At Africa’s (political) institutions, aspiring women face informal traps
by Toolsy Luchmun & Piyush Mathur
Edited by Diana Højlund Madsen, Gendered Institutions and Women’s Political Representation in Africa (Zed: 2021) is a multi-author collection of eight essays examining institutional influences on women’s political representation in Africa. The collection emerged out of a two-day workshop that had taken place in December 2018 at the Uppsala-based Nordic Africa Institute (NID). Most of the collection’s contributors are Africa-based researchers; the rest are based in Europe or the United States.
On the whole, the volume provides a multi-national and critical overview of how politically ambitious women continue to be marginalised and undermined by mainstream African institutions—and how African women have been trying to change this situation through their own institutions or as individuals. The term institution is sanctioned, in the book, a broad meaning—derived from Georgina Waylen’s (2014) definition of that term ‘as rules and procedures (both formal and informal) that structure society by constraining and enabling actors' behaviour’ (2). As to the institutions that have actually been discussed here, they include the following: (African) political parties; (Africa’s) media; the Southern African Development Community (SADC), a Gabarone-based intergovernmental organization; several African feminist organizations; and the London-based Westminster Foundation for Democracy.
The book’s first chapter, ‘Feminist institutionalism, women’s representation and state capture: the case of South Africa’, is by Amanda Gouws; it explores the factors that led South Africa to be considered successful as a political empowerer of its women. Gouws points out that South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Conference (ANC), had reserved 50% of its tickets for women; this step resulted, after the May 2019 elections, into a parliament that had women in half of its total seats. But Gouws argues that the ANC had given its tickets only to those women that had been obedient to Zuma and had toed the party line. So, in reality, South Africa simply saw a deferral of its women’s true empowerment—and its women’s issues have remained ghettoized.
The statistics of South Africa’s political empowerment of women is thus entirely quantitative; in fact, structures that were designed in the early years of South African democracy itself, Gouws stresses, have yet to see the light of day. Under these circumstances of subordination, if women continue to have ‘the same vested interests’ as men, then they would be unable to create a space in which their issues could be voiced and heeded (32). Gouws thus leaves the reader wondering whether South African women have been complicit in their own marginalization.
From South Africa we cross over to one of its northern neighbours—Zimbabwe—in the second chapter. Authored by Mandiedza Parichi, this chapter, ‘Confronting the double-bind dilemma in the representations of Joice Mujuru in Zimbabwean newspapers between 2000 and 2008’, alleges and lays bare a journalistic conspiracy of sorts in Zimbabwe against its erstwhile Vice President, Joice Mujuru. Based upon a fine-grained interpretative analysis of a sample of 18 stories selected out of ‘a corpus of thirty newspaper articles’ about Mujuru from three major Zimbabwean newspapers, Parichi attempts to show that, so far as sexist reporting is concerned, it was of no consequence whether the outlet was government-owned or privately funded, pro- or anti-government. All the three major newspapers—Kwayedza, The Financial Gazette, and The Standard—‘portrayed women in a way that marginalizes and disadvantages them’ (65).
Zimbabwean media disadvantaged Mujuru (and other female political aspirants) by locking them into a sexist double bind (of one type or another): a no-win situation for them whereby no matter what they would have attempted, they would not have been considered fit for political office. Giving numerous examples from the three newspapers (and also some international outlets), Parichi discusses the different types of sexist double-binds— mother/non-mother; wife/mother; sinner/saint, etc.—into which Mujuru (and other female politicians) came to be trapped. Analysing the Zimbabwean examples, Parichi attempts to illustrate that the press tends to undermine the credibility of a female politician from the very beginning—as if to ensure her failure—often through subtle linguistic stereotyping and derogation, whereby forcing her to choose between ‘being liked but not respected’ and ‘being respected but not liked’ (53). She conveys the sense that aspiring women politicians would continue to have their achievements reported through the lens of gender unless a more gender-neutral media emerges.
In chapter three, ‘Candidate training programmes in Africa—A waste of resources or pedagogies of the oppressed? Experiences from Letsema training workshops in Botswana (2013 - 2019)’, Sethunya Tshepho Mosime and Maude Dikobe reflect upon a growing criticism, particularly from American quarters, of candidate training workshops’ failure to get more women elected to Botswana’s political institutions. This is in view of the fact that Botswana—otherwise one of the stronger democracies of Africa—has seen a decline in the number of women elected to its parliament through 1999-2019 despite these workshops (74). The critics have argued that these workshops are pointless in contexts such as that of Botswana—where candidates cannot ‘enter the elections through self-nomination’ and parties won’t nominate a woman, no matter how well trained, to an electoral ticket. Per these critics, it would be better to focus on why parties do not choose women as their candidates rather than on ‘why women do not step forward’ (which happens to be the focus of these workshops) (74).
As two of the co-founders of the Letsema Resource Support for Botswana Women in Politics, Mosime and Dikobe, however, take a slight exception to the aforementioned criticism of candidate training workshops for women. The authors draw a brief history of attempts toward women’s political empowerment in Botswana following the government’s refusal to sign the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Protocol of Gender and Development of 2015—and its eventual acceptance of ‘the revised Protocol of 2016, which was less prescriptive’ (75). What they observe here, on the whole, is that there are several examples from Botswana and other African countries whereby women elected through constitutional quotas or special elections failed to push the cause of women’s empowerment (if in part because the ticket allocations were numerically too small); what that suggests to these authors is that party tickets and even electoral wins must not be viewed as the holy grail of a woman’s political empowerment.
Contrariwise, despite failing to get party tickets, women have continued to work for the parties in Botswana because their party membership itself got them greater opportunities than earlier—in that they were able to use their spaces in the parties ‘to build their political-social capital and to enhance their other strategic life choices’ (75; original italics). Indeed, via their party memberships, women in Botswana have been able to attend Letsema workshops, too. In this context, Mosime and Dikobe also provide a quick, yet original and critical history, of key approaches to women’s ‘empowerment’ from 1994 onward as well as of their various critiques themselves.
This critique elegantly graduates, within their narrative, into a self-critical reflection on how Letsema had started—what idea of women’s empowerment it originally had—versus what it would come to learn through actual experience. If the original motive for Letsema was to ready women for political office (as part of their empowerment), the revised motive, after the first five years of its operation, would turn out to be something akin to Naila Kabeer’s idea of enabling women ‘to make strategic life choices’ through a complex set of factors (80; original italics). While Mosime and Dikobe give many revealing, highly detailed examples of how individual trainees of Letsema reported using their party memberships and political activism to enhance opportunities for themselves with the context of extreme male dominance—and how, additionally, Letsema’s workshops have helped them—perhaps the most important contribution of Letsema might be the fact that it ‘extended women’s access to other women that would otherwise simply be perceived as opponents’ (80).
Most of this chapter comprises detailed, story-style, descriptions of the following: the actual contents of Letsema’s approach to candidate training (which stresses songs, social media, professional networks, and feminist participatory action); Letsema’s evolution into a native organization from being a US-funded consultancy; and how Letsema has used some of its biggest individual and organizational partnerships. While the chapter is very enlightening, it is overwritten; contains repetitions; and is a bit unwieldy structurally: It might have been better perhaps if it had been broken down into a series of three chapters.
The fourth chapter, ‘Party primary candidate nomination institutions, informality and women’s candidature in Malawi’s parliamentary elections’, is by Asiyati Lorraine Chiweza. This chapter shows that despite having ‘a progressive Constitution’—and being a signatory to several agreements regarding women’s empowerment—Malawi remains a highly discouraging system for aspiring female politicians. Listing out and discussing the roles of the key national institutions that have been governing Malawi’s electoral system since the country was founded as a republic in 1995, Chiweza notes that these national institutions don’t mandate how the parties must govern themselves internally. Lacking organizational funds, Malawi’s parties thus act as private entities owned by each of their top party leaders, who finance them and remain personally unconstrained by any organizational rules.
Until 2019, none of Malawi’s parties had a written set of ‘rules on candidate selection’; they also lacked ‘specific legislative provisions on quotas’ for women (112; 125). Citing reports from 2019 produced by the 50-50 Management Agency, Chiweza highlights the presence of not only ‘systematic efforts’ directed against women from being candidates in the parties’ primaries but also that of rampant irregularities that had translated into women’s exclusion from the primaries (104). To learn about how the primary processes worked, female aspirants had to depend on their experienced male party leaders for verbal guidance. This secretive, privileged guidance was often incomplete, vague, or inconsistent—and whatever set of rules that did emerge from it were also selfishly violated in actual practice by the ground functionaries. This type of a situation encouraged ‘particular powerful actors and undemocratic practices to thrive and influence the outcome of party nomination processes’ (105).
As for her methodology, Chiweza focused specifically on how the Democratic People’s Party (DPP) and Malawi Congress Party (MCP) had conducted their 2014 and 2019 primaries. She interviewed women who had been selected through their party primaries to learn from their experiences going through the process—and additionally interviewed 65 key informants—both male and female—to collect ‘in-depth information on the selection process' (110). All these interviews were put through a ‘combination of content analysis and process tracing’ leading up to an understanding of ‘how the rules were applied and the causal processes’ (ibid). The essay is very rich and sincere in these details.
Chiweza ends the essay by recommending that Malawi’s parties ‘make the process more predictable by introducing clear, transparent and written primary election institutions’ (126). If the parties choose to follow up on Chiweza’s recommendation, then they would benefit immensely from her painstaking attempt in the essay at writing out the four categories of rules that emerged from her interviewees’ recollections of their primaries’ processes. Leave that daydreaming aside, political scientists interested in Malawi would find that segment of her essay to be peculiarly valuable.
In the fifth chapter, ‘Inspiring a revolution: Women’s central role in Tanzanian institutions, independence and beyond’, Catherine Cymone and Fourshey Marla L. Jaksh criticize the conventional historiography of Tanzania’s political institutions for its marginalization of women’s contributions to their articulation. The authors’ approach, on one level, is to broaden the scope of what comprises a political institution as well as a contribution to it—such that would allow us ‘to consider more kinds of activity and performances of politics than the normative ascendance to named political positions and titles’ (131). On another level, as if as a demonstration of what a feminist historiography of institution building might look like within the context of Tanzania, the authors’ approach is to bring out the story of Bibi Titi Mohamed, who was the lead singer in a popular musical group during the colonial times before she ‘became the leader of the women’s section of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) and initially the sole woman in President Julius Nyerere’s post-independence government and inner circle’ (134). More generally, Cymone and Jaksh attempt to work out in the essay a framework for—and an advocacy of—African feminisms; their attempt, however, is bogged down in their reviews of an overly large number of other authors and discourses as well as many other (often repetitive) details lacking clear direction and structure.
In the sixth chapter, ‘Experiences of gender equality legislation in Kenya: The role of institutions and actors’, Shillah Sintoyia Memusi seeks to explain why women remain severely under-represented in Kenya’s government institutions despite the fact that the country’s 2010 Constitution—via Article 27 (8)—mandates that ‘not more than two-thirds of members in elective or appointive bodies’ be ‘of the same gender’ (163). Indeed, without this constitutional provision (and associated electoral safeguards), Memusi notes, Kenya’s 12th national assembly would have had only 8.3% female members; and even with the provision in place, the same assembly had been able to have 76 women ‘out of the total 349 representatives’ (164). She argues that this weak presence of Kenyan women in the government bodies is a result of how the culture has traditionally associated men with the public realm, and women with the domestic realm: except that this dynamic plays out within the context of patriarchy (whereby women’s domestic roles and responsibilities also remain subject to male approval).
Memusi illustrates the above via a case study of the Maasai, among whom ‘men are de facto leaders’—whose position as such was ‘strengthened by the colonial and immediate post-colonial state-making processes’ (167). Maasai men are thus better able than Maasai women ‘to navigate formal processes to their own benefit’ (a type of situation, she insists, that prevails in Kenya at large) (168). For the case study, Memusi collected qualitative data in the counties of Kajiado and Narok over the course of seven months in 2016 and 2017—via ‘participant observation, citizen focus group discussions and interviews with administration officers’; the narrative that emerges from her discussion of these results is highly informative about the local cultural beliefs that marginalize women at every stage within the practical contexts of politics—and how (168).
Memusi has put her case study within the broader context of how patriarchy got rearticulated in Kenya through the colonial rule; and how the country’s postcolonial politics ensured that women would remain ‘relegated to wifehood and motherhood’—until a struggle for gender equity would become a force to reckon with through the 1990s—leading up to the adoption of the 2010 Constitution (173). As to why the legal provisions are not translating into the expected levels of gender equity in Kenya’s politics, Memusi indicates that informal, cultural norms of propriety prevent women from asserting themselves on crucial decisions in critical public settings; as a solution, she suggests employing ‘new methods and engagement techniques for interaction…founded upon a proper understanding of the challenges brought about by the intersectionality of formal and informal institutions and the actors therein’ (188). It would have been a good idea for Memusi to append a descriptive list of such methods and techniques to her essay.
The seventh chapter, ‘Women’s representation and institutionalism in Nigeria—historical perspectives’, is by Monica Adele Orisadare. Lamenting the fact that very few women in Nigeria have been active in post-military rule democratic politics (which has been around since 1999), this essay gets lost for a little bit in a meandering review of literatures on institutionalism and feminism. Not soon enough, Orisadare begins to focus on reporting, in three consecutive segments, the scope and status of Nigerian women as political decision makers during pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial times; each of these segments is rich in detail and examples. The overall message that emerges from these three sections is that Nigerian women enjoyed a politically and commercially active, powerful status during pre-colonial times (even though the political/administrative roles of women and men were frequently complementary); colonial administrations, however, radically altered that dynamic, making sure that Nigerian women were forced out of political and administrative positions even as Nigerian men were also relegated to inferiority vis-a-vis White men.
‘The introduction of the assumptions of European patriarchy into Nigerian society by the Colonial administrators and Christian missionaries placed restrictions on women that changed the position of women in indigenous societies,’ Orisadare avers (204). Nigerian women protested colonial measures many times—with the 1928 riot by Aba women being the most prominent—but the devastating impact of the colonial measures on their rights persist to date. While women in southern Nigeria were granted voting rights in the 1950s, their northern counterparts would have to wait until 1979 to get them; in the meantime—in 1960—the country would gain its independence from the British rule.
Orisadare provides a quick sketch of the struggles that the Nigerian women had to go through mainly during the four decades preceding the country’s independence; she follows that up with a calibrated account of their fight for political rights and power (and their small successes) during the eventful years between 1960 and 2018 (that included eight military regimes). Highlighting several contributing factors—including monetization of politics—behind the marginal political status of women in the post-1999 democratic Nigeria, she notes toward the end of the essay that ‘no woman has won election as a governor, vice president or president’ (210). As to how that situation could be improved, she does not delve into it much beyond recommending local adaptation of the best global practices.
While Orisadare’s essay has a lot to offer to the reader, it should have been copyedited for composition; it should also have been better proofread: On some occasions, just to give one example, it has ‘Mamdani’ misspelt as ‘Mandani’. But there is also one unexpected contribution that this essay makes that deserves to be noted: It introduces the reader to two very useful tables of information about Nigerian women’s political representation during pre-colonial and post-colonial times. These two tables are duly credited by Orisadar to a 2012 article that had been authored collectively by T. O. Kolawole, M. B. Abubakar, E. Owonibi, and A. A. Adebayo.
In chapter eight, ‘Affirmative action in Ghana? Patriarchal arguments and institutional inertia’, Diana Højlund Madsen seeks to find an answer to why only 13% of Ghana’s parliamentary seats are occupied by women despite that country’s being a signatory to various global agreements on gender equity and its being ‘the first sub-Saharan country to introduce a quota with ten reserved seats for women’ in 1959 (217-218). Toward her quest, Madsen collected data via 31 qualitative interviews ‘in 2016, 2017, and 2018…with female and male MPs’, various types of governmental and non-government officials working on gender equity, and gender activists (219). She topped up those inputs with ‘gender-differentiated election data and readings of party manifestos from 2016 as well as participant observation in fora on gender/politics’ (ibid).
Based upon all that field research, Madsen identifies ‘a politics of insults, ridicule and rumours’ on the one hand, and ‘the monetization of Ghanian politics’, on the other, as the key ‘informal institutional barriers’ to women’s participation in politics (219). Unfortunately, this essay remains a poorly narrated, often unengaging mishmash of various kinds of observations, review comments, ground reports, and historical facts. Madsen provides many useful details, but she hasn’t always succeeded in the essay into organizing them into a compelling, coherent piece of research.
Conclusion
On the whole, this collection of essays is a very useful research-based exploration of African institutions’ hidden agendas working against women’s political empowerment. However, while it is a rich guide for future research and education, the volume—with the exception perhaps of the essay on Letsma—does not contain much practical guidance on how African women’s interests and participation could be promoted across the continent’s (political) institutions. Moreover, since its essays mostly focus on one specific country or another, it by default leaves out most African countries from its purview. Finally, several contributions to the volume deserved greater focus on organizing and structuring the information they have sought to convey—and on narrating it smoothly.
Toolsy Luchmun has been teaching within the elementary school system of Mauritius for more than 5 years. Her research interests are in the interconnections among gender issues, politics, and education. You are welcome to contact her via Thoughtfox by clicking here.
Piyush Mathur, Ph.D., is a transdisciplinary author and reviewer with multidisciplinary academic experiences at several institutions, including at an expatriate university in Nigeria. Dr. Mathur’s academic articles could be freely accessed by clicking here.