Feminist Knowledge | Review Essay: African Feminist Studies: 1980-2002

Introduction

In her seminal review article, Amina Mama (1996) observes that women's studies in Africa emerged mainly in the 1980s. Earlier works like Denise Paulme's Women of Tropical Africa (1963), Kenneth Little's African Women in Towns (1973) and Sylvia Leith-Ross' African Women: A Study of the Ibo of Nigeria (1965) comprised studies that were mainly either documentary in nature or pre-feminist. The period from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s is consequently an important shaping moment for African feminist scholarship and women's studies, while the period from the mid-1990s to the present day ushers in many new patterns.

An earlier period witnessed the first wave of scholarship on the distinctive intellectual, cultural and political agendas confronting African feminism. Interventions by scholars like Chikwenye Ogunyemi (1984) and Molara Ogundipe-Leslie (1985) challenged eurocentric traditions to define distinct forms and goals for feminism in Africa. Another important trend in Africa was the upsurge of publications describing the agency of African women, especially in anti-colonial struggles. Often produced by women with first-hand involvement of political struggle, these include: Angolan Women: Building the Future From National Liberation to Women's Emancipation (1984), which was documented by the Organisation of Angolan Women; and Women in Ethiopia (1982), and Ethiopia: Women in Revolution (1984), both written and published by the Revolutionary Ethiopian Women's Association (REWA).

Beyond Africa, research, teaching and publications on women and gender steadily grew. Much of this early work among "Africanist feminists" [1] was extremely reductive and generalised. Based largely on speculation and secondary research, it drew heavily on deduction and stereotypes. A key example here is Rosa Cutruffelli's Woman of Africa: Roots of Oppression (1983), a work whose limitations have been sharply criticised by post-colonial feminists like Amina Mama, writing in a west African journal and Chandra Mohanty in her seminal "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses" (1991).

From the late eighties, an emerging emphasis among Africanists on locally grounded work strongly countered earlier tendencies to reduce African women to two-dimensional subjects of analysis. Attention to diversity and complexity also shaped new trends for scholarship in Africa. The preoccupation - pronounced among feminists focusing on literary and cultural studies - with critiquing western feminisms [2] , gave way to more goal-oriented work addressing the myriad challenges posed by gender oppression in different African contexts. Careful analysis of particular processes also shaped a growing emphasis on gendered social processes. While much earlier scholarship registers an interest in celebrating women's activism, more recent scholarship intricately theorises women's agency to develop multi-disciplinary explorations of the ways in which gender affects all social relationships and personal and collective identities.

An overview of women's studies scholarship in Africa poses the challenge of disaggregating and assessing the enormous range of material and perspectives subsumed by the overlapping categories of "African feminist studies" and "women and gender studies in Africa". One means of mapping out scholarship is to distinguish between studies emphatically concerned with interrogating gender hierarchies, and more descriptive and exploratory approaches to women and gender. The latter, exemplified by a study like Kayongo-Male's The Sociology of the African Family (1984), deals descriptively with gender roles or women's political and cultural expression without developing a systematic gender critique of these patterns. This study is concerned primarily with scholarship and writers who embed such critique to produce critical knowledge about African women and gender. The comprehensive and radical essays edited by Imam et al. and collected in Engendering African Social Sciences (1997), are studies that consistently bring feminist analysis to bear on a range of fields and disciplines. They are therefore illustrative of critical feminist scholarship.

Another complicating factor stems from the institutional diversity in the locations and affiliations of researchers. A vibrant tradition of research, teaching and publishing on women and gender in Africa thrives beyond the continent, especially in the United States. Apart from being more well-resourced than traditions on the continent, it often operates in cultural and institutional contexts that are relatively amenable to feminist initiatives. In Africa, feminist work in universities is far more vulnerable to financial exigencies, interference from the state and party politics and, very often, extremely limited financial support. Abiola Odejide, in a recent appraisal of WORDOC, draws attention to this situation when she writes: "The centre's experience as one of the earliest women's studies centres in sub-Saharan Africa … illustrates the challenges faced by many other similar organisations. Although they have the vision and intellectual resources to play crucial transformational roles, they are often severely hindered by structural and financial constraints" (2002).

Examining differences between the form and scope of scholarly traditions within Africa and those flourishing beyond the continent is important. A detailed discussion of these differences is beyond the scope of this review. But a superficial glance would highlight such factors as how research and scholarship are hierarchically distributed and consumed, and how different traditions become vested with varying forms of authority or credibility. Writers' geographical locations also shape the tenor of their writings. Often, this can determine whether scholarship is more speculative in orientation or whether it is firmly anchored in regional particularity and insight.

The expanding mass of work on African women and gender written by scholars located in the west and published by houses like Zed, Routledge, Lynne Rienner and St Martin's Press immediately signals the visibility of scholarship within a western academic mainstream. However, smaller publishing outlets in Africa, such as Fountain Publications in Uganda, numerous publishing houses in Nigeria that include Tamaza (Zaria), Vista Books (Lagos), Achisons (Owerri), and JEL Publications (Kaduna), or Baobab and Weaver Press in Zimbabwe, have generated a vibrant (albeit marginalised) tradition of incisive, topical and strongly contextualised research and writing. Importantly, this work is not always easily available, since it falls beyond the circulating networks of most academic activity. Located outside of the academy, long-established non-government development organisations and research networks such as the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), the Southern African Political and Economic Series (SAPES), the Women's Research and Documentation Centre (WORDOC) in Nigeria and the Association of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD) have been hugely influential in generating a continental feminist tradition determined by regional intellectual, cultural and political agendas.

Specialist networks and organisations dedicated to particular areas for women's empowerment, like Akina Mama wa Afrika (AmwA) [3] ; the African Women's Leadership Institute; Femmes Africa Solidarite (FAS) [4] , which concentrates on peace-building; ABANTU for Development [5] , dealing with organisations and development; the Council for the Economic Empowerment of Women in Africa (CEEWA) [6] , Women in Law and Development in Africa (WiLDAF) [7] , Women and Law in Southern Africa (WLSA) [8] , AMANITARE [9] , a recently launched organisation concentrating on reproductive rights and gender-based violence, the African Women's Media Centre [10] which is based in Dakar, and the Association of African Women Scholars (AAWS) [11] , which has consolidated scholarship in Africa and North America, have considerably strengthened the work of those formed in the eighties. This tradition has allowed feminist intellectuals to "institutionalise their presence, to articulate agendas for African feminism by facilitating research and activism by African women scholars [through organising] workshops on methodology, women and rural development, reproduction, the mass media and development assistance" (Mama, 1996:6).

Since the activities of regional forums have often proved difficult to sustain, nationally-based centres emerging from the early 1980s in countries including Dakar, Ghana, Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Botswana, Nigeria and Zambia have played increasingly prominent roles. The resources of both regional and national networks and organisations, which have increased in number and influence in recent years, make notable contributions to African feminist theory. Particularly important local initiatives are Women in Nigeria (WIN), which has published many innovative biographical and historical studies, the Women's Research and Documentation Centre (WORDOC) in Nigeria, which has a large resource centre and library and has also published various studies on women and gender, the Zimbabwe Women's Resource Centre and Network, the Tanzanian Media Women's Association (TAMWA), many Ugandan organisations including Law and Advocacy for Women in Uganda (LAW-U), the Ugandan Media Women's Association and the umbrella National Association of Women Organisations in Uganda (NAWOU), and in Botswana, the Emang Basadi Women's Association, which has concentrated on gender-based violence. National networks have encouraged scholars to identify regional priorities and to shape nuanced, historically-grounded research with the potential to guide continental trends. Importantly, strong national projects have the potential to steer networking for activism and research at a continental level. The pattern of developing national studies as the basis for strategic continental generalisation and comparison is evinced in the recent National Machinery for Women in Africa Series, a series of papers published in 2000 by the Third World Network-Africa. Encompassing both general studies of gender and national machinery in Africa, as well as case studies undertaken in Ghana, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Zambia, Botswana and Tanzania, these substantial papers review research and practice to address issues relevant to policy formulation, gender training and research throughout Africa.

While this review highlights regional particularities in the production of African feminist scholarship, it also questions rigid distinctions between local and foreign scholarship. As I show, there are distinctive traditions and trajectories; at the same time, these have shaped each other in productive and collaborative ways. The impact of globalisation on scholarship has entailed a new porousness around national boundaries. The frequency and size of contemporary international conferences combined with the extensive use of electronic technology has made it extremely difficult to cordon off distinct zones of scholarly and intellectual inquiry. The diasporic migrations of many feminists, especially the movement of many African feminists to the United States, must also lead us to carefully assess what we mean by the "geographical sites" of certain intellectual productions. The globalised networks that shape intellectual production, the diasporic movements of scholars, the rapid circulation of sources via the Internet and contemporary commercial publishing are all factors that make for high degrees of cross-fertilisation across national and continental boundaries.

In view of the financial and organisational consequences in universities, the political crises and escalating militarism and civil war in many African countries, the frequent migration of scholars from Africa has become an especially prominent pattern [12] . This makes the drive for diasporic African women's exchanges an even more pressing concern than before. One of the earliest calls for dialogue between women in Africa and African women in the diaspora came from Filomina Steady in The Black Woman Cross-Culturally (1981). Since Steady's publication, numerous other ventures, galvanised by mounting social, political and cultural change across the continent, have deepened cross-cultural exchanges. Notable among these is the Women of Africa and the African Diaspora (WAAD) conference, first held in 1992 and attended by over 700 researchers, activists, policy makers, and students throughout Africa and the African diaspora. The conference focus, reflected in its theme of "Bridges across Activism and the Academy", laid the basis for crucial strategising and networking during the nineties and has been followed by two other gatherings, one in 1998, which took place in the United States and another in 2001, held in Madagascar. Periodic events such as the WAAD conferences offer strategic opportunities for conversation between migrant African intellectuals and those based on the continent. But they do not absolve diasporic intellectuals from the ongoing challenge of developing networks connecting them to progressive agendas both within their countries of origin and to the continent more generally. The challenges and contradictions that face migrant African feminist intellectuals are, in view of their growing number, an important subject for critical reflection. Registering this, Paul Zeleza describes a revolutionary role for this expanding group in the context of rapacious intellectual imperialism:

Migrant African intellectuals, as cultural producers, have an important and specific role to play in brokering relations between Africa and the North, in blackening the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. They must resist the seductions of the Northern academies to become native ventriloquists, complicit "others" who validate narratives that seek to marginalise Africa... They are both students and teachers of African and Northern societies, cultural workers and producers who should, in solidarity with historic African diaspora communities, construct knowledges of their multiple worlds that demystify the roots of Africa's and diaspora Africa's oppression and exploitation. (2002: http://www.feministafrica.org/2level.html)

Another issue raised by an overview of African feminisms concerns the degree to which studies dealing with non-African situations offer comparative insight into African contexts and situations. Many African feminists, black feminists, and womanists, condemning the dominance of white, western or mainstream feminism, have made strong cases for indigenous theories rooted in the regional concerns of African women. These interventions continue to defend the integrity of African women's agendas. At the same time, a review of feminisms in Africa must take into account the symbiosis that has always occurred between western feminisms and feminism in Africa, a symbiosis that can enrich regionally-grounded scholarship and politics, as well as research and politics in the west.

Angela Miles, writing from the West, cogently makes this point in her appraisal of the diversity of Western feminisms. Distinguishing between "assimilationist" and "transformative" trends (1998:164), she observes how "holistic visions of the world and integrative values are posed in opposition to dualistic logic and separatist values" to unsettle "scientific dualism and western science's claim to universal and superior knowledge" (1998:165). "In this process" she goes on to write, "everything is redefined: production, progress, development, wealth, to name just a few concepts relevant to this topic" (1998:165). Miles is therefore able to conclude that "western transformative feminisms…are important potential allies for 'third world' feminists and activists who are resisting the same dualistic and exploitative relationships" (1998:165).

In a recent interview, Amina Mama (2001) positions herself differently to comment on this collaboration. She argues that a vibrant legacy of autochthonous African feminism has had a marked impact on the scholarship and practice of western feminists, although this borrowing is rarely fully acknowledged: "The historical record tells us that even white women have always looked to Africa for alternatives to their own subordination…Look how the English dispatched anthropologists like Sylvia Leith Ross and Judith Van Allen to try to make sense of the Women's War of the 20s! So we have always been part of the early conceptualisation of so-called 'Western feminism,' even if not properly acknowledged as such" (2001:16). It is worth noting here that considerations of collaboration between feminisms tend to dwell on how Africa may learn or borrow from progressive trends in the West, rather than on how progressive western traditions have grown from and drawn on African ones. Be that as it may, the inevitable cross-fertilisation between feminisms is a long-established process easily obscured when feminists retreat into separatist camps. Most importantly, it can be an enriching process with the potential to invigorate what Miles terms transformative feminisms, what Chandra Mohanty terms "imagined communities" (1991) and what Nira Yuval-Davis (1989: 67) defines as "transversal alliances", simultaneously grounded in particular contexts and geographical locations while concerned with cross-cutting personal, structural and political changes.

Although outlining broad exchanges among progressive Western and African feminisms is important, the feminisms of culturally marginalised women have a particular relevance to Africa. One example is presented by the similar theoretical interventions made by African-American feminists and African feminists. In very similar ways, both have raised the importance of exploring gender and feminism in relation to race, class and imperialism. It is no coincidence that the term "womanism" was proposed as an alternative to feminism by both a Black American, Alice Walker (1984) and by a Nigerian, Chikwenye Ogunyemi (1984), in the same year. Other points of fruitful intersection can be tracked in studies of citizenship and nationalism. Much of the path-breaking work on nationalism and citizenship undertaken by writers like Uma Narayan (1997), Kumari Jayawardena (1986) and Nira Yuval-Davis (1989; 1997) has considerable import for gendered processes in contemporary Africa. This essay, while concerned primarily with African contexts and scholarship focusing on the continent, will consider these patterns of ongoing engagement. The emphasis is on tracing potential avenues for further exploration, rather than on documenting information.

Footnotes