ROAPE Publications Ltd.

Feminism in Africa: Feminism and Africa Author(s): Pepe Roberts Reviewed work(s): Source: Review of African Political Economy, No. 27/28, Women, Oppression and Liberation (1983), pp. 175-184 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4005612 . Accessed: 12/03/2012 08:42
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175

Debate
FEMINISM AFRICA:FEMINISM IN AND AFRICA
The articles in this issue are not the first in ROAPE to be addresseddirectlyto the issue of gender and women's struggles in Africa.Nevertheless, coveragehas at best been occasionaland until now no opportunity been taken to reflect on has the impact that feminist analysis has had upon the debates current at the time when ROAPE was founded. Nor has there been any reflection upon the similaritiesand differencesbetween women'sdemandsin the west, the natureof which have been implicitin some of the articles which have been published,and the struggles and demands of women in Africa. The feminist movement in the west has been accusedof racism, that is to say that it has failed to recognise the differenthistoricalexperienceof blackwomen comparedto that of white women and has been aggressive towardstheir culturalvalues and struggles for freedom as black women. In this paper I want to illustrate some features of the developmentof socialist feminist analysis in order to illustrate what I believe to be some of the difficult questions confronting feminist politics and the relationshipbetween feminism and socialism at an internationallevel at the present moment. In brief, the socialistfeminist critiqueover the last decadeor more has shifted debates on, for example, the process of proletarianisation,from positions which ignored the question of sexual divisions and gender inequalityto ones which represented women's subordinationas the consequences of capitalism. Graduallyit has shifted debates to recognise the specificity of gender relations - of women's to subordination men - and their interactionwith modes of production.These relations have, for example, affected the structure of capitalist interventionin Africa. This shift has taken place long after African women themselves recognisedthat their subordination men was not the effect of capitalismalone. to But contemporary women's movements in Africa have been formed during recent or continuing struggles for national liberation which has shaped their reflection on the subordinationof women in past and contemporary social formationsand the priorities of struggle. The maintask of socialistfeminismhas been to conceptualisegender divisionsas a set of social relations which have historicallyand in all known cultures been based on the domination of men and the subordinationof women. Gender relations, it is argued, are distinct from those of class in capitalist or noncapitalist societies. They are, however, embedded in the social relations of productionand reproductionsuch that the subordination women serves the of

ECONOMY 176 REVIEW OF AFRICANPOLITICAL

of interests of, say, capitalismas well as those of men. This conceptualisation gender relations has been the basis of the critique of Marxist theories of imperialism, development and underdevelopment.These had been generally devoid of any questionsconcerningthe relationshipbetween the developmentof capitalism in Africa and the deepening of gender divisions and women's which already existed in the pre-capitalistsocial formations. subordination The consequence of this analysis has been to challenge many of the major premises of the body of theory with which socialistshave worked.This challenge was not powerful enough at the time when ROAPE was foundedto have been reflected in its first editorial which committed the journal to a Marxist and perspectiveuponthe analysisof imperialism class struggle in Africa. But the of contribution feminist analysisto many of the majorissues with whichROAPE has been concernedhas gradually(if not consistently)informedthe content of its debates and reflected various stages in the developmentof the feminist critique. In the early 1970s, the attempt to develop a socialist feminist analysis of the relationshipbetween capital and gender relations in the peripheryconfronted work which was devoid of reference to sexual divisions, let alone gender in inequality.Consider,for example, Saul's contribution ROAPE 1 (1975)to the debate on the peasantryand class alliances.* Saul arguedthat the class actionsof some African peasantries were restricted because their 'ultimate security and subsistence rests upon maintainingrights in land and rights in family labour' (p.46).From a feministperspective,these peasantriesseemedto be no more than male peasants. In many (if not most) societies in Africa, few women had either individualor collectiverights in land to maintainexcept access conditionalupon becomingand remainingwives. 'Familylabour',however, glossed over the very different rights a man might have in wives and in other kin and the methodsby which control over wives' labour might be secured. Moreover,Saul apparently attributedthe existence and exercise of such 'rights'to the survivalof 'important vestiges of pre-capitalist social networks and cultural pre-occupation'(p.49). Feminist analysis sought to conceptualisethese 'rights' that men possessed in women as gender relations through which men controlledwomen's productive and reproductive labour. Further, we argued that the social relations of producers to capital transformed, and was transformed by, these gender relations. This meant that, far from being a vestige of pre-capitalist social networks, women's subordinationwas further secured in peasant households producingfor capitalist markets. The feminist debate first sought to establish the reasons why capitalism increased the subordinationof women in the non-capitalistsectors: in other words, the relationshipbetween capital and women's labour.It was argued, for example, that the intensificationof female labourin peasant economiesreleased male labourfor the productionof cash crops. In the labourreserve areas capital 'used' women's productiveand reproductivelabourto ensure a supplyof cheap male migrant labour to the capitalist sectors. Their productive labour was intensified to ensure the subsistence basis of labour reserve areas while their of reproductivelabourensured the maintenanceand reproduction labourpower at no cost to the capitalistwage.
of *In namingcontributors,it is not my intentionto accuse them particularly the crime of gender blindnessbut to illustrate the general perspectivewhich their work represented.

DEBATE 177 This argumentwas used in ROAPE 7 by Innes and O'Mearain relationto class formation in the Transkei. They focused on the fact that the class divisions between the peasantry and the proletariat and semi-proletariat were also divisions between women and men. The consciousness of male - and some female - migrantlabourwas formed in the site of capitalistproduction.Yet the majority of women experienced their 'double oppression' at the site of the reproduction of labour power in the reserves. The political and ideological practicesthat might ensue, they argued, would differ:while men might struggle against capital at the point of production,women might be - and indeed had been - involvedin mass popularresistance against the blackcollaborator class of chiefs and headmenin the reserves. This 'structuraldivisionat the heart of the proletariat' might affect the alliances it could forge and its willingness to organise as a class against capital (p.82). They concluded,however, that these divisions might be overcome through the common features of both urban and rural experience of capitalist exploitation which was 'the white man and his oppressive system of apartheid'(p.83, original emphases). These arguments clarifying the relationshipbetween capitalism and women's labour,however, tended to evade the questionof women's subordination men to in bothpre-capitalistand capitalistsocialformations.Innes and O'Meara so in did more ways than one, of which two may be mentionedhere. First, they used the term 'doubleoppression'to mean that women were 'chainedto capital in a dual sense' (p.82)and not, as the term has subsequentlybeen morefrequentlyused, to mean that women are 'doubly oppressed' through gender relations and by capital. In their argument, the sexual division of labour in the pre-capitalist household did not account for the subsequent oppression of women under capitalism(p.72). They conceivedof the sexual divisionof labouras an arbitrary allocation of tasks, rather than a reflection of social relations of gender. The sexual division of labour was, therefore, merely subject to manipulationby capital rather than possessing any autonomousbase from which to reproduce itself undercapital.In neither socialformationwere (black)women oppressedby (black)men. Secondly, they appear to have assumed that proletarianisationwas the same experience for the small number of women as for the large majority of men. There were, therefore, no divisionsbetween male and female workersdespite the divisionswithin the 'proletarianhousehold'reproducingmale labourfor capital. But the site of productionof the majority of women wage workers in South Africa is the white householdwhere they are employedas domesticlabour,a site of consciousnessvery differentfrom that of the majorityof men (andwhich men have been more successful in escaping). As domestic labourers,they are more likely to feel (and be) oppressed by white women as by white men (though it is unclear whether Innes and O'Meara were being inadvertently sexist). The consequences of this very different experience of proletarianisationhas been described by Jacklyn Cock in ROAPE 21 and by Gaitskell et al in this issue. Oppressedby capitalismand by racism, women's experience as wage workers and as black workers has nevertheless been different from that of men. This, then, poses the questionof women's relationshipto men and not merely of women's relationship to capital. What social processes ensured that women should remain in the reserves or be located in different forms of wage labour from men?The restrictionof the vast majorityof womento SouthAfrica'slabour

ECONOMY POLITICAL OF 178 REVIEW AFRICAN reserves and, during the colonial period, to the labour reserves and peasant commodityproducingsectors in the rest of Africa was partly achieved by the institution of state controls over their movements and by the lack of wage employmentfor women:the effect of state and capital'srestructuringof gender relations.However,the means by which such controlswere exercisedwere often realised through the existing structures of male controlover women's mobility. Sam Jackson's article in ROAPE 13 illustrated the restrictions (and freedom) upon entering wage work placed upon secluded Hausa women in Northern Nigeria. In relation to issues such as these, it has been necessary to conceptualisethe structures and practices through which men control women's productive and reproductive labour in non-capitalist social formations. It was to this that Bernstein rather obscurely alluded in ROAPE 10 as the 'acquisitionof more specialisedelements of reproduction'(i.e. women) 'realisedthrough commodity relations,for example,the monetisationof the brideprice' (p.63).In his articlein ROAPE 21 however, the 'relations and practices of ... gender differences led him to specify more clearlythat womenwere doublyoppressed'by gender andby the developmentof peasant commodityproduction(p.50). Bernstein attributed these gender difficulties to the 'persistence of pre-capitalist relations and of practices'which,amongst others, inhibitthe furthercommoditisation land and labourpower (p.51). that The modeof recruitingwomen'slabourto the peasanthouseholdis primarily of marriagewhich secures (undervarious conditionsand to different degrees) a wife's productive labour and her domestic and sexual services. The material advantages to men of securing women's labour through marriage have been debated widely in relation to the reproductionof the householdin pre-capitalist underpeasantcommodityrelations.It is socialformationsand to its reproduction usuallyarguedthat commodityrelationsintensify gender divisionsand women's subordination starklyrevealing,as it were, wives' lack of ownershipof the means of productionyet their existence as unfree labour.Theirqualityas unfree labour, it has been argued, becomes increasingly important as commodity relations destroy the bonds securing other non-freelabourto the peasant household.For of example, the commoditisation land and labourpower has enabled successive generations of sons of Yoruba cocoa farmers to enter into wage labour or establish enterprises independentlyof their fathers. The withdrawal of male domesticlabourhas led to a muchhigher dependenceupon female productiveas well as reproductivelabour.The resulting 'sexual politics of labour'involvinga struggle between wives and husbandsover the sexual designationof tasks and the period of a wife's working life for her husband's enterprises has been describedelsewhere (Roberts, 1984). Commodityrelations, however, also provide the objective conditionsby which wives also may ultimatelyescape their existence as unfree labourwere it not for Consequently,as Bernstein suggests, the social forces of gender subordination. controlover womenmay becomea struggle between 'capital'and male household heads. The latter may exert their control, as the following example graphically illustrates, throughthe enforcementof marriageas a mechanismfor resecuring women's labour. In the Western Region of Ghanain the early 1930s, the revival of gold-mining offered women the opportunityto abandondomestic services to husbandsand

DEBATE 179 their labour on male owned cocoa farms to trade in foodstuffs and other commoditiesto the male migrantlabourersin the camps surroundingthe mines. The loss of women's labour to the cocoa economy (at a time when cocoa prices to were severely depressed)was so serious as to lead the omanhene proclaimthat all such 'free women' were to be arrested and confined until their husbands reclaimedthem or until a man took one as a wife for the sum of 7/6, an amount constituting both a bride price for a 'second hand woman' and a fee for their release. It is not surprising, therefore, that, under circumstanceswhen the separation between husbandsand wives is not enforcedthroughoppressivepracticessuchas those of apartheid,women should regard the petty commoditysector or wage labouritself as a means of escape. The prior existence of gender subordination has meant, however, that the process of female proletarianisationhas been slower than that of men and has taken on a qualitatively different form. Bryceson's article in ROAPE 17 considerablyadvanced our perception of this process. Unlikethat of male peasants, femaleproletarianisation Tanzaniadoes in not involve separation or dispossession from the means of production since women had neither possession nor control as pre-capitalistproducers or as peasant farmers. Essentially, she argued 'in the process of female proletarianisation Tanzaniawomen have struggled against pre-capitalistmale in control over their labour'(p.9). Whileproletarianisation releases women's productivelabourfrom the controlof men to exploitation by capital, this process has never been completed. The historicalreasons for this remain contested in Britain(in what is known as 'the family wage debate')but several lines of argumentappearto be relevant to the different historical experience of capitalist development and female proletarianisation Africa - about which we still know much too little. in The first of these concerns the methods by and degrees to which men retain control over individualwomen as unpaiddomesticlabour, sexual 'partners'and bearers and rearers of their children - the 'relations of human reproduction'. The second concerns the ways in which capital organises and organises itself aroundthese conditionsand the third is the way in which the state may (or may not) intervene to modify them. It is still a matter of muchdebate withinfeminist analysis to explainwhether, or perhaps how, male control of the relations of human reproductionis to be explained in terms of men's material interests or lies purely in the realm of ideology - a distinction difficult to make whatever theory of ideology one espouses since in the context of control over women, material interests are invariably heavily disguised as the natural and inevitable relations between women and men. For example, Leitner (in ROAPE 6) can account for the fact that Kenyanwomenagricultural workersearn 40-50per cent less than their male colleagues in terms of the advantages employersgain in reducedwage costs by maintaining a sexual division of labour in tasks. But she had to resort to (borrowed) ideology or the failureof proletarianconsciousnessto accountfor the reasons why neither male workers nor the Union had done anythingto improve the discriminatory rates paid to 'their wives': 'As dominationpatterns of the socalled modernsociety extend far into the workers'families,the men like to think of themselves as the ones who have to earn enoughto maintaintheir families. . .' (p.40). She goes on to point out that the Unionwas riddledwith sexism, quotinga

ECONOMY 180 REVIEW OF AFRICANPOLITICAL

document stating that 'a job, like freedom or a wife is a birth-rightof every citizen' (p.41, original emphasis). Yet clearly the maintenance of gender in discrimination wages can be explainedas one of the manymethodscollectively available to men for securing women's continued dependence despite upon a 'male wage'. proletarianisation Whenwomen do gain access to a living wage by selling their labourto capital(or by supporting themselves through petty commodity production), the restructuringof conjugalrelations,usuallyrealisedthroughstate intervention,to retain male control over women's reproductiveservices (and sometimes over their wages) can appear and may be suddenly more contradictoryand more gender relations. underpre- or non-capitalist oppressivethan their subordination Thus Bryceson and others have pointed out that laws which give husbandsthe right to control a wife's wages, or that give women fewer rights of custody over their own childrenin marriagethan outside it, or that condonewife beating, are some features of the experienceof sexual oppressionwhichlead to high rates of divorce, or simply women's rejection of marriage or remarriage. Inevitably, however, whether women 'escape' or not from the gender discriminationand household,they are exposed to sexual sexual violence within the proletarianised harassment and exploitation outside it. In South Africa (and, of course, elsewhere includingBritain)sexual exploitationis also part of racist oppression. The questionof violenceand, more generally,the way in whichmale power over women is maintained has led feminism in the west to analyse the cultural ideologiesof gender differencewhichsupportit. We know that sexual identity concepts of masculinityand femininity - are culturallyproducedand culturally specific. They are, however, so deeply embeddedin our lived experiencethat, in Gramsci'swords, they constitutethe limits and substanceof commonsense. They are the most difficultto challengeand changebecausethey appearto be the most naturalof all 'human'attributes. Feminist historianshave shownhow the sexual division of labour in production, for example, has been historically specific however much it is represented at any given moment as a divisionbased on the 'natural attributes' of women and men. Black feminists have shown that the 'natural attributes' of black women have historicallybeen considereddifferent societiesin a specificand from those of white, placingblackwomenin multi-racial subordinateposition in the gender hierarchy. The historical forms of the sexual division of labour in production,however, appear more transient and more vulnerableto revolutionarychange than the relations of human reproduction. Within these relations - which feminist socialists argue constitute the basis of gender divisions- the culturalproperties of sexual identity are intimately constructedon the basis of male authorityand The sexual identities of white women and white men in women's subordination. western societies have been predicatedon the assumptionof male dominanceand of male control of female sexuality. These assumptions pervade all social institutions such as science, the law, education and state provision of family services. The feminist critiqueof sex-gender identities constitutes a critiqueof culture itself (thoughoften abused as an hysterical attack upon nature). The feminist critique of sex/gender identities - of the relations of human reproduction- has a longer (and lost) history than that of the contemporary women's movement.It has also been that aspect of feminist socialismwhich has Yet been most silencedin socialistdebate and in socialisttransformation. it is the

DEBATE 181

central core of the argument. Women's subordinationis not the effect of precapitalist or capitalist modes of productionbut of gender relations themselves. Around these a separate struggle is requiredfor the solutions which socialism historically and internationally has proposed have been far from adequate. Socialist societies have sought to rid themselves of gender inequality by the abolitionof private property, by legislation and by exhortation.These have not succeededin confrontingwomen's daily experience of subordination and silence arising from the culturalconstructionof gender relations. If it is on these issues that socialist feminism and socialism have historically diverged,it is on other but relatedissues that western feminismhas been accused of cultural and racial imperialismby black women themselves. Some of these changes do not relate to the debates which I have outlined so far. African and blackfeminists and white feministsworkingin Africahave muchcommonground in the analysis of Africanwomen's oppressionunder imperialismand capitalism. The divisions lie in the direction of the feminist critique of culture and sexual identities and in the prioritiesof struggle. This debate centres first around the fact that African women have had to struggle against both the oppressive sexual identities of their own cultures and the viciousimpositionof western conceptsof femininityin the course of imperial domination.Deprived of their cultural base, these latter appear conspicuously 'unnatural' and African women have a long history of resistance to their imposition through tax riots, for example, or through the desertion of development schemes which have offered women at best western 'domestic ideals' disguised as Home Economics and at worst (and often) have deprived them of the means to fulfil their own cultural identities as women (see, for example, Anna Conti's descriptionin ROAPE 15/16). Resistance to alien cultural values has not precluded struggles against those elements of indigenouscultureand sexual identities whichoppress. But, as in the west, these struggles have often historically been individual rather than collective, defensive rather than revolutionary,silent rather than public. They have concernedwhat Johnson and Bernstein called 'the culturaland ideological relationsthat informmarriageand the practicesof familyexistence' and relate to that concept of struggle which feminists have describedas 'the personal is the political'.ChristineObborecords many cases of the ambivalenceand silence of women who have struggled against the oppressive practices of marriage and family life and gives some indication of the reasons why these struggles are silent. Womenwho struggle to maintainsome economicindependencefrom men may be accused of making their husbands impotent, or of prostitution or of neglecting their children and 'causing' juvenile crime. Similarly, women who vigorously dislike polygyny are confronted with claims that it is the natural birthrightof the African(man).Whilethere has been scope for individualacts of resistance, however, the exercise of individual strength often increases a woman'spersonalvulnerability. Those who are not deterredby male fantasies of female aggression encounter the moral crusades, the denigration and the violence against women who force their way out of male control. The dilemmaof the doublestruggle that Africanwomen have to engage against both western and indigenousculturalidentities has been that acts of individual resistance are not only charged with being immoral rather than political but being in pursuit of western life styles and concepts of women's freedom rather

ECONOMY 182 REVIEW OF AFRICANPOLITICAL

than African ones. These dilemmashave divided and silenced women. While it has been the object of feminism to raise 'morality' into its proper personal politicalcontext, it has been accused of dictating sexual standardsand cultural aspirations,of policingthe boundariesof acceptablefeminismand imposingupon women of other culturesthe aspirationswhichhave emerged from the historical context of women's oppressionin the west. This charge has perhapsbeen most damagingto the solidaritybetween blackand white women on the issue of cliterodectomyand its related practices. Feminists have understoodthe performanceof cliterodectomyupon western women, last knownto have occurredless than 40 years ago, as an obviouspracticeto mutilate women'sbodiesand destroy sexual pleasurein the interests of male sexuality.Its continuedpractice in Africa and elsewhere provokeshorror. But the millionsof women who continue to practice it perceive it as part of their cultural and religious concepts of female and male sexuality within which its abolition presents a threat and a void ratherthan an immediatesolutionto women'ssexual found the strength to refute it or to oppression.Women who have individually campaign against it confront derision and are made deeply vulnerable. The collective struggles which are taking place now have to formulatean alternative concept of female sexuality which relates to African women's collective experience, history and aspirations.As Rowbothamsays: 'Thereis muchthat is unclearand unknownin the makingof a new culture . . .'Under these conditions, there are few groundsfor an internationalfeminist agendadictatingthe outcome of women's personal/politicalstruggles. There are, however, clear grounds for international solidarity in demand of political recognition of these struggles to enablewomento organisecollectivelyaroundthese personal/political issues. The second issue concerns the priority of these struggles in the process of national liberation and socialist transformation in Africa. To some extent, different prioritiesrelate to circumstances- struggles against imperialismand racism demand the solidarity of women and men which African women have always provided and sometimes forced upon men. Then, too, imperialismhas imposedlaws, committedatrocities and destroyedlives to the extent that under nationalistreconstructionwomen'sdemandsare for the basic means of existence and their very survival dependent upon the provision of basic amenities for themselves, their childrenand men to restore shattered economies and broken lives. In the process of reconstruction, socialist countries have got rid of discriminatorylaws imposed by colonialismagainst women and struggled to provide those means of existence. They have also, in some places, succeededin abolishing some of the forms of patriarchy embedded in pre-capitalist and peasant societies, such as bride-price.Women's organisationsin Mozambique, Angola and other countries have been able to articulate demands for reproductive rights, for the social conditions for entering or re-entering productivelabourand for a more equal divisionof domestic labour. Yet in those countries, women's movements have not been the autonomous political organisationswhich feminists have demandedin the west. Moreover, their demandshave not only been dictatedby circumstancesbut by the socialist path to women's liberationwhich these states profess. These paths deny - like socialism has in the west - the historical contributionof feminism to socialist for theory. In Mozambique, example, the cause of women's oppressionhas been

DEBATE 183

attributedto 'decadenttradition'and capitalism(PresidentMachelin his speech on IndependenceDay in Mozambique, publishedin ROAPE 4). Mozambique's socialist path disregards much socialist feminist tradition in favour of Engels. Women's liberationis to be achieved by the abolition of private property and women'sentry into socialproduction,both of whichare inseparablefrom socialist strategy itself and therefore requiringno separate struggle. In his speech to the Womenin 1973, Machelstated: First Conferenceof Mozambican
is Let us be clear on this point:the antagonisticcontradiction not foundbetween man and woman,but ratherbetween women and the social order,between all exploitedwomen and which explains her absence men, and the social order. It is her conditionsof exploitation from all tasks of thought and decision in society ... This is the main aspect of the her contradiction: exclusion fromthe decision makingsphere of society.

It is difficultto avoidthe conclusionthat if womenhave been previouslydevoidof all tasks of thought and decision, they will need male guidance in formulating their struggles. And this seems to have been very much what Macheloffered. First, he made it clear that women's oppressionby men was a very secondary issue in the task of liberatingwomen even though this experienceof oppression included 'the marriage system, the frequent brutality of the husband(and) his systematic refusal to consider women his equal . ..' These have been, amongst others, the very experiencesof oppressionagainst whichwestern feminists have demandeda separate struggle. Secondly,Macheldelegitimatedstruggles around these issues in the very terms whichthreaten internationalfeminist solidaritythat feminismis a bourgeoisdeviation and an aspect of culturalimperialism:
We witness at present, mainlyin the capitalistworld,an ideologicaloffensive which, under the aegis of women's liberation, pretendsto transformintoan antagonisticrelationship the withman, thus dividing contradiction men and women ... In reality,beyondthe demagogy which masks the real nature of this ideological offensive, it is an offensive by capitalist society in order to confuse women and to diverttheir attentionfrom the real aim. In our ranks there occur small manifestationsof this ideologicaloffensive. We hear, here and there, women murmuring against men as if it were the sex differencethatwas the cause of their exploitation,as if men were sadistic monsters who take pleasure in women's oppression.

This statement defines the limits of permissiblefeminismin very clear ways. It is a secondary issue, it confuses women (not, apparently, men!) and it is not acceptableto suggest that men, ratherthan the socialorder,mightbe held in part responsiblefor the maintenanceof gender divisions. Of course, socialistfeminismdoes not argue that women shouldnot unite against men in common struggles against imperialismand class exploitation nor that men are sadisticmonsters except that the culturalconstructionof male sexuality too often legitimates male violence. But it does argue that the reconstructionof the private domainof women's daily existence, which extends outwardsinto the experience of harassment and violence, is a pre-conditionof freedom. What, then, of those women who had been heard 'murmuringagainst men', breaking the silence? In Ruth Neto's statement to the Angolan Women's Congress (publishedin this issue) she states that:
Thereare other problemswomen experience in theirday-to-day lives whichare a resultnot of external factors but of objective and subjective internalfactors. It is up to us to give impetus to their solutionbecause we experience and feel them more intensely.

It is becausemen do not feel them and because socialismdoes not recognisethose

184 REVIEW OF AFRICANPOLITICAL ECONOMY

factors as political issues, that it is so easy to silence even the murmuringsof women. Pepe Roberts
Bibliographic Note J. Bourne 'Towardsan anti-racistfeminism',Race and Class Vol.XXV,No.1, 1983; H.V. Carby'Whitewomen listen! Blackfeminismand the boundariesof sisterhood',Centrefor ContemporaryCultural Studies ed. The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism tn 70s Britain, Hutchinson and Co, London 1982. Z. Dhlamini 'Women's Liberation',A. de Bragancaand I. Wallersteineds. TheAfrican LiberationReader Vol.L.TheAnatomy of Colonialism,Zed Press, London1982 (this articlefirst publishedin 1972);H. Johnsonand H. Bernsteineds. Third WorldLives ofStruggle,Part III. Women's Struggles,Heinemann, London, 1982; Christine Obbo, African Women: Their Struggle for Economic Independence, Press, London1980;P. Roberts,'RuralWomenin WesternNigeriaand Zed HausaNiger' in K. Younget al eds. Serving TwoMasters,Routledgeand KegalPaul, 1984; S. Rowbotham, Dreams and Dilemmas, London,Virago, 1983;CherylWalkerW'omenand Resistance in South Africa, London,Onyx Press, 1982.

What Why

done for women ? has "development" women into do planners talk of "integrating" development? role do women really play in multinational companies? in food production? in health? in communicationand education? are women organising themselves,and fighting to gain controlover their own lives ?

What
How

Womenin Development: a resourceguide for organizing and action bringsanswersto all these questions.Itmakesa feministanalysisof the issues whichare crucialto women in countries,and presents both developing and industrialised extensive literatureaudio-visualand group resources for action, study, and organizing.Publication1983. PriceUS$ 12 (includessurfacepostage,add$ 7 forairmail). 10 copies or more: $ 10 each (includessurfacepostage). International money order or cheque payable to ISIS, Currency P.O. Box 50, 1211 Geneva 2, SWITZERLAND. equivalentsacceptable.