Women and African Nationalism

The history of studies of women's involvement in African nationalist struggle, mobilization, and party politics can be traced along intellectual and political paths that initially followed, later paralleled, but have seldom deviated from or led the course of Africanist historiography.1 On the face of it, it would seem that those of us who have focused on or seriously included women in our African research should have done better. After all, the birth of most independent African nations from the late '50s to mid '60s, of a field called African Studies, and of a contemporary women's movement with both intellectual and political agendas all occurred within a dozen years of each other.2 Moreover, all were born in hopeful ferment. Like the new nations, both African Studies and the women's movement were eager to shake off the grip of mental colonialism. The "new" African history and the historians attracted to it had no ossified agenda or framework. The work at hand was to recover Africa's past, celebrate the emergence of independent Africa, and gore the sacred imperialist cows of old. Whereas women's historians interested in effecting changes in the process and production of American or European history had to fight their way onto trains that had been moving through centuries on well-worn gauges, the "new" Africanist train had barely left the station in the early '60s.3 If timing seemed to favor Africanist historians concerned with women, it also appeared to support African women's full participation in nationalist movements. By the mid-twentieth century, adult women in most independent nations of the world had achieved the vote. Some had achieved it in the course of anticolonial nationalist liberation struggles of their own.4 In so far as African nationalist leaders and parties sought, at the constitutional level, to articulate arguments for independence from colonial rule in terms that were both preached and understood by governments in England and France (if not PortugaLSpain or Belgium), it was in thefr interests to present themselves as enlightened proponents of western democracy and equality, including full political rights for women.5 Moreover, as has invariably been the case when it is expedient or necessary to draw on the resources and energies of all the people, women were, in almost all movements of African nationalist struggle, including the armed struggles waged in Mozambique, Angola, Guinea Bissau, Zimbabwe and Namibia, quickly "elevated" to the level of tasks required, in some cases becoming "full adults" almost over night.6