Teaching Resources | Feminist Thought in African Contexts

Feminist Thought in the African Contexts: Developing Transformative Teaching for African Universities
by Amina Mama

[This essay gives an historical overview of the context within which curriculum work takes place.]

Africans have regarded education as a major route to liberation and development throughout the colonial and post-colonial periods. During the nineteenth century Pan Africanists such as Africanus Horton called for the establishment of African universities, dedicated to the tasks of intellectual de-colonisation. This call was taken up by twentieth century nationalists who saw independence as requiring the development and training of Africans to equip them to lead and run the emergent nation states. Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere and Kenneth Kaunda were among those who pursued this dream when the national liberation movements swept to power in the 1950s and 1960s and the old colonial powers departed.

From the 1960's onwards, the new African governments undertook to massively expand educational provision at all levels, treating the establishment of national universities as an essential aspect of becoming a nation. Mkandawire (2000:2) describes the intellectuals of the nationalist era as having a key role to play in the five major tasks of nationalism which he lists as "de-colonisation, national sovereignty, national development, democratisation and regional co-operation". No doubt it was this understanding that led African governments to build over 300 universities during the first four decades of political independence. It was in short through the strategy of investing substantially in education that much of Africa was able to pursue the indigenisation of all its governmental, corporate and civil institutions, once the colonisers had departed. This in turn saw the children of the educated elite growing up in the 1960s and 1970s in independent states confident in a post-colonial cultural and intellectual world in which their right to nationhood, to self determination and self realisation was assured. The right to the best education the world could offer was optimistically assumed and pursued. [1]

It is one of more tragic aspects of Africa's recent past that this massive investment was to be set back by a largely unforeseen set of circumstances, before it ever came to full fruition. These included the militarisation of African politics during the Cold War period, with the ensuing outbreak of devastating civil wars in countries such as Nigeria and Sudan, and the beginning of no less destructive and often much lengthier war by proxy, as the USSR and the USA dominated the global landscape. Militarisation paved the way for military rule, and by the mid-1980s more than half of Africa 's nation states were under military rule. Other countries also saw an erosion of democratic political structures, with only one or two exceptions, notably Botswana and Senegal. Centralised states that emerged pursued large scale industrialisation projects, many of which yielded disappointing results or created new dependencies. The bedrock of African economies, the agricultural sector was insufficiently sustained. Overall the continent was afflicted by the widespread failure of the economic development models that had been pursued in the name of African development. Economic decline saw the deterioration of the initially-established infrastructure and services during the 1980s and 1990s, as debt-servicing came to dominate national policy agendas to the neglect of national needs. It was in this beleaguered context that the development doctrine of basic needs led to policies that further constrained social development, and placed particular limitations on the public funding of higher education. By the 1980s universities in particular were no longer defined as an essential pre-requisite for African development, but as a luxury that was to become once again the preserve of the industrialised countries of the North, and African governments were directed by international financial institutions to concentrate on basic literacy and numeracy.

Tadesse (1999) traces the history of African academic institutions, noting that the period of massive expansion and university-building was followed up with a period of decline.[2]The causes of the overall deterioration of African universities have been discussed at some length elsewhere. What is clear is that they included the overall economic downturn that took root during the so-called 'Lost Decade' of the 1980's, which saw the withdrawal of public funding from all aspects of public service, especially higher education, in exactly those countries where the majority of the population were so poor that they depended almost entirely on public provision. That this retraction of public services was imposed as part of structural adjustment dogma and the economic conditionalities that accompanied international development aid has been well established. So too has the fact that despite the increasingly unfavourable international economic regime even since that time, the demand for higher education coming from African people all over the region has continued to increase. The results are also well known - massively increasing access in the context of resource constraint has resulted in serious problems within higher education systems that were established in the euphoric early years of independence, and sabotaged the plans that would have ensured the large scale pursuit of education for liberation and development.

Africa has entered the twenty-first century - and the global knowledge economy - with the weakest higher education system in the world. Although somewhere between four and five million undergraduate students are enrolled in Africa's universities, this figure represents only a 3 per cent uptake of the pool of people who qualify for entrance, the lowest rate in the world. Despite the fact that women have never been excluded from Africa 's post-independence universities, only about 25 per cent of those enrolled are women. Furthermore probably less than 19 per cent of academic staff are women, and a 1996 figure suggests that only about 3 per cent of Africa 's professors are women. Women academics have therefore faced particular challenges, given the male-dominated features of academic life. Both the intellectual and institutional cultures of universities have been particularly masculine in their orientation and assumptions, and there has not been a time in human history when this was not the case. While this gender inequality in academia is not specific to Africa, the fact that the overall situation is so parlous only makes the prospects for women seeking academic careers worse.

African intellectual culture has undergone significant development throughout the last half century. The continent's long and impressive intellectual history dates back to ancient times, as shown by the ongoing excavation of past civilisations. [3] These efforts have been further enhanced since the 1980's by the interventions of feminist historiographers, whose revelations have transformed - and continue to transform - androcentric accounts of African histories of statecraft and politics, societies, economies, labour relations, familial and kinship organisation, rural and urban. [4]

African thinkers have challenged imperial epistemologies and Áfricanism' (as compared to Orientalism subject to Edward Said's critical analysis) debunking the mythical constructions of Africa within Western thought, challenging the derogation of African intellectual capacities challenging the supremacy afforded to Western philosophy, all the while transforming the meaning of philosophy itself. Even so, the historical record of African intellectual contributions and achievements continues to grow, albeit with a focus on male thinkers. The record of African women's thought is only now coming to the surface as a result of recent feminist historiography and literary studies. [5] A comprehensive history of African thought is still to be produced, and it is to be hoped that this will address the pervasive androcentrism of knowledge systems, and excavate African women's contributions to philosophy, orature, literature, history, politics and society as well as mens.

More broadly, because the global production of knowledge about Africa remains heavily dominated by Western scholars the particular contribution of continental scholarship tends to be obscured and under-referenced. However, the problem goes beyond the compounding tendency of established scholars to privilege Western publications. It is also a real problem. In global terms, Africa continues to be severely under-represented, producing less than 0.5 per cent of the world's research publications at the present time (Teferra and Altbach 2003). Within this, the bulk are produced by a very small number of countries - Nigeria, Egypt and South Africa – leaving production being almost non-existent in many of Africa's 54 countries.

Perhaps this low figure should not be taken as a good indicator of research production, given the fact that a great deal of African research and scholarship falls beneath the radar screen as a result of the constraints on publication and dissemination. Nonetheless it is clear that African research production has declined in a manner that can only reflect the consequences of the erosion of the public universities where the bulk of research has always been carried out. Gender dis-agregated data is not available, but if the faculty profile is taken as indicative, then we need to take serious note of the fact that very few of the 19 per cent of Africa's academic staff who are women are employed in positions that enable them to undertake research.

It is in this rather dire context that the achievements within the field of gender and women's studies become nothing less than remarkable. The annotated bibliography carried out under the G/WS Africa programme lists no less than 1,600 entries, within which a significant proportion are by African scholars. It is not possible to ascertain what this proportion is, given the mobility of scholars, and the fact that the 2003 review, and its predecessor (Mama 1995), both made a concerted effort to locate and procure research carried out by Africans. The practical difficulties of doing so were immense, involved making use of the personal holdings of longstanding collectors and the activation of personal contacts. [6] Even so, none of the available continental bibliographies and review essays are comprehensive, and the need for more focused reviews carried out on particular themes or within a national frame remains.

Implications for Liberation and Development

The correlates of the fragility of African higher education systems are seen in the diminished policy capacity that now troubles many African governments, not to mention the prospects of regional institutions such as the African Union, and the various sub-regional structures assuming new importance. Regional economic dependency is thus compounded by regional intellectual and analytical capacity deficits, that perpetuate reliance on the importation of costly technical advisors and consultants. The hordes of expatriate development experts costs the continent billions of dollars per annum, yet they are often a condition of both debt re-negotiation and aid packages that seem to do more to sustain the international development institutions and their ever expanding networks than anything else. The proliferation of the universally applied technical fixes offered by the global development industry has produced some highly negative results, at least as far as Africa 's impoverished populations are concerned.

However, it is the fact that Africa suffers from a high incidence of development failure, that should give greatest cause for concern. There is an almost complete lack of accountability for even the most disastrous development initiatives, it is not the developers who bear the costs or consequences of wrong-headed plans and projects. This suggests that the externalisation of policy-making generates its own problems.

It is within this scenario that over three decades of Women in Development (WID), Women and Development (WAD) and Gender and Development (GAD) efforts appear to have done little to mitigate the situation of African women who continue to bear the brunt of development failure. The advance of what is currently referred to as globalisation looks set to increase the already-stark regional disparities in higher education. More specifically the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs looks set to consolidate the U.S.A.'s domination of the 'market' in higher education service.

Gender inequalities in education and in all aspects of public life and government clearly have their effects. Despite over three decades of gender equality commitments and policies, the gender gaps all over the region persist, in some contexts deepening further with each decade that passes. This a situation that underlines the dire need to develop the intellectual and institutional capacities to address gender inequalities and injustices. This imperative demands that educational institutions - especially those that are publicly accountable - take gender seriously. Educational institutions across the continent can reasonably be expected to ensure that they do not further entrench and compound gender inequality and injustice in the course of carrying out their educational work. It is here that gender studies assumes its significance.

At the present time, the pursuit of gender equity in higher education has been inadequately attentive to the gender dynamics of knowledge production through the research and teaching work of educational institutions. With the exception of gender studies, the emphasis has been placed on questions of numerical access, rather than on the intellectual matters that are supposedly the main business of educational institutions. Given the limited reach and the modest scale of gender studies teaching, this has meant that three decades of feminist interventions have had very little impact on African teaching, despite its obvious importance to regional development and democratisation agendas.

In the context of higher education reform, it is clear that the modest aim of letting a few more women into increasingly competitive and cash-strapped institutions is unlikely to mitigate the broader retraction of overall opportunities for higher education. More profound intellectual changes - like those that were referred to in the calls for intellectual de-colonisation - are more likely to be effected by taking gender seriously in the academic curriculum. This is what gender and women's studies offers the higher education arena.

In African contexts the emergence of gender and women's studies can be located within a feminist intellectual tradition.

Intellectual Antecedents of Gender and Women's Studies in Africa

It would be premature to attempt to chart a trajectory for African women's thought. [7] Some obvious precursors can be located in African women's movements, many of which have addressed intellectual and educational matters. The examples cited here suggest that African women may have a history of pursuing intellectual work, not merely for its own sake, but as a form of political engagement aimed at effecting liberatory social transformations. Certainly this would be worth exploring.

Nana Asmaú, the sixteenth century Islamic scholar and educator, is a key example. While she may not be described as a feminist, she worked with a network of women educators to provide Islamic education for women, as part of a wider process of Islamisation which drastically altered the cultural and political environment of a large part of West Africa.

In the early twentieth century, the Egyptian women intellectuals played important roles in the social transformation of North Africa. Huda Sharawi not only engaged in both party politics and public protests, but was also involved in the establishment of L' Egyptienne a journal published by the Egyptian Feminist Union in the 1920's. The writings and poetry of Doria Shafik and others also demonstrate women's contribution to the intellectual culture of their times.

Many of the woman activists of the nationalist era were also scholars and educators - Constance Agatha Cummings-John, who became the first woman mayor of Freetown, Sierra Leone; Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti the Nigerian socialist feminist activist; Margaret Ekpo of Nigeria - all began their careers as highly educated women, and as educators. There are undoubtedly many more women intellectual activists waiting to be excavated by feminist historians.

Like African men, African women have not merely attempted to mimic the more esoteric models of higher learning that developed in the elite institutions of Western Europe and North America. They too have placed a premium on education as a strategy for liberation and advancement, both as individuals and collectively. This is clear in the way in which their educational practice sought to address the needs and interests of ordinary women. Cummings-John established vocationally-oriented schools, in a pragmatic effort to equip Sierra Leonean women with skills that would be respectable, but at the same time allow women to earn an income and so reduce their dependency on marriage and husbands. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti was even more radical, in the sense that her efforts were specifically directed toward the ordinary women - working traders and farmers rather than the daughters of the elite. It was this involvement that in the end culminated in mass political action, including the ousting of a repressive Alake, the local chief.

The post-independence period saw women pursuing their education to the tertiary level in significant numbers, struggling against the constraining patriarchal ideologies and values of the nationalist era. There have also always been African leaders who saw value in ensuring that women were emancipated and educated. These included Kwame Nkrumah, Samora Machel, Oliver Tambo , Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela. Women entered the universities, and beyond the campuses, formed organisations and networks that took the need for research and analysis seriously.

The teaching of Gender Studies in Africa

The establishment of the Association of African Women on Research and Development (AAWORD) in Dakar in 1977 marks the beginning of steps to institutionalise gender and women's studies on the African continent. It was followed by the establishment of other women's resource and documentation centres and networks, all of which drew the link between knowledge and power, and saw research, analysis and information work not as an empty way of spending time, but as a key activist strategy, pursued because it was viewed as liberatory, and therefore as political. There was therefore never an ethos or illusion of ideological neutrality in any of the scholarly activities of African women. The goals of personal and/or collective advancement and emancipation have always been there, even when the pursuit of education has led to a formal Western-style academic training might have tended to obscure personal and political motivations in the name of 'objectivity' and neutrality, especially in the case of the sciences or within positivistic social science. Consciousness-raising and collective reflection on experience was as much a bedrock activity of women's groups as it has been in other liberation movements. Over time, many of the women's resource centres began to offer gender training, as a way of disseminating information and developing gender competence beyond their own ranks, initially within communities, but over time, increasingly to address the needs expressed by government and development agencies seeking to include gender (usually a 'gender component') in their projects. For example, women's groups working on domestic violence would be invited to offer training to policy officers, in the hope that this would improve service delivery. The offering of short courses and training thus rapidly became instrumentalised in the context of endless development needs.

The fact that educational work on gender began in women's groups suggests that gender studies in Africa was initiated outside the universities and only later were the struggles to establish institutional spaces within them pursued. Although a course in 'Women and Society' was established at Nigeria's Ahmadu Bello University as far back as 1979, the real growth of gender and women's studies began at the end of the 1980s, with most of the courses being offered currently having been established in the 1990's.

There is evidence to suggest that gender and women's studies in African universities have maintained a closer and more reciprocal engagement with feminist activism. This may well be because the pool of women with tertiary education in Africa is so small, with the result that the same women are often simultaneously engaged in academic, activism, research, policy making and development work. However, it also relates to the broader African intellectual tradition, which as I noted above, has simply never afforded much space to purely academic or theoretical work. [8]

The institutional and intellectual political conditions within which gender and women's studies has spread within African academic institutions deserve further attention. However, it is clear that both the ongoing dynamism of African women's movements, and the internationalisation of feminism have been important factors. While the participation of women in the anti-colonial and national liberation movements has long been recognised, post-colonial African women's movements are still inadequately documented. Although the Ugandan and South African women's movements have been the subject of several recent publications, there is still little or no research and analysis on women's movements across most of the continent. [9]

There are competing ideas about the strength and coherence of African feminist movements. While some bemoan the fragility of African women's movements, others celebrate their dynamism, resilience and achievements and yet others have developed critical analyses that display the complexity of postcolonial gender politics, and within these the definition of feminist movements. The theoretical literature is equally disparate, having tending to oscillate between triumphalism and despondency, when what is really needed is much more serious research and analysis. Only a small number of recent studies begin to approach the depth of engagement necessary to adequately theorise feminist movements and women's movements in African contexts. Perhaps the only thing that can be agreed at this point is that African gender politics - always diverse - have become increasingly complicated and contested. In such a context, women's movements appear and disappear from view, displaying a multiplicity of new forms and strategies, pursuing concerns and political interests that span every level of social reality from the poorest rural community to the gender advisory group at the World Bank.

All in all, despite the constraints on higher education, the post-colonial period has seen a steady increase in the overall pool of educated women unwilling to accept the continued discrimination against women manifest in all contemporary political, economic, social and cultural institutions, and therefore displaying a proclivity for feminist thinking. This has occurred in a regional political context which has seen many African women survive wars and dictatorships, famines and dislocations, and all the worst consequences of mal-development. However, it is also clear that women have continuously engaged in individual and collective actions to respond to and overcome challenges, and to push liberatory agendas. In the context of political democratisation and an international climate less tolerant of overt gender discrimination, there are new opportunities for transformative action, in and beyond the campuses.

The interaction between international women's movements and the development industry has facilitated the pursuit of gender-related development strategies at local, national and regional levels, creating a need for new capacities, new technical devices (gender-planning frameworks) and new gender competencies in a range of areas, the best-known being those concerned with gender planning, and more recently with gender mainstreaming. The development nexus, (like the academic nexus that allowed the institutionalisation of women's studies) has produced contradictory results. Feminist analysts express concerns over the neutralisation of feminist objectives within the development process, a theme that increasingly dominates the discussions among feminists working in the international development arena. [10]

For feminists on the African continent, it is clear that the context places particular burdens on the limited pool of women scholars working in African educational institutions. These were discussed and explored at some length at the workshop held to launch the continental initiative within which the curriculum project is located ( Report of January 2002 Workshop). Several of the recommendations developed during those deliberations respond directly to the global and continental inequalities in knowledge production, and the manner in which these continue to marginalise African knowledge, and women's participation in African knowledge production.

Footnotes

[1] This was not the case in the Southern African nations still under white rule, where liberation wars were still in progress, but post-independence Africans also grew up with a strong sense of regional solidarity and celebrated each new victory with the renewed enthusiasm, all the way up to South Africa’s liberation in 1994.

[2] See also Sawyer 2002, Sall 2003, Zeleza 2003.

[3] Among the best known are Cheikh Anta Diop, Ade Ajayi, Ivan Van Sertima, Ki-Zerbo.  The UNESCO General History of Africa provides a comprehensive source.

[4] Among the best known are Awe (1991), Mba (1982), Walker (1982), Callaway 1987, Akpan & Ekpo (1988), Johnson-Odim (1986) Johnson-Odim and Strobel (1992). See Mama 1995,and Lewis 2002 for full listings.

[5] Promising work that attempts to address this includes Mack & Boyd’s work on Nana Asmaú (2000), Nelson’s work on Doria Shafik (1996), Badran’s translation of Huda Sharawi’s Memoirs (1998) and the many oral historical and biographical works generated since the 1980’s (Denzer 1998, Johnson-Odim and Mba 1998). The Feminist Press “Women Writing Africa’’ series is also a significant development.

[6] A significant amount of the activity on the G/WS Africa list-serve concerns identifying and locating material.

[7] Collins (1990) has written a history of North American Black Feminist thought.

[8] The lack of synergy between academic and activist feminism is often bemoaned among teachers of women’s studies in Western universities, where there has been an ongoing debate about whether ‘de-radicalisation’ is a necessary result of institutionalising women’s studies, or not. 

[9] See Lewis 2003 at www.gwsafrica.org

[10] This was clear at the workshop ‘Gender Myths and Feminist Fables’ held at the University of Sussex in July 2003.