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Women and Development in Africa

By Ifi Amadiume

The colonial experience that introduced Western gender perceptions and practices affected the traditional involvement of African women in the development of their societies, leading to women's marginalization and economic and political disempowerment. A gender and development approach in postcolonial development discourse seeks to reinstate the importance of women in development, while recognizing that the destructive effects of poverty and disease touch both women and men.

Xhosa women at the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development   [Kayo Rautenbach]

Even if women are made visible and they increase their economic production capacities, their labor and efforts would only be exploited if there is no change in the unequal structures of government. We need gender-partnership and power-sharing to move beyond the present gender impasse in order to find an alternative, inclusive and compassionate future.

Many of us have seen education and access to capital as the ultimate solution to the discrimination against women that is found in all aspects of the postcolonial national construct in Africa. However, more recent patterns of gender participation in politics and political office in most nations of the world point to more complex solutions. It seems that culture must also be part of the equation. Culture and knowledge systems are also related to economics. As such, I find it necessary to examine women's cultural traditions and their creative contribution to Africa's development.

Spirituality, Literature and Development

When we look at women's contributions and approaches to development in Africa, we see that generally women are guided by teachings deriving from what I would call a "relational matriarchal principle" that sees us all as human beings and children of one mother, umunne. I believe this to be a general and basic African ethic of kinship. It can further be a non-racist and non-patriarchal basis for an alternative global citizenship in the struggle for human rights, social justice and an inclusive development.

It is an honor and an affirmation of Africa as the mother of humanity that an African woman in the person of Wangari Maathai won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize for her environmental activism. Maathai and women in the Green Belt Movement that she founded in 1977 have planted 30 million trees across Africa. Their achievements make clear the importance of recognizing women's organizations and cultures as powerful vehicles for national development, particularly with regard to their capacity to mobilize women.

Women in Dakar/  MAINDRU PHOTO

In women's folk traditions and the literature of resistance produced by African women we see that victims of colonization and imperialism are still able to invent alternative means of subverting the desires of their oppressors in thought and action. I have called this creative production a relational matriarchal literature that employs Africa's own originality in constructing and reconstructing ideas and cultures from within its own rich heritage.

African women writers have not shied away from a gender perspective on modernization, bringing to light the tensions between tradition and modernity in marriage and family practices and the manner in which women's voices and choices are often subdued by male biases. They have tackled the question of patriarchal domination in economic and political power and engaged the controversial topics of feminism, choice and sexuality. They have raised questions about the failed promises of education and social mobility given the persistence of Eurocentric cultural imperialism and the dictatorship of finance capitalism embodied in the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and their associated Structural Adjustment conditionalities. They encourage more complicated ways of thinking rather than easy moralizing.

Traditional African descent-based societies used gender-flexibility to liberalize where biological gender would have been constraining to women in the occupation of economic and political positions. Such gender inclusiveness promotes the social equality and power inclusiveness that are necessary for achieving inclusive and equitable development.

In my book Male Daughters, Female Husbands I examine the influence of gender in precolonial power structures and dynamics and show that roles were neither rigidly masculinized nor feminized. The flexibility in African gender teaches us that culture can write and rewrite biology toward inclusiveness. A man can play a mother's role and women can be sons and husbands. Here, the language of kinship and descent becomes the model for government administration and the state. Through the concept of male daughter a man or woman can head the descent group, and this can be translated symbolically--and in reality--into a woman head of state. Through the concept of female husbands women can be heads of financial companies and corporations. This is an excellent use of metaphor, imagery and symbolism in creative thinking for a progressive society. This is what literature does best--liberalizing culture and society.

There were important achievements made by so-called "primitive" women in Africa that women in the most powerful nations in the world today are still not able to accomplish. How could women, who were pharaohs, chiefs, queens and empresses in precolonial Africa, not be allowed to be presidents and prime ministers in the postcolonial modern period?

If we look at African economic, political or cultural history, we can say that colonialism brought gender regression to the African nations that the colonialists invented. Social and economic production was centered on women from the beginning of history in Africa right until the different colonial encounters. Under the current situations of imperialism and dependency that are reshaping African nations and societies, we want to look back and cling to the positive legacies that used to center women in development with the support of men.

Voice from the Village

We no longer can prescribe just education and access to capital without also engaging the character and gender makeup of the national framework in which development takes place. The nation is a network of so many intersecting cultures and systems of social relations, on the local, national and international levels. The peasant woman making culture and producing wealth in the village equally has a right to shape national policy.

Green Belt Movement members in Kenya

We have had to jump over several hurdles toward arriving at more appropriate theories of gender and development. First the recognition that the colonizing Christian/Victorian gender model of domesticity is alien to African women. It was then necessary to launch an argument for assistance, meaning access to education, technology and credit and now power-sharing. We've come a long way from the times when women's economic activities were not seen as being relevant to economic development, to arguing the need for a gender-informed democratic future. Women now say that they are ready for power-sharing. Women have to sit at the peace table. Women's involvement is necessary at every level of civil society from local communities to the top seat of government for their peace initiative in development to be effective.

The present Western patriarchal model has proven to be completely anti-gender democracy. However, in the past, it was even possible for delegations of women's peace groups to hold meetings with opposing factions. Women's peace delegations used to occupy disputed grounds before war set in. Igbo and Ibibio women used this kind of strategy in their 1929 Women's War against colonization. Women were willing to use their respected and revered bodies to cool hot spots.

As the poor and weak people of the world continue to suffer from neoliberalism and negative globalization, through resistance and struggle we must demand the right to redefine our communities as truly inclusive, liberal and equal on our shared planet, based on gender democracy and a just economic exchange.

Ifa Amadiume has lived in Nigeria and the U.K. and is currently professor at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, U.S.A., where she teaches in the Department of Religion and the African and African-American Studies Program. Her book Male Daughters, Female Husbands (Zed Books, 1988) won the Choice Outstanding Academic Book of the Year award in 1989.

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