Women in Politics
During the first decade of the twenty-first century, several of Africa’s 54 nations have seen dramatic increases in the number of women in politics. This change can be attributed to several factors. Women’s political activism increased during the 1990s, both within and beyond the formal political sphere. The mobilization of women’s movements within national political transitions has become much more effective. The internationalization of feminism globally – which has put women’s demands for greater representation on the international stage – as evidenced in the World Conferences convened by the United Nations (UN) and by increasingly vocal transnational feminist networks, has also empowered women’s activism at local levels. The countries with increased women’s political representation are all electoral democracies, many of which have undergone transitions from various forms of authoritarian rule (van de Walle, this volume).
These transitions have been diverse. The end of apartheid brought the African National Congress (ANC) to power in South Africa in 1994; the military victory of the National Resistance Movement (NRM) over the government of Uganda led to a new government, the institution of a ‘one-party democracy’, and a new constitution that included an affirmative action strategy for women in 1986; and post-genocide Rwanda elected 48.8 per cent women to the House of Representatives in September 2003. Five years later, this rose even further when women won 45 out of 80 parliamentary seats in the 2008 election, making Rwanda the first country in the world to elect a majority of women representatives. These highly celebrated examples remain exceptions to the general rule, which sees men continue to significantly outnumber women and dominate political power and influence in most of the world. In this global context, the low average for the percentage of female elected representatives in sub-Saharan Africa at 19.1 per cent is on par with the global scenario, in which 19.2 per cent of the world’s elected representatives are women (IPU 2011). Comparatively, the United States lags behind other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations, ranking 67th in the world with only 16.6 per cent women elected – far less than many African nations.
It is important to keep in mind that while some African countries have an impressive number of female members of parliament (MPs), gender equality is more problematic the higher one goes up the political ladder. There were no democratically elected female heads of state until Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was elected in Liberia in 2004. Indeed, the historical record only makes her election more impressive. Throughout the whole of the twentieth century Africa had no democratically elected female heads of state, and only three women monarchs. Empress Zauditu ruled Ethiopia from 1917 to 1930, and Queen-regents Dzeliwe Shongwe (1982–83) and Ntombi Thwala (1983–86) ruled the Kingdom of Swaziland. President Jean-Bédel Bokassa appointed Africa’s only female prime minister, Elizabeth Domitien, in the Central African Republic (CAR), but she only served for one year (1975–76). Africa’s first female head of state was Ruth Perry, selected as interim chair of Liberia’s Council of State during the mid-1990s. It is thus clear to surmise that women’s marginalization has been a deeply entrenched feature of African political cultures and institutions.
Sadly, these complexities and the efforts of women’s movements to promote female political participation have often gone unnoticed because many mainstream studies of African politics still neglect changing gender configurations. Van Allen (2001) observes that most research continues to focus on the contestations arising between male elites, with insufficient attention to the important role played by labour and other social movements – such as international women’s movements – in advancing women’s political equality. As this chapter illustrates, further attention to the role of women and a gender analysis of African politics can contribute to a deeper understanding of broader democratization processes.
Attention to gender exclusions and the masculinized quality of political cultures illuminates both the formal and informal character of political institutions and processes that clearly involve far more than the obvious contestations between ruling men. Indeed, it is often argued that the equitable participation of women gives a good indication of just how democratic a given regime is. The Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) states:
The advancement of women goes hand in hand with the overall development of society and contributes to better and more effective governance. A stronger presence of women in parliament will allow new concerns to be highlighted on political agenda; and new priorities to be put into practice through the adoption and implementation of policies and laws. The inclusion of the perspectives and interests of women is a prerequisite for democracy and contributes to good governance.
(IPU 2008: 6)
However, given that most of the world’s democracies exhibit severe under-representation of women, taking gender equality as a definitive criterion implies that no nation has yet attained democratic governance. That feminist political theorists uphold this definition while it has less currency in mainstream political studies indicates that different conceptualizations of ‘politics’ and ‘democracy’ are at play within the literature.
Although well-intentioned, the tendency of qualitative research on gender and politics in Africa to focus on ‘best case’ scenarios, combined with a lack of in-depth research, has had the effect of focusing attention away from the under-representation of women and on to a small number of success stories, most notably post-apartheid South Africa, post-1989 Uganda, and post-genocide Rwanda – all countries that are in the top 25 globally in terms of women’s numerical representation. As home of Africa’s first democratically elected woman president, Liberia is now generating wide interest. Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe have strong scholarly communities carrying out significantly more local research than much less-studied nations, like Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Mali, and the Seychelles. Similarly, some conflict-affected countries – Liberia, Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and Rwanda – have generated studies on gender and security, while other conflict zones, such as Chad, Sudan, or Morocco, have not.1
Nevertheless, it is also these countries that have generated a larger body of research, wherein both local and international scholars have begun to debate and theorize the political possibilities of having women in office, and what it will take to make them more effective political actors in political institutions. Scholars must grapple with the challenges arising from the fact that the national histories of women, gender, and politics are in continuous flux, being influenced by local dynamics and by the complex interplays between local and international influences. Researchers have shown a deepening interest in investigating challenging questions about the quality of women’s political participation and their effectiveness. How much political influence do women actually have? Do they exercise influence as women, or do they simply perform in the same ways as men? Women’s movements in the countries with the highest numbers of women in the legislature are increasingly concerned about the extent to which women in structures of power and policymaking do actually translate their hard-won and increasing presence into the delivery of gender-just policies – that is, policies that lead to real advances in the lives and prospects of women in the society at large. Qualitative studies go further than surveys to answer these questions and explore some of the conditions under which women participate, the normative gendered assumptions that prevail in the institutional cultures, the procedures and practices of government and political institutions, and the gendered inequalities in economic status that so often curtail women’s participation.
This chapter draws on this literature to review the changing gender configurations in contemporary African politics, and the critical role that African women and women’s movements have played in regional political development in the post-Cold War period. It supports the view that democracy cannot be fully understood without attention to the various social forces involved in bringing it about – what Saul (1997) refers to as ‘democratization from below’. It argues that many of the constraints to women’s political participation lie within the gendered construction of political institutions and processes, so that women are faced with the dual task of entering and working within male-dominated arenas, while also working outside of them to promote reform.
The Global Picture
The broad global scenario of gender politics has emerged following several decades during which women’s movements made important inroads at many levels of international governance and politics. The latter years of the twentieth century saw women’s movements participate in the UN Decade for Women, Development and Peace (1975–85), the main feature of which was the emphasis on integrating women into development. The concern that women and their interests be taken more seriously by male-dominated governments was specifically addressed in the call for governments to establish official structures (described in UN parlance as the ‘national machinery’ for women) in order to integrate women into development planning and policymaking. African nations pursued this ahead of other regions in the world, so that by the 1990s the majority of nations had some institution dedicated to this task. However, an independent review – carried out 25 years after the third Global Women’s Conference, held in Nairobi in 1985, inspired a surge of gender activism – reveals that these were largely under-resourced, with limited capacity to effect change.
The initial government responses to the post-Nairobi demands for women’s fuller participation in development were limited and instrumental, and can be characterized as liberal rather than transformative, in the sense that they did not challenge the basic features of women’s subordination (such as the gender division of labour, economic disparities, or women’s political marginalization). Instead, the emphasis was on integrating women into development (the Women in Development or WID approach). WID was implemented largely through supplementary projects for women, which were themselves small-scale and did not challenge unequal power dynamics. Over time, awareness of the limits of the ‘add women’ approach gave rise to a more strategic focus on power relations, articulated in the increasingly assertive demand for the inclusion of women in political power and decision making. These were manifest in the Beijing Platform for action, formulated at the 1995 World Conference a decade after Nairobi, amidst the 1990s upsurge in global feminist networks and women’s movement activism (Basu 1995; Naples and Desai 2002).2
The last two decades have seen local and transnational feminist activism bear fruit in local and global governance arenas, respectively. An array of UN resolutions, declarations, legal reforms, and policy instruments has been implemented, with varied levels of uptake in member countries. Women’s political participation has been a particular focus of international feminist activism since the Beijing Conference of 1995. In 2010, the vigorous engagement of women’s movements around the world culminated in the establishment of a new global governance structure for women, UN Women, whose head, former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, reports directly to the UN Secretary-General.
Contemporaneous positive changes in Africa include the African Union’s (AU) unequivocal policy commitment in 2003, under the leadership of former Malian President Oumar Konare, that no less than 50 per cent of future AU commissioners would be women. This was followed by a Gender Working Group convened to begin strategic planning for a special session on gender during the 2004 Heads of State Summit, which resulted in a Solemn Declaration on Gender Equality in Africa signed by all heads of state. At the sub-regional level, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) has taken the lead in Africa in adopting its Protocol on Gender and Development, which commits to attaining gender parity in political decision making by 2015.
Women in African Nationalist Politics
African politics has seen many changes since the attainment of political independence. During the nationalist era, women’s movements contributed to decolonization and political development in many countries. However, very few women were afforded leadership roles in the main political parties or movements. Furthermore, the fact that women contributed significantly to the struggles for political independence and national liberation across Africa was for a long while neglected in mainstream studies of African politics. It has largely been left to feminist scholars to unearth and document women’s participation in these historic processes. Women contributed to national political movements in a multiplicity of ways, often transgressing local gender norms in order to do so, and often at some cost to themselves and their families.
One of the best-known cases can be found in the region that makes up Nigeria’s southern states, where there is a long history of militancy by women’s movements. These include the Nwaobiala dancing women’s movements of the 1920s and the Women’s War, quelled by a colonial army that shot and killed 53 women protesters (Mba 1982). During the 1940s and 1950s women’s political activism in southern Nigeria continued, including the many actions led by prominent socialist feminist Ransome Kuti, who campaigned tirelessly for women’s political inclusion (Johnson-Odim and Mba 1997). It was women who came together across regional and ethnic colonial divisions to form a national organization (the Nigerian Women’s Union) and to lobby for the extension of suffrage to all Nigerian women, instead of excluding women in the Muslim-dominated northern parts of the country.
Similarly, women participated actively in Guinea-Bissau’s national liberation war against the Portuguese (Urdang 1979). In Eritrea’s 30-year struggle for independence from Ethiopia, as many as 30 per cent of fighters were reportedly women (Wilson 1991). In Algeria, women also performed multiple roles in both the political and the armed struggles against the French, a factor that led the French to mount specialized programmes to educate women in the hope of preventing their recruitment by the National Liberation Front (FLN) (Lazreg 2009). High levels of women’s involvement were also evident in the liberation struggles waged in Southern Africa, Namibia, Angola, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe.
It is worth noting that many of the above-mentioned movements were inspired by socialism and reflected the influence of the relatively progressive gender politics that characterized leftist politics and socialist methods of struggle. According to the basic Marxist tenets espoused by Samora Machel and other revolutionary African leaders of the 1980s and 1990s, the emancipation of women was fundamental to the success of the revolution. That this went against indigenous cultural norms was a matter for education and consciousness-raising in the movement. The extent to which women’s participation can be attributed to the exigencies of war has been a subject of some debate, because movement victories have not translated into the significant and sustained participation of women in national politics that international feminists – perhaps romantically – anticipated.
In contexts where the struggle for independence involved the growth of political parties and movements, rather than liberation wars, women were extensively involved in political mobilization and anti-colonial activism. African women were often already organized through various networks and organizations that embraced political activism as the nationalist movement took shape. In Ghana, the mobilization of women across the class spectrum contributed to the victory of the Convention People’s Party, led by Kwame Nkrumah, forming the first independent government in 1957 (Manuh 1991). In Guinea, women engaged actively alongside veterans, labour, and student movements in the political processes that saw the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA, African Democratic Rally) form the first independent government under the leadership of Sekou Toure. In East Africa, too, women were actively involved in national party politics, as well as through women’s organizations such as the Sudanese Women’s Union, Maendeleo ya Wanawake in Kenya, and the Tanzanian Women’s Union. Taken together, these examples demonstrate that women were highly motivated and effective political activists during the nationalist struggles that took place in many parts of Africa. For the most part, they mobilized in support of otherwise male-dominated political movements and parties.
Political Independence
Political independence marked a new level of democratization, expanding the possibilities for African political leadership and participation. All of the party leaders were men, but some made definite efforts to include women, although their involvement remained largely restricted to highly gendered roles as men’s help-mates and party supporters. Early studies argue that women were therefore unable to play a major role in African statecraft (Parpart and Staudt 1989). Yet, it is clear that political independence marked a significant advance from colonial rule. Ghana offers an example, as Nkrumah readily acknowledged the contribution of women to his success (Manuh 1991). The fact that there were no women in his cabinet led Nkrumah to introduce the first ever quota system in African politics, in the form of the Representation of the People (Women Members) Bill, passed into law on 16 June 1960. Thereafter, 10 women were elected unopposed as MPs, setting Ghana ahead of the rest of the continent and indeed much of the Western world in women’s representation in politics.
The case of Tanzania under Julius Nyerere offers another example in which the Tanzanian Women’s Union played a prominent role in national politics, and female political leaders like Bibi Titi came to prominence working for the party (Geiger 1997). Like Tanzania, other socialist-inspired governments, such as Guinea, Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, also sustained mass national organizations for women after independence. These gave women a gender-specific political space to play roles that remained largely supportive, in contrast to the more autonomous women’s movements that were later to develop in civil society and advocate more assertively for women’s rights (see below).
The early democracies of the 1960s and 1970s nevertheless saw women minimally represented in government, and expected to support mainstream agendas rather than engaging in feminist advocacy. The exceptions were those countries that developed socialist-style mass national women’s organizations (e.g. Ethiopia under Mengistu Haile Meriam), or those countries in which political parties established women’s wings in the service of the party and its leaders. Not long after, many of Africa’s new nations began to display levels of authoritarianism and instability that in some instances – Sudan and Nigeria were the first – deteriorated into the bloody conflicts and a series of military coups d’état that dominated the grim landscape of the 1980s, imposing extreme limitations on women’s political participation in particular.
Gender Politics under Authoritarian Regimes
By the mid-1970s more than half of Africa’s nations were under military rule, characterized by limited public involvement in the political sphere, widespread political repression, human rights abuses, and a tightly managed political strategy of unconditional co-optation (Cheeseman, this volume). Neither military rulers nor civilian dictatorships allowed any significant level of representation for women in government. In all cases, military or civilian, political power was monopolized by a male elite, with deep and lasting effects on political culture.
Systematic repression of civil society and dissent eroded civilian capacity for pro-democracy activism, provoking numerous struggles to expand democratic spaces, many of them involving women. Military leaders occasionally appointed individual women to political office, usually to address traditionally feminine areas of government, such as social welfare and education. The gender politics of military rule were somewhat more complex than mere tokenism, because a number of authoritarian regimes developed strategies that involved elite women in high-profile ways, while reinforcing the conservative gender ideologies of African militaries. These are addressed in discussions of ‘first lady syndrome’ and ‘wifism’ in Nigeria (Ajayi 2010) and Ghana (Manuh 1993). Women’s highly visible public presence on terms directed by their military husbands can be understood in part as a state response to the internationalization of feminism that took place during the 1980s. However, the various manifestations of ‘state feminism’ that arose under authoritarian regimes in African nations have been hostile towards independent women’s organizing, and in actuality are anti-feminist in their restoration of conservative gender politics.
Beyond this, military elites shared the public eminence and spoils of office with their wives. In 1980s Nigeria, for example, successive military leaders’ wives launched high profile programmes and mobilized military wives across the Federation to run them, placing elite wives in the public spotlight as never before. Nana Agyeman Rawlings, wife of Ghanaian military ruler Jerry Rawlings, established the 31st December Women’s Movement, which served the ruling regime by mobilizing women and creating international credibility for a regime that was very rapidly abandoning its revolutionary pretensions (Aubrey 2001). The 31st December Women’s Movement later metamorphosed into a party support wing, mobilizing women for Rawlings’s subsequently elected People’s National Democratic Convention. Later it became more like a non-governmental organization (NGO) and pursued women’s agendas in civil society (Tsikata et al. 2005).
Some ostensibly all-male military regimes established national political machinery for women – the official structures advocated by the UN under the Women in Development rubric. So it was that Nigerian military ruler General Ibrahim Babangida established the National Women’s Commission in 1985, the year of the Nairobi Conference. Ironically, women’s activists returning from the same conference were arrested and briefly detained by the regime for allegedly bringing Nigeria into disrepute. After a brief period in which the National Women’s Commission existed as a government body and developed its own programmes, the leadership was arrested and control of the commission was subsequently taken over by Mrs Babangida. A decade later, General Abacha’s wife attended the 1995 Beijing Conference with a 200-person delegation; that same year, her husband inaugurated the Federal Ministry for Women’s Affairs and Social Welfare. However, these formal structures for women were largely devoted to housing the pet programmes of the successive first ladies, who thus left the business of government to their husbands.
As Sisulu et al. (1991: 9) observe, ‘state feminism serves ultimately to maintain the status quo of the public life of politics, and to repress women’s engagement in civil society’. Africa’s authoritarian regimes therefore consolidated the patriarchal character of the state, and the accompanying militarization of political life ensured that the majority of women remained relative outsiders to politics and decision making during the 1980s and 1990s. As a result, the democratization movements that emerged to challenge authoritarian governments largely fell short of seriously addressing women’s marginalization within their ranks, mostly regarding feminist causes as a distraction from the real business of politics.
Women in Africa’s Democracies
During the wave of democratization in the 1990s, women’s political activism resurged and significantly greater numbers of women began to contest for office amidst these political transitions. At the highest level, women ran for president in Kenya and Liberia, and sought party nominations for the presidency in Angola, Burkina Faso, the CAR, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Nigeria, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Tanzania. None, however, succeeded in their campaigns. It was thus a remarkable development when Agathe Uwilingiyimana was elected to serve as Rwanda’s prime minister in 1992. Killed with her family at the outset of the genocide, she was a strong advocate of women’s rights and set a new standard for women in high public office. Neighbouring Burundi also elected a woman prime minister, Sylvie Kinigi, in 1993. In 1994 President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda appointed Wandera Specioza Kazibwe as his second in command, making her Africa’s first female vice-president, albeit in a ‘no-party’, multi-tiered system that reserved seats for women. In West Africa, Senegal became the first country to have a woman prime minister when Mame Boye was appointed by President Abdoulaye Wade in 2001. By the end of the 1990s, legislative bodies in Ethiopia, Lesotho, and South Africa had all appointed female house speakers, while those in Uganda, Zimbabwe, and South Africa had female deputy speakers, giving women a great deal more visibility and presence in the political arena.
Similarly, Mauritius is a signatory to two important protocols that aim to improve the representation of women in parliament, namely the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the 1997 SADC Declaration on Gender and Development. Yet despite its relative economic stability and success, it has the lowest representation of women in politics among the SADC countries, at just 5.7 per cent. The ‘invisibility’ of women in politics has been described as ‘a grave democratic deficit’, and blamed on the present electoral system, which ‘will never do justice to the true role of women in society and will never enhance the empowerment of women’ (Bunwaree and Kassenaly 2005: 29).
Botswana’s parliamentary system provides another example of a stable and peaceful democracy, in place since independence from the British in 1966. Like Mauritius, Botswana has seen sustained economic growth; wealth from diamond mining has been utilized for development, including social, educational, and health infrastructure. An active and highly effective women’s movement led by Emang Basadi (‘Women Stand Up’) successfully pursued legal reforms to equalize women’s citizenship rights. Re-elected President Festus Mogae subsequently appointed 10 women to top positions in government and the public service, including the ministers of local government and of health, assistant ministers of local government and of the Office of the President, and head of the National Bank. The ensuing years have seen the women’s movement continuing to support women’s entry into politics, lobbying for better representation in political parties, transforming women’s wings, carrying out training among women, and advocating for political reforms that would enable further progress for women in political life. However, women’s participation has increased slowly, and institutional constraints in the political system have been identified as the major obstacle to further progress.
In Tanzania, the transition from a one-party state to a multi-party democracy has delivered very limited gains to women: men dominate emergent political parties and women candidates have difficulty winning support. Two years after the ruling party Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) initiated a multi-party democratic transition in 1992, women comprised only 21.6 per cent of party membership in the eight parties for which data were available. Among these, just one party, Chama Cha Demokrasia na Maendeleo (CHADEMA), achieved gender parity, although several others surpassed the 30 per cent quota set by the Beijing Platform in 1995. The active lobbying and advocacy work of a vocal women’s movement and other women’s NGOs has kept gender equality on the political agenda, though progress has remained slow.
In contrast to the gradual progress of multi-party democracies, there are also contexts in which increased levels of authoritarianism and political repression have hampered progress for women. Zimbabwe is a case in which women’s participation in the liberation war was followed by some modest gains under the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) government. A national machinery was established and, for the first time, women from all racial groups were able to campaign and contest for seats in the national legislature. However, these gains were not sustained. The national machinery was downsized and under-resourced, and political participation remained low and ineffective in pursuing women’s rights. By the early 1990s an independent women’s movement had formed, partly in response to the ZANU government’s ‘clean-up’ campaigns, which led to the mass arrests and victimization of women. Popular media humiliated former fighters in a public debate over the question of whether freedom fighters could make good wives. The challenges facing women within Zimbabwe’s political arena have given rise to a women’s movement that plays a leading role in Zimbabwe’s beleaguered civil society, consistently working to increase women’s participation through continuous activism, advocacy, training, and outreach activities.
The political crisis in Zimbabwe that has developed since the 1990s has seen women’s groups establish a broad coalition and play a leading role in the constitutional reform process. The National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) was chaired by long-term feminist activist Thoko Maatshe. However, this process was overtaken by other developments, as the Mugabe government has continued toward authoritarianism, monopolizing power, detaining and arresting critics, and actively suppressing the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). High levels of political violence deter many women from campaigning for office, and it is well known that those who do dare to run for office are often subjected to abusive and humiliating treatment. It is not surprising that the number of women elected to office declined during the 1990s. In the 1995 election, women won 22 per cent of parliamentary seats, but by 2000, although more women than ever before were contesting, only a small proportion (14 per cent of the 55) were elected, to make up just 9.3 per cent of the total 150 seats.
Even without making reference to the wider crisis of democracy, Gaidzanwa notes that:
In Zimbabwe, the electoral system places a great burden on women since membership in a political party is a prerequisite for election into parliament. Membership in political parties is a strongly gendered process based on the availability of one’s time, energy, resources and skills to participate in the public domain. Political parties hold meetings, rallies, and workshops and require their members to devote time to relationships with other party members to enhance their chances of attaining electoral office. These requirements therefore rule out the participation of large numbers of women, especially those of childbearing and child-caring ages who also shoulder domestic responsibilities.
(Gaidzanwa 2004: 11)
Male party leaders obstruct women’s participation when they select only male candidates, and influence the selection at constituency and provincial levels. Women are also constrained by their limited exposure to the complex systems and procedures, and by the fact that they generally lack the funding to protect themselves during campaigns. Electoral dynamics between political parties also have negative effects on women’s chances of election, as does the fact that decisions are often determined by deals cut between men, while women remain outsiders in a situation that has been only worsened by the struggle between the two main contenders for power, ZANU and the MDC, which entered a precarious power-sharing arrangement after the 2008 election.
In South Africa, representation of women has steadily increased since the end of the apartheid regime which had upheld racial and gendered exclusions for decades. The successful mobilization of women under the Women’s National Congress guaranteed constitutional equality to all citizens of the new South Africa. It also led the victorious African National Congress to introduce a quota system, thus dramatically increasing women’s representation. By 2008, women constituted 42.8 per cent of ministers – a 200 per cent increase from 1997. Women have not only controlled portfolios traditionally associated with their gender roles, but also several key cabinet portfolios that have tended to remain under the purview of men, notably foreign affairs, public works, land and agriculture, and justice and constitutional development. By 2008, women were also holding 40 per cent of deputy minister positions, including defence. South Africa is a clear case in which women have mobilized successfully in the context of a transition toward democratic governance.
In addition to increased political representation, significant gains have been made in the legal and policy status of women, partly due to the high level of mobilization by women during the transition. Women in the parliament formed a cross-party parliamentary caucus in an effort to maintain the sense of unity around women’s rights. The remarkable legislative achievements of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on the Quality of Life and the Status of Women under the leadership of ANC MP Pregs Govender demonstrates how the combination of affirmative action and strategic organization by women in political institutions can be effective, even in a political culture that is still male-dominated.
It also shows the fragility of women’s gains, as the significance of particular individuals raises uncertainty about the extent to which they can be sustained over time (Gouws 2005). Similarly, some local analysts remain critical of the fact that even with the relatively favourable scenario that shaped the South African transition and its first few years of majority rule, women’s significant legislative and political gains have not translated into real social and political transformations in the wider society (Friedman 1999). Thus, for example, although South Africa’s legislation on termination of pregnancy is among the most progressive in the world, a range of additional factors – such as ensuring that health services apply the law, and that women have the resources and confidence to access and make use of the legal provisions – continue to limit its implementation.
Overall, Africa’s democracies see women’s equality still hampered by the patriarchal and sometimes violent political cultures that still bear the legacy of authoritarian regimes. Structures and processes continue to advantage men, and economic disparities mean few women have the resources to campaign. Thus, while women have embraced the new range of possibilities that have opened up with the transition from authoritarian rule to multi-party politics, a range of new challenges have limited and hampered their equitable participation. Some of these can be understood as the highly undemocratic and often misogynistic political cultural legacies of patriarchal and authoritarian rule. These have permeated civil society, women’s movements, and emergent party systems, and produced a mistrust of political institutions, discouraging many women from putting themselves forward as candidates. As Goetz and Hassim note:
Party systems, and the ruling party, may be insufficiently institutionalised for women to challenge rules which exclude women – simply because there are no firm rules and rights, only patronage systems and favours. Alternatively, where a military or theocratic power structure bolsters ruling parties, there is little scope for women’s engagement because the rules of these institutions explicitly deny women’s full right of participation.
(Goetz and Hassim 2003: 11)
In addition to the continued dominance of single parties in many states, transfers of power through electoral processes have often been marred by electoral malpractice and electoral violence in which women are attacked in gender-specific ways that are often deeply personal, as demonstrated by recent events in Kenya in 2007–08 and Côte d’Ivoire in 2011. Instances of political disorder and civil war are particularly significant for women because they tend to create particular difficulties for female political participation. Indeed, war and conflict have negative effects on women’s lives as well as on gender relations: in addition to hunger, death, and the loss of loved ones, women living in conflict zones have been subjected to widespread rape and sexual violence (particularly in the DRC, Liberia, and Sierra Leone). Partly because of this, post-conflict contexts have been enthusiastically discussed as heralding a post-war window that might offer women new opportunities for political participation (see Clark, and Curtis, both this volume). However, the experience of countries that have attempted to build democracy out of conflict since the end of the Cold War suggests that this is not necessarily so.
While female participation has increased in countries such as Rwanda due to the use of quotas, as discussed below, the picture is very different in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Liberia, despite having the region’s first woman president, still has only 12.5 per cent women elected representatives, well below the regional average. Despite President Johnson Sirleaf’s appreciation of the active support of the women’s movements in both the peace and the electoral processes, the Liberian case indicates that it will take a great deal more than a woman president to overcome the enduring effects of years of misogynistic, militaristic rule, and violent conflict. Whereas the various militias that waged the war involved as many as 30 per cent women combatants, the new national army displays the conventional exclusion of women. Women have also remained politically marginalized in post-conflict Sierra Leone, where they make up only 13.2 per cent of the legislature, despite the activities of women’s organizations seeking to increase this participation.
The effectiveness of quotas in facilitating women’s numerical representation has been well established, as countries without quota systems have largely failed significantly to increase numbers. The fact that the average number of women in parliament is higher in sub-Saharan Africa than in the rest of the world can largely be attributed to quotas (see Table 12.1). The top 10 nations with regard to women’s political representation are Burundi, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Tunisia, and Uganda. Seven of these have constitutional quotas for national parliaments, some of which are also combined with legislative quotas for lower levels of government. At the time of writing, 29 of Africa’s 54 countries have quotas, the majority of which have been voluntarily introduced by political parties, rather than as constitutional requirements. Their implementation thus remains contingent on election outcomes. In South Africa, for example, the closed list system adopted by the ANC includes a proportional representation requirement, under which the ‘zip’ or ‘zebra’ system requires that alternative male and female candidates be included on the party list for each seat.
Table 12.1Regional percentage of women in elected office
Region |
Percentage of women in office |
Global |
19.2 |
Americas |
22.4 |
Europe |
21.9 |
Nordic |
41.2 |
Sub-Saharan Africa |
19.0 |
Asia |
18.3 |
Pacific |
12.4 |
Arab states |
11.4 |
Source: IPU, March 2011.
The combination of quotas and the pressure brought to bear by international and domestic women’s movements has supported an increase in the percentage of women elected to office in sub-Saharan Africa, from 12.2 per cent at the end of 2001 to 19.1 per cent in 2011. However, it is important to note that this continental trend has not been evenly distributed within Africa (Table 12.2), and that its impact has not been uniformly positive.
Table 12.2Percentage of women elected representatives in Africa
Country |
Lower house (%) |
Upper house (%) |
Rwanda |
56.3 |
34.6 |
South Africa |
44.5 |
29.6 |
Mozambique |
39.2 |
– |
Angola |
38.6 |
– |
Tanzania |
36.0 |
– |
Burundi |
32.1 |
46.3 |
Ethiopia |
27.8 |
16.3 |
Sudan* |
25.6 |
10.9 |
Namibia |
24.4 |
26.9 |
Lesotho |
24.2 |
18.2 |
Senegal |
22.7 |
40.0 |
Mauritania |
22.1 |
14.3 |
Eritrea |
22.0 |
– |
Cape Verde |
20.8 |
– |
Malawi |
20.8 |
– |
Mauritius |
18.8 |
55.0 |
Burkina Faso |
15.3 |
– |
Zimbabwe |
15.0 |
24.2 |
Gabon |
14.7 |
17.6 |
Zambia |
14.0 |
– |
Cameroon |
13.9 |
– |
Djibouti |
13.8 |
– |
Swaziland |
13.6 |
40.6 |
Sierra Leone |
13.2 |
– |
Liberia |
12.5 |
16.7 |
Madagascar |
12.5 |
11.1 |
Togo |
11.1 |
– |
Benin |
10.8 |
– |
Morocco |
10.5 |
2.2 |
Mali |
10.2 |
– |
Equatorial Guinea |
10.0 |
– |
Guinea-Bissau |
10.0 |
– |
Kenya |
9.8 |
– |
Côte d’Ivoire |
8.9 |
– |
DRC |
8.4 |
4.6 |
Ghana |
8.3 |
– |
Botswana |
7.9 |
– |
Algeria |
7.7 |
5.1 |
Libya |
7.7 |
– |
Gambia |
7.5 |
– |
Congo |
7.3 |
12.9 |
Nigeria |
7.0 |
8.3 |
Somalia |
6.8 |
– |
Comoros |
3.0 |
– |
Source: IPU, March 2011.
Note: * Before the independence of South Sudan.
Consider Uganda, which instituted mandatory reserved seats, whilst other countries have adopted a combination of these two systems. Ahikire (2003) investigates the effectiveness of women in local government, noting that the quota system yielded as many as 10,000 women in local political office around Uganda in 1998 – a dramatic change in the level of representation, which might have been expected to lead to more substantive and qualitative changes. Instead, the impact has been contradictory, as the increased number has been accompanied by a lack of legitimacy and women are often accused of not having secured their positions on merit. She concludes that women in electoral office would be more effective if there were a strong civil society support system.
Ugandan MP Miria Matembe argues that women in Uganda ‘have been trapped and have become hostages to the quota system, which was originally introduced to liberate them’ (Matembe 2006: 8). However, arguments against the reserved seats option do not take cognizance of the fact that without it women fared far worse. In Matembe’s view, Ugandan women have perceived women’s seats in parliament as a privilege bestowed by a benevolent president, and this has clearly limited the extent to which they have challenged the status quo and pursued gender equality agendas.
Thus, in terms of effectiveness, the challenge is not whether quotas lead to an increase in the number of women representatives, but the extent to which women representatives can effectively pursue substantive changes that advance gender equality beyond the legislature itself. The evidence indicates that having more women in the legislature contributes to a change in the public attitudes concerning the acceptability of women in politics (Tripp et al. 2006: 129). It can also lead to significant progress in policies pertaining to women and gender equality, as has been the case in South Africa and Uganda. However, the extent of women’s effectiveness at actually transforming the gendered culture of politics remains the subject of much debate.
Overall the evidence points to women’s effectiveness being highly contextual, relating to local and international dynamics that cannot be read from statistical data on numbers alone. Qualitative research points to various aspects of the national political cultures that constrain women’s participation. Key among these are the level of democracy, manifest in the rule of law and general respect for human rights that goes disregarded in authoritarian regimes (VonDoepp, this volume). Other aspects of the political culture that limits the extent to which quotas for women can be effective in advancing women’s rights includes the persistence of misogyny, male backlash, and the subversion of quota systems by men manipulating individual women to pursue their own agendas.
In sum, while the emphasis on affirmative action and quotas may have generated some change, overall it does little to take the wider social, economic, and cultural conditions of gender inequality into account. Quota systems fall short of advancing the deeper changes that would make equal participation in political arenas possible. Goetz and Hassim (2003) distinguish feminine presence from political effectiveness, calling numerical and substantive representation ‘feminine presence’ and ‘feminist activism’, respectively. However, as others have noted, the various efforts to break down the barriers to women’s equal political participation ‘signal that there is room for women’s agency to shape politics, and that formal political rights are an important precondition for advancing equitable social policies’ for women (Hassim and Meintjes 2005: 4).
Women’s Movements and Political Change
In addition to their rising profile in formal political institutions, women have played key roles opposing corrupt and repressive regimes through civil society engagement in many countries. Public demonstrations, nationwide manifesto processes, and other militant actions have seen women engage with the challenges of political participation in numerous ways. In Kenya, the early 1990s saw women at the forefront of often violent protests in support of imprisoned human rights activists, and more recently, protesting against the 2008 post-electoral violence and its targeting of women. In Sierra Leone, too, women actively advocated for peace during the war years, and openly defied soldiers to demonstrate for a free vote when it was rumoured that the military government might postpone the February 1996 elections. The sub-regional Mano River Women’s Peace Network in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, was instrumental in the regional peace process, strong women advocates were involved in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and women have continued to agitate for greater inclusion of women in democratic governance with a 50:50 campaign supported by various non-governmental networks and organizations.
In Nigeria, though women continue to face challenges in making gains in formal representation, the women’s movement mobilized independently across the country during the 1990s. A key achievement of this period was A Political Agenda for Nigerian Women, coordinated by Gender and Development Action (GADA) (GADA 1998) working with other women’s organizations across the country. The political summits that generated the agenda gave a high profile to women’s opposition to military rule, as women called for an end to the violent, corrupt, and monetized political culture that had come to prevail during 30 years of military rule.
In Uganda, the Forum for Women in Democracy (FOWODE) has worked tirelessly to increase and facilitate women’s political participation. In 2010 they coordinated the national consultative process that gave rise to the Ugandan Women’s Agenda, which reiterates national commitments to gender equality, identifies obstacles hindering women from full and equal participation, and demands a series of measures which would overcome these to facilitate women’s political engagement. Ghana has also seen significant independent mobilization of women outside the auspices of the government and ruling party, led by NGOs and networks that advocate for women’s rights and strengthened political participation. Led by the ABANTU network, the women’s movement organized a highly successful Ghanaian Women’s Manifesto that involved nationwide outreach and awareness building in the run up to the 2004 elections (Mama 2005). In Tanzania, women have organized themselves into the Feminist Activist Coalition (FEMACT), a broad coalition dedicated to pursuing women’s empowerment and political participation. A Women’s Manifesto was ratified by FEMACT members in 2011 and an active ‘50:50’ campaign is ongoing. Women’s movements in Ethiopia, South Africa, and Uganda have also produced manifestos that prioritize the increased political participation of women and list measures that would facilitate this in and beyond the formal political sphere.
These examples all illustrate a change that goes beyond numbers. Men’s domination of African political arenas is being challenged by women’s movements at many levels. At the national level the picture is still very diverse, but women’s movements are active in even the most beleaguered and unstable contexts. Women’s activism has been most effective at shifting the political terrain when other conditions have also made this possible, as was the case in South Africa during the mid-1990s, but there is also ample evidence that strong women’s movements have been key actors in the transitions to peace and democracy.
Conclusion
Africa’s feminists have long argued that there can be no democracy without the full and equal participation of women. Left-leaning male political leaders and nationalists have often concurred and made significant gestures toward the inclusion of women in politics at key moments of change. The evidence confirms the value of affirmative action mechanisms to redress numerical inequality as a first step, but highlights the need for other positive interventions that can address long-standing political cultures of exclusion. The African nations with larger numbers of women in office, where gender inequality is still very much in evidence within and beyond the political arenas, demonstrate that even equal numbers are a minimal condition for fuller equality, not an end point. Overall, the continental shift toward democratization has made it more possible to increase women’s representation in public office and to make inroads in ensuring that this translates into more effective pursuit of women’s interests. The growing strength and capacity of women’s movements correlates closely with women’s formal political participation. Yet, women continue to face challenges at every stage and must be prepared to pursue a great deal more than mere numbers and legal reforms to bring about the level of gender justice and democratization that African women are now demanding.
Notes
1These include the work of the IPU and several African networks including Electoral Institute of Southern Africa (EISA) and the Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA).
2Examples include iKnow, a virtual network linking women across the world to inform, exchange information and experiences, and develop collaborative projects that will advance women in politics. Within the African region, the Violence Against Women in Politics (VAWiP) initiative is part of a larger Africa regional project by UN Women, with aims to set up structures that can respond to the prevalence of electoral violence against women. Independent activism includes the international ‘50:50’ campaign launched in 2000 by a well-established non-governmental organization (NGO), the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO). There are also active ‘Get the Balance Right!’ campaigns in several African countries (Sierra Leone, Tanzania, South Africa).
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