Women In Africa

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Women in Africa

Timothy Veneylo November 26, 1995 History 387

In many parts of Africa, there is a large discrepancy in who controlled the resources, access to the economy, individual autonomy and central voice in the government between the men and the women. African men, for the most part, have the largest say in the activities of the country. When issues of concern arise, "men's issues" usually became the issues of national concern, and those issues pertinent to women go to the back of everyone's mind. Women are forced to accept the results of men's actions, and usually nothing gets accomplished that benefits them. Because women continually were overlooked, they began to come together and protest. If one examines the following women's protests and their outcomes: A.E. Afigbo's The Warrant Chiefs, Sylvia Leith-Ross' African
Women, Jean Allman's "Rounding Up Spinsters: Gender Chaos and Unmarried Women in
Colonial Asante", and Irene Staunton's Mothers of the Revolution, several questions arise. What were women seeking and how did this differ from what men wanted? Did women attain their goals, and if not, why not? If women were not successful in getting their concerns at the forefront of national interest, at what, if anything, were they successful?
In several instances women became so angered by their lack of voice, that they were moved to act. In some of these cases, women were relatively successful in organizing and mobilizing. The story of the Aba Riots, which is discussed in both The Warrant Chiefs and African Women, proves this point well.
In Nigeria, in the late 1920's, the Warrant Chiefs wanted to impose a system of annual taxation. What was so displeasing to the people about the tax was that it involved a census, and that the money went towards no specific project. The concept of counting free people was a foreign one to the Igbo. This notion went contrary to custom, and it was believed to bring about death (Afigbo, 229). The people of the Eastern Provinces felt that because they were being counted, the colonial government was enslaving them or that they were out to destroy them.
Also objectionable to these people was the fact that the collected money went towards "‘development'" (Afigbo, 228), something for which these communities had not asked.
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...cause they wanted exclusive authority of their productive and reproductive rights. Women were angry, rightfully so, at the fact that men no longer provided them "chop money." Also, when slavery was abolished, men began pawning their wives and exploiting them for use on their cocoa farms. The women became so enraged at their subjugation by men, that they reacted, successfully. Allman affirms that these women were successful when she says that "this particular form of coercion was unsuccessful in even minimally facilitating the exploitation of women's unpaid labour and one important reason for its failure was that the capture of unmarried women did not get the backing of the colonial government" (Allman, 212). In this particular instance, women were able to "shape actively the emerging colonial world" (Allman, 213). The only thing that the chiefs succeeded in doing was making the arrest of women a profit-making venture; because every time a woman was released from jail, she or the man had to pay the fine. Unfortunately, this was not their goal, so they were ultimately unsuccessful. Women's productive and reproductive rights remained under their control.

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