Document(s) 10 de 13

Introduction

The WID literature on Africa has explored the negative consequences of contemporary trends in national and international political economy and of development activity in particular, and it has also generated prescriptions for the amelioration of these consequences. As previously suggested, the literature is tied, not always firmly, to a much smaller body of more theoretical writing, largely by anthropologists and historians, who have sought to explain the culture and political economy of gender in Africa (for reviews, see Robertson 1987; Strobel 1982). However, the increasing visibility of WID discourse and the growing challenge to conventional social science assumptions have not generated a coherent approach that overcomes past theoretical errors and asks the right empirical questions. There are two reasons for this:

• the relationship between WID and feminist literature and
  
  
• the relation of WID literature to the wider body of literature on the Third World.

WID/feminist literature relationship

With few exceptions, conceptual problems inherent in feminist literature have been incorporated into the African material. Far from breaking with conservative problematics, as they hoped to do, many feminist scholars argue from the same assumptions that underlie the arguments they are challenging. For example, many feminists accept the idea of women’s universal subordination.

Some feminist analyses…come to social darwinist conclusions in spite of themselves.… Feminists and marxists seem haunted by an unrealistic fear: What if the social darwinists are right when they assert that women have never been the social equals of men? I think this fear has retarded inquiry into the question of women’s position. Instead of tackling the problem head on, many have often found it easier to make end runs or apologies, conceding that women are subordinate but reasoning that culture, not biology, has put us in that position or that the conditions for equality have not yet been created.

(Sacks 1982:5)

Sacks (1982:60) demonstrates her point through a critique of the still-influential article of Ortner (1974). Sacks argues that in studies such as Ortner’s,

The essence of culture…as it pertains to women, is to select those themes and attributes that reinforce female subordination and to project them as the totality of femaleness and maleness. And so the concept of culture becomes the science of stereotyping; culture becomes the enemy of women; and we are led by this logic back to [the 19th century writer] Bachofen where women really are rooted in nature, and hierarchy, or culture, is a male creation reflecting reality. There is not much to recommend this logic.

Rosaldo (1983:76-77), in a critique of her own earlier work as well as other studies, makes a similar point, targeting the nature/culture duality as the central “biased dichotomy” in need of redress.

Few social scientists writing today would deny the fact that feminists have changed our intellectual horizons. At a minimum, we have “discovered” women. More important, we have argued that certain categories and descriptions that at one time made good sense must be reformulated if we are to grasp the shape and meaning of both men’s and women’s lives…[but] feminist scholars over the past ten years provided challenges to certain biases in traditional accounts without supplying the conceptual frameworks necessary to undermine them. While recognizing enemies and blind men among teachers and peers, we failed to recognize ourselves as heirs to their traditions of political and social argument Simultaneously, we embraced and were at pains to redefine some of the gendered dualisms of past work. We found a source for questions in the most egregious errors of the past. But at the same time we stayed prisoners to a set of categories and preconceptions deeply rooted in traditional sociology.

WTD/Third World literature relationship

The problem of unexamined preconceptions in the feminist literature is related to the second problematic connection for WID literature: the wider realm of Third World scholarship from which WID also draws inspiration. In this academic tradition, scholars have again been unsuccessful in breaking free of Western discursive practices, in spite of radical attempts to do so. An example of this is the failure of Marxism to escape Western economic concepts in its intensive effort to theorize non-Western class relations and precapitalist modes of production. For instance, the debates in ROAPE discussed in Chapter 1 reflect a preoccupation with Western categories of understanding (e.g., see Kaplinsky et al. 1980). Furthermore, in their productivist emphasis, Marxists accept the privilege accorded to the economic realm by the “modernization” or “developmentalist” school of thought both developmentalists and orthodox Marxists view noneconomic motivation as irrational. In the first case, it is seen as backward tradition; in the second, as a superstructural chimera or, at best, a mystified, ideological representation of relations of production.

Baudrillard (1975) asks whether capitalist economy can illuminate earlier, non-Western societies. His answer to this question is an emphatic no. “Starting with the economic and production as the determinant instance, other types of organization are illuminated only in terms of this model and not in their specificity or even…in their irreducibility to production. The magical, the religious, the symbolic are relegated to the margins of the economy” (Baudrillard 1975:86-87). The dilemma, according to Baudrillard (1975:88-89), is that “Western culture was the first to critically reflect upon itself (beginning in the 18th century). But the effect of this crisis was that it reflected on itself also as a culture in the universal, and thus all other cultures were entered in its museum as vestiges of its own image.”

The work that I have identified as feminist political economy comes closest to addressing the epistemological dilemmas raised here. Nevertheless, there has not yet been a coherent, sustained critique of the conceptual problems embedded in WID and other literature on the Third World. I have organized my discussion of the problems into six interrelated categories. If future development efforts are to help rather than harm African women and African communities, each of these categories requires investigation and correction.

The public/private dichotomy

A component of most conceptual frameworks for the consideration of women in the development process is the identification of “public” and “private” social spheres, the domain of men and of women, respectively. This division is the basis for the “welfare” approach and the emphasis on “income generation” to the neglect of women’s productive role (discussed in Chapter 4). The division is also a powerful component of sexist ideology and policy. Few liberal studies, including most WID literature, however, challenge the dichotomy. Rosaldo (1974:35), in her earlier work, exemplifies the theorization based on the public/private concept:

Characteristic aspects of male and female roles in social, cultural, and economic systems can all be related to a universal, structural opposition between domestic and public domains of activity. In many ways this claim is far too simple.… Yet the complexities of particular cases do not undermine our global generalization, which points not to absolute, but to relative orientations of women and men. Furthermore, by using the structural model as a framework, we can identify the implications for female power, value and status in various cross-cultural articulations of domestic and public roles.

While Rosaldo went on to become her own best critic regarding this analysis, as her reflections cited on p. 112 demonstrate, the influential textbook in which the analysis appears (Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974) continues to inform most liberal thinking on the subject. Many argue that the solution to women’s disadvantage vis-a-vis development programs is either a more active role in the “public” sphere or a better recognition of the potential contribution of the “private” sphere. That the public/private dichotomy is an inaccurate conceptualization of present and, even more so, past African life needs asserting in the strongest possible terms.

Some Western feminist theorists have focused on the public/private dichotomy (for an overview, see Jaggar 1983). Spender (1980:191-197), for example, links the public sphere to the written, male-dominated word. She argues that the private world and language of women are subordinated to the dominant world of men. There are some interesting insights for Western women in Spender’s (1980) analysis; however, the study displays both the problems of radical feminism’s atheoretical approach and the ethnocentrism that characterizes much feminist writing. (Spender universalizes from Western experience, without acknowledging that she is doing so.)

Armstrong (1978) argues that the growth of a public/private distinction is due to the growth of the state and the declining ability of women to control and distribute resources: features characteristic of Western society and African nations today. Western theory, however, does not explore the possibilities of a world where the distinction between public and private is absent; indeed, where such realms are not perceived. Such therapy, therefore, cannot speak to the African past, when women controlled and distributed resources and when state structures, where they existed, did not “privatize” women. Even under present, adverse conditions, women retain a measure of control over the distribution of resources that has been absent from Western society for centuries.

The feminist literature on the Third World, with a few notable exceptions (e.g., March and Taqqu 1986), has not systematically debated the dichotomy. Many studies on African gender relations, however, including some WID studies, do implicitly challenge the public/private dichotomy. The best of them document the porous boundary between what is kept from general view (the “private”) and what is out in the open for all members of the community to see. The world of women is indeed separate from that of men, marked by a sexual division of labour and gender-specific ideological discourse. It is far from private, however, in the sense Westerners understand the concept (where a private world of the home is supported by law, residential patterns, and political practice). The community of women is as full a participant in the decision-making structure of village life as the community of men.

Even Muslim societies, which practice the seclusion of women and appear to lend themselves most readily to Western notions of public and private, challenge our understanding of these concepts. Callaway (1984:430) uses Ardener’s (1975:vii-xxiii) concept of the “muted group” to explore the ways in which women in some societies, seemingly silent with regard to their own interests, are able to have an active community life (see also Dwyer 1978).¹ Indeed, “the ’muted group’ construct implies that the seeds for total independence exist within the women’s experience of total suppression” (Callaway 1984:430). Under conditions that may appear unbearable to a Westerner, the value system of a separate world for women, within which women are fully autonomous and active social agents, “stimulates and sanctions an assertiveness which could ultimately be the foundation for political efficacy” (Callaway 1984:430-431). It is precisely upon such ideological and structural foundations that it was possible for the Muslim Hausa women in the Kano River Irrigation Project of Nigeria to mount a successful strike for higher wages in 1977. The success of this action was a good example of political efficacy (see review of Jackson [1985] in Chapter 3).

For the great majority of African women who are not secluded on religious grounds, the distinction between a public and private world is even less valid. Wipper (1982), Van Allen (1976), Mackenzie (1986), and Mackenzie (1986) are among the many scholars who have documented women’s resistance movements during the colonial era. They have demonstrated the ability of women to mobilize for political action. The importance of such action in colonial history has, outside such studies as these, remained invisible, however (Mbilinyi 1986).

¹In criticizing Ardener’s concept of “the muted group,” one can ask the question, silent to whose ears? Women are neither silent to each other nor to men in the local community (Dwyer 1978; Etienne 1982). Much of the feminist writing that sees women as ideologically dominated fails to recognize the tautology of their argument: the voice of women is absent from the world of male discourse; therefore, women are silent; therefore, men are ideologically dominant. Many of the studies in Ortner and Whitehead (1981), for example, are guilty of this tautology. In focusing on the absence of women from male discourse and failing to investigate women’s ideology and how they think it relates to male ideology, feminist scholars perpetuate notions of the universal subordination of women. The problem is not the silence of women but the privileged status of the community of men gained through contemporary socioeconomic processes.

Although women are largely absent from contemporary national and “formal” political institutions, their political efficacy continues to be manifested at the community level. It is at this level that we must investigate the nature of the African “public.” As all the detailed work on women’s organizations reveals and as substantiated in a theoretical work on women’s associations (March and Taqqu 1986), women’s communal organizations are one of the most vibrant, effective institutions at the local level. Given that the “formal” juridical and political institutions imposed by colonialism upon Africa are weak, “informal” structures have a local legitimacy that sanctions their decision-making authority in the community. March and Taqqu (1986) analyze the reasons for the emergence of “rational-legal authority” (Max Weber’s term), which led to the formation of the large-scale political structure known as the state. This structure was imposed on the precapitalist, small-scale African societies by colonial conquest

Perhaps because jural-political authority superseded other kinds of authority in our own history, it has largely superseded them in our thinking as well. The historically specific, political-jural form of authority that evolved in the west appears to have come, by itself, to signify the total concept of “legitimate” authority. From this perspective, formal associations appear legitimate because they are empowered by rational jural-political charters. The fact that informal associations do not have such charters, however, neither makes them illegitimate nor excludes them from political processes. Public acceptance and sanction, not charters, constitute the primary basis for authority.

(March and Taqqu 1986:2)

March and Taqqu (1986) attribute confusion over legitimacy to “failure to distinguish between several meanings of the word ’public.’” The summary by Van Allen (1976:64) that they use to clarify these meanings is worth repeating:

One notion of “public” relates it to issues that are of concern to the whole community; ends served by “political functions” are beneficial to the community as a whole. Although different individuals or groups may seek different resolutions of problems or disputes, the “political” can nevertheless be seen as encompassing all those human concerns and problems that are common to all members of the community, or at least to large numbers of them. “Political” problems are shared problems that are appropriately dealt with through group action — their resolutions are collective, not individual. This separates them from “purely personal” problems.

The second notion of “public” is that which is distinguished from “secret,” that is, open to everyone’s view, accessible to all members of the community. The settling of questions that concern the welfare of the community in a “public” way necessitates the sharing of “political knowledge” — the knowledge needed for participation in political discussion and decision. A system in which public policy is made publicly and the relevant knowledge is shared widely contrasts sharply with those systems in which a privileged few possess the relevant knowledge — whether priestly mysteries or bureaucratic expertise — and therefore control policy decisions.

Therefore, there are two meanings to the concept of “public”: “the nature of the collectivity involved, and the nature of the space or style in which that collectivity operates” (March and Taqqu 1986:3). In the West, such distinctions have been forgotten and only one meaning is accepted: a supposedly uniform total public in whose name policy is made. “This assumed uniformity gives rise to an idiom of public interest or common welfare which is essential to formal political action” (March and Taqqu 1986:3). Something is considered politically legitimate only if it serves this hypothetical “public interest.” Because this idiom of public interest is part of a political discourse that has become dominant in the Third World, systems of authority that fall outside the definition are not acknowledged as legitimate.

This is why women’s organizations are seen as “informal” and not considered part of the legitimate political structure. Another problem for the legitimacy of such associations is that they operate in a sphere rendered less visible by contemporary, male-dominated structures and discourses: the world of “women’s affairs.” However, this does not make their activity “private.” The lower profile does not correspond to a low level of public acceptance and political power. In fact, the case of the Ifelodun Yoruba women’s group described in Chapter 5 suggests the opposite conclusion (see also Van Allen’s [1972] classic study of Ibo women’s custom of “sitting on a man” and O’Barr’s [1982, 1984] important theoretical contributions to the topic of women’s political power). To understand the nature of “public life” in Africa and the role of women within it, the Western conceptualization of opposing private and public spaces must be abandoned.

The WID literature has argued that the public realm has been favoured over the private realm in the development process. I would argue instead that it is the community of men that has been favoured over the community of women. Outsiders, from missionaries to colonial officials to contemporary governmental elites, have recognized men’s networks as the sole, legitimate “public” with which they should deal — the uniform, undifferentiated “public” that embodies “public interest.” Consequently, the complex links between the male and female communities, which serve to make of a village a functioning “public” whole, have been broken or distorted. Concomitantly, women’s community has been relegated to the status of “private” or informal, to conformity with Western ideology. As March and Taqqu (1986:5) say, the view that “informal life is personal and hence apolitical — especially among the poor and the powerless — obscured the legitimacy of associations that are not constituted through rational-bureaucratic and legal charters.” The denial of the African concept of public, implicit in almost every development effort, has done a profound disservice to the political life of African communities.

Family” and the “domestic realm”

The problems in conceptualizing “family” in Africa have been considered in Chapter 3. The foregoing discussion on the public/private dichotomy also bears intimately upon this issue. The notion of “household” is necessary (see Bryceson 1985:11). Far too much of the literature assumes that the “household” is an undifferentiated unit, however, with no internal divisions or contradictions. Liberal and developmentalist approaches assume that the household may be taken as a unit of statistical analysis that acts rationally as a corporate entity in the marketplace. Thus, development policies have often targeted the household without considering the differential impact upon its different members (see Guyer and Peters 1987).

African sex-gender systems pose special problems for considering the household. For example, the complexities introduced by polygyny are overlooked. Even though a majority of African marriages are now monogamous, the idioms, practices, and organization of space are still often structured according to the polygynous marriage. Because of the lack of subtlety in perceiving family and household, writers reduce women’s problems within the family to “male domination” — a vague and ahistorical notion. Bryceson (1985:8) argues that, in most of the women and technology literature, “male domination in its cultural and institutional sense, is treated as an historical given fact Having identified the extent and incidence of the edge that men have over women in the acquisition and control of technology, the analyses rarely offer an in-depth dissection of its nature.” The consequence is that analyses of family and household are “primarily descriptive.”

A more rigorous, historically grounded understanding of gender relations therefore requires a clearer conceptualization of the African household and, in particular, the politics of space. A starting point is the recognition that African households have indefinite social boundaries. “Not only do households vary in structure, but also in function, often with household members resorting to participation in other groupings for some of their production and consumption functions” (Bryceson 1985:11). The recognition that women’s labour is not domestic in the Western sense is particularly important Not only is women’s agricultural work not domestic, but their transformation (consumption) activities must also be seen in a different light These tasks are an “enabling function for agricultural production. Women spend a great deal of time in drudgery which directly or indirectly contributes to production. A case in point is the provision of water, which has most frequently been defined in terms of social welfare. In fact it is properly a matter for agricultural policy” (Fortmann 1981:208).

The spatial boundaries of families are also indefinite. Members of a household often reside in different dwellings within a village or, indeed, in different settlements. It is common in Africa for households to be divided between urban and rural members, with constant circulation between physical residences. Much of Africa’s economic resources move back and forth between city and countryside (and sometimes between countries) through these family networks.

Another erroneous aspect of the concept of “family” commonly applied is the implicit assumption that inheritance and genealogy centre around the husband and father. For the large areas of sub-Saharan Africa characterized by the matrilineal descent system, this assumption has had serious consequences. Rogers (1980:129-138) provides an insightful analysis of the active suppression of matriliny by the World Bank and other agencies. Using the World Bank’s Lilongwe Land Development Program in Malawi as an example, Rogers (1980) shows how the complexities of land tenure, cooperative production and distribution, and inheritance are reduced in the understanding of project officials to a set of “socialistic” obstacles to progress. In the evaluation documents, matriliny is described “somewhat emotively as ‘matriarchy’” (Rogers 1980:132). This, of course, misses the point about matriliny, which according to most anthropologists is a system of inheritance and obligation revolving around the uncle-niece and nephew relationship, rather than around the father-children relationship, as in patriliny. Although men are still dominant in matrilineal systems, studies reveal a greater authority for women and more control over communal assets than in patrilineal societies.²

²The relative authority of women in matrilineal societies has become a subject of debate, however. Poewe (1981), amongst others, challenges the assumption that male members of matrilineages are automatically more authoritative than female members. I suggest there is a tautology in much of the reasoning on matriliny: “everywhere, men dominate women, thus women’s authority in matrilineages cannot be real: it is only apparent authority.”

To illustrate the conceptual errors perpetrated in the World Bank project, Rogers (1980:131) comments on a document that deals with present attitudes to inheritance:

[The evaluators] cite survey responses from the people they define as “growers” (mostly men): “The survival of Matriliny in Africa is a talking point among Sociologists and there is certainly considerable evidence of an increased desire amongst growers that inheritance should pass to their children.…” The problems with this rationale are [that] the answers are likely to have been influenced by what the enumerators (themselves very Western-orientated, with salaries paid by the project) wanted to hear. In addition the question of what was understood by “their own children” is an open one: if, for example, a man felt his nephews or nieces to be his own children, and entitled to inherit his goods, he would probably have responded in the affirmative.

How and why an ideology of the family emerged that was at variance with the African reality is another subject of inquiry. Mbilinyi (1985a,b) locates the emergence of such an ideology in the political economy of colonialism and neocolonialism (see also Bryceson 1980).

Ideology about the male dominant-female dependent nuclear family has been used in an effort to legitimise the periodic expulsion of women from the wage labour market and/or towns during times of crisis. The ideology pertaining to the countryside, where villagers supposedly can survive so long as they work hard enough…helps to rationalise their forcible return “home” to what is described as their tribal homeplace. Both sets of imagery have arisen in the context of consistently lower wages for women than men in all occupations and at different education levels…Both imageries conflict with the growing rate of urbanisation and the increasing number of female-headed households in villages and town.

(Mbilinyi 1985b:81)

Analyses of this kind rescue the concept of “family” from the received truth of a “natural” state and locate it firmly in the African historical context (see The “traditional,” pp. 121–124).

The task of reconceptualizing the family is particularly urgent in the light of a dramatic world demographic trend toward households headed by women. Youssef and Hetler (1983) provide a useful comparative survey of this trend, but also stress the difficulties in collecting data given biases in statistical research methods. “Even when questions on the sex of the household head are incorporated into data collection procedures, there are still major obstacles to determining the incidence of woman-headed households because of the definitions, or lack of definitions, of ’family’ and ’household head’ in censuses and surveys” (Youssef and Hetler 1983:225). The circumstances of female household heads have been well described, however (for summaries of recent studies, see Momsen and Townsend 1987). Chipande (1987) discusses the innovative strategies of female household heads in Malawi; Wilkinson (1987) presents the particular problems faced by rural Basotho women in the context of Southern Africa’s labour reserve system.

Women head households in Africa both from necessity and by choice. Many are widowed, divorced, or left to run households when men migrate to find work. Increasing numbers of women are choosing to become single mothers to circumvent the daunting inequities of married life and to ensure security for their old age (the appropriation of their income by husbands, the loss of property rights and, hence, access to credit, commoditized bridewealth, and the patrilineal control of children are some of the problems facing married women). Only when the ideology of the male-headed nuclear family is abandoned and it is recognized that female-headed families are not anomalous and marginal to African society, will development planning adequately account for the needs of this significant household form.

The economic as the socially determining level of society

Both neoclassical and Marxist economics assume the primacy of economic motivation in human life (although the structural Marxist school of Althusser, Poulantzas, and Laclau discussed in Chapter 1 challenges this assumption). Much of the WID and feminist political economy literature sees economic relations as the source of ideological and political structures and practices. Gender relations, are also analyzed in largely economic terms, in spite of attempts to theorize the sex-gender system as an autonomous structure in human society. This preoccupation with economic roles is now reflected in many aid documents (e.g., ILO/INSTRAW 1985). As I have shown, a focus on the economic contribution of women and the economic dimensions of gender relations is an important corrective to perceptions of women as marginal, noneconomic beings, inhabiting a “private” realm and requiring “social welfare” to correct their problems. Fortmann’s (1981) critique of “domestic” work, cited previously, is a demonstration of the utility of this approach.

Nevertheless, it is time to take stock of the recent preoccupation with the economic. Although it is beyond the scope of this study to critique “economic determinism” or to enter the current theoretical debate about it, I suggest we should examine our assumptions in this regard. The invisibility of the politics of space is a case in point Another example is Jackson’s (1985) conclusion about women making choices on political and ideological grounds rather than on economic grounds (see the discussion of KRP in Chapter 3, pp. 67–70). Particularly serious is the practical invisibility of the “social welfare” (or “social reproduction”) issues of nutrition and health care in the WID and feminist political economy literature. Given the intimate connection between economic factors and the ability of women to fulfill their social welfare responsibilities, the overemphasis on economic factors is all the more dismaying. As Cecelski (1987:45–46) points out, for example,

When families are really hard pressed, food production and cash earning take precedence over women’s household tasks such as cooking and fuel and water collection, even though these are also essential for family welfare.… When more time has to be spent on particular tasks, whether in farming or in fuel collection, women’s other work suffers.… In villages where women had to spend more time on fuel collection, they spent less time on cooking. This, however, can result in a lower nutritional level.

With regard to technology transfer, Carr and Sandhu (1987) have shown that much “appropriate technology” planning has been based on the assumption that the primary impact of new technology would be economic, in the form of more time available for either food production or income earning. The errors in this thinking (discussed in Chapter 3, pp. 56–61) again demonstrate the dangers of reducing the complexities of women’s activities to simple economic dimensions. As an example of unintended outcomes, Carr and Sandhu (1987:51) present evidence that “technologies related to household tasks are unlikely to save women time since they may simply result in other family members offering less help, or lead to increased expectations regarding the quality or quantity of household services.”

Baudrillard (1975) argues that our theories of economic causality are in fact a metaphor derived from the experience of 19th century industrial life, where production was indeed the dominant element shaping society. He critiques the application of Marxist models of political economy and the Marxist method of historical materialism to earlier and non-Western societies.

The analysis of the contradictions of Western society has not led to the comprehension of earlier societies (or of the Third World). It has succeeded only in exporting these contradictions to them. At times not even the contradictions have been exported but very simply the solution, that is, the productivist model.… Through its most “scientific” inclinations toward earlier societies, [historical materialism] “naturalizes” them under the sign of the mode of production.

(Baudrillard 1975:89–91)

Political economists may find Baudrillard’s judgment overly harsh. Nevertheless, perhaps we should ask whether the “productivist model” is appropriate for theories of African social relations, either in the past or the present Certainly, attempts to explain all aspects of sex-gender relations in terms of relations of production have proved difficult. With regard to WID research, an overemphasis on production issues at the expense of other aspects of development problems has created a theoretical and empirical imbalance in the literature. Mbilinyi (1984) identifies economism as one of the chief priorities for research in East Africa, and criticizes her own earlier tendencies toward such reductionism. Admitting that undue emphasis has been placed on “women’s place in production and reproduction” and that definitions of these concepts have been overly mechanical, Mbilinyi cites an example of such economism in her bibliography on women in Tanzania (Mascarenhas and Mbilinyi 1980:12) to which a colleague drew her attention:

Our conceptualisation of the women’s question refers to women in production and reproduction, that is, the nature of women’s work, and how women are situated in production and in the reproduction of the labour force and society itself.… This is why there are so many items on women peasants and women workers, on ideology and education, on health and nutrition, and none on fashions of dress and hair style. The problem of integration of women into development is not a problem of hairstyles.

Mbilinyi confesses

As we later noted in the same work, harassment of women for wearing short dresses, blue jeans and cosmetics was part of a general campaign to put women in their place as subjugated people. Hair styles had everything to do with women’s oppression and the oppression of men as well!

(Mbilinyi 1984:298)

Swantz (1985) pinpoints the preoccupation with dependency theory as part of the problem of economism. She argues that although it is important to recognize and analyze the dependency of local economies on international market forces, the adequacy of dependency theory for explaining women’s condition must also be questioned.

In view of the fact that a mode of analysis may contribute to further subjection of people in general or of women, the theoretical approach adopted is crucial. A dependence theory approaches the problems negatively, concentrating on aspects of deprivation of a class of people, but failing to point a way forward.… When developing a methodology for an analysis of local solutions in social processes, it cannot be assumed that the improvement of the living conditions of peasants and workers in general will suffice for the correction of imbalanced structures in relation to women.

(Swantz 1985:2–3)

As the following discussion of the “traditional” reveals and as suggested in the discussion of mate ga in Chapter 6, a fruitful line of research lies in the application of theory about discourse and ideology to our understanding of African political economy. In discourse analysis, power relations are understood to be shaped by dominant visions of reality. Mbilinyi’s (1984) point about the use of cultural discourse to subjugate women and Swantz’s (1985) point about the negative consequences of the dependency approach confirm the value of studying discourse. Yet, such theory has only recently begun to be applied to WID issues. The following discussions of “tradition” and “nature” develop an argument about discourse. The final section of this chapter explores the relationships between power and knowledge.

The “traditional”

I have argued against perceiving developing societies to be on a unilinear course between a “traditional” and a “modern” existence. I have also shown how precolonial elements of sex-gender systems have been retained in a dominated, distorted form, providing the ideological raw material to constrain the autonomy and power of women: in the name of “tradition.”

Along the same lines of ideological inquiry suggested in the preceding section, it is important to investigate the ideology of “tradition” as it pertains to gender relations. Katz (1985) demonstrates, in the context of African national politics, the power of ideological discourses that recruit “tradition” to their explanations of how society should be. Dominant discourses that support the ruling group are those that have most successfully used tradition to legitimize the group’s political power. To distinguish contemporary ideological constructions from genuine historical social structures (especially sex-gender systems), similar work must be done at the local level (e.g., Glazier 1985). Disparate evidence suggests that the challenge of women’s demand for rights and improved economic and social conditions is met with the accusation that they have abandoned their “traditional” responsibilities and are seeking to undermine the family. Such gender discourse has a powerful effect in the creation of guilt among women, in stifling their dissent, and in blocking progressive legal reform.

The political pitfalls inherent in an ahistorical view of “tradition” are exemplified by the controversy surrounding the question of clitoridectomy. Western radical feminists condemned the practice as a “barbaric tradition.” African apologists defended it, however, and attacked Western feminist interference in the name of “honourable and functional tradition.” In neither case is the appeal to a primordial, unchanging “tradition” helpful in understanding and solving this politically sensitive and medically urgent problem. Kirby (1987) provides an incisive analysis of the feminist discourse on clitoridectomy. Focusing on the thinking of Western women who do not believe clitoridectomy to be a problematic topic, she critiques their assumption that they speak authoritatively for non-Western women. Kirby also challenges their belief that clitoridectomy provides evidence of universal patriarchy. The books by these feminists are

disturbingly consistent in their representation of a mutilated, abject body.… The peculiar and prurient fascination of the viewer/reader is swiftly sanitised behind the impassivity of a medical gaze. In fact medical discourse provides the common thread which weaves through this entire cluster of texts, providing its classifications and, implicitly, the “real” meanings which will secure the argument.… A mind/body dualism is an essential assumption for these arguments.… The vitality of this body’s subjectivity, the beliefs and values which have been “incorporated” into its existential significance are pared away as extraneous.… Although clitoridectomy and infibulation are practised in thirty countries in Africa alone, the diversity of its cultural, political and historical experience is summarily negated: medical discourse alone provides the guarantee for this Western positivity of “What you are.”

(Kirby 1987:37–38)

Kirby (1987) concludes with some reflections on the dark side of Western philanthropy and suggests that preoccupation with “traditions” such as clitoridectomy have more to do with the West’s obsessions than with enlightened altruism.

It is not only Westerners who misconstrue tradition. Wilson (1982) gives an excellent analysis of contemporary African gender discourse.

Authenticitié has been a device for consolidating power and legitimizing antidemocratic principles as traditional African values. Today, it is clear that authenticité has been used to obtain mass support and to distract attention away from the pressing economic and social problems that confront Zaire.… The rhetoric and reality of authenticité is paternalistic, authoritarian, and self-serving.… Under authenticité, the entire responsibility for maintaining the morality of the system rests with women. Men do not have moral responsibilities.

(Wilson 1982:190–191)

Wilson’s (1982) study, which documents the ways in which an ideology of “tradition” is used to control and oppress women, is an example of the kind of research that might fruitfully be pursued.

Mbilinyi (1985a) adds an important dimension to the critique of ahistorical approaches to “tradition.” In Tanganyika, colonialism created notions of “traditional life” to serve its own exploitative ends. According to Mbilinyi’s (1985a) conclusions, the colonial Tanganyikan regime constructed a dichotomy between rural, “traditional” African life and urban, “modem” life that transformed indigenous society in the service of “the colonial solution.” In reality, the colony consisted of peasant-based economies on the one hand and a capitalist sector on the other. The latter was made up of urban and plantation enterprises that were owned first by German and later British multinational companies, and by individual European and Asian settlers. Both rural and urban enterprises depended on the migrant labour system; in particular, the plantations depended on the largely female casual labour pool. The aim of the regime, therefore, was

to stabilise the working class and restrict African settlement in town solely to permanently employed workers and the middle classes. In order to successfully carry this out the African extended family system was attacked, and the nuclear family was encouraged. The secondary economy was heavily taxed, regulated, and wherever possible, undermined. “Staff associations” or “workers councils” were promoted among workers to counter fee labour movement. Women became central actors and targets in the struggle to impose the colonial solution.

(Mbilinyi 1985a:88)

Mbilinyi (1985a) critically examines colonial discourse to uncover the economic and political reality served by the concept of a division between “city” and “countryside.”

A contrast between city and country permeates colonial commentary on the society its agents found, and the one they struggled to create and rule. In simple terms, the city was associated with non-Africans, men, adults, wage employment and civilization; the country, with Africans, women, children, “subsistence” and “bush.” According to colonial ideology, the country was none IOI Africans, in “tribal areas,” and the African in town was considered an “alien” in “foreign” territory who had “immigrated” and was in danger of being “detribalised”.… Colonial archives assume this contrast. Moreover, they presume that the past was rural and agricultural. The centuries of urbanisation and economic specialisation which was identified with the development of feudal kingdoms, Swahili culture and the rise of the Zanzibar Commercial Empire, vanish from memory. So, too, do the struggles between slaves and slave-owners, queens and commoners, disappear.³

(Mbilinyi 1985a:88)

In addition to inventing a false traditional/modern dichotomy, the colonial discourse Mbilinyi analyzes supports the public/private dichotomy previously discussed: the village being the “private” sphere in Western terms and the town being the only truly “public” domain. On the grounds of both dichotomies, the demands and needs of the “country” could be dismissed by colonial policy as backward and unimportant.

Mbilinyi (1985a) proposes concrete strategies to combat biases in both archival records and the interpretations of historians. Suggesting that “the same facts are subject to different interpretation, depending upon the group or class or sex with which the spokesperson identifies” (p. 96), she argues for the creation of opposing knowledge. However,

The creation of oppositional history is in itself a political act. By speaking, writing, acting, drawing, or singing their own histories, people teach one another new ways of perceiving themselves and the world. Defiance of “official” histories is an act of empowerment.… The main audience ought to be the speakers themselves and the popular classes they represent.… This suggests the production of easily readable texts and other media in the local national languages spoken by the people.

(Mbilinyi 1985a:96)

³The process Mbilinyi (1986) delineates is a precise description of the discourse of apartheid and the conceptual underpinnings of the Bantustan system in South Africa, whereby the majority of South Africans are treated as foreigners in their own land.

We have recently seen arguments, by both Western commentators and certain African leaders, that the colonial past is over and done with and should not be used to explain contemporary problems (for a particularly pernicious example of such writing, see Sender and Smith 1986). This argument, again, conspires to reinforce the vision of a backward Africa, where present dilemmas have no history other than timeless African “tradition.” I thus agree with Mbilinyi’s (1985a) view that the recapture of history, including that of the colonial era, is a vital task for the present. This could be used to correct Western biases regarding Africa and to empower local communities and particularly women.

Mbilinyi’s (1985a) proposal (and the work of Tanzania’s WRDP in general) offers a valuable tool for inserting women into not only the policy-making process but also the process of constructing accurate knowledge about their communities and problems, in other words, the objects of development policy. The practical importance of such historical research is dramatically illustrated by Kimati’s (1986) study of nutritional knowledge amongst Tanzanian women. Kimati (1986:131) protests that

The word “ignorance” used in the nutrition context by some people implies not knowing about good nutritious foods and how best to use them in the “western sense.” Traditional knowledge about food may not have been valued as useful. This word has been used in nutrition for years with an already formed bias that the mothers who have malnourished children…are the ones who are ignorant and we, the educated, know everything about nutrition.

This study found, however, that the traditional combination in Tanzania of prolonged breast-feeding, complex weaning practices, women’s food production and higher social status, nutritional supplements for lactating mothers, and family planning ensured sound nutrition for children. Kimati (1986) suggests that rather than ask why one third of Tanzanian children under 5 years suffer protein malnutrition, nutritionists should ask why two thirds are not malnourished. The answers, to be found in traditional nutritional practices, will provide many of the solutions for eradicating malnutrition. Kimati’s (1986) argument for the recruitment of local knowledge to nutrition policy could be replicated for every area of development planning.

The nature of “nature”

Along with mainstream development thinking, most WID writing takes the environment as a given: a known entity that need only form the backdrop for development research and action. Assumptions about how the environment works take one of two forms. The first sees it as a neutral, unengaged, and indifferent essence, timeless and “out there,” apart from human lives. The studies on the social oppression of women discussed in previous chapters display, through their silence on the environment, such an assumption. Even in studies that deal with environmental resources such as land and water, discussions of women’s loss of use rights or control present people relating to each other in a passive, noninteractive, physical context.

The second vision of the environment implicit in development thinking is one of nature affected by humans. Their effect, however, is seen merely as a problem of misuse or overuse, usually because the users know no better, and it is overuse that has caused the environment’s catastrophic decline — people have tempted and brought on their heads the laws of entropy. Sectoral analyses of environmental resources often assume that nature is working this way, as does much of the writing on African famine. Studies that often make this assumption are those concerned with deforestation and the problem of fuelwood (cf. Agarwal 1986). Even though this catastrophic vision of nature is more dynamic than the first and includes the idea of human agency, it too is making assumptions about a nature that is “out there” and somehow not part of the social problem. Whether nature is seen as a homeostatic device, as in the first view, or as a decaying, abused body, as in the second, the nature of “nature” has remained unexamined. In both, nature is “natural.”

What both of these assumptions about the environment miss is the social dimension of our understanding and practices regarding nature. It is this historically created relation to the environment that now shapes nature itself. Agarwal (1984) challenges us to rescue the concept of “nature” from the realm of timeless essence and give it a history and a dynamic relationship to human thought and action. He explores the national and international socioeconomic processes that have favoured one kind of nature, “a nature that is geared to meet urban and industrial needs, a nature that is essentially cash generating,” over another kind of nature, “a nature that has traditionally come to support household and community needs” (Agarwal 1984:9). It is the latter nature, the rapidly vanishing one, that is most supportive of women’s responsibilities and needs, and about which women have a deep working knowledge. What Agarwal (1984) proposes is that nature is historically selected by dominant forces in society and actively shaped to their needs. Both the ideas about what nature is and the actual physical transformations it undergoes are the products of society. In other words, nature is far from “natural.” This is not, of course, to argue that no “real” world exists apart from human thought about nature and that science has been investigating a chimera. Rather, it is to suggest that the dominant scientific discourse about the environment, as it has historically developed over the past several hundred years, is intimately connected with the social and political world within which it was developed.

Agarwal’s ideas are an excellent starting point for a critique of assumptions about the nature of “nature” in Africa. We need to study the concept precisely because the assumptions of experts have contributed to the failure of past development efforts. It is the unwitting (or disguised) selection of Agarwal’s first nature by contemporary socioeconomic forces that poses the greatest environmental problems for women and local communities in Africa. By this process, the relationship of women to the environment has been undermined, devalued, and disregarded. It is Agarwal’s second nature that we should identify, analyze, and promote if we wish to see solutions to the resource problems of African women and, hence, of African communities. When based on the second nature rather than the commercially oriented first nature, however, local environmental practices are necessarily discredited by the traditional/modem dichotomy and considered obstacles to development Moreover, competing uses of nature find concrete expression within the African family. Whereas men welcome the commercialization of production fostered by development activities, women often resist it For men, Agarwal’s (1984) first nature appears to offer immediate opportunities; for women, however, the second nature is the only one within which they can continue to carry out their traditional responsibilities. A commercialized nature is one where women have reduced use rights, where their scientific knowledge is devalued, and where resources are directed away from the local community that women sustain.

At the heart of the problem, therefore, is a shift from one kind of nature to another, a transformation that has gone unnoticed. The historical construction of a nature more hostile to women has not been clearly addressed in the WID literature; indeed, the WID enterprise is inextricably intertwined with this problem of thinking about the environment. On the one hand, the issues identified by the WID literature beg questions about the underlying assumptions of development efforts. On the other hand, however, the conceptual problems embedded in the WID literature contribute to the perpetuation of mistaken assumptions about the nature of “nature.”

When scholars take on the term “nature” or “environment,” they enter a well-demarcated arena of debate. One of the topics that has aroused great controversy in Africa, as elsewhere, is conservation. Environmentalists have colluded in constructing a static, timeless nature, a museum to be protected from human activity. Agarwal (1984:1) suggests that many conservation programs

seem to be based on the belief that concern for the environment essentially means protecting and conserving it, partly from development programmes but mainly from the people itself. There is little effort to modify the development process itself in a manner that will bring it in greater harmony with the needs of the people and with the need to maintain ecological balance, while increasing the productivity of our land, water and forest resources.

The argument here for Agarwal’s second nature does not accede to the idea of nature as museum. Rather, it begins from the premise that humans and nature construct each other in an ongoing dialectical process. The shaping of that process should be an area of concern. Agarwal (1984) states that most environmental groups in India that are succeeding in mobilizing people at the local level to prevent ecological destruction (often in the face of government policies) are not concerned with environmental protection per se. Rather, their concern is “to put the environment at the service and the control of the people, the people being defined as the local communities who live within that environment.… It is this growing understanding of the relationship between the people and their environment, born out of a concern for a more equitable and sustainable use of the environment, that is probably the most fascinating development” (Agarwal 1984:2).

Because arguments against the dominant view of nature are often dismissed as antidevelopment and antipeople, it is important to discuss the conservation view and how it is distinguished from the second nature. Third World governments have a point when they protest that “having got their riches and their affluent lifestyles, Westerners were now simply asking for more affluence: clean air, clean water, and large tracts of nature for enjoyment and recreation, many of which were going to be preserved in the tropical forests and savannas of Asia, Africa, and South America” (Agarwal 1984:3). These arguments, however, are used as a justification for the promotion of a nature geared to urban and industrial needs, i.e., to the interests of Third World elites.

The power of the push for such a nature not only lies in the political and economic power of dominant classes but also stems from the construction of Western scientific knowledge. As Keller (1985:131) argues,

The very concept of “laws of nature” is, in contemporary usage, both a product and an expression of the absence of reflectivity. It introduces into the study of nature a metaphor indelibly marked by its political origins. The philosophical distinction between descriptive and prescriptive laws is invoked to underline the neutrality of scientific description. But nonetheless, laws of nature, like laws of the state, are historically imposed from above and obeyed from below.

Cloaked in the respectability of the laws of nature, the proponents of the first nature dismiss the knowledge and concerns of those who hold to the second nature. Given that indigenous scientific knowledge (the “science of the concrete” as Lévi-Strauss termed non-Western sciences) falls within the latter category, this dismissal has profoundly disturbing consequences for the ability of Africans to promote their own understanding of nature.

A variety of natural and human resources are untapped because, outside the communities themselves, there has been little or no knowledge of their existence. This is especially true in relation to women, whose control over local resources has not so far been sufficiently recognised. [Such resources are] a “power of periphery.”

(Swantz 1985:3)

Cecelski (1987:46) gives an example of such resources: “In subsistence economies uncultivated areas provide food, medicines, building materials, tools and utensils. Foods gathered from these areas, mainly by women, are often an important nutritional supplement. Even arid and semi-arid savannas and deserts can provide a variety of wild produce, which are especially important as a fallback during drought.” Yet, the destruction of these products of the second, community-oriented nature by development projects and environmental degradation have largely gone unnoticed because local knowledge has not been valued. Agarwal (1986) condemns forestry planning on this account and makes an eloquent case for genuine community participation in policy-making and implementation.

It is important to stress that local knowledge about nature is not merely “folk knowledge,” in which there has been no rigorous testing of propositions against reality. The “science of the concrete” may be inextricably woven into everyday practices, where its rigour is invisible to Western scientific methods. The recovery of this science requires subtlety and social expertise. Dahl (1981:201) makes the point with regard to pastoralism.

A certain type of research for which I think there is still a need is that of pastoral ethnoscience. Sheer descriptive studies of ecological classification systems, ethnobotany, etc. do not receive much academic acclaim but are urgently needed, they are needed both to establish a reasonable platform for communication with pastoralists and to give proper appreciation of the pastoralists’ substantial mass of useful knowledge. One may argue that such studies are not the business of anthropologists, but one cannot deny that it is their active duty to interest botanists, animal husbandry personnel, etc. in these fields.

An example of such “ethnoscience” is the work of David Western on Masai cattle management (e.g., Western and Dunne 1979). His work challenges assumptions that had commonly been made by anthropologists working on East African pastoralist societies regarding pastoralists’ lack of “scientific” understanding of livestock management and milk production. Decisions regarding homesteads, migration, and other matters were seen to be based on purely social criteria (for a classic case study, see Gulliver 1955). Such a view is possible if one subscribes to the idea of a noninteractive, passive nature, visible only to the eye of an impartial, Western science. In contrast, Western started with the question of the pastoralists’ scientific basis for herd-management decisions (Western and Dunne 1979). Interested in the complex, harmonious interaction of humans and animals in the savannas of Kenya, Western educated himself in anthropological issues and methods. In the course of his work with the Masai of Amboseli, he was inducted into an age set, as enthusiastic researchers often are. As a lineage brother, he became an owner of cattle himself.

Thus, as both an honorary Masai and a scientist respectful of the alternate scientific knowledge of a different culture, Western sought to discover whether there was a common ground for his science and that of the Masai. Consequently, he asked better questions about pastoral decision-making and came up with answers different from those of the anthropologists. His enquiries took two directions. First, he surveyed existing and past boma (settlement) sites and, with Dunne, quantified regularities in the sites chosen (see Western and Dunne 1979). Their statistical analysis revealed that boma sites were consistently located at a certain point in the slope of a hill, on certain types of soil and stones, and oriented in particular ways. Second, he asked his age mates why they located bomas in this way as well as other questions about cattle management Because he asked scientific questions, based on his own expertise both as ecologist and cattle owner, his informants responded with a wealth of information regarding their decision-making process.

In the highlands, Masai favoured black or coloured cows for their better heat absorption properties, which enhanced milk production (melanism as an energy-conserving mechanism has been observed by ecologists studying other species). Contrarily, in hot, lowland areas, white cows reflected heat and, in using less body energy to combat heat, yielded better than dark, coloured cows. With regard to the location of bomas, the site characteristics quantified by Western and Dunne were explained by the Masai in terms of the maintenance of cattle in optimum condition. Points further down the slope would be too dank and encourage disease; sites higher up would be too cold and exposed. In addition, sites were chosen for the nature of the ground: dark soils and stones absorbed the sun’s heat and reflected it at night, keeping the cows warm. This prevents the diversion of milk-producing energy to heat conservation. Western came up with a great deal of scientific knowledge about dairying: elders responsible for choosing the grazing location for the day would do meteorological observations to ensure that the green flush following spot thunderstorms was used. They knew to the last cup what each cow could and should produce and constantly strove to meet production targets through sound technical choices in herd management

One might add a point that even the enlightened ecologist has not yet focused on: this daily subtle use of nature must involve close collaboration between the dairyists: women, who actually controlled and measured the milk, and the male herders or herding directors. The next task in uncovering local scientific knowledge about cattle management, therefore, is a similarly sensitive exploration of the dairying and livestock health-care knowledge of women.⁴

⁴Even though work on pastoral peoples has recently taken a more enlightened attitude toward pastoral practice, on the whole, it remains gender biased and ethnocentric (Kettel 1986:48). For a more sophisticated approach to cattle management that, nevertheless, does not pay adequate attention to the role of women, see Galaty et al (1981).

In conclusion, the bankruptcy of development research and policy is due to not only its gender blindness but also its denigration of the scientific capacities of Africans and, by extension, the denial of a historically shaped nature. What this account of pastoral science reveals is the importance of starting from the assumption that humans in a successful socioeconomic lifestyle are intelligent regarding all aspects of their social and physical world.

Liberating subjugated knowledges

Inherent in all of the preceding conceptual problems is a profound epistemological predicament, exemplified by Mbilinyi’s (1985a) call for a struggle to recapture history for Tanzanians. Much of the critique of conceptual frameworks in Chapters 1 and 2 and evidence throughout this study confirm that competing views of reality are a central aspect of development dilemmas. Time and again, this review has chronicled the imposition of the dominant, Western “knowledge” to the detriment of local “knowledges” that are more appropriate constructions of local reality. Part of the problem has been poor science that relies on biased dichotomies: inadequate theories and methodologies for understanding the “family”; the nature of public life; the history of African societies at both the broad and local levels; and local conceptions of nature. This poor science is itself a product of history, emerging as an aspect of, and a support for, the power relations that subjugated Africa. By the nature of these power relations, knowledge of Africa was constructed by non-Africans according to Western categories of thought. The alienation of Africans from their own knowledge of themselves is the other part of the epistemological dilemma. Given the deep differences between the West and Africa in both knowledge and practice of gender relations and in the construction of female identity, the crisis in knowledge has urgent implications for WID efforts.

It would be irresponsible and utopian to suggest the possibility of return to a golden age of African self-knowledge (indeed, the suggestion that the African past is more “authentic” than the African present is implicitly ethnocentric, denying the right of Africans to identify themselves as cosmopolitan members of the world community, sharing its modem cultural values and practices). Nevertheless, researchers can no longer avoid the task of investigating the relationship between dominant power structures, past and present, and the nature of knowledge about Africa. Central to this task is an engagement with the theory of discourse. A start has been made by scholars interested in applying the insights of recent discourse analysis (as well as the ideas of earlier Third World humanist critics such as Franz Fanon) to our knowledge of Western domination. For example, a 1984 conference on the sociology of literature at the University of Essex generated the Group for the Critical Study of Colonial Discourse now based at the University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA (Group for the Critical Study of Colonial Discourse 1985; for a relevant study from the Group, see Spivak 1985). Said’s (1979) exploration of the concept of “the Orient” in Western thought, already considered a classic study, has provided the inspiration for much of this thinking, including some work on discourse on Africa (e.g., Miller 1985). Mueller (1987) has engaged in a ground-breaking critique of WID discourse.

Michel Foucault, the thinker who is widely credited with having developed during the 1970s a new method for the study of humans in society (and whose later work inspired Said and subsequent discourse analysts), provides a place to begin a theoretical inquiry into the discourses of domination in the Third World (for an introduction to his ideas, see Foucault 1980b). Foucault has been criticized from both left and right, as well as by feminists, for his obscure writing and irrelevance to contemporary social and economic concerns — they view him as a trendy theorist of the avant garde. Nevertheless, an increasing number of scholars in the West, including feminists, are recognizing the value of Foucault’s approach for a fresh understanding of the nature of institutions and the mechanisms of power, as Mueller’s (1987) work attests. The controversial nature of his vital contribution to recent social thought should not deter researchers in gender and development from assessing his theory and adapting his insights in the African context.

Foucault’s (1973, 1979, 1980a) work shows how ideas about madness, illness, crime, and sexuality have been transformed in the modem era to serve the tactical needs of new social systems. Out of his analyses of organized forms of social life, such as prisons, hospitals, schools, and insane asylums, original thinking has emerged about the nature of power and discourse and the way in which our era has constructed humans as objects of knowledge. This is neither accomplished by the deliberate actions of power-wielding practitioners, nor does it follow formal laws or rules. Instead, cultural practices are structured by a “grid of intelligibility” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983:121), which emerges through the subtle interplay of power and knowledge. The “grid of intelligibility,” according to Foucault (1980b:194) is “a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourse, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions — in short, the said as much as the unsaid.”

Although Foucault’s work focuses almost exclusively on Western institutions (and there is vigorous debate over the quality of his historical methodology), his relevance to the Third World is nevertheless significant. First, his thinking provides a method for an epistemological investigation into how the African — and especially the African woman — has been constructed as an object of knowledge. Second, his insights on the relation between power and knowledge provide a valuable conceptual tool for understanding the emergence of this knowledge about Africans in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Foucault (1979:26) conceives of power “not as a property, but as a strategy…one should decipher in it a network of relations, constantly in tension, in activity, rather than a privilege that one might possess.” Power is not simply exercised in a monolithic way by those who “have it” over those who “do not have it” (the notion of power in much underdevelopment theory). Conversely, knowledge is not something that can only exist apart from power relations.

Perhaps we should abandon the belief that power makes mad and that, by the same token, the renunciation of power is one of the conditions of knowledge. We should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.… In short, it is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but power-knowledge, the processes and struggles that traverse it and of which it is made up, that determines the forms and possible domains of knowledge.

(Foucault 1979:27–28)

So far, this study has implicitly argued that contemporary international economic relations and related aid efforts are power relations that have shaped and, in turn, been shaped by particular “forms and domains of knowledge” about Africa and African women. The discourse is not necessarily coherent and unified: indeed, I have argued that knowledge about Africa and its development problems is fragmented among the different research/action loci and between different conceptual frameworks. As Foucault (1979:26) says about discourse: “It is often made up of bits and pieces; it implements a disparate set of tools or methods. In spite of the coherence of its results…it cannot be localized in a particular type of institution or state apparatus.”

Foucault (1983) contends that a new kind of power has emerged in the last several hundred years. This power has been advanced by a series of disciplinary practices across an array of institutions, including the state (he deliberately puns in his use of the term “discipline,” implying both its meaning as regulation of behaviour, and its meaning as regulated areas of inquiry).

What is to be understood by the disciplining of societies in Europe since the eighteenth century is not, of course, that the individuals who are part of them become more and more obedient, nor that they set about assembling in barracks, schools, or prisons; rather that an increasingly better invigilated process of adjustment has been sought after — more and more rational and economic — between productive activities, resources of communication, and the play of power relations.

(Foucault 1983:219)

Those power relations are, he suggests, a new secular version of “pastoral power” (in the sense of spiritual guidance, not herding society). The new “pastoral power” resides in the state and other modem institutions and, like the ecclesiastical power that it has replaced, is salvation oriented.

It was no longer a question of leading people to their salvation in the next world, but rather ensuring it in this world. And in this context, the word salvation takes on different meanings: health, well-being (that is sufficient wealth, standard of living), security, protection against accidents. A series of “worldly” aims took the place of the traditional pastorate.… Sometimes the power was exercised by private ventures, welfare societies, benefactors and generally by philanthropists. But ancient institutions, for example the family, were also mobilized…to take on pastoral functions.… Finally, the multiplication of the aims and agents of pastoral power focused the development of knowledge of man around two roles: one, globalizing and quantitative, concerning the population; the other, analytical, concerning the individual.

(Foucault 1983:215)

This quotation reads uncannily like a description of development aid activities. I believe that Foucault’s concept of a secular “pastoral power” can be used to illuminate the process by which development discourse and its accompanying disciplinary practices have come to dominate Third World societies. The utility of Foucault’s ideas about the relationship between power and knowledge is explored further in Chapter 7.

In thinking about the utility of discourse theory for feminist political economy and practical research on women, technology, and development, the theories of resistance that are being proposed to counter the new globalizing power process should be given special attention. Laclau and Mouffe (1985) argue that old conceptions of social struggle that rely on theories of contradictions between monolithic classes are no longer appropriate. Instead, they call for a “radical democratic politics” that links the interests of marginalized and oppressed groups, allowing them to mount a more powerful challenge to today’s hegemonic forces than each group could muster alone. Central to Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) analysis of the pluralistic resistance movements of our day is recognition of the importance of the feminist struggle. As well, they are concerned with the West’s domination of the Third World.

Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) thinking about resistance is closely related to Foucault’s ideas about “the insurrection of subjugated knowledges,” an insurrection that is already under way, according to him.

What has emerged in the course of the last ten or fifteen years is a sense of the increasing vulnerability to criticism of things, institutions, practices, discourses. A certain fragility has been discovered in the very bedrock of existence — even, and perhaps above all, in those aspects of it that are most familiar, most solid and most intimately related to our bodies and to our everyday behaviour. But together with this sense of instability and this amazing efficacy of discontinuous, particular and local criticism, one in fact also discovers something that perhaps was not initially foreseen, something one might describe as precisely the inhibiting effect of global, totalitarian theories…. The attempt to think in terms of a totality has in fact proved a hindrance to research.… I believe that what this essentially local character of criticism indicates in reality is an autonomous, non-centralised kind of theoretical production, one that is to say whose validity is not dependent on the approval of the established régimes of thought…

By subjugated knowledges one should understand…a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naiïve knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity.… It is through the reappearance of…these local popular knowledges, these disqualified knowledges, that criticism performs its work.… With what in fact were these buried, subjugated knowledges really concerned? They were concerned with a historical knowledge of struggles. In popular knowledge there lay the memory of hostile encounters which even up to this day have been confined to the margins of knowledge.

(Foucault 1980b:80–83)

This thinking on “subjugated knowledges” is directly relevant to the point previously made in here on the suppression of local knowledges and the struggle to retrieve them. It is also relevant to the critiques throughout this book of theories and policies that universalize from both Western subjectivity and Western historical experience. Foucault (1980b:83–84) calls for researchers to “establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today.” The purpose of such “genealogical research” is to “entertain the claims to attention of local, discontinuous, disqualified, illegitimate knowledges against the claims of a unitary body of theory which would filter, hierarchise and order them in the name of some true knowledge and some arbitrary idea of what constitutes a science and its objects.… It is really against the effects of the power of a discourse that is considered to be scientific that the genealogy must wage its struggle” (Foucault 1980b:83–84).

Geertz (1983) is an important protagonist in this struggle to establish a voice for disparate knowledges. He suggests that the growing interest in interpretation and exegesis is in part

a result of the growing recognition that the established approach to treating such phenomena, laws-and-causes social physics, was not producing the triumphs of prediction, control, and testability that had for so long been promised in its name. And in part, it is a result of intellectual deprovincialization. The broader currents of modem thought have finally begun to impinge upon what has been, and in some quarters still is, a snug and insular enterprise.

(Geertz 1983:3)

To the extent that development thinking has been such a “snug and insular enterprise,” nonchalantly dismissing the dismal failures of its own predictions, tests and methods, it is long overdue for such “intellectual deprovincialization” (for a valuable and highly readable introduction to interpretive social science, see Rabinow and Sullivan 1979).

Feminist scholars such as Mbilinyi are attempting to carry out the tasks proposed by Foucault and Geertz. Indeed, the entire feminist endeavour can be construed as an attempt to give women and gender relations a historical context This is what Rosaldo (1983) is endeavouring to do in her reflections on the moral and epistemological dilemmas of feminist social science (cited at the beginning of this chapter). The task of Western scholars and aid agents is to take local knowledges seriously: to rescue them from the “margins of knowledge” and to incorporate them into a scientific understanding of African society. Western scholars must also recognize the dominant position of their own knowledge in the hierarchy and the role that knowledge plays in international power relations. Concrete suggestions for research that address the epistemological issues raised here are made in Chapter 7 (pp. 146–157).

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