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

Women, Politics and the State

In 1989, Staudt and Parpart edited the first substantial comparative study of women and the state in Africa, providing a highly-influential resource for women's and gender studies teaching and research. Since then, the multiple and complex strands in the field of women, politics and the state have been traced by African women scholars who identify key concerns within the rapidly-shifting terrain of African civil society, the state, nationalism and militarism. Frequent collaboration between women scholars and women's organisations and networks in Africa has shaped a vigorous tradition of continentally-grounded work on politics and the state. The growth of this tradition is promising in view of the expansion of organisations and networks that have been publishing scholars' work. Earlier organisations like AAWORD, formed in 1977, and the Women's Research and Documentation Centre (WORDOC) in Nigeria, established in 1986 have published numerous studies of women, politics and leadership [17] . More recently, ABANTU for Development has been responsible for cutting-edge work on organisational change and peace-building, and has been augmented by organisations such as Amanitare, which focuses on women's health issues This proliferation of organisations should bode well for developing and increasing the volume of African publications. It is important to note, however, that the circulation of this suggestive work is still hampered by the relative weakness of publishers and research networks on the continent. Accessing the range of innovative work in this field consequently requires careful archival work and searches that are often more painstaking than conventional Internet or library catalogue searches.

1. Women and Politics in the Pre-Colonial Period

It has been observed that an important theoretical strand of work within African feminist theory revisits the pre-colonial period to reassess women's roles and statuses. Challenging imperialist views about the victimisation of traditional third-world women, many anthropologists and historians are increasingly stressing women's powers during this period. Mama's mid-nineties study comments on the paucity of research into women's roles and gender relations during the pre-colonial period, going on to observe that many writers have dwelt on mythological aspects. Recent seminal anthropological and historical works, however, suggest significant shifts.

In a bibliographic essay published in 2000, Margaret Snyder writes that, "New research raises questions about earlier theories that women were quite autonomous in pre-colonial times" (2000:1038). Snyder tends to deal with one strand in the research. The range of writings on this period, writings that embrace history, anthropology and interdisciplinary research, indicate that theorists have advanced strikingly different conclusions.

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get money glass shower enclosure farmland for sale vacation rentals barcelona spain spider mite control laws of the universe how to build stairs canandaigua aldis groceries zelune fresh for school mc master-carr grex p630 amelia earhardt decoraci n bilbao devis autocommutateurs how to forward email surplus hydraulic winch alyssa kinnaird yamaha sno-scoot cryptic gallbladder splatter ball watch company trainmaster justin tmberlake amy racina pr server l'yser erotic furry cartoons eva mendes porn ocracoke island realty jeff harkins knives alligator gars executive outplacement johnstown pa foundation la caixa videogrlvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Two broadly diverging arguments emerge in studies produced since the early 1990s on women on pre-colonial Africa. On one level, historical work, as exemplified in studies like Sandra Greene's Gender, Ethnicity and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast: A History of the Anlo-Ewe (1996), Barbara Cooper's Marriage in Maradi: Gender and Culture in Hausa society in Niger, 1900-1989 (1997) and Marcia Wright's Strategies of Slaves and Women: Life Stories from East/Central Africa (1993), analyse the distinct forms of pre-colonial gender inequalities and hierarchies. Dealing with differences and connections between gender relations during the colonial and pre-colonial period, these works offer evidence of the value of the gender concept, rather than jettison it. They are also, however, strongly concerned with the agency of African women during the pre-colonial period. For example, Greene draws on an array of oral and archival sources to consider how women, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, negotiated relative powers and independence in relation first to clan elders and later to the colonial state. Developing Greene's thesis that pre- and colonial gender relations were articulated in complex ways, Marcia Wright shows how particular women's locations in kinship structures allowed them to marshal certain powers in relation to authoritative men, and how this negotiated authority was undermined with the colonial practice of buttressing chiefs and male elders.

In contrast to scholarship foregrounding gender hierarchies during the pre-colonial period are studies that both contest that gender was a significant social category and that affirm women's spiritual and secular authorities, a situation that changed with colonialism. Ifi Amadiume (1987, 1990, 2000), taking this approach to an extreme, has established an influential paradigm for this thesis, and her prolific output from the eighties to the present day draws on a range of evidence. A recent work, which draws similar conclusions in interpreting pre-colonial African women, is Oyeronke Oyewumi's The Invention of Women: Making African Sense of Gender Discourses (1997). Her study is anchored in an ambitious discussion of Western philosophical, conceptual and linguistic traditions and argues that patterns of defining human bodies in social and cultural terms is not a feature of the Yoruba society with which she is concerned.

Although Oyewumi stresses that Yoruba society was strongly hierarchical, she insists that gender, a concept foreign to the pre-colonial worldview, did not play any meaningful role in determining power relations and subjectivity. The value of Oyewumi's work lies in its analysis of the cultural framing of "gender", and, more broadly, of the cultural biases that inevitably underpin feminist terms and assumptions. This analysis is grounded in a lengthy linguistic and philosophical analysis of power, subjectivity and society in pre-colonial Yorubaland. But it is debatable whether her argument, ultimately discrediting the significance of hierarchical relations between men and women in pre-colonial Nigeria, acknowledges how complicatedly language and social relations reflect gender hierarchies, even when those hierarchies are very different from the patterns manifested in other extensively theorised contexts.

Pat McFadden has spoken out strongly against the tendency among scholars like Amadiume and Oyewumi to jettison "gender" as un-African:

Interestingly, their common dismissal of the notion of gender as 'Western' comes from a peculiar reliance upon the very intellectual traditions that underpin the disciplines of social anthropology and ethnography. The academic language…is drawn largely from the stock of traditional ethnographical and anthropological sense making, different only in that it is applied via a claim that because it is an African female academic who is using the language, it therefore assumes a different meaning. (2001:60)

Also noteworthy here is the extent to which Oyewumi, like Amadiume, appears to contest a Western-centric tradition of stereotyping African women, yet capitulates to a colonial tradition of mythologising and exoticising their mysterious powers. The mythic figure of the powerful African matriarch, prominent in early studies such as Denise Paulme's Women of Tropical Africa (1963), has enjoyed enormous sway as a symbolic construct. The reliance in recent scholarship on this construct is an alarming indication of the impact of Western discursive inventions of African women, where anthropological units of analysis have been used to demonstrate (or inscribe) the essentialised difference of African from Western societies.

Arguments offered by Oyewumi and Amadiume, although open to contestation, create a suggestive conceptual space for reassessing the apparently universal concepts that have too long been central to influential feminist research. While the powers that Amadiume invests in African women may not entirely reflect women's pre-colonial positions, and while the absence of gender as a linguistic term does not necessarily disprove the existence of power relations between men and women, Amadiume and Oyewumi's unsettling of many concepts and hypotheses has helped generate new research into pre-colonial African women, and created a receptive context for further work in the field.

This innovative work is well evidenced in Heike Becker's recent work on Namibia (2000). Becker takes up as her central thesis the idea that women in the past had a significant share in political power, ritual leadership, and the transmission of oral history and traditions. They were also able to negotiate significant forms and degrees of power in their sexual and economic lives. She goes on to show that careful historical investigations indicate that "gender" was not the only determinant of a woman's margin of power and identity, and that factors such as age and class significantly influenced women's powers in secular and religious domains. Becker's ideas resonate with the insights of Oyewumi and others who have critiqued the universality of cultural and linguistic expressions of gender hierarchies, although they enlist more rigorous analysis and historical evidence. They are consequently at the cutting edge of an important growth area in African feminist research. These ideas are also manifested in Sylvia Tamale's research on Ugandan women's contemporary participation. Here she traces their public roles in the present to political participation in the past to show that pre-colonial women "wielded social and political influence through indirect methods; physical absence did not equal political passivity" (1999:5). Challenging the assumptions of African male scholars and Eurocentric commentators who have reduced women to victims, Tamale identifies a space for African feminist scholarship which is both cognisant of women's agency during the pre-colonial period and marked by historical and critical insight.

2. Women and the Post-colonial State

Studies of women and gender in relation to the state focus both on women's access to and powers in the state and the law, and on women's role in governance and the gender dynamics of governance, policy-making and political participation. The first wave of scholarship on women and the state dealt with the impact of the colonial and post-colonial state on women, with studies of women's participation in policy-making and governance emerging mainly later. Since the mid-nineties, the number of studies of women and statecraft has risen considerably, with studies of women in statecraft having formed a growing field during the last five years. Earlier studies like Tsikata's (1989), Manuh's (1993) and Kabira at al. (1993), have been supplemented by work by Albertyn (1995), Derryck (1997), and Longwe (2000). A number of more accessible works, produced or commissioned by organisations have supplemented these studies to target mixed audiences of trainers, NGO workers, civil society organisations as well as researchers and academics. These would include the Emang Basadi Women's Association (1999), European Parliamentarians for Africa (1998) and the EU-funded Parliamentary Support Programme in South Africa (1999).

The growth of this accessible documentation reflects women's growing visibility within African governance and statecraft during the post-colonial period. The reasons for this new prominence are complex, often contradictory and by no means always encouraging. Contributing factors would need to take into account the expansion of a global women's movement, which has put pressure on governments to accommodate women's participation in democratic governance. The impact of this movement is evident in organisations ranging from the United Nations and the World Bank to donor NGOs and foundations like SIDA, DANIDA and Ford, which often make recipients' commitment to gender transformation and women's empowerment a prerequisite for funding. They would also involve the global, continental and regional events and movements that have pressured non-democratic governments to accommodate women's participation in governance and policy-making.

In the nineties, such events would include the Beijing Conference, which identified among its twelve critical areas for priority action three areas, Education and Training of Women, Women in Power and Decision-Making and Institutional Mechanisms for the Advancement of Women; all of these directly concern women's participation in the state. Other important events and movements are the first Women of Africa and the African Diaspora Conference (an event which sparked off important networking and led its founding organisation to support a range of gender-based human rights concerns in Africa); the hosting by CODESRIA of the conference, "Engendering African Social Sciences" in 1991; and ABANTU's gender and governance conference in 1995. Also important has been the formation of the African Women's Leadership Institute, an outgrowth of Akina Mama wa Afrika, which broadly trains women "for informed leadership positions that will ultimately promote a progressive African women's development agenda"; as well as the work of the numerous women's peace organisations that have mushroomed on the continent. By the mid-nineties, it had become clear that African women could no longer be seen as the passive subjects of state power, with many regional feminist events and organisations - often apparently small and un-dramatic - steadily putting pressure on the masculinist, autocratic and reactionary structure of post-colonial states.

In the sphere of women's access to the state and its impact on African women, an important basis for research has been provided by Parpart and Staudt's pioneering Women and the State in Africa (1989). The collection of essays is framed by an introductory theoretical debate which sets provocative agendas for ongoing research. The volume includes case studies of Nigeria, Zaire, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe and highlights the importance of the intersection of private and public spheres for African women. Later contributions which suggestively open up questions for further research on women's relation to the state have centred on citizenship studies, an area that conceptualises their constitutional and legal status and rights, as well as their social standing and "belonging" within national communities and civil society. These latter positions often prove more difficult to monitor and investigate, since they are shaped by ideology, popular culture and everyday practice, rather than by laws, formal structures and institutions.

Citizenship for African women in the twentieth century presents a very different scenario from the struggle for citizenship shaped by the suffragette movement in the West. Because African women played key political and productive roles throughout the twentieth century, their battles have not taken the form of breaking out of constricting domesticity into male-dominated public spheres. Instead, their struggles have involved hierarchically gendered entries into and access in the public spheres of politics and productive labour. Generally, it has been demonstrated that citizenship for African women has very distinctive meanings and histories in Africa. Sylvia Walby explores these in the following way:

In most First World countries there is a period of several decades between the granting of political citizenship to men and to women. This is quite different from the circumstances of many Third World countries, where women won the franchise at the same time as men at the moment of national independence from colonial power. …For third world women political citizenship is typically achieved before civil citizenship, the reverse of the order for men. (1996:246)

With the post-colonial period, questions of citizenship have acquired key importance and have been approached from a variety of angles. One of these revolves on customary law. Here Ann Stewart's contribution to Women and the State: International Perspectives, a collection edited by Rai and Lievesley (1996), proves very suggestive. Using case studies of four women from Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Botswana, Stewart plots the controversies surrounding their claims to rights ranging from land claims to citizenship. She shows how "customary law has articulated with metropolitan state law to place women in particularly invidious situations in asserting their rights. While the heavy elitism of the state has coexisted with a nominal commitment to women's rights, the populism of customary law has often given women even fewer opportunities to assert or pursue their rights" (1996:38). Developing this argument, Jacobs and Howards' discussion of state policy in Zimbabwe describes women's extreme vulnerability in the face of dual laws. The Legal Age of Majority Act, which gave women new powers in divorce, marriage and custody, is contradicted by their designation as infants in Customary Law, with many "men being able to refer to the law they find most beneficial" (Jacobs and Howard, 1987:32).

The precariousness of women's positions in relation to metropolitan, as well as customary law has been pronounced in most parts of Africa, where the colonial powers instituted systems, ostensibly based on tradition, which caricatured aspects of pre-colonial governance and both increased and solidified the powers of male chiefs and elders. Generally, gender relations and identities have been integral to the construction and reproduction of colonial state strategies and apparatuses. This is suggestively explored in Martin Chanock's Law, Custom and Social Order (1985) and The Making of South African Legal Culture, 1902-1936: Fear, Favour and Prejudice (2001). After independence, governments either came under pressure to maintain the "customary" patterns of authority instituted under colonialism or had vested interests in their preservation. Green, citing Jana Everett, observes that "it is during the process of state consolidation and expansion that gender inequalities become particularly instrumental in elite survival strategies… This is true of even the most progressive, revolutionary states, which, in an effort to co-opt traditional elements, have routinely disappointed women. Whether the state is authoritarian or democratic, traditional leaders are a crucial interest group that the state needs to satisfy" (1999:77). The consequences of the state's capitulating to customary law have often been disastrous for poor and rural women when they turn to the justice system to defend their land or human rights. This makes the subject of women and customary law, especially in the context of much of the charged continent-wide support for customary law as authentic and traditional, an area that sharply distinguishes the field of gender, the law and rights in Africa from discussions in contexts that use only one legal system.

A key contribution to African debates is Nhlapo's "African Customary Law in the Interim Constitution", from the thought-provoking anthology of South African case studies, The Constitution of South Africa from a Gender Perspective (1995). Locating his analysis in the controversies preceding the introduction of a new constitution in post-Apartheid South Africa, Nhlapo captures the dynamic between customary and metropolitan definitions of the law and rights in African societies undergoing change. Most importantly, he stresses that customary law, far from representing pre-colonial forms of authority, encoded rigidly autocratic and patriarchal elements that bolstered colonial and apartheid hierarchies. His overarching argument, one which resonates in many African contexts, is that the constitutional recognition of customary law signals governments' glaring betrayal of women's rights. It is startling today that, as protests against autocratic post-colonial states escalate behind the aegis of populist politics, "customary law" may gain legitimacy as authentically African legal systems and increasingly undermine women's hard-won gains since independence.

The important work in this area, including essays collected in early work like Hay and Wrights' African Women and the Law (1982) and Martin Chanock's Law, Custom and Social Order (1985) should not be seen as the definitive work on a dormant or fading subject. Writing in 2001, Pat McFadden registers the ongoing relevance of feminist critiques of customary law when she comments on such practices as the raping of young girls in preparation for marriage or as a cure for HIV/AIDS, incest and domestic abuse, and widowhood rites that persecute women as evil, as witches or as polluted. She concludes: "These are the laws which make it possible for men to continue violating women in the home even though it has become a crime to do so, because often women find themselves outside the justice delivery systems which are constructed as 'anti-family' and 'anti-custom'" (2001:68). While McFadden provides a timely judgement of the hugely damaging impact of religious-based and customary laws in Africa, it is noteworthy that certain women have been able to secure a certain measure of power and authority within customary systems. This is the conclusion reached by Heike Becker (2002) in her discussion of post-independence politics in rural Namibia. A study like Becker's acknowledges that, even though custom may be codified as a sacrosanct and timeless system to suit conservative patriarchal agendas, it can often be transformed in relation to the social dynamics and political struggles of its context.

Another issue that distinguishes African women's social standing as citizens concerns the ways in which women are defined, both as icons and as participants, in national collectivities. For many anti-feminist commentators in Africa, mothering and motherhood define legitimate and natural roles for women as citizens, with these nurturing responsibilities being seen to validate women's public statuses and roles. Internationally, feminist interventions on motherhood and citizenship stress the conservativism of these ideas. Uma Narayan, criticising the view that "motherhood should be regarded as a citizenship activity"(1997:52), therefore writes: "I believe feminist interpretations of the idea of citizenship as social standing need to resist locating the dignity and worth of individuals in their capacities to be contributors to national life, and to insist that dignity, worth and social standing matter to all who are participants in national life, that is who are part of the national community, independently of how they contribute to it" (1997:2). Narayan suggests that motherhood may be coerced, with women being obligated to serve the "national interest" without enjoying the freedom of choice and movement that participatory citizenship - defined in terms of dignity, worth and social standing - should entail. In her seminal study of women's relations to national communities in South Africa, Ann McClintock (1995) deals intricately with the ways in which women have been positioned as symbols of the nation. The value of McClintock's study in the context of feminist discussions of nationalism and gender in South Africa are very clear. But it is also important to note the potential of McClintock's line of inquiry into expanding gendered discussion of national and ethnic projects that pervasively affect women's social standing as citizens.

A number of recent commentators on nationalism as a global phenomenon have agued that nationalisms, contrary to Benedict Anderson's persuasive prognosis a decade ago, have proliferated alongside unprecedented violence and atrocities committed in the name of national and ethnic purity (see for example, Nixon, 1997). Contemporary state proliferation and ascendant ethnic nationalism have generated new forms of social engineering, militarisation and violence. As Rob Nixon shows, central to the ascendant nationalism in such contexts as Rwanda are collective imaginings of the body politic, of ethnic cleansing and of ethnic purity. Because of the cultural precariousness of ethnicity as opposed to race and nation, ethnic nationalisms may prove more virulent in their defences of purity and the body politic. And in this context, gendered tropes and relations that configure ethnic boundaries as feminised, define rape as a strategy for ethnic cleansing, target women as passive symbols of the purified collective and men as the phallic agents for its defence, and prioritise familial imagery entrenching gender stereotypes, have become increasingly rife.

These trends warrant African feminists' increased attention to the intimate and inescapable connections between gender, citizenship and ethnic formation and conflict. McClintock's rich study offers methodological and conceptual pointers for such work. This research takes gendered studies beyond documenting women's unique suffering and experiences of violence; instead, gender is defined as an integral component of ethnic formation, this facilitating more comprehensive, enduring and radical challenges to existing power structures. It is noteworthy that the most penetrating and insightful analysis of the Rwandan genocide, Mamdani's When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (2001) has only tentatively touched on questions of gender. Path-breaking research into sexual slavery, sexual torture, rape and other forms of gender-based violence associated with civil wars is reflected in contributions to What Women Do In Wartime (1998) edited by Turshen and Twagiramariya. A more recent collection, edited by Sheila Meintjes, Anu Pillay and Meredeth Turshen (2002), confronts the extent to which gender influences social reconstruction, identity formation and consciousness in post-war situations. While the anthology explores African countries like South Africa, Nigeria and Namibia, the inclusion of studies of contexts like Yugoslavia, Sri Lanka and Haiti creates a textured comparative framework for considering the intersection of violence, gender and social transformation. Although many contributions judiciously indicate how gender violence is perpetuated in ostensibly "post-conflict" situations, the anthology as a whole is a rich exploration of possibilities for change where gendered relations are correctly made central to agendas for social transformation.

The rising number of studies of women and statecraft in Africa is reflected in countries where women's participation has increased. It is therefore noteworthy that a range of research and information, comprising populist and accessible handbooks or leaflets and scholarly studies, has proliferated in Uganda, with its long-established affirmative action programme for women, and South Africa, which has one of the most gender-sensitive constitutions in the world. A significant comparative study on this subject is Anne Marie Goetz's "Women in Politics and Gender Equity on Policy: South Africa and Uganda" (1998).

The bibliographic database http://www.wougnet.org/new3/Documents/BIB/bib_politics.html, based on listings compiled by Shela Jhaveri and Margaret Snyder (Bibliography of Research on Uganda Women, 1986-2001), captures the range of Ugandan studies on women and statecraft. Alongside books by Aili Tripp and Sylvia Tamale are a number of journal articles and chapters in books including Byanyima's "Women in Political Struggle in Uganda" (1992), Kakwenzire's "Preconditions for Demarginalising Women and Youth in Ugandan Politics" (1996), Mugyenyi's, "Towards the Empowerment of Women: A Critique of NRM Policies and Programmes" (1998), Ahikire's "Women, Public Politics and Organisation: Potentialities of Affirmative Action in Uganda" (1994), as well as numerous short studies by Tripp and Tamale.

Sylvia Tamale's When Hens Begin to Crow: Gender and Parliamentary Politics in Uganda (1999), is an especially detailed and thoroughly researched project and suggests approaches for expanding work in relation to other African contexts. Tamale's theoretical framework and empirical detail draw attention to the complexity and political unevenness of state power, and she introduces her study by claiming "I perceive state institutions as a reflection of a location of history and culture, with their power sites always shifting" (1999:26). Locating her examination of the post-colonial state in rigorous analysis of pre-colonial law as well as the colonial state, Tamale explores the evolution of women's participation in relation to increasing gender equality and policymaking in Ugandan society. She refuses a model that presents women as recipients of state benevolence. Instead, she highlights the multiple and often small-scale processes which directly and indirectly pressured the patriarchal state to launch the affirmative action programmes of the eighties, and especially the 1989 ruling that at least 39 seats in the Ugandan parliament be reserved for women.

Another feature of the radicalism of Tamale's analysis is her sobering assessment of the class biases within women's participation. The author shows how certain women continue to be excluded from parliamentary politics through such mechanisms as educational qualifications, and that the interests of women legislators are frequently at odds with women constituents. She also stresses that simply increasing the number of women parliamentarians does not automatically lead women MPs to initiate gender-sensitive policies. Male-centred institutional cultures and many women's fear of or inability to challenge entrenched patriarchy often mean that little substantive changes occur in the wake of increasing quantitative representation. Her analysis here is connected to the trend within feminist scholarship on the state towards a Foucauldian emphasis on the gendering of institutions and social forces in ways that massively reduce individuals' roles.

Tripp, also dealing with Uganda, develops this line of argument in stressing the limitations of women's representation in government when institutions themselves are pervasively marked by gendered hierarchies and masculine laws. Karam's Egyptian study (1998) extends this analytical framework and draws directly on Foucault to explore the intricate interplay of gender, religion and the state. Her view of the gendered state is therefore one that acknowledges the intricacy of forms of hegemony, negotiation and subtle coercion that it coordinates. Rather than defining power as an overwhelming force from above, Karam acknowledges that the state is often reproduced through the "ongoing creation of a relationship which encourages the complicity and consent of the subordinate partner or partners" (1998:25). In an extremely important recent comparative study of Uganda and South Africa, Anne Marie Goetz and Shireen Hassim (2002) contribute to existing feminist critiques of the intricacy of gendered state power in Africa and women's parliamentary representation in African state-building, and offer methodological and conceptual leads for feminists to deepen rigorous investigation of ways in which patriarchal states use women's participation to gain legitimacy.

Similar arguments about the limitations of women's quantitative representation have surfaced in an innovative study produced by South Africans Debbie Budlender, Tanya Goldman, Tanya Samuels, Piers Pigou and Nahla Valji, Participation of Women in the Legislative Process (1999). Unlike studies like Tamale's, Tripp's, and Goetz and Hassim's, the latter work is aimed at an audience within the NGO and legislative sector, rather than at academics and researchers. Its methodological focus, shaped by the goal of raising awareness of the need to mainstream gender in parliament, offers a model of well-researched and accessible work likely to strengthen knowledge - across the board - of women's participation in legislative processes. Situating their study of the South African parliamentary system in global initiatives for achieving gender equity, they appraise gains that have been made while rigorously evaluating the difficulties of transforming parliament's institutional culture. A different kind of South African project is the collection of essays in Taylor, Mager and Cardoso's Cracks in the Edifice: Critical African Feminist Perspectives on Women and Governance (2000). Developing comparative studies of gender developments in governance and participation, this work offers many challenging political and research questions for studies in the rest of Africa.

While some of the writers surveyed above have picked out progressive currents within women's involvement in politics, Mama deploys the concept of "femocracy" (1999), a term which sharply alerts our attention to the extent to which women may become complicit with autocratic regimes. Mama's sobering views are clearly connected to her focus on militarised Nigeria, a context offering few of the promising indications of transformation which Tamale and Budlender are able to locate. Mama highlights the extent to which a women-led oligarchy has worked to buttress Nigeria's masculinist military dictatorship while simultaneously serving the interests of a small group of elite women. This movement, she shows, has appropriated the rhetoric and discourse of women and development without acting on the need for meaningful gender transformation. Building on cautions raised by many feminist analyses of the recent African state, Mama's argument serves as an important warning against two dangerous assumptions. One is that the visibility of women in the state apparatus automatically indicates gender justice, while the second is that the rhetoric and language of gender politics within the state is a guarantee that gender justice is being addressed. Mounting evidence of women in the state apparatus, and the post-colonial state's increasing use of the rhetoric of women's empowerment, create ongoing challenges for feminists as they confront the meagre changes for women that have been instituted by the state. As governments face the pressure to democratise from human rights organisations, from donors and international organisations, it is becoming increasingly important for them to co-opt both individual women and groupings who pay lip service to gender equity, who use the state apparatus for capital accumulation and who ultimately consolidate power and support autocratic bureaucracies.

It is noteworthy that feminist critics differ in their assessment of the role of femocrats (see Tsikata, 2000:10). A writer like Amanda Gouws, registering arguments developed by Eisenstein and Miller and Razavi, defines femocrats as role players who often articulate and work with the agendas of progressive women's movements (1996). Feminists' diverging views about femocracy are largely shaped by the distinctive political climates, institutional cultures and feminist legacies they confront. Currently, femocracy poses many questions for ongoing critical inquiry as feminist activists and scholars on the continent grapple with the complexities of women's relations to state bureaucracy and patriarchal institutional cultures. As a first-hand account of her involvement in parliamentary politics, Miria Matembe's Gender, Politics and Constitution Making in Uganda (2002) offers a noteworthy inside view into women's participation. A woman who played a key role in ACFODE, a major force in the women's movement in Uganda, Matembe went on to become a member of the Ugandan Constitutional Commission and to table gender as a central issue in national politics before becoming minister of Ethics and Integrity. Her book is noteworthy in offering insights into the growth and challenges of a defiant woman whose politics and vision are shaped by, among many other factors, her childhood in rural Uganda, her particular educational history at Makerere and at Warwick, her work experiences in commerce, and the available discourses of independence and authority she was able to draw on.

3. Nationalism, Militarism and Peace-Building

Studies of women and nationalism from the colonial period to the present day demonstrate a gamut of interpretations, and reflect broader progressive views about the changing role of nationalism on the continent. In the fifties and sixties, mobilisation and action under the banner of national freedom was central to popular politics that included women's self-determination in the build-up to independence and in the years immediately thereafter. Decades later, the control of African states by neo-imperial and local bourgeois role-players led to increased disenchantment with the rhetoric and practice of nation-building, which is increasingly seen as the ideology of autocratic, neo-imperialist and patriarchal state formation.

Early studies of women's movements highlight the militancy of African women involved in nationalist processes as well as their agendas vis-à-vis male-centred nationalism. Often produced by or based on the testimony of women with first-hand experiences of political struggle, these include many accounts of women's experiences of armed struggle; experiences which encouraged women to take up unprecedented positions and relationships towards men in public life. Studies like Dike's edited collection, The Women's Revolt of 1929: Proceedings of a National Symposium to Mark the 60th Anniversary of the Women's Uprising in South-Eastern Nigeria (1995), Urdang's Fighting Two Colonialisms: Women in Guinea-Bissau (1979) and Wilson's The Challenge Road: Women and the Eritrean Revolution (1991) are particularly noteworthy here. Research which thoroughly excavates details in histories of women's anti-colonial participation, like Angolan Women: Building the Future From National Liberation to Women's Emancipation (1984), 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), correct the male bias in mainstream appraisals of nationalism. They demonstrate how pivotally women were involved in the grassroots and foundational structures on which independence struggles in Africa were based. The documentation of these movements also indicates their working-class and peasant orientation. In view of the heavily elitist emphasis in post-independent politics, these histories of women's anti-colonial struggles reveal the extent to which the contributions of both women and the working classes were outmanoeuvred by elites.

A related issue concerns the gendered politics of these movements. In her exploration of Algerian women in public life, Marnia Lazreg (1994) shifts concern away from considerations of whether these movements were "feminist" or not. Arguing that women involved in armed struggle against nationalism automatically experienced changes in the ways they confronted, were situated in and conceptualised power relations, she shows how gendered struggles were implicitly incorporated into women's anti-colonial struggles. Her account of the consequences of Algerian women's participation is crucial in assessing the gendered politics of women's anti-colonial struggle throughout Africa. These consequences included the formation of groupings and bonds larger than those existing between women during peace-time; their role in educational, business or paramedial activities which gave them new responsibilities and authority; their involvement in missions beyond the gendered spaces they usually occupied; and the relationships forged with men as co-activists and collaborators (Lazreg, 1994:138-140). These factors, shifting relations within and perceptions of gendered hierarchies, encouraged women to experience major forms of political awakening - whether or not their anti-colonial activity directly challenged men's authority or not. Lazreg concludes: "Revolutions against hunger, unemployment, poverty and political discrimination are necessarily revolutions in structures of consciousness" (1994:140). This intervention into theorising women's anti-colonial involvement powerfully identifies the distinct contours of feminist awareness in Africa and other parts of the third world. It offers invaluable insight into a militancy often disputed by certain claims that African women's nationalist involvement was emphatically "pre-feminist" or "non-feminist". Lazreg's efforts to reposition women in nationalism as self-conscious and active historical agents is also evident in Susan Geiger's Tanu Women: Gender and Culture in the Making of Tanganyikan Nationalism, 1955-1965 (1997). Geiger examines the life stories of women active in the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) and demonstrates how they forged an independent sense of national (and often pan-African) solidarity, with distinct conceptions of tolerance, solidarity and loyalty.

To a large extent, the early euphoric celebration of women's involvement in nationalism was a function of the celebratory and optimistic tenor of anti-colonial struggle and the post-independence challenge of nation-building. Changing alliances and configurations of power in the post-colonial state have made women's involvement in party-political politics and in "national" ventures coordinated by the state increasingly fraught and invidious. This difficult situation makes civil society organisations and initiatives key sites of progressive national change and development. Yet recent studies of women and politics highlight the complexity of women's involvement in civil society initiatives. Because civil society, as Tsikata (2000) observes, often perpetuates practices that discriminate against women, women may sometimes turn to the state to challenge gender discrimination in civil society initiatives. Women's organisations may therefore need to negotiate complex and shifting allegiances between two sets of institutions and structures.

Women's problematic status in the post-colonial state apparatus has also led to increased disillusionment with prospects for women's participation in nationalism. In Africa, the disillusionment has sparked off a body of gendered research on nationalisms, research which intersects with studies undertaken in many third-world contexts. Important earlier examples here are essays collected in Nira Yuval Davis' Woman-Nation-State (1989) and Kumari Jayawardena's Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (1986). Showing how women have been incorporated into male-centred nationalisms by playing strong and "masculine" roles, these works powerfully demonstrate that women in nationalist struggles and nation-building projects remain subordinated within the overall gender hierarchy despite their powerful roles.

In the recent explosion of interest in gendered nationalism worldwide, research has been strongly comparative. A key study here is Blom, Hagemann and Hall's collection, Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (2000). As Blom observes in her introduction, comparative research "is well under way today - to analyse parallels and differences within Asian, African and Western culture in the interaction of gender and nationalism" (2000:6).

Central to this work has been a growing emphasis on culture, ideology and the discursive imagining of nations. In her "No Longer a Future Haven" (1994), Ann McClintock illustrates this concern by analysing the role of family icons and myth-making in South African nationalism. This area of research paves the way for ground-breaking analysis of masculinity in the imagining and growth of national and ethnic collectivities in Africa. In her "Khaki in the Family: Gender Discourses and Militarism in Nigeria" (1999), for example, Mama traces connections between patriarchy and collectivity in Nigeria's military regime. Overall, however, studies of masculinity remain relatively undeveloped in scholarship on nationalism from the eighties to the present day. Numerous studies register the extent to which masculinity is implicated in nationalism, ethnic chauvinism and violence on the continent, yet few studies focus systematically on disentangling the complex histories of African masculinities and patriarchies. Peter Knauss' The Persistence of Patriarchy: Class, Gender and Ideology in Twentieth Century Algeria (1987) offered the foundation for important subsequent work. To some extent this has been developed in Chenjerai Shire's path-breaking "Men Don't Go to the Moon: Language, Space and Masculinities in Zimbabwe" (1994:38). Dealing with the many "domains in which men are constructed as 'men' through language and space", he shows how African masculinities have been framed by shifting power relations shaped by colonialism, migrant labour and anti-colonial resistance. This work on multiple and historically constructed masculinities offers a precedent for further exploration in different local and national contexts, and also indicates the urgent relevance of identity studies to contemporary processes of transformation and collective identification.

An important site in Africa for women's political interventions is national machinery. Positioned in-between the state bureaucracy and civil society, often dependent on international donors, and coordinated by governments, national machinery offer extremely slippery terrain for progressive women's movements in Africa. The intricacies of this machinery and the details underpinning national machinery for women have been comprehensively explored in the Third World Network-Africa National Machinery series. Influential feminists from research networks, NGOs and academia (including Tsikata, Ofei-Aboagye, Wangusa, Dambe, Chisala and Nkonokomalimba and Meena) have produced comprehensive papers in this series which contribute pivotally to understanding the nuances of women's interfacing with the state, with civil society, with NGOs and with overseas donors (2000).

While the research on nationalism is yet to register fully the complex impact of gender in state-coordinated nationalism and ethnic nationalism, recent work on militarism, highlighting escalating war and violence on the continent, has been sharply alert to the gendered dynamics of militarism and civil war. In earlier work on militarism, scholars like Jacklyn Cock (1991) writing about South Africa, and Urdang (1989) dealing with Mozambique, show how militarism, like nationalism, draws on traditional gender hierarchies to incorporate women in conventionally nurturing roles. Horace Campbell has produced important recent work on this theme by dealing with Angola (1999, 2001). The gendered implications of militarism and its impact on women are comprehensively examined in the anthology, What Women Do In Wartime: Gender and Conflict in Africa (1998), edited by Turshen and Twagiramariya. Here Twagiramariya and Turshen's " 'Favours' to Give and 'Consenting' Victims: the Sexual Politics of Survival in Rwanda" and "Women Denounce their Treatment in Chad", written by the Women's Commission of the Human Rights League of Chad in collaboration with the editors, are especially significant in highlighting the centrality of violence towards women in relation to state power and ethnic conflict.

A valuable comparative perspective, that includes a focus on African contexts and links different forms of gender-based violence, is offered by States of Conflict: Gender, Violence and Resistance, edited by Susie Jacobs, Ruth Jacobsen and Jennifer Marchbank (2000). By exploring violence against women ranging from the domestic level to the level of the state in contexts including Northern Island, China, India and South Africa, the book shows how deeply gendered violence is embedded in private and public life. While gender is the focus of analysis, relations like ethnicity, race and class are seen in many contributions to be intricately woven into power, conflict and change in different regions. These multiple relations surface clearly in Teboho Maitse's chapter on violence against women in the South African national liberation movement. Showing that nationalism and the struggle for national liberation in South Africa constructed a false sense of equality for women, Maitse examines ways in which black men have displaced their anger towards the apartheid state.

As Maitse's analysis reveals, much of the discussion of gender and state power shows how masculinity necessarily becomes a subject of inquiry, with emphasis being placed on the links between constructions of manhood and violence. Like much research on nationalism therefore, research on women and militarism develops a timely exploration of masculinities in Africa. In particular, themes of specific socio-economic circumstances and colonial or neo-colonial histories that shape gendered subjectivities for men means that writers carefully explain the trends towards masculine authoritarianism and violence. Given the widespread media and popular assumptions about the innate aggressiveness or authoritarianism of African men, these analyses offer important correctives.

More recent studies of militarism have highlighted the complexities of women and gender in relation to escalating violence and situations in which women have been actively involved in ethnic violence and civil war. An earlier tradition of defining women homogenously - often as the victims of male armies and masculine ideals - or as those who have been peripherally conscripted into armed conflicts has given way to efforts to tease out ambiguities in ways in which gender informs militarism, and in which women are involved in armed conflicts and violence. Importantly, studies of militarism in Africa which do not directly engage gender, such as the collection, edited by Hutchful and Bathily (The Military and Militarism in Africa), Seegers' The Military in the Making of Modern South Africa, Mamdani's Citizen and Subject and When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and the Genocide in Rwanda and Martin Chanock's Law, Custom and Social Order (1985) all powerfully point to the need to analyse masculine ideals, behaviour and cultural norms as these are shaped by particular historical circumstances, legacies and events.

Innovative articles take up these challenges in journals like Peace Review and the online Journal of Humanitarian Assistance [18] , while contributions to newsletters like Propeace, published in French and English in Kigali, have provided important empirical accounts of the rapid and momentous developments concerning women and war. Campbell's "Rwanda's Women: The Key to Reconstruction" (http://www.jha.ac/greatlakes/001.htm) suggestively explores women's pivotal roles in peace-building and raises important general implications for other organisations in Africa.

Studies of militarism clearly have a directly activist orientation, with insights feeding into significant initiatives for peace-building in Africa. Generally, it has been shown that women, because they manage households and are directly responsible for the survival of their families, suffer most during violent conflicts and wars. It has also been argued that working-class, rural and peasant women are usually directly involved in peace-building, although responsibilities for formal peacekeeping in Africa remain vested in men and socially privileged groups. This view, which informs the policies of women's peace movements, is linked to an influential trend in feminist peace work and research. In her discussion of strands in feminist peace research, Linda Forcey notes that the most influential standpoint in research has been the essentialist one, emphasising the caring, relational, mothering qualities of women (1991:335). While the assumption that women are inherently caring and supportive of peace is clearly problematic, women's roles and situations during wars inevitably mean that they experience the effects of wars in very different ways from men. Facing unique pressures to care for children and the elderly, and especially vulnerable to random and unpredictable killings, torture, rape and displacement, they face the worst consequences of wars. This makes the "essentialist" argument a viable one for exploring women's unique potential contributions to peace-building work and research in Africa.

Studies of the nexus of intensified militarism and women's peacemaking initiatives are therefore at the centre of topical interventions into the war-mongering and ethnic battles in contemporary Africa, and are helping to shape the interdisciplinarity that is a distinguishing feature of feminist peace research. Forcey defines peace studies as being concerned with "the causes of war, violence and systemic oppression, and explores processes by which conflict and change can be managed so as to maximize justice while minimizing violence" (1991:335).

The rapid growth of women's peace projects in Africa already signals the visibility of initiatives committed both to peace-building and to understanding and challenging varieties of violence and war on the continent. In a comprehensive review published in Peace Review, Anna Snyder (2000) surveys these activities and shows that they include the Federation of African Women's Peace Networks (FERFAP), formed at a Pan-African Conference on Peace, Gender and Development in Rwanda in 1997, the Association of Mozambican Women for Peace (MWFP), which played a crucial role in ensuring peaceful elections in Mozambique in 1994, in Burundi and the Association of Women for Peace, formed in 1993 with an emphasis on peace education. IIDA is a Somali-based peace organisation which was established in 1991 and initially focused on aid and relief before turning to peace education and mobilisation among all clans, while the African Women's Peace Table was launched in South Africa in 2000. Femmes Africa Solidarite (FAS), formed in 1996, is a women's peace organisation which focuses specifically on promoting women's leadership in the prevention and management of conflict. Like FERFAP, it has worked to create networks and dialogues between different African women's organisations. Many of these organisations produce newsletters, magazines, reports and publications that offer invaluable statistics and records of women's experiences. An accessible publication that attempts to document these experiences, offer theoretical perspectives, and makes recommendations is War in Uganda: Voices of Women, written and published by the Uganda Women's Media Network (1998). This study is a key example of the accessible intellectual work that could play a direct role in addressing women's needs in the context of spiralling war.

Notable studies reflecting recent initiatives and mapping out the specifically gendered implications of women and peace-building in Africa are The Gender Implications of Peacekeeping and Reconstruction in Africa and The International Dimension of Peace Building and Conflict Prevention, Resolution and Management in Africa: African Women's Concerns, both published by ABANTU in 2000. The first of these deals with the need to mainstream gender into contemporary processes of peacekeeping that include regional intergovernmental organisations and civil society initiatives. Incorporating contributions from writers who include the director of a centre for conflict resolution, and key figures within the OAU and UN, the study registers the voices of the different role players active in present-day peacekeeping initiatives. The second work, focusing especially on the role of the United Nations and the European Union, considers how African women's perspectives on conflict and peace-building are to be situated alongside international processes concerned with Africa. It also includes recommendations on how the African Women's Committee on Peace and Development (AWCPD) can work on international initiatives for peace-building in Africa.

The origin of peace research in women's day-to-day experiences and hard-won battles, the way many writers and researchers within peacemaking have been situated at the centre of the conflicts with which they engage and the intersection of militarism in Africa with vested neo-imperial interests, are all factors which will shape distinctive radical subject-matter and methodological orientations in future African feminist peace studies.

4. Gender and State Policy

The state's co-ordination of gender advocacy in much of Africa massively impinges both on the fate of critical feminist scholarship and gender activism on the continent. Studies of statecraft by Tamale (Uganda), Lazreg (Algeria), Gaidzanwa and McFadden (Zimbabwe), Mama (Nigeria), Hale (Sudan), Hassim, Gouws and Budlender (South Africa), and Tsikata (Ghana), among many others, necessarily deal with the gendered implications of state policy. So does much work on areas directly linked to state policy like labour, health and education. But examining the evolution of state policy from the colonial period to the present day helps to explain the current form of public policy, the tricky relationship between critical independent scholarship and gender initiatives and the often confused or ameliorative gender initiatives of the state.

In a highly suggestive article on Ghana, Tsikata identifies a schism between policy activism and intellectual activism on gender in Africa, a situation that has meant that "research has not had a fundamental impact on the work of activists, organisations and on state policy formulation" (1997:381). She goes on to claim, "while analysis has shown that state action is often both gender-blind and gender-biased, both independent and state-sponsored activists have sought to rely solely on the state to outlaw gender discrimination, with limited success" (1997). The systemic and structural nature of the problem presents difficulties that cannot easily be remedied. Tsikata's historical approach to policy is extremely valuable, since it develops more than a critique of existing state policy and considers how patterns develop, how pervasively they have affected gender research and activism and, implicitly, how they can be changed. Reviewing historical trends helps to explain the constrained dialogues between critical feminist scholarship and gender activism and the reasons for the highly visible, yet remarkably ineffectual state-inspired gender policy-making throughout Africa.

In what follows, sections on labour, health and education demonstrate the rigour of work on gendered policy. In this section, I outline salient processes that have created a particular legacy for gender advocacy in different parts of Africa. Three pivotal processes are identified: the long-term effects of the gender biases of the colonial state; the role of new post-colonial states in de-radicalising women's movements after independence; and the proliferation of ad-hoc policies during the post-colonial period. This overview is extremely broad. It underplays historical and social details that make each country's policies distinctive. It is intended, however, as a survey of the scenario of gendered policy-making, activism and scholarship on the continent.

Colonial policies have had far-reaching consequences on women's present positions; consequences which the male biases in post-colonial policy-making have done little to correct. Much research on education demonstrates that the period immediately after decolonisation often witnessed dwindling numbers of girls in schools. Dealing with Zimbabwe, Rudo Gaidzanwa identifies "a decline in the proportion of girls in senior secondary school since 1980 despite the expansion of free primary schooling and growth in numbers of secondary schools" (1997:288). Explaining these patterns only with reference to the gender blindness of the post-colonial state does not address the long-term impact of colonial policy in structurally entrenching gendered divisions of labour, the domestication of women and deep-seated stereotypes of women's statuses and roles.

With the growth of the mining and agricultural industries under colonialism, men were rapidly recruited to work in mines and on farms, a practice that went hand in hand with women's systematic exclusion from waged labour. In most cases, colonial policy entrenched women's positions in pre-capitalist economies by instituting a cult of domesticity entirely at odds with women's actual roles. While men were "legitimately" employed in the capitalist economy, women often migrated unlawfully to the cities to meet the demands of cash economies. This led to their employment in the informal sector as, for example, traders, petty commodity producers, sex workers or manufacturers and retailers of food and liquor. As much research on this period shows, all of these activities, as well as the migration of women, were strictly policed by different colonial administrations.

Colonial definitions of women's urban work as peripheral and unlawful, together with the stereotypes surrounding their presence in towns, continue in the post-colonial period. Describing public perceptions of women's informal trading in Ghana, Tsikata notes the dominance of the perception of "market women in urban areas as an undifferentiated mass of …corrupt elements who bear responsibility for Ghana's economic problems" (1997:399). Dennis (in Afsar, 1987:21) makes similar observations about women traders in Nigeria. She shows how the military government of the eighties blamed women traders for economic crises, with the state's modernising and disciplining missions instituting a formidable array of mechanisms against working women in cities. Dealing with Zimbabwe, Jacobs and Howard show how the government, immediately after independence, instituted policies of urban population control targeting women in ruthless round-ups (1987: 39-44). Throughout Africa, the low status, demonising and scapegoating of women's urban economic activity continues to affect their battles - often to meet subsistence levels - in the informal sector.

Another feature of colonial economic policy was the marginalisation of women farmers. While women in the rural areas often took responsibility for farming, colonial policies buttressed highly autocratic patriarchal relations of ownership, inheritance and law. As Mbilinyi's Big Slavery shows in relation to Tanzanian women (1991), this meant that land ownership and control were firmly vested in men, even though women were the primary agriculturalists in rural areas. The disempowerment of women farmers persists in the present, with post-colonial policy-making often capitulating to rigid patriarchal definitions of customary law or perpetuating gender blindness in such legislation as inheritance laws.

Women's exclusion from the formal economy was mirrored in their exclusion from the colonial political administration. Colonial states generally developed strong relationships with men as workers, administrators and officials. In Francophone, Lusophone and Anglophone Africa, women were generally positioned in Catholic, Victorian and other paradigms of domesticity. Needless to say, these paradigms entirely distorted their de facto activities as farmers, breadwinners, household heads or political activists. The cult of domesticity imposed through colonial rule and ideology has had enormous practical and ideological implications for many African women. From an ideological perspective, it has been central to ways in which nationalism - articulated by male elites schooled in the colonial educational system - defined decorous roles for women as mothers of the nation or the handmaidens of anti-colonial struggles.

On another level, Tamale, describing the salience of domestic science teaching in missionary education for girls in Uganda (1999:11), captures the ethos that fixed standards of womanly conduct in many African countries during the years after independence among women themselves. Jessica Ogden's "'Producing' Respect: The 'Proper Woman' in Post-colonial Kampala" (1996) deals with women's self-regulation of their social and sexual behaviour in the face of tremendous material and ideological pressure. Focusing on the widely-defended notion of the "Proper woman, omukyala omutufu" she shows that "as participants in post-colonial Kampala, women actively generate the means and meanings by which they can obtain respect and respectability, and be identified as Proper Women" (1996:165). While Ogden seeks to avoid portraying Ugandan women as passive dupes of patriarchal ideology, and demonstrates ways in which they seek to negotiate dignity and authority within their immediate communities and the broader society, she points clearly to the hegemonic patriarchal discourses that circumscribe their ideas about a socially-valued self.

Overall, the cult of domesticity shaped by colonialism set major ideological constraints for conceptualising powerful roles for women. Rooted in colonial prescriptions for "civilised" and "feminine" positions for African women, the view that women's legitimate duties were to their immediate families and homes has been all-pervasive. Tsikata's Ghanaian examples of opposition to some of the government's progressive gender legislation are revealing here. She shows that legislation aimed at promoting equal work opportunities for women was solidly contested by MPs claiming that women, rather than compete for employment opportunities with men, had primary responsibilities to their families, with the government's new legislation threatening to promote delinquency and emotional stress for children. Focusing on Nigeria, Dennis locates efforts to police women's altruism and wifely duties in the context of the War Against Indiscipline and the military dictatorship of the eighties (in Afsar, 1987: 19-22). Capturing the aggressive conservativism of the backlash against gender equity, these examples highlight the hegemony of views endorsing archetypically feminine roles for women in post-colonial nation-building.

With the transition to independence, the new ruling parties rapidly set about consolidating and unifying the diverse and militant women's organisations that had mushroomed during the struggles against colonialism. The militancy and independence of women's movements in countries like Algeria, Ghana, Zimbabwe and South Africa rapidly dissipated as women's wings were yoked to the new ruling parties. With this co-opting of many grassroots and local women's movements, political lines of difference (which might have sparked off important realignments, mobilisation and consolidation for radical women's organisation in the post-colonial period) were reduced to personality struggles and petty conflicts.

Tsikata demonstrates this situation in Ghana (1997: 393) while Gaidzanwa reflects on the co-opting of the women's movement in Zimbabwe and South Africa (1992). Extending the argument to Kenya, Tripp shows how the Kenyan African National Union steadily increased its grip on women's organisations to turn the dominant Maendeleo ya Wanawake into a party wing eventually declared the sole representative of Kenyan women (2000:9-10). Lazreg develops similar conclusions in her discussion of how women involved in Algeria's armed struggle were later confined by the patriarchal agendas of post-independent Algerian nation-building (1994). In an important contrastive study, Tripp shows how Ugandan organisations were able to elude state co-option. Focusing on the concept of "societal autonomy", her study is an important discussion of conditions shaping the independence of Ugandan women's movements, a position that has generated the vigorous gender struggles in the country today (2000).

A final consideration in explaining the general impact of state policy on gender concerns the fragmentation and conservativism of post-colonial policy-making. Generalising about state policy on gender in the third world, Haleh Afsar writes:

Third Word states in general…do not have coherent policies abut women, nor do they usually have structural facilities for co-ordinating their decisions. Given the tension within bureaucracies and the almost total absence of discussion between the separate branches of the executive, it is not surprising to find the introduction of policies which have radically opposed implication for the lives of women and make at one and the same time contradictory demands of them. (1987:3)

Many of the pioneering feminist studies of African state policy today, including Tsikata's (1997), Tamale's (1999), and Tripp's (2000) demonstrate that it is often liberal or Women in Development approaches that frame state policy and generate funding. Post-colonial governments, under pressure to democratise from donor agencies and an international community, have been quick to embrace ad hoc, piecemeal and uncoordinated gender initiatives. This creates situations where gender is arbitrarily woven into policy-making in the absence of any long-term vision or context for meaningful gender transformation. At times, legislation may be surprisingly radical. Yet this is often not connected to legislation in all areas, so that concerted policy-making in certain sectors may be out of step with its absence in others, or particular pieces of progressive legislation may be undermined by unmonitored gender discrimination in the wider society. Tripp expands this bleak picture of state control over gender advocacy by showing how many African governments have regulated funding sources for progressive activism and planning (2000:10-11). By monitoring NGOs, many African governments have sought to ensure that funding potentially aimed at progressive and state-independent gender initiatives is channelled through the state's agendas for development and policy-making.

The coordination of gender advocacy mainly under the impetus of indigenous patriarchal anxieties about meaningful gender equity, external pressure and western prescriptions has had far-reaching consequences for women. Although the picture that emerges is of vigorous and high-profile gender activism, planning and policy-making, the reality is often evidence of governments' nominal engagement with women's rights. Feminist work in the field of labour, the economy and health all focus critically on state initiatives. Yet it is usually the legacies and patterns traced above, rather than this insight and rigour that infiltrates policy-making. A notable recent effort to demonstrate the value of critical gender analysis and research to policy-making is Gender Training in Ghana: Politics, Issues and Tools, edited by Tsikata (2000). The emphasis among many African governments on liberal and externally driven models of development for women is, however, an enduring problem at the start of the twenty-first century.

The salience of the state in gender initiatives can easily create the impression that it offers a flourishing source for gender research and documentation. It is easy to assume that the voluminous research, mechanisms and information generated by different governments creates an encouraging climate for future work, especially when these are linked to significant donor support and international mechanisms. The fact that they have not done so poses a crucial challenge to African feminists seeking to forge connections between their intellectual work and radical activism.

One way in which this challenge has been met is through feminist scholars' active intervention into sites created or opened up by donor organisations and the state. For example, the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research team in Ghana, whose findings were published in 1998 as the Women in Public Life Research Report, made a comprehensive effort to survey the roles and status of women in public life. The detailed report includes empirical information, analysis and recommendations rooted in feminist agendas. These have been ratified by the Ghanaian government and will be reflected in its future planning. Another example of feminist scholars' participation in research directly attuned to interventions is the summary report, Education in Tanzania with a Gender Perspective, edited by Marjorie Mbilinyi and Patricia Mbughuni (1991), which grew out of a research project funded by SIDA. The findings of the authors of the report, Marjorie Mbilinyi, Patricia Mbughuni, Ruth Meena and Priscilla Olekambaine, are encapsulated in the form of proposals that include policy recommendations (the introduction of an Equal Opportunity Policy), national machinery (an Equal Opportunities Commission), curriculum reform and interventions into primary, secondary and adult education. Gender work produced through the Centre for Basic Research in Uganda has also sought to influence policy-planning and implementation in fairly direct ways. This work is illustrated in A Dialogue on Gender Dimensions of Agricultural Policy in Uganda (1996), a report written by Samson Opolot and John Ssenkumba, on a workshop aimed at making gender visible in Uganda's macro-economic policies. The National Machinery series, though less directly aligned with policy-making, performs a similar function of directly addressing existing platforms, statistical patterns and challenges for gender justice. Such projects have a direct bearing on policy-making and development and ensure that platforms for gender planning are oriented towards women, rather than towards those who have been instrumental in their subordination.

Footnotes