Feminism paper

Paper Presented at CODESRIA 30th Anniversary Grand Finale

12th Dec 2003

DRAFT! Not for citation without express permission of the author

Gender Studies for Africa’s Transformation

Amina Mama,

African Gender Institute, University of Cape Town.

Introduction

Most of us here are post-colonial intellectual workers in the sense that we went to school in the newly independent nations. We have tended to lead rather peripatetic careers that traverse continents and nations, diverse political contexts, and various academic disciplines. Our intellectual identities are therefore likely to be multiply constituted and deeply cosmopolitan. Our intellectual identities are likely to owe as much to continental social movements and civil society formations and independent research networks as to the universities. For those of us engaged in and concerned about the development and transformation of our societies into more just and equitable places, these are both changing and challenging times. I work at the African Gender Institute (AGI), a modest structure established at the UCT in 1996, after a continent-wide consultative process, and at a particular moment of opportunity in the university’s history. The AGI owes its existence to the political transformation of South Africa. 1996 was a moment characterised by an unprecedented degree of enthusiasm with regard to the possibility of intellectual transformation, an optimism that the then-Vice Chancellor instituted through the establishment of two Chairs – the ill-fated AC Jordan Chair in African Studies, at one time occupied by Mahmood Mamdani and the Chair in Gender Studies that I have held since 1999. The African Gender Institute is just one of the 30 or more sites now engaging in gender and/or women’s studies (GWS) in African universities. The Growth of Gender and Women’s Studies in Africa1 Gender and women’s studies has been a growth area over the last two decades. From just a handful of sites in the early 1990’s, the field has grown.2

1 I acknowledge the work of my colleagues at the AGI, especially Joanne Henry the in-house web-mistress, and Barbara Boswell project assistant. 2 There are currently over 800 degree-awarding departments and programmes in gender and women’s studies in the USA.

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A total of 30 universities across the continent responded to the survey, identifying their institutions as sites for teaching and researching gender and women's studies. These universities are Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia; Ahfad University in Sudan; Ahmadu Bello University, Lagos State University, Obafemi Awolowo University, University of Benin, University of Ibadan, University of Nigeria and Usmano Danfodiyo University in Nigeria; Makerere University in Uganda; the Universities of Buea and Yaounde 1 in Cameroon; the University of Cape Coast and the University of Ghana in Ghana; The University of Malawi; the University of Namibia in Namibia; the University of Sierra Leone; the University of Zambia; the University of Zimbabwe; and Rhodes University, the University of Cape Town, Fort Hare University, the University of Durban-Westville, the University of Natal, the University of Pretoria, the University of Stellenbosch, the Institute for Gender and Women's Studies at the American University in Cairo, Egypt; the University of South Africa (UNISA) and the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. South Africa has the greatest number of Gender and Women's Studies teaching sites, with 9 out of the country's 27 universities offering some degree of gender and women's studies teaching. With seven universities out of forty teaching gender and women's studies, Nigeria has the second largest number of gender studies sites on the continent. Ghana and Cameroon identified two universities each serving as gender studies teaching and research sites, while most other countries included in this survey had only one. 3

The oldest of these are the Women’s Documentation Centre in the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ibadan and the Women’s Documentation Centre at University of Dar Es Salaam, both established during the early 1980’s. The largest is the Department of Women and Gender Studies at Makerere University. The number of faculty and students has increased substantially too. There are currently about 140 women scholars in the continental Feminist Studies Network. There are also signs that gender studies is gaining some modest institutional ground, as the number of sites recognised as full academic departments has also risen during the last few years. The AGI’s survey responses indicated that:

Sites for teaching and researching gender and women's studies are structured and administered in a number of different ways. Certain institutions have departments, units or programmes dedicated to gender and women's studies teaching and research, while other institutions have gender interwoven or "mainstreamed" within other, more traditional disciplines or taught courses. Of the 30 institutions 17 have dedicated gender teaching and/or research units, programmes or departments, while the remaining 13 institutions offer gender studies as courses or modules within other institutional departments or courses. Dedicated gender programmes, units or departments, for the purpose of this study, are defined as units which specialise in, and have as their core function gender teaching and/or research, with dedicated staff and a dedicated coordinator, director or chair. The existence of a dedicated gender studies unit, can be taken as a superficial indicator

3 Further details available at www.gwsafrica.org

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of institutional commitment, but for this to be meaningful requires additional investment in infrastructural and highly-trained human resources in gender and women's studies (Boswell 2002).

However of the dedicated units, only four have formal departmental status: the University of Makerere’s Department of Women and Gender Studies, the University of Buea’s Department of Women’s Studies, d the University of Zambia’s Gender Studies Department, and the AGI4. In terms of teaching levels, twelve of the identified sites offer masters level programmes (6 of these being in South Africa), but only 5 on the entire continent offer undergraduate degrees5. Only 2 on the continent offer doctoral degrees (Cape Town and Makerere), and both have relied on a strong undergraduate teaching base in order to do so.6 Others offer courses within mainstream courses, short courses, or diplomas in GWS. The intellectual content of the teaching varies, but it is evident that the vast majority of them teach in the area of women in development, or gender and development. Very few teach, or publicly admit to, teaching in more controversial fields, such as sexuality, and those that do place it under the respectable rubric of health or population studies, rather than treating it as a key aspect of gender, or even gender and development. This suggests a degree of academic pragmatism, and a willingness to comply with administrative rationales that bind gender studies to developmentalism and government servicing, and accommodate feminist initiatives insofar as they present a funding opportunity.7 Those engaged in teaching point to a number of substantial constraints. Beyond the salient problems of overload and poor remuneration, the limited availability of locally generated research and publications, and the constrained access to those that do exist, pose a major challenge to the development of locally relevant teaching which can support and or develop activist agendas with local women’s movements, is posed by.8 The existing programmes and departments face many challenges. Kasente (2002) provides us with a frank and honest appraisal of the achievements and compromises at Africa’s largest gender and women’s studies department: 4 This is a formal status, as the AGI is still 2 short of the minimal number of faculty posts required to fully establish it as an academic department in the UCT’s own terms. 5 These are Makerere Unversity, the University of Cape Town, the University of Pretoria, the University of the Western Cape and the University of Buea. UCT will be suspending its 5 year old undergraduate major in 2004. 6 The rarity of doctoral programmes is partly a reflection of the dearth of senior level capacity, as there are hardly any full professors with specialised skills in gender studies. This reflects the overall deficit in women academics. 7 The situation is similar to that within government with regard to the establishment of the national machinery for women all over Africa, as an export product. No-one assumes a single structure can or should address women’s issues in Western contexts. 8 see AGI 2002 ‘Strengthening Gender and Women’s Studies in African Contexts’ Workshop report available at www.gwsafrica.org

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…the department’s experiences in its first decade demonstrate considerable quantitative growth in terms of student numbers, the development of a national and international profile and the expansion of research. This however has occurred alongside a diminishing sense of internal cohesiveness, accountability to the women’s movement and engagement with issues of gender transformation in the broader society (2002: 91).

The wider reform effort at Makerere has created a situation in which there are now over 1,000 students enrolled at the Department, with ten faculty members. The rapidly expanded teaching load has been accompanied by competing demands coming from stakeholders within and outside the university. From within the university have come demands related to gender mainstreaming, notably the work of ensuring that various players are kept aware of the cross-cutting importance of gender, coupled with demands that burden the department with the task of providing all the conceptual and practical resources for implementing mainstreaming. From without have come the competing demands from government for support to the ministry and various women’s organisations, and from international donors seeking the training of local development workers. The department tried to respond to these needs by negotiating partnership arrangements with northern institutions. These enabled the department to establish an outreach programme in gender training, which set out to achieve the commendable goal of creating

“….a critical mass of development workers who would work directly with communities to enhance their capacities to meet women’s practical needs and to advocate for change where required”.

This clearly speaks to a common interest in developing engaged intellectual workers, as has been discussed here by Ki Zerbo and Mkandawire’s contributions. However the fact that such applied teaching has tended to rely on donor-funding has made many such programmes vulnerable to the vagaries of the development industry and shifting donor interests. The AGI has prioritized continental networking. While this may be a response to the particular capacity deficits in the Western Cape locality, it also bespeaks a continuation of the traditions of regional intellectual networking exemplified by CODESRIA, and of feminist networking exemplified by AAWORD, the Tanzania Gender Networking Programme, the Women and Law in Southern African research network (WLSA), the Zimbabwe Women’s Resource Centre and Network, the Women Law and Development Network (WILDAF), FEMNET, the Southern African Network of Tertiary Institutions Challenging Sexual Harassment and Gender –based Violence, the Gender in Africa Education Network and a host of other gender activist networks on the African continent. The main difference is its concerted effort to rehabilitate and claim scholarly work within academic institutions as legitimate terrain for feminist work in African contexts.

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Overall, there are now over 140 individual African women scholars in the feminist network established during the last 2 years through the AGI’s continental networking programme, the vast majority of whom are located on the continent. In summary, it is clear that GWS has proliferated in the last decade and a half, in a manner worth subjecting to more detailed critical analysis, and intellectual strengthening. But, what is the importance of gender studies today, and what informs and energises the emergence of such counter-hegemonic intellectual activity on Africa’s beleaguered and male-dominated campuses? How do we explain the remarkable proliferation and growth of gender studies in Africa? I will argue that the answers to these two questions lie firstly in the African political context, which includes a longstanding understanding among progressive thinkers – namely that the transformation of gender relations as an integral and necessary facet of African liberation and development.9 Secondly, they have much to do with the rise and decline of African higher education, and the manner in which this has facilitated the gradual but steady entry of women in African universities. Thirdly the political and economic constraints which have circumscribed and challenged intellectual identities and freedoms in African contexts, have generated new trans- and inter-disciplinary intellectual directions on several fronts, notably modernisation/development studies, cultural studies, and gender studies (see CODESRIA 2002, Gulbenkian Commission 1996). Fourth, they lie in the transnationalisation of feminism, and the particular impact of UN feminism and the uptake of this by national governments. Finally, they relate to contemporary developments within social theory, and the fact that feminist theories and methodologies are gaining currency, as a valuable route to overcoming the legacies of both the epistemological violence and the paradigmatic limitations bequeathed to the world by imperial and patriarchal hegemonies in knowledge production. The context and conditions under which these five conditions have evolved are briefly reviewed below. Gender Politics and Developmentalism Feminism, to put it simply, is an international political and intellectual movement to challenge the subordination of women. It has many roots and trajectories, some of which are decidedly transnational, in the sense that they draw the connections between local and global manifestations of that ongoing subordination. In African contexts, the picture cannot be reviewed here, but it is worth noting that women’s involvement in early-mid-twentieth century nationalist struggles that took place in contexts as far apart as Egypt, Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania, to name a few, was followed up after independence with a growth of gender activism. The main strategies

9 This can be seen expressed among leading intellectuals of the Algerian, Mozambican, Zimbabwean, Ugandan, South African liberation movements. Most recently it can be seen in the unexpected outcome of the Rwandan election which resulted in 48% of women being elected to the Parliament, far in excess of the 30% quota.

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pursued have been state-focused. Understandably, women’s activism was largely directed at prevailing on the independent states they had helped to craft, pursing legal and policy reforms and more equitable access to resources. The arguments were made on largely integrationist and instrumental grounds – women as citizens deserve to be integrated into national development so that they can better serve the national development agenda. The main response of the state was to accept legal and policy reforms (up to a point), and to establish a national structure to which these demands could be addressed and directed, while statecraft and government continued as usual. Internationally, the impact of feminism on the global development industry has led to many things, only some of which are as radical and progressive as their instigators dreamed. Historically speaking, the interaction has generated something of a traveling circus of experts, gender technocrats touting a new kind of export product, whose brand- name has shifted with the decades, from WID to WAD to GAD to GM, or gender mainstreaming. These agents both challenge and service the industry, but their value to the alleged beneficiaries remains debatable, as conditions at the capitalist periphery remain arduous and gender injustices abound. You do not need me to recount the empirical evidence that places African women as the poorest of the poor, as the majority of refugees and displaced persons, as the most vulnerable to violence, to HIV/AIDS, and to numerous other violations and injustices which I prefer not to list here, at a celebration. Developmental feminism is the main product of the liaison between Western-dominated feminism and the development industry, and can be traced back to the initiation of the global development interest in women, and was early manifest in the UN Decade of the 1970’s and 1980’s10. If one were to take a long view, one might be tempted to draw an analysis that traces developmental feminism back its precursors in imperial feminism, or the more philanthropic feminist internationalism, depending. One might also draw the connections between Un feminism and nationally-based state feminism, on the basis that both are about the politics of entryism, and as such display very liberal and pragmatic tendencies that had quite negative import in the military dictatorships, and now in the context of neo-liberalism. Whatever trajectory one traces, it is clear that developmental feminism has been the result of at times quite complex negotiations that reflect the rapid growth and proliferation of feminist thought and strategy on the one hand, and the long arm of much more powerful players in development industry. The unequal power and authority has ensured a dynamic of appropriation and incorporation that constantly subverts and challenges more transformative feminist agendas. Today, now that the state has been rolled back, and in some instances collapsed entirely, one might want to speak less of bureaucratization of feminism by the state and to focus instead on the impact of marketisation. The poorly defined and even more poorly understood logic of ‘market forces’ has largely supplanted the hegemony, and some might say the protection, of the state. That this shift has been accompanied by financial stringencies that thwart and subvert social justice agendas whenever these do not look “efficient” in the immediate term only makes it harder to live with – basically it produces

10 UN feminism elaborated elsewhere (Mama 1997: 416-417)

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a leveling down instead of a leveling up of the various public health, educational and welfare services upon which women so depend. Within the world of global development feminism has made complicated inroads, the product of complex negotiations within and across the hierarchies of power that drive the development industry. Each apparent advance has generated its own challenges and risks; each manoeuvre has been greeted with new manoeuvres. As we enter the ‘knowledge society’ a key concern must be the global inequalities played out in the arena of knowledge production, in which I include feminist knowledge production. Shifting University Landscapes

‘Widespread university education is essentially a post-colonial phenomenon…only 18 out of the 48 countries of sub-Saharan Africa had universities or colleges before 1960. With the approach of political independence or immediately thereafter, many African countries regarded the establishment of local universities as a major pillar of the post-colonial national development project. The new universities were to help the new nations build up their capacity to manage and develop their resources, alleviate the poverty of the majority of their people, and close the gap between them and the developed world’ (Sawyerr 2002: 2).

Africa now has about 316 universities, the greatest concentrations being in Nigeria has more than 45 universities, and South Africa. Gross enrolment rates in African universities increased dramatically, from an estimated 181,000 in 1975 to over 600,000 in 1980. After a plateau in the 1980’s the figures more than doubled to over 1.75 million in 1995, and are still growing fast in most places (AAU data). Despite this substantial growth, the African region still has the lowest tertiary enrolment rates in the world.11 It is also worth noting that African HE institutions have always been concerned with contributing to development and social responsibility, in a way that makes them fundamentally different from the earlier Western idea of a university, rooted as that was in the idea of carefully sequestered religious brotherhoods. They were not so much ‘universal’, as regional and nationalist in their initial visions and missions, but it seems fair to say that the social responsibility of intellectuals was assumed.12 Academics, while not always loved by politicians, have nonetheless been given key responsibilities in African nations, some taking up Ministerial or even Presidential positions during the early decades, and many more appointed to high level public offices since. Even the military found it expedient to co-opt academics by creating whole cadres of advisors drawn from the universities and the intellectual left, as the

11 Japan, a small set of islands with roughly the same population as Nigeria has 300 universities. 12 Recent South African debates on values in education and the need to ‘re-insert’ the public good in higher education (Singh 2000) suggest that the same cannot be said of South African universities. Presumably this can be traced to the history of apartheid, and the fact that in South Africa universities were designed to divide rather than rather than unify the nation.

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examples of both Ghana and Nigeria demonstrate very well, and as we heard yesterday in relation to Ethiopia and Somalia. Over time, the earlier regional centres intellectual debate and radical thinking that vigorously contested the received Western paradigms and disciplinary legacies were displaced by more parochial national and sub-national institutions. As nation states themselves became more inward-looking and neocolonial, so too did the universities servicing them. Even some of the more radical states – those that claimed to be revolutionary or Marxist - unleashed campaigns of terror against the intelligentsia. Authoritarian and military rulers dramatically diminished the freedom of thought at action in a number of contexts. While the growth of the HE sector continued, often as a political gesture, economic decline and the imposition of structural adjustment programmes constrained the availability of public funding. It needs to be noted that ‘nationalism’ as a homogenising discourse that played valuable unifying functions, nonetheless did not take full cognisance of the diverse composition of most African nations. With hindsight it is easy to see that ‘national relevance’ remained unproblematised, and insensitive to the fact that African nations are deeply marked by class, ethnicity, gender, religion and other dimensions of difference and inequality. In keeping with the assumptions of Western liberalism, it was further assumed that differential patterns of access and inclusion would simply wither away, once formal exclusions of the colonial era were abolished. Although the extent to which this withering away did occur has not been adequately monitored, it does seem fair to observe that the public financing of universities, coupled with the fact that there were no formal exclusions ensured that small but significant numbers of women and other previously disadvantaged groups found their way to obtaining degrees, and into the national intelligentsia. In some countries there were quota systems designed to overcome regional and ethnic disparities, and later in a few institutions, affirmative strategies were deployed to increase the intake of women.13 The various strategies for inclusion had effected some numerical changes, and the fact is that African universities have functioned as key routes to upward mobility, enabling steadily increasing multitudes of Africans to gain the credentials and training towards the pursuit of professional careers first at home, and later abroad too.14 Up until the crisis and the ‘Lost Decades’ of the 1980’s and 1990’s, locally trained doctors, lawyers, teachers, scientists, social scientists, artists, media professionals were produced in sufficiently vast numbers to staff the major government and private sector institutions then being established all over the continent during the first decade or so of independence. These were therefore effectively indigenised (if not fully de-colonised) in the sense of being staffed by Africans, with a minority of expatriates remaining on 13 Nigeria has never countenanced affirmative action to increase women’s access, but is has long had a policy of ‘federal character’ designed to ensure that all federal universities maintained intake quotas from the different regions of the country. Uganda introduced affirmative action for women when the NRM came to power (see Kwesiga 2002). 14 Albeit not to an extent that compares with Asia, which has no suffered the same degree of under- provision.

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limited contracts and visas, (albeit on higher salaries), until even these departed, or were obliged to leave, with the economic downturn of the 1980s. 15 The well-documented deterioration of Africa’s HE sector that ensued during the 1980’s need not be detailed here. Life simply became untenable for new generations of Africans who might reasonably have been expected to hold the keys for the future. Significant numbers migrated overseas, only a minority able pursue academic careers, and those who remained found their brains drained in other ways – into various entrepreneurial and consultancy activities that soon became more essential to their survival than their professional employment as highly training academics. The appalling long-term consequences the deterioration of HE may have for the development capacities of the region, not to mention the intellectual development of future generations are probably immeasurable. Who are the beneficiaries of this disaster? It would be disingenuous of me not to note that Africa’s own authoritarian regimes were complicit in this, as they often viewed the campuses as hotbeds of radicalism and encouraged the public to regard them as a public nuisance and a waste of resources. So too did key international financial institutions, who constructed a strange counterposition between basic literacy needs and advanced intellectual skills, asserting that Africa should concentrate its shrinking resources on the former, as if even maintaining schools did not require a tertiary system. The implications for the increasingly unequal international division of labour need no elaboration. The resultant capacity deficit has cost the continent heavily, as development planning has increasingly fallen into greater reliance on external experts, to the tune of 4 billion dollars a year paid out to expatriate technical advisors. The OECD countries have never withdrawn public funding and subsidisation, but rather developed the sector to attract and earn income from foreign students. The US alone generates 547,000 dollars per annum from foreign students. With the world market in HE services now exceeding 30 billion US dollars, the US now seeks the inclusion of HE services in the General Agreement on Trades and Services, to further consolidate its global dominance of the sector. There is another more positive development that needs to be noted here. The 1970’s also saw the emergence of several other sites of intellectual production, taking the form of autonomous scholarly networks, the most significant of these being the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) in 1973, and the Association of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD) in 1982. Both were autonomous Pan-African networks which reaffirmed, and later came to sustain, earlier intellectual traditions that challenged imperial legacies and committed African scholarship to new and transdisciplinary methodologies, to multilingualism, to egalitarian and radical scholarship grounded in African social realities and concerns, and to the defense of academic freedom. Many of us – at least within African social sciences 15 It needs to be noted that the picture was not uniformly ‘expatriate’ - East and Southern Africa faced a

somewhat different situation, given the residential status of various groups of settlers and descendents of

settlers, and the institution of apartheid.

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owe something to these alternative structures, for the importance of the intellectual imperative that they signalled has grown over the years. However, it needs to be said that with the exception of women’s structures like AAWORD and the Feminist Studies Network, these have remained almost as male dominated as the universities themselves, despite repeated expressions of goodwill and good intentions. What are we, as a progressive intellectual community going to do to address the persistence of gender inequality in our alternative structures? Despite these important alternative developments, in Africa, as much as anywhere else, the public university remains the key site for the production of knowledge and expertise. It is also the key site for the production and reproduction of values and world-views, for the production of people, of identities, subjectivities and consciousness. Yet this clearly ideological role has most often been covert, in keeping with the liberal political tradition, and its claims to neutrality. Gender Politics in African Universities Let me move to a discussion of gender politics, as one among several of the dimensions of inequality that the modern African universities might have been expected to challenge, given their popular, nationalist mandates, the role of women in the nationalist movements that gave rise to political independence, and the removal of formal exclusionary practices at the end of colonial occupation. I have noted that the pool of women scholars has grown over the years. However, the empirical profile is one in which inequality has been sustained across the first three decades of independence. The figures are not even complete, but by the mid- 1990’s only 3% of Africa’s professoriate were women, (Ajayi et al 1996). More recent calculations indicate a high level of variation, but place the number of women faculty as between 6.1% in Ethiopia, 12% in Ghana and Nigeria, and after a decade of affirmative action, 19% in Uganda. Only 20% of students on the continent are women in the mid 1990’s (Ajayi et al 1996). At the present time the statistics are still incomplete, but the percentage of women enrolled varies widely from a low of 9% in Central African Republic and 15 % in Ethiopia, to over 40% in Morocco, Egypt, Senegal, with Libya and Swaziland both showing 51%. These figures only address access to study and employment, and tell us very little about the institutional cultures and conditions facing women in Africa’s universities. For these we rely on qualitative evidence and the accumulated experience and knowledge among Africa’s gender conscious academics (see Feminist Africa 1). Suffice to say that Africa’s campuses remain deeply difficult and challenging places for women at many levels. The persistence of patriarchal and misogynistic campus cultures need to be recognised as key factors leading to keen interest in gender studies. As a field it offers women possibilities of ‘safe’ collegialism, research opportunities, alternative routes to academic and professional development. It also problematises and explores the myriad experiences of marginalisation that still accrue to women in mainstream scholarship and scholarly institutions. Another key factor lies in the ongoing social and political realities in which ‘gender’ features increasingly in the discourses of governments and international

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agencies, while gross inequalities and injustices continue to mark most women’s lives on a daily basis. GWS offers analytical tools for making sense of the contradiction between rhetoric and reality, between theory and practice. Little wonder that African women have begun to develop their own varieties of feminist praxis. Feminist Studies in Africa As, feminism has not just generated significant changes in governance and policy, but as Mkandawire acknowledged in his closing remarks at the 1991 CODESRIA seminar on Gender and the African Social Sciences, it has also generated a large and diverse body of theoretical and conceptual tools, a corpus of methodologies and approaches to knowledge-building. It has also generated an impressive array of pedagogical innovations and adaptations that are creatively and imaginatively deployed by teachers, trainers and advocates working with gender theory. It has also produced a substantial body of knowledge. All of these have grown as the numbers of women and men working in the field has increased. In this respect it is worth recalling that one of the feminist epistemology, enriched as it has been by the interventions of Southern-based feminists, insists on being politically engaged, and on being constantly alert to the politics of location and diversities of class, race, culture, sexuality and so on. Feminist epistemology also seeks to build understanding of the connections between the local and global, between the micropolitics of subjectivity and everyday life, from the macro politics of global governance and political economy. This reflects a commitment to a certain holism, offering conceptual tools that traverse that various layers of social realities, so challenging and subverting the disciplinary and locational fragmentations that have characterised Western academic tradition. Feminist theorists therefore straddle many intellectual and institutional arenas, in which they face the challenge of keeping global and local levels of analysis in their sights. They must therefore cultivate the navigational and strategic skills required to move between the different and at times competing levels of analysis. In the academic arena, whether one refers to women’s studies, gender studies or feminist studies it is clear that feminist thought has generated a great deal of intellectual ferment across all the disciplines. Feminist studies have often been deeply subversive, overturning pre-existing assumptions, pre-existing histories of knowledge, and transforming pre- existing accounts of human history with rich and interesting herstories that function to complete and to subvert the masculine-dominated canons that went before. The de-mythologisation of Africa has been a central project of the modern day African intelligentsia, ever since Africanus Horton dreamed of an African university, back in the 19th century. The work of leading African philosophers and thinkers has done much to challenge the mythologisation of Africa, all the way from the early travelers who wondered at the discovery of great centres of learning on African soil, to present day re- inscriptions of Africa as all that is dark and dreadful.16 16 Particularly the work of Paulin Hountoundji, Valentin Mudimbe, Kwame Appiah.

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However, whether their consciousness was nationalist or Pan Africanist, African intellectuals have continued to display a quite remarkable reticence over questions of gender. What the dominance of male interests and concerns has meant for African thought has yet to be properly addressed within the African scholarly community, but in the meantime there is a fair amount of local myth-making about African women, African femininity and masculinity, and of course African feminism. African American Gwendolyne Mikell (1999) for example, depicts ‘African feminism’ as deeply pro- natalist, heterosexual and preoccupied with the politics of survival, while major collections of African work on philosophy commission chapters on feminist philosophy written by North American feminists, as if there were no African ones (Eze 1998). Let me just note that feminism has emerged in its own right in many African contexts and can be traced back to the 18th and 19th centuries if not earlier, as early manuscripts from Egypt and all over Southern Africa demonstrate. However, it is also worth noting that throughout the late 20th century and into the 21st, the worthy connections between feminist activism and feminist scholarship in African contexts have been complicated by the dominance of developmentalism, something that does not feature so much in Western histories of feminism. In practical terms, the availability of even limited resources for women’s projects has generated a plethora of organisations, networks and movements, most of which are yet to be documented with any seriousness.17 Clearly continental scholarship in the field of gender and women’s studies has a key role to play in the study of Africa, and of African women and gender relations in particular. To what extent does it display a will to truth that can counter the generalisations of global development industry and its appending of gender? To what extent can it in fact be a critical and independent field of work, linking theory and practice, networking across institutions and fields, and unleashing the critical capacities offered by the vantage point: African, gendered female? Strengthening Gender Studies for Africa’s Transformation Here I will discuss the programme of the above name, which is currently ongoing. The broad vision underpinning all the activities is that of an African continent enriched by a robust and dynamic intellectual environment which supports African teaching and research in the field of gender and women’s studies and contributes to democratisation and gender justice. The programme sets out to strengthen African teaching and research in gender and women’s studies by bringing teachers and researchers based in African universities together in a series of carefully-designed training, research and publishing activities, and a combination of online communications and workshops.

17 While there are usually token contributions from Africa in the global collections on women’s movements, which are usually given rather short thrift in the commentaries there are still very few comprehensive studies, and very few of these have been produced by African scholars in their own right (e.g. Tripp and Kwesiga 2003).

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The regional launch workshop set out an action plan, and the project has since pursued the following: • Established a regional network of scholars, researchers and ITC activists • Set up a listserve for ongoing discussion and intellectual engagements among

network members • Established and grown a dedicated GWSwebsite hosted at the AGI (still growing, but

with content areas that include review essays and bibliographies, policy papers, politics, identity and culture, religion, health, gender-based violence, education, ICTs, land/economics, and a section for the publication of student writings)

• Launched an electronic journal – two issues of Feminist Africa are currently available on the FA website.

• Compile, produce and disseminate teaching resources • Develop a core curriculum for those teaching gender and women’s studies in African

tertiary institutions (this has been pursued by the Curriculum Working Group, and is in progress).

Challenges The initial review of the web statistics indicates a steady uptake by scholars on the African continent, but an ongoing increase in uptake by Western countries, already comprising the majority, only some of which might be attributed to the African diasporan interest. What this means is that consumption by Western scholars may well exceed uptake on the continent, which is not surprising given the sheer weight of numbers.18 The strategy for redressing this natural tendency, given that there are more telephone lines in Manhattan that on the entire continent, is to protect the African focus of the site when it comes to interactions, ownership and contributions. The emerging rapport between scholars is developed through a synergy between the different elements in the project. At present this works well – the listserve and the websites support one another, and both informed the curriculum meetings held in Accra and Cape Town in 2002. With regard to the journal, again there is an editorial policy that seeks to privilege writing by African scholars working with feminist frameworks. To the same end, we are already working on ensuring that hard copy edition is made available to feminist scholars in African institutions. It also remains important that the community of scholars actually know one another as people and thinkers, and dialogue within and across borders, rather than via Sussex or New York, as has tended to be the case to date. This may well be a privilege that is taken for granted in contexts where the infrastructure is more efficient, and where clear disciplinary traditions exist and are maintained by specialist associations, and where resources are available for annual congresses and meetings. This can no longer be said

18 In December 2002, the 3-yearly CODESRIA General Assembly was attended by 300 mainly African scholars, as compared to the annual US African Studies conference which was attended by about 3,000 mainly U.S based scholars working on Africa.

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for most of African, and here it requires an inordinate amount of work to make happen on the African continent, even within a given nation.19 However, far greater challenges are posed by the effects of our locations on our intellectual work and more directly, on intellectual politics. Much has been written about academic freedom in Africa, and the particular constraints that women academics are subjected to. Much less is known or said about the manner in which we become habituated to compromise and constraint, in ways that hamper the emergence of strong, well-rooted, critical perspectives of any kind, but perhaps especially gender theory, gender relations, on development, and of course feminist visions of development, as seen and experienced from the unique vantage points offered by diverse African contexts. Conclusions GWS has emerged both out of the particular historical and present day challenges facing Africa, and African women in particular, and been facilitated by the nexus between feminism and development. This partly explains its proliferation during a time of rapid national, patriarchally-driven mal-adjustment and strife. At an institutional level, resource-hungry university administrators rightly or wrongly perceiving that women’s studies this might be a fundable area, have been tolerated the enthusiasm of women prepared to put in the extra energy and hours on the basis of feminist political and epistemological motivations. This may explain why mostly male administrators have allowed the initiatives, but so far proved resistant to including it within recurrent budgets or indeed made any plans to secure these efforts with adequate institutional support. This can be described as a parasitic tolerance. In a climate of marketisation and cost recovery, that is at the same time replete with rhetoric about ‘gender mainstreaming’, this expedient tendency is likely to produce further challenges to the establishment of centres, even while it stimulates the development of further critique and analysis. I have argued that intellectual terms the development nexus has been responsible for as many constraints as opportunities, both of which are worth exploring and analysing. More politicised approaches, such as those offered by feminist theory emerging across the post-colonial capitalist periphery, can and do provide critical conceptual and analytical lenses. These offer us valuable tools for demystifying the realities of contemporary Africa, and African gender relations by isolating and addressing some of the fallacies currently circulating under the variously named rubrics of globalization, and previously named as women in development, women and development, gender and development, and gender mainstreaming. I have further suggested that feminist intellectual capacities grounded in contemporary African social and political realities need to be pursued and developed as a means to moving beyond a focus on the cultural and behavioral specificities on the one hand, and the grand universalising modernist frames on the other. Neither do justice to African 19 The experience of the Network for Women’s Studies in Nigeria is exemplary.

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gender relations, or to the diverse, complex and changing subjectivities, social arrangements and material realities that feature in the lives of African women and men in the present century. Rather than simplifying, fragmenting and reducing the many truths out there, we need to embrace new levels of intellectual sophistication, cosmopolitanism and competence, as we – with the rest of the world - move into an era replete with new challenges. References Altbach, P 2003 The US and the International Education Trade, Int Jnl Higher Education 31:5-7. Bennett, J 2002 Strategising Gender Equity in Feminist Africa 1. Diouf, M and Mamdani, M 1994 (eds) Academic Freedom in Africa, CODESRIA. Jackson, C & Pearson, R 1998 Feminist Visions of Development, Routledge. Mohanty, C 2002 “Under Western Eyes” Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles, Signs: Journal of Women in culture and Society, 28 (1). Sall 2000 (ed) Women and Academic Freedom in Africa, CODESRIA Strengthening Gender Studies for Africa’s Transformation Websites: www://gwsafrica.org www://feministafrica.org