ABSTRACT
In the struggle against colonial power, twentieth-century African nationalism subordinated women’s rights to the demands of political and economic independence; 1 gender equality was either expected to develop automatically with liberation, or dismissed as ‘a new form of cultural imperialism’ (Seidman 1984: 432). But in twenty-first century post-colonial Africa an unprecedented array of international and regional legal instruments now promise to advance women’s rights. As the site of considerable interaction between transnational and local governmental and non-governmental organisations this objective remains vulnerable to accusations of ‘western’ interference, a refrain all too familiar to the many post-colonial feminists obliged to negotiate the dialectic of local resistance to women’s empowerment and universalist presumptions in western feminism (Narayan 1997: 1–40; Gilligan 1993; Menon 2000). The least contested campaigns for women’s rights have frequently been those perceived to be ‘above’ culture and in the wider national interest; for instance, health-related and reproductive rights (e.g. reducing maternal mortality, teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections), overlapping with violence against women (VAW) through a narrative of sexual harm. 2 Indeed, these areas delivered substantial alliances between feminists from across the world, ensuring greater integration of sexual and reproductive freedoms into women’s rights through the Declarations at Vienna (1993), Cairo (1994) and Beijing (1995). 3 As women have developed increasingly global alliances, so they have needed to account more carefully for the differentials of culture and history.
As feminism has sought to become integrally related to struggles against racialist and colonialist oppression, it has become increasingly important to resist the colonising epistemological strategy that would subordinate different configurations of domination under the rubric of a transcultural notion of patriarchy.
(Butler 1993: 46)