to take his wife away. So he just said ‘well this girl is old enough to get married’ and was ready to take whoever would give him anything. This old lady hinted to me about it because at that time I was looking for a house help, she said ‘well you can go and take this girl but the father wants something’. So I said ‘fine, but I don’t want it to look like I am buying the girl’. The old lady said ‘no I know you but please go and save this little girl because she’s just too small to be given up to marriage’. I had to negotiate with the father and I agreed that I would pay the cow, I would either go and buy a cow or I would give him the equivalent of a cow’s money and the girl would be my wife. That’s the language I had to use, because if it was just that I was going to save the girl the father wouldn’t have agreed. I had to use this negotiating language to say that I want to marry the girl. It is allowed among those people, a woman can marry another woman but would have to look for a man to father children for her.
Linda: How does this work, why is it allowed?
Mary Margaret: Well if a woman is — by the standard of the people — rich, which means she’s financially independent and is also the daughter of a man who hasn’t got sons, if that woman should get married it means that the name of her father will die, because our inheritance is through the male line. So usually what the woman does in that case is stay in her father’s house, and she can marry a woman. She can’t father children to carry on her father’s line but she can either ask the woman to look for any man of their choice to father children for her or the woman might already have a male friend and they would negotiate with the male friend to father children for her.
Linda: But those children will have her wife’s father’s name and stay within his family?
Mary Margaret: Right
Linda: So this is about keeping property and the name within the patriarchal line?
Mary Margaret: Yes with the hope that in the children born at least some of them will be boys and when that happens the lineage can continue.
Linda: Even though in actual fact those children have absolutely no biological relationship at all to the family?
Mary Margaret: At all at all, but the fact that she dowried that woman means the children are hers and it’s accepted. Until recently what happened was that the children were brought up not to recognise their biological father, so as soon as the woman got pregnant there was a break in the relationship, and the man understands that he’s only fathering the children but he cannot claim them as his children.
Linda: So he can’t claim the children and he can’t claim her presumably?
Mary Margaret: No he can’t claim her
Linda: Because she is another woman’s property?
Mary Margaret: Because she is another woman’s property so.
Linda: So under customary law it was perfectly acceptable for you to marry this girl?
Mary Margaret: Right, it was perfectly acceptable for me to marry the girl and then whatever I did with her later was not her father’s business. But I only did that to be able to save this poor girl, she lived with me for four or so years, just for me to be sure that she would be grown enough to do whatever she wanted to do. I made sure she learnt how to trade in some way, she learnt some techniques of trading. Then I had to let the father know that really I didn’t mind if the girl fell in love with a man of her choice and got married to the man and if he wanted he could still come and collect his cattle because I only gave one cow. The man was surprised; he said ‘oh madam are you sure?’ I said ‘yes, I have no problem with that if you want to go for your dowry’ He asked if he should return my cow, but I said that was my contribution to the household: ‘this girl is now my daughter’. The girl is now married and I think she now has two or three children, every now and then she finds time to come and visit me and to let me know that she is OK.
Right now, when I go back I have a case of a woman who got married to another woman which I am going to follow up. Let me call the woman Anna and her ‘husband’ was a woman. Her ‘husband’s’ father didn’t have a son but had two daughters born, the eldest decided her sister should get married but she would stay and make sure the father’s name continued. So in the process she married Anna, according to Anna because her ‘husband’ was a woman they had a very good loving relationship and she was allowed to choose a man within the community to father children for her. The first child was a girl, and unfortunately for Anna her ‘husband’ died. Anna kept the relationship with this man and had another two children, a girl and the boy died. So she never had the boy, even though that was the aim of the late ‘husband’. At the moment the family are harassing her. And they are kicking her out of the house. She has become such a destitute woman if the catholic church doesn’t feed her she doesn’t get to eat. The most recent event is that her daughter has given birth to a boy and she is being harassed because the family see her as a threat to the property, they had forced Anna’s daughter to marry but this man just totally neglected her and she nearly died; she got pregnant and she was starving. That is how I came into contact with them: the first child and the mother came to me to plead for help as the daughter who had given birth was starving. We brought her to the presbyterian sisters who have made sure she is fed and there is milk for the baby and then the husband’s house people came and said they wanted her back. It’s quite a complicated story and because this girl has given birth to a son the cousins of Anna’s late ‘husband’ see this son as a threat. They were happy that Anna herself didn’t have boys because it meant that that line would have died, but now that there is a grandson who is a boy it means that the family line can continue. I got so fed up with them that I sent the case to the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice. And even there they are trying to handle it as negotiable if possible, because they are saying if we use aggressive methods or take them to court what will happen when the woman goes back to that community? But I made it very clear because I brought in the police and I got a lawyer, what I have asked is for us to use very calm language but at the same time we must let them know that this woman’s rights should not be trampled on.
Linda: Because legally presumably she was married to this woman and so therefore she’s entitled to the property?
Mary Margaret: She’s entitled to stay there, she has every entitlement to stay there. But while I am away nothing is being done.
Struggle not submission
Linda: And what about FGM, how does that impact on your work?
Mary Margaret: It’s an issue both among the moslem community and the traditional community. For the moslem community they do it when the children are so young from about one year old up to between one and ten years old, but for those who do it in the traditional community its part of an initiation into womanhood so they do it to teenagers who are about 15 or 16
Linda: Post menstruation?
Mary Margaret: Yes you should have started menstruation, saying you are now a mature woman but you also have to prove that you have been a virgin and then there are funny beliefs that women who are not circumcised or whose genitals are not mutilated cannot plant certain vegetables because if they do the vegetables will die, all sorts of things.
Linda: What has been the impact of making FGM illegal in Ghana?
Mary Margaret: Among the traditional communities there’s a lot of campaigning going on and a lot of education. There’s a lot of collaboration between some NGOs and the Ministry of Health. We have the body which is called the National Council of Women and Development and this body is linked to that, working where the practice is very prevalent. What is happening is that the practice has gone underground especially among the moslem communities. Because with the traditional communities because there it involves grown up girls, and because it’s painful, and because there has been a lot of campaigning, some of the girls themselves run away from this. So that’s a good point, but still in the rural areas where the older women, especially the grandmothers, still have a very big influence on the growing girls, they are usually able to convince the girls to go in for this. It used to be a celebration. There used to be a day and they would bring this man — it’s usually a man who performs the operation, and a certain number of girls would have the operation performed on them and then there would be a celebration, drumming. That no longer happens now it is illegal, so it is done quietly with no more making the supposedly happy noise and having girls dance to show that they are brave girls and all that. This celebration caused a lot of bleeding, and sometimes these girls have bled to death. When that happened of course the blame was put on the girl — that she wasn’t a virgin and her mother could be in trouble because they would say ‘why didn’t you take good care of your daughter’, that type of thing.
Linda: Do you think the numbers are going down in traditional communities?
Mary Margaret: Yes I think so, but not among the moslem communities because there they always do it before you know what is happening. I tried to find out once from one area which is predominately moslem and the report was that where Ghana borders Burkino Faso and also Togo, it was the women from those areas who still carry on the operation but not the Ghanaian women. But these women live in Ghana and don’t consider themselves from outside the country, they consider themselves Ghanaian. They also claim that it’s within tribes that were already doing it before Islam came, so now they find it very difficult to stop it.
Talking informally with some of the health personnel like the community health nurses who work in the rural health areas, what they try to do is when these girls come for pre-natal and ante-natal services they make sure that they warn them about going to circumcise if the baby is a girl and they have at the community level once a week health delivery services. So at least the women who have come for the pre- and ante-natal services they do a follow up and they make sure that these women don’t do it to their daughters.
Linda: You said something about your work in CENSUDI needing to achieve ‘critical mass’. Can you explain what you mean?
Mary Margaret: What we are trying to do is get a group of women who have gone through a series of training and workshops on women’s rights, who have skills in lobbying, negotiating and can organise a campaign. They can then raise issues, especially women’s issues, lobby and put pressure on government agencies to do something. This group would be more or less a permanent group, made up of women across the board, who know what they are doing. What we mean by critical mass is that they are always there and they don’t have rely on somebody to come and tell them what is happening — they will find out themselves and they will carry out the action that is needed.
Linda: So the work the organisation is doing is working with women so they become activists?
Mary Margaret: Yes, so they become active, for us when we say empower women we don’t mean just financial freedom, like most development agencies. Financial empowerment is useless, for instance, if a woman is a trader and is making a lot of money, yet the husband can just beat her, take the money, and because she still believes that she is the husband’s property, she doesn’t know that she can do something about this.
Linda: I know your organisation was involved in the research on violence against women, but how does it come up in your work?
Mary Margaret: We are collaborating with an organisation in Scotland called the Active Learning Centre and we have brought 18 or so locally based women (some men) leaders from NGOs and given them training on women’s rights and they in turn have gone back and held training with their group members at the community level. All of a sudden it looks like it has woken women out of a sleep. Now women come to the office saying ‘Madam my husband has been beating me and doing all sorts of things to me’, for the first time openly telling us things like this, and that they want to do something about it. Violence against women has been going on all these years but the women who have been experiencing it have never been able to say it; at least now some of them are beginning to talk about it. We are hoping that these women can also form another critical mass in their communities so that they can help other women in violent situations.
Linda: If a woman was trying to get out of a violent situation from what you have said before it looks like she actually has very few options.
Mary Margaret: No, she has nowhere to go, so often it comes down to the fact that you gave them a listening ear. We ask ‘if you go back what will happen’ and usually they say ‘well now that I know that he hasn’t got the right to beat me, when he comes home and he’s provoking me, I will walk out of the room’. So the women themselves find strategies for dealing with it until they can take it to the human rights league for it to be addressed.
Linda: And is there anything at a community level in terms of messages that this is unacceptable?
Mary Margaret: No, not in that way. The NGOs that we are collaborating with are supposed to, that is part of the training, to convey that message, but within whatever activities it is that they do.
Linda: So the idea is to integrate work on violence against women in with work on all sorts of other things?
Mary Margaret: Yes, in all sorts of things like income generation, skills training, even festivals using things like drama, which some of them have already done.
A Ghanaian feminism?
Linda: I know there have been a lot of questions and confusions about the words feminism and feminist in Ghana — and in West Africa more widely, would you say there is a sense of a women’s movement in Ghana?
Mary Margaret: Yes there is a woman’s movement, but we haven’t used the word feminist. You have to understand that in Ghana feminism has been made to have the same meaning as lesbianism. So if you used the terminology ‘feminist’ some of us, the women ourselves, and the men especially, would just brush you aside as a lesbian; because to be honest with you in Ghana lesbianism, homosexuality is not accepted, it’s not accepted. But I would say all the activities of those of us who find ourselves in the forefront of this fight against violence against women are feminist. Now I must confess that I myself did not know the difference between feminism and lesbianism until I attended this seminar. Now I know that a feminist is simply a woman who refuses to be downtrodden by the men, it’s as simple as that.
Linda: Is homosexuality talked about at all?
Mary Margaret: A bit, a bit. A few months ago, one of our newspapers had a picture of two gay men who were in indulging in sexual activity. I don’t know how the newspaper got the picture, but it just caused some hair raising even in Accra. So really it is not talked about because it is not accepted, especially lesbianism. My sense is that it is not OK for men to be indulging in being gay, but as for lesbianism it shouldn’t even be mentioned.
Linda: Do you think it might be possible for women in Ghana to claim the word feminist?
Mary Margaret: Yes, now that I know its meaning it will be important that I bring it into whatever forums or activities I am working in with women. And maybe together with ideas from these women we can see how we can defend our feminist activities, that feminism is just us trying to fight for our rights and saying ‘no you suppress us so much, now we want to end this oppression’. It will take some time, but in any case we have had to go on fighting for our rights all these years and we can never give up, if we give up then we are worse than at square one.
Linda: So you’ve got a reputation now of not giving up?
Mary Margaret: Yes, they know that they would never succeed in brushing me aside, I am just like a leech, you have to just stick there and make sure that you get what you want.