- Africa Day discussions continue to promote African unity, but the position of women in these conversations remains largely overlooked.
- African women continue to experience unequal outcomes in education, economic participation, political representation, and access to resources.
- Meaningful African unity requires the voices, experiences, and interests of women to be placed at the centre of development initiatives.
Annually, Africa Day celebrations across the continent are filled with reminders of the promises of unity and solidarity for the continent.
In South Africa, Africa Day is commemorated through a diversity of activities promoting this very idea of unity, first championed by the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), the precursor to the African Union (AU), on 25 May 1963.
Within the South African higher education milieu, the celebrations continued this year despite ongoing tensions of Afrophobia in the country, marking the relevance of universities as places of continued reflection in the context of conflict.
Some of the debates rightfully focused on trying to find solutions for continued African solidarity in the context of the ongoing “scramble for Africa”, growing geopolitical conflicts, technological shifts, and the opportunities offered by multipolarity. While the debates emerging from the celebrations are important for advancing broader unity, what is not showing up is the position of women in this work to develop and unite the continent.
This is disturbing, as African women, both adult women and young girls, make up more than 50 percent of the continent’s population. Thus, more than half of the population dividend that many proponents of Africa’s development emphasise is made up of a group seldom centred in formal African development initiatives: adult women and young girls.
While we recognise that gender does not operate in the same way everywhere, gender development research shows that women across the world experience development disproportionately. This is even more so for women on the African continent. This is because development is not neutral; it is just as gendered as it is racialised.
The African Gender Development Index illustrates that women are underrepresented in education, economic participation, and political participation. While the numbers vary across the continent, what remains constant is that African women remain an addendum in African development programmes, on its platforms, and as beneficiaries of its projects, while carrying an unequal burden of the failures of this development.
For example, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (UN), African women in Sub-Saharan Africa shoulder a disproportionate share of food production labour while holding lower levels of land ownership and being less likely to inherit land.
The cost of the patriarchal dividend
While South Africa shows progress in terms of access to education for girls and women compared to other African countries, this is not translated into access to jobs and leadership positions once women enter the workplace.
Research argues that this discrepancy is the result of the patriarchal dividend. It has become the norm for men to defer to other men, even when women are more qualified, more experienced, and even when they hold leadership positions. Similarly, powerful men will defer to other men, sometimes to the most junior and least qualified men in the room.
This patriarchal dividend leads to experiential contradictions for women leaders, who are rewarded for self-erasure while simultaneously being treated as disposable. The architectures of patriarchal power work tirelessly to unsettle and provoke women leaders, who are then forced to act in ways that the system labels as “irrational”.
Feminist researchers such as Bell Hooks have written extensively about these tactics and how they minimise women leaders’ achievements while imposing respectability politics on them. For example, when these women leaders resist dehumanisation, that resistance is defined as aggression. As a result, women are often labelled angry, aggressive, and difficult.
If African unity is to be achieved, African women and their interests should be centred. Their voices, presence, and experiences are indispensable. Otherwise, the shared aspirations of the continent will remain a pipe dream.
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