Source:Swazi Observer
Whatever the level and incidence amongst African women in pre-colonial societies of autonomy, power, or authority with an economic basis or a political presence, the colonial state and the capitalist penetration of kin based modes of production changed what was there.
Colonialism is held to have deepened, entrenched, re-enforced, and created public/private dichotomies. This effectively removed African women from the public domain and reified them in a Western inspired domestic or private sphere.
Through the 1980s evidence had mounted that European inspired colonial ideas of male and female spaces meant that women’s predominance in production was neglected in favour of African men who were targeted for improved agricultural production techniques and cash-cropping.
Ironically, involving men in agricultural production was originally held to free overburdened African women to devote themselves to their families and thus to become ‘proper housewives’ in a European sense. Training that drew women into home-craft activities stressed this intention. By contrast colonial taxation policies forced men into wage labour, and in the agricultural sector colonial policies favoured male ownership of land and means of production against female producers and they neglected women in the provision of credit and extension service.
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These processes meant that African men could extend their power over women, who gradually lost entitlements to land, and control over products and increasingly also their own labour, as they worked the cash-crop fields of husbands or kin as unpaid family labour. Ironically, this meant that while women’s importance in production increased, their control decreased: the ideology of the domestic domain as the proper place for women consolidated this loss of control.
This ‘housewifisation’ of African women was the first step to exploiting their labour as unpaid and invisible family labour.
The mystification that women are basically housewives made a large part of labour that is exploited and super-exploited for the world market invisible. It justified low wages; prevented women from organising, keeping them atomised, geared their attention to a sexist
and patriarchal image, namely the ‘real’ housewife, supported by a man, which was not only unrealistic for the majority of women, but also destructive from a point of view of women’s liberation.
Husbands sued or divorced their wives if labour withdrawal was a repeated strategy, and divorce would bring women back to their matrilineal kin, where they faced the problems of single women.
Both married and single women suffered production dislocations, while they came to be more dependent on husbands to share agricultural knowledge and earnings with them, and on matrilineal kin to supply male labour and technology to them.
The actions of the colonial state thus restricted women’s economic power in both urban and rural areas. Women’s work increased in this process while at the same time their control over means of production and products decreased. In many parts of Africa the colonial notions of men as sole actors in the public sphere also further restricted women’s access to political or quasi-political positions.
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In Southern Africa, for example, where women could be appointed headmen and chiefs in exceptional cases, colonial preference to give men such positions closed whatever avenues existed before.
In Zimbabwe women’s access to public life via religious roles, such as their important role as spirit mediums, who acted as key mediators in local disputes, and authority figures in situations of natural disasters, lost their political role in the clear separation between political and religious domains.
In Southern Africa, many women remained in one way or another dependent on men, a dependency that restricted their strategies to individual struggles for survival. It also inhibited the formal organisation of women or concerted action since their identity ‘remained linked to men as long as women could not support themselves’.
The colonial state was thus actively engaged in creating new gender distinctions and reinforcing indigenous gender stratifications. Because the dichotomy was a hierarchical one, men were allocated power and value and women subordination. The ‘implantation of male government under colonialism, and the depoliticisation of most women’s issues in the private sphere’ came to be institutionalised in nationalist politics and thereafter in the modern African states.
This process, many scholars have suggested, was further entrenched by the fact that class politics intersected gender issues. Women politicians, when and if they existed, thus tended to pursue the interests of their own class only, or advocated a depoliticised, male determined version of women’s concerns and aims within formal politics.
Gender continuities in nationalist struggles
In the 1950s and 1960s nationalist movements swept through most African countries, first the relatively non-violent set of ‘revolutions’ mainly in West Africa in the late 1950s followed by similarly non-violent secessions in East, Central and Southern Africa in the 1960s.
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A second set of nationalist movements occurred in ‘settler colonies’, including Kenya, Algeria and, with independence finally won in 1980, Zimbabwe, which we also deal with later. At the same time more self-consciously socialist and Marxist-Leninist liberation movements led protracted liberation wars in former Portuguese colonies, namely Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique.
The last armed struggle for independence, fighting against an internal enemy, continued in Namibia and South Africa until black majority rule was established in 1990 and 1994 respectively.
The statist literature of the late 1980s, concerned though it was with the gendered nature of the colonial state, paid relatively little attention to the relationship African women had to nationalist movements and the role they assumed within them, beyond suggesting that modern states, including the more gender aware socialist ones, continued and entrenched the colonial disempowerment of African women.
Women’s political actions and history thus “disappeared in the cumulative process whereby successive written accounts reinforce and echo the silence of previous ones.”
Quite a different literature originated with the more orthodox Marxist feminist lobby, whose members have reviewed gender aspects of the liberation struggles in the Portuguese colonies and in Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa.
In South Africa the struggle against apartheid and women’s contribution towards it has been the subject of a broad range of academic and biographical work from within South Africa from the 1980s onward. In Zimbabwe and Namibia, internal accounts of women involved in the liberation struggle and analyses of such involvement have begun to emerge only recently as part of the process of coming to terms with the realities of the liberation struggle which transcend into near mythical representations.
silenced
Such “reclaiming of the ‘silenced’ past” has also been recorded in Tanzania.
Women’s participation in nationalist movements, up until the late 1980s, and with notable exceptions, happened largely on terms set by men. Yet, in many countries women have been credited with having been a major driving force sometimes egging on men and taking initiatives, which surprised men and at times caused them to moderate women’s radicalism.
Almost everywhere, however, women’s specific interests were subordinated under nationalist agendas. Initially this might not have been either visible or important, since women’s motivation to join nationalist movements was occasioned by their rejection of colonial rule, even though their specific experience had shaped their experience of colonialism differently from men’s.
When women’s concerns were addressed, they were raised from within the male discourse on women’s domesticity. In South Africa, Zambia and Tanganyika, women acted in defence of “motherhood”. Even in cases where women were allowed into the ultimate male domains of warfare as combatants, they often ended up with tasks more attuned to their supposed domestic role relegating them to supplying a range of auxiliary services for men.