Continental networking initiatives such as
these are especially pertinent when one considers the history and current
situation of women’s studies in Africa. The first gender studies course to be
taught on the African continent was set up in 1979 by women activists working
in the Department of Sociology at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria. It
was given the inoffensive title ‘Women and Society’ and marked the first
serious attempt to encourage undergraduates to develop some understanding of
women’s lives, and how women are socially situated somewhat differently from
men, and the implications of this for our understanding of society.
It was to be eighteen years before the
publication of the first African textbook addressing what it means to bring
gender to bear on the social sciences in African contexts. Both the 1991
workshop on ‘Gender Analysis’ and the eventual publication of Engendering
African Social Sciences demonstrated that between 1979 and 1997, a
substantial community of African scholars working with gender theory and gender
analysis has emerged. Furthermore, this community had developed the capacity to
challenge the premises of the mainstream disciplines bequeathed to the
continent by colonial educational systems, and which still organise African
intellectual life into various, gender-blind compartments.
This compartmentalisation of knowledge
production is reflected in the existing institutional arrangements designed to
facilitate intellectual life, in the existence of various disciplinary
departments. This poses an immediate challenge to a field like gender and
women’s studies, because it is a field in which the depth and breadth of the
subject matter renders it inherently cross-disciplinary. ‘Gender’ is as key to
our fuller understanding of human psychology, as it is to our understanding of
philosophy, society, culture, politics, history, economics, or indeed any
aspect of our humanity or our science. It a field of study that heralds and
generated a paradigm shift that traverses all aspects of intellectual life.
Little wonder then that as a field of
study, gender and women’s studies has not easily found a place in the academy.
Most academics display great resistance to the intellectual challenges that a
conceptual and analytical understanding of gender demands, with the result that
it does not sit easily in malestream departments, most of which are still
male-dominated, numerically and intellectually.
Those wishing to teach or research using
gender as a major conceptual resource have often had to live on the margins of
their departments, teaching special modules on the side, finding the strength
to persist despite the commonly experienced intellectual derision and lack of
institutional support. One result of this is that those working with gender
often remain isolated and unaware of the parallel emergence of gender and
women’s studies at other, similarly beleaguered locations. Networking offers
important possibilities for overcoming this atomisation and developing valuable
synergies between ongoing work at different African locations.
Others have adopted the strategy of
working to set up specialised units or departments, so offering a safe space
within which gender and women’s studies can emerge and engage in the
constructive criticism and reflection essential to its growth and consolidation
as a substantive field of scholarship and enquiry, one that must be as rigorous
as it is subversive. Here too continental networking has an important role to
play.
The global realities of knowledge
production and its financing are such that many African scholars are involved
in north-south networks. Many of us are more conversant with theoretical
developments occurring in the relatively privileged academies of the north than
they are with their own neighbours. Even within the strongly internationalised field
of gender and women’s studies this continues to be true.
This initiative forms an important element
within a wider project ‘Strengthening
Gender Studies for Africa’s Transformation’ which the African Gender Institute
embarked on in the year 2001.
[3]
The familiar logistical and communicative constraints
operating between and within universities are such that we cannot claim to
have located all the sites that currently exist on the continent's 300 university
campuses. We therefore offer this directory as a sketch of the GWS landscape
on the African continent, with every intention of continuing to develop and
update it in the future. Indeed that is a responsibility that, in publishing
a necessarily incomplete resource, we hope that you will share with us, inspired
by the fact of its very existence and usefulness!
Amina Mama
Chair in Gender Studies,
African Gender Institute,
University of Cape Town.