Every gain brings new challenges.
Every practice is informed by theory; every theory is born
of practice.
I am greatly honoured to be invited to give a keynote
address here, and thank the conference organisers for this privilege. We at the
African Gender Institute salute and welcome everyone here, believing that we
all share in being deeply concerned with women’s liberation from all the
multifarious forms of oppression that history has bequeathed to us- imperial,
military, political, economic, cultural, social and psychological. I believe we
are all here because we are engaged in some aspect of the struggle to transform
our world into a place in which women and men can be treated as fully human, no
matter how humble that contribution might be. In my case that contribution is
humbly given.
We have heard that the bearers of money are here, the
bearers of food are here, and we have been treated to rich cultural
performances. Now it is time for ideas.
My colleagues at the African Gender Institute share with
many of you, and especially with our sisters at Makerere University, in the
practical work of growing and strengthening liberatory feminist theory and
practice as a valuable means to that end.
Given the complexity of today’s world, replete as it is with
new informational, military and developmental technologies and tools, this is a
challenging task indeed. It requires as much attention to local dynamics as it
does to global forces, as much attention to theory and strategy as to practical
action.
The thoughts I will share with you
today in this address are informed by various practices– pedagogical,
intellectual, institutional, administrative, analytical and strategic. All
these practices continuously shape and are shaped by my ongoing critical
engagements with theory and ideas of our times. They are also informed by the
collective struggles of activists and scholars all over this continent, and
beyond. Decades after independence, and cognizant of the unequal global
politics of knowledge production, I assert our right to draw on and contribute
to international intellectual culture, and turn it to our own ends. I believe
that African women have always contributed to theory – not just as raw data and
cultural consumables, but as people who inspire, challenge and indeed produce
theory too. What passes for theory today has been strongly influenced by the
critical interventions of African and other non-Western intellectuals. This is
especially true within international feminist praxis, which owes much to the
experience of national liberation movements and the efflorescence of women’s
movements in former colonised contexts all over the world.
The movement between theory and
practice generates various tensions – hopefully creative ones: tensions that
emanate from the continuing hegemonies and inequalities between North and
South, between what is seen as ‘global’ and what is relegated to the ‘local’,
between what is defined as ‘theory’ and what is defined as ‘practice’.
There are also constant struggles
between the encrustations of old ideas and practices, and new ones trying to
emerge, through all the struggles that are being played out daily in
postcolonial institutions and polities. I would suggest that these struggles
are most acute in contexts where development has often been negative, and which
have often been defined as ‘developing’ societies – as if some societies have
stopped developing!
Our present location on the African
continent offers a unique and different vantage point. My colleagues and I
welcome you to a region which is an excellent venue from which to view and
reflect on global development and on the impact of dominant paradigms emanating
from the centres of global power, venues which despite their remoteness,
nonetheless exercise such a profound influence on all our lives. Because of
this profound influence, we need to analyse and understand these paradigms and
the ideas and assumptions that inform them – not abstractly, but in terms of
our own lived realities and their consequences. At times we need to resist them,
for many global paradigms have had inimical consequences in our communities,
our social relations, networks and organisations, and our organisational and
intellectual capacities.
Our academies have also provided a
forum for much critical thinking and visioning, but challenging ideas have not
always been welcomed; not by our politicians, our military rulers, nor by
international financial institutions. As a result many academics have turned to
passively servicing governments, and those who have not, have often been
marginalised and constrained. As a result intellectual freedom has been
severely compromised. Today, if we passively and uncritically embrace
‘globalisation’ and ‘marketisation’, happily adopting every new recipe for
‘good governance’ or even ‘gender equality’ – if we fail to interrogate the
paradigms and tools and fill them with our own meaning and interests, we run
the risk of further compromising our capacity, reducing our historic role as
the upholders of our people’s interests, and rendering mindless service to the
interests of international financial institutions directing ‘development’.
The depletion of critical
intellectual capacity means that our continent has suffered a severe
decapitation that has diminished our ability to determine our future, and which
has to be addressed, in forums such as these.
By the early 1990’s African
governments were spending as much as $4-billion per annum on buying over
100,000 expatriate technical advisers (Mkandawire and Soludo 1999:37)[1].
The quality of all this external direction and advice can in part be gauged
from the high rates of development project and planning failure.
Yet the theorising and directing of
development continues to be largely externally driven, and increasingly
technocratic, while our own public institutions remain incapacitated. Today in
some countries, the public sector has been so denuded that it has collapsed
completely, leaving whole populations at the mercy of military and economic
entrepreneurs, insecure and with very little public service or protection.
‘Development’ has now become a rather truncated discourse in a field dominated
by the financial monopoly of the Bretton Woods institutions, and reduced to the
dogma of Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP), with all the negative
consequences being attributed to ‘failure to implement SAP properly’.
Widespread popular resistance to SAP meant that it had to be enforced. With the
result it has often been accompanied by increased political authoritarianism
(Ake 2001)[2].
All this
suggests that we need to rethink, re-visit and re-theorise where we and our
societies are going. More then ever before, we need to take our experience
seriously, analyse it and revision our direction. On the surface, the two new
initiatives – the African Union (AU) and the New Partnership for Africa’s
Development (NEPAD), indicate that our leaders recognise this need. It remains
to be seen what will come out of this recognition, and indeed, the extent to
which women can advance a progressive gender agenda within these new
initiatives.Let me mention a few of the gains of the last few decades, before
moving to address what I view as the key challenges.
Gender continues to be one of the most important arenas for
political and social transformation in the African region, and there are now
many layers of gender struggle and much accumulated experience to consider.
Feminism has wrought significant changes on the
international development landscape. Today there are few, if any, agencies that
do not make efforts to take gender into account, and which do not devote some
resources to women’s development, whether through Women in Development (WID),
Women and Development (WAD), Gender and Development (GAD) or mainstreaming
strategies. Development practice has given rise to many new planning frameworks
and tools, all of which demand our critical attention, particularly from the
perspective of what development has achieved in terms of overcoming the
oppression, exploitation and marginalisation of women. While appreciation is
due for the contribution of the development industry, we should beware of a
tendency to be too grateful. We need to move cautiously. No funding comes
without its constraints and consequences, and there are today many different agencies,
all with different analyses and agendas, which we would do well to reflect on.
When it comes to gender politics,
it is fair to say - without dismissing the enormous daily struggles of women in
rural and urban communities - that on the African continent, feminist strategy
has often been very state-focused, and it is the state that has delivered most
of the gains. There are good reasons for the salience of ‘state feminism’ in
African contexts. The gender interests of women have largely been defined in
relation to the state, with women seeking to ensure that the modern state acts
as a bulwark against the often abusive excesses of both imperial and
traditional constructions of women. Women have directed much of their advocacy
towards the state. We have demanded that it deliver services that are in many
ways key to the de-privatisation of women’s oppression. We have called on the
state to enact laws to protect women from rape and gender-based violence, to
guarantee women’s human rights, and proscribe some of the extreme
manifestations of sexual oppression occurring in African contexts – child
marriage, female genital mutilation, the disinheritance of widows and such
like. It seemed a reasonable strategy. After all, African women not only fought
in anti-colonial struggles, but also later responded to the new nation-states
with great enthusiasm. We hardly need to be reminded that women embraced
nationalism, or that to the extent they have been allowed in, whether as office
cleaners or as Ministers, women have served the nation-state too.
The essentially liberal feminist strategy of entering and
lobbying the state has produced many gains in the form of many legal and policy
reforms, and these have benefited those women – regrettably always a minority -
in a position to take advantage of them. Larger numbers of women can be said to
have benefited from public education, health and welfare services.
Formal discrimination was thus largely removed from the
books in many countries. In other words, the political practice of feminist
jurisprudence has borne fruit, as women’s minor status in colonially-inscribed
‘customary law’ has been reformed, and women included in constitutional
provisions regarding citizenship.
Women’s active campaigns for the
adoption of affirmative action policies to ensure that greater numbers of women
could enter and participate in the public arenas have borne some fruit.
However, in most places public and corporate life is still very patriarchal.
Nowhere on earth has the
gender-just target of 50% been implemented, but some countries have adopted
some kind of affirmative action, notably Uganda, Ghana and South Africa. Where
it has been deployed, affirmative action may have had limited effects beyond
the increase in numbers, but it has worked. Those countries without it
demonstrate without doubt that it works, because without it women remain on the
outside. Take Nigeria as an example. Despite constitutional equality the number
of women in the newly democratic Nigerian political structures remains pitiful.
The same might be said of the United States of America, which certainly has far
fewer women in power than Uganda.
The United Nations Decade for Women consolidated the focus
on the state in the call for specific state structures to oversee the
integration of women into development (WID). The so-called ‘national machinery
for women’ was set up all over Africa during and after the decade. Indeed
Africa appears to have pioneered the national machinery.[3]
That these were structures which
received minimal support from government, did not cause much delay. Even
women’s movements have remained far too grateful, and rather silent on the fact
that national structures and policies were not accompanied by national
resources – they simply did not feature in the national budget. This suggests
that some may even have been set up because it was assumed there would be no
need to put the money where the mouth is – they are expected to be dependent on
external funding and expertise, despite the obvious problems this poses (TWN
2000).
These structures will remain skeletons without flesh unless
we rise to the challenge of making them more organic - more capable of pursuing
the interests of ordinary women.
Challenges
However, every gain brings new
challenges.
What does this focus on the state
mean in countries where the state has collapsed, or where the public sector has
been severely reduced? The gains made within the state are likely to be lost with
the diminution of the public sector, public services, and with the wholesale
privatisation of national assets that has been integral aspect of
globalisation.
It has become clear that without
further measures, the still modest increase in the number of women does not
translate into qualitative changes in the institutions themselves, or in the
services they deliver. Nor is it proving enough to overcome the male domination
of policy and decision-making. The numerical representation remains at the
stipulated target level, and over time is easily subverted, especially in the
absence of any definable women’s constituency. In multi-party systems, women
are divided across parties, and during elections, the vote is simply rigged to
favour women who will uphold the interests of the competing parties, rather
than pursuing gender interests.
The empirical picture offered by gender statistics worldwide
indicates the limited reach of legislative and policy gains. Why have the
results been so limited, that today African women in particular continue to be
so badly over-represented in all the indicators of mal-development and
underdevelopment? Illiteracy, ill-health, poverty, vulnerability to conflict
and violence, limited access to the law, limited capacity to take advantage of
progressive policies and so on: the picture is all-too familiar and depressing
to reiterate.
Challenges also arise from
the political context. We have
learnt that the finest of structures and strategies can be subverted. Even in
the most favourable scenarios, increased official interest in gender also
presents challenges, around the level of instrumentalism. Often ‘integrating
women into development’ or ‘mobilising women for development’ has translated
into exploiting women more efficiently in increasingly unfavourable economic
contexts, and hiding this modernization
of exploitation under convenient invocations of ‘tradition’,
‘complementarity’, without necessarily confronting the real challenge of
transforming contemporary gender contradictions or making our life-prospects
any better.
In the case of
authoritarian and anti-democratic regimes, illegitimate and discredited
governments have sometimes been able to capitalise on the international gender
political climate, deploying ‘the women question’ opportunistically, in a
manner designed to curry international favour, while disingenuously
domesticating their own image.
Today there are cases
where the laws, policies and official structures for addressing gender equality
exist, but these are not implemented or pursued. Progressive laws are not
upheld, policies are ignored, and budgets are not made available.
Indeed, some of the prettiest national gender policies are
in fact generic templates put together by international gender experts who
cannot be called to account, and who, in seizing the opportunity, naturally
tend to rely more on the international documents than on the local and national
realities. In a more democratic and less imperialistic world, national policy
would be a participatory localized process, researched, collectively
articulated and discussed, and developed in a manner that would ensure that
national conditions and concerns provide the basis for national policies, with
people, having an interest in them.
Policy development requires the bringing together of various
kinds of capacity – the bringing together of intellectual and political
capacity, as well as technical capacity. At present these capacities tend to be
located in separate institutions: economic power resides largely in international
financial agencies, political power resides in government, and intellectual
capacity is located in our increasingly fragmented academies.
Ill-conceived and
poorly-conceptualized or passive adoption of generic frameworks and checklists
that are not sufficiently animated by local realities, which profess to be
‘neutral’ rather than attempting to attend seriously to constantly-shifting
power relations and gender politics, are likely to fail, and in any case are
easily subverted.
The weakening of the state and the public sector also poses
challenges: challenges that force us to question the strategic focus on the
state and on formal structures and strategies. In the end we still have to
reckon with our societies - societies that are in some instances becoming more
rather than less misogynistic, reverting to overt violence and repression of
women. If the state is to be leaner and meaner, then we are going to have to be
smarter and sharper – more incisive in our analysis, better mobilized to defend
our interests in the arenas of formal power and beyond, in the corporate
sector, and in civil societies that are so often deeply uncivil when it comes
to women.
How do we face these challenges? What is clear is that the
pursuit of gender equality has become an increasingly complicated business,
very much linked in to the global development industry. The gender struggle has
become one that requires very specific kinds of critical, intellectual and institutional capacity,
worldwide, but nowhere more so than in the challenging circumstances of this
continent. Policy makers are not completely wrong when they identify a lack of
capacity and expertise as a major obstacle to implementing gender equitable
laws and policies, or simply say – “we do not know how to do this”.
How do we build strategic intellectual and institutional
capacity for women’s liberation?
We need to work towards a more active and calculated and
conscientious engagement between theory/research and policy/practice. In our
resource-starved contexts this requires particular forms of networking and
community-building. Where we do not have the resources for separate
institutions, let us work to bring our well-grounded theorists and
practitioners, and the people together, to foster a deeper engagement between
knowledge-building and social transformation. Let us work together to unleash
the critical and creative capacities of as many women as possible, so that we
can actually do a better job of advancing the development of this continent,
using what Amilcar Cabral famously referred to as ‘the weapon of theory’ to
bring about our liberation.
This requires that we work to generate locally-relevant
understandings of gender relations in our distinctive and special worlds, and
use this as the knowledge-base for our struggles and strategies, to assist us
in developing home-grown solutions to home-grown problems, and to guide us in
deciding which aspects of the generic tools and recipes we can in fact turn to
our own purposes and use.
We need to address this question because the distance
between theory and practice has particularly far-reaching consequences for all
those concerned with gender justice. Feminism, once put through a postcolonial
lens, offers a radically subversive agenda that goes against the grain of all
imperial interests, as well as against the grain of mainstream national and
African regional institutions. That means that boundaries must be pushed and
people’s deepest values overturned. It also means that where there are
opportunities we must be quick to seize and capitalise on them, before they
close up again.
However, the dialogue between theory and practice must be
carefully cultivated if we are to get beyond passive servicing. It requires
reflective spaces in which theory and practice are brought together in a
critical engagement. It requires strategic attention to international and
national contextual conditions, and greater sensitivity to the micro-political
machinations of different institutional cultures prevailing in academic,
activist and bureaucratic organisations and networks.
We live in deeply challenging times. New technological
advances mean that megabytes of politicall-correct sounding discourse can now
speed around the globe through cyberspace. Rhetoric and surface-level
spindoctoring can obscure a global reality in which the majority of women are
still very much oppressed and marginalised. The fact is that all manner of
interested parties now talk about gender, meaning very different things. Yet
profound injustices persist. In other words, rhetoric has often overtaken
reality. We must continue to work at changing the discourses and the laws and
policies: pushing for their fuller, more effective implementation. But we must
also find ways of making sure that the buck does not stop there.
African feminism today is
increasingly cognisant of the limitations of the strategies so far pursued.
However, the conditions under which we organise are not getting any easier.
Women all over Africa are rising to this challenge in disparate ways, with huge
energy and creativity, re-working feminism, devising new strategies, and
deploying new technologies alongside the new insights gained from the
experiences of the last few decades.
Would it be over-optimistic to anticipate the emergence of a
coherent, strong and independent unified women’s movement under present
circumstances? What we do in fact see are often spasmodic mobilisations,
followed by retreats and re-groupings (eg. the recent occupation of
Texaco-Chevron by 150 women in Nigeria, whose demands for work and other
concessions have been partly successful).
Perhaps it would be more realistic to envisage and work
towards a series of interconnected mobilisations and strategic alliances, whose
strategists navigate the complicated politics of state and international
funding so skillfully that that they are able to retain a degree of
independence and self-direction. This clearly requires a high level of analytic
and strategic capacity, which combines locally-acquired experience and
knowledge with international acumen. Just how we might pursue this locally and
internationally is something we should discuss in a forum like this.
The conversation we have
started today suggests that in seeking to deepen and activate the connections
between political, intellectual and practical work, we need to take constant
account of the shifting global, regional and local terrain. We need to be alert
to the implications of, for example, the unprecedented dominance of the USA in
the world today, and the gendered ramifications of the global militarism being
propounded under the ‘war against terror’.
I wish us all a productive few days, in which we engage with
the integrity and mutual respect necessary for a spirit of solidarity and
creativity. This is a world congress, and the fact that we are mostly women
does not mean it will not be just as difficult to overcome the political,
intellectual and behavioural legacies of centuries of Western hegemony,
worldwide patriarchy, and the fragmentation, exploitation and opportunism that
this tends to produce. I hope that we can find the courage to address our
contradictions instead of hiding and retreating from them, because failing to
do so will jeopardise the possibility of solidarity.
Finally, I would ask that we take the opportunity presented
by the fact that this conference is being held here, to foster a deeper, more
up-to-date understanding and respect for what it means to be women, and to be
feminists living and working in Africa today.
Every practice is informed by theory, every theory is born
of practice, and every gain brings new challenges.
Thank you very much.
Ake, Claude 2001. ‘The Feasibility of Democracy in
Africa’ Dakar: CODESRIA Books Dakar.
Mkandawire, T. & Soludo, C .1999. ‘Our Continent, Our Future: African Perspectives on Structural Adjustment’, Dakar: CODESRIA/ IDRC.
[1] Mkandawire, T & Soludo, C 1999 ‘Our Continent, Our Future: African Perspectives on Structural Adjustment’, CODESRIA/ IDRC.
[2] Ake, Claude 2001 ‘The Feasibility of Democracy in Africa’ CODESRIA Books, Dakar.
[3] These have only recently been subjected to independent evaluation (see Third World Network, National Machinery Series, Accra 2000).