In Africa, as in other parts of the world, women's movements have wrestled with how best to address women's concerns by working with the state. From independence through to the early 1990s, the presence of authoritarian one-party regimes and/or military regimes posed enormous constraints on what was feasible and the extent to which women's movements were able to influence policy. Nevertheless, various governments initiated policy changes to improve the status of women, especially in the area of social policy and in some of the legislation adopted regarding women's employment, maternity leave, and, to some extent, family law.

African governments were generally responsive to United Nations efforts to create national machineries to advance women and to international treaties such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). However, the readiness and capacity to commit resources toward realizing the goals of these institutions were often illusive. This has been the biggest challenge in incorporating women's concerns into the state and policy apparatus, although, as this chapter shows, it is by no means the only one.

It was not until the 1990s that coalitions of international women's movements and UN agencies began to exert pressure on governments to deliver on their promises and to adopt policies to advance women's interests through a process of “gender mainstreaming” (True and Mintrom 2001).

The contemporary women's movements in Africa draw on multiple historic traditions of resistance. They draw some of their tactics from indigenous women's strategies that were part of African societies before colonization. They have also been influenced by experiences of anticolonial resistance and by national liberation movements that thrust women into new roles beyond motherhood, being a wife or an obedient daughter. And finally, and perhaps most directly, they grew in response to the postcolonial party/state-directed women's organizations in the era of single parties and military rule. This chapter traces the historic origins of some of these forms of protest and collective action. It also discusses some of the historical factors, and the impact of colonial policies on civil society and in the area of education that influenced these earlier forms of mobilization.

PRECOLONIAL AND INDIGENOUS FRAMES AND FORMS OF COLLECTIVE ACTION

Contemporary women's movements have drawn on a wealth of historical traditions of collective resistance, some of which predate colonialism. They have been transformed from more localized forms of resistance into broader anticolonial protests, and some tactics have found their way into contemporary protest movements.

Political Motherhood

One older frame for political action that is frequently drawn on in contemporary protest movements is an essentialized notion of “motherhood” (Tibbetts 1994). Motherhood is generally the basis on which women often say they sacrifice for their families, love and rear their children, oppose violence, take selfless action, and carry out many other duties and obligations.

This book offers an explanation for some of the most significant developments in Africa since the 1990s, namely the emerging visibility of women as political actors and the adoption of a new generation of policies advancing women's rights. We raise many questions that have rarely been examined in a comparative African perspective: Why have some countries been more likely to adopt these policies than others? Why have so many of these changes taken place in countries coming out of civil conflict? Why have so many partially democratic and nondemocratic countries introduced woman-friendly reforms? What difference does democracy make to the adoption of women's rights reforms? These are just some of the questions this book tackles.

This book is one of the first to document the dramatic changes in women's mobilization and women's impact on politics across the continent in the 1990s. There are a few superb country studies (e.g., Britton 2005; Fallon forthcoming; Hassim 2006; Steady 2006; Tamale 1999) and some regional studies (Geisler 2004). An important edited volume by Gretchen Bauer and Hannah Britton (2006) examines women in African parliaments. There is a very small but growing literature on the subject in journals that focuses on aspects of the changes described in this book in one country or context (e.g., electoral quotas for women, women and land concerns, and female genital cutting). Our book brings many of the pieces together and tells a much bigger story about overall changes in women's movements and their political impact after the 1990s.

This book is about a social transformation that is revolutionizing women's status in African societies in ways that it would have been hard to imagine even a couple decades ago. For those involved in the movements, it still seems like there is a long way to go and the hurdles ahead are daunting. However, if one takes a step back to examine the overall crossnational picture in Africa, the patterns of change are unmistakable and there is no question that there have already been significant changes in gender-related norms, government objectives, and, to a more modest extent, in the advancement of the status of women.

The cases of Cameroon, Mozambique, and Uganda in many ways typify some of the key trends that we see today in Africa, both in women's status as well as in the persistence of the status quo. Each case points to both possibilities as well as the limitations of these changes.

Women's movements were critical to the legislative and constitutional changes related to women's rights, facilitating gender mainstreaming in the state bureaucracy, carving out new roles for women in postconflict contexts, and promoting expanded political leadership roles for women at all levels. But women's movements were not alone in their efforts to bring about radical changes. They took advantage of opportunities that had converged at the international and regional levels as well as trends within Africa, such as the end of major civil conflicts.

One of the most remarkable changes since the mid-1990s in Africa has been the rise of women political leaders. Rwanda claimed the world's highest ratio of women in parliament in 2003, with close to 49 percent of its seats held by women. Mozambique has 35 percent of its legislative seats held by women, and in many other African countries today, women hold over one-third of the parliamentary seats. There have been six female prime ministers since the mid-1990s and women Speakers of the House in Ethiopia, Lesotho, Gambia, Nigeria, and South Africa.

Liberia's Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf became the first elected woman president in Africa in 2005 and there have been two unelected female heads of state since 1995. Until the 1990s, it was virtually unheard of for women to run for the presidency in Africa. In the 1990s, women ran for the top executive office in the Central African Republic, Kenya, and Liberia. Since 2000, increasing numbers of women have run for office in about half the presidential elections held in Africa.

Six women have held the position of vice/deputy president. Uganda's Wandera Specioza Kazibwe became the first female vice president in Africa in 1993 and served for close to ten years. Women are also visible at the cabinet level; they are heading up key ministries and are no longer relegated only to the ministries of women, education, health, youth, and community development as they were in the past.

In contrast to the earlier postcolonial period when women's organizations tended to be closely associated with the ruling party and state, after the 1990s a new generation of independent women's organizations emerged with their own agendas, leadership, and sources of funding. Although the older welfare, domestic, and developmental agendas have persisted to this day, a new emphasis on political participation emerged, especially in the 1990s, that allowed women to press for the changes that we discuss in subsequent chapters, including constitutional and legislative reform and greater representation of women in legislatures, judiciaries, and the bureaucracy. New women's organizations formed to improve leadership skills, encourage women's political involvement on a nonpartisan basis, lobby for women's political representation, press for legislative changes, and conduct civic education.

This chapter looks at some of the characteristics of women's organizations and then examines some of the challenges that they face. It looks at the ways in which the authorities challenged women's associational autonomy. It shows how women's associations expanded their focus from developmental issues to the inclusion of more explicitly political concerns, to advocacy, and to demands for female leadership and representation. The chapter then identifies ways in which women's collective action is distinct from that of other interest groups. These differences lie not only in the goals of women activists but also in their inclusiveness across ethnic and party lines.

As discussed in the previous chapter, most organizations were formed after 1990, coinciding with the emergence of new democratic openings.

The women's movements that emerged in the 1990s were distinct from women's mobilization in the early post-independence period in several ways. First and foremost, they were generally autonomous of the ruling party and state. Women's organizations set new broader agendas and selected their own leaders. They obtained new sources of funding independent of state patronage networks, which women's organizations had depended on to a greater extent in the past. The new women's organizations took advantage of changes in donor funding patterns favoring nongovernment organizations (NGOs) after the 1990s, providing them the impetus to expand.

What then gave rise to these new movements in the late 1980s and especially in the 1990s? There is no single explanation for women's heightened activism in Africa, but three key factors are considered here. These include (1) international influences and the diffusion of ideas and tactics across Africa with respect to women's rights; (2) a changing resource base in which some women's associations had greater access to alternate sources of funding; and (3) in some countries the opening of political space for women's associations as a result of democratization and political liberalization. These factors are important because they shaped the ways in which the movements sought policy changes, the kinds of issues they took up, and their levels of success. This chapter discusses how these factors came into play.

The steady end to a significant number of conflicts in Africa since the mid-1980s has been an important change in the African political landscape. Sometimes low-grade conflict continued in the aftermath of a negotiated peace agreement. Major settlements occurred after the end of national wars of liberation in Namibia and South Africa. Civil conflicts diminished or came to an end in countries such as Angola (2002), Burundi (2004), Chad, (2002), the Democratic Republic of Congo (2002), Liberia (2003), Mozambique (1992), Rwanda (1994), Sierra Leone (2002), southern Sudan (2005), and northern Uganda (2007).

With the winding down of almost all these major conflicts, women's organizations vigorously pressed for increased political representation and changes in policy and legislation regarding women's rights. Unlike the post-conflict situations prior to the 1990s, and especially after 2000, women now were beginning to see many of their aspirations for greater rights addressed through new constitutions and the passage of legislation. International norms were changing, as evident in governmental commitments made at the 1995 Beijing United Nations Conference on Women and in other international and regional treaties and conventions.

One of the clearest examples of this change is in the area of women's legislative representation. In African countries where conflicts ended after 1985, women hold, on average, 24 percent of legislative seats compared with countries that did not experience conflict, where women account for only 13 percent of the legislative seats.

In the past decade, women have become visible in African politics in unexpected ways, setting new precedents. In 2003, Rwanda elected a new parliament with the highest percentage of women in the world (close to 49 percent). Africa has some of the highest rates of female legislative representation in the world, with women claiming over 30 percent of the parliamentary seats in Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Burundi. In November 2005, Liberia's Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf became the first elected woman president in Africa. Specioza Wandera Kazibwe served as vice president in Uganda for a decade (1994–2003). There have been six female prime ministers in Africa since the mid-1990s, with Luísa Dia Diogo serving as prime minister in Mozambique since 2004. At the regional level, Gertrude Mongella of Tanzania became the first president of the Pan-African Parliament of the African Union, and half the parliamentarians are women.

Women's new engagement with politics is evident in other ways as well. Women's movements have successfully lobbied for constitutional reforms to include gender equity and antidiscrimination clauses. They have sought the passage of new legislation to expand women's rights. Women are for the first time making bids to participate in an official capacity in national-level peace talks in countries where conflicts have come to an end. These are just a few of the dramatic changes in women's status that are under way in Africa today.

Since the 1990s, women's organizations have been pushing for and often succeeding in getting constitutional reforms and legislative changes. As a result of such efforts, today twenty-one out of forty-six African constitutions have provisions with customary law being overridden by statutory law and the constitution. Only three constitutions make specific mention of women or gender in this regard. Moreover, thirty-two countries have antidiscrimination clauses with particular reference to women. Gender equality is specifically mentioned in all but eight sub-Saharan Africa constitutions out of forty-six constitutions, further highlighting the importance of gender equality (see Table 5.1).

These are extremely profound challenges because they are more than attempts simply to improve legislation or add a few sentences in a constitution. They are, in effect, efforts to legitimize new legal-based sources of authority for rights governing relations between men and women and family relations. Prior to the 1990s, even when laws existed to regulate marriage, inheritance, custody, and other such practices, customary law coexisted and generally took precedence when it came to family and clan concerns. Today, women are challenging these norms through constitutional and legislative changes. This is no small matter, but one that will take time to realize even with legislative and constitutional reforms, because customary norms are so deeply entrenched and customary law is so widely practiced.

The constitutional changes have occurred in the context of reforms that were part of democratizing trends sweeping Africa.