Op 5 november vond het jaarlijkse symposium van het Vrouwennetwerk Wageningse Ingenieurs plaats. Het thema was dit jaar 'Colourful Journeys, Inspiring Women'. Lara de Brito sprak onderstaande tekst uit.
~~Good afternoon, I am going to start with sharing with you how growing up in Mozambique shaped me as a person and of course also as a politician. And i will end the talk with the different faces of feminism and how we can use them to create an engaged society that benefits women more.
As i said my story starts in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, where my parents fought for the independence of the country. In 1975 this independence was a fact and the freedom movement Frelimo took power and formed a Marxist-Leninist government. In 1976, one year after the independence I was born in Maputo. We lived in a neighborhood outside of the center close by the sea, a small neighborhood of only five streets. We lived in the first street and in the second street was the local school. My mother was idealistic and decided it would be a good idea for her children to go to this local school, a choice that I understand very well. My little sister and I, together with my best friend from Chili who also lived in our street were the only three white children at this school. Everyday we walked to school and before class we all stood in straight lines with our left fist up in the air and sang the national anthem. When class started we went into the tiny classrooms, a cramped space where sometimes half of the children sat on the floor. Most of them didn’t have shoes, even fewer had the money to buy the much needed schoolbooks. Besides the huge poverty there also was a lot of physical punishment at the school. After a while we reached the conclusion that it wasn’t the best place for us to study and so we started to frequent the International School. The contrast could not be bigger! This was really the opposite of our local school. The International School was frequented by rich diplomat kids living in huge houses with swimming pools and tennis courts. There was this girl in my class, a Portugese girl, that had the same pair of sneakers in all the colors of the rainbow. Something i never forgot.From no shoes at all to the same sneakers in all the colors of the rainbow. In both worlds I felt like a spectator, sometimes even like an outsider.
At a very young age I was aware of poverty and inequality. This shaped me and lead me to the political ideas I have today. But as a young girl I was also aware of the fact that I had several identities, something i will come back to more detailed later in this talk. I was a girl. I was a white girl. I was a white girl with a Mozambican passport. I was a white girl with a Mozambican passport that was very much aware of the poverty and inequality around her. I was a white girl with a Mozambican passport that was aware of this huge contrast, the poverty, the inequality around me and realised at a very young age that context matters and that we needed to do something to create opportunities for those who didn’t have them. I learned that one child that was born into a very rich family had all the opportunities in the world. And another child when born into poverty, even if this child had the same ambitions, the same character, the same talents and intelligence, it probably would stay all of its life in that position. He or she would never have the same chances as the other rich child had. That struck me as deeply unfair, I knew as a small child that it was deeply unfair. But it was also very important for me to realize that this is actually not a fact of life.
Of course there are political choices we can make to make sure that inequality isn’t that extreme. Not only overthere , but also here in Europe.
This background is like a moral compass for me and it’s this moral compass that I use all the time for the political work I do today. It’s also my background that makes it possible for me to be a different kind of politician. A politician who has no time nor the patience to spend her days talking about procedures and political games while there is so much work to do. Not only in Mozambique, or in poor countries, but also in rich countries and also in a city like Wageningen. And I really do think that living in a rich country only gives us a bigger responsibility to effectively do something against poverty and inequality That we make the right choices and create opportunities for everyone in an equal way.
Today we live in a time of great change, a time of multiple crises; an economical, a political, a social and an environmental one. We have an economy that is completely focused on the output, on money. We measure everything through the line of making money. It’s all about how much money we have, GDP, income, assets. But in life, the things that matter, that really matter, that have value to people and to our planet are different things. Not only the outcome matters but also the process, because quality of life is all about how we are able to do things and in which circumstances we can do them. A few weeks ago I was in Amsterdam for the Brainwash festival. I listened to a very interesting thinker and economist speak ,and above all one thing he said stayed in my mind. The person speaking was Tomas Sedlacek, one of the most interesting economists today. Sedlacek is from the Czech Republic and worked for president Vaclav Havel. He explained that our current economy is based on a two hundred years old physics model. To quote Sedlacek ‘a model that was invented to study dead things’. It appealed to my imagination and I though I should read more about this because this could be a very logical reason why the economy we have is not helping people and our planet forward, not valuing the things that matter. But instead is making the rich richer and the poor poorer and destroying our planet in the meanwhile.
That is the place we are at today. And although sometimes unsettling, we live in very interesting times I have to say. Full of huge threats, and at the same time full of opportunities for a radical change, a real paradigm shift. The key question is: what can we do to make sure that in the future, our near future, we create an engaged society, another kind of economy where the things that do have value and do matter to people are the things that are of real importance, and that we base our choices on those. First of all I think we need to learn to think in a complete different way. To be able to value the things that matter and base our economy on this, we have to learn to think in a more radical way. As I said before, as a very young girl I was aware of the fact that I had several identities and that for creating opportunities context matters. That brings me to one of my favorite thinkers that has influenced me a lot. Amartya Sen is anIndian nobel prize economist and philosopher. In one of Sens books ‘Identity and Violence’ he argues that there is no such thing as one identity, not for a person and not for a nation. We all have multiple identities, and not only this, but that it depends on the context, on the situation, which one is more relevant and more important. He takes himself as an example and tells about being at a restaurant and that the fact that he is a Nobel prize winner is not very relevant in this situation and not important at all. But the fact that he is a vegetarian even more. Besides context he also talks about intention. It’s very natural to me to include context and intention in the way I think. But including intention is not part of the way most of us think today. In the West we have learned to think about things in a static way with fixed definitions, something is either good or bad. To think,and include context and intention needs a radical and different path of approaching things and I urge that we should learn how to do this, and do it, and then start doing it a lot more. When it comes to intention Sen uses nationalism as an example. He starts by saying that there is no such thing as nationalism being good or bad by itself, by itself it has no value. It depends on the intention and what it is used for. If nationalism ,or a strong identity is used to exclude people, like Wilders does.To say that certain people are not welcome, then of course it is a bad thing. But imagine a strong indentity being used to include people, like we do in Wageningen. Here we are very proud of our international identity that welcomes people, then it is actually a good thing because the intention is to include instead of to exclude. These are examples of a complete different way of thinking, a different way of thinking that is going to enable us to make smarter and more precise decisions and to teach us how to think more and beter to start with.
The next step, to concretize what I said before, is that we need a new economy. We have to replace the logic of competition by a strategy of collaboration. The new economy we need is a feminist economy. There is a school of feminist economics that has existed for a while and I would say that it is more relevant now as ever because of the crises and changes we face today. For example: if we look at the decentralizations in Holland, in general the new tasks that municipalities are responsible for since last year, we see something alarming.Asking citizens to do more in society, to participate when it comes to caring for others, the elderly or working as a volunteer, we see that women are overrepresented. The emancipation and the position of women is at stake and this asks us to be very alert. Not to mention the fact that women are still not equally paid for the same work as men do is of course dazzling. Back to my initial statement, we need a feminist economy to make sure that the things that matter to people and the planet are valued and thus form the base of this new economy. Important is the fact that the principles of feminist economy are the same as the principles of the green economy. There is one approach within feminist economics that I find very inspiring and that is the capabilities approach. The capabilities approach was also created by Amartya Sen in collaboration with Martha Nussbaum, a colleague philosopher. The capabilities approach is an alternative way of looking at the economy and is based on individual capabilities and needs. It looks at what is necessary to help people and invest in their capabilities so that they can live a good life and develop themselves and their abilities. So it looks at and values also the process ,and not only the outcome like the current economy does. And it values a lot more, not only materialistic things such as cultural, social aspects of well-being, but also health, bodily integrity, thought and also the materialistic dynamic of well-being. The main importance is that it is a much broader way of looking at society, based on the things that are of value and not only on based on making money, to say it in a very compact way. I do believe that to achieve this new feminist economy, the feminist green economy that benefits women more and protects our planet, we need democratization. Because we need to give women a much bigger voice and in our current democracy women are underrepresented. When it comes to democratization and forms of direct democracy I think we can learn a lot from South American countries, specifically Brazil. Of course I know that Brazil is now in the middle of a political crisis and people might not like the idea that I’m using Brazil as a good example, but Brazil actually has decades of tradition of using forms of direct democracy, of democratic deliberation like participatory budgeting. Research that has been done shows that one of the most important results is that it gives a much stronger voice to women and minorities. A much stronger voice from women means that the decisions made are much more in line with the values I was talking about instead of the traditional now current economical money fixed way of valuing things.
To conclude; we need a new economy, we need democratization to achieve this new economy and of course we all here should play our role to move this ,more engaged, better society forward. I do think that to achieve an engaged society, and to achieve the new feminist green economy that benefits women more, we all need to take responsibility and rise to action and use the different identities and roles we have ourselves much better. A very important role is the one as a voter, so I would say that we really need to vote for women, for feminists, can also be men, people that are going to increase the influence we have on the choices we make for our lives. We need to use our multiple identities and roles better. To start with the role of mother, because raising kids is one of the most influential and important things to do, and of course in particular raising boys. But also as a friend, a scientist, as a professional, an employee, a volunteer, and so on, you can do a lot to influence others and get people to choose for the things that matter and to replace competition by collaboration. Feminism has many faces, all these identities we can use in our daily lives to create a context in which we can change the intention. The intention is now making money, which is a poor one. But it can be changed to make sure people find wellbeing in all the important aspects of life. An economy werein our planet is being protected and that we maybe undo the damage as well . I believe we all have a say in this. We can use our multiple identities to create a context in which the intention can be changed.
I really do hope that within a few days the highest glass ceiling of the world will be shattered with the election of Hillary Clinton as president of the United States. Her husband is well known for the quote ‘It’s the economy stupid’ I would say: ‘it’s the new feminist economy my friend’. Collaboration instead of competition.
Be aware of the different faces of feminism and use them the best you can. Thank you very much.