Today as ever, African female activists are reshaping not just African feminist agendas but global ones as well.

[Elisabeth Janaina]

Today as ever, African female activists are reshaping not just African
feminist agendas but global ones as well.

Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of many feminists
shaping global discourses today. Credit: Commonwealth Foundation/Colin
Patterson.

One of the great fallacies one still hears today is that feminism
started in the Global North and found its way to the Global South.
Another is that universal understandings of women’s rights as embodied
in UN treaties and conventions were formulated by activists in the
North.

International Women’s Day, however, provides an opportunity to
highlight the reality: that not only do feminisms in the Global South
have their own trajectories, inspirations, and demands, but they have
contributed significantly to today’s global understandings of women’s
rights. Nowhere is this clearer than in Africa, where women are
increasingly exerting leadership from politics to business and have
helped shape global norms regarding women’s rights in multiple arenas.

For decades, African activists have rejected the notion that one can
subsume all feminist agendas under a Western one. As far back as the
1976 international conference on Women and Development at Wellesley
College, Egyptian novelist Nawal El-Saadawi and Moroccan sociologist
Fatema Mernissi challenged efforts by Western feminists to define
global feminism. In the drafting of the 1979 Convention on the
Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the All African
Women’s Conference was one of six organisations and the only regional
body involved.

[Nawal El Saadawi: “All people are mixed blood, the more mixed you are
the better”]

African women have also been influencing national gender policies for
over half a century. In 1960, for example, Mail’s Jacqueline Ki-zerbo
had already developed the idea of considering the gender impacts of
policies. It was only decades later that this idea – now commonly
known as “gender mainstreaming” – gained international currency,
particularly in national budgetary processes.

In key UN conferences, African women activists have been visible from
the outset. Egypt’s Aida Gindy held the first international meeting on
Women in Economic Development in 1972. The Kenya Women’s Group helped
organise the 1985 UN Conference on Women in which African women
brought issues of apartheid and national liberation to the fore. And
Egypt’s Aziza Husayn helped organise the 1994 Cairo International
Conference on Population and Development, which shifted the debate
around population control away from a traditional family planning
emphasis on quotas and targets to one focused on women’s rights and
health.

Additionally, Sierra Leone’s Filomena Steady was one of the key
conveners of the Earth Summit in 1992. Tanzania’s Gertrude Mongella
was General Secretary of the pivotal 1995 UN Beijing Conference. And
African women peace-builders played a crucial role in the 2000
Windhoek conference, which paved the way for a UN Security Council
Resolution encouraging the inclusion of women in peace negotiations
and peacekeeping missions around the world.

[Wangari Maathai was not a good woman. Kenya needs more of them.]

[It’s time to axe Kenya’s big dick politics]

Leading the world

Women in Africa have also set new standards for women’s political
leadership globally. The likes of Guinea’s Jeanne Martin Cissé,
Liberia’s Angie Brooks and Tanzania’s Anna Tibaijuka and Asha-Rose
Migiro have all held top positions at the UN. Meanwhile at a national
level, many African countries have made important gains in women’s
representation.

Rwandan women today hold 62% of the country’s legislative seats, the
highest in the world. In Senegal, South Africa, Namibia, and
Mozambique, more than 40% of parliamentary seats are held by women.
There are female speakers of the house in one fifth of African
parliaments, higher than the world average of 14%. Women have claimed
positions in key ministries throughout Africa. And women have
increasingly run for executive positions, with Liberia, the Central
African Republic, Malawi and Mauritius all having had female heads of
state. Moreover, these increases in female representation are taking
place across the continent, including predominantly Muslim countries
such as Senegal, where women hold 43% of legislative seats.

These new patterns are found at the regional level too, with women
holding 50% of the positions at in African Union Commission, compared
to just one-third at the European Commission. South Africa’s Nkosazana
Dlamini-Zuma meanwhile chaired the AU Commission from 2012 to 2017.

Women’s strong presence in African parliaments has resulted in new
discussions about strategies to enhance female political
representation worldwide. Scandinavian scholars such as Drude Dahlerup
and Lenita Freidenvall even argue that the incremental model that led
to high rates of female representation in Nordic countries in the
1970s has now been replaced by the “fast track” African model in which
dramatic jumps in representation are brought about by electoral
quotas.

Shaping the world

African women have also been pioneering in business. Aspiring young
female entrepreneurs today have several role models they can follow
such as Ghana’s Esther Ocloo, who pursued the idea of formalising
local women’s credit associations and became a founding member of one
of the first microcredit banks, Women’s Worlds Banking, in 1979.

According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, African countries
have almost equal numbers of men and women either actively involved in
business start-ups or in the phase of starting a new firm. And in
countries such as Ghana, Nigeria and Zambia, women are reportedly more
likely to be entrepreneurs than men.

These changes are evident not only at the grassroots but, to an
extent, at the highest levels. Female representation in boardrooms
worldwide is very poor, but Africa’s rate of 14.4% is only slightly
behind Europe (18%) and the US (17%), and ahead of Asia, Latin America
and the Middle East.

Finally, a younger generation of activists is emerging throughout
Africa today and redefining feminism from an African perspective. One
sees this not only in the work of the African Feminist Forum, which
first met in 2006, but also in the work of figures such as novelist
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who issued a clarion call to women in her
video We Should All be Feminist, adapted from her 2013 Ted Talk, in
which she explores what it means to be an African feminist. Her book
length essay by the same title is found on bookshelves in major cities
around the world, and the Swedish Women’s Lobby has given it to every
16-year-old in Sweden to help them think about gender equality.

Feminist discourse meanwhile has become commonplace throughout the
continent on websites, blogs, journals, and social media. New feminist
novels like Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (Kenya), Kintu by Jennifer
Nansubuga Makumbi (Uganda), and Americanah by Adichie (Nigeria) have
offered new ways of imagining women.

There are clearly still enormous hurdles for African feminists to
overcome in fighting for gender equality. But as they have over the
past half a century, Africa’s women activists of today are reshaping
not only African feminist agendas in tackling these challenges, but
global ones as well.

Aili Mari Tripp is Professor of Political Science and Evjue Bascom
Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. She is the co-editor, with Balghis Badri, of
Women’s Activism in Africa (2017).

An earlier version of this article was originally published at Think
Africa Press.