When you first started cycling yourself, did you ever envision using it in this way?
No! Not at all. But I was keenly aware of how the bike was an integral tool for social action. When I started riding my bike in Afghanistan, it was really to test how deep the social taboo went and to try and understand why that barrier was in place. I wanted to understand if there was room for shifting that attitude in an area where you have women running for president and yet can’t ride a bike. It just seems crazy.
In three years of riding in the country, I never thought I’d see a girl on a bike. Then I went through a Hazara area, which is an ethnicity known as being a little more progressive. It was there I discovered the women’s team. I would never have encouraged a girl to get on a bike before that point, because I would not have wanted her to take such a risk at the request of a western woman.
Can you talk us through the reasons why women can’t ride? It seems like such an alien thing.
It definitely seems alien. Women in Afghanistan can’t straddle a horse, motorcycle or a bike. They’re supposed to ride side-saddle on the back. It’s biological reasoning.
When you look at any culture, when women started to ride bikes it created a lot of controversy.
But a friend of mine sent me a book about the women’s suffrage movement in the US, and when women started riding bikes in the late 1800s. They were dressed in petticoats and hats and boots and gloves, incredibly conservatively, and yet they were considered immoral and promiscuous.
I realised that when you look at any culture, when women started to ride bikes it kind of up-turned the apple cart and created a lot of controversy. You’re letting women have independent means of transportation that does not require a male escort and allows them to travel freely in a way they couldn’t on foot.
That to me shows why the work that I’m doing potentially has so much growth. This has happened in every single culture. You can’t blame this on religion, it’s just a natural, cultural timeline of women’s rights.
Do you think if we can remove the fear of women’s independence, the fear of the physical aspect disappear?
The paranoia that it’ll take away a daughter’s virginity will take a long time to dilute. This is deeply ingrained in a culture where male doctors can’t deliver babies, even if the woman is going to die in childbirth. Afghanistan has the worst records of infant mortality because they don’t have enough midwives, and men will not let a male doctor see their wife give birth.
Like everything, as something becomes more normal there will still be the more conservative factions that will rail against it and say that this is dishonourable to these girls and their families, but over time and over a generation that will shift. It shifted in America and Europe, and the bike was intricately tied with those women’s rights movements in various countries.
The Afghan Women’s Cycle Team consists of
Mariam, Sadaf, Massouma, Zahra, Nazifa and Forozan.
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