AFRICAN WOMEN: REFLECTIONS ON THEIR SOCIAL, 
ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL POWER

Mojubaolu Olufunke Okome
Fordham University
Invited paper presented at Lehman College, CUNY, May 12, 1999

Introduction

In this paper, I intend to explore the multiple ways in which African women exercise and deploy power, despite the social, economic and political constraints that they face. Thus, I will address both constraints and possibilities that shape the actions and reactions of African women. The goal of exploring women's power is to emphasize that there are opportunities for enhancing women's power by using and expanding mechanisms that are available in their culture.

This paper is not meant to indicate that women are not marginalized, impoverished, or invisible in public life. It is intended to recognize that women are not a lump of humanity, that there are class, ethnic, status, religious and other differences among them. At the same time, I intend to recognize that there are traditional avenues that are available for women to exercise power, and they ought to be emphasized in the quest for further empowerment for all women. The paper will also demonstrate that women are not necessarily natural allies. The distinctions among them may divide and prevent the building of women's movements that struggle for women's rights. This recognition is not necessarily devastating. An awareness that there are cleavages among women can be used to build even stronger movements that are directed at serving all members by addressing their needs. This is a work in progress. My research is ongoing.

It has become generally accepted almost as a truism that women are disadvantaged and discriminated against worldwide. One of the most valuable contributions of feminism as a movement is that it lays out the nature, form and extent the evidences that exist of man's inhumanity to woman. Contemporary feminists have shown evidence of the inequities and inequalities that proliferate in all parts of the world against women. They are right. Against this background, I ask the questions: Do women have any power in African society? Under what circumstances? These questions are asked because I am an African woman who in my personal experience, is aware that the studies that posit the automatic powerlessness of women as a group vis a vis all men do not explain my own experience. They also may indicate the existence of a very real human situation, but do not give any idea of the richness and vibrancy of life as it exists, and as I know it. To demonstrate what I mean, let me quickly make the following observations: 

  1.. There have been studies in the past that made the claim that indeed, some women are powerful. Such studies then provide us with examples of women who have taken leadership roles in their societies. From these studies, it is clear that when we speak of women, we ought to specify that there are class differences among women. These class differences imply that some women are granted social, political, and economic privileges that are not open to other women. These privileges are also not open to majority of men in society. Examples abound all through Africa. 


  2.. The point is also increasingly being made that if we take as a starting point, the feminist contention that gender is socially constructed, then, constructions of gender must take on different forms in different geographical locations. Thus, the gendering of society in Africa does not automatically take on the same form as we observe in the western world. This also is an important observation that informs my work. Since Africa is composed of 52 countries, and Nigeria, the country with the largest population has over 250 ethnic groups, there are cultural differences that make the social constructions of any categories more complex than in the West. What we need to do in Africa is to conduct studies that go from one ethnic group to the other and consider issues of gender. We cannot make conclusions on the conditions in Africa without doing this initial groundwork. 


  3.. Let me also hasten to note that virtually all of Africa was colonized. Whatever we observe in Africa today is a combination of precolonial culture overlaid by elements absorbed as a result of the experience of colonization. 
Dimensions of Women's Power

To return to the question of women's power in society, and the circumstances under which they may have power, and the influence of women's power or weakness, I make the following initial claims:

Women may have power in society in the following institutions: the family, kinship group, community, ethnic group, state. Instances of power would include women's power as mothers vis a vis children, regardless of age. As wives, the first wife has more power than other co-wives. As political officials, there are examples of women who are queen mothers e.g. the Edo of Nigeria, the Buganda of Uganda, the Akan of Ghana. Women can also have economic power based on their ability to own the means of production, or the ability to control the gains that they make from exchange. There are also examples of women's ritual power. Some are priestesses, goddesses.

A second set of questions arise. If we start off from the contention that women are commonly oppressed by male patriarchy, what are the defining characteristics of femaleness and maleness, strength, and weakness? Have these characteristics remained the same over time? When did they change? Since this is a work in progress, I will raise these questions in the course of my research, which will focus specifically on the Yoruba of Southern Nigeria. I will not necessarily answer them definitively today, except to point to the exciting new research on gender among the Oyo Yoruba by Oyeronke Oyewumi (1998). Oyewumi argues that among the Oyo Yoruba, seniority, and not gender is the definitive category. To apply Western gender categories to Oyo Yoruba society is to erase the real lived experiences of people. This is because as a woman, a person may be powerful in some respects, and weak in others. For example, one and the same woman may be a daughter, wife, mother, sister, grandmother, mother in law, political official. Each status carries with it advantages and disadvantages, and those advantages and disadvantages are held vis a vis other individuals in society, who may be male or female. Women are not precluded from exercising power, even ordinary women who are poor.

Let me pause and explain. As a daughter, a woman has rights in her natal family vis a vis the wives in the family. As a matter of fact, other women who marry into this kinship group refer to her and all the "children of the house" as "my husband". She has privileges and entitlements that arise from this status. She also has rights to her family's land, inherits from her father through the unit that is headed by her mother (in a polygynous family). As a wife, this same woman has little power vis a vis her sisters in law and mother in law. She gives them the respect that is due to these statuses. As first wife, she has more power vis a vis subsequent wives. She no longer has to undertake the tedium of everyday chores when more junior wives are married. She ought to be consulted in all matters including the marrying of the cowives and family decisions. AS mother, a woman has real power over her children, regardless of their age. As a sister, a woman has power vis a vis younger siblings. She has less power vis a vis older ones. As a mother in law, she has enormous power vis a vis her daughter in law. She can decide to use this power in a just manner, or choose to be oppressive vis a vis her daughters in law. As a grandmother, a woman is respected by all that are junior to her as having attained the heights of old age, and thus as having become wise. As the Yoruba say, o ti g'oke agba.

The point that I am trying to make is that as a woman, there are conditions under which one is legitimately able to exercise power. However, this does not imply that each and everyone will perform identically. Personal capacity matters. Also, social and political institutions can intervene to empower or disempower individuals and groups in society. When we also consider the question of what constitutes the defining characteristics of maleness and femaleness, these characteristics may not be attached to males or females as a function of traditional institutions assigning roles in an immutable, unchanging manner, but as part of a fluid, hegemonic process where the hegemons of the day manufacture consent by defining for everyone else what our common sense understandings of the world should be. As a result of the operation of a hegemonic process, powerful groups in society can then generate a definition of strength and weakness and the assignment of gender roles to fit the common sense understandings of the world. What those roles are for African in the precolonial era differ from what they came to be in the colonial era, which also differ from what we observe today.

Limits of the Modernity/Tradition Thesis

To all intents and purposes, what we see in African countries today is that people, including scholars draw a dichotomizing line between modernity and tradition which affects not only practices, values, principles and behaviors that humans manifest, but also the geographical spaces that they occupy. The city under this dichotomizing scheme is modern, the village, traditional. Wearing a Yoruba iro and buba is traditional, wearing a skirt and blouse is modern. Cooking with a gas stove, using aluminum and stainless steel pots and pans is modern, using wood in an adogan, clay pots, some kinds of cast iron and wooden spoons is traditional. If a woman cooks, that is tradition. If a man does, it's modern. If a person lives in a mud hut, that's traditional, in a concrete house with corrugated iron with galvanized steel roofing, it's modern. A traditional woman is weakened by traditional structures. She has to cook, clean, take care of children and the old, the sick and visitors. She cannot have any perception of herself as an individual. The community defines her. She is the property of her husband, a jural minor, is likely to have had some genital surgery imposed on her, to have experienced high levels of infant mortality, to be illiterate, poor, overworked, unappreciated, and totally marginalized. A modern woman is not.

The question we need to ask and answer is: If the traditional woman is traditional, what makes her so? That she resides in the traditional milieu? When did tradition stop and modernity begin? Did tradition weaken people due to some intrinsic quality in tradition, while the logic of modernity is intrinsically to empower, to free the individual from parochial ties that ultimately marginalize? Most people tend to date modernity from the 15th Century contact between Africa and the West, a contact that ultimately denuded all Africans, male and female, of any meaningful power. If we think of tradition and modernity as constructs that define a moment of domination, we begin to see that what we take as "tradition" today has a strong overlay of the "modern". What one observes in Africa then is not necessarily tradition versus modernity, but the dragging of Africans into the European-dominated world system to perform the menial tasks. The dragging in was not only the exercise of physical power but of hegemonic power where the new conquerors influenced society in a profound way to define the conquered as savages and themselves as the civilized liberators.

As "savages", the conquered were doomed to become eternally damned, but were redeemed by their benevolent conquerors. Lest we think that this perception defines a moment in the dim past, it exists today in form of the failure to recognize that pre-colonial African societies within Africa were heterogeneous in nature. The traits that are now attributed to modernity could be found in many. Those traits were not only discouraged by the modernity-wielding Europeans. They were destroyed. The crisis-ridden societies that struggled to survive the assault of modernity by holding on to some practices, fashioning new ones ot ward off the calamities that beset them and to adopt and adapt, came to be presented as traditional, exhibiting the pathological traits that we have come to identify with backwardness. It is within this framework that I examine the role of African women in society.

The argument that I make is that when an entire continent has been exploited in its human and material resources as profoundly as happened in Africa, it is to be expected that the colonizer after conquest, through trickery and brutal wars of pacification, attempts to establish its hegemony such that its values, principles, and ideas become accepted as the common sense. The behaviors and attitudes preferred by the hegemon become the norm, and by the same token, those of the conquered become unacceptable, illegitimate, backward. Wehere in the past, women were able to play some important roles in society, with colonization, these are defined out of existence. Where the religion of the colonized had key roles for women to play both as deities and priestesses, the imposition of Christianity ruled these out. Whereas motherhood formerly implied power, it now came to be seen as an encumbrance. Whereas motherhood and participation in the economy were not mutually exclusive, it soon came to be as Africa moved inexorably toward Westernization. Although being a woman was not coterminous with being the weaker sex, this became the norm. Indeed, one of the most important institutional upon which a woman's claim of power could be made - motherhood- became irrelevant because of the separation between the public and private spheres that was an integral part of the colonial enterprise. As an actor that was restricted to the private realm, women were domesticated and subject to the discipline of those recognized as the heads of households - men.

We look now at women all over Africa and maintain that "tradition" is the problem. If we are among the more progressive, we argue that women are oppressed by patriarchy that besets them from two sources - the tradition of patriarchy and that set in motion by colonization. To make this claim depends on the extent to which we can maintain that the societies of Africa at the inception of colonization were "traditional". To claim that they remained pristine, immutable and unchanging, conservative and reactionary in the face of centuries of countervailing influences from within and without. To do this, I would argue is wrong. If we study history, we find that in the precolonial era - between the prehistoric age and the 15th Century, history reveals evidences of continuity and change. Thus we must revoke our commitment to a dichotomy between tradition and modernity. Change is as much a part of the precolonial as it is of post-colonial Africa. We can examine the question of the pace of change, however, and the extent to which phenomena such as the growth in the numbers of the urban centers and the introduction of large-scale mining and plantation agriculture generated deep shifts that were extremely dislocating.

To specifically address the power of women in society, and take the various roles of women that were previously identified as indicators of instances where they may be able to exercise power, as mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, grandmothers, mothers in law, political official, owners of capital, nobility/aristocracy, deities, religious leaders. What does the evidence show? First let's think of the ideal, of what is possible under the best possible scenario. Unfortunately, I will only be able to speak briefly on women as mothers. 

Motherhood

Orisa bi iya o si, iya l'a ba sin. There is no deity like the mother, mothers are the ones that we ought to worship

It is widely posited that motherhood is important in all of Africa's societies or communities. Of course, the requirement that all women ought to be mothers may also operate in an oppressive manner to discipline those who are not able to bear children. I want to start with the ideal. Ideally, what are the powers, privileges, and entitlements that motherhood gives a woman? The Yoruba say, Iya ni wura, baba ni jigi. Mother is gold, father is a mirror. Mother is gold, strong, valuable, true, central to a child's existence, wise, also self-denying. As a mother, ikunle abiyamo - the kneeling position that is assumed at the moment of birth - confers privileges on a mother. Ideally, mothers ought to be respected, ought to be heeded, ought to be able to ask their offspring to transcend the limits of doing just enough. Mothers also ought to be respected by society at large. The very act of childbirth is to say the very least, one of the most difficult things that a human being undertakes in life. Prior to this, a mother carries the child in uteri for nine months, and subsequently, nurtures the child, guaranteeing not only physical survival, but moral development and the development of a social conscience.

Among the Yoruba, motherhood confers privileges, privileges that hark back to the very foundations of society and women's presumed roles in it. Women symbolize fertility, fecundity, fruitfulness. Women also are feared. They are believed to be capable of deploying, even of having the capacity to unleash powerful forces of darkness. Those who have studied the rituals associated with Gelede ritual performances among the Egbado and Igbomina demonstrate the underpinning of female power and the visible demonstration of the power of women for both good and evil, the power to create and destroy, to critique social behavior and to use the power of satire to check transgressors. Gelede is a display of the power of women to create new life and to undermine the very essence of society if not properly worshiped (Drewals, 1983) A similar portrayal of women's power in the spiritual realm is observable in Ifa, the use of divination to decipher and explain human existence (Bascom, 1969). It is seen in the worship of Yemoja, Oya, Osun, all very powerful women deities. Their worshiper are not only women. These deities are ministered to by both men and women. When the priest or priestess becomes the iyawo, (wife) prior to gaining the full stature of priest, When priests wear "women's" clothing, are they cross-dressing? is this a mark of transvestitism, as claimed by some scholars? (See Drewal 1992) Not if we really understand Yoruba culture.

When viewed from the perspective of scholarly works on gender, we see that the gendering of society may in and of itself render women as mothers not only powerless but marginal to social, political and economic life. The burdens of motherhood may be so heavy that a woman is never able to develop a sense of her self. She is most likely to be impoverished, most likely to be irrelevant. Constantly, we are reminded that women are the weaker sex. Wars affect them more, economic crises prostrate them, they are the epitome of wretchedness. Statistics are deployed to confirm the reality of these depictions. I am not denying that women are burdened, I am not contesting the existence of patriarchy, I am not saying that there are no instances of gender-based oppressions in contemporary Yoruba society. What I claim, the assumption that will undergird this work in progress, is that women in African society exercise power in multiple ways that are difficult to acknowledge, or recognize when we use the tools that are designed to study Western societies. In order to properly study African societies, we have to as an initial condition, consider the reality that stares us in the face - African societies are different. We can learn valuable lessons on the human condition if we take them seriously. Gender is not deployed in the same manner in African societies as it is in the west. There are multiple conditions that we cannot explain with the tools of western scholarship.

I asked a 74 year old female informant questions on some of these issues. She comes from a polygynous family where the rule of thumb followed by her father was that the first and last child of each wife would be educated. It mattered not at all if the child was male or female. I asked what the norm was in her own home town, Tede, in present day Oyo State , Nigeria. She responded that women were in fact more likely to be at the inception of the colonial era. Some also chose to educate their slaves rather than their freeborn children/citizens because there were no advantages to being western educated. Those that were so educated had no opportunities for upward mobility. It was a prudent idea to send only those whose labor could be spared, or those whose lack of upward mobility was not considered to be overly injurious. "okunrin a maa ba won r'oko, nitorinaa, obinrin ni yio lo si ile eko". Some also believed that "gbogbo anfani ti obinrin ba ni, oko re ni yio see fun" and also that "ko si ohun ti obinrin le da se". When asked if there were exceptions to these rules in observed practice, my informant identified women from the royal family and women who were regarded as "Alaigboran, onijogbon" as those who were recognized to be perpetual transgressors to these rules. I find the existence of transgressors interesting, because it alludes to the lack of fixity of status, it allows for individuals to be able to manipulate and interpret the rules in a manner that favors them. It allows for multiple interpretations of the same rules, and for some women to wield power. To be able to wield power successfully does not imply that such women have a perpetual win-win situation. They must negotiate with individuals, groups, and whole societies in order to be able to carve out their own niche. They must pay the costs as well as enjoy the benefits of asserting or expanding their rights and entitlements. Unfortunately, the state of the art today is such that when we hear historical accounts, these cases are not brought up. This is why Funmi Iyanda's observations are interesting. It is clear that a new kind of historical research on women's history must be done where we look at the experiences of ordinary people and how people negotiated their lives in spite of the constraints that existed.

Another very important factor to realize is that if we accept that contemporary women are commonly oppressed by patriarchy, the agency that is primarily responsible is the state. The contemporary state was not created by Africans. It is a colonial imposition. Being so imposed, it bore, to paraphrase Amina Mama, the racial hierarchy and gender politics of nineteenth century Europe as a result of which Africa was "indoctrinated into all-male European administrative systems, and the insidious paternalism of the new religious and educational systems" This "has persistently affected all aspects of social, cultural, political and economic life in postcolonial African states." (Amina Mama 1997, 47). I spoke again to my 74 year old informant. We were talking about the politics of kingship and the traditional rivalry among the Yoruba kingdoms. At a point, this woman, who hails from Tede in the Oyo North region told me about Tede's position within the hierarchy of the Yoruba kingdoms. According to her, Tede, which is a very small town has never lost any battles. In the heydays of the Yoruba wars, Tede's women participated actively in the battles. They gathered intelligence, and fought as combatants. Some of their activities bring to my mind the reputed magical powers of women. This is what she told me:

      Informant: Ogun o ko Tede ri, bi o tile je pe ilu naa kere pupo.


      Me: Ee ti ri?

      Informant: Nigba won ba de ibi ti awon ota wa, won o ka ese otun abi osi kuro nle, won a gbo ohun gbogbo ti won nso. Ngba awon ota ba nta ofa, ko nii ba won. Awon naa o wa gbe ofaa won, won o taa ba awon ota. Ogun ti se nuu.
       Informant: In spite of its small size, Tede has never been vanquished in war. 
      Me: How so?

      Informant: When they got to the enemy, they lifted up either their right or left foot, and they hear all that is being discussed. When the enemy shot their arrows at them, it did not hit them. They (the women) then lift up their bows and arrows, and shot at the enemy. That's the end of it. The battle was won.
     

I pressed my informant, who is a staunch Christian to let me know why this would happen. I wanted to know if she believed what she was telling me was the truth, since it is in direct contradiction of Christian doctrine. She took great pains to explain to me that Africans had their own science before the advent of the European presence. She told me that much information has been lost, therefore, the picture that we have today is incomplete. When asked why, she told me that her own experience of Christianity entails turning one's back completely on the past, and becoming a new person, with a whole new outlook on life. Thus, it made total sense that the science of the past would be forsaken for the new deal. It also made sense that the corpus of knowledge becomes extinct through disuse and disbelief. I asked for the origin of a word in the mama's oriki - aisiki - (a word which also occurs in my oriki) her response is that she ought to have asked her grandmother. Nobody knows now.

No doubt there is a paucity of women in positions of authority in Nigeria. However, to properly address issues related to the oppression of women, we must work both within families, communities, ethnic groups, and all other social agglomerations. We also must work within the state. We must work on devising mechanisms that empower women as individuals, as economic, political and social actors. Developing an understanding of the cultural mores that support women's empowerment is useful as a building block in the making and defense of claims that are made to push against obstacles and impediments to women's power. Such understanding is impossible without undertaking research that identify instances where women have power, and in what scope and domain. Of course, women have to use all possible avenues in this struggle - the law, moral suasion, protests, coalition-building for the purpose of bringing all manner of pressure to bear on the power structure, taking the initiative to become the interpreters of culture with the realization that culture is not static, it is constantly changing and being reconstituted. The work that I have undertaken by beginning this research is envisaged as a contribution to this effort. Thank you.

Works Cited 

William Bascom Ifa Divination: Communication Between Gods and Men in West Africa Bloomington, Indiana, 1969.

Henry John Drewal & Margaret Thompson Drewal Gelede: Art and Female Power among the Yoruba Bloomington, Indiana, 1983.

Margaret Thompson Drewal Yoruba Ritual: Performance, Play, Agency Bloomington, Indiana, 1992.

Funmi Iyanda "An Opinionated Female" Tempo (Lagos) May 13, 1999 Copyright (c) 1999 Tempo. Distributed via Africa News Online (www.africanews.org). Received on Naijanews on May 14, 1999.

Amina Mama "Sheroes and Villains: Conceptualizing Colonial and Contemporary Violence Against Women in Africa" in M. Jaqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, eds. Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures New York: Routledge, 1997.

Oyeronke Oyewumi The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Feminist Theory. University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Aminata Toure "Muslim Women Claiming Their Rights" PANA August 6, 1998

Agence France Presse (AFP) ABUJA, May 27.

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