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

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Amina Mama who, as co-ordinator of the GWS-Africa Project, offered valuable comments on work-in-progress, and to Heike Becker for commenting on a draft. I am also grateful to participants in the first continental GWS-Africa workshops for useful suggestions.

Preface

The African Gender Institute's (AGI's) "Strengthening Gender and Women's Studies for Africa's Transformation" (GWSAfrica) Project is part of a much wider, ongoing regional movement devoted to enhancing the intellectual quality and practical relevance of research and teaching on women and gender. Previous intellectual and capacity-building ventures in the field of gender have been undertaken by regional networks including the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), the Association for African Women on Research and Development (AAWORD), the Women's Research and Documentation Centre (WORDOC), Southern African Political & Economic Series (SAPES) and the Third World Network (Africa). This project will build on and contribute to these by drawing extensively on current information technology to network among African scholars, to create platforms for new writing and research and to disseminate strategies for curriculum development and teaching.

A key component of this project entails reviewing and consolidating research trends and scholarship. Centres such as CODESRIA, WORDOC, AAWORD and SAPES have acknowledged the tactical need to build networks among scholars whose opportunities for dialogue have been adversely affected by such factors as inadequate resources in African universities, the paucity of local publishers for feminist scholarship and heavy teaching and administrative demands which often make exploratory or collaborative research impossible. Assessing and marshalling scholarship by using current information technology is a strategic priority for the AGI's project, with the present essay contributing to its process of foundation research.

As a review I was commissioned to research and write for the AGI project, this essay pursues two goals. On one level, it documents the rich and voluminous work on women and gender studies in Africa, registering the enormous field which the AGI's project will help to expand. On another level, it is my interpretation of exchanges and linkages, gaps and possibilities, strengths and ongoing challenges thrown up by reading within the field. Both levels feed into the project's broad aim of fostering conditions and resources for enhancing research in a burgeoning field of activist-oriented scholarship.

Amina Mama's "Women's Studies and Studies of Women in Africa During the Nineties", published under the auspices of CODESRIA in 1996, is the most comprehensive survey of African feminist scholarship to date. This essay is in many ways a sequel to Mama's article, which set out to "stimulate and inspire the production of more and higher quality work in the field of African women's studies" (Mama, 1996:9) and especially to create foundations for further networking among African feminist scholars. The AGI's capacity-building project takes up this broad objective at the start of the twenty-first century, with both the 1996 essay and this one forming a backdrop, shaped by African feminist scholars, which should define progressive and intellectually rigorous regional agendas for further work.

While there have been a number of disciplinary reviews (for example, Zeleza, 1997 and other contributions in the collection Engendering African Social Sciences, 1997), bibliographic essays (Hunt, 1979 or Snyder, 2000), or regional surveys (Belinda Bozzoli on South African research, 1983 and Margaret Snyder on Ugandan scholarship, 2002), Mama's review article registers detailed continental developments across disciplines and subjects that include politics and the state, work and the economy, and history. My approach has included a key section on literary and cultural studies for good reason. Since the early nineties, this field has been offering paradigms and vocabularies for research in a range of disciplines. With the growing emphasis on representation, discourse, subjectivity and textuality within sociological, anthropological, historical and economic inquiry, literary and cultural studies are currently providing crucial concepts and theories for the social sciences.

Elsewhere in this essay I have retained the categories that framed Mama's study, with new categories and subsections being suggested by my sense of currents different from those that were identifiable in the mid-nineties. One of these is the move towards consolidation and diversity within and across fields, a trend that has led me to address disciplinary divides and conscious exchanges more frequently than Mama did. Between the time of the first wave of African feminist research and Mama's review, scholarship within fields like statecraft or women's health was fairly new and limited, with many fields being represented by very few scholars. The situation today has changed. Scholars from different regions using diverse theoretical models and methodological approaches have stimulated rich variety within fields and disciplines, and it has become increasingly important to chart regional and conceptual dialogues and comparisons.

In seeking to capture these exciting interchanges, I have often offered only brief accounts of the path-breaking scholarship undertaken over the last few decades. It has seemed to me more important to provide a narrative that traces themes and debates, rather than attempt to capture the complexities and variety reflected in particular works or by individual scholars. The structure of the essay helps to sustain this narrative, with the opening sections on women's movements, theory and history reviewing scholarship on epistemology, organisations and a discipline in which scholarship on African women was inaugurated. The following sections indicate how work in fields ranging from labour to education have been situated in relation to research on politics, the state and state policy. In the last two sections, I turn to two particularly fertile areas of intellectual growth. One, "Life History, Autobiography and Biography" reflects the eruption of a range of African women's voices into public debate, while the other, "Literary Criticism and Cultural Studies" reveals the innovative paradigm and conceptual development that has led researchers to draw increasingly on aspects of literary theory and criticism.

Particular challenges were posed by research on material written and published in Africa, since much of this is not reflected in existing Internet and bibliographical sources. Here there seems to be no substitute for informal networking. For example, I obtained important but relatively inaccessible material from colleagues at the AGI who have acquired a substantial collection of valuable but poorly-circulated intellectual resources through years of networking as African feminist scholars. Another challenge was posed by the range of traditions of scholarship and writing on the continent, shaped by such factors as different dominant languages, varying colonial and post-colonial histories and particular forms of religious affiliation. Because of my location, I have not been able to explore a thriving tradition in Francophone Africa, the distinctiveness of Lusophone research; and my consideration of the rich fields of gender work and women's radicalism in Egypt, Algeria and Morocco is very cursory.

Reading across disciplines invaluably sharpened my sense of strengths and gaps within each subject. I also discovered many unexpected trajectories in fields about which I had many misconceptions. The range of first-person narrative forms by African women since the eighties was, for me, an extraordinary trend. Apart from their rich subject-matter, these narratives present remarkable localised insights into issues of voice, mediation and representation, issues that many may consider to be definitively explored in Western post-structuralist theory.

My reading has alerted me to fascinating interventions and exchanges, and especially to the significance of connections between disciplines and the reciprocal and energising linkages between activism and research. I have also been struck by the extent to which the field indicates African women (not only as academics and scholars) increasingly reclaiming interpretations of worlds which have for too long been constructed by men, within colonial discourses or by scholarship abroad. This is most marked in theory-building, politics, the continentally-based trends in history and an exciting wave of first-person narrative forms. My impression is of a field that is dynamic, receptive to new directions and findings and vitally attuned to priorities for transformation and justice in Africa. The value of undertaking a panoramic overview in gaining a sense of these innovations cannot be overstressed. Examining different disciplines, traditions, kinds of texts and subjects in relation to one another has allowed me to discover important connections and possibilities, especially in areas where my teaching and research have been located.