Introduction

Throughout the contemporary era, citizenship has been defined generally as both legal status and “lived experience” (Isin & Turner, 2007, p. 16); a form of political activity, identity, and solidarity (Bosniak, 2000, p. 451); an identification of group and individual engagement (Barry, 2006, pp. 20–21); and simultaneously as identity, practice, and a set of relations (Pailey, 2016a). While the literature on citizenship tends to overly emphasize its inclusionary force, citizenship is essentially about exclusion in that it creates gendered, racialized, classed, ethnicized, and aged “non- or partial citizens” (Lister, 2003, p. 43). In this vein, the term “citizen” has been challenged by feminist scholars as historically male-centric and inherently exclusionary because women were not included in the original social contract instituted by Western enlightenment, but were instead “generally subsumed under male heads of households with no legal rights of their own” (Tickner, 1997, p. 627). While citizenship as an ideal has been presumed to be genderless, it is still “based on male defined norms which deny the complexities of female experiences” (Seely, Diouf, Malischewski, Vaikath, & Young-Burns, 2013, pp. 431–432).

In the same way that feminist scholars have questioned the primacy of maleness as a referent of citizenship, so too have internationalist and Africanist scholars challenged whiteness as a referent of citizenship by centering the experiences of so-called Global South subjects in their analysis about citizenship and geopolitical hierarchies of power. Adopting a feminist lens of analysis, this article demonstrates that contestations over women’s equality in contemporary Africa have centered around the fulfillment of citizenship rights embedded in law, practice, and lived experience. It examines structural, institutional, and cultural barriers to ensuring full citizenship for women in policy and praxis, including an evaluation of how African women’s political, economic, social, and cultural rights have transformed over the post-independence period. To that end, the article contends that the assertion of women’s citizenship in Africa has essentially been about ensuring equality of access to rights, resources, and representation.

Feminist, Internationalist, and Africanist Conceptions of Citizenship

As one of the foremost feminist theorists on the intersection between citizenship and gender, Lister (2003, pp. 37, 41–42, 196) borrows Oldfield’s definition of citizenship as both legal status with attendant “social and reproductive rights,” and practice as “an expression of human agency in the political arena” to argue convincingly that to be a citizen means to enjoy the rights of citizenship required for social and political participation, while to act as a citizen means to “fulfil the full potential of the status” despite structural constraints such as entrenched gendered inequalities. Thus, a comprehensive theorization of citizenship must factor women as subjects rather than objects of study and must also incorporate both their individual rights and political participation in all spheres (Lister, 2003, p. 41). For example, earlier attempts to cast citizenship as a gender-neural, abstract concept failed because they did not account for women’s uniquely embodied experiences (Lister, 2003). Accordingly, feminists are deeply concerned about how women are excluded from citizenship based on “their relationship with the private sphere” as well as “the problematization of their inclusion in the public sphere” (Gouws, 2005, p. 3). In this respect, the private sphere has been identified as a site of both agency and oppression for women (Yuval-Davis, 1997b), thus “changing the divide between the private and the public sphere but also understanding the fluidity of its boundaries and the interconnectedness between the two spheres are some of the greatest challenges for creating an egalitarian citizenship” (Gouws, 2005, p. 5).

For some scholars, it is important to abandon the private–public dichotomy altogether because “women’s exclusion from the public, political arena is in some way determined by structural inequalities in the family and the labour market and by the public–private divide” (Siim, 2000, p. 32). Thus, citizenship is context specific, with African women, for instance, deriving citizenship simultaneously from membership of different communities, including family, state, nation, while often experiencing limitations to their agency and autonomy in these same institutions (Imam & Kamminga, 2012, pp. 11–12). For example, in some African countries with federal systems, such as Nigeria, women’s citizenship rights are conferred at dual levels (national and state); while national citizenship in Nigeria is conferred by birth via a parent or grandparent who was indigenous to Nigeria at the time of independence, state-level citizenship is derived from paternal origins, so much so that married Nigerian women are denied state-level citizenship if they reside in a spouse’s state of origin that differs from their father’s (Pereira, 2004, pp. 1, 7). This has consequences in the political realm, in which Nigerian women have been barred from contesting for political office in regions other than their paternal state (Pereira, 2004, p. 1).

As the example from Nigeria shows, it is particularly useful to analyze how women’s citizenship is mediated through fluid and interconnected institutions such as “the state, civil society, and the domain of the family, kinship and other primary relations” (Siim, 2000, pp. 4, 19; Yuval-Davis, 1997a). Women’s citizenship is particularly constrained because of their “time poverty” resulting from added responsibilities in the home (Gouws, 2005; Lister, 2003). Feminist scholars have recognized the practical and material conditions that limit women’s citizenship, including domestic responsibilities such as childcare which keep them “tied to traditional gender roles,” thus leaving unchallenged “fundamental social divisions that allocate different roles to women and men” because of their biological differences (Goldblatt, 2005, p. 124). Women’s largely unpaid and unrecognized care work in the home due to the sexual division of labor severely restricts their ability to live as agentic citizens in the private and public spheres; this has been heightened in contexts like South Africa where the burden of care for those with diseases like HIV/AIDS rests with women (Goldblatt, 2005), or in public health emergencies such as the 2013–2016 Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, where women provided the majority of home- and hospital-based care (Pailey, 2016b). Thus, scholars have argued that state structures must acknowledge and validate care as a fundamental citizenship right to enable women to exercise the institution equally and sufficiently (Goldblatt, 2005, pp. 130–131; Sevenhuijsen, 1998, pp. 19, 23).

In studying how women experience citizenship differently based on their layered identities in and outside the home, the concept of “non- or partial citizens” has become particularly instructive for explaining the variable ways in which different types of women are included or excluded from the institution. For instance, in the same way that essentialist citizenship binaries served to subordinate the private female non-citizen to her public male citizen counterpart, as indicated in Table 1, they have similarly served as justifications for why Europe (as the so-called rational, impartial, independent, subject-citizen parent) colonized Africa (as the so-called the irrational, partial, and dependent object-non-citizen child).

Some feminist scholars struggle with whether women’s inclusion as citizens should focus on their embodied difference from or sameness with men, since the liberal tradition of rights tends to falsely equate equality with sameness. Others argue that negating or ignoring women’s embodied difference from men “reinforces or reintroduces inequality into the concept of citizenship ... while it is assumed that rights apply universally to everyone many groups of people with particular identities feel excluded from citizenship” (Gouws, 2005, p. 4). In embracing a “gender inclusive” model of citizenship, Lister (2003, pp. 68–92) proffers the term differentiated universalism to illustrate how the universalism of citizenship must accommodate women’s difference and diversity. Having recognized that the tendency to universalize “citizenship as rights” often inadvertently renders invisible some women’s very specific needs and vulnerabilities that may block them from pursuing “legal and policy redress” (Manicom, 2005, p. 36), Lister (2003, p. 87) argues that a feminist praxis of citizenship recognizes and responds to the particular needs of individual citizens—whether based on historical exclusion, such as the experience of colonialism, or because of contemporary inequalities, such as the feminization of poverty—while simultaneously affirming their equal membership in society.

As women are far from homogeneous, some scholars have argued that we should be thinking of “feminist pluralistic citizenship” to illustrate the differences between women given their varied social qualifiers as well as the “different sites of their participation” (Gouws, 2005, p. 5). While feminism has clearly reconfigured the “‘classic-modern’ citizenship project,” scholars such as Manicom (2005, p. 22) have argued that it has simultaneously silenced “black and Third World women living in the metropoles and post-colonies” whose perspectives, experiences, and subjectivities must be part and parcel of a feminist theorizing of citizenship because their “cultural, racialized, national, ethnic, religious or communal identities have been central to their exclusion from citizenship and are integral to their strategies for pursuing an inclusive, democratic politics.” In a “non-sexist, non-racist and non-Westocentric” configuration of citizenship, the position of women must be compared to that of men, but also in relation to their memberships in “dominant or subordinate groups, their ethnicity, origin and urban or rural residence” as well as their “global and transnational positionings” (Yuval-Davis, 1997b, pp. 4–5). Adopting an intersectional, internationalist definition of citizenship in reference to Crenshaw’s (1989) groundbreaking work about how individuals experience dominance and discrimination differently depending on their social qualifiers, Yuval-Davis (2000, p. 172) addresses Manicom’s concerns in her notion of “multi-layered citizenship” to describe how “people’s rights and obligations to a specific state are mediated and largely dependent on their membership of a specific ethnic, racial, religious or regional collectivity.” Although not entirely confined by it, “people are not positioned equally within their collectivities,” just as women are not positioned equally within the institutions that govern their lives (Yuval-Davis, 2000, p. 172).

Given the asymmetrical nature of geopolitics and the citizenship hierarchies within countries and continents, an important body of research has emerged to examine citizenship from a Global South perspective, generally, and the evolution of citizenship in post-independence African states, specifically. Echoing Mamdani’s 1996 seminal text, Citizen and Subject, Manby’s unprecedented book published in 2009, Struggles for Citizenship in Africa, asserts that citizenship laws in Africa, as residual hallmarks of colonialism, have been contested because of their exclusionary and discriminatory manifestations, thereby fomenting conflict and instability in the contemporary era. A historical analysis of the evolution of citizenship laws in Africa, beginning with the onset of colonialism, demonstrates that citizenship was non-existent for the “subjects” of colonial rule, and only a few native male administrators retained any form of citizenship within colonial territories (Manby, 2009; Mamdani, 1996). Anticolonial struggles for independence, on the other hand, simultaneously constrained and liberated African women. While women were able to assert greater power within nationalist movements through their identification as mothers, they were also confounded by the deliberate silencing of their demands for gender-inclusive citizenship, agency, and participation (Hassim, 2005, p. 56).

During independence, citizenship laws were reconfigured in the same manner European law configured liberal citizenship, by birth or ancestral lineage, whereby those not native to the soil were excluded either because they had migrated to the region during the colonial period, or because they had migrated from another section of the territory (Manby, 2009). Just as colonial boundaries remained the same, so the citizenship norms that were adopted often reflected a European ethos. Although modern legal norms, coupled by globalization, are pressuring Africa to loosen regulations on citizenship, post-independence states still hold very strict definitions of who belongs, often excluding ethnic groups who were not physically present in the polity by a particular date (e.g., Uganda and DRC), non-blacks (e.g., Liberia and Sierra Leone), immigrants (e.g., Nigeria), and women (Manby, 2009). This trend, scholars have argued, is manifested in the fractured nature of contemporary African identity formation (Adejumobi, 2005; Manby, 2009; Mamdani, 1996).

Citizenship as a site of contestation in Africa is particularly at odds with its liberal definition in social theory, which claims that modern citizenship included civil, political, and social rights for all members of a given society, whereby all enjoy the right to equal treatment under the law (Marshall, 1950). This construction of citizenship has been critiqued implicitly and explicitly by a range of scholars, including O’Connell Davidson (2013, p. 15), who asserts that “those who enjoy citizenship in the formal sense do not always enjoy equal access to its privileges and protections.” It is clear that social theory of liberal citizenship has a blindspot where the Global South, generally, and Africa, specifically, are concerned. It has an even larger blind-spot for the lived experiences of women citizens in those areas. Given that the very foundations of citizenship were couched in whiteness, maleness, and property ownership, black and African feminists have argued that women’s citizenship in the Global South, and particularly in Africa, has its unique logics fashioned not only by patriarchy, but also by histories of slavery, colonialism, structural adjustment, land dispossession, militarism, and neoliberalism (Mama, 2011; McFadden, 2005). Thus, Africa represents an important case study of how contestations over women’s citizenship equality have evolved from decolonization onwards.

African Women’s Struggles for Citizenship Equality

During the period immediately following independence in most African countries, citizenship laws explicitly discriminated on the basis of gender, with African women excluded from certain rights and privileges, if they were deemed citizens at all (Manby, 2018). For instance, whereas most countries in Africa are gender-neutral in terms of granting both men and women the right to pass on citizenship to spouses and children, others are gender-neutral only with respect to children, favoring men in the transfer of citizenship to spouses; still others invariably deny women the right to pass on citizenship to children (Manby, 2018; Seely et al., 2013). The latter group includes countries as varied as Liberia—though Liberia was never formally colonized by European powers—Burundi, Guinea, Libya, Mauritania, Somalia, Sudan, Swaziland, and Togo (Manby, 2018; Pailey, 2014, 2016a).

At independence, restricted citizenship laws based on gender were a reflection of restrictions embedded in the citizenship laws of former colonial metropoles. However, countries with revolutionary heads of state eschewed the practice of gendered citizenship discrimination. One such leader was Burkina Faso’s Thomas Sankara, whose strong commitment to gender equality quite possibly influenced the country’s adoption in 1989—long after his ouster—of a family code with strong women’s rights provisions (Manby, 2018, p. 98). Some early post-independence citizenship laws did not restrict women from transmitting citizenship, as was the case in Chad, which changed gendered discriminatory laws during the period 1961–1962, and Côte d’Ivoire, whose laws did not discriminate on the basis of gender when they were first adopted in 1961 (Manby, 2018, p. 98). While Lusophone countries may have obtained independence later (in the mid- to late and thereafter), they adopted gender equality norms in their citizenship laws from the outset, thereby enabling women to transfer citizenship to their children and, with the exception of Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe, to their spouses; this could be attributed to the countries’ socialist ideologies (Manby, 2018, p. 98). A watershed moment in the battle for African women’s citizenship equality occurred in 1992 when a woman activist in Botswana, Unity Dow, was granted the explicit right by the Court of Appeal to transmit citizenship to her children and spouse (Manby, 2018, p. 98). Widely publicized across the continent, the case emboldened advocacy around the right to citizenship and nationality for African women. By the end of 2017, 42 out of 54 African countries did not explicitly restrict African women from passing on citizenship to their children, and under half had removed laws restricting women from passing on citizenship to their spouses; the transmittal of citizenship to spouses has encountered more resistance (Manby, 2016; 2018, pp. 98, 102).

According to Manby (2018), the impetus for introducing gender equality in citizenship laws across Africa came from simultaneous local, national, international, and transnational advocacy. Despite significant gains in transforming citizenship regimes across Africa to address the needs of women, fierce resistance to granting women equal citizenship rights has persisted. For instance, although the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa adopted in 2003 compels states to refrain from gender discrimination, it is virtually silent on citizenship rights for women primarily because of strong opposition from North African states (Manby, 2018, p. 101). In formerly colonized or so-called developing contexts like Africa, “the relationship between gender and the nation or women’s rights and national identity politics has been unpredictable and uneasy,” with contestations over citizenship particularly stark in the 20th century and beyond during the “third wave” of democratization (Moghadam, 1994, 2003, p. 65; Yuval-Davis, 1997a; Jayawardena, 1986). As Pereira (2004, p. 1) has argued, “[African] women’s experiences of citizenship are deeply steeped in experiences structured by gender inequality,” including the economic liberalization and structural adjustment programs of the 1980s and 1990s as well as the more contemporary neoliberal project which severely limits women’s abilities to live fully (Nyamu-Musembi, 2007, pp. 200–204). Because restrictions on African women’s citizenship still persist despite some legal reforms to the contrary, African scholars like Nyamu-Musembi (2007, p. 177) have argued that formal citizenship—the rights and obligations that define the state–citizen relationship—does not necessarily guarantee substantive citizenship—the “absence of constraints imposed by lack of action on the part of state institutions, or constraints imposed by norms, relationships and institutions at the sub-national or informal level that mediate one’s experience of formal citizenship, regardless of gender.”

Thus, citizenship as lived experience for women in Africa demonstrates the limitations of citizenship as couched in laws and rights solely, what Gouws (2005, p. 3) describes as “procedural equality.” For instance, although South Africa admittedly has one of the most liberal constitutions in the world, a Women’s Charter for Effective Equality which heralds gender-inclusive citizenship and socioeconomic rights for women as the bedrocks of democracy, and one of the most advanced National Machineries for Women—a state structure created for the express purpose of gender mainstreaming—South African women at varying levels still struggle to benefit from the rights and privileges of citizenship, what Gouws and others refer to as “substantive equality” (Gouws, 2005, p. 3; Manicom, 2005, p. 26; Seidman, 1999). Although the differential experience of black South African women in particular during apartheid was heavily negated by a nationalist liberation struggle, in the post-independence era these same women began to assert their subjectivity by securing certain rights in the public domain—including reproductive, labor, customary, and political rights—through collective mobilization bridging racial, socioeconomic, and ideological divides (Gouws, 2005, pp. 8, 10; Hassim, 2005, pp. 57–69; Seidman, 1999). However, many of the conditions that rendered them subordinate and unequal during apartheid and before it remain unchallenged and unchanged in a post-independence and post-apartheid nationalist project (Gouws, 2005, p. 8; Manicom, 2005, p. 26). As a case in point, Manicom (2005, p. 34) has shown that South African women at varying levels are reduced to second-class citizens in part because of the post-apartheid state’s adoption of neoliberal policies that have “fostered a feminization of labor and of poverty,” particularly adversely impacting black women.

As the example of South Africa indicates, an examination of African citizenship laws demonstrates that legal treatment of women is variable and uneven, both across the continent and within individual countries (Seely et al., 2013). While many African constitutions have been rewritten since the 1990s, “women’s citizenship rights are not automatically enshrined” (Seely et al., 2013, p. 433). In their analysis, Seely et al. (2013) illustrate how laws drafted in early post-independence periods tended to be less gender neutral, outwardly discriminating against women, while laws in countries with significant Muslim populations tended to favor men. Where there is a high prevalence of strong women’s movement advocacy (as in Rwanda and South Africa) or legal court action (as in Botswana and Zimbabwe), citizenship laws can be amended “either by leveraging the legal system to bring about change or by emphasizing gender neutrality in the law as part of a larger constitutional overhaul” (Seely et al., 2013, p. 430).

African women post-independence have had to contend with the inherent contradiction between liberal citizenship emphasizing equal rights under the law (without guaranteeing those rights in practice), and customary law which confines women to the private sphere under the authority of male relatives (Meintjes, 1995, p. 7). To address the unintentional and deliberate centering of men in statutory and customary forms of citizenship, respectively, scholars have argued for a radical shift in how we construct public and private spheres of influence because they form the basis of legal systems and determine how men and women relate. According to Meintjes (1995, p. 8), “the reordering of roles and responsibilities in private and every-day life are particularly pertinent, since these determine how women can participate in civil life” as full citizens. In her analysis of citizenship construction and practice in South Africa, Meintjes (1995, p. 7) makes the important point that citizenship rights enshrined in legal statutes and regulations alone will not liberate women from the strictures of dominance and discrimination. Similarly, Imam and Kamminga (2012, p. 26) have argued that “women’s legal position, however, is not only framed by the content of law, but also by the extent to which they can access it, and the extent to which it is likely to work in their interests.”

The difficulty in addressing women’s differential experience of the institution of citizenship lies in the fact that:

inequalities that can be linked to “citizenship” for women are extremely broad and multifaceted, including (but not limited to) economic rights and inheritance, health care and reproductive freedom, domestic and sexual violence, marriage and divorce, and representation in political institutions.

(Seely et al., 2013, p. 431)

Across the globe generally, and in Africa specifically, women have evoked citizenship in their struggles for suffrage, political quotas, and welfare rights (Lister, 2000; Moghadam, 2003, p. 64; Narayan, 1997; Walby, 1994). For example, in South Africa women were actively involved in ensuring that the country’s first democratic constitution enshrined broad sweeping rights for women, including rights to equality, freedom from violence, freedom and security of person, reproductive freedom, etc. (Ndlovu & Mutale, 2013, p. 74). Similarly, women from Zambia, Malawi, and Uganda fought for the inclusion of women’s rights provisions in their countries’ constitutions, specifically related to affirmative action, non-discrimination, and criminalizing violence against women (Ndlovu & Mutale, 2013, p. 74).

Since feminists define citizenship as both legal status with certain rights and practice through political agency, it is important to examine how the active assertion of African women’s political rights and representation serves as a proxy for citizenship equality, and how some women have employed leadership in the public sphere to enhance women’s citizenship in all spheres.

Political Rights and Representation as Proxies for Citizenship Equality

Socioeconomic and Cultural Rights as Proxies for Citizenship Equality

Conclusion: Moving from Rights to Justice

This article has adopted a feminist lens of analysis to examine how African women’s citizenship—defined as legal status with attendant rights, resources, representation; and as practice through active political participation—has evolved from independence onwards. Although the rights discourse has predominated in women’s struggles for equality of citizenship across the length and breadth of Africa, and has framed the contours of this article, some scholars correctly argue that equality is fundamentally about ensuring justice rather than simply instituting procedural rights:

“Rights” have levelling and universalised legal meaning. “Justice”, on the other hand, is far broader, and implies a holistic understanding of ways in which certain groups and institutions can prevent others from realising their different liberties . . . Through rights discourses, gender mainstreaming consequently constructs universal subjects as passive recipients, impedes their agency in driving change, thereby foreclosing possibilities for them to drive alternative gender transformation in society and privileges the subject positions of globally and regionally dominant subjects.

(Lewis, 2009, pp. 209, 212)

Although citizenship is often framed as a system of rights, the rights-based approach to securing equality has been fiercely critiqued for being unaccountable to the socially weak, “legalistic, top-down, and relying excessively on supranational legal frameworks, formal legal instruments and institutions,” and thereby detrimental to the “priorities and practices of people who frame and make rights claims in struggles over resources or social power” (Goetz, 2007, p. 26; Nyamu-Musembi, 2007, p. 177).

Goetz (2007, pp. 30–31) and other scholars recommend advocating for gender justice rather than the more mainstream gender equality or women’s empowerment, because gender justice demands accountability by power-holders and addresses structural inequalities “that result in women’s subordination to men.” Scholars have also asserted that because citizenship is gendered, removing legal barriers to full citizenship rights for women, though necessary, is ultimately an insufficient condition for achieving equality, and this general belief is true for African women (Tickner, 1992). For example, in her analysis of why women in Ghana fail to win competitive elections—and are therefore inadequately represented in political decision-making—Darkwa (2016, p. 247) argues that legal frameworks and regulations that purport to protect the rights of women in public and private spheres do not challenge the status quo sufficiently. Feminist scholars have repeatedly posited that an emphasis on “legal rights” is too narrowly focused on the citizen–state relationship, preferring instead to analyze barriers that may inhibit women from engaging with the world as autonomous human beings.

While changing legal frameworks around citizenship may not address African women’s lived experiences of inequality entirely, Manby (2009, p. 22) has argued convincingly in her analysis of the struggles for citizenship in Africa that “a denial of the right to citizenship itself under national law is often central to the denial of other rights,” and that the legal right to citizenship is the foundation of all other rights including the right to vote or hold public office, the right to healthcare and education, the right to freedom of movement, and the right to land. Similarly, Seely et al. (2013) contend that laws make manifest “unwritten social conventions,” and are therefore important markers of what societies deem legitimate and just. Thus, the literature suggests that conceptualizations of citizenship remain varied and nuanced in Africa, and that debates about how women’s equality of citizenship can be anchored in law, practice, and lived experience will continue to prevail.