the African Women's Movement today

The Challenges and Prospects for the African Women's Movement in the 21st Century
By Patricia McFadden, Women in Action, issue 1, 1997
African women have been an important and increasingly visible part of modern African political life. We participated in anticolonial struggles as trade unionists, political leaders, wives and mothers-often in the more traditional ways that women have entered politics. But we have also made fundamental changes to the body politic of Africa in very significant ways:

By engaging in anticolonial struggles, we introduced gender into African politics, though largely through forms sanctioned by men, and often our entry was through the patronage of men. African women have fought patriarchy and male privilege for centuries. By involving ourselves in the anticolonial resistance, we crossed over the very boundaries which had constructed politics as a male preserve. Our presence in these movements, our rejection of women's traditional status, was met with resentment and resistance. But African politics is bound to change as we recognize that women are a political force and we are needed to change the course of this continent.

We have a troubled relationship with Nationalism, in the sense that often, it is our loyalty to the men who inherited the state at independence (brothers, husbands, uncles, friends) that determines our first reaction when a critical issue arises-rather than a critical feminist perspective.

Women's participation in the armed resistance became a critical part of the construction of new identities and relationships with the state and civil society, but some of these new relationships are problematical. We need to interrogate the identities we are inheriting and/or constructing: are they productive? are they good and strong? are they rooted in healthy traditions or in very masculinist, androcentric traditions?

African women still do not recognize that we are a political movement. We still behave like ladies at a tea party, and we are often shocked when men are brutal and violent towards us. We need to understand the true nature of politics so that we can change it. In my view, our activism is grounded in four critical elements which I would like to share with you.

One, our Africanness is defined by and through a patriarchal norm which defines Africans through the male. The establishment of authenticity for African women has to become a central tenet of the African Women's Movement in the 21st century. We must not have to derive and or reflect Africanness through any male.

Two, there is the struggle to regain our female identity. African women have no personhood or bodily integrity as an established and recognised norm in any of our societies. Women experience gender violence all the time, female children in particular. It seems so inexplicable. I suggest that the concepts of personhood and bodily integrity can help us understand gender violence in all its manifestations, sexual abuse as well as mutilation. We need new thinking tools, new activist tools in whose design and formulation we are a part of.

Next is our welfarist participation in national projects. Increasingly, the African Women's Movement's programs are oriented to fill the gaps created by Structural Adjustment Programs in our societies. We are taking over responsibilities which the state should be shouldering, and we are not asking ourselves whether this is our agenda or if it is an imposed agenda. Female nurturing can easily become a trap...we need to understand the limits of our nurturing, where we should draw the line in relation to the responsibilities which men must assume, and especially men who traffic in the state.

Finally, there is the question of our relationship with African men; even more critically, we need to ask them to take the responsibility of changing themselves. As political activists, are we going to reproduce the stereotypes of African women on batiks and tapestries sold in the curio shops, the stereotypes of us as either pregnant, carrying a baby on our backs, or both? While African men are represented through images of dancers and musicians, why can't we see African women doing other things besides being birthers and reproducers? And Beyond Our Activism, What Do We See Around Us?

Today, we are experiencing the end of the welfare programs which opened doors for us as women. For the first time in our known story, African women had the ability and the spaces to think together and strategize collectively, because we had programs which recognized the deprivation caused by five centuries of the plunder of this continent. And yet in all of Africa, the doors to opportunity through education, basic health care, accessible and affordable transportation and shelter, basic security to livelihoods, are being shut in the face of the next generation.

Structural Adjustment is reversing the minimal gains which we had begun to make as women these past three decades. In fact, of all the continents, Africa least enjoys the surplus which is universally produced through human productivity; and yet it is the most materially and culturally endowed. The African Women's Movement must face the social, political, economic and cultural issues arising from macroeconomic policies which are imposed upon us and which are weakening the civil society, and weakening and redirecting the Women's Movement as well.

Africa is struggling with a heavy debt burden which, as we all know, plays itself out in the lives of women, especially poor women. On the other hand, there is a very clear connection between the debt and military spending. In all the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, there is clear evidence that almost half of national revenues are spent on the purchase of arms (look at Zimbabwe and Uganda ), while almost 60 percent of foreign exchange generated leaves the region in debt-repayment. Those at the helm of the African state are using the bulk of our national resources to arm themselves to the teeth. There may be very good reasons, in their view, to do so. But I will never be convinced that any argument for military spending is better than putting in place the fundamentals for sustainable development. And finally, even as we know that it is in women's lives and on women's bodies that the consequences of civil strife are played out-there are no effective mechanisms tod