Preparing your experience
Preparing your experience
An Ode
Our name is the Nawi Afrifem Collective. Most who know us, call us Nawi.
Nawi is the name of the last known survivor of the N’Nonmiton who died in 1979 at over 100 years old. The N’Nonmiton were a group of women soldiers who protected the Kingdom of Dahomey from attack and French colonization. N’Nonmiton means our mothers. In Turkana, a language spoken by a community in Kenya, Nawi means home.
Nawi is the memorializing of the name of an African woman.
Nawi is the recognition of history and of continuity.
Nawi is time – past, present, future - all together, all at once.
Nawi is an ode to an anti-colonial and anti-neoliberal struggle.
Nawi is a community of African women committed to understanding and critiquing
our current macroeconomic systems and who we’ve become as a result of them.
Nawi is an imagining for building fair, just and kind worlds.
Nawi is a home to commune, to nourish and be nourished, to dream, for joy, for freedom and for a mutual harvest.
We are African women who believe that the macroeconomic systems and policies guiding our countries, and the global economy, are anti-poor, anti-labor, anti-women, anti-joy, anti-beauty, anti-sustainability and therefore fundamentally, at odds with life. We are a collective helping to build a community of African women researchers, writers, artists, healers and dreamers committed to analysing, giving language to, changing the language of, and influencing the policies guiding, our macroeconomic systems.
This, all of this, is the reason that we deal in macro level economics.
In her book Zeina, Nawal el Saadawi wrote this,
“The cost of bread is higher,
Our homes are on fire.
Sugar and oil are dearer
And we’ve become cheaper.”
These words are as true today, if not more so, than when they were written. Our work is trying to figure out why. Why is the cost of bread higher? Why are our homes on fire? Why are sugar and oil dearer and why have we become cheaper? And, of course, our work is also to try to change this reality.
Macro level economics, simply put, is how governments make decisions about how to raise and spend revenue. That is, how to make money and how to spend money, including what to budget for, and how, what and how much to tax.
As we see it, our current macroeconomic systems are at the service of neoliberalism and under that ideology, the market (or more precisely, those controlling the market) rules all. So, instead of governments regulating fair food prices, the markets determine the cost of food. Instead of strict regulations on labor rights, wages, benefits, and taxes, governments reduce regulations to make it easier for private companies to increase profit. Instead of health care and education being seen as a right, they become the playground of private companies. Neoliberalism centers private companies, whose main goal is to maximize profit, sell us goods and services, sometimes basic goods and services, at prices most beneficial for them. And it’s not just that they determine the price of goods and services, they determine their quality. They determine how we work, how we are treated at work, what we eat, how much we pay for food, our health outcomes, our education, and how we treat the environment. They determine our value, a value calculated on racist, classist, sexist principles. Hierarchies that determine who’s lives, labor, safety, liberty, happiness and love matter the most. These companies and the market centered profit driven policies that allow them to exist, determine our relationships to each other. This, we believe, is the crux of our malaise.
As for women, as with everything concerning us, there is a difference for us in the consequences of how a country makes money (how fairly it makes money, who and what is being taxed) and spends money (how equitably it shares resources, who and what is prioritized in their budgets). When you’re the one who makes the food, fetches the water, births the babies, rears the children, cares for the sick, sows the seeds, and harvests the crops, you feel the effects of macroeconomic policies differently. Birthing babies is easier and safer with properly resourced maternity wards, girls are more likely to go to school regularly if there are suitable bathrooms and sanitary products available to them, they are more likely to stay in school if school feeding programs are available to them decreasing financial burdens on their families, they are most likely to finish school if they don’t have to work or get married to support their parents and siblings, women’s time spent on fetching water is reduced or eliminated with water infrastructure, their lives are safer with paved lit roads, and on and on and on. How a government spends its money, every budget cut, every budget allocation, is a women’s rights issue, a feminist’s preoccupation.
Our work, more than being against a system, is at the service of our dreams. We dream of a radically transformed and just economic system that embraces the basic rights and needs of human life as well as the natural environment. We dream of worlds that center education, healthcare, housing, good healthy food, sustainable agriculture, love, beauty, and joy.
For us,
In a time not so far away
Life is queen
This above all
Is the dream.
To make the dream, we
Research, write papers, tell stories, and make art to bring the language of macro level economics closer to how we speak with those we love, to our favorite poem, to the cadence of our grandmothers.
Use language, change language, shift language as a tool for understanding, dreaming, imagining and influencing policy and social change around macroeconomic systems.
Build community, strengthen networks and collect and share the works of African women, individuals and collectives, who share a desire to see our systems be at the service of life.
On our honor and by our word
We vow to center life.
We will ask of the world, of our economic systems and policies, of our governments, of our work and of our relationships – Is it fair? Is it just? Is it kind?
We will be driven by curiosity, exploration, and experimentation.
We will be wild, our throats open, screams and laughter, in our critique and our imaginings.
We will be daring and when we are scared or unsure, we will call on the help of our sisters, our mothers, our ancestors and the spirits to guide us.
We will privilege language, colloquial everyday language. We will privilege, not terms, but description and stories and our senses.
We will ask questions like, how does it feel, what are the sounds, what does it look like?
We will stop to admire the flowers, the craftsmanship of a fine piece of furniture, we will take walks. We will do this to stay alive and with the knowledge that the systems and ways of being that we work to change are at odds with beauty.
We vow that our lives and our work will be beautiful.
We vow to help build worlds from our dreams and imaginations.
We vow to be open to change, including in the words we have written and spoken here.
We vow to work, always and primarily, at the service of life and for a mutual harvest.