In this paper I attempt to connect several dots, specifically my research on African women's activism, environmental justice, and climate change. The book on which I am currently working is tentatively entided “‘The Great Upheaval’: Women, Taxes and Nationalist Politics in Abeokuta (Nigeria), 1945–1951.” The study examines the struggles of Nigerian women to shape the nationalist agenda and their setbacks as the country moved decisively toward independence. At its core lies an analysis of a tax revolt launched by women in Abeokuta in 1947. The Abeokuta Women's Union (AWU), under the leadership of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti (the mother of the late musician Fela Kuti), began a protracted protest against a tax increase. This revolt is well known in Nigerian popular history, and many people outside of Nigeria were introduced to it in Wole Soyinka's memoir, Ake: The Years of Childhood (1981:164–218).

The Nigerian military state has used gender politics for its own ends, exploiting opportunities afforded by international concern with women. The highly publicized program for rural women enabled the regime of Babangida to gain international credibility. The Abacha regime did not seek or win international support, but sought to upstage the gender politics of their predecessors locally by mounting more broadly populist programs which promised benefits to “the family” and further reinscribed women within highly limited reproductive roles. Because Nigerian civil society has been so reluctant to engage with gender, the military have been able to appropriate the terrain they refer to as “women development” for their own ends. Through a series of high profile programs, they have neutralized the potentially subversive and inherently antimilitarist notion of women's liberation, and propagated a gender politics which normalizes military rule.

This article begins by exploring the efforts of African women’s movements from the 1990s onward to end violent civil conflicts and to insist on guarantees of gender equity in newly formed governments. It attempts to explain these recent successes first by examining the complex relationships between international women’s movements and African women’s groups from the Second World War onward, particularly from the era of the U.N. Decade for Women beginning in 1975. The article then turns to a broader problem: exploring the connections between contemporary women’s activism and deeper currents in African history that link the precolonial period with the more recent past. By examining a variety of twentieth-century women’s protests, it argues that cloaked in the language of political, economic, and environmental grievances, these movements also reflect a hidden history of women’s influence as public healers, empowered not only to cure individuals, but also to mend broader relationships in the community.

Across Africa in the early twenty-first century, autonomous women's movements have transformed the political landscape. With their support, African women are lobbying for constitutional reforms, entering political office in unprecedented numbers, and initiating legislation to expand women's rights. African women's movements have been emboldened by changes in international and regional norms concerning women's rights and representation, a new availability of resources to enhance women's status, and in many places, an end to conflict. In Botswana, the 1980s and 1990s were a period of heightened women's mobilization. Led by the women's organization Emang Basadi, the women's movement accomplished many significant victories, including winning a landmark citizenship case, prompting a comprehensive review of laws to identify instances of gender discrimination, issuing the first women's manifesto in Africa, and organizing workshops for political parties and women candidates. Some scholars have suggested that Emang Basadi's work was responsible not just for increasing women's representation in parliament, but also for broadening democracy in Botswana. Since 2010, however, a once vibrant women's movement has gone quiet. This article seeks to understand this development and to explore how the movement might be revitalized. The article concludes by drawing comparisons with other women's movements in the region and suggesting that the women's movement in Botswana, like others in the region, may be, in the words of one scholar, “in abeyance.”

An ethnographic analysis of two interconnected cities for the Somali diaspora—Nairobi and Johannesburg—helps to uncover alternative narratives about the lives of Somali women and the ways they renegotiate their cultural and religious identities in diasporic contexts, moving beyond the widespread representation of Somali women in the global imagination as helpless victims. Using the domains of marriage and female circumcision, Ripero-Muñiz analyzes how these women exercise their agency while at the same time negotiating the cultural and religious practices of their community. By focusing on the ways in which Somali women re-negotiate their identities, this article helps to locate the agency of women in refugee and migrant communities in sub-Saharan Africa.

Most discussions of African women as rural producers have either underscored African women's traditional roles in production, focused on female exclusion from the development process and the need for female inclusion, or they have documented the failure of agricultural development projects because of oversight of the female dimension (Hafkin and Bay, 1976; Etienne and Leacock, 1980; Bay, 1982; Burfisher and Horenstein, 1985). Observation of the intense involvement of Ghanaian women in both cocoa and food production, as well as their plight during the more recent crises in the Ghanaian economy, leads one to new insights into African economic relationships. This case raises some interesting questions about the exploitation of women in agricultural production, the relationship between declining cash crop and food production and the national economy, as well as the national consequences which flow from the failure to give women a proper role in the rural economy.

The present analysis uses historical, ethnographic case-study, survey, statistical, and political data from cocoa farming areas of Ghana (especially the Sunyani area) to examine the changing relationship of rural women to economic and national stability. It is argued that in the recent difficult political and economic climate in some African countries, pressures exerted on rural areas have contributed to a heavy reliance upon female producers. Over time these pressures further contribute to an unstable rural economy, because this exploitation of the female labor force, while itself a reaction to socioeconomic trauma, further discourages male involvement in agricultural production.

In Mozambique and Cape Verde, writing in Portuguese by African women has directly engaged political reconstruction by denouncing colonial oppression and embracing national freedom. This article addresses the recent history of Lusophone African women's fiction, which has been pivotal in inscribing the intimate arena of sexuality and motherhood into power relations and has also revealed ways in which the domain of violence intersects with private lives. By focusing on two novels that exemplify this trend, this article demonstrates links between the political and the intimate. It also shows how Lusophone African authors contribute to healing social conflict through their narratives, and draws some conclusions about gender relations in the Lusophone African experience and across the continent.

Uganda and Tanzania are two of many African countries with diverse post-colonial experiences that have taken steps towards political liberalization in the 1990s. In both countries, the continued pursuit of political liberalization is threatened by sectarianism. Any consideration of Uganda's political future immediately raises questions of how to resolve the seemingly intractable religious, regional and ethnic differences that have had devastating consequences in its recent history. Concerns voiced by non-Baganda over the recent upsurge in monarchism in Buganda and the resented perceived political advantage of individuals from western Uganda in positions of power are but two examples of the ever present issue of ethnicity in Uganda. Tanzania, which has had a less volatile recent past, was by the early 1990s seeing manifestations of religious sectarianism and undercurrents of ethnic tensions, including tensions between Muslim and Christian communities and between the African and Asian business communities, that were being expressed more openly than at any other time in its post-colonial history.

Rather than explore the new manifestations of sectarianism in Tanzania and Uganda, which remains an important task, this essay asks what are the countervailing forces within society that challenge these new or revived sectarian tendencies? Are there concurrent developments that provide bases for institutional change that might serve as alternatives to a political, economic and social order based on sectarianism? While there are no simple answers to these questions, research on the informal economy in Tanzania and its related organizations (1987-88) and currently on women's associations in Uganda (1992 to the present) suggests one arena where one finds such cross-cutting tendencies: in the emergence of new women's urban associations in the late 1980s.

The article argues for an approach to studies of sexuality in Africa that considers the subject of female sexuality from the perspective of capacity and power. Based on data from Mozambique, and informed by conceptual frameworks as well as by research findings from other African countries, the article investigates preparations of the erotic female body such as body tattoos, hip belts of glass beads, and elongated labia. It also discusses how “traditional” sexual capacity-building has been transferred from rural contexts into urban settings, empowering young women in love relationships with older, richer men.

This article examines the ways in which childhood and youth experiences of living in polygynous households shape the aspirations of middle-class Muslim Senegalese women to companionate marriage. Increasingly, such aspirations are fulfilled through marriage with European men. In contrast to an enduring popular discourse according to which women live happily with polygyny throughout the Senegambian region, this article shows how some middle-class women’s choice to “marry out” is explicitly linked to family narratives and personal experiences of suffering. In a context in which many of these women face strong familial opposition to marriage with non-Muslim European men, this article suggests that the women’s narratives provide moral legitimacy to their “alternative” choices.