Africa and African Diaspora Feminism

Well-known feminist thinkers who have played prominent roles in political and intellectual debates throughout the 1970s and 1980s include Nawal El Sadaawi (Egypt), Zenebewerke Tadesse (Ethiopia), Fatima Mernissi (Morocco), Fatou Sow (Senegal), Bolanle Awe (Nigeria), Patricia MacFadden (Swaziland), Ifi Amadiume (Nigeria), Ruth Meena (Tanzania), and Fatma Allo (Zanzibar). In terms of organizations, the establishment in 1977 of the Association of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD) marked the growing assertiveness of African feminists. The founding workshop set out to establish a continent-wide network of scholars dedicated to undertaking research from an African and gender perspective. The declared mission of AAWORD includes two clearly feminist commitments: to analyze and transform gender relations and social conditions in Africa; and to build a powerful African women's movement linking human rights to the theory and practice of development.

During the 1980s AAWORD was joined by several other research and documentation centers, notably the Women's Research and Documentation Centre (WORDOC) at the University of Ibadan, set up by a group of Nigerian academics that included the historian Bolanle Awe, and the Women's Research and Documentation Project (WRDP) at the University of Dar Es Salaam initiated by Tanzanian academics.

The 1990s saw a continuing proliferation of documentation centers and gender and women's studies units on African campuses, as well as several new initiatives to bring these together through research and networking activities. In pursuing an initiative designed to network and strengthen the work of scholars in gender and women's studies working in African institutions, the African Gender Institute (itself formed in 1996) was able to identify as many as thirty such sites in Africa's 316 universities, with several others still being established (Boswell, 2002). The scholarly output in the field of gender studies, much of which bears the influence of feminist thinking, has also increased rapidly, as several recent reviews indicate (Mama, 1995; Lewis).

The expansion of the field appears to be continuing in the early twenty-first century, despite the apparently unfavorable context offered by Africa's beleaguered universities, most of which remain extremely resistant to the idea of feminism and offer very limited institutional support to gender and women's studies, teaching, and research (Feminist Africa). A core concern reflected in both AAWORD and the African Gender Institute is the commitment to bring critical reflection and political activism together for the benefit of women. Intellectual activism is intrinsic to feminism worldwide, but in African contexts it has raised unique challenges because of the particular salience afforded to "gender planning" and "gender mainstreaming" in the international development discourses that have such profound effects on the region.