State Feminisms: National Gender Machineries

“State feminism” is a term used to refer to either “state policies and procedures … which are in some way designed to improve women’s status and opportunities”—otherwise known as national gender machineries—or “the tendency for feminists to achieve positions of influence within government.”¹ The first national gender machineries emerged in Africa in the 1970s in the wake of the 1975 United Nations Conference on Women held in Mexico City. The conference was a landmark event that institutionalized the importance of women’s issues globally. Indeed, across Africa, the United Nations Conferences on Women had a formative impact. By 1980, forty-one African countries had established the first national machineries for women; by 1985, when the third United Nations Conference on Women was held in Nairobi, fifty-one countries had set up national machineries. The importance of national machineries was reaffirmed at the fourth United Nations Conference on Women which was held in Beijing in 1995; one of the twelve critical areas identified at this meeting was the need for institutional mechanisms to address the needs of women.²

Despite global recognition of the importance of national gender machineries, the consensus from policymakers and scholars is that they have been largely ineffectual in Africa.³ This state of affairs is attributed to four major factors.

First, these institutions were created for self-serving purposes in Africa.⁴ Many of the states that created these institutions had no legitimacy; they were either military regimes or one-party state regimes. They therefore acceded to the wishes of the international community not out of a genuine concern for gender equality but to improve their status globally. Because the international community has rarely engaged in a critical assessment of how these institutions function in various places, non-legitimate states were able to gain international approval while paying mere lip service to women’s concerns.

Second, African states’ lackadaisical state attitude toward these institutions is evident in poor financing for them.⁵ In Cameroon, for example, President Biya has touted his interests in women’s issues on a regular basis, but he has not matched his words with financial commitment. Government funding for the national gender machinery has consistently been one of the lowest, hovering around 0.50 percent of the annual budget. Even worse, the amount devoted to the national gender machinery decreased over time, from 0.63 percent of the total budget in 1998 to 0.43 percent in 2004.⁶ Clearly, in Cameroon, the financial needs of the national gender machinery have not been a state priority. A similar situation is evident in Zimbabwe where annual allocations to the national gender machinery have barely covered staff salaries.⁷ A summary of findings for eleven sub-Saharan African countries concluded that African states had only offered “lip-service and peanuts” to the national gender machineries.⁸

Third, the lack of consistent government support for the work of the national gender machineries means that the institutions have had to rely on donors for funding. Thus the agendas of these institutions have been donor-driven, consisting primarily of implementing projects from a development perspective as opposed to pursuing policies that actually address gender equality. Rather than transform gender relations—which is key to the feminist agenda—these institutions focused on development projects.⁹ In effect, the true purpose for which these institutions were set up was undermined.

Finally, the purpose for which these institutions were set up has been undermined by “femocracy,” an organizational structure that may be defined as

an anti-democratic female power structure, which claims to exist for the advancement of ordinary women, but is dominated by a small clique of women whose authority derives from their being married to powerful men rather than from any action or ideas of their own.¹⁰

First ladies have spearheaded these institutions, which have been especially evident in Ghana, Nigeria, and Cameroon. Also, in the early years of independence, first ladies in Somalia and Kenya gained notoriety for the personal wealth they amassed during their period as first ladies. Two decades later, African first ladies were in the news again for their proclivity to create their own organizations.¹¹ The nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) they set up competed with the national gender machineries for funding (both internally from the state and externally from donors), and they excelled at raising funds. National gender machineries have thus been described as poor cousins of these femocracies.¹²

In the countries in which femocracies existed, they eclipsed the national gender machineries on the international stage. For example, first lady Nana Konadu Rawlings led the Ghana delegation to the 1995 United Nations Conference on Women in Beijing in her capacity as the chair of the largest NGO in the country.¹³

There were also tensions between the national gender machineries and the first lady-run NGOs. For example, in Nigeria one first lady ordered the imprisonment of the national gender machinery chair.¹⁴ And yet, as with the national gender machineries, femocracies have been criticized for their lack of interest in transformatory gender politics. In Nigeria, first lady Maryam Babangida went so far as to publicly declare on several occasions that she was not interested in women’s liberation or feminism but instead in wifehood and motherhood.¹⁵

Femocracies were not set up to enhance gender relations on the continent; indeed, it has been argued that the real purpose of these organizational structures was to cement a positive image of the ruling parties and enhance their credibility locally.¹⁶ In Ghana, the link between the NGO and the ruling party was evident in the group’s name—31st December Women’s Movement, a reference to the date of the second coup d’état that propelled Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings into power for an eleven-year period.

As with the national gender machineries, many scholars doubt the extent to which femocracies have improved women’s status. Other scholars offer a more tempered accounting, arguing, for example, that the femocracies put women on the public agenda as a constituency whose interests must be addressed. Though very few of women’s interests may have been addressed in Africa to date, putting women on the agenda was an important first step.¹⁷

National Liberation Movements

The majority of African countries attained independence from colonial rule in the early to mid-1960s. While the independence struggles of the 1940s and 1950s were largely peaceful, in some parts of Africa, independence required a resort to armed struggle led by national liberation movements. In the Portuguese colonies of Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, Angola, and Mozambique, as well as Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa, independence was only won after years—in some cases, decades—of armed struggle. It is widely noted that African women were actively involved in these liberation wars.¹⁸ In Zimbabwe, there were as many as ten thousand women recruited into the armed wing of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and trained as guerilla fighters.¹⁹ Women were visible not just in their numbers but also in the various activities in which they participated. While they engaged in domestic activities such as providing food for the army, they were also actively involved in the main mission of the army: freedom fighting. Women were out in the fields wielding guns and killing the enemy, a fact of which the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), for example, was extremely proud.²⁰

Rhetorically at least, national liberation movements embraced women’s liberation as an integral part of national liberation struggles. Many liberation movement leaders claimed that women’s liberation was equally as important as liberation from the colonial regime. Amilcar Cabral, leader of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC), noted, “We cannot have a successful revolution without the full participation of women.”²¹ Similarly, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe stated, “By waging the armed struggle, [the Party has] created, therefore, a process generative of forces that will result in the total liberation of the women.”²²

The extent to which women were fully incorporated into the activities of liberation movements differed from country to country. In Guinea-Bissau, PAIGC women were not actually part of the militia. Instead, they participated in political education and provided rice to the guerilla camps—in essence an extension of their domestic responsibilities.²³ In Mozambique, by contrast, FRELIMO incorporated women more fully into the movement. But even in Mozambique there was a disjuncture between the ideological discussions about gender equality and the practice of it. For example, while women were conscripted into FRELIMO, they were initially barred from receiving military training and thus could not participate in combat activities.²⁴ The situation only changed when the numbers of women in the movement grew and they rallied against the unequal treatment they received. A women’s detachment force, which participated fully in the armed struggle, was then created.²⁵

Once independence was won, female combatants often discovered that the equality created in the camps would not be sustained outside of the camps. In the first years after independence in Zimbabwe, women made up only 7.3 percent of the parliament. At the district level, the female presence was even lower: 1.86 percent of councilors.²⁶ These numbers did not change much, until Zimbabwe implemented a temporary gender quota for its senate for the 2013 and 2018 elections. Members of the women’s wing of the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) were also reduced to mere observers at rallies and other meetings, rather than equal decision makers at the highest level. A deputy woman minister from Zimbabwe therefore described the women’s wing as a “non-decision making machinery.”²⁷ Members of women’s wings in Botswana and Zambia share similar perspectives on the inability of women’s wings to effect real change in women’s lives. As a result, professional women in particular are opting out of the women’s wings of political parties and setting up civic organizations of their own.

Gender, Conflict, and Peacebuilding

In addition to liberation wars, there have been a number of civil wars and political conflicts across the African continent. Earlier literature characterized women as victims of these conflicts with civil wars described as the preserve of men. As victims of war, women lived with the daily threat of abuse and the fear of being abducted, forced into prostitution, or raped.²⁸ In times of war, the moral sensibilities of a society are upturned and what would have in times of normality been considered a taboo is normalized. Rape becomes rampant, even a “weapon of war.” The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), for example, earned itself the unenviable title of “rape capital of the world,” with as many as eight thousand women raped in one year during the conflict in that region. In addition to the rape rates increasing astronomically, the upturned moral sensibilities emboldened teenagers to rape adult women. These women thus had to deal with the fact that they had had sex with men young enough to be their sons, a phenomenon otherwise quite uncommon in Africa.²⁹

In the double victimization that is common in patriarchal societies, raped women not only have to endure the psychological trauma of rape but also societal disapproval: married women find that their husbands are no longer interested in them, and unmarried women find it difficult to get married. In societies where marital status confers respectability, the implications of such shunning are severe.³⁰ Women who are raped may end up pregnant or with a sexually transmitted infection. In some cases, raped women are forced to marry their rapists.³¹

More recent literature from the countries of Chad, Sudan, Somalia, Sierra Leone, the DRC, and Rwanda acknowledges women’s roles as both participants and peacebuilders.³² For example, in South African townships in the 1980s and early 1990s, women as well as men rounded up informers, threw tires around their necks, and burned them, a practice known as “necklacing.”³³ While women have been victims and occasionally perpetrators of violence in conflict-ridden societies, they have also led peacebuilding efforts. Such peacebuilding work was perhaps most evident in the case of Liberia, where Leymah Gbowee led the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, a movement that worked assiduously to help bring the Second Liberian Civil War to an end in 2003.³⁴ For her efforts, Gbowee was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2011. Women have played and continue to play significant roles in peacebuilding efforts across Africa, including in Angola, Burundi, the DRC, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Uganda.³⁵

Finally, in some post-conflict societies, gender relations might actually improve. In Rwanda, for example, restrictions regarding women’s ownership of land was no longer tenable in some communities where the male population had been decimated.³⁶ Similarly, women’s income-earning opportunities have improved in both Sudan and Liberia since the wars in both places.³⁷ Other scholars have argued that reconfigured gender relations enhanced women’s opportunities to stand for political office in post-conflict societies on the continent.³⁸ Indeed, research shows that the end of long-standing armed conflict (1985–2010) in Africa had positive impacts on women’s political representation.³⁹ However, war is not an appropriate mechanism for social change given the havoc it wreaks.

Democratic Political Transitions

By the end of the 1980s African economies and polities were in crisis; indeed, many have referred to the 1980s as a “lost decade” for Africa. Across the continent, but especially in West Africa, dozens of military coups d’état beginning soon after independence had produced years of military rule interspersed with the occasional civilian administration. Certainly, despite the infrequent suggestion to the contrary, military regimes proved no more adept at economic development than their civilian counterparts. In other parts of the continent, some national liberation movements still sought independence or found themselves challenged by guerilla wars as soon as they attained power. In others, civil wars and other political instability also followed independence again wreaking havoc with economies. Oil price increases during the 1970s and the ensuing world recession resulted in falling demand and prices for many of Africa’s commodities, catapulting many African economies into intolerable debt and eventually into the clutches of the international financial institutions and structural adjustment programs (SAPs) aimed at restructuring failed economies. These SAPs included debilitating austerity measures, to which women and children were the most vulnerable.⁴⁰ Across the continent, African women bore the brunt of the crises of their states and the negative impact on women was manifest in a myriad of socioeconomic indicators.⁴¹ African women responded in divergent ways to this post-independence trajectory. On the one hand, especially in rural areas, women embraced a survival strategy of organizing at the grassroots level, eventually growing into significant mobilized national women’s movements.⁴² On the other hand, educated elite women embraced a gender equity approach to ameliorate economic and political problems, seeking among other things to address their subordinate position in public life, leading to more women seeking public office. As democratic political transitions unfolded across the continent beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, both responses were apparent.⁴³

Mobilized National Women’s Movements

Since the 1980s, a plethora of women’s organizations and movements have emerged across Africa, distinct from those nascent women’s organizations that may have contributed to national independence and liberation movements and those state-sanctioned women’s associations and wings of political parties of the first few decades of independence. The United Nations Conference on Women held in Nairobi in 1985 was widely considered a turning point, providing an impetus for the formation of women’s organizations and the emergence of national women’s movements across the continent.⁴⁴ The groups had disparate origins and a range of goals. Some emerged from the grassroots as attempts to ameliorate difficult economic conditions, but over time became much more political in their focus—ultimately seeking regime change. So, for example, in Kenya, the Greenbelt Movement began as a way of replacing trees and providing income to rural women farmers. It ended up deeply involved in the effort to democratize the country.⁴⁵ Women also came together in many places to help end conflicts. The most well-known example of this was the group of Liberian women who “prayed the devil [Charles Taylor] back to hell.”⁴⁶

Women and their organizations played pivotal roles in the democratic transitions that commenced in Africa in the early 1990s: “Like student organizations, labor unions, and human rights activists, women’s organizations openly opposed corrupt and repressive regimes through public demonstrations and other militant actions.”⁴⁷ In many instances, such as the original Greenbelt Movement, women’s organizations and movements joined forces with other civil society organizations to topple undemocratic regimes. Then, once political transitions were underway, women and their organizations and movements took advantage of the early political openings “to make bolder strides in the political arena.”⁴⁸ Among other things, women consolidated independent women’s organizations; demanded women’s expanded participation in politics,—through affirmative action policies if necessary; and even formed their own political parties in countries as diverse as Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, and Kenya.

In Botswana, where no political transition took place, the 1980s and 1990s were years of heightened women’s mobilization focused initially on laws that discriminated against women and the need for legal reform, before shifting to political education and women’s political empowerment. In 1994, the women’s group Emang Basadi issued Africa’s first “Women’s Manifesto,” hoping to influence the manifestos of political parties competing in national elections.⁴⁹ Across the continent, coalitions of women’s groups issued manifestos in the ensuing decade. Ghana’s manifesto, issued in 2004 in hopes of influencing electoral outcomes in that country, among other things, was authored by a coalition of women’s organizations that had emerged in strength in the years after that country’s political transition in the early 1990s. Prominent among the issues driving women’s mobilization in Ghana has been the need for legislation to address domestic violence and the lack of women in political office, especially in parliament.⁵⁰ In countries like Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda, women’s organizations exerted pressure on political parties and government to adopt electoral gender quotas and other affirmative measures to bring more women into political office,⁵¹ often relying on commitments made by their governments in national, regional, and international protocols and declarations. On the whole, “associational autonomy” from the state and dominant party has proved to be a critical feature for success—with associational autonomy being defined as a movement being able “to set its own far-reaching agenda and freely select its own leaders.”⁵²

In recent years, African women have also mobilized around the rights of lesbians and other sexual minorities. In Namibia and South Africa, lesbian activists have used visibility and invisibility strategies selectively to improve their access to citizenship rights.⁵³ These are key demands in a context of political homophobia among African heads of state and other leaders who deride and, in many cases, persecute sexual minorities.

Women’s Political Leadership

Discussion of the Literature

In the 1970s and 1980s, primarily women scholars of Africa sought to focus on women as political actors—looking back to women’s roles in nationalist struggles and liberation movements and forward to women’s roles in the post-independence period. In a series of articles on women activists in the Tanganyikan Nationalist Union (TANU) and women in African nationalism more broadly, Susan Geiger documents the “neglect of women” in the history of nationalist movements across the continent stemming, ostensibly, from a lack of written records; the predominance of men in national-level political leadership; and an understanding of gender as a category relevant at the domestic or community level but not the national or global level. Geiger addresses this oversight in her own work by using life history research and a feminist theoretical framework to examine women’s participation in TANU and other nationalist movements across Africa.⁷⁸ A decade earlier, Jean O’Barr sought to restore African women to analyses of political life across the continent—to make “the invisible visible.” She traced the early invisibility of African women in accounts of African politics to prevalent assumptions held by scholars about the political roles of African women (heavily influenced by an “invisibility of women in political science” more broadly)—having to do with a valuing of politics over other aspects of economy and society, of the public over the private, and of men’s activities over women’s activities, as well as an absence of “prominent women” in national politics.⁷⁹ (She noted that sociologists and anthropologists were more likely to be writing about women in Africa than political scientists.) O’Barr’s concern to restore African women to accounts of politics and policy coincided with Ester Boserup’s seminal work on the need to take into account women’s role in economic development, an integral part of the “nation building” that was to be taking place across Africa in the early years of independence.⁸⁰

Scholarship has also followed political developments “on the ground.” While women’s overt political roles may have been eclipsed under military and single-party regimes in the first three decades of independence in some parts of the continent; in other countries, women were fighting alongside men in civil conflicts or continued struggles for national liberation, and this was reflected in a literature that delved deep into women’s roles—Turshen and Twagiramariya’s What Women Do in Wartime and Urdang’s And Still They Dance: Women, War and the Struggle for Change in Mozambique—or a later literature that looked at women’s roles once the conflicts were over—King-Akerele’s Women’s Leadership in Post-Conflict Liberia: My Journey or Burnet’s Genocide Lives in Us: Women, Memory and Silence in Rwanda. With the rise of autonomous mobilized national women’s movements across the continent from the mid-1980s onward came monographs investigating women’s associations and organizations in one country after another: Hassim’s Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa: Contesting Authority; or Leslie’s Social Movements and Democracy in Africa: The Impact of Women’s Struggle for Equal Rights in Botswana; or Fallon’s Democracy and the Rise of Women’s Movements in Sub-Saharan Africa, which focused on Ghana.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the focus on women’s roles in social movements made way for women, rather than their organizations, to be the political actors as MPs, judges, and cabinet ministers. This development was reflected in volumes such as Women and the State in Africa, edited by Jane Parpart and Kathleen Staudt; Bauer and Britton’s Women in African Parliaments; Bauer and Dawuni’s Gender and Justice in Africa: From Obscurity to Parity?; and Sylvia Tamale’s When Hens Begin to Crow: Gender and Parliamentary Politics in Uganda. Another extremely important literature to emerge in the late 1990s and early 2000s was that which grappled with feminism and feminist approaches in an African context.⁸¹ Early contributions to this discussion included Mikell’s African Feminism: The Politics of Survival in Sub-Saharan Africa and Oyeronke’s African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood.

In addition to these works, there has also been significant research produced and published in journals not widely accessible outside of particular African countries; some, but not all, of this work was strongly supported by institutions such as CODESRIA in Dakar or the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town.