ABSTRACT
The question of violence against women in sub-Saharan Africa has gained an enhanced and disturbing significance since the early l990s, following the several major civil conflicts that have endangered the viability of individual states as well as the stability of entire regions. Gender-based violence has emerged not just as a woeful by-product of civil war in a context of weak or “failed” states but rather, as in Rwanda, Darfur, or the Democratic Republic of Congo, as a political weapon to terrorize local populations and wither the very sinews of the political community. Yet the analysis of violence against women requires a broader remit – and not just in the African case; account must also be taken of the gender violence within a particular societal setting that is sanctioned indirectly by state indifference to social practice, or even active complicity in it (Geras 1998). A range of examples across the African continent (and elsewhere) of governmental failure to confront issues of gender violence, to deal with related questions of entrenched gender inequalities helping to shape the context for this, or to address the inconsistencies between lofty commitments to human rights in their constitutions and the ordinary laws governing the behavior of their citizenry, are all testimony to the role of indifference as an instrument of policy, especially when power is uncertain or insecure or where the instruments available for its exercise are insufficient (HRW 2005; Okereke 2007; Borwanker et al. 2008). These examples furnish evidence also of the limited convergence between a pervasive international culture of human rights that shapes, in part, the environment in which modern governments must work, political realities on the ground, and, in particular, the circumstances of normalized gender violence representing not so much an element corrosive of social order as a seeming component of its social and political stability. If gender-based violence is the most widespread and socially tolerated of human rights abuses, domestic violence is undoubtedly its most common form. I will focus on the latter in the following discussion of the central African state of Malawi. As the former British dependency of Nyasaland, Malawi had incorporated more than two dozen indigenous communities; the Chewa alone represented around 50 percent of the population at the l966 census (Stubbs 1972: 72-73). The impact of the colonial dispensation in reordering Nyasaland’s social, economic, and political landscape was profound. With no significant
mineral deposits to be exploited, European plantation agriculture was encouraged in the Shire Highlands in the south and, to a lesser extent, in Central Province. African communities were pressed into servicing the colonial enterprise either through the conversion of traditional land rights to tenancy arrangements or through taxation, which forced tens of thousands of men into labor migration each year (Vail and White 1989). Overall, Malawi’s development base at independence in l964 was modest. Urbanization – a key indicator of industrial and commercial development or the presence of large-scale mining – stood at around 5 percent (it was only 14 percent by l998). With a poorly developed road network, limited physical infrastructure, and low levels of literacy, the countryside was not just rural but “deeply rural” (Bryceson and Fonseca 2006: 1654). The government taking power at independence under the Malawi Congress Party (MCP) quickly consolidated its grip, with the new president, Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda, constructing an authoritarian state that was to prove unusual among post-colonial African regimes in the extent to which Banda was able to centralize control and deploy a personality cult to impose his priorities on Malawi (Short 1974; Lwanda 1993). While using traditionalist values and imagery to crowd out alternative discourses from public arenas, he oversaw an official “national” culture centered on his own Chewa community (Vail and White 1989: 179-184). Women found themselves enlisted as one of the regime’s most visible support bases. Banda portrayed himself as their protector and benefactor, while appealing to a culturally conservative model of women’s role. He was the “Nkhoswe Number 1” (that is, senior uncle), and women formed his “mbumba” – resonant terms to Chewa women.2 Although in l987 Banda’s government ratified the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, it entered a reservation declaring that:
owing to the deep-rooted nature of some traditional customs and practices of Malawians, the Government . . . shall not, for the time being, consider itself bound by such of the provisions of the Convention as require immediate eradication of such traditional customs and practices.3
