Source:Swazi Observer
Gains women have made in national decision-making rank amongst the highest in the world, while traditionalism seeking to constrain women has been on the rise on the ground too. 

These trends go hand in hand with tensions between women in politics and women activists which go back to the 1970s and 80s when women were able to enter politics on the parameters set by men only and patriarchal bargaining and co-optation were common. 

They go hand in hand with the ongoing marginalisation of national machinery for the advancement of women and their co-optation by ruling parties, hampering their main task of facilitating communication between governments and the people. They go hand in hand with the personal problems many women politicians have with negotiating the role expectations of their families and communities, and of finding their way around political procedures and practices. 

Even though the political historical contexts of these Southern African countries differ – ranging from classic one-party states, over settler colonialism, stable democracy, armed independence struggle etc. they also have a lot in common – in particular historical periods when women’s movements were restricted to male dominated women’s leagues, no matter if the state was supposedly socialist, a humanist one-party state or democratic. 

States that gained independence later saw women’s movements that tried to avoid the pitfalls of their sisters in the region. Zimbabwean, Namibian and South African women had been in exile in Tanzania, Zambia and Botswana, and they had realised the problems women’s movements had faced there. This created connections between the SADC countries, also with regard to their respective women’s movements. 

Years of intermittent research shows change of attitudes and paradigms not only in the subjects of many studies and “pathetic” women in one-party political systems in the 1980s to an understanding of their limitations and appreciation of their achievements, which they often managed at great personal cost, many years later. 

Today the fact that women politicians have been elevated to a fashionable topic for researchers, journalists and civic organisations alike, means the interest has given way to reticence and sometimes expressions of hostility on their part.  

Debates concerned with women’s relationship to the state in Africa – their engagement with or disengagement from it – go back to the 1980s, when the state as a concept was rediscovered in the social sciences. 

At the time, feminists criticised this emerging scholarship for failing to address the differential impacts state structures and policies have on women and men and the differential influence men and women have on state actions. 

Rather than concentrating on gauging degrees of state autonomy, as mainstream political science did, feminists were urging the study of the relationship of the public and private spheres within the state. 

This focus, which had long been the core of feminist enquiry, had gained even more significance as women’s organisations and national machinery in Africa raised expectations of influencing public policy in favour of women and brought to the fore questions about the patriarchal “nature” of the state which subverted and suppressed women’s interests.

Approach

Critical of the Women in Development approach, which had limited its approach to questioning the impacts of development on women, feminists now questioned the links between gendered ideologies, economic interests and state power. 

Ultimately feminists were keen to investigate if the state is by definition patriarchal or if it can also be harnessed in the interests of gender equality. Their concern with how gender based distinctions are institutionalised and legitimised in specific state bureaucratic and legal orders had been stimulated by the outcome of the UN Decade of Women with its demands for state action to serve women’s interests. An inquiry into the state as potentially responsive to women’s demands represented a departure from previous concerns of feminist theory, shifting the focus from looking pre-dominantly at the reasons preventing women from gaining a foothold within the state to assessing “whether and how more women in public office affect the fundamental nature and policies of the state” .

Initially the inquiry focused on the interface between class, gender and capitalist transformation in Africa, “showing that capitalism does not everywhere have the same effects for women” that African women cannot be thought of as a single category, nor be simply analysed in gender-neutralterms ‘as men’ since gender was an important social indicator. 

Thus, while class relations were held to mediate experiences of gender, gender also qualified the positions women gained in emerging classes.

Behind the argument sat the observation that modern states, via the artificial division of society into public and private spheres, had diminished women’s voice and power. This observation locked into the studies of the gendered nature of the colonial state, which was held to have effectively cut off the power and authority African women had held in pre-colonial African societies. 

But in order to gauge the nature of the gender conflicts that arose in the clash between pre-colonial African societies and colonial states, some reference points of pre-colonial gender relations have to be known. Yet, what the literature has presented as evidence of women’s social, economic and political status prior to the colonial penetration of Africa has remained scant, and has lent itself to conflicting interpretations. 

Efforts to rewrite the history of African women, moreover, while they have attempted to document women as traditional leaders, and leaders of ceremonial and messianic movements have “tended to glorify individual African female rulers without detailed analyses of the specific historic circumstances under which they lived”.

Such accounts tended to elevate exceptional cases over the majority of women, who must be presumed to have had much less authority and political power. 

In a more differentiated view, Jean-François Bayart has posited “youth” and “women” as the “two subordinate categories par excellence in pre-colonial African societies” which “originate from relationships of economic production, legal relations and, of course, cultural particularities”. 

Differences

Since these categories were socially constructed rather than based on biological differences, members of a “feminine aristocracy” were able to participate in systems of power and to enjoy privileges while amongst inferior social categories women were feared for their “sorcery”.

Gwendolyn Mikell has recently argued that traditional African societies were built on a corporate model which “acknowledges that individuals are part of many interdependent human relations” serving to maintain “the harmony and well-being of the social group rather than that of individuals”.

In this corporate kinship based African society the realm of the political, remained fluid because the right to political participation was derived from membership in kin units. Women were not excluded from this process and could, theoretically at least, rise to political leadership positions.  

Other commentators have been happy to acknowledge traditional African women leaders, but they clearly identify traditional societies as having been “at odds with themselves as to exactly what to do with women” because then as today “a woman’s sole right is to have no rights. She has no real power, only pseudo power”.