‘We will not be pacified’: From freedom fighters to feminists

African women’s movements and feminism

The multiple manifestations of women’s movements across the African continent are understudied with no substantive research at all in many of the 54 states that make up the African Union. There are a few landmark movement studies (e.g. Lazreg, 1994; Mba, 1982) but national coverage is often limited to isolated chapters in edited collections gathered under the broader category of ‘Third World’ feminism (Alexander and Mohanty, 1997; Mohanty et al., 1991), ‘local feminisms’ (Basu, 1995), or ‘Southern feminisms’ (Byrne and Imma, 2019). The first book bearing the title ‘African feminism’ defined it as ‘heteronormative, pronatalist and focused on survival’ (Mikell, 1997), an externalized, developmentalist characterization that feminists in the region strongly rebut by their very existence. It erases substantive intellectual and political contributions of Africa’s feminists to local change, and the global landscape.

A more up-to-date recent collection on the subject refrains from defining feminism in Africa by using the less political ‘women’s activism,’ a term that circumvents decades of philosophical and political debate, to observe of African women that ‘most still do not self-identify in this way even though they may share the goals of feminists’ (Badri and Tripp, 2013: 3, emphasis added). What does this mean, on a continent where most women still do not use English? Independent women’s organizations and networks contrast to state structures and for the most part determine their objectives, and mobilize resources quite skillfully, in order to pursue agendas that are not being adequately addressed by the state, some of which development actors consider deserving of grants. In the field, this has often required women’s groups not to use the word ‘feminism’ in proposals because it is deemed to be ‘political.’ In a world as complicated at postcolonial Africa, individual naming is not, in fact, definitive or static, but often contextual, strategic, and dynamic. Even at an individual level, many modern Africans carry multiple names that reflect indigenous, religious, and European influences, accustomed to being called differently according to context. The feminist work detailed here shows how visions of ‘feminism’ and ‘freedom’ and ‘justice’ are defined not externally or by the globally dominant West, but forged and grounded in the processes of becoming feminist thinkers and the practice of making movements. Movement-making is therefore conceptualized as a central activity of ‘feminists’ who carry out radical political and educational work, which begins with political consciousness (feminist conscientization). In this approach, self-naming as feminist is just one of numerous micro-political acts that can come about. ¹ More seriously, if we wish to develop a better understanding of ‘feminism’ or ‘women’ in the complex and ongoing history of African liberation, it seems that feminists, and the work that they do, should be front and center.

The question of feminism has spawned a century of African debates over gender, feminism, women’s movements, and the woman question. Even so, the term is poorly understood in public life. It is still an African common-place to attribute anything concerning women, rights, peace, and development to ‘feminism,’ or ‘Beijing-people’ in ways that situate it as a dangerous foreign interference, racialized white, and sexualized lesbian. It therefore makes little sense to focus our attention on whether women activists in Africa name themselves ‘feminist’ or not. From a movement perspective we need to attend to what the term means among the community of women who think, live, and work as feminists on the continent, and to value the work that we do. This demands locally-grounded approaches that archive and reflect on the thought and movements of women that are regarded and responded to (by the state, civil societies) as ‘feminist.’ Here I do not address the media or public constructions, or those of existing scholars, but instead draw on excerpted narratives, writings, and movement involvements of a few individual feminists, to point out the critical role of feminist intellectual leadership in women’s movements. ²

In the 21st century, to dispute the relevance and the authenticity of feminism and African women’s movements is to belie over four decades of women’s organizing, not to mention the corpus of creative, writing, research, and gender equality policies produced by the growing community of Africans who consider themselves, and their work, to be ‘feminist,’ and who contribute to the work of movement-making. ³ This diverse community includes some visible structures, among them NGOs, community and professional associations, local civil society coalitions, and transnational networks, but also much older women’s clubs and affinity groups that connect class, ethno-religious, cultural, national, linguistic, institutional, livelihood, and business interests. Feminist thought in African contexts is grounded in complex and multi-layered experiences of indigeneity, colonialism, dictatorial regimes, corporate extractivism, new manifestations of conflict, militarization, cultural reactions, and all the effects of contemporary neoliberal globalization. The movements that feminists lead include rural community organizers, farm workers, sex workers, students, teachers, trade unionists, professionals at all levels in all fields, girls, adolescents, women in their prime, elderly women, women who never married, married, divorced, and widowed women. Over the last decade, resistance to orchestrated homophobia and outbreaks of femicide have catalyzed inclusion of queer, lesbian and bisexual women, and sex worker organizations, particularly in East and Southern Africa.

This article therefore foregrounds the contributions of particular feminists, drawing on narrative interviews conducted with them, read in conjunction with their writings and activism in women’s organizing and in local and national pan-African and socialist movements of the post-independence era. They are all women who have worked in mainstream public institutions (the university, the government, the media, in non-governmental, and civil society organizations) alongside dedicated women’s movement work, most of which is unpaid. Particular attention is focused on instances where local feminist research and intellectual work directly inform and shape particular campaigns or actions in their national contexts. The post-independence examples referred to below are drawn from just two contexts: Ghana on the West Atlantic coast and Uganda on the shores of East Africa’s Lake Victoria.

Even during colonial rule, many educated African women often took it upon themselves to organize women beyond their own elite class and were clearly anti-colonial. A well-known example is Nigerian educator and political organizer, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, who organized women to oust a local chief who exceeded the acceptable bounds of authority. Her biographers describe her as a nationalist, socialist, feminist on the basis of her political activism (Byfield, 2003; Mba, 1982). Ransome-Kuti’s own writings confirm this assessment. In 1947, for example, she had this to say about British rule in the Protectorate of Southern Nigeria:

Not more than one per cent of the women in Nigeria can read or write. Throughout Nigeria, which is 372,674 square miles, there are only four secondary schools for girls, three in the colony of Lagos, and one in the protectorate at Ibadan. The Union of Women has tried to run voluntary schools for adult education but the women, who start work at four in the morning, are, by evening, too tired to learn. (Ransome-Kuti, 1947)

In 1961, a year after political Independence Day dawned on 1 October 1960, the picture had already changed dramatically. Few African women had their own rooms, but they did have a state of their own. As a Nigerian nationalist feminist Ransome-Kuti was excited about the future:

Now the old orders have changed; our women have been rapidly taking their proper places in the [future] of Nigeria. Our men are now learning that their women are no longer their slaves but their immediate associates. Our women try to pull their weights with men in all spheres of Nigerian life. It has become our adage now that in some spheres of life, woman can do what man can do. We have now women doctors, police, athletes, lawyers, artisans, teachers and scientists, and many women are kept at key posts in many governments as well as in commercial offices. ⁴ (Ransome-Kuti, 2003 [1961]: 241, author’s italics)

Ransome-Kuti organized women to resist colonial pacification, something that involved fighting the African men (chiefs, tax-collectors, soldiers, and policemen) who were serving the colonial administration. Later we see that feminists nowadays also respond critically to the failures of flag independence, ⁵ neo-colonialism, militarism, political authoritarianism, and underdevelopment, all of which have been profoundly damaging to women’s prospects of freedom, and tangibly thwarted their aspirations for decent lives. In other words, it has fallen to feminists to continue to organize resistance against the persistence of male supremacy in both local and global regimes.

Feminist resurgence in the independent states

The conferral of legal citizenship on women frames the emergence of a post-independence feminism founded on women’s rights as citizens of their nations. It is feminists who have led demands for full and equal inclusion in political structures and African economies. Women have demanded human rights, including property rights, where these previously accrued only to men. Yet both state and general public reactions to such demands have often been misogynistic and violent. During the 1970s–1980s, the militarist and authoritarian character of the African states that served as enforcers of Western economic interests also constrained the emergence of post-independence women’s movements demanding economic justice for Africa, and African women in particular. They had good cause to do so.

The development paradigm pursued under flag independence had devastating consequences for most African people, but these were particularly harsh for women. The global development policy doctrine made matters worse, as ‘economic reforms’ undermined the emergent public sector (Mkandawire and Soludo, 1999). The reconfigured, militarized, neoliberal, capitalist state that emerged from the political carnage of structural adjustment was not at all liberal, and worse, it had less capacity to deliver freedom to those it governed, and only intensified the burdening of women, sustaining the impoverishment of women along with the broader economic marginalization (Elson, 1991). Permanent poverty has been the inheritance of all but a very small capitalist elite, characterized by a flagrant culture of extreme consumption and ‘big-mannism.’ ⁶ The left intelligentsia that emerged out of the transition from colonial rule attempted to regroup, and one cohort established the Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa in the early 1970s. There were very few women with tertiary education at the time, but a group of feminists, determined to challenge the impact of modern development failure on women, formed the Association for African Women in Research and Development (AAWORD/AFARD) in 1977. This organization went beyond the old Pan African Women’s Organization, ⁷ to offer critical feminist perspectives on the gender dynamics of underdevelopment and poverty. ⁸ AAWORD/AFARD was also not a mass movement, but a feminist research and development group. Its formation was historic, heralding a re-emergence of radical thought among African women at a time when the limitations of flag independence were crystallizing in a series of military coups and authoritarian regimes.

The two contexts discussed here differ in significant ways. Ghanaian women became full citizens at independence in 1957, after businesswomen and traders supported the victory of Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party, which ruled until the 1966 coup (Manuh, 1991). For Ugandan women, citizenship was also the major benefit of independence in 1962, but the ensuing decades were dominated by despotic and misogynist rule, and guerrilla war. In both contexts, as in many other parts of Africa, women have historically organized en masse prior to independence, in ways that are not the focus of this discussion, yet nonetheless inspire postcolonial feminism.

Feminism in Ghana

Educated Ghanaian women have a long tradition of intellectual creativity and political engagement, as noted above. It is well known that business women across the class spectrum actively supported the nationalist movement that brought the Convention People’s Party to power in 1962. The next generation of women participated in the revolutionary socialist movements of the 1970s. The post-independence emergence of feminism in Ghana can therefore be traced to the women who were affiliated to the New Democratic Movement (NDM) of the late 1970s and early 1980s, while the more militarist Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) regime, which seized power in 1979 and again in 1981, actively mobilized women for its own instrumental ends. Ghanaian feminism also reflects the fact that despite decades of militarized political repression, women never failed to grasp opportunities to attend the national university, established during the nationalist years.

Dorcas Coker-Appiah (born in 1946) is one of the many Ghanaian women who saw the dawning of independence; she attended the University of Ghana Law School, and then began a career in law. The gross violations of women’s rights she witnessed working at FIDA (Federacion Internacional de Abogadas, International Federation of Women Lawyers) provoked a feminist consciousness. In terms of organizing work, she established the Gender Studies and Human Rights Documentation Centre (the Gender Centre) in Accra, in 1995. Four years later, the Gender Centre conducted a nationwide research project on violence against women and published a report (Coker-Appiah and Cusack, 1999). As it happened, a spate of 34 particularly gruesome murders of women took place in and around Accra between 1999 and 2000, provoking mass protests led by a spontaneous gathering of feminists calling themselves ‘Sisters’ Keepers.’ Public outrage came to a head with the famous ‘march to the castle’ led by outraged feminists, staged just before the national elections of December 2000 yielded an inconclusive result (see Manuh, 2007; Tsikata, 2009). The ensuing run-off elections were held January 2001, and saw the National Democratic Congress (led by former military dictator Jerry John Rawlings, now clad in civvies) finally ousted at the polls, by President Kufuor of the New Patriotic Party. A group of women lawyers took the opportunity of the change in government to present a draft Domestic Violence Bill to the new Attorney-General. The new Attorney-General invited civil society to discuss the Bill, and suggested a public campaign. Local feminist lawyers were able to make the case that wives and domestic partners remained unprotected from the ‘wife-beating’ condoned under the British colonial and customary laws. The women’s movement response was a feminist-led Domestic Violence Coalition (DVC) that carried out a nationwide campaign for the passage of what would eventually become the Domestic Violence Act (2007). The resources and organizational capacities of the Gender Centre, conveniently situated in downtown Accra, had prepared it to play a leading role in a campaign that was to extend over six years, as discussed below.

Another well-known feminist is Takyiwaa Manuh. Like Coker-Appiah, Manuh earned a law degree from the University of Ghana Law School. She joined the revolutionary socialist NDM during the 1970s, and was a founder of the Federation of Ghanaian Women (FEGAWO), envisaged as a nationwide, independent Ghanaian mass organization of women that would advance women’s interests in the socialist revolution. However, when the NDM was neutralized by the PNDC military regime, it also proved impossible for FEGAWO to continue its mission to build a strong, independent, national women’s movement. The revolution and the women’s movements both ran up against challenges that would prove insurmountable for decades. What happened to the ‘Ghanaian revolution,’ and how did this affect the emergence of the strong, independent feminist movement that FEGAWO set out to build as early as the 1970s?

The answer is well known locally. Flight-Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings led the first of his two coups d’état on 31 December 1979. While Rawlings borrowed the revolutionary rhetoric of the left, many leftists did not support military intervention. As a result, PNDC security forces threw many of the NDM comrades into detention without trial. The ensuing political repression effectively quelled the nascent revolutionary movement. ‘The woman question’ was then taken up by First Lady Mrs Nana-Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, who took control of the 31st December Women’s Movement. ⁹ Supporting a military dictatorship that sought to consolidate its power by securing support from international financial institutions, Mrs Rawlings styled herself to match the revolutionary rhetoric of her military husband, donning combat fatigues and rallying women to support him. She was able to make use of state resources and funds that flowed into Ghana when Rawlings became a World Bank poster-boy. With the revolutionaries subdued, the Rawlings were able to remain in power for most of the next three decades, where they consolidated neoliberal policies to the detriment of Ghana’s long-suffering people (Manuh, 1991; Tsikata, 1989).

During the years of political repression several NDM-affiliated feminists, among them Rose Kutin and Dzodzi Tsikata, also took time away from Ghana to pursue graduate studies, which led to their acquiring expertise in various aspects of development planning, adding gender analysis and feminist methodology. Others stayed quiet but busy nonetheless. ¹⁰

A decade later, in the 1990s, these individual feminist intellectuals had become politically-astute policy analysts and researchers, who would carry out a great deal of work within and for Ghana’s women’s movement. Their intellectual trajectories suggest that their career choices and scholarly interests were directed by their involvement in the left, and their experience of military rule. However, it is as politically-minded organizers that they have been able to develop and turn their skills to productive purpose and participate in organizing at critical moments, as discussed below.

Even before the eventual electoral defeat of the Rawlings couple in the January 2001 run-off, Tsikata led the establishment of the Network for Women’s Rights (NETRIGHT) in 1999. ¹¹ Kutin was already directing the regional office of ABANTU for Development. ¹² The ABANTU Regional Office for West Africa (ABANTU-ROWA) is locally respected as ‘the NGOs’ NGO’ because of its substantive contributions to political and organizational capacity-strengthening and coalition-building methodologies across Ghanaian civil society. ¹³ ABANTU has worked for over a decade strengthening women’s participation in political life. Both NETRIGHT and ABANTU’s effectiveness is distinguished by the ability of core members to activate connections rooted in the earlier mass mobilization work of the Ghanaian left. These make it possible to build newer coalitions with labor activists, teachers, nurses, media women, other professional associations, trade unions, and with people from local political and community structures. ¹⁴

Despite their hugely successful national mobilization in support of the Domestic Violence Bill from 2003 forward, the campaign ran into unexpected obstruction from the state. When they submitted their report to the executive, the former Attorney-General had been moved to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and lost interest, so it was delegated to the portfolio of the incumbent Minister for Women’s Affairs. It was therefore she, not he, who rejected the findings of the report of the DVC, and proceeded to mount a state media campaign against the Bill. The parliamentary motion to pass it was therefore defeated. The Minister’s anti-feminist media campaign disparaged campaigners and accused them of undermining African family values.

The state’s willful deafness to public support for the Bill only fueled the feminist fire within the women’s movement. The DVC continued to lobby until a new Minister for Women, Alima Maham a supported passing it into law in 2007. Meanwhile Ghana’s best-known feminists became determined to embark on an even more far-reaching nationwide mobilization, and given the circumstances, they opted for an independent mobilization that would not depend on the cooperation of the state to be effective. The resulting mobilization gave rise to the Women’s Manifesto for Ghana (2004), at the time the largest public mobilization to take place since Rawlings’ 1981 coup interrupted the nascent socialist movement and crushed the NDM, back in the 1980s (Mama et al., 2005; Tsikata, 2009).

The Women’s Manifesto for Ghana was precipitated by the state’s anti-democratic refusal to work with the women’s movement. Manuh (ABANTU Board Chair) and Kutin (ABANTU Director) discussed how the treatment of the DVC clearly showed the women’s movement that the new government – now boasting a Ministry for Women – was still exhibiting an authoritarian culture that would continue to ignore, even obstruct, the women’s movement, and indeed all those it governed.

ABANTU’s Regional Office for West Africa (ABANTU) was the feminist organization (established and led by Rose Kutin and Hamida Harrison) that set about mobilizing a new independent coalition, and embarked on the process that would eventually generate the Women’s Manifesto for Ghana. ABANTU, was widely respected and well-positioned to provide a headquarters and mobilize resources. It also had the feminist technical and training capacities that allowed it to apply participatory pedagogy and organizing methods to convene, overtly political independent coalition that included a much wider array of members. ABANTU set out to raise public consciousness and collectively articulate a national agenda, with, by, and for the women of Ghana. Coalition participants included other women’s movement organizations (NETRIGHT brought its own network), professional associations of nurses, teachers and others, civil society groups, NGOs, trade unions, community groups, and traditional and local government political structures (district assemblies in all five regions of the nation). The initial working group designed a nationwide campaigning and consultation process that would take place over many months, across all five regions of Ghana. A rolling series of public meetings worked like political rallies to raise awareness, hold public debates, and galvanize public participation across the nation. Dzodzi Tsikata (NETRIGHT’s founding convenor) was called upon to launch the first of this series of meetings, for which she presented the latest evidence on women in Ghana. ¹⁵ The support of media women also proved critical, clearly facilitated by Rose Kutin’s highly respected status among a generation of media women. ¹⁶

The participatory action strategy of the feminist organizers was again able to draw on the feminist collaborative research carried out by activist scholars. In this instance a team of feminist researchers had completed and published the findings of the National Machinery Series (2000) two years before the Ministry for Women was announced. This landmark study examined eight African states, including Ghana (TWN National Machinery Series, 2000). ¹⁷ It was widely debated and shared with the National Council for Women in Development and the Government of Ghana. The conclusions clearly pointed to the general ineffectiveness of the state national machinery, but was especially critical of Ministries for Women, in light of the evidence that these were the most bureaucratic and least effective structure for pursuing women’s interests in African states (Mensah-Kutin, 2000, 2010; Tsikata, 2000). Clearly the report went unheeded.

The final Women’s Manifesto for Ghana is the collectively drafted and publicly owned document that was launched to an audience of over a thousand in September 2004, before the December election. The launch event was lent drama by the Minister for Women’s Affairs’ last-ditch attempt to divert public attention to a hastily but widely announced publication of a ‘National Gender Policy’ that no-one had heard of Only the immediate activation of the strong interpersonal networks saved the day. Throughout the night, thousands of cell phones rang across the nation confirming that the planned Manifesto launch was still on. In the end over a thousand or so people from all the regions made it to the capital to participate in the celebration of the Manifesto (Mama et al., 2005). The launch was a high point in ABANTU’s work, and indeed that of the feminist movement in Ghana. It enabled the articulation of a democratically-generated national agenda for Ghanaian women, making it a landmark moment in the slow political awakening that has become possible in Ghana since the Rawlings were ousted in December 2000.

The Women’s Manifesto mobilization had a more successful outcome than the Domestic Violence Coalition, largely because it was not instigated at the behest of a fickle state unaccustomed to civic participation. Feminist social scientists provided research support and analysis and fed this into the movement activism throughout the process. Empirical research was brought to life through inclusive, participatory democratic public debates; production of educational posters and leaflets, planning meetings, and even the writing were collectively executed, and the draft document circulated nationally. This highly participatory methodology succeeded in re-affirming the collective ownership and responsibility that would keep the Manifesto alive for another decade, under the auspices of the Women’s Manifesto Coalition, purposefully established under the leadership of Hamida Harrison of ABANTU. The Women’s Manifesto was re-published several times in the first few years, and re-launched on the 5th (2009) and 10th anniversaries (2014), and an expanded and updated edition published and launched in 2016. It works as a ‘living document’ that is used in educational and policy training institutions, labor organizations, as well as across the multiple constituencies who participated in its preparation.

The experiences of both the DVC and the Women’s Manifesto for Ghana taught Ghana’s feminist movement that the state is not monolithic, and that even with an elected government democratic participation can be evaded and subverted, and the structures of power do not necessarily act in concert. We saw the state evade accountability to those it governs, in this case, the feminist movement and the public they mobilized. The growth of highly capacitated feminism as an intellectual and political force for change in Ghana challenges the persistence of a militarist political culture of disrespect for the voice of the people in Ghanaian public and political life. Despite the high caliber of Ghana’s women, numbering 51% of the population, and with outstanding levels of educational and professional achievement, they still form just 13% of the nation’s political representatives. Purportedly democratic Ghana, formerly a world pioneer in appointing women to powerful positions, now elects 70% fewer women representatives than Uganda, more than a decade after the transition from military rule.

Feminist public intellectuals in Ghana exhibit expertise, capacity, and the political will to continue to raise national public consciousness and make movements that push the frontlines of change, not with guns, but with radical ideas and praxis that encourage the public to move with women.

Over in East Africa, Ugandan feminist intellectuals also work with their women’s movement to pursue women’s interests. However, while both Ghanaian and Ugandan women’s movements have re-emerged after protracted periods of military rule and both have seen state orchestration of gender politics, Ugandan women have faced a much higher degree of brutalization, violence, and military conflict. Uganda has not liberalized into party politics in the way of Ghana. Ugandan women live under an entrenched no-party regime. Uganda’s feminists have emerged out of harsher conditions, complicated by the state’s imposition of gender-mainstreaming and affirmative action policies that see three times as many women holding political office as Ghana. ¹⁸

Uganda: The perils of patronage

Ugandan women’s access to education during the colonial era was just as limited as it was elsewhere in Africa and the colonialists claims about the missionary’s role appear to have been exaggerated (De Haas, 2016). ¹⁹ In reality there were just a handful of elite missionary schools, and their approach was conservative. Sarah Ntiro was the first Ugandan woman to obtain a degree (in history, from Oxford University in 1955). She came home to pursue a career as a teacher, but resigned in protest at the British colonial policy of paying women teachers less than men. She would spend much of her life fighting for women’s rights, until her death at the age of 92. As a local obituary reports:

Ntiro was instrumental in making sure women earned salaries equal to those of men. She was at the time (1955) a teacher at Gayaza High School, having graduated from Oxford University with Bachelor’s in History the year before. When the colonial Government tried to pay her less than her male counterparts with the same academic qualifications as she had, she rejected the salary and decided to teach without pay. It is said the wife of the then Governor heard of Ntiro’s protest, and intervened. The issue was pursued and she was permitted to receive a salary equal to that of men, setting a precedent that has stood for almost 60 years. ²⁰

Women’s participation in the national political transition to flag independence was limited and lacked the mass women’s mobilizations of Ghana; and it appears that only a small number of elite wives were included in the political parties of the day (Tamale, 1999).

Hilda Tadria grew up to graduate from Makerere after flag independence, as one of the small cadre of ‘first-generation’ Ugandan university women. During the years of brutal political repression and war, she earned a Master’s degree from Cambridge University, and then a doctorate at the University of Minnesota, before returning to join the faculty at Makerere. ²¹ She speaks of a lifetime of public engagement:

Throughout my life I have worked for positive changes in the lives of African women. As a young school girl, I remember going along with my mother to teach reading, writing and nutrition to women in her community- based groups. ²²

In 1973 Tadria wrote one of the earliest (forgotten) articles on the Ugandan women’s movement, enthusiastically observing: ‘Women’s associations in Uganda have in the last 20 years become so much more common and popular’ (Tadria, 1973: 218). Joy Kwesiga ²³ also graduated from Makerere in the 1970s, where she spent many years as a university administrator, later to pursue graduate education at the London School of Economics in the 1990s. Both women recall the dawning of political independence, and the deadly aftermath of colonial rule, under Idi Amin Dada and Milton Obote. Women faced restrictions on their freedom, and while hundreds of thousands of Ugandans were murdered, women faced the particular horrors of rape, sexual torture, and misogyny (Decker, 2014). Tadria, Kwesiga, and other Ugandan university women recall being infuriated when the Obote regime prevented them from attending the Nairobi conference in 1985. They set about establishing an independent women’s group, and founded an early feminist organization, Action for Women and Development (ACFODE). After the defeat of the last Obote regime by the National Resistance Army in 1986, women’s organizations could begin to re-emerge. By this time feminism had become a global reality, and Ugandans felt left behind.

The National Resistance Army (NRA) took Kampala the capital, on 22 January 1986. Among the victorious forces were an unknown number of women fighters. Winnie Byanyima, graduate in mechanical engineering, rode into Kampala on a tank. The daughter of veteran politician Boniface Byanyima, Winnie had fled threats to her safety as a student during the Obote dictatorship. During her student days in Thatcher’s Britain, National Resistance Movement (NRM) founder Yoweri Museveni had reached out to recruit her, and after graduation, she joined the NRA during the Bush War. ²⁴ After their military victory, she was popularly elected as the youngest MP in the Ugandan parliament, where she was an outspoken feminist for 11 years. Forced out and fallen from favor, she joined the opposition. Her experience is indicative of the dramatic changes that Ugandan women have experienced under President Yoweri Museveni and the NRM’s no-party state.

Nonetheless, the changes that the NRM introduced in its first two years were not insignificant, and gave at least one outside observer cause for optimism:

The establishment of the Resistance Committees, as grassroots organizations, and key ministerial appointments in agriculture, industry and a women’s ministry, together with a general gender sensitivity demonstrated by the NRM and reinforced by the consciousness-raising activities of the political wing of the NRM, the Women’s Affairs Directorate of the NRM Secretariat and of pertinent autonomous women’s organizations, together form the basis for a process of real empowerment of women in Uganda. Structures are in place, women are in leadership positions in the government, in the judiciary and in other organizations throughout the country, at all levels; rural women are gradually participating in the state system and real resources (though far too limited) are being made available directly to women. In the process, it appears that gender-based discrimination may be beginning to erode. (Boyd, 1989: 116)

In the ensuing years, Ugandan women have faced deeply contradictory changes. The roots of these can, at least in part, be traced to the oft-noted exigencies of war. An unknown number of Ugandan women joined the NRA during the most critical stages of the guerrilla war, but there is little documentation regarding the extent of the recruitment, or the terms of their participation. An isolated press report from the 33rd anniversary of the start of the Bush War (2016), the national Daily Monitor carries a telling item that lists the ‘top 100’ war heroes, providing details on their heroic acts. Number 29 is a woman:

RO/00029 Lt. Joy Mirembe (Deceased)

The only woman combatant among the 100, she died in childbirth during the war. Commander Mirembe together with Olive Zizinga, Gertrude Njuba and Brig. Proscovia Nalweyiso were some of the few and very first women to join the bush war. (emphases added) ²⁵

This does not mention Mirembe’s military achievements, and it is the only group entry on the list, shared with three other women combatants. Yet there is popular public consensus that Uganda’s NRA could not have survived long, let alone won the war, had it not succeeded in winning the sustained support of local populations, especially women. Byanyima describes the scenario:

The leaders were hiding, and living among the peasants. They started finding they could trust women to conceal fighters, and nurse causalities; combatants who were injured and couldn’t move. In the first stages of the war there was a lot of mobility, and combatants were moving in small groups because they couldn’t hold territory, and so they needed to keep moving all of the time, and casualties had to be nursed back to health and fitness so they could go back to join the troops. (2017 interview)

According to her, the inclusion of women in political structures became essential to the NRA’s survival. Byanyima is critical of the ‘disappearance’ of the uncounted number of mostly poor, rural women fighters from the political landscape. ²⁶ According to her, women fighters were indispensable during the Bush War, but later overlooked by male-oriented demobilization programs. After the war, it was not fighters, but more educated women who were recruited to adorn the political offices in the no-party system. ²⁷ Veteran politicians who joined the NRM include Joyce Mpanga (Minister of Women and Development 1989–1990, Minister of State for Primary Education, 1990–1992), and Rhoda Kalema, who joined the National Resistance Council in 1989, to be elected to the Constitutional Assembly in 1995. ²⁸ Museveni appointed Specioza Kazibwe, a surgeon, also known as Nnanalongo (mother of twins), as his Vice-President from 1994 until 2003, when she fell from favor. Miria Matembe, lawyer, was also personally recruited by Museveni, and then appointed to the Constitutional Commission (Matembe and Dorsy, 2002).

Different from both of these were other Ugandan feminists who, inspired by MP Byanyima’s example and armed with hopes sparked by the revolutionary rhetoric of the NRM, seized the historic opportunity that the moment presented. Stella Mukasa left a position at the New York-based International Council for Research on Women, and returned to Uganda to offer her services to the new Ministry, where she worked with DANIDA (Danish Development Cooperation) staff, until life became impossible. A number of transnational feminist networks also moved to Kampala. ABANTU for Development in Nairobi convened a series of workshops for an East–West collaboration ‘Strengthening Capacities for Engaging with Policy from a Gender Perspective’ held in Uganda between 1991 and 1994. Sarah Mukasa, member of the London-based pan-African network Akina Mama wa Afrika, relocated to establish an office in Kampala, where it continues to be a vital resource for feminist movement-building across the region. The Geneva-based feminist network the Women’s International Cross-Cultural Exchange (ISIS-WICCE) also decided to relocate its head office to Kampala in 1988. There it has since become an African-led transnational feminist organization working with women in war zones. ²⁹

Ugandan feminists, like their Ghanaian counterparts, engage in research, documentation, public education, and political advocacy work, producing local scholarship that informs and shapes Ugandan feminism. The examples here illustrate feminist engagements with Museveni’s anti-democratic patronage politics, and take place in the years prior to the local and international protests against the notorious Anti-Homosexuality Act (2016).

When Hens Begin to Crow: Gender and Parliamentary Politics in Uganda (Tamale, 1999) was the first substantive study of women’s political participation in post-independence Uganda. This accessible book found wide circulation in Uganda, becoming a foundational text for the women’s movement and for the literate public, in a society emerging from long history of extreme and misogynistic rule. ³⁰ The author drew attention to the effect of the postcolonial regime’s top-down inclusion of women, noting that ‘women continue to support the NRM government because it gave them access to the political arena, and this has nipped any popular opposition in the bud’ (Tamale, 2000: 11). Tamale was the first to detail women’s experiences of parliamentary politics in the context of the NRM’s affirmative action policy, exposing what was later conceptualized as the sexual pacification ³¹ of supposedly powerful women through a culture of male dominance, sexual bullying, humiliation, and harassment that constrains women’s political effectiveness. Public displays of misogyny and widespread tolerance of violence against women remain features of Ugandan political culture.

Like ACFODE’s founders, law professor Tamale clearly understood that the women’s movement needed to maintain a critical distance from the NRM early on. This meant that for a while, ACFODE was able to lobby the NRM to appoint women to senior positions. Tadria describes how, in the first fervent days of NRM’s consolidation into a ruling regime, ACFODE feminists compiled a dossier of the CVs of accomplished women and presented it to Museveni just when the NRM was reorganizing the civil service. ³² In this way they outmaneuvered NRM men who tried to argue that there were no qualified women available, and succeeded in ensuring that women were included in senior appointments.

The numerous women’s movement organizations established from the 1990s forward are mostly NGOs, networks, and coalitions, but a feminist organization like ACFODE maintains extensive connections with local community women’s groups across the country. Uganda’s feminist movement has become a significant element in national struggles for basic rights and democracy, first for women, and later in support of Uganda’s sexual minorities. ³³ Feminists who worked for the NRM government in its early years have since left to pursue their work elsewhere. ³⁴ And even some of the most loyal of ‘Museveni’s women’ have also been dispensed with. This may be because the foil of ‘gender-mainstreaming’ has lost the currency it had, as the NRM shifted from consolidation into a politically-repressive heavily-indebted machinery. ³⁵ The divisions this created among women came to the fore in the Constitutional Assembly: NRM loyalists dedicated to ensuring Museveni’s extended stay in power were pitted against feminists like Byanyima.

Byanyima’s strategic election to Chair of the Women’s Constitutional Caucus meant that women were able to play a critical role in the debates, securing significant gains for women, even as Museveni adjusted the presidential age limit, so he could remain in power. Byanyima and other pro-democracy feminists working in and outside the state followed on to establish the Forum for Women in Democracy (FOWODE), an independent feminist-led political organization dedicated to pursuing the improved constitutional provisions for greater participation of women in politics. FOWODE works in close alliance with the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC).

Another impressive example of activist-intellectual synergy is the Making a Difference project. Conceptualized in a series of think tanks convened by ISIS-WICCE between 2011 and 2012, this addressed the perceived ineffectiveness of women politicians vis-a-vis women’s interests. A collaboration was initiated between ISIS-WICCE, feminist scholars at Makerere School of Gender and Women’s Studies (then directed by Ahikire), and the Ugandan Women Parliamentary Association (UWOPA).

Tamale’s study of parliamentarians (1999), and Ahikire’s work on local government (Ahikire, 2007, 2014) both informed the action research on the question Tamale posed when she distinguished between the ‘descriptive’ and ‘substantive’ representation of women in Uganda’s parliament (Tamale, 1999). The context was one in which affirmative action had increased the number of women in Uganda’s parliament, to limited political effect. The question was could they be made more effective? Tamale had already found that women MPs relied on male political patronage. Worse, the pervasiveness of public misogyny and sexual abuse in postwar Ugandan society meant that women MPs were commonly subjected to sexual harassment, extortion, slander, and scandal, in ways that hampered effective participation (Tamale, 1999, 2000). Ahikire’s extensive studies of women’s participation in local government go deeper into the local political culture, to reveal the enduring effects of militarism on communities. ³⁶ ISIS-WICCE, the feminist peace-building NGO, set up the research collaboration with feminist scholars and the Women’s Parliamentary Network (UWONET). The researchers set about carefully registering the factors facilitating and inhibiting change in the gender regimes that pervade current governance challenges such as militarism, patronage, fundamentalism, as well as the intense sexualization of political spaces (ISIS-WICCE and UWOPA, 2014: 3).

The methodology of the ISIS-WICCE-UWOPA study was led by feminist political scientist Josephine Ahikire, so it used participatory-action pedagogic methods. Participants were drawn from national as well as local, community, and civil society organizations. In this respect it resembles the strategy used by the ABANTU network to produce a sense of collective, public ownership and responsibility during the Women’s Manifesto process.

The ISIS-WICCE-UWOPA research findings reflect this extensive public engagement, and were widely discussed at national and continental workshops prior to the final publication.

The final report contains detailed and compelling evidence of the enormous vision, courage, and integrity of the many women taking on the challenges of seeking office, because they want to make a freer and more just society. However, it also reveals many of the practices of pacification that often hamper and obstruct women’s political aspirations and curtail their effectiveness and enforce their subjection to male patronage. The revelations about the humiliations obstructing women inside political institutions informed and energized the research process, making it an intervention that marked a new, highly capacitated level of feminism in Uganda. ³⁷ The final 104-page report Making a Difference Beyond Numbers (summarized in Feminist Africa, 2015) is a powerful, critical resource for making political change. The subtitle ‘Towards Substantive Engagement with Political Leadership’ refers to the strategic knowledge that was generated, to fuel the feminist movement.

Conclusions

In both Ghana and Uganda, women’s movements are pioneering new levels and forms of public political engagement and organization. This discussion has highlighted the activism of a small cadre of first- and second-generation women with high levels of education and expertise, who have made effective and sustained contributions to the making of movements that are as clearly ‘feminist’ as they are ‘African,’ in the sense that they are pursuing women’s liberation in their respective African locations. In Ghana, the feminist movement that emerged during the 1990s can be traced to 1970s socialist movements, but was stalled by prolonged military rule. To date the Government of Ghana ignores women’s calls for affirmative action, without which women’s representation will continue to be parlous, despite the years of capacity-building work carried out by ABANTU and others. Ugandan women may have suffered far greater brutality and destruction from the war, but by the 1990s the no-party NRM regime’s gender directives did increase the inclusion of women, but on terms that hampered their effectiveness. Women’s public presence thus could not be transformative, in the context of an authoritarian regime that keeps its women politicians at the behest of male patrons, subject to sexual pacification, and aware of their own disposability.

In both nations we saw the power of feminist intellect being coupled with far-reaching, well-networked civil society and community organizations, to involve a much wider public in movements for change. We also saw in the anti-violence movement in Ghana that collaboration with the state can be a trying process, local gender knowledge and expertise can be disregarded and feminists castigated by state functionaries, even those appointed in women’s name. Movements may have to regroup and reform in the face of bureaucratic deafness and political foibles, which show a political class that has remained deaf to public initiatives and hostile to democratic engagement. State disrespect for those they govern evidently does not ‘wither away’ when a multi-party electoral system is put in place after decades of authoritarianism.

In both contexts, NGO-ization has given way to increasingly collaborative coalition-building as a way of scaling up their role in societies pursuing democratization after decades lost to dictatorships. From FEGAWO to NETRIGHT and ABANTU in Ghana, and from ACFODE to FOWODE to the Ugandan Feminist Forum, we see a growing cadre of sophisticated feminist intellectuals working far beyond their own ranks to make and shape women’s movements that enunciate women’s collective struggle and political, legal, and economic interests in pursuit of freedom. Feminism is a constant struggle, one that is discovered and remade with each generation. At least in Ghana and Uganda we see that feminism exists in the lives and works of its own dedicated and activists and thinkers, in each nation, and in continental networks. Why would this not be true for feminism across the continent, and for African feminism globally?