reading assignment

Chapter Twenty-nine

Women and Gender Roles in Africa since 1918: Gender as a Determinant of Status

Sean Redding

The roles and status of women in Africa altered dramatically in the years after World War I. The year 1918 is conventionally seen as the high point of imperialism, the first time that most of the continent, except Ethiopia and Liberia, were under direct political control by outside powers, and these powers had succeeded in consolidat- ing their rule by imposing effective administrative structures. In the pre-colonial period, African women had filled numerous roles as individuals and as members of families and clans and had widely ranging social ranks. The years of the colonial scram- ble and of the early period of colonial rule had brought with them a number of changes, some subtle and some stark, for Africans generally and women in particu- lar. Yet, it was only after 1918 in much of Africa that European colonial administra- tors had sufficient enforcement powers to begin implementing laws and regulations that often had wide-ranging effects on the African societies they ruled.

The impact of the colonial period should not be over-emphasized, however; by the 1960s in most of Africa the tide of imperialism had receded and new post- colonial governments were in place in all but the white settler states of southern Africa (Angola, Mozambique, Rhodesia, and South Africa; these states finally rid themselves of white rule in 1975 in the case of Angola and Mozambique, 1979 in the case of Rhodesia, and 1994 in the case of South Africa). Although the colonial and post- colonial states did not always place the roles of women high on their list of changes they would like to make, often the changes to women’s roles that resulted were sub- stantial, particularly as the social and economic foundations of women’s pre-colonial and early colonial roles eroded. These changes were then accelerated and codified by alterations to the legal and administrative structures that provided real social and legal meaning for the word “woman.”

In this chapter I will argue that the word “woman” acquired new meanings in the colonial and post-colonial periods. In particular, it is my contention that gender iden- tity had been in the pre-colonial period simply one of many factors that determined so- cial status for an individual. The innovation of the colonial period, with the twined forces of European gender ideology which tended to view women as legal minors and social dependents upon their male relatives (Chanock, 1982; Wright, 1982), and Christian

mission teachings, which deemed domesticity to be women’s highest, most moral role (Thomas, 2000: 1–12; Stoler, 1989), was the tendency to bring gender to the fore as a determinant of status. However, colonial administrators and missionaries, whether white or black, did not act in isolation. Their administrative structures and teachings interacted dynamically with African cultures and the numerous African middlemen who were present to interpret those cultures. At the foundation of the interaction, however, was the belief held by most colonial officials that gender was an unproblematic and uni- versal category, rather like “tribe” (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1992b: 48–67; Mamdani, 1994: 79–82); and so officials and missionaries set about trying to make African women behave like (or at least adhere to some of the same legal and social rules as) European women in Europe (Hansen, 1992: 4–13; Van Allen 1976: 80–3).

The changes wrought by Europeans and Africans during the colonial period extended into the post-colonial period. The majority of post-colonial states retained the administrative and legal frameworks left to them by their departing rulers. In most cases, the developing ideology of African nationalism from the 1940s onward did not question these frameworks themselves so much as the fact that non-Africans were running the State. Moreover, when nationalist leaders came to power in the immediate post-colonial years, they did not have the means to raze the old adminis- tration and start fresh (even supposing that they might have had no difficulty in decid- ing what a “fresh start” would look like). The nation-states of Africa, even if they have been bureaucratically weak, have been able to deploy a legitimizing ideology of nationalism and self-determination that has created incentives for the maintenance of elements of the old colonial and pre-colonial social orders (Cooper, F., 1997). This ideology has in many cases included an overt hostility to feminism as it has developed in the non-African world, defining it as “un-African” and therefore as “neo-colonial.” The hostility to the assertion of women’s legal rights and to the development of women’s political movements has tended to perpetuate the notion that women are men’s subordinates. Insofar as African states have formulated policies explicitly for women, these policies have focused on health care, primary education, and family issues which, although laudable in themselves, have tended to reinforce women’s roles as mothers within a male-headed household (Abdullah, 1995). There has been little consideration of, for example, domestic violence, or the needs of single mothers or independent women. For women who are poor and from rural backgrounds, their depressed status can make them available for tribal or ethnic political movements or it can alienate them from politics altogether (Barber, 1994). Thus, despite the vital social and economic roles that African women have played his- torically (and still do play), in politics and the legal system women have had to battle with an ascribed status as men’s dependents.

The Colonial Period

The colonial period was one of dynamic change for ideas about gender, as fluid pre- colonial ideas about women interacted with imported ideas. I will not spend much time on pre-colonial societies here, as the topic is covered in chapter 13 of this volume. However, it is important to mention some salient points about pre-colonial African societies so that we may better understand the developments of the colonial and post-colonial periods.

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Most pre-colonial African societies had strong concepts of “male” and “female,” and in many societies people believed that all work was gendered, although the reality of who actually did the work might not have always matched up with the ideal case. Many, although not all, societies had deities and spirits who were female, a fact that suggests that people esteemed femaleness and accorded it some supernatural powers as well as more mundane ones (Okeke, 2000). And a number of societies (particu- larly those found in Central Africa) were matrilineal – that is, they traced inheritance and lineage through the female line. (It should be noted that “matrilineal” does not mean “matriarchal,” and that matrilineal societies could be just as male-dominated as patrilineal ones. In matrilineal societies, inheritance and family membership typi- cally passed from maternal uncle to nephew.)

Although gender distinctions were thus key in many ways to how pre-colonial societies were structured, other information was often more determinative of an indi- vidual’s status. For example, a sister/daughter within her own natal homestead fre- quently had more rights and a higher status than a brother’s wife, even if the wife was chronologically older (Oyewumi, 1993). A mother had more rights and higher status than either a newly married wife or an older wife who had no living children (Wilson, M., 1961: 30–5). A wife married through bridewealth (or brideservice) had more rights and higher status than one married through sale (i.e. a slave-wife or con- cubine) (Broadhead, 1983). An older, post-menopausal woman, with adult children, could have as high a status as an older man, depending upon the individuals involved and the social norms. A chief ’s or big man’s daughter could retain an elevated status in most cases in her married household regardless of whom she married (Kopytoff and Miers, 1977: 30–6). In some societies, including Asante (in present-day Ghana) and Buganda (in Uganda), royal women had considerable political power (Musisi, 1991). And a woman who practiced as a diviner or healer (and who had a substan- tial popular reputation) could, at least while she was actively engaged in her profes- sion, have a significantly higher status than even an older man (Berger, 1976). By contrast, the majority of rightless persons to be found in any African society were held by those groups who participated in the internal and/or external trade in slaves, and most of these rightless persons were “trade slaves,” slaves bought (or forcibly seized) explicitly for the trade, who were kept only for a brief period and then sold once again, regardless of their gender (Kopytoff and Miers, 1977: 14–27). Nonethe- less, the market at any given moment might assign a higher price to one gender or the other, making that gender more “valuable” in market terms. Although the Atlantic trade in slaves ended in the nineteenth century, the internal market and the East African market (that sent slaves across the Sahara and the Red Sea to external destinations) continued well into the twentieth century, and has sporadically reap- peared in war-torn areas in the post-colonial period as well.

In societies in which slavery was uncommon or non-existent, other forms of dependency existed in the pre-colonial period. Most societies regarded age as a more important marker of status than sex; and wealth (sometimes measured in material goods or livestock, but more frequently measured in control over people) also deter- mined status. Some women were able to acquire material goods and dependents (including slaves), and thereby acquire status in their own right (Brookes, 1976). Thus, in the pre-colonial period, the status of women was not uniformly below that of men.

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When the major colonial powers, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Belgium began aggressively taking colonies in Africa in the 1880s (Portugal retained colonies from an earlier period), their initial concern was with establishing direct and defen- sible political control. By 1918 they had established working colonial administrative systems that included legal codes with direct effects on the status of African women. (Germany lost its colonial possessions in the aftermath of World War I; its African colonies were divided among the other colonial powers to be ruled as “League of Nations Mandated” territories.) In many cases, colonial administrators had two aims with regard to African women. One aim was to “liberate” them from the hard phys- ical labor that most women (including both slave and free) performed in the fields in the production of food and cash crops. In many areas of Africa, the development of a market for cash crops had preceded the onset of the colonial period, and pro- duction for the market was well-entrenched in some form by the time that colonial administrators were able to exercise effective control over their districts. Coincident with this desire to “liberate” women was the desire to force men to become more directly economically productive, in other words to engage in wage labor or to take a larger role in the production of cash crops (Bradford, 2000; Redding, 1993). Mis- sionaries and administrators were also intent on liberating women from arranged mar- riages, and to that end they generally liberalized divorce laws, at least until women proved so willing to divorce that they often clogged colonial courts with cases relat- ing to the dissolution of marriages (Parpart, 1988: 116–19).

The second aim was to “domesticate” women. “Domestication” involved in some areas (although not all, the most notable exception being most of West Africa) trying actively to keep women out of the market; encouraging them to subscribe to more Westernized or Christian notions of monogamous marriage (equally true for men); and ultimately restricting the legal rights of women, making them the legal wards of their male relatives (Gaitskell, 1990; Hansen, 1992). The latter had the added benefit (from the point of view of colonial administrators) of effectively har- nessing the family as an administrative unit, making older men the “policemen” of the families by making them responsible for the conduct of their dependents (Marks, 1989).

Administrators also had other items on their agenda. For example, they usually wished to keep women and children largely in the rural areas even if adult men were required for wage labor in the major urban centers. Europeans tended to think of Africans as being “essentially” rural and thus out of place in the city. If men were needed as laborers, administrators still felt that women and children should remain in the country, and they devoted numerous laws and a great deal of enforcement power to achieve that end. Moreover, whites were worried about the long-term polit- ical effects that a class of fully urbanized Africans might have, and the prohibition against women migrating into town seemed likely to inhibit the development of such a class (Parpart, 1988; Posel, 1993; White, 1990). The criminalization of female migration had the further effect of diminishing women’s economic roles as it hin- dered them from taking up some of the more highly paid forms of wage labor and undercut their ability to organize to demand higher wages and better working con- ditions. The regulations in many cases forced them into criminal activities, such as the illegal brewing of beer (and other forms of alcohol) and prostitution, since legal employment was denied them (White, 1988). It also barred their access to

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education and other forms of social services that might potentially have allowed them some social mobility or independence.

Perhaps the most important effect of these changes to the legal and administra- tive structures during the colonial period was the degree to which Africans began using the legal code and the administrative framework in their daily lives. African adaptation obviously varied across regions, and in some important ways, it was not that Africans adapted as much as it was that European administrators altered the structures to allow Africans to adapt, partly to cut administrative costs and partly to lessen the potential for revolt or resistance (Fields, 1982). But still it is important to consider why at least some Africans availed themselves of colonial tools, even those that had been reshaped to be more appealing to them.

With regard to marriage, in most regions, colonial administrators began after 1918 to change their attitudes. Previously they, along with missionaries, had allowed women (particularly those who had converted to Christianity) to resist or overthrow their marriages to non-Christians and to polygamists by making the potential bride’s consent mandatory and divorce broadly available. But this resulted in too many women leaving families and setting off on their own, which conflicted with the admin- istrative desire to keep people in stable villages in the countryside. So, by the 1920s, administrators began to make it more difficult for women to leave their marriages by making divorce more costly for women and their natal families (Renne, 1992; Rude, 1999: 7–20). Unless a woman could prove she had been assaulted criminally by her husband, or accused of witchcraft by him (also a criminal offense), the family of a woman who left her marriage would almost certainly have to reimburse the husband’s family for the bridewealth payment (Redding, 1996: 37–40). Since the woman’s family might well have already spent or dispersed the goods or livestock they had received for the bridewealth, having to refund the amount was a substantial hardship.

This gradual alteration in the attitudes towards women and marriage gave African men a greater legal space in which to increase their control over women, both as wives and as daughters (Redding, 1996: 25–35). Daughters came under increasing pressure in the family to maintain a very strict version of virginity until marriage. In the pre-colonial period, many (non-Muslim) African societies had allowed unmarried girls some freedom in sexual expression as long as they stopped short of full sexual intercourse. (Although even full premarital sex that resulted in pregnancy could usually be legitimated through subsequent marriage or through the payment of a penalty by the offending boy to the girl’s father.) Christian missionaries deemed this rather liberal view of virginity uncivilized, and put pressure on converts to adhere to a much narrower definition that prohibited all sexual play prior to marriage. Even African parents who did not convert to Christianity often adopted this stricter defi- nition because it lessened the potential for out-of-wedlock pregnancies that might render their daughters either unmarriageable, or else lower the bridewealth that prospective husbands would pay (Bastian, 2000; Berman and Lonsdale, 1992: 386–90; Mager, 1998). Colonial magistrates and district officers tended to reinforce the “customary law” on out-of-wedlock pregnancies by allowing fathers to sue their daughters’ boyfriends for “damages.” The girls themselves, however, had no legal standing to sue their boyfriends for child support or remuneration. In certain cir- cumstances, if the girl was under age or if there was evidence of a violent sexual

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assault upon her, she could go to the headman (a subordinate to the chief whose duties were those of a local policeman) and inform him that a crime had been com- mitted, and then the boy (or man) could be tried in a colonial court. However, under colonial laws a girl or woman was not legally considered an adult, capable of author- ity even over her own person.

The status of legal minor for women also had a immense impact on marriage. Some wives who, had they lived in the pre-colonial or early colonial periods, might easily have left unhappy marriages, increasingly found themselves after the 1920s legally bound to partners who neglected them or abused them. In regions where male migratory labor was common (southern Africa and the eastern region of the Belgian Congo), it was not unusual for men to become more and more irregular about sending some of their wages back to their rural families as time went by; wives in this situation were left very much to their own devices. They could only retain their rural rights to cultivate land if they remained within the marriage, since the land they cultivated was held in their husbands’ names (see below). However, their ability to grow cash crops on their own (without some male assistance) was often severely limited by the size of the plot allotted to them, and by their other family-related responsibilities. If a wife chose to migrate to town, however, she was usually in vio- lation of the law, and she risked the family’s right to continue cultivating the land. Alternatively, if a wife chose to leave the marriage, her own family was then liable to return the bridewealth paid for her, and her children (in patrilineal societies) could be taken away from her, since they belonged to her husband’s lineage; both customs were rigorously upheld in colonial courts (Parpart, 1988; Redding, 1993; Renne, 1992). The colonial enforcement of some of the stricter patriarchal customs tended over time to create, in the words of sociologist Mamphela Ramphele, a “demand for unquestioning obedience on the part of women . . . by both educated and unedu- cated men as central to the maintenance of patriarchal family relations. One has to be seen as a ‘real man’ or be laughed at by one’s friends and neighbours” (Ramphele, 1993: 76).

At the same time, some kinds of marriages began to disappear. These included marriages that were considered unusual or immoral by Western standards, such as female husbands (in which a family paid bridewealth for a wife for their daughter, and any children this wife had – as a result of taking a lover – became part of the family of the female “husband”) (Amadiume, 1987: 1–10) and slave marriages (in which a family bought a slave to be the wife or husband for one of their children) (Cooper, B.M., 1994). Some of the women who had been involved in these mar- riages may have found their status empowering, while others were more socially dis- abled by the arrangements in the pre-colonial period. However, the net effect of the colonial laws was to homogenize women’s status, thereby sometimes raising the status of those women who had been the most powerless, but simultaneously lowering the status of those women who had had substantial power.

Moreover, as women were increasingly identified as the legal dependents of men (either fathers, husbands, brothers, or in some cases, sons and nephews), they usually could not bring legal cases without the assistance of male relatives, and had no legal claim to property as individuals distinct from their male guardians (Okeke, 2000). Individual women of course found ways to evade these restrictions, but they had little recourse to the State to protect them or their property, and this necessarily

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weakened their social status, their economic independence, and their ability to transmit their property at their deaths to those whom they designated. This occurred despite the fact that in many regions of Africa women were often visible as success- ful professionals and shopkeepers.

Perhaps the most significant type of property ownership denied a woman under colonial rule was the right to cultivate land in her own name. Technically, in most colonies, the State denied Africans – male or female – the right to own land. However, the states recognized use rights, known as “customary tenure,” over particular parcels of land that usually were registered in individuals’ names; in ordinary circumstances only men could legally have title to such rights. Under the colonial version of “cus- tomary tenure,” the (male) titleholders could not sell the land (which was owned by the State) or legally sell the use rights. But they did have the right to decide what to grow on the land, and they could pass on the right to work the land to their (male) heirs. The legal control over the land belonging to the men contrasted with the his- torical preeminence of women in working the land, setting up potential conflicts over “ownership” of the land versus ownership of the crops (Goheen, 1996: 107–40). If these conflicts ended up in court, women found themselves legally at a disadvantage. In the colonial and post-colonial periods, an additional dimension was added to this gender split: as access to markets and the importance of cash crops increased, men often took some of the best agricultural land over for the growing of cash crops, and left women some of the poorer land for growing “garden” crops – crops specifically for household use. Men then sometimes retained the profits made from cash crops and left women to provide food for the household and, occasionally, forced them into limited cash-crop production to provide money for children’s school fees, health care, clothing, and so on (Goheen, 1996: 107–20). In regions where livestock and livestock products (such as wool or milk) became important cash “crops” (such as in southern and eastern Africa), men usually owned the livestock and controlled the profits as well (Bradford, 2000; Redding, 1993). Individual women have occasion- ally poached on these male privileges, sometimes under the cover of acting as their male relatives’ agents, and sometimes openly but at the cost of their social “respectability” (Bozzoli, 1992: 16–25, 122–64).

Religion often played a key role in legitimizing changes in women’s status. In Muslim areas, the idea of gender separation was already established prior to the colo- nial period, even if separation was not widely practiced, especially in those areas where it conflicted with a reliance on female agricultural labor (Cooper, B.M., 1994). But purdah (the segregation of women) had been a sign of a flourishing household – a status symbol to which many Muslim families aspired. This segregation of women cor- responded with the colonial wish to redivide the gender division of labor, and so found some favor with colonial authorities. (Usually, colonial powers did not allow extensive Christian missionary work in Muslim areas, and so any misgivings that missionaries might have had about purdah were not expressed in policy.) Women may have chosen to be segregated because it allowed them to retreat from a harsh world outside the domestic sphere, to avoid some of the most arduous agricultural labor, and to claim a higher social status, even though this retreat, in the long run, may have hurt their legal rights and eroded their economic independence (Cooper, B.M., 1994: 61–4).

In areas that became widely Christian or in those areas where there were distinct splits between those who converted to Christianity and those who did not, a dynamic

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mix of religious beliefs developed that affected the status of women, whether or not they as individuals were Christian. Women frequently adapted the missionaries’ mes- sages as to their proper roles; these roles then became part of a more generalized system of social status, so that various trappings of Christianity, such as Western-style clothing, sending children to school, drinking tea, going to the hospital to give birth, and restricting women’s activities outside of the household, became status symbols for all women (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1992a; Gaitskell, 1990: 351–72; 37–68; Hunt, 1999: 5–24).

In the process of being adapted by Africans, “Western” social practices often took on new meanings that transcended and in some cases contradicted the original mean- ings imputed by missionaries. For example, as the historian Nancy Rose Hunt notes in her study of colonial rule in the Belgian Congo: “A hospital birth did not neces- sarily mean compliance with colonial desires and rules. Congolese insinuated their own fertility strategies into this seeming obedience. Colonial obstetrics began, after all, because Congolese sought help in childbirth emergencies” (Hunt, 1999: 322). In this case, successfully bearing children was the single most important local determinant of a woman’s achievement of full adulthood and social status. Not having children, or not being able to bear live children or raise them to adulthood, was more than a personal tragedy: it could become a cause of social ostracism by leaving the woman and her family open to accusations of witchcraft; it could cause her husband to divorce or abandon her and her natal family to disown her; and it could leave her without children to care for her in her old age. Most Western-trained doctors in the 1920–50 period were missionaries, and most hospitals were run by mission societies and were sites of intense evangelization. Entering the hospital to give birth made a woman available for Christian preaching, which might have been an onerous price to pay for many non-Christian women. But in certain circumstances, such as breech births or other childbearing-related difficulties, the desire for a live baby probably outweighed the cost of having to listen to Bible stories. Moreover, the African nurses (who were often male) and nurses’ aids who staffed the hospitals acted as cultural intermediaries, adapting Western medicine to fit African social real- ities and vice versa.

Mission societies also controlled most schools in African colonies, at least until the 1950s, and thus tended to control the curricula, often with minimal input from the colonial state. Mission schools were not just sites for evangelization; they also attempted to reform African gender identities by providing gender-specific skills. In addition to basic literacy, manual trades such as brick-making, carpentry, and agri- cultural techniques, were part of the education boys received; girls learned to read but they also learned to iron, sew, and clean. Africans did not necessarily accept in an unqualified or unreflective way the missionaries’ ordering of society. Boys and girls regularly defied mission rules on behavior, particularly sexual behavior, and some- times chafed under the usually strict hierarchy imposed by missionaries. Yet, most colonial African parents and children alike regarded literacy as a real benefit, enabling families to negotiate better with the colonial administration as well as increasing the earning power of the educated individuals and their families. Realistically, however, the kinds of jobs open to most girls emerging from these schools consisted of domes- tic labor, thus reinforcing a particular version of female gender identity. (Some women did go on to attain professional status as teachers, nurses, doctors, lawyers,

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and business leaders, but they constituted a small minority among African women. (Marks, 1987: 1–42; Musisi, 1992: 172–88).)

Beyond the resistance of individuals, there were also significant, wider backlashes against innovations in gender identities proposed by missionaries. In Kenya, for example, when mission doctors, supported by their colleagues in the schools, tried to abolish the practice of female circumcision among Gikuyu Christians in the 1920s, they faced extreme resistance, and lost many converts. Female circumcision (in this case, cliterodectomy that ordinarily was performed at puberty as a mark of a girl’s imminent transition into a new phase of her life) subsequently became a mark of Gikuyu identity and a rejection of Western imperialism, although prior to the 1920s not all women who spoke Kikuyu had been circumcised. Many Gikuyu banded together and formed independent schools, modeled in part on the mission schools, but which did not prohibit their female pupils from going through the circumcision ritual. In doing so, Gikuyu hoped to retain an aspect of their culture that they increas- ingly saw as essential to their emerging ethnic identity. Many parents (both men and women) also hoped that the ritual would give them greater control over their unmar- ried daughters so that they would continue as virtuous and productive members of their families. The issue of female circumcision endured as an inspiration of anti- colonial feelings among Gikuyu until it became in the 1950s one of the central issues of the Mau Mau rebellion (the rebellion of the Land and Freedom Army) that rocked the British colonial administration and eventually led to Kenyan independence in 1963 (Berman and Lonsdale, 1992: 389–97). Despite the significance of the issue of female circumcision to the development of Kenyan nationalism, however, women often found other issues important to them (such as women’s legal rights to own property and participate in business) sidelined during the anti-colonial struggle and not seriously championed by the men on either side (Robertson, 1996). The promi- nence of issues about women’s sexuality and social roles was also no guarantee that women themselves would figure prominently as leaders in nationalist movements, even as these movements attempted to regain African control over the machinery of the State. Thus in resisting Western imperial control, African political and cultural movements often continued the colonial tradition of viewing women as the subor- dinates of men, and could have a similar flattening effect on the landscape of gender roles and identities.

The Late Colonial and Post-Colonial Periods

Further evidence of this flattening effect on the status of African women can be seen in the late colonial and post-colonial periods, as African colonies began to emerge as independent nation-states. The nationalism that developed in most colonies in the 1940s and later was based largely on two different kinds of movements: one that mobilized Africans on the basis of a liberal political notion of ethnic or cultural self- determination, and another that followed more of a trade-union model, with some Marxist ideology occasionally attached. Each of these political strands had its own strengths and limitations, but regardless of the ideological stripe of any given move- ment, what was remarkable was how few female leaders there were in this period. Some women leaders were found in trade unions, particularly in South Africa which was the most industrialized of the African colonies. But many other African

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nationalist parties had women’s auxiliaries or women’s leagues that often acted merely in a support capacity for the main party that was the province of men. When these women’s organizations did act independently, their actions were frequently couched in terms of protecting women’s roles as mothers and wives.

A classic example of women’s organizations mobilizing around certain kinds of feminine roles can be found in the women’s anti-pass campaigns in South Africa. The various colonial states in the region had required for many years that African men carry passes (internal passports), and violations of the pass laws were the most common cause of criminal imprisonment in South Africa. African women, however, did not have to carry passes, largely because the history of passes was intertwined with the history of labor migration, and until the twentieth century men were more likely than women to migrate to major urban centers in search of wage labor. Ironically, however, given colonial administrators’ desire to force women and children to remain in the rural areas, the fact that women did not legally have to carry passes made this policy difficult to enforce. In 1913 in one province of South Africa (the Orange Free State), officials attempted to impose passes upon women, only to have women successfully protest that laws requiring them to carry passes would make them subject to indecent treatment by policemen, and would take them away from their families should the women be arrested for being without their passes. It was not until forty-five years later, in the late 1950s, that the State (by then the apartheid state) tried again to impose passes on women, this time on a country-wide scale and with greater resolve and success. Women once again mobilized, using both the African National Congress and the Congress’s Women’s League to structure the protests. Women voiced many of the same issues relating to their roles as mothers and wives, as well as expressing fears about the predatory nature of policemen. At the same time, however, most of the leaders of the ANC (which included both men and women) were on trial for treason, and were unable to devote significant time to the protests. Moreover, the ANC was perennially short of funds and was embattled by the apartheid state that had enacted numerous laws in its determination to impose a very rigorous form of racial segregation upon the South African population. The result was that within five years all African women were required to carry passes (Wells, 1983). These pass laws remained in place until the apartheid state began to crumble in 1990.

The fact that women were most visible in political movements that highlighted their maternal roles should not be read as an indication of a lack of interest in broader political activities among women. As Teresa Barnes has noted: “. . . it can be taken for granted that if there was a political struggle in colonial Zimbabwe, African women were involved in it. Perhaps they were not involved in the same ways as their hus- bands, fathers, and sons, but they acted in ways that were important . . .” (Barnes, 1999: 149) Politically-minded African women formed the organizational backbone of the ANC during the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign in South Africa in 1952, and often provided the strongest support for bus boycotts and other strikes in the 1960s and later. They also were critical to the success of various strike actions in colo- nial French West Africa, in Nigeria, Cameroon, Kenya, and Tanzania, and to guer- rilla movements in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, and Namibia (Geiger, 1987; Isaacman and Isaacman, 1984).

But if women were so critical to the success of African nationalist movements in attaining state power, how does one account for the low priority subsequently given

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to women’s rights and issues in most post-colonial states? This is not a question that can be answered easily, and is the subject of ongoing research by many scholars. One partial answer may be that the maternalist focus of many women’s groups during the late colonial period, when combined with the legacy of colonial laws that did not favor legal rights for women, tended to accentuate the role for women as mothers and wives whose voices were not properly or effectively heard outside of the domes- tic realm. Another factor may be that the nation-states that emerged in the post- colonial period were almost immediately beleaguered by problems that were not entirely of their own making, such as the Cold War rivalries that were being played out on Third World ground, and the oil crisis of the early 1970s with the worldwide recession and inflation it caused. These problems combined with issues that were unique to the African post-colonial experience, including states that were both authoritarian (being direct lineal descendants of the authoritarian colonial regimes) in terms of policy creation, and relatively weak when it came to enforcement, par- ticularly outside of the major urban areas. In such a situation of political and eco- nomic uncertainty, many of the leaders who came to power in the aftermath of the colonial era scrambled to maintain their own hold on power at the same time as they struggled to hold their countries together. One of the few tools that many leaders had was the legitimating ideology of nationalism (and increasingly ethnicity), which they deployed to defend their own positions and policies, and to attack their politi- cal rivals, deriding them as allies of neo-colonialism or, sometimes, as traitors (Cooper, F., 1997: 406–25; Wilson, F.R., 1982: 150–70). The price of active dissent for women could be inordinately high under such circumstances (Oduol and Kabira, 1995: 187–207).

Moreover, many African women had some difficulty in coalescing around issues or an ideology other than those surrounding their roles as wives and mothers. Western feminism, circa the 1970s, seemed to many African women to be too focused on individual expression and on sexual liberation, and not concerned enough with the problems of motherhood and marriage. Western feminists also sometimes focused on the same issues that had been objectionable to colonial-era missionaries (such as female circumcision and polygyny), and these objections activated a number of deeply held suspicions among both African men and women that feminism was a new form of Western cultural imperialism (Bozzoli, 1983; Roberts, 1984; Steady, 1983).

African women attempted to address these problems by developing “womanist” and “African feminist” theories. These emphasized the historical agency of African women and tried to speak to real political, social, and economic issues faced by the majority of women. One of the initiators of African womanist theory, Nigerian liter- ary critic Chikwenye Ogunyemi, defined it as an attempt to deal with “issues like extreme poverty and in-law problems, older women oppressing younger women, women oppressing their co-wives [in polygynous households], or men oppressing their wives. Religious fundamentalism is another African problem [for women] . . .” (Arndt, 2000: 714–15) She also noted that she felt some frustration that Western feminists tend to focus only on one or two issues at the expense of other concerns:

If I am talking in Europe, I do not want somebody to tell me what to deal with [in Africa]. And then, if I am talking at home, I think I can be more – what shall I say? –

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outspoken, more candid. I may say frankly, ‘Listen, this female circumcision is terrible.’ . . . Whereas, when I come here [Europe], if somebody is going to dictate the agenda and limits me to female circumcision . . . so that I do not talk about other things, where you really can help me, I get annoyed. Because I do not want to be objectified.

(Arndt, 2000: 724)

However, despite the attempt to appeal to a broader audience and to present their political agenda in ways that might be more in tune with African social norms, African womanists are still often seen as elitist. And while these theories could potentially have an impact on policies in African states, the reality often has been that African women political leaders face the same problems of limited state resources and a hostile political environment.

The scarcity of state resources has become particularly acute in countries affected by structural adjustment policies. These policies, implemented by external lending institutions such as the World Bank as a prerequisite for new loans, usually require the states to cut their budgets dramatically and deregulate their economies in the hope that over the long term these policies will result in freer market economies with stronger growth rates. Specific components of the policies often include land reform (doing away with “customary tenure”), the eradication of price supports and subsi- dies for basic cash crops and foods, and the termination of various social welfare mea- sures. Although gender-neutral in theory, in practice many of these measures have hit women the hardest. Rural women frequently have not had the cash to buy the land they had previously cultivated, and so have found themselves evicted by the new, private owners. Husbands and other male kin have often not stepped in to replace the diminishing social welfare network, particularly since their own cash crops typi- cally have brought in smaller profits (Goheen, 1996: 130–40). Some of the recent initiatives under the structural adjustment policies have tried to remedy the worst effects of the earlier ones, often by targeting women’s organizations as recipients of donor aid. Whether these new measures will have their desired effect remains to be seen.

The worst consequences of a lack of a political voice for women can be seen in the rapid spread of AIDS since the 1980s. The dominant mode of transmission for the disease in Africa is through heterosexual sex, and so one might expect that men and women would be equally at risk for developing AIDS symptoms. In fact, however, women frequently develop the symptoms of full-blown AIDS long before their male partners, largely because of their disproportionately poor access to resources of all kinds, ranging from money and food, to adequate (or even basic) health care. The lack of a strong political presence has made it relatively difficult for women to press for resources in the political arena (Iliffe, 1987: 238–47). The fact that social welfare systems are on the decline also tends to hit poor and rural women the hardest: as they rapidly find themselves unable to grow their own food because of illness, there are few government services to assist them, and members of their family may shun them because they fear catching the disease (Altman, 1999; Crossette, 2001; Kalipeni, 2000). While widespread medical intervention, with assis- tance from international agencies and states, is necessary to combat AIDS, African women will also have to engage even more aggressively in politics beyond the local level to ensure that their voices are heard and their needs addressed.

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Conclusion

African women’s roles and status changed dramatically from 1918 onwards. Some of these changes were intentionally constructed by colonial administrators and mis- sionaries, and some were the result of a dynamic mixing of African and Western cul- tures, political and administrative structures, and economies. Over the course of the colonial and post-colonial periods, the status of women has tended to become more uniform than it was in most pre-colonial societies. Gender has become one of the foremost determinants of status, as legally, socially, and economically women are subordinate to men and largely dependent upon them for access to various kinds of resources. As a result, African woman have had a number of difficulties in the post- colonial period relating to their lack of access to various resources controlled by men and by the states.

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