Whither The African Women's Movement?

By Seodi V-R White[i]

[email protected]

29th March 2023

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1.????Introduction

In celebrating women’s month, March 2023, I wanted to share my experience and thoughts on how the African women’s movement has evolved. ?Having been an active and outspoken member of this movement for over 25 years, many gains have been made and there is more to be achieved. For those of us who have contributed to the shaping of women’s human rights on the African continent; the nature and character of the fight or activism, has been ground up. Constructed from African women’s lived realities. But also, that it has been inspired by women writers from and on the continent and as well as women who participated in the global women’s movement through the United Nations global conferences for women.

There have been some pushbacks along the way. For example, the idea that every time we waded into a new frontier with regard to women’s rights, the pushback had/has been that we are copying western feminism and that we are abandoning our identity as Africans. That as Africans, we are products of culture, and that feminism is an affront to that cultural framework.

I have never agreed with this notion that the construct of African women’s human rights is subject to the clawback clause(s) that subject the validity of those rights against cultural frameworks whether negative or positive.

2.??What is Feminism?

Feminism is a wide range of political and social movements, and ideologies that share a common goal to define, establish, and achieve political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes. The underlining premise of feminism is to seek women’s equality and justice in every sphere of life and create opportunities for women to access the same resources that are otherwise freely available to men[1] .

In short, it is the belief and action that aims at creating equality between men and women.

First-wave feminism (Nineteenth to Twentieth century) was when women campaigned for suffragette movements and raised their voices for the equal right to vote and equal access to parliament. The second wave arose in the 1960s for women’s equal legal and social rights. The Book The Second Sex (1949) by Simone de Beauvoir influenced this wave of feminist thinking. The Third wave of feminism was a reaction to the failures of the second wave. This movement began in the 1990s and extended into post-colonial feminism, ecofeminism, and gender studies.

Some scholars have argued that the Fourth wave could have started in 2012 through the “me too” movement. This is a term coined by Tarana Burke in 2009 when she first mentioned it in My Space. She explains this more clearly in her book titled Unbound?(2021) about how this term was coined and hijacked in 2012.

I’m not convinced that the movement against sexual harassment in the workplace as the “me too” movement is known; only started in 2012. Perhaps it grew stronger and faster wings when it was captured by Hollywood through the Harvey Weinstein scandal at that time.

3.??Did The African Women’s Movement Enter the Global Feminist Movement or Simply Bonded With It?

One of the questions that I also want to address is whether the African women’s movement is modelled after the Western Global Women’s Movement and whether therefore African feminism is indeed Western as it has been claimed in some quotas.?

At what point did the African Women’s movement enter the global feminist movement or is that even a fair term? Did we enter the mainstream, or did we join and become mainstream? This question for me is important for me to explore as it debunks the pushback that the movement has never really been African-homegrown but a copy of Western values.

Let’s start with Nairobi in 1985. In 1985 women from all over the world through the umbrella of the United Nations gathered in Nairobi and came up with the Nairobi Forward Looking Strategies. These strategies called for among other things, governments to increase the number of women at all levels of decision-making and to provide training and opportunities for their advancement. In addition, the Strategies called for governments to recognize that gender equality?was not an isolated issue but encompassed all areas of human activity. It was necessary for women to participate in all spheres, not only in those relating to gender.

Then the climaxing of the movement in Africa came from Beijing in 1995 ten years after Nairobi. 189 Member States of the United Nations (UN) went to Beijing for the 10-day Fourth World Conference on Women (4WCW) to ratify the Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA), which was to become the blueprint for women's equality around the world. This World Conference on Women was the most important of the four?conferences on women held between?1975-1995,?because it built on political agreements that had been reached at the three previous global conferences on women, and it?consolidated five decades of legal advances aimed at securing the equality of women with men in law and in practice.?It consolidated gender as the analytical framework through which women’s equality could be addressed.

Back in Africa, ?the “back from Beijing gender agenda” roared and it roared loudly. African women began influencing their governments to create government Ministries for Women and to ratify the Beijing Platform for Action.

As a young woman lawyer fresh out of college, I jumped on this feminist wave and started pushing for reform in my own country that recognized women’s rights as human rights. I particularly focused on making the law work for women. It was a great time to be alive.

4.??The Influence of African Feminist Writers in the ’80s

But if truth be told, the conversation around feminism in Africa did not start with our prominent presence in Nairobi and Beijing in 1985 and 1995.

Before then, in the 80s there were beautiful literary pieces that interrogated gender inequality from an African standpoint.?

Senegalese author Mariama Ba wrote in 1980 the ground-breaking book “So Long a Letter” which won the Noma Award. I first read this book as a young teenager. It made sense. I have been asking myself, apart from my own upbringing in which I was mainly raised by a single, independent, intelligent, strong woman who brought home the first feminist book I ever read. Who else influenced my thinking at an early age? And it was the author, Mariama Ba.

In the book, set in Senegal, her country she discusses two women who married men they love. Things go wrong for both as the two men pressured by society, take second wives. ?The first woman refuses to accept that arrangement and leaves the country and eventually becomes a high-end public official in the Senegalese Embassy in the United States. The second woman decided to stay in this marriage despite becoming a victim of domestic violence. She writes about her negative experiences with this decision to her friend in the United States in this long letter. It is in this discussion in her letter that she engages her friend who had chosen a different path out of a similar situation of the injustices brought about by her culture against women.

In her second novel which again my mother brought home is called “The Scarlet Letter” (1981) ??Mariama Ba goes beyond African relationships inter se and brings another protagonist, a French woman who marries a Senegalese man. ?What started as a romantic relationship ended in a very abusive one. The conversation around culture, inequality, oppression, and the role of older women in bolstering these cultural iniquities comes up. ?

Mariama Ba’s work began to be taught in literature classes both in African universities and secondary schools. My own Mother as an educationist influenced the introduction of The Scarlet Song into Malawian Secondary Schools’ literature.

There were other literary books at that time but for me, Mariama Ba’s work stands out. And it goes to show that feminist consciousness in Africa, was homegrown as African writers started to question the cultural fabric and engaged in gendered conversations that were jarring (at least that’s how I felt when I read Ba’s books).

5.??My Own Activism in The African Women’s Movement

After dribbling in part-time activism through the Malawi Women Lawyers Association which involved Sunday trips into villages to teach women about the law, in 1998, I joined Women and Law in Southern Africa (WLSA), a regional organization in seven countries in Southern Africa, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Lesotho, Botswana, Mozambique, and Swaziland (Eswatini as it is now known). This is the organization where my women’s rights activism was solidified. I found a robust conversation as well as robust activism that was grounded in action research which data was used to inform policy and legal reform in the seven countries.

The thesis behind WLSA’s formation was through a regional conference in 1982 where legal scholars as well as social scientists from Southern Africa met in Mbabane Swaziland (Eswatini) and presented papers on the legal situation of women in Southern. It became clear that the law as it then stood in many countries in Southern Africa was crafted by colonialists based on research undertaken by colonialists most of whom were white, male, and obviously did not speak the language of the people whose culture and lived realities they were researching. White men powered by colonial governance systems researched African women, about African women, and used their findings to inform colonial governments in framing laws and policies based on their research with no input from the very African women whom they were regulating. And therefore, missed the voices of African women both as research subjects and as researchers and informers, and influencers of government law and policy.

For me, this was the first time I came across a clear post-colonial deconstruction of African women’s positioning within the legal and policy framework. Women and Law in Southern Africa challenged the construct of gender relations as constructed in our laws based on colonial-laced research.

I found myself in the middle of ground-breaking feminist action research work encrusted within the nexus of legal pluralism where cultural norms, semi-autonomous social fields practices, culture, and formal and informal laws danced together, competing and complementing each other over one person: The African Woman. How do we embrace what works for her into the discourse of legal infrastructure both in terms of the law and well as the justice delivery systems? In the hope that the aftermath of the effectiveness of that legal infrastructure would permeate into all sectors of society such as health, economic well-being, education, etc.

The struggle to unpack all this and discern what is for the African woman and what is against her was at the heart of what we termed African feminism in WLSA. It was ground-up. It was homegrown. It was real.

I found myself in the midst of making this history whereby we were researching the grounded realities of African women as African and engaging with women as Africans and informing law and policy as Africans.

In my own country through this work, I found myself challenging the law as it was then on paper and pushing for legal reform. In 1998, we pushed for 3 months of maternity leave in the Employment Act and that stands today, we also challenged the absence of laws protecting women and it is through this construct that we pushed for the enactment of the Prevention of Domestic Violence Law, a process which started in 1999 and the law enacted in 2006. We further pushed the legal reform in Inheritance matters starting in 2000 and the law called the Deceased Estates (Wills, Inheritance, and Protection) Act was passed in 2011.

Through Women and Law in Southern Africa ?(WLSA) and engaging with African women across the continent and beyond I found my voice as an African feminist. It is the voice for gender equality and the realization that we needed to revisit our laws, our justice delivery, and administration systems.

6.??Whither the African Women’s Movement?

There is much more to be achieved in the space for African women’s rights. ?

Whilst we have made gains in some legal spaces, we are nowhere near economically empowered.

I always look at women’s participation in the global economic forums that are now become spaces where billionaires cut deals. Think Doha or Davos. African women are not there as part of the billionaire group. They are mainly there as placard-carrying activists. Further, we are yet to become equal players in the digital space as coders, developers even content creators. Further, our property rights in marriage remain something highly contested in the courts, from West to East Africa, North to South. Do we own property in marriages outright or do we still have to prove joint ownership?

Even among ourselves we still need to re/define empowerment. In feminist literature, policy frameworks, we continue to pit status against each other. For example, the single parent is pitiful and needs to be rescued. The married woman is in danger of abuse or is abused. The cohabiting woman needs that institution to be recognized as a marriage otherwise she is in danger. Deep down we remain colluded with patriarchy. We continue inadvertently to assume our inherent lack of agency as we characterize each other as somewhat weak, pitiful, poor with zero agency, and in need of rescue.

We also face the danger of “feminism lite” as Nigerian Author Chimamanda Adichie in her letter to her friend Ijeawele in her book “Dear Ijeawele or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions” (2017) ?writes:

Beware of the danger of what I call “Feminism Lite”. It is the idea of conditional female equality…… Being a Feminist is like being pregnant. You are either or you are not. You either believe in the full equality of men or you do not.

She further gives the example of “Feminism Lite” analogies like “he is the head, and you are the neck” Or “he is driving but you are in the front seat”. She also goes on to analyse as “Feminism lite” the idea that, “men are naturally superior but should be expected to treat women well”.

This brings me to the following questions:

What is truly our vision of a truly empowered woman? What is the avatar of an empowered African woman for whom all of us can say: that’s the minimum standard?

That’s what we can tell our governments: Make laws and policies and build budgets that make all of us at the bare minimum, look, be, and engage like that avatar!

I hope as this month March 2023 closes, we will continue to ponder these questions and act on them.

Aluta Continua!!

[1] Javeed Ahmad Raint (2017) International Journal of Research Vol 04 Issue 13

[i] Malawian Lawyer, Lifetime Member of the African Women’s Movement, Public Policy, Gender and Women’s Rights Expertise, emerging business lawyer.

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