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Let the women speak! And listen
Anene Ejikeme, Africa Files At Issue Ezine
January 15, 2008

http://www.africafiles.org/atissueezine.asp

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Anene Ejikeme, a Nigerian woman who teaches at a university in Texas, volunteered to edit this series on the economic empowerment of women in Africa. Her editorial focuses on the need for African women to be agents of their own empowerment. Too often the idea of tradition has been used by African men and by world organisations to prevent the voices of ordinary women in Africa from being heard.

In 1929 women in southeast Nigeria mounted a war against the forces of British colonial rule. The women targeted all the symbols of the new political order - the offices and homes of colonial officialdom, as well as its representatives. The "disturbances" and the demands made by the women at the Commission of Inquiry set up by the colonial government to investigate surprised the British. The women who testified before the Commission consistently demanded that women be represented in the new institutions which had been set up by the colonial government. More than 50 women lost their lives, but colonial authorities failed to appreciate the extent to which women felt aggrieved by colonial policies which rendered them invisible. Although the women organized and carried out this rebellion, it did not stop colonial authorities and missionaries from continuing to insist that African women were "no better than cattle and sheep" and completely lacking in agency.

Almost eighty years later, the assumption that African women lack agency continues to be the prevailing view about them. This impression is so often at variance with what I see, for example, when I am at home in Nigeria where, every day, I meet women who struggle to feed their families and to send their children to school, daily making decisions that help sustain their families.

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