Women’s movements and collective action in Africa: lessons from Ousmane Sembene’s God’s bits of wood, Anlu of Cameroun and the women’s market rebellion in Lagos

Abstract

The objective of this thesis was to analyse women’s collective action in colonial Africa with a goal of understanding and highlighting the roots, gains and opportunities of women’s movements in Africa through an African feminism lens. I did this by assessing three examples of women’s collective action namely the March to Dakar of 1947, The Anlu revolt of Cameroun in 1958 and the Lagos Market Women’s Rebellion of 1929 in which women defied stereotypes and broke traditions to actively and successfully resist various aspects of colonization. As a historian, feminist, and scholar of African women studies, this thesis provided an opportunity to demonstrate that feminism is an important ideology for African men and women to understand and embrace, not as foreign idea that is for a certain calibre of women, but as an ideology that existed and that is useful, relevant and salient in Africa through history. To achieve this, I did a content analysis of secondary data seeking to understand how African feminism as an ideology informed, shaped and guided the women’s actions during colonialization. Inspired by Ousmane Sembene’s God’s Bits of Wood which I had read as a literary text, I found the story compelling and with such strong feminist agenda that it motivated me to do more work on Anlu and the Lagos Market women as these took place in colonial era, they involved thousands of women across big area rallying around common issues, defying stereotypes, and had relatively successful outcomes. The key findings were three fold. Firstly, that women played an important role in resisting colonization, and not just a supportive role to men. Women organized and mobilized pushed by their own sense of agency, solidarity and commitment to affect change. Secondly, that feminism as a practice and theory is not a borrowed Western concept; the collective actions of the women in these three countries reflects African feminism which is characterized by self-determination, solidarity, strategic organization and encompassing of the various mountains besides colonialization such as patriarchy, culture, religion, and economic hurdles. The movements were informed and strengthened by pre-existing traditional practices that gave credence to the women’s actions. Thirdly, women’s movements were not just about bread and butter, they were strategic and succeeded at influencing systemic political, social and economic changes though not entirely as colonialism continued past the era discussed in this thesis. Further research would be good to interrogate how modern day women’s movements can leverage more on African feminism as an ideology that is African-centred, practical, and strategic in leadership, work place, family, business, politics, social and economic aspects of African societies.