Doing gender work in Ghana

Abstract

7 Doing Gender Work in Ghana Takyiwaa Manuh “What can we do for African women?” “What about micro-credit?”1 my new friends asked, as we sat sipping wine in the lounge of a beautiful residence hall of a small American college in mid-2005. As the interrogation progressed, I was amazed at the almost absolute lack of knowledge about Africa and its people in the twenty-¤rst century by these well-meaning, well-educated senior women college professors attending a women’s studies conference. The exception was one person who had her own West African ties and whose son or daughter had almost been caught in the cross-¤ghting in la Côte d’Ivoire. Where and how was I expected to start off as I was inundated by the barrage of questions and liberal good feeling? How much of Africa was I expected to cover, and which African women would be the object of our concern that evening? I had escaped from the dance and was making my way to my dorm room, when I was hailed to join the group. I had accepted but had not bargained for the “African Women 101” course I was being called upon to deliver. The old weariness set in as I watched these specialists of Latin America and Asia attempt to explain their lack of speci¤c or even general knowledge of African issues in our highly interconnected globalized world where CNN beams news of happenings even as they occur. What indeed can any woman anywhere do for African women that they cannot do for themselves? How did this thinly disguised unconcern, shallowness, and ignorance repackaged as mild interest intersect with the almost frenzied activities and contestations around gender in several African countries by women who might claim kinship at a certain level with some of my new friends? The disconnect I was experiencing sent me back many years in recollection of another event. It was the early 1980s and this was an arid time in Ghana. Books and reading material were, like soap and sugar, considered “essential commodities.”2 In response to this scarcity, the Cultural Affairs Of¤cer at the United States Information Service provided some academics in the arts and social sciences at my university access to articles in two or three journals they considered valuable for their work. Typically, one selected a few articles from the table of contents of the chosen journals, and copies of these articles arrived free of charge. Signs: The Journal of Women in Society and Culture had been one of my selections, and through this facility, I was able to share in a larger intellectual community located elsewhere. However, it became increasingly dif¤cult for me to make any selections when the Signs table of contents arrived because I found it harder and harder to relate to what I considered to be abstract, surreal, and narcissistic theorizings on dreams, bodies, and other individualistic projects that increasingly suffused the pages of the journal. This was especially so as I compared these writings with the very real issues of lack of rights and democratic space, Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) and their privations, the increasing dictate of the international ¤nancial institutions in Ghana and several African countries, and the responsibilities and possibilities that faced me as a woman and scholar. My opinion of Signs persisted for much of the early to mid-1990s when I lived in the United States, and my disaffection was reinforced by what I experienced in women’s studies programs at the university where I was located. For someone who had been a scholar and an activist, these were very lonely times, as I found little to relate to in what was offered as women’s studies. Returning to Ghana in 1998, I was struck by the pace of work around democratization and political space, trade, economic policymaking, and gender, mostly by civil society activists. While both women and men worked on all the other issues, gender work was almost exclusively “women’s work,” even as it encompassed and extended beyond the issues civil society activists were engaged in. Thus, antiviolence projects and activities around women’s economic rights and political participation were mainly the domain of female gender activists, with the exception of a gender development “institute” whose executive director was male. How has gender become institutionalized around Africa and in Ghana? What issues have animated gender activism in Ghana? What forms have gender debates in Ghana taken and how...