Gender at the CODESRIA General Assembly in 2002

By Josephine Ahikire, Dept of Women and Gender Studies, Makerere University.

In the opening plenary on 'The Kampala Declaration: 10 Years on' Amina Mama remarked on the changing gender profile of CODESRIA. She noted that 12 years earlier she had been at the very same location attending the regional conference on 'Academic Freedom and the Social Responsibility of Intellectuals'. At that event, there had been only a handful of women, and the intellectual environment was one that could not even accommodate papers specifically on gender. As a result she and Ayesha Imam had jointly presented a paper on 'self-censorship', albeit taking resistance to gender theory and analysis as a prime illustration of the manner in which even in relatively liberal environments, scholars often self censor their work and collude with the status quo. This contrasted to the General Assembly of 2002 which was attended by far larger numbers of women. Women she said were now not only livening up the whole atmosphere, but also constituted a powerful intellectual presence in almost every debate that arose. In concrete numerical terms, about 30% of the 130 listed papers, were presented by women, most of these in the various mainstream panels which covered a whole range of subject matter. Furthermore, neither the plenary session 'Gender Relations in Africa' nor the panel dedicated to 'Issues in Gender Studies and Gender Relations' were comprised entirely of women, but also included men engaged in ongoing gender research. Among the high profile evening lectures that were held each evening, Samir Amin and Mahmood Mamdani were joined by Fatou Sow from Senegal, who delivered a powerful treatise on gender when she took the podium as the first woman to be invited to deliver the prestigous Cheikh Anta Diop lecture.

However, as Sylvia Tamale observed in the parallel working session on gender, it had become a case of quantity over quality, as there was a lack of focused gender debate in the assembly. The random mode in which gender /women focused papers were situated across the conference mitigated against the much needed space to interrogate the position of gender studies in the African Academy generally. To Tamale, this was a lost opportunity, especially in view of the fact that "male stream" CODESRIA was at last beginning to show signs of taking gender seriously.

These two separate observations alert us to the opportunities as well challenges of gender studies both in CODESRIA, and in the wider African intellectual project. They point to the fact that although women have made important inroads into the African academy, there is still a deep-seated intellectual ghettoisation which ensures the continued marginalisation of gender studies as a field of knowledge and scholarship.

In the first instance, it was clear from the various presentations that gender has not been sufficiently positioned as a key category of analysis. There were still conspicuous silences in key areas, such as in discussions of issues of citizenship, development, international relations, conflict, security, and even higher education, all arenas where a gender analysis has major implications for even the most basic conceptualisations.

So how present was gender at Codesria 2002?

The Plenary session on Gender Relations in Africa was well attended and aroused extremely heated debate. As the chairperson remarked, it contrasted to other plenary panels in presenting the work of emergent scholars, rather than that of long-established gurus in the field. It was also rather wide- ranging and diverse in its content, as if only the concern with gender caused them to be grouped into a single panel. Manthiba Phalane presented a paper on 'Globalisation, the Feministation of Poverty and the Masculine Workplace: A South African Perspective. Felicia Arudo Yieke's paper was 'Collaborators or Warriors? A Sociolinguistic Analysis of the Discourse of patterns of Men and Women in their Claim for Space in the Public/Formal workplace'. Susanna Yene Awasom presented 'A Critical Survey of the Resuscitation, Activation and Adaptation of Traditional African Femal Political Institutions' in which she discussed the case of the Takumbeng Society in the Cameroon in the context of national political changes. Charles Ukeje's paper was 'From Aba to Ugborodo: Gender identity and Alternative interpretations of the Discourse of Social Protest Among Women in the Oil Delta of Nigeria', and Kathy Cisse Wone gave a presentation on 'Ideologie Socialiste et Feministe d'Etat au Senegal: De Senghor a Abdou Diouf'.

The discussant for these papers, Marnia Lazreg, was incisive enough in her commentary to provoke heated and in some instances, quite angry responses from the floor, but it was hard to tell whether this was the result of her intellectually aggressive style, or the content of her critique. The panellists for their part, took the comments extremely well, and seemed well able to survive what the chairperson described as their 'initiation' into African academic politics.

There were quite a number of presentations that brought discussions on gender into the other panels, notably those on development, rural dynamics, political economy of land, the African diaspora and the political economy of contemporary Africa.

In the panel specifically allocated to gender studies, the papers presented ranged too widely for any coherent discussion to take place. As a result there was not only insufficient time to do justice to any of the subjects, as here too, there was little intellectual basis for considering them together.

Charmaine Pereira's paper on 'Trajectories for Women and Gender Studies' was concerned with the emergence of Gender Studies as a field of scholarship in the Nigerian context, the impact, challenges and prospects. The context for Gender Studies was highlighted to include changing notions of higher education, the political and economic conditions bringing about the politicisation of higher education, the influence of the development industry particularly the United Nations Conferences, the influence of women's organisations (such as Women in Nigeria) and the existence of state structures for women such as the ministry for women and child welfare. Her analysis raised the need to critique the current trend towards a de-radicalised discourse and the increasing professionalisation of gender studies, and the need to enhance feminist visions, and to strengthen links between feminist studies and women's movements and organisations.

Signe Arnfred presented a paper on 'Conceptions of Gender in Colonial and Post Colonial Discourses'. Using the case of Mozambique the presenter alerted us to the persistence patriarchal manner of the state from the colonial times through to the post colonial period. It was noted that all governments since the colonial time, look at women as helpless victims. There is no language to grasp female power in, for example, cases of matrilinieal societies. On the whole, the paper underlined the political continuities during the last fifty years of turbulent Mozambican history but on the positive note, efforts of the civil society and women's pressure group have began to make some incursions.

Babere Kerata Chacha on 'Same Sex relationships Customary Law and Change in Tanzania' focused on the woman to woman marriages among the Kuria in Tanzania as a practice that is not recognised by governments and is also not given prominence in gender studies and research, and hence is still imperfectly understood. The paper emphasised the need to understand the significance of such marriages and the changes and continuities that have occurred in this institution.

Sarah Muzaki presented a work in progress paper entitled 'Cultural Turbulence at its Most: Uganda's "Guys" and "Chicks" - Neither "Here" nor "There". This addressed the effects of globalisation on the youth cultures of contemporary urban Uganda and the cultural hegemony of the West. Her main concern was specifically how the youth exhibit great vulnerability to cultural domination and the gender dimensions of this, as manifest in the identification as 'chicks' and 'guys'. In what the presenter termed as new identities of hybridity, the presenter went on to interrogate the notions of beauty, leisure and sexuality which seem to dominate the discourse among the youth and comes to the conclusion that the youth seem to be neither here nor there - a recipe for a cultural crisis in Africa.

Ayo Ogundipe made a presentation on 'Gender and Culture in Indigenous Films in Nigeria'. Ogundipe opened with a remark about profound changes in the film industry in Nigeria where Nigerians increasingly prefer Nigerian films, made by indigenous artists. The presenter examined what is being presented and attempted to tease out issues of women and men's representation. The Nigerian home video industry is noted to have some remarkable features, given that it is not unusual for women to be assigned domineering roles, albeit often in a negative sense. The way in which the Nigerian society is portrayed has some uniformity in terms of representation of women. Nobody wants a woman who has a mind of her own and hence such characters usually come to a bad end. Some of the observations on this trend however are that there is great avenue for culture to be perpetuated (in a positive and negative sense) and there is opportunity for people to come to know the different cultures in Nigeria.

Through out the discussion in the panel, it was noted that these were indeed interesting areas of scholarship. However one inherent gap identified was the lack of theoretical engagement that is grounded in African experiences and scholarship. There was a strong feeling that gender studies has yet to make profound inroads into the African Academy. Hence, there was a realisation that gender studies still calls for theoretical rigour and in this regard, the initiative by the African Gender Institute (AGI) to publish an online journal was greeted as a very welcome and overdue development. CODESRIA indeed faces a challenging task ahead- namely how to sufficiently centre gender debates within the African intellectual project, a task that places the challenge at the doorstep of not only those recognised as gender scholars but also of the entire intellectual community.

It is to be hoped that the unanimous election of Zenebeworke Tadesse as the first ever woman President of this important Pan African intellectual organisation, will indeed translate into a major shift in the African intellectual project.