Africa and African Diaspora Feminism

Feminist thinkers often draw inspiration from the history of women's leadership roles in African societies, citing examples of women who ruled kingdoms and led wars of conquest since the earliest epochs of human civilization. Most often cited are the seventh-century Berber queen known as the Kahina of the Maghreb, the ninth-century Magajiyas of Daura, the legendary sixteenth-century Queen Amina of Zazzau, the nineteenth-century Nzinga of Angola, and Nehanda of Zimbabwe. These examples illustrate that African women leaders exercised their authority—often in the distinctly feminine styles of their times—in a manner that spanned spiritual, political, and military realms, and that has served to inspire feminist ideas all over the world.

The cultural complexity and dynamism of a region in which so many cultures coexisted and interacted with one another throughout the ages has given rise to quite disparate, at times idiosyncratic, gender relations and philosophies. There is little commonality between the complex and contradictory gender cultures expressed in Yoruba, Somali, Hausa, or Egyptian oral poetry, yet all of them are African, and all are rooted in conditions and contexts that are African in the sense of having been generated and inspired on the continent.

Women's movements on the African continent reflect the gendered cultural, social, and political organization of the numerous African societies in which they are located. There is enough evidence to suggest that African history is replete with diverse examples of mobilization against women's oppression, even though these have often been omitted by historians (Zeleza). Many of these at times phenomenal movements defy a simple definition of feminism. The available evidence suggests that women's movements in Africa reflect the traditions of organization that have characterized spiritual and material life in Africa as far back as recorded history goes. Few would seriously challenge the idea that gender differentiation has been a key feature of social, cultural, and political life all over the continent as far back as records can be found. Accordingly, African women have long been organized around lineage and kinship groupings, and around women's religious, cultural, and political duties and their productive and reproductive roles. The record also shows that these existing organizations were sporadically activated to defend women's interests.

Kenyan women were organized in mumikanda (work parties) and in various social and welfare groups—ngwatio among the Kikuyu-speaking communities, and mwethya among the Kamba-speaking communities. In Nigeria, Igbo women were organized as in various patrilineage wives and daughters associations, and governed through women's councils. Such networks of women collectively imposed sanctions on husbands who erred (the practice of "sitting on a man"), and proved capable of instigating widespread civil disturbances when they found their interests being compromised. The early-twentieth-century example of the Nwabiola Dancing Women's Movement in colonial Igboland (Eastern Nigeria) illustrates the manner in which apparently conservative organizational forms could become militantly activist when women saw their interests being threatened (Mba). All across West Africa business has long been conducted through market women's associations and trading networks that were periodically activated in defense of women's economic interests, and at times their political interests.

As colonialism gained ground, some of the earlier women's associations and groups were redirected by missionary groups and colonial governments, often through volunteers with a degree of Western education. These modern "women's clubs" were often designed to "civilize" and "uplift" African women, usually by instilling western European ideologies of domesticity and offering training in related skills (Tranberg Hansen). Domestication notwithstanding, it is clear that African women exercised enough agency to deploy whatever skills they acquired in innovative ways that empowered them and laid the ground for future involvement in national public life. Examples of women's groups coming together as larger bodies include the Mother's Union and the Catholic Women's Clubs of Uganda, the Federation of Nigerian Women's Societies, the National Council of Women of Kenya, and the Association of Women's Clubs in Zimbabwe. When nationalist movements gained momentum, seemingly conventional women's groups and associations—charitable and welfare groups, mother's groups, and market women's associations—often directed their energies in support of nationalist goals. The Convention People's Party led by Kwame Nkrumah was among those nationalist movements that benefited substantially from the support of women—in this case the market women of Ghana.

Many of the women who later became leading educators, activists, and politicians were initially involved in the women's clubs of the colonial era, among them Margaret Ekpo of Nigeria, Agatha Constance Cummings-John of Sierra Leone, Mable Dove-Danquah of Ghana, and Gertrude Kabwasingo of Uganda. The more radical among these women—most of whom were elite and educated women—mobilized across the class lines too, as Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti did with such success. Ransome-Kuti was a key player in the Abeokuta Women's Union, which mobilized to oust an oppressive alake (chief) in 1948. In the ensuing decades she became a leading national political figure identified with nationalist, socialist, and feminist causes (Johnson-Odim and Mba). Ransome-Kuti's life is illustrative of African women's vibrant and militant history of resistance to colonial rule and imperialism and highlights the key roles that women activists played in nationalist movements all over the region, long before the second wave of feminism emerged in the Western world. Well-documented examples of more overtly political women's movements include those of Egypt, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Algeria, Mozambique, and the anti-apartheid movement of South Africa.

Some were chapters for women in the existing nationalist structures (for example, SWAPO Women's League, ZANU Women's League) or women's battalions in the nationalist militia (for example, the Algerian women in the FLN, the Frelimo Women's Brigade convened by Josina Machel, the short-lived women's detachment in the National Resistance Movement [NRM], or the women fighters said to make up 30 percent of the Eritrean People's Liberation Front). Other political women's organizations derived from party organs but broke away out of frustration, at times to pursue feminist agendas more overtly, as was the case with the Egyptian Feminist Union that broke away from the Egyptian Wafdist Party under the leadership of Huda Sharaawi. In an unspecifiable number of cases, women established new kinds of organizations with varying degrees of autonomy.