GWS - Feminist Knowledge

As cross-cutting fields, religion and education are often explored in studies more notable for their contributions to other areas. For example, Amadiume's work on ethnographic philosophy is probably better defined as scholarship on pre-colonial women or as theoretical intervention. Much of the analysis of education in Badran's (1996), Lazreg's (1994) and Karam's (1998) studies deal broadly with Muslim women in public life, while the acute though dispersed discussions of education in book-length studies by Tamale (1999) or Tripp (2000) are central to their wider exploration of policy-making. Religion and education are usually interwoven, with dominant religious values in certain countries or communities shaping gendered educational patterns and policies. What follows therefore surveys some of the central perspectives in education and religion-related analysis that have emerged in studies of different fields.

There have been three major strands within studies of Christianity and women in Africa. One focuses on how missionary teaching shaped values and conduct for African women. A second, explored mainly in anthropology and social history, deals with patterns of Christian conversion among African women and, in work on a more recent period, with women's distinct roles in the independent churches mushrooming around Africa. A third strand is theological and explores Christian women's struggles for authority within the African church.

In most parts of Africa, formal education featured as a powerful colonial tool. Education was an overtly coercive instrument for both African men and women. But it had varying engendering effects, setting in place standards of docility and compliance for African women that were different from the values instilled in men. Of key importance here is the cult of domesticity that reconfigured African social relationships and institutional arrangements. It has been shown how engineered patterns of domestication affected African women's positions to create ideological perceptions that activism and policy-making during the post-colonial period have often failed to dislodge.

It is noteworthy that few women were educated formally in schools, although evidence from various countries suggests that individual colonial women, for example, the wives of missionaries, sometimes independently educated groups of or individual African girls and women. The dynamics of relations between philanthropic white women and African girls are disentangled in Shula Marks' Not Either an Experimental Doll (1987), which foregrounds the cultural dislocation that went along with young girls' education, often with devastating existential consequences.

In policy-related work, discussions of the impact of Christianity focus both on gendered effects and the creation of class and other power differentials among women. Lazreg explores the impact of Algerian missionary work - functioning to promote French colonial policy - in instituting domestic vocations for Algerian girls. Here the inclusion of subjects like knitting, sewing, weaving and hygiene explicitly indicate the colonial policy of preparing native women for the maintenance of families (1994: 63-79). As she observes, this agenda reinforced an indigenous patriarchal preoccupation with women's nurturing and wifely duties. Dealing with Uganda, Tamale shows how regional and class hierarchies were entrenched with colonial provisions for educating elite women and women in certain areas, a pattern that occurred throughout Africa (1999:11-13).

Such evidence of the pervasive and far-reaching effects of missionary activity is an important explanation of persisting ideological legacies, educational emphases and power relations in the post-colonial period. Ifi Amadiume offers this evidence in her Daughters of the Goddess, Daughters of Imperialism (2000), and shows how the culture and ideology that currently drives conservative women's organisations in Nigeria can be traced directly to a colonial legacy. Using the Marxist formulation of "class reproduction", she considers how certain Nigerian women and girls were inducted into a colonial world that encouraged them to espouse materialistic and patriarchal values, and how this world has been reproduced in the present through elite women's organisations. This structural analysis of culture and politics explains the hegemony of conservative organisations, why they have proved so influential and resilient, and why the goals of social status, career advancement, material reward and "feminine respectability" have proved so important for many women.

Comparative and detailed analysis that traces connections between Christian-inflected policy and education would contribute to understanding the current hegemony of certain discourses of respectability among African women, as well as a legacy that continues to affect curricula, institutional practices and gender streaming in schools. Existing explanations have been piecemeal; there is scope for synthesising this work and tracing overarching historical patterns.

Anthropologists like John and Jean Camaroff have examined the agency of women in Zionist churches in South Africa and the symbolism surrounding gendered spaces and meanings in religious belief. This work is connected to studies dealing with women in traditional sacred rituals or belief systems. These readings of religion as a philosophical system, and of the roles of women and feminine principles in pre-colonial cosmologies expand conventional understanding of women's powers in secular domains. An encouraging strand within such studies deals with the impact that African women, situated in traditional religions, can have on various developmental campaigns. For example, it has been shown how women prophets, healers and spirit mediums have contributed to the environmental projects and agricultural activities dominated by women in many parts of Africa. Tina Beattie, a feminist theologian who has lived in Zambia, Kenya and Zimbabwe writes:

In Africa, feminist Christians have made considerable efforts to introduce socio-political concerns into their theological beliefs. Rosemary Ruether, whose work has been widely embraced by many western Christian theologians, defines feminist theology in the following way: "The critical principle of feminist theology is the promotion of the full humanity of women… Theologically speaking, whatever diminishes or denies the full humanity of women must be presumed not to reflect the divine or an authentic relation to the divine, or to reflect the authentic nature of things, or to be the message or work of an authentic redeemer or a community of redemption" (1985:18). Drawing attention to the cultural biases of Ruether's central themes, Tina Beattie argues:

Some African women theologians have also focused on progressive connections between Christianity and aspects of traditional belief and ritual. Nigerian theologian, Daisy Nwachuku and the Ghanaian theologian, Elizabeth Amoh have explored the traditional rituals associated with such practices as polygamy, widowhood and childbearing to deal critically with aspects that contribute to women's subordination and to celebrate those that enrich Christianity and advance women's liberation (see Beattie, 2000:26-28). In Therese Tinkasiimire's "Women's Contributions to Religious Institutions in Uganda" (2002), the author traces the role of women in positions of leadership in the Anglican church, the Catholic church and the Muslim community to the authority vested in women priestesses, mediums and religious specialists in pre-colonial east African societies. Acknowledging that women were generally dominated and discriminated against in these societies, she shows that their acknowledged influence in certain spiritual and educational affairs for communities offers a precedent for them to pursue rights to religious leadership in the present context.

In the sphere of Islam, enormous inroads have been made since the consolidation of western-centric studies of women's uniform oppression by Islamic forces. From the eighties, Fatima Mernissi's sociological work on Morocco (1985, 1988a, 1988b) fleshed out women's agencies in the context of Islamic law and values. This approach has been developed in scholarship during the nineties by Hale (on the Sudan), Badran and Karam (on Egypt), and Lazreg (on Algeria), all of whom demonstrate how Muslim women in Africa have resisted the patriarchal appropriation and deployment of Islam. Their work on Islamic feminisms in Africa uncovers a vibrant tradition of consciousness and activism that has long challenged women's subjugation. Karam's delineation of three schools of feminism, Islamic feminism, Muslim feminism and secular feminism indicates different forms of affiliation with religion: Islamic feminists, grounding their vision firmly in Islamic teaching, search for models of gender equity in what is perceived to be the different but equal gender roles prescribed by Islam. Muslim feminists, arguing that Islam needs to accommodate women's rights, have tended to look to secular models for their activism. Secular feminists claim that women's struggles need to be located beyond religion and separate their religious beliefs from their struggles for gender justice.

Badran's (2001) recent work on feminism in the Mashrique, by highlighting the intersection of these feminisms, shows that the connections between religious and secular discourses have led to a new holistic feminism. Given the intellectual and political exchanges between feminists in the Mashrique and those in countries like Egypt and Algeria, the latter are likely to witness increased cross-fertilisation between discourses as they encounter new forms of religious ascendancy within the state and the law. Overall, the Egyptian legacy as recounted by Mernissi (1985, 1988a, 1988b), Karam (1998) and Badran (1996) illustrates a long engagement among African women scholars and activists with religion. This situation has empowered certain Muslim feminists to rally religious discourses in challenging growing patriarchal attitudes in the recent agitating for Islamic states. Dealing with Sudanese women's use of Islamic teaching in struggles for human rights from the sixties to the eighties, Sondra Hale (1997) shows how they have battled to resist the growing hegemony of patriarchal Islamism in this country. Lazreg (1994) claims that Algerian feminists and scholars have generally not developed within Islamic traditions. This has meant that they are relatively ill-equipped to engage in tactical and informed debates surrounding ascendant Islamic nationalism.

Beverly Mack and Jean Boyd's One Woman's Jihad: Nna Asma'u, Scholar and Scribe (2002) contributes significantly to studies of African women and Islam by shifting the focus away from Northern Africa to Nigeria. Exploring the life and work of a Nna Asma'u, a Hausa woman legendary among many Hausa in Nigeria, but about whom there has been no written scholarly interpretation, this work deals both with her life experiences in relation to her rapidly changing world, and with her writing, especially her poetry. One of the main observations made by the authors is that certain Islamic traditions of encouraging (separate) education for girls could prove very empowering for young women. Asma'u was born at the start of the eighteenth century, well before the colonisation of Nigeria and the introduction of missionary education. Because scholarship and piety were linked in the Islamic tradition into which she was born, Asma'u grew up both as a devout Muslim, and as a thinker, teacher and writer, whose intellectual work was socially valued. The authors are therefore able to offer fresh perspectives on the extent to which Islam offered certain African women access to formal education and literacy, which, by the time of Nigeria's independence, was available to a very small percentage of women.

Feminist interventions into systems of post-colonial education have dwelt on exacerbating discrimination against girls in primary and secondary school education, especially those who are poor and live in rural areas. Rudo Gaidzanwa (1997), dealing with Zimbabwe, and N'dri Assie-Lumumba (1997), focusing on continental trends, both show that post-colonial policies vastly transformed admission criteria and facilities to reverse colonial practices of under-educating Africans. They go on to show that these measures did not enhance the enrolment and performance of girls. As Assie-Lumumba argues, wider gendered hierarchies and divisions of labour actively undermine policies aimed at increasing education for girls, with situations in poorer communities - heavily reliant on female labour in spheres like agricultural work and trade - militating against girls' performance and enrolment in schools. It has been noted that the economic and political crises continuously wracking many post-colonial countries place special pressures on girls to leave school and work from an early age. Mbilinyi, Mbughuni, Meena and Olekambaine (1991) note an anomalous situation in Tanzania, where expansionist policies since independence have specifically targeted the unique difficulties facing girls, even though they have not always had desirable effects.

Apart from the gendered socio-economic factors undercutting expansionist policies for girls, discriminatory policies in many African school systems actively entrench male biases. For example, pregnancy among schoolgirls has often been severely punished, with girls being expelled or prevented from re-registering after giving birth. The punitive attitude to young women's sexuality, and the failure to target the boys and, in many cases, the men who father schoolgirls' children has been marked in a number of countries. Even when punishing pregnant girls is not codified in policy-making, the state's non-interference is evidence of its neglect of glaring male bias. The punitive attitude towards girls' sexuality also reveals a starkly puritanical Christian and missionary legacy in schools, with girls being singled out as those whose moral values need to be strictly policed.

Another example of continued gender biases in schools is manifest in the feminisation of professions. Assie-Lumumba (1997) demonstrates that this process, which is constantly changing, leads to jobs and vocations being downgraded relative to the proportion of women entering them. Occupations such as primary school teaching or nursing, currently dominated by women, have undergone similar shifts to those in the west. The links between this process and gender streaming is important. Few post-colonial states have intervened into assumptions that women's "natural" abilities are conducive to certain occupations, with formal and informal gender streaming preparing girls for roles in downgraded occupations, rather than for "masculine" ones in technical, scientific or administrative vocations. The engendering process in formal education is manifested in the preservation of a strongly masculinist ethos in schools. Aggressive competitiveness, rigid hierarchies and routine corporal punishment all continue to be the norm in many schools. This creates an environment that obviously alienates girls and disadvantages their performance.

Grossly unequal opportunities for young girls in schools highlight the urgency of interventions - at different levels - that seek comprehensive solutions to women's poor performance and low enrolment. Describing these solutions, Assie-Lumumba writes "Educational problems cannot be treated as though educational systems were closed-circuit systems. Education is conceived to produce and reproduce citizens, women and men, who are trained in accordance with a model of society established by the dominant class. Indeed, it is only radical solutions that could allow for real changes, far-reaching changes with substantial results" (1997:313).

As studies on Egypt by Badran (1996) and Karam (1998) reveal, the history of women's education in this country indicates strikingly divergent trends because of the distinctive history of formal education in countries where the dominant religion was Islam. Although there was no place for women in the traditional Muslim school system, the introduction of secular schools from the start of the twentieth century drew heavily on a Muslim legacy relatively independent of colonial values and traditions. This tradition, even where institutions were controlled or run by the colonialists, was more autonomous from the colonial value system because of the prior existence of a legacy of formal education, of texts for instruction, of literacy skills and of distinct institutions.

With the establishment of schools for girls and places for women in universities, Egypt generated a rich tradition of women's scholarship and feminism (see Badran, 1996). It is important to note that girls and women generally attended single sex schools or universities, and that the first schools formed in the early 1900s concentrated on preparing girls for roles as wives and mothers. Badran notes that from the 1930s, there was an increasing trend to introduce standard curricula among girls, even when schools continued to be segregated (1996:147). The scale of Egyptian girls' enrolment and their impressive academic performance in segregated schools tend to support the idea of empowering girls academically by separating them from boys, a thesis at the centre of international educational debates on how to empower girls in the context of pervasive gender discrimination.

Work on gender in relation to higher education necessarily needs to address cross-cutting issues. These include the production of feminist knowledge and the growth of women's studies; the institutional cultures of higher educational institutions (which addresses pressing issues of sexual harassment in contexts where women's independence and authority are ruthlessly policed); the challenges that women face in combining activist work beyond the academy (and, very often, reproductive work) with teaching and research; and the place of intellectual work on gender in the context of Africa's current transformative needs. It is therefore important that the theme of the launch issue of Feminist Africa, a new continental journal devoted to gender in Africa, is "Intellectual Politics" and focuses on gender in relation to Africa's higher educational landscape (see http://www.feministafrica.org). The editorial of the launch issue affirms ways in which gender teaching and research, despite considerable odds, are rapidly transforming the face of African higher education:

Feature articles in the publication deal provocatively with the subjects of knowledge production ("Between Knowing and Imagining: What Space for Feminism in Scholarship on Africa?" by Charmaine Pereira), the African intellectual diaspora and neo-imperial knowledge production ("African Universities and Globalisation" by Paul Zeleza), and institutional cultures (Jane Bennett's "Exploration of a "Gap": Strategising Gender Equity in African Universities"), and offer dynamic models of feminist research on education that transcend the cataloguing of statistics or an atomised attention to institutional dynamics.

While studies of women in university education have been less developed than those dealing with school systems, discussion of Egyptian women, because of their enrolment in universities from 1929, has been noteworthy (see Badran, 1996). Badran (1996) and Karam (1998) trace the strong tradition of women in Egyptian universities. But the situation has had mixed effects. While women have often occupied important academic positions, they have had few opportunities to transmit their values and vision to the wider society. The situation in Egypt therefore echoes circumstances elsewhere in Africa, with feminists generally concurring that future educational policy will need to address women's key roles in educational administration, decision-making and planning. In a report aimed at influencing educational planning and policy-making in Tanzania, Patricia Mbughuni, Ruth Meena, Marjorie Mbilinyi and Priscilla Olekambaine (1991), each exploring different levels of education, all point to the importance of women's strategic involvement in decision-making and policy-implementation. Another significant contribution to education that deals with Tanzania is Amy Stambach's "'Education is My Husband': Marriage, Gender and Reproduction in Northern Tanzania" (1998). Stambach intricately explores Chagga women's feelings about education in relation to independence and marriage and writes: "A Chagga friend's comment has long intrigued me: 'Education is my husband,' she said, in response to a Chagga man's suggestion that she get married soon…. " (1998:187). The detailed fieldwork that informs Stambach's study allows her to explore Chagga women's choices, perceptions and options in relation to education in ways that are methodologically and theoretically very suggestive for gender-related research on education.

Statistical information and trends have been mapped out for other countries in policy-related studies. For example, Tripp (2000) describes the effectiveness of affirmative action in Uganda, when various gender advocacy groups lobbied the Makerere University administration to change admission criteria for women students. Organisations like ACFODE, ABANTU, the Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE) and the African Women's Leadership Institute have been especially instrumental in monitoring and promoting women in university education. In line with the belief that university education prepares women for a range of leadership positions, they have acted on the tactical necessity of targeting universities to generate gender transformation in different spheres.

Existing studies of higher education have focused both on the urgent and pressing need for increasing the numbers of women students and staff in universities as well as on the numerous cultural and political legacies, curriculum and administrative biases and masculinist cultures that constrain women students' entry into universities, their performance as students, and the general well-being, opportunities for career advancement and freedoms of women academic staff. Influential studies of African women in higher education, including those by Rudo Gaidzanwa (1997), Assie-Lumumba (1993; 1997), Eva Rathgeber (1991, 2002), essays in Bloch, Beoku-Betts, and Tabachnick's Women and Education in Sub-Saharan Africa: Power, Opportunities, and Constraints (1998) and a recent book by Joy Kwesiga, Women's Access to Higher Education in Africa: Uganda's Experience (2002) deal carefully with figures and statistics, detailing the overwhelming dominance of men in higher education. They also, however, offer comprehensive analyses of why this has been the case. They consequently explain why gender imbalances are not easily addressed through affirmative action or any "straightforward" measures of redress. Joy Kwesiga's Women's Access to Higher Education (2002) deserves special mention as a recent study of local circumstances that also addresses wider histories and potential challenges for transforming higher education in sub-Saharan Africa. The study therefore exemplifies the value of a comprehensive and probing exploration of factors, ranging from cultural values and practices to poverty and structural adjustment, in understanding the deeply-embedded relationships, structures and attitudes that oppressively position women in Africa's higher educational institutions. As is the case with Assie-Lumumba, therefore, Kwesiga's analysis demonstrates the need for "radical solutions that … allow for real changes, far-reaching changes with substantial results" Assie-Lumumba, 1997: 313).

Popular education has been pivotal to such spheres as gender-based violence and HIV/AIDS. Civic education workshops around gender relations have grown in response to demands for addressing proliferating gender-based problems. Although civic education has tended to increase as countries face challenges to deal with gender issues in numerous fields, it has not been systematised as a field of research specialisation and training. Gender training has tended to evolve in distinct spheres in response to contingent needs. Teaching methodologies have therefore surfaced to confront different contexts, and scope remains for systematic consolidation and coordination.

In a pioneering comparative study of gender in popular education in third-world contexts edited by Walters and Manicom (1996), Walters observes important changes, both in Africa and globally, affecting trajectories of popular education. With the emphasis on overarching national patterns such as communism and nationalism, popular education was geared toward the large-scale popularising of state ideologies and preparing citizens for united nation-building. The shifting role of the state in relation to the needs of different communities and interest groups and the fragmentation of master narratives has led to a concentration on particular policy-related issues. Small-scale gender development projects and the growing importance of gender training workshops for HIV/AIDS will make research on the pedagogy and appropriate subject-matter of feminist civic education an increasingly important priority.

Two recent publications that explicitly target gender trainers are Mager and Blake's Masculinities in the Making of Gendered Identities: A Getnet Guidebook for Trainers (2001), and Gender Training in Ghana: Politics, Issues and Tools (2000), edited by Dzodzi Tsikata. The first of these is notable for the way it opens up careful exploration of how gendered identities are created through particular historical and cultural experiences. The goal of transforming gender hierarchies is therefore rooted in the need for comprehensive awareness-raising and education in such fields as identity-construction, culture and language. The book therefore avoids the superficiality and preoccupation with immediate "solutions" that often characterises gender training, and focuses instead on the need for thoroughly understanding and transforming gendered consciousnesses. Gender Training in Ghana: Politics, Issues and Tools also develops a holistic and analytical emphasis. The range of essays in the book collectively demonstrates that "politics" is integrally connected to the variety of "issues" at the centre of gender transformation, and that adequate "tools" need to be rooted in a comprehensive understanding of gendered relations and the radical strategies needed to transform them. As such, it contests the trend among state and donor-driven advocacy and developmental approaches to atomise and simplify gender "issues" and "tools".

The African Gender Institute offers a valuable resource for tracking gender and women's studies on the continent through its website and directory at http://www.gwsafrica.org. Listing both individuals and institutions, the directory sets out to "identify those engaging in gender and women's studies in African higher education institutions, and to establish their institutional capacity and areas of specialisation" (Mama, 2002). One of the main findings of the survey indicates a contradiction between capacity and resources on the one hand, and on the other, the dedication of individuals and groups who have driven the development of a profoundly embattled field in their respective contexts. Capturing this, Mama writes in her introduction to the directory:

Deborah Kasente (2002) fleshes out these comments in her portrait of Africa's oldest gender and women's studies department, the University of Makerere's Department of Women's and Gender Studies, and describes the financial and resource constraints under which it has been operating since its establishment in 1991. Testimonies of the beleagured status of African gender studies departments and programmes, as well as of individual academics who have struggled to introduce gender research and teaching into their universities are revealing about a range of situations. Among other things, they pinpoint the quagmire out of which feminist knowledge has struggled to emerge and to flourish in Africa, as well as the fortitude and commitment of dedicated feminist groupings and individuals.

Although statistics on and descriptions of departments and programmes in Africa permeate a variety of personal narratives and studies of various themes, there has been little methodical comparative work on women's studies programmes and teaching in Africa, or attention to its development and prospects for its future growth. The topics are frequently discussed in the context of trends in scholarship or reviewed in relation to the strengthening of institutions, but have rarely constituted in-depth study in themselves. In South Africa, where gender and women's studies has had a particular history of engagement with women's studies and feminist theory in the west, two noteworthy publications have sought to trace the origins of the field: Deborah Gaitskell's Introduction to the Journal of Southern African Studies' special Issue on Gender (1983) and Belinda Bozzoli's "Marxism, Feminism and South African Studies" (1983). While both appraisals focus on a very particularly South African legacy, they offer important methodological approaches by exploring the origins of a field in studies that simply "made women visible" before considering how emerging gender analysis and feminist approaches address complex issues of power and identity in African contexts.

Important reviews of gender and women's studies have also come in the form of reports on workshops held by the Network for Women's Studies in Nigeria, with Number 1 being edited by Amina Mama, a second by Charmaine Pereira and a third by Abiola Odejide and Ifeoma Isiugo-Abanihe. In the first report, Bolanle Awe surveys the growth of women's studies over a decade and warns that "The danger of donor-driven research which might be following an international agenda rather than addressing the needs of the people is very real" (see Mama, 1996:12).

As Awe observes in her comments on Nigeria, the nineties witnessed a steady upsurge in gender analysis as a tool in African knowledge production, as well as in teaching at tertiary level. The networking and advocacy among Africa's women scholars concerned with launching women's and gender studies teaching was an important current during the early nineties, and included the work of the Gender Equity Unit at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa and the Network for Women's Studies in Nigeria. Especially notable developments in the setting up of teaching and programmes include a Women's Studies Department at Makerere University, established in 1991, the Development and Women's Studies Group at the University of Ghana, the Gender Unit at Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique, Institutes of Development Studies - which all focus on women and gender - in Zambia, Botswana and Zimbabwe, and the African Gender Institute in Cape Town, South Africa. [21] Yet it is important to assess the progress of women's and gender studies teaching in Africa not so much in terms of the quantitative upsurge of departments or courses, but in terms of their impact and objectives. As Awe (1996) warns, the upsurge of gender advocacy in the context of state-coordinated development indicates how easily women's studies can lose its political force and ultimately simply service conservative state initiatives for ameliorative gender training and advocacy.

Given this danger, it becomes crucial to pose challenging questions about the role and shape of women's studies programmes. A particularly important question is how they are to avoid the trend in certain western universities of simply promoting individual scholarship and academic advancement that has little substantive contact with gender advocacy and civic education. Another issue concerns the need for programmes that galvanise in-depth and critical scholarship for empowering independent and critical students, rather than those that simply prepare them for bureaucratic positions in the state machinery. This challenge is not dealt with simply by the voluntarist action of feminist scholars. While academics may be willing to undertake rigorous and progressive teaching, they can be constrained by funding limitations, institutional constraints and a host of other factors [22] . These multiple constraints suggest enormous challenges for feminists as they strive not only to launch women's studies programmes, but to monitor and invigorate them, often under extremely trying conditions.

[21] For a detailed survey of gender and women’s studies programmes in different African countries, visit http://www.gwsafrica.org/directory/index.html.

[22] See Kasente’s (2002) discussion of recent trends at Makerere for an illustration of this point.