Feminist Knowledge | Review Essay: African Feminist Studies: 1980-2002
Labour, Economy and Development
Numerous scholars have stressed that the binarism of private and public, domestic and masculine or productive and reproductive are misleading categories for considering gendered economic activity in Africa. Women's roles in such spheres as agriculture and family support mean that their biologically and socially reproductive activities have always been linked to productive roles. The findings of many researchers therefore highlight the enormous contributions made by women to domestic and national economies. For example, in a recently-published study of women's involvement in the economy, Margaret Snyder writes:
In Uganda as in many other African countries, the estimated value of the incomes (in cash or kind) women produce is 50 percent of the total family income in two-spouse households and, of course, 100 percent in the nearly 30 percent of households where they are the sole providers. That leaves only about one in five households having more than half of family income provided by men. Women constitute 48 percent of the labour force of 11 million persons but their daily productive hours are measured as far higher than those of men, at a ratio of 15:9 (2002:79).
The extent of African women's economic productivity is clearly illustrated in their role in agriculture and their relations to the land. This subject has generated a thriving body of research that explores women's work and their correspondingly weak land rights from the pre-colonial period to the present day. These studies include SAFERE's special issues on the "Gendered Politics of the Land" (1995); a work edited by Shamim Meer, Women, Land and Authority: Perspectives from South Africa (1997), which focuses on women's rights, access and political status, and Bryeson's Women Wielding the Hoe: Lessons from Rural Africa for Feminist Theory and Development Practice, a collection in which contributors chart the range of events (such as war and AIDS) and local and global processes, including Structural Adjustment Programmes(SAPS), that shape women's roles as farmers. Despite this innovative research, the "quick-fix" solutions suggested by WID, WAD and GAD approaches strongly inform policy-making on women in relation to work in Africa.
Policy-making and planning
have also been constrained by the tendency towards generalisation in studies
of women and agriculture. This is identified by Ann Whitehead in her "Wives
and Mothers: Female Farmers in Africa" (1994). Whitehead acknowledges that,
while the emphasis on African women's crucial roles in farming is important,
the "blanket categorization of sub-Saharan African farming as female also
serves to homogenise what is an area of considerable cultural and economic variety"
(1994: 36). Whitehead goes on to consider how effective policy-making that meaningfully
addresses women's empowerment in agriculture should be based on detailed data
collection to ascertain exactly what role women's labour plays in agricultural
production and to distinguish between their roles in market and non-market production.
She presents a compelling case for the need to anchor advocacy and policy-making
around women's agricultural labour in detailed empirical studies of the links
between production and reproduction and the connections between market and household
economies.
Generally speaking, the many economic initiatives affecting or aimed at women's
work in post-colonial African countries - whether introduced through state "reforms"
or in response to external pressures on countries to increase productivity and
develop efficient economies - have eroded working-class women's economic control
even more than has been the case with rural and poor African men. In their discussion
of this theme in relation to reforms, liberalisation and globalisation, Munguti
et al. (2002), Stella Enrinosho and Piping Fawole (2002), and Astronaut Bagile
(2002) examine how often women "suffer the brunt of economic transformation
and yet…have more effective coping strategies" (Munguti et al, 2002:42).
They therefore concur with Whitehead in her discussion of the extent to which
women, due to their socialisation, often work harder and are driven by maternal
altruism to accommodate the top-down initiatives that further erode their economic
well-being. It is noteworthy that the findings about "reform" and
globalisation in recent years show little evidence that policy-makers have acknowledged
the ineffectiveness, from women's point of view, of past measures. Earlier studies
of the impact of reforms that affect women, such as Zenebeworke Tadesse's "The
Impact of Law Reform and Women: The Case of Ethiopia" (1982) therefore
present critiques that are very similar to recent ones.
Many studies outlined above point clearly to the need for carefully scrutinising women's work in relation to pressures and power relations shaped internationally, within particular countries and within the household, as well as the circumstances and discourses that often drive women to work excessively hard. At the same time, however, the delineation of general trends in women's work can form a necessary basis for strategising and policy-making. Many of these patterns are outlined in Mama's twenty-page section on women's work from her mid-nineties review article. Here she captures the intricate variety of women's formal and informal, paid and unpaid, socially essential yet unacknowledged work from the pre-colonial period to the nineties. Framing her study with a overview of conceptual issues, she writes: "African research into gender relations and work is particularly fascinating because of the enormous range of activities that African women engage in and the permutations that these have undergone with the changing circumstances of pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial societies" (1996:56).
Her observations about the range and complexity of women's labour is reflected in the variety of regional studies. In recent years, these have captured local patterns and critically adapted inherited concepts to appraise women's particular experiences. Examples of these studies include Oppong's African Mothers, Workers and Wives: Inequality and Segregation", Robertson's Trouble Showed the Way: Women, Men and Trade in the Nairobi Area, 1890-1990 (1997), Sheldon's Courtyards, Markets, City Streets: Urban Women in Africa (1996) and Snyder's Women in African Economies: From Burning Sun to Boardroom (2000). Dealing especially with the intersections between formal and informal work and with the blurred gendered underpinnings of labour, these critics have all contributed enormously to our understanding of the complexity of women's labour. Mama gestures towards different consensuses of women's work in the pre-colonial period, women's informal work during the colonial and post-colonial period, and women's wage labour from the colonial period to the present day. What follows is an outline of these consensuses.
Scholars like Kapteijns (1999), Guy (1990), Schmidt and Grier (1992), Kaplan (1982) and White (1984) have stressed how women from different regions in Africa were situated in patriarchal societies in which male inheritance, through both matrilineal and patrilineal systems, ensured that women never achieved the economic power of men. Two themes run through this scholarship. One is that women played pivotal roles in such activities as agriculture and food production for domestic consumption. Here it is argued that women bore the main burden of family subsistence, with men's socially valued activities as hunters or pastoralists rarely contributing to domestic production what women's labour did. Another theme revolves on women's reproductive roles in the context of pre-capitalist labour and wealth. The reliance in pre-capitalist society on domestic and kin-based systems of labour and on political relations established through marriage meant that women's potential as bearers of children and as wives put a high economic premium on their statuses as mothers and daughters.
The somewhat deterministic view of women's exploitation, both as mothers and primary producers, is to some extent qualified when we turn to disciplines like history and anthropology, in which scholars like Amadiume (1987; 1997), Akosua (1981), Wills (1988), White (1987) and Becker (2000) have intricately explored women's relative powers in pre-colonial society. These disjunctures point to the fact that while pre-colonial women may have enjoyed social, symbolic and ritual powers, economic power remained firmly vested in men. It is important to note here that neo-Marxist concepts and models can offer somewhat determinist views of pre-colonial women in the economy. In some ways, the notion of triumphant capitalism has been echoed in the paradigm of ever-triumphant patriarchies, with the possibilities for exploring ambiguities or complexities being reduced by this framework of hegemony. Further studies of women in pre-colonial economic life are likely to be enriched by the attention paid by many recent anthropologists' attention to women's partial and negotiated powers. Micro-level anthropological research on women in pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial economies, such as Becker's (2002) can also transcend the broad, sweeping studies of macro-society that tend to level and reduce complex economic dynamics.
Another consensus surfaces in research on women in the colonial and post-colonial informal sector. Here there has been a concentration of rich studies of migration, urbanisation and political rebellion in relation to women's diverse strategies of survival and advancement within cash economies. Demonstrating miscellaneous ways in which women were urbanised in different parts of Africa, this work highlights particular colonial policies and the unique challenges that different women faced. Studies of southern African women, like Bozzoli's (1991) and Barnes' (1992) reveal a different scenario from studies of West African Women, where there has been ample evidence of women prospering tremendously as traders in cash economies. Collectively, however, this research draws attention to the agency of women, highlighting the extent to which they negotiated extremely difficult pressures - originating in both colonial systems and hostile or patriarchal post-colonial environments - to build informal systems of survival and prosperity.
An especially important
study here is Garcia Clark's Onions Are My Husband: Survival and Accumulation
by West African Market Women (1994). In this extremely carefully-researched
study of women's trade in Ghana, Clark jettisons the framework of survivalist
economic strategies for African women to show how many women traders accumulated
wealth in the face of a Ghanaian economy pressured by structural adjustment,
male and state control over dominant resources and gender inequalities in the
local community and household. Margaret Snyder's Women in African Economies:
From Burning Sun to Boardroom (2000) also devotes significant attention
to women's triumphs in the informal sector. Frequently referring to the views
of women themselves, the study is especially noteworthy in exploring women's
own perceptions of the challenges they faced. It is significant that the wave
of work on women sex workers during the colonial and post-colonial periods extends
the tradition of viewing women as agents who successfully resist multiple forms
of oppression and economic exploitation. Avoiding the victim paradigm, research
by scholars like White (1990) and McClintock (1991), who have both dealt with
prostitution in Nairobi, and Dirasse (1991), dealing with post-colonial Ethiopia,
emphasise women's tactical choices.
A third consensus traces the role of women in waged work and the formal sector.
Here the tendency has been to see women as having been actively discriminated
against as wage labourers, both through exclusion during the colonial period,
and through gender inequities in the post-colonial economic context. Colonial
policy focused on domesticating African women to ensure that men worked in urban
areas while women maintained the labour sources for colonial-capitalism. This
meant that women's labour was excluded both in the colonial administrative systems
and in the agricultural and mining activities during the colonial period. Consequently,
Africa has never demonstrated the feminisation of wage labour that has marked
imperial and neo-imperial economies in other third-world contexts.
It is noteworthy that African women were also sidelined as sources of domestic labour in most parts of Africa. The ready availability of men's labour in, for example, Nigeria and Kenya, meant that it was often men who were employed as domestic servants in colonial households, while women performed domestic tasks for their own families. Importantly, contexts like South Africa, which from the 1930s, turned increasingly to a large body of semi-skilled labour for the expanding mining and agricultural industry, did draw on women's severely underpaid domestic labour.
A colonial legacy of discrimination against women's waged labour has been echoed in the post-colonial context. Studies have explored the iniquitous mechanisms preventing and circumscribing women's access to higher paid economic activities. Mukurasi's Post Abolished (1991) is a powerful autobiographical account of the author's battle against gender discrimination in Tanzania despite this country's progressive post-colonial policies. While sections of Synder's From Burning Sun to Boardroom (2000) focus on the triumphant entrepreneurial spirit of women, her study also deals with the policies and informal mechanisms that affect Ugandan women's waged work. In similar ways to Mukurasi's publication, this appraisal of the discriminatory landscape that women workers confront is supported by the voices of the women themselves.
Pioneering work on women's reproductive and productive labour, and especially on ways in which this labour becomes blurred, has drawn attention to the invisibility of women's work in social production and reproduction, and to the extent to which African women triumphantly defied colonial, patriarchal and post-colonial state restrictions in creating strategies for subsistence, for supporting their families and communities, and also for accumulating wealth. This work is well-illustrated in an early tradition comprising, among many others, Hafkin and Bay's edited collection Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change (1976), Jeanne Henn's "Women in the Rural Economy: Past, Present and Future" (1984), Jane Guyer's "Women in the Rural Economy: Contemporary Variations" (1984), Robertson and Berger's Women and Class in Africa (1986), Ifeyinwa Iweriebor's "Women in the Family Labour and Management: What Can Be done?" (1985) and Arlene Enabulele's "Childrearing and the Working Mother" (1985). Much recent work has shifted away from micro-economics to macro-economics in examining post-colonial state policy-making in relation to women's economic well-being, as well as gendered access to and control over economic resources. This is illustrated in April Gordon's "Women and Development" (1996), which examines pre-colonial, colonial and post-independence trends before turning to the successes and limitations of policy-making interventions in different African countries. She shows that these include access to land, credit, services, education and different legal social and political barriers.
Takyiwaa Manuh's "Women in Africa's Development" (1998) is another recent example of a holistic approach to women and "development". Dealing with the cross-cutting concerns of work, social services, health and the impact of conflict and violence, Manuh indicates that development is by no means a discrete area of women's social and political experiences. Her appraisal of women's economic roles also incorporates a crucial emphasis on their responses, with the author demonstrating inventive efforts among women throughout Africa to deal proactively with economic pressures. Manuh writes:
Many rural and urban women belong to women-only mutual-aid societies, benevolent groups in churches, cooperatives and market women's groups. Some of these groups allow women to pool their resources to reduce their workload and to invest in savings societies or cooperative ventures. Cooperative societies have provided women access to resources, for example, the Corn Mill societies in Cameroon, the "Six S" associations in Burkina Faso and the General Union of Cooperatives in Mozambique… In Benin, an estimated 90 percent participate in traditional women's savings and credit groups. Informal rotating credit associations in Ghana, Tanzania, Gambia and Zimbabwe have been used by the estimated 25 percent of economically active women in the non-agricultural informal sector to invest in business and farms, home improvements, and school costs for their children. (1998:3)
A valuable study that develops
Manuh's emphasis on women's agency, while also considering the effects of economic
reforms and women's exclusion from policy-making is Demanding Dignity: Women
Confronting Economic Reforms in Africa, edited by Dzodzi Tsikata and Joanna
Kerr (2000). Incorporating studies of Uganda, Cameroon, Togo, Mali, Burkina
Faso, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Kenya, Chad and Ghana, this study offers an
extremely comprehensive appraisal of current priorities for "development"
that face women on the continent.
The attention to macro-economics is also illustrated in an article like Margaret
Snyder's "Women's Agency in the Economy" (2002), which examines the
impact of interventions into the Ugandan government budget and the role of an
organisation like the Council for the Economic Empowerment of Women, as well
as Debbie Budlender's discussion of the South African Women's Budget initiative
in "The Political Economy of Women's Budgets in the South" (2000).
Studies like these play a much-needed role in mainstreaming gender within areas
where ostensibly "social" or "national" needs are predicated
on men's economic activities, or defined in ways that reflect men's needs and
locations.
The gender emphasis on economic concerns at a macro-level also has a longer history that originates in different ways of thinking about women's productive and reproductive roles in the context of Africa's "development". WID, WAD and GAD paradigms have had an important impact in establishing models for teaching, research and gender training in Africa largely because they offer functionalist models for practical and, in may cases, well-financed, gender work. Despite the volume of critical work on gender and social process, and the radical scholarship that critiques modernisation theory, the WID thesis, first enunciated in Ester Boserup's Women's Role in Economic Development (1970) continues to influence policy-making and activism attentive to women's needs in Africa. The fact that international donor organisations like the World Bank, the United Nation and the European Union, together with donor organisations based in Canada, Sweden and the United States persistently use the WID approach, is an index of the disparity between the liberal and even often conservative politics of funding sources for women in development on one hand, and the critical political direction currently being taken by gender research, both in the west and in Africa on the other.
The exigencies of commercial publishing in the west and the standards of critical and progressive scholarship established by university and other publishing houses focusing on Africa, generally guard against the dominance of WID approaches in scholarly arenas. But these studies are still evident in the canon. One that uses an especially blunt developmentalist orientation is Ingrid Palmer's Gender and Population in the Adjustment of African Economics: Planning for Development (1991). Arguing that structural adjustment policies can positively affect women's economic positions, Palmer avoids "calling attention to social injustices" to focus instead on "seeing that gender considerations are systematically taken into account in economic policies" (1991, preface). The argument, as critics of WID have noted, ultimately places enormous burdens on African women, already significantly involved in subsistence production and agriculture for their families and communities, and entirely ignores the impact of oppressive local and global economic and political practice.
That certain tertiary-level courses and gender training programmes continue to use WID, WAD and GAD analyses are indications of the pressure to meet donor requirements, and the corresponding neglect of radical and intellectually rigorous research. It is therefore encouraging that certain progressive organisations based in Africa are contributing increasingly to supporting research and training. While the massive resources required to drive the developmental process is unlikely to come from progressive African sources, it is important that organisations like AAWORD, WORDOC, ABANTU for Development and Amanitare offer much-needed direction for shaping a critical climate for African women and development.
This progressive orientation is manifest in Snyder and Tadesse's African Women and Development (1995), which offers the first detailed critical description of the evolution of development programmes from their inception in the mid-seventies to the mid-nineties. The period covered therefore charts the abortive legacy of early development models established in the seventies and maps the initiatives, from the late eighties, that sought to remedy past failures yet often repeated their shortcomings. This work is likely to prove an important guide to researchers because of its extensive use of interviews with important role players, its references to and analysis of key documents and its discussion of central projects. Other studies that have general relevance to Africa and that draw on radical politics, Marxist analysis and militant feminism, also wrest "development" from its traditional moorings in liberalism and discourses of modernisation. April Gordon's Marxist-inflected work offers an important model. Her Transforming Capitalism and Patriarchy: Gender and Development in Africa (1996a) astutely appraises models, policy-making, theoretical paradigms and concepts that are crucial to progressive studies in this field. A similarly critical overview is offered in Adepoju's collection, Family, Population and Development in Africa (1997). Providing macro-surveys of the field, these works offer rich sources for intellectually rigorous yet also practically inflected research and conceptual frameworks for teaching, policy-making and gender training.
Sub-Saharan Africa, which manifests unique developmental needs, has been the focus of important recent work. Here, a striking study of African women's work, its perception and population and development policy in relation to this is Adepoju and Oppong's Gender, Work and Population in Sub-Saharan Africa (1994). In this volume, women's work is explored via detailed analysis of gender roles, kinship, conjugal relations and the connections between reproduction and production. Contributors' essays, dealing with different African countries, collectively show how governments and donor agencies ignore the minutiae of women's labour and end up predicating programmes on skewed or wholly abstract understandings of what this labour actually entails. A particular strength of this volume is its sensitivity to a region manifesting the highest rate of economic activity and fertility for women, while also exhibiting the highest levels of maternal and child mortality in the world. This volume clearly demonstrates the vast gap between policies and research ostensibly aimed at developing particularly impoverished women and the realities of women's working lives. It is significant that other studies of women in sub-Saharan Africa, most notably Hay and Stichter's African Women South of the Sahara (1995) and essays anthologised in Gwendolyn Mikell's African Feminism: The Politics of Survival in Sub-Saharan Africa (1997) pick up on Adepoju and Oppong's critical analysis of micro-economics.
Scholarship that focuses on the particular political and economic legacies of individual countries has also yielded rich insights. Demonstrating clearly that gender and work in Africa are connected to historical and global processes, studies including the South African case study, Divided Sisterhood: Race, Class and Gender in the South African Nursing Profession (Marks, 1994); Pankhurst's Gender, Development and Identity: An Ethiopian Study (1992), which minutely explores the confluence of labour, state policy, domestic life, marriage, motherhood, cultural values and religion in the region of Menz; and Goheen's Men Own the Fields, Women Own the Crops: Gender and Power in the Cameroon Grassfields (1996), develop extremely detailed case studies of women's work in particular networks and contexts of power. At the same time, these studies focus on complex global and national currents. Work like this is noteworthy for its emphasis both on gender politics at the micro-level and on global politics and macro-economic processes. Increasingly, such studies are challenging the rigid models of development that have thus far dominated work on women and the economy. They focus on analysing detail as a basis for developing localised models of development, rather than on exploring detail in relation to a priori models of development. In so doing, they avoid the structuralist macro-economic and state-driven trends within much previous work on third world women and the economy.
Another important strand in the broadening of approaches to development is Moore and Vaughan's Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition and Agricultural Change in the Northern Province of Zambia, 1890-1990 (1994). They engage eco-politics to explore women's productive and reproductive roles in the context of patriarchal and macro-economic processes. Drawing on the more context-sensitive currents of the Women, Environment and Sustainable Development approach of the eco-feminist movement, this kind of study focuses on women's relationship to the environment within the broader context of social development. While the criticism usually levelled at Women, the Environment and Sustainable Development approaches is their alignment with essentialist aspects of western eco-feminism, this work sensitively explores the priorities of Zambian women and the social determinants of their particular relationships. It seems important to note here that the relationships between African women and the environment reveal patterns that differ enormously from masculinist control over and exploitation of the land. This relationship justifies lobbying for women's centrality in agrarian reform, a process that echoes the recent emphasis on women's roles in contemporary peace-building.
Overall, current research on development suggests a turn away from the economistic and consensus approaches of the eighties. Increasingly, scholars are analysing economic processes from interdisciplinary points of view, and often challenging the concepts and models deployed in earlier research. This transition seems to be echoed in the waning influence of economistic and developmentalist discourses in a range of fields. During the eighties, sociological, historical, anthropological and even cultural studies drew extensively on terminology originating in developmental models and economistic paradigms. As evidenced in many historical, anthropological and political studies, theorists have transformed or abandoned many earlier concepts and approaches, with efforts to embrace the richness and complexity of African women's lives leading them to avoid the formulaic surveying of spheres like production, reproduction and economically determinist notions of development.
The enduring currency of the notion of "development" in relation to the field of gender and women's studies in Africa, however, warrants critical scrutiny. It is noteworthy that much research and writing in the field continues to be compartmentalised in terms of this formulaic notion, and implies an atomised technocratic understanding of complex social processes. It is as though gender and women's studies in African contexts could be legitimated only when tied to economically instrumentalist ideas about "improving" African societies. (To a large extent, this extends a tradition of women in development, concerned mainly with African women's economic productivity, rather than with their general well-being or with the complex identities and experiences that affect gender identities, roles and social processes in Africa.) The rich range of research in different fields and across disciplinary boundaries, and in relation to cultural processes and identities, clearly demonstrates a more holistic and humanistic emphasis within gender and women's studies. At the same time, however, it is important that the interpretation and categorisation of this work acknowledge how broadly it contributes to understanding wide-ranging social processes and experiences, rather than see it simply as an entry point into examining deterministic models of progress.