Development is a process that transforms societies. Despite considerable variation across world regions and over time, one commonality of development has been that the initial phase, from 1950 to 1975, likely led to growing inequality between men and women in both opportunities and well-being. The first decades of planning and promotion of development largely excluded women, partly as a result of unequal gender relations in many societies as development began: the slave trade, colonial indifference to women’s rights, and missionary activities may have worsened the status of women. More importantly, the men who controlled the late colonial and early post-independence state saw little reason to promote a pro-woman agenda in development. The initial phase of development thus reinforced male privilege. After 1975, national and international social movements arose to pressure governments and institutions to undo the legacies of gender inequality. Women-centered development flourished in the 2000s. There have been uncertainties, however, over the cost-effectiveness of some of the various policies and programs implemented as a result of the movements to include women in development.
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Women and Development in Africa
Michael Kevane
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Poverty and Inequality in South Africa: A History
Colin Bundy
Contemporary South Africa exhibits widespread and persistent poverty and an extraordinarily high level of inequality. Historically, poverty and inequality were forged by forms of racial subordination and discrimination shaped successively by slavery, by colonial settlement and conquest, and by a mining-based industrial revolution in the last quarter of the 19th century. The explosive growth of capitalism and urbanization in a colonial context shaped a set of institutions and social relations—the “native reserves,” migrant labor, pass laws, job reservation, urban segregation, and the like—which reached their most stringent form under apartheid legislation, from 1948 on. The political, social, and economic system of apartheid entrenched white wealth and privilege and intensified the poverty of black South Africans, particularly in rural areas. By the 1970s, the apartheid project began to flounder and the National Party government launched a series of concessions intended to stimulate the economy and to win the support of black South Africans. A historic transition during the late apartheid years saw a shift from labor shortages to a labor surplus, generating structural unemployment on a massive scale. This was a problem that the African National Congress (ANC), in power since 1994, has been unable to solve and which has been a major factor in the levels of poverty and inequality during the democratic era. The ANC has made some advances in combating poverty, especially through the rapid expansion of welfare in the form of pensions and social grants. This has reduced ultra-poverty or destitution. In addition, the provision of housing, water, sanitation, and electricity to black townships has seen significant growth in assets and services to the poor. Yet since 1994, inequality has increased. South Africa has become a more unequal society and not a more equal one. Two factors have caused inequality to deepen: increasingly concentrated income and wealth, and a sharp rise of inequality within the African population. The ANC continues to commit itself to “pro-poor” policies; yet its ability to reduce poverty, and especially to achieve greater equality, appears to be substantially compromised by its failure to reverse or reform the structure, characteristics, and growth path of the economy.
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Women in Gabon
Claire H. Griffiths
Gabon, a small oil-rich country straddling the equator on the west coast of Africa, is the wealthiest of France’s former colonies. An early period of colonization in the 19th century resulted in disease, famine, and economic failure. The creation of French Equatorial Africa in 1910 marked the beginning of the sustained lucrative exploitation of Gabon’s natural resources. Gabon began off-shore oil production while still a colony of France. Uranium was also discovered in the last decade of the French Equatorial African empire. Coupled with rich reserves in tropical woods, Gabon has achieved, since independence in 1960, a higher level of export revenue per capita of population than any other country in sub-Saharan Africa in the postcolonial era.
However, significant inequality has characterized access to wealth through paid employment throughout the recorded history of monetized labor. While fortunes have been amassed by a minute proportion of the female population of Gabon associated with the ruling regime, and a professional female middle-class has emerged, inequalities of opportunity and reward continue to mark women’s experience of life in this little-known country of West Central Africa.
The key challenge facing scholars researching the history of women in Gabon remains the relative lack of historical resources. While significant strides have been made over the past decade, research on women’s history in Francophone Africa published in English or French remains embryonic. French research on African women began to make a mark in the last decade of colonization, notably with the work of Denise Paulme, but then remained a neglected area for decades. The publication in 1994 of Les Africaines by French historian Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch was hailed at the time as a pioneering work in French historiography. But even this new research contained no analysis of and only a passing reference to women in Gabon.
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The Archaeology of Political Complexity in West Africa Through 1450 CE
Stephen Dueppen
Political complexity in archaeological research has traditionally been defined as socio-political differentiation (roles, statuses, offices) integrated through centralized systems of power and authority. In recent decades the assumption that complex organizational forms tend to be hierarchical in structure has been called into question, based upon both archaeological research and ethnological observations worldwide, including in classic archaeological case studies of centralization. Moreover, there has been an increasing interest in exploring variability in political legitimizations and articulations of power and authority globally. Until these theoretical shifts, West African complex societies, both archaeological and from ethnographic analyses, were largely ignored in discussions of political complexity since many (but not all) conformed poorly to the expectations of highly centralized power and administration. West African ethnohistoric and archaeological examples are now playing important roles in current discussions of heterarchical organizational structures, checks on exclusionary power, cooperation, urbanism, ethnicity, and the nature of administration in states.
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Nationalism, Decolonization, and Development in Kenya
Kara Moskowitz
In colonial Kenya, the British administration appropriated fertile lands for European settlers. The resulting land shortage, alongside coercive policies such as taxation, forced many African families to become laborers on white farms or in cities. As land scarcity heightened and labor conditions worsened, African communities in Kenya engaged in various forms of anticolonial resistance, ranging from strikes to protests to violent conflicts like Mau Mau. In the 1940s, the colonial state began responding to African resistance with development and welfare. Development not only failed to improve standards of living, but it also allowed the state to intervene more aggressively into African lives. The imposition of misguided and unwanted programs, which also relied on communal forced labor, produced only greater discontentment. In cities especially, workers appropriated the language of development as a new basis to make claims. Building on mounting protests and shifting global politics, nationalist politics intensified, and as a result, processes of decolonization formally started in 1960.
During independence negotiations, contestations for land shaped political alliances and drove heated debates over the structure of the postcolonial government. Prior to the resolution of these issues, the colonial administration began enacting land resettlement. These programs—based on the principle of willing buyer–willing seller at market value—protected white settlers and further entrenched class, ethnic, and gender inequalities. Kenya gained independence with a federal constitution, but Jomo Kenyatta and the KANU (Kenya African National Union) party that came into power opposed regionalism. Within a year, Kenya had become a de facto one-party state, and the federal constitution was abolished. Though Kenyatta adeptly strengthened and preserved his power, postcolonial Kenya witnessed the rise of populist, ethnonationalist, and separatist movements. While none have been wholly successful, Kenya’s economic and political inequalities, its unmet promises of decolonization, and its ethnic antagonisms have ensured continual protest and a fractured nation.
