This emancipation from the old, rigid and parochial dichotomies of only being housewives and homemakers has not only been a breath of fresh air in the miasmic mediocrity of andocentric traditions, but also a lift to the pedestals of family and societal problem solving. Many are now recognizing that African women can still maintain their traditionally excellent role of being good homemakers and housewives while at the same time effectively participating in societal development issues in a perfect juggle of responsibilities. The recent bagging-in of the Nobel Peace Prize by Kenya’s own Professor Wangari Maathai is a step in that direction. It was a shot in the arm to the relentless struggle by the Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) afflicted, the battered, the abused, the widowed, the poverty stricken and the HIV affected/infected African woman in their fight for justice, along with an equitable share of government and civil society recognition and appreciation.
In her efforts to shed off some outdated psychosocial and economic cuticles and crass discrimination, Professor Maathai has come a long way from facing myopic oppositions, corruption-engineered frustrations, political persecutions and other debilitating acts of destabilization. However, her fighting spirit has never given up. Having burnt the midnight oil to conserve existing indigenous forests in Kenya as well as having planted millions of trees, no earthly recognition could be more fitting to Professor Wangari. She is dubbed ‘Mama Kenya’ for her neutrality in ethnic and political debates, usually preferring to focus on development issues in her constituency and in other parts of Kenya; and now, Africa and the rest of the globe.
Other notable symbols of the African woman’s awakening include Dr Graca Matchell, Dr Julia Ojiambo, Angelique Kidjo, Professor Norah Olembo, Ms Lucy Muthoni Wanyeki, Professor Esther Kahangi, and Dr Anna Tibaijuka, among many others whose contributions to humanity will remain etched in the daily lives of many and historical memoirs. Professor Kahangi has significantly contributed to the improvement of food security by pioneering tissue culture banana production in East and Central Africa, while Dr Tibaijuka’s efforts as the head of the UN-HABITAT to improve living conditions in urban and rural dwellings around the world are laudable.
I was especially impressed by the assertion of Ms Muthoni-Wanyeki that a woman’s proximity to an important person does not in effect make her equally important through induction of the same. This goes a long way to show just how much harder the African, and Third World women at that, have worked to gauge their rightfully deserved place in today’s society.
The achievements by these hard working African women and their ilk are however, mirrored against a background of many still in dire need of care and attention; with derogatory practices such as FGM, widow oppression, wife battery and the disinheritance of female family members still carried out unabated in some parts of the African continent.
The real struggle fought by these genuine women has unfortunately been dogged by the influx of less genuine ‘red-blooded’ ‘feminists’, whose apparent aim has been to pit genders against each other, with the females going for the ‘emotional throats’ of the males in an unwarranted, circuitous and directionless gender war. This glaring ignominy, compounded by the fact that the larger percentage of these saboteurs is made up of a few pretentious and mostly urban women, does not ring well for the true essence of the years of arduous struggling to uplift womenfolk from the penitentiary of cultural discrimination and segregation.
Considering that the rural African woman more often than not has to contend with ignorance, abject poverty and a general lack of enough resources for development, their situation should be given serious redress by development and gender experts, as well as policy makers. Due to media inaccessibility, their plights often pass with little mention and this increases the gravity of their woes. It was therefore not shocking to witness a group of rural-based women at a Nairobi Conference criticizing a few pretentious urban based colleagues for neglecting them. While this may be partially true, it arouses a need for cross boundary networking between women for greater capacity building ability; this can only be initiated in liaison with the rest of the society, who will be giving them the relevant props.
As we engage in the ennobling quest of giving African and Third World woman access to their rightful place in society, it is instructive to note that many African traditions are indeed noble and should therefore not be subjected to wholesale condemnation. Androcentrism - geared and selfish aspects of the same, such as FGM, amongst a plethora of its virulent ilk, should however be willfully discarded. A gender war should not be left to brew, as some rights ‘proponents’ tend to imply. They should embrace the fact that culture is dynamic and nature’s intention is to better them by the decade, while at the same time evading their adulteration and thus, deterioration. It is only then that they will not lose sight of the focus of this equity struggle; and in effect, give the hard working, but often ignored, African woman her due recognition and place in the annals of history.
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