Women's Pivotal Role in the National Independence Struggles in Africa

Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of the Pan-African News Wire, addressing an African American History Month forum in Detroit on February 28, 2009. (Photo: Cheryl LaBash)
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos

Women’s Pivotal Role in the National Independence Struggles in Africa

From the anti-colonial movements to the present, women have been at the forefront

By Abayomi Azikiwe
Editor, Pan-African News Wire

There have been many articles written this year on the 50th anniversary of the “Year of Africa” where 17 nations gained their political independence on the Continent. Yet of these accounts and reflections on the significance of five decades of historical experience not nearly enough attention has been given to the indispensable role of women in the campaigns for national liberation and their continuing efforts into the second decade of the present century.

On August 9, 1956, some 20,000 women in South Africa marched from various regions of the country to the apartheid capital of Pretoria. They represented a cross-section of women, most of whom were African, who resided and worked in both urban and rural areas of the country.

Throughout the 20th Century women in South Africa had resisted the policies of the European settler-colonial rule under both British and Boer domination. As early as 1908, African women had fought against racist laws that prohibited the brewing and distribution of traditional beverages so that their men could be lured into beerhalls and drained of their wage earnings.

Women boycotted and picketed the beerhalls forcing many to close. They demanded that profits from the establishments be utilized to develop housing and amenities for the African people relegated to the townships by the racist colonial system.

However, it was the struggle against the pass laws that was initiated by women that served to spark a broad-based mass movement during the 1950s. The women’s march on Pretoria advanced as a major demand the abolition of passes that controlled the movement of Africans inside their own country.

According to South African Researcher Fatima Meer, “In 1952, passes were extended to African women throughout the country. Up to 1918, when they had been withdrawn in the face of stringent resistance, they had been applied to African and Coloured women in the Orange Free State alone.” (Meer, “Women in Apartheid Society,” Reprinted in Pambana Journal, Feb., 1986)

Meer then points out the underlying reason for the enforcement of the apartheid pass laws, “The intention was to contain the women in the reserves, to leave them there to starve with their dependents, the unemployable young, the sick and the old.”

This struggle against the pass laws that was led by women was a protracted one. Meer recounts that “There was spontaneous resistance to the imposition of passes throughout the country and the resistance continued for eight years. Thousands of women were repeatedly imprisoned. “In 1954, 2,000 were arrested in Johannesburg, 4,000 in Pretoria, 1,200 in Germiston, and 350 in Bethlehem. In 1955, 2,000 women marched to the Native Commission’s office in Vereeniging.”

The most prominent organization in this movement against the pass laws was the African National Congress Women’s League that was founded in 1943. The League was instrumental in building the campaign as a national movement utilizing its branches throughout the country.

Women from both the Natal Indian Congress and the ANC combined their forces and formed a broader organization. Both organizations were at the core of the founding of the Federation of South African Women in 1954, which played an integral part in the Campaign of Defiance of Unjust Laws that lasted from 1952-1956.

In 1960 the ANC Women’s League organized a demonstration of both women and children who were family members of those detained during the state of emergency in Durban. During this demonstration some 60 women and children were arrested and imprisoned.

The ANC Women’s League was banned alongside the parent organization after the Sharpeville Massacre on March 21, 1960. Nonetheless, this tradition of struggle was to carry over through the 1980s and 1990s when the masses of workers and youth were able to overturn the racist apartheid system in 1994.

Women and the Movement for African Unity and Socialism

The role of women in South Africa was replicated in various forms in many states throughout the Continent from the 1950s through the early 1990s, when the last vestiges of white-minority rule were eliminated in Southern Africa. A major effort took place in 1960 when the All-African Women’s Conference was formed in Accra, Ghana.

Ghana in 1960 was considered the fountainhead of the national independence movement and Pan-Africanism. Kwame Nkrumah, the leader of the Convention People’s Party (CPP), had relied heavily on women in the urban and rural areas during the struggle for independence and the post-colonial period.

C.L.R. James in his book, “Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution,” noted that “in the struggle for independence, one market woman…was worth any dozen Achimota (college) graduates….” Kwame Arhin , a writer on the CPP-ruled era in Ghana history, said of the women inside the party that “Together with the workers, young men educated in primary schools and the unemployed, women became some of Nkrumah’s ablest, most devoted and most fearless supporters.” (Arhin, “The Life and Work of Kwame Nkrumah, p. 102)

The Women’s Section of the CPP was formed simultaneously with the party itself. The formation of the CPP provided opportunities for the wider involvement of women in politics inside the then Gold Coast (later known as Ghana). In 1951, the CPP selected Leticia Quake, Hanna Cudjoe, Ama Nkrumah and Madam Sophia Doku as Propaganda Secretaries who traveled around the country conducting political education meetings and recruiting people into the party.

By the time of independence in 1957, women such as Mabel Dove, Ruth Botsio, Ama Nkrumah, Ramatu Baba, Sophia Doku and Dr. Evelyn Amarteifio were playing leading roles as organizers, politicians and journalists. In 1960 they would consolidate the various women’s mass organizations into the National Council of Ghana Women (NCGW).

After Ghana became a Republic in July 1960, the Conference of Women of Africa and of African Descent was convened in Accra, the capital. Nkrumah addressed the gathering saying that “Who would have thought that in the year of 1960, it would be possible to even hold a conference of all Ghanaian women, much less of women of all Africa and women of African descent.” (Evening News, Ghana, July 19, 1960)

Nkrumah then asked “What part can the women of Africa and the women of African descent play in the struggle for African emancipation? You must ask these questions not by word of mouth but by action—by positive action, which is the only language understood by the detractors of African freedom.” (Evening News, July 19, 1960)

Shirley Graham DuBois, the wife of W.E.B. DuBois and an accomplished writer, organizer and committed socialist in her own right, was in Ghana at the time of the founding of the First Republic and the inauguration of the NCGW and the AAWC. She would praise the role of women in Ghana during this period in order to highlight the achievements under the Nkrumah government.

DuBois stated in an address before the Women Association of the Socialist Students Organizations in Ghana, that “the advancement of Ghanaian women in recent years have been amazing and now with ten women Parliamentarians in Republican Ghana, this country had achieved what took Europe centuries to accomplish.” (Evening News, July 14, 1960)

In supporting the then movement towards socialism in Ghana, DuBois recounted her travels to the People’s Republic of China and the achievements of women since the revolution of 1949. She claimed in her address that “the women of Socialist China were advanced in all spheres of useful activity and enjoyed equal rights with men politically, economically, culturally, socially and domestically.”

Women would play pioneering roles in other African liberation struggles in Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Algeria, Tanzania, Guinea, Nigeria and Sierra Leone as well as many additional states. At the present time, the African Union has declared the year 2010 as the beginning of the “Decade of Women" (2010-2010) on the Continent.

Gender Equality and the Continuing Struggle Against Imperialism

At the recent annual summit of the African Union, the overall theme of the gathering was initially focused on the status of maternal health and children. As a result of the United States imperialist influence, there was an attempt by the Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni to redirect the emphasis of the Summit to carrying out Washington’s foreign policy objectives in Africa.

The social dynamics of the world economic crisis has impacted Africa and forced an estimated 50 million people into poverty. The continuing influence of capitalist economic policies on Africa are a direct result of the subordinate integration of the Continent’s productive forces to the imperatives of the multi-national corporations and financial institutions.

In order for the challenges of gender inequality and the impoverishment of women and children in Africa to be fully addressed, there must be a struggle waged against western domination and the transcending of capitalist relations of production. This struggle in Africa can be supported by anti-imperialist forces in the industrialized states when they demand that their own imperialist governments honor the right of self-determination and sovereignty for the oppressed and post-colonial nations.