Feminist Knowledge | Review Essay: African Feminist Studies: 1980-2002
History and Social Transformation
Two scholars who have offered important appraisals of trends in African women's history are Nancy Hunt (1989), a feminist Africanist based in the United States and Tiyambe Zeleza (1997), a Malawian historian who has worked in different parts of Africa and currently lives in the United States. Concerned with divergent scholarly and pedagogical concerns, their studies explore the thriving tradition of historical studies in the West, especially in North America and Britain, and the multidisciplinary work that shapes feminist historical research on the continent.
Although Hunt's bibliographic essay was published over a decade ago, its review of past trends and pointers to new research are still relevant today. One of her overarching arguments is that feminist histories of African women have fixated on what Gerda Lerna termed "compensatory" history (1979). Describing the first wave of feminist interventions into historiography, Lerner explored feminists' countering of narratives of triumphant men from the early 70s with "contributory" studies of heroines and women's agency. This tradition of "herstory" was progressively succeeded by comprehensive documentation of women's ordinary lives - both in the past and present - a path that marked the turn to social history, oral research and life history. Hunt, endorsing the subsequent shift among feminists in the Western academy to detailed theoretical work on gender (rather than "women"), argues that much historical work on African women has foundered in early traditions of "herstory", failing to develop rigorous theoretical explorations of gender or nuanced forms of political expression.
Hunt's concerns differ substantially from Zeleza's, who makes a strong case for an African compensatory tradition in view of the intellectual and political challenges facing history as a discipline in Africa, the nature of a continental women's movement and pedagogical priorities for feminists within the African academy. While Zeleza is in favour of engendering history as a discipline, he is equally sensitive to activist, intellectual, research and teaching priorities that make a "compensatory" emphasis on women extremely important.
The contrasting emphases of these differently-oriented scholars are worth recounting at some length because they pinpoint a tension between Western-based and African-based feminist historiography. Hunt writes from the perspective of a scholar in a tradition that, since the eighties, has occupied a triumphant niche within the academy. Her invocation of a linear narrative, charting women's history in the sixties, women's social history in the seventies, and, from the eighties, the shift towards gender and theoretical complexity, is in many ways the success story of Western feminist historians. Africanist feminists, working within this victory narrative of women's historiography in the West, have institutionalised their work in the academy and pursued concerns aligned with the theoretical agendas of progressive scholarship in the West. Zeleza implicitly questions this narrative and draws attention to different agendas for Africa. Signalling the danger of focusing only on mainstreaming gender within historiography, he insists:
Women's history and gender history are mutually reinforcing, and need to be pursued simultaneously by feminist historians. In concrete pedagogical terms this means devising curricula that contain specific courses in women's history and consciously incorporating feminist perspectives into mainstream courses. Creating and maintaining specific courses in women's history is based on a recognition that women's history…is formed by both the politics of women's liberation and intellectual developments within history and associated disciplines…Women's history, in short, must not be seen as a temporary necessity (1997:107).
Hunt shows that Africanist feminist history has a legacy dating back to Strobel's work on women in Mombasa (1979). As she observes, much of this work "is marked by a tendency to use African women's political protest and rebellion as a means of articulating western feminist agendas" (1979: 363). This impulse need not necessarily be deplored as sinister or duplicitous; yet it must be acknowledged that the concerted documentation, interpretation and evaluation of African women's pasts has been intimately connected to Western feminists' search for and definition of their own intellectual and political priorities. This largely explains why feminist history on Africa has expanded so massively during the late twentieth century and why its reception - reflected in recent publishing and conferences - has been so favourable abroad.
Today, the domain of African women's history is marked by a vocal, well-established Western-based tradition alongside a relatively diffuse body of feminist history based in Africa. While numerous African scholars have written about history, their work is not marked by the same disciplinary focus and cohesion characterising their counterpart Western-based feminist historians of Africa, or by the coherence that is a feature of African-based feminist studies of politics. One reason for this may be that because African women's history has been so explicitly linked to political agendas, feminist scholars have oriented their historical research towards politics. But the question of the paucity of scholars within the disciplinary framework of African history also requires critical assessment of the institutional culture and ideological obstacles that affect women's entry into this discipline.
Suffice it to say here, however, that a range of contributions, spanning literary studies, politics and anthropology have helped to shape subject-matter and methodologies that are African-based. In the context of this vast body of work marshalled in the service of African feminist intervention into the male-dominated terrain of African historiography, as well as the fraught location of the small community of feminist historians in African universities, norms of what women's history should and should not do at present are obviously open to question. Joan Scott powerfully makes this point when she addresses a different situation in the West but also critically assesses the success story implied by Hunt: "I would like to argue that the story needs some critical reflection because it is not only too simple, but also because it misrepresents the history of women's history and its relationships both to politics and the discipline of history. The history of this field requires not a simple linear narrative, but a more complex one that takes into account the changing position not only of women's history, but of the feminist movement and the discipline of history as well" (1991:43). What follows therefore registers the priorities and divergences traced above in relation to three categories. The categories of pre-colonial history, colonial history and social history identify both the subjects and methodologies that have been key to research trends.
Feminist history of pre-colonial Africa has been piecemeal and often draws on anthropology and politics. The originality of work by Amadiume and Oyewumi has already been noted in relation to theory. By producing empirically-comprehensive information and theorising about women's roles and politics in the past, this work has also contributed pivotally to shaping an historiographical tradition, especially one rooted in a compensatory trajectory of women's history. This contributory history ranges from research which makes gender relations and women visible in the pre-colonial context, like Freida-Nela Williams' study of pre-colonial Namibia (1991), to studies focusing specifically on women's leadership roles and relative powers. These have included explorations of women's roles in the state, matriarchal societies as well as women's spiritual powers (Berger, 1976 and Boyd and Murray, 1985). Literary studies undertaken by scholars like Ruth Finnegan (1976), Elizabeth Gunner in an anthology co-edited with Graham Furniss (1995), Isabel Hofmeyr (1987, 1992) and Lidwin Kapteijns (1999) have focused on women's roles as cultural producers or composers and performers of oral genres.
Some of the work drawing attention to the powers and authority of women in pre-colonial society has been very general and heavily mythologised (see, for example, essays in Qunta, 1987). Regional studies have countered this tradition by focusing on the empirical particularities of specific locations. Scholars like Abubakr (1992) and Alagoa (1992), Kaplan (1982) and White (1984) have focused on women as queens, on marriage and kinship systems and on women's role in production. Another strand in research on pre-colonial women explores the distinctive gender relations of the pre-colonial period. In this field there have been studies on the impact of Islam on gender relations, as well as work on women's hierarchical stratification by scholars like Sweetman (1984), Callaway (1987) and Robertson and Klein (1983). Essays collected in Women and Slavery by Robertson and Klein (1983) are especially noteworthy for their insights into the unique ways in which women were involved in or affected by the trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery within Africa. They also offer explorations of the variegated class and power locations of pre-colonial African women. These trends have been pronounced in studies of West Africa, with scholars like Akosua (1981), Wills (1988) and White (1987) focusing on women's participation in trade, production, state formation, and their differential locations in hierarchies shaped by slave trading and expanding polities and states. Overall, the challenges posed by precarious oral sources and colonialism's obliteration of the past number among the reasons why the history of women in the pre-colonial period remains fairly undeveloped.
Since the nineties, however, methodologically suggestive efforts have been made to revisit the past in many essays anthologised in Kent's Gender in African Archaeology (1998) as well as in articles like Nakanyike Musisi's "Women, 'Elite Polygyny' and Buganda State Formation" (1991). Musisi's article demonstrates the centrality of gender relations to state power and shows how the expansion of the Buganda state over several centuries was predicated on the exchange and circulation of women. While recognising women's authority in the pre-colonial ruling elite, Musisi shows that gender dynamics constantly informed pre-colonial power relations. In the anthology, Gender in African Archaeology, Schmidt's "Reading Gender in the Ancient Technology of Africa" (1998) and Maclean's "Gendered Technologies and Gendered Activities in the Interlacustrine Early Iron Age" (1998), painstakingly document and analyse evidence of gendered labour and social divisions during the pre-colonial period.
Studies of colonialism have been abundant. A key theme has been the nature of the connections between pre-colonial gender patterns and the patriarchal relations and structures of colonialism. This theme has generated debate about whether African women's gendered statuses worsened or improved with colonialism. Most critics argue that colonialism severely curtailed the powers that pre-colonial women enjoyed. Judith Van Allen's study of the Igbo Women's War (1976) is often seen as a pioneering example of this thesis. Van Allen argues that Nigerian women, enlisting the assertive organisational and political strategies of a pre-colonial period, resisted taxation as a direct response to the colonial administration's eroding of their former power and autonomy. Some have developed this thesis to insist that colonialism entrenched and deepened patriarchal domination within pre-colonial societies, which co-opted chiefs and male elders into highly authoritarian systems of indirect rule. The vested interest of colonialism in consolidating patriarchy is an argument also supporting studies of women's urbanisation and social control under colonialism. These findings within feminist studies echo many neo-Marxist studies of colonialism, which show how colonial capitalism reduced reproductive costs by maintaining women's productive and reproductive roles in rural "pre-capitalist" areas. Women worked as agriculturalists, raised children and cared for the sick and elderly while men were coerced or co-opted into grossly underpaid migrant labour in the capitalist economy, which was consequently able to minimise costs.
While the argument that women's circumstances deteriorated dramatically under colonialism has generally proved persuasive, the fieldwork of certain scholars uncovers anomalies in the picture of uniform colonial policing of African women. For example, Mbilinyi's (1989) work with a Tanzanian peasant woman considers ways in which the colonial legal apparatus offered certain Tanzanian women measures of power and legal recourse, which were erased after independence. Terri Barnes (1992) offers a view which contrasts with many southern African scholars' findings about the strict policing of African women in the cities, and indicates that the colonial state often encouraged women's presence in urban areas, where they played social, economic and sexual roles in supporting the migrant labour force. Careful empirical work has therefore charted the myriad relations, shaped by the articulation of indigenous systems and particular colonial policies, affecting women's regionally-specific, everyday struggles under colonialism.
Women's resistance to colonialism has been a central preoccupation of a "compensatory" tradition. Much of the research and writing about women's participation in nationalism applauded their political agency, explicitly and implicitly defining this as a precursor to post-independent political participation. A considerable amount of this celebratory work was produced in Africa, registering the optimism among women's movements in the build-up to independence and many women's anticipation of future roles in nation-building and governance. The work embraced both conventional scholarly productions and more accessible documentation often produced by women's organisations.
The gendered nature of women's involvement in nationalist movements did not constitute a central thread in the celebratory tradition of affirming women's participation. The absence of a political and intellectual critique of women's political roles severely hampered the preparedness of women's movements to confront the battles against gender discrimination in the post-colonial period. Written a decade after Zimbabwean independence, Rudo Gaidzanwa's (1992) powerful discussion of women and Zimbabwean nationalism provides a searching account of the roots of the post-colonial state's betrayal of women's struggles in women's "back seat" involvement in nationalist struggles. In many ways, the tenor and substance of this study exemplify African women scholars' retrospective assessment of women's gendered participation in nationalism. It is noteworthy that South African scholars, benefiting from post-colonial African feminist traditions of research and political analysis, were able to shape radical scholarship and political analysis of women's gendered political participation in the years prior to the first democratic election
Another gap in the continental contributory documentation of women's nationalist involvement is the neglect of the precise ways in which women orchestrated - at grassroots and local levels - the political and communal networks and conceptual foundations that nationalist movements rely on. Customarily attributed mainly to the visionary leadership of figures like Mandela, Nyerere and Nkrumah, African nationalism has yet to be understood in terms of the hard work, mobilisation and leadership roles of African women. The voluminous work on women's participation seems to have concentrated mainly on their visibility in struggle, rather than on appraising the extent to which communal and national movements relied on the leadership skills, activism and political vision of women in grassroots organisations, or the numerous boycotts and rebellions that fuelled wider national movements. Evidence presented by researchers like Cheryl Walker (1982) indirectly raises this theme in relation to South African women. Effa-Attoe and Jaja's biography of Margaret Ekpo (1993) is also provocative in tracking the pivotal yet understated role of a Nigerian woman leader in the creation of the Nigerian nation-state. Dealing with a Tanzanian context, Susan Geiger (1997) explodes the idea that nationalism was driven solely by Western-educated men. She considers how un-Westernised women worked to build a sense of solidarity, militancy and assertiveness that cut across ethnic lines and that, directly and indirectly, strengthened a spirit of nationalism. Further research and analysis across the continent is yet to generate the important work needed in this area.
A central concern among Africanist feminists has been the gendered nature of colonialism. Here work has embraced both white women's ambiguous roles in colonial and imperial processes and the evolution of the imperial project in the constitution of colonial masculinities. A voluminous body of research has burgeoned around such figures as Margery Perham, with historically inflected biographical research highlighting the processes that shaped these personalities as social subjects. In the case of Margery Perham, the African women's database lists numerous publications and a number of bibliographies. This profuse research suggests a late twentieth-century obsession in the West with European and colonial ambitions and fantasies which is itself the subject of critical inquiry and speculation.
A notable body of theoretical work, associated with scholars like Helen Bradford (1996, 1998), Ann Mager (1999) and Patricia Hayes (2000) has surfaced in recent years on the subject of gender and colonialism. In her introduction to Gendered Colonialisms in African History, Nancy Hunt sets the tone for the deconstructive analysis in this field in the following way: "Colonialism can no longer be viewed as a process of imposition from a singular European metropole, but must be seen as tangled layers of political relations and lines of conflicting projections and domestications that converged in specific local misunderstandings, struggles and representations" (1997:4). She goes on to affirm the gendered insights that open up "our appreciation of the enigmatic mutations and durations, facts and fictions, transgressions and secrecies" (1997:4). The abundance of this work is impressive, as is its detailed attention to texture, interstices and lacunae. Importantly, it has been closely aligned with the post-colonial studies associated in the eighties with Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak, scholars to whom it is indebted for its methods and lexicon. The range and intricacy of this work makes it difficult to define clear themes, especially since, as its exponents argue, it is precisely the absence of unifying themes and linear narratives that marks its scholarly worth.
But a strand clearly presented within this research is what Hunt terms the "colonialism and culture" school of colonial studies. Here there have been important shifts away from the subjects favoured by previous historians (production, kinship) to subjects such as domesticity, sexuality and the body. The shift to cultural history has therefore focused on symbolic construction and representation, rather than on entities and constants clearly observable in real life. This post-structuralist turn towards narrative and cultural production has been accompanied by a distinctive vocabulary, which originates in literary and cultural studies, rather than the concepts developed in disciplines like anthropology, economics and politics. The "colonialism and culture" school has considerably expanded insight into themes like colonial subjectivities, the hybridised identities and processes that elude binaries of coloniser and colonised and the symbolic, local and individualised political responses of Africans to colonial hegemony. As revealed in many of the contributions that painstakingly explore narrative and textuality in Gendered Colonialisms in African History, however, its main drawback is a tendency to neglect the politics of the discursive processes that it minutely explores.
One of the most important contributions of Africanist feminist history and African feminist historical research has been methodological. In the West, the wave of historical research undertaken in the eighties raised with growing urgency the need for researchers to shed conventional assumptions of interpretive authority (see, for example, White, 1986). Progressive work that is both self-reflexive and that carefully documents the intricacies of women's lives has therefore contributed to a global transformation of historiographical concerns and methods.
Among the scholars who have pioneered this work are Luise White, Nancy Hunt and Marcia Wright, all of whom counter projections of African women as passive victims of colonial, post-colonial and patriarchal processes. Wright's Women in Peril (1975) deals with the contradictions in women's experiences and self-definition and uses their life narratives to convey this complex scenario. White, in The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (1990), introduced the then-neglected subject of sexuality and dealt intricately with gendered relations to shed light on labour relations and the creation of colonial urban spaces. Hunt's work has been especially influential in shaping new readings of women and resistance. Her most notable scholarship analyses medicalisation and colonised women's location at the confluence of different scientific and popular constructions of gendered and racialised bodies (1990). Much of her work also surveys the state of women's history in Africa, and here she has made a strong case for countering determinist models of domination and resistance by opening up studies of political expression in different sites (1989; 1997). Her contributions have also foregrounded feminist historians' need to interrogate conventional authoritarian forms of historical interpretation (1989).
The progressive feminist tradition of social history has uncovered the value of life history research, with many of the most complex and detailed explorations of women's history incorporating extensive life history and personal narratives. Marcia Wright's Strategies of Slaves and Women (1993) which draws extensively on personal narratives to examine connections between the personal, cultural and political levels of East and Central African women's experiences, Belinda Bozzoli's Women of Phokeng (1991), shaped by this scholar's involvement in a research project collecting the oral narratives of some of the poorest rural women in South Africa, and Shula Marks' Not Either an Experimental Doll (1987), involving a comprehensive examination of South African letters and oral sources, are particularly notable examples of this work.
The value of life history as a corrective to dominant historical and other accounts is well-illustrated in Heike Behrend's Alice Lakwena and the Holy Sprits: War in Northern Uganda 1986-1997 (1999), a book first published in German and recently translated into English. Behrend, an anthropologist, based her study on a northern Ugandan woman named Alice Auma who, possessed by a spirit and known as Alice Lakwena, led a large movement against the Ugandan government in 1986. Currently in exile in Kenya, Lakwena has been the subject of reductive patriarchal and racist interpretations that either reduce her role to evidence of persisting "priomordialism" in present-day Africa, or underplay her agency as a visionary, political strategist and leader. Behrend's study undertakes a complex investigation of the manner in which Lakwena can be seen to intervene into previous trajectories, led by elite men, of nation-building and resistance. For example, Lakwena is seen to create connections between politics and religion, to link injustice towards people and the abuse of a physical environment and to stress the ethical underpinnings of her opposition to the Ugandan government with reference to notions of pollution, impurity and sin. Behrend consequently examines Lakwena's evolution of a language of nation-building and resistance that is radically different from the discourses customarily employed by Africa's male leaders in distinctively modern and secular strategies of nation-building.
Since life history and oral narratives as parts of scholarly projects feature pre-eminently as a methodological tools, they often loses their force as self-sufficient knowledge, irrespective of their progressive framing by feminist researchers. The conflation of biography and history in the African women's bibliographical database is a clear indication of the way this genre has been yoked to a distinct intellectual agenda. The secondary status of life history therefore raises what Hunt, referring to a different problematic, describes as the tension between creating "images of whole women while analysing change over time" (1989:365). As Hunt implies here, a holistic view of women's lives emerges out of detailed narratives of these lives; anlaysing the processes in which these lives are located requires the organising role of an interpreter who necessarily manipulates and censors the individual's narrative. For the purposes of mapping out the genre of life history and biographical narrative as a distinct genre with its own direction and priorities as knowledge production, this essay goes on to deal with developments in life history narrative in a separate section.
The strong tradition of contributory women's history, marked in African contributions to studies of women in pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial society, has often been explored within the framework of social history. This work is inflected by insight into interlocking circumstances and relations. It is noteworthy that this work rarely uses the lexicon of cultural history much favoured by many Africanist feminists today. Yet the detailed case studies of such themes as kinship, marriage, production and reproduction evidence their ability to inflect inherited concepts with new meaning, and to probe many of the processes which scholars in the west have conceptualised in different ways.
Impressive earlier work has been produced by Bolanle Awe (1991,1992). Confirming Zeleza's argument about the tactical need for writing African women into history, she has contributed enormously to an African tradition of "herstory" by focusing on the agencies of Nigerian women. Fatima Mernissi (1988), responding especially to the representation of Muslim women in history, raises challenges for alternative approaches and methodologies to expand African women's critiques of both history as a discipline and the assumptions made by certain Africanist feminists. Laray Denzer has produced an especially notable contribution to history in her study of Yoruba women and her framing of the memoirs, Constance Agatha Cummings-John (1995), in which she links the texture of historical process to a Nigerian woman's narrative of her life experiences. A similar emphasis emerges in For Women and the Nation (1997). In this thoroughly-researched study of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti of Nigeria, Cheryl Johnson-Odim and Nina Mba make a significant African-centred contribution to historically-inflected biographical work.
In recent years, essays by African scholars collected in the anthology edited by Kent, Gender in African Archaeology (1998) and Women in African Colonial Histories (2002), edited by Susan Geiger et al., have provided important progressive studies from the pre-colonial period to recent history. The work is notable for its multidisciplinary orientation, and presently reinforces a burgeoning field of cultural studies. Diana Jeater's Marriage, Perversion and Power: The Construction of Moral Discourse in Southern Rhodesia, 1894-1930 (1993) remains a fascinating example of this interdisciplinary approach. As the title suggests, Jeater combines anthropology, history and sociology to show how women were situated in relation to African and colonial patriarchies. While the rigorous analysis of local patterns in the town of Gweru is extremely perceptive, Jeater also develops an analysis, with far-reaching implications across disciplines, of the extent to which African and colonial patriarchal systems reinforced each other.