ABSTRACT
Is it possible to make major criticisms of academic categories and models on the basis of intuition and generalised personal feeling? My felt generalisation is this: that in Africa, south of the Sahara, in both traditional and modem conditions and even in Muslim areas, the ‘position of women’ has a good deal to be said in its favour, by comparison with other major cultural regions such as the Mediterranean, the Arab Middle East, India or China. Of course there are contrasts between one part of Africa and another, even between closely neighbouring peoples. But a reading of the literature, together with personal experience gained from travel, leaves one with a striking series of impressions of the relative economic, political and sexual freedom of most African women. We remember the proud and colourful market women of West Africa; the royal queens, queen mothers and princesses of the traditional kingdoms; the King of Dahomey’s female bodyguard; the fighting women of traditional Ethiopia 1 and the rioting women of Iboland in the 1930s. 2 There are the organised guilds of prostitutes in rural Niger, 3 and the femmes libres of modem city life; and, not least, the modem women politicians of Africa. Nowhere in traditional Africa, south of the Sahara, were women veiled or wrapped up physically to the extent we see them in the Mediterranean, Middle East or India today. Nowhere were they secluded within the walls of the domestic household and cut off from public life as in some other regions. African forms of architecture and settlement patterns themselves did not permit such seclusion nor such a separation of the domestic from the wider sphere of social life. The very openness of life in the villages makes visible the African woman’s daily tasks, whereas her Arab or Indian sister’s daily work is hidden where possible from passing strangers. It is true that there is an image of the African woman’s lot being one of hard labour and virtual serfdom to her lord and master, even of being ‘bought and sold’ in marriage, but the payment of bride-wealth is no more ‘buying a wife’ than European dowry was ‘buying a husband’. If I may now add a subjective response gained from living and travelling in Africa, then I can say that as a woman visitor, alone or with unrelated male companions, I often feel personally much more comfortable and unquestioningly accepted in Africa, rather than in, say, an Arab environment.
