As South Africa debates the political challenges associated with the ANC’s year-end conference at Polokwane, this is perhaps a good moment to think beyond immediate struggles and to consider what women have achieved beyond the borders of this country.
When the 50th anniversary of the famous Women’s March took place a little more than a year ago, the highly visible participation of senior government and party officials was striking, but not entirely unfamiliar on the African landscape. The African public has seen many official women’s rallies. Mobutu Sese Seko’s ceremonial ”mass promotion” of women as wives and mothers, the media spectaculars featuring Nigeria’s overdressed military wives, and the populist parades of Nana Konadu’s December 31 Women’s Movement in Ghana are not far back in our collective memory.
In post-apartheid South Africa, however, those attending last year’s Women’s Day rally had somewhat better credentials. Many of the marchers were led by women who risked their lives and liberty to free their nation — and many of them have come into government equipped with liberatory vision and direct experience of political struggle.
But perhaps the most distinguishing moment came when President Thabo Mbeki — widely regarded as the most progressive of Africa’s presidents on gender matters — took a highly critical stance on the record of his own government. ”We have failed our women,” he announced in his address to the crowds. Following this, key public figures were moved to call for the launch of a progressive women’s movement.
While the realisation that women need to remobilise in the post-apartheid context is not new, the call has not come generally from women within government circles. One of the key lessons of Africa, where state-directed mobilisations of women have been a regular feature of national politics, has been that women’s movements need to retain a degree of independence from the state and ruling parties.
Perhaps there is an assumption that South Africa is different — and there are important differences. Yet the call arises also from the frustration of failure — as evidenced in the yawning gap between legal and policy reforms enacted by the state, and the realities of women’s lives outside the new ruling elite.
Broader economic policies that constrain public spending and cut institutional incapacities are among the factors that have severely curtailed the effectiveness of the legal and policy gains of the post-apartheid era. Whether an officially sanctioned ”progressive women’s movement” would be able to put pressure on government is highly questionable. The record suggests otherwise — that effective change is contingent on the level of mobilisation outside the official arena.
The fact that gender activism has focused so much on the legal and policy arenas of the nation state has posed a long-standing dilemma for feminist movements in Africa and women’s increased entry into the structures of power has not resolved it.
Women’s movements have continued to mobilise from outside, calling the state to account, and African governments have responded as governments do — with structures, policies and modest representation in decision-making. Africa has led the world in the establishment of official structures for women, from ministries to desks and, in some countries, significant numbers of women have been either elected or appointed to senior posts. Gender policy activism has yielded a number of national and regional policies that pertain to women’s rights and activists have pursued legal reforms at constitutional level and in civil law.
Women’s activism has produced results all over the continent, but these continue to be constrained in the face of state institutions that remain overwhelmingly patriarchal and in contexts where legal redress remains beyond the reach of most women. Often legal reforms coexist alongside economic policies that compromise their realisation. The increased attention to human and women’s rights has coincided with economic reform packages that divest the public sector, worsen women’s poverty and render the law less accessible than ever.
The fragility and powerlessness of the state in large swathes of Africa, and the uncivil nature of the forces that emerge to fill the gaps, give cause for concern. In places such as Sierra Leone or Liberia, where there is mass illiteracy and up to three-quarters of the women have been raped, what are the prospects for civil peace and reducing widespread violence?
The era of democratic governance has seen a resurgence of cultural and religious discourses, often fomented by men of means (but not of vision) who manipulate ”tradition” to vie for votes. Ironically, women have supported demands for returning to practices such as virginity-testing, witch-hunting and public castigation. Perhaps women hope these developments will afford them levels of protection and dignity that they have been long deprived of during the years of misrule. But which women benefit? These resurgences target women who are economically weak, young and, above all, lacking the protection of powerful men.
Indeed, powerful men are often the perpetrators of the ”morally indefensible” behaviours that led to the condemnation of women and might even have been tasked with protecting them. Jacob Zuma’s case is not the only one that comes to mind.
Yet this is no simple matter because local personal and political exigencies now resonate within a more global frame in which questions of masculine dignity are threatened in many parts of the world, under the rubric of the United States-led ”war on terror”.
Politics and culture make a strange brew in contemporary politics. Women — even those with gender activist credentials — can find themselves pitted against one another in a manner that deflects public attention away from more substantial gender interests. It can be hard to keep our eyes on the prize in all this sound and fury.
These machinations aside, the fact is that where we do have significantly more women leaders in parliaments and government structures, it is as a result of long struggles by women. We have every right to commend the new women within the state and feel a sense of pride in them. However, it is clear that the relationship between the institutions of the state and women’s movements need to be negotiated with care.
The difficulties of negotiating women’s interests are typified in the oil belt of Nigeria, a region where profits in excess of $350-billion have been generated since the Seventies, but where more than 90-million people live below the poverty line. Women led the protest movement against the oil companies — peacefully in the Eighties and Nineties and, when this failed, they mounted a series of sporadic direct actions between 2000 and 2003 that shut down much of Nigeria’s oil production.
The US-backed Nigerian military action that has greeted these protests signals a new level of direct repression in the context of global economic policies that breed or simply ignore social injustice. Even so, the mobilisation and leadership exercised by this movement points to women’s capacity to resist the excesses of globalisation.
The post-colonial experiences of women in Africa offer us much insight into the manner in which powerful political and class interests operate. Local women’s movements find themselves engaging not just with their own governments, but with international strategic interests. Washington is setting about building military bases in at least six African locations, while seeking a home for its new Africa Command. Women’s critical perspectives on militarisation need to be mobilised to challenge our governments and to resist the ”global” interests that encroach on our lives each day.
African women have been at the receiving end of globalisation through their direct experience of the development failure that manifests in lives cut short, lives lived out in poverty, lives lived in fear and vulnerability to violence and disease. It is in Africa and upon the bodies and lives of African women, in particular, that the effects of Western policy dictates have done their worst damage.
Perhaps our continent’s greatest resource is its accumulated historical experience. Demystifying the forces that confront this region and realising our liberatory vision requires that we learn the lessons offered by the history of women’s resistance to oppression. Women are uniquely placed to pursue the struggle for freedom and to eradicate the divisive manifestations of oppression that continue to persist in our minds as much as in the structures of power. Women of Africa unite!
Amina Mama is chair in gender studies, based at the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town