Life Slowly Improves : Women in Africa: Bias and Burdens

At the edge of a blacktop road verging on highland fields of tea, five Kenyan women sat waiting for the bus to the city. Sacks of beans, cabbage and corn, tied with bits of broken rope, waited with them.

Far in the distance lay the cluster of buildings, the center of Nairobi, dominated by the cylindrical tower of the Kenyatta Conference Center, where this week several thousand people are gathering under auspices of the United Nations to assess the progress of women in the last decade.

The Kenyan women were not on their way to offer their views on the issue. They were going to town to sell their produce so they could feed their children. In a sense, that was testimony enough on the role of women in Africa.

Cooking and Farming

“I do everything,” said Lucy Njeri, 35, the mother of six children. “I wake up at 6 o’clock, I make the fire, I make the breakfast, I feed the cow, I milk the cow, I send the children to school and then I work in the shamba (farm plot). I grow maize, beans, bananas and yams. I dig, I plant, I weed. I get the water. We do not have a tap in our village. The water is one kilometer away.”

Njeri’s friends and neighbors, sitting around her on the grassy bank by the side of the road, nodded and laughed as she spoke, her litany of labor familiar to them all. They found it entertaining to hear her rattle it off, machine-gun fashion, her brow furrowed with irritation as she spoke.

All around, the life of rural Africa--merely a long look away from the city below--moved past: a young woman, hugely pregnant, with a barefoot toddler holding her hand and another child, too young to walk, riding her hip; an old woman carrying a load of firewood that must have come close to equaling her bodyweight, while her husband followed four paces behind, carrying only his walking stick.

Too Routine to Notice

The women waiting for the bus found it all too routine to notice, until it was pointed out.

“It is not a man’s work to carry firewood,” explained Mary Nyambura, 25, as the old woman plodded along silently, her torso nearly parallel to the ground under the weight.

And why not? she was asked.

“We don’t know,” Njeri said.

“We are just following what we found,” Nyambura said.

What African women have found--what they have inherited--are burdens that might crush people of less resilient fiber.

The women of Africa produce between 60% and 80% of the food grown on the continent. They haul the water, carry the wood, till the soil.

They are poorly educated, if educated at all. In Kenya, a country that is better off than most, 70% of the women are illiterate--more than twice the illiteracy rate for men.

Africa’s women give birth to children at the highest rate in the world, contributing to a 3.1% annual population growth on the continent as a whole and reaching as high as 4% a year in Kenya and Zimbabwe.

A high percentage of them undergo clitoridectomies in ceremonies so primitive and brutal as to be beyond imagining in the rest of the world, making millions of African women mute vessels for sexual satisfaction (and mechanisms for reproduction) for the men who dominate their lives.

In many cases, they are regularly beaten by their men and are turned out if they complain.

In most African marriages, the man is expected to have girlfriends--as many as he can afford--while the woman is expected to remain faithful. In most countries in Africa, she can be divorced without a settlement from her husband.

In general, whatever her value as a beast of burden for the African family, the female in Africa is regarded as an inferior being.

‘Feed the Boys First’

The birth of a male, in most African societies, is a matter for special congratulation and, as workers in most of the refugee camps in Africa will attest, the death of a daughter is a tragedy more easily borne than the death of a son.

“If there isn’t enough food to go around,” noted a Swedish nurse working among Tuareg refugees in Mali, “they’ll always feed the boys first.”

It is a pattern repeated across a continent burdened by deepening poverty, increasing hunger and diminishing resources. Where the resources are limited, the bulk of them are reserved for males. In Kenya, there are university places available for fewer than 1% of the country’s secondary school graduates. Of the 6,682 students at Nairobi University last year, 1,489--22%--were women.

And yet, there is perceptible advancement in the status of women in Africa, however retrograde it may seem to women and men of more modernized cultures. A little more than a decade ago, the proportion of women enrolled at the University of Nairobi was 15%.

More Enter Job Market

“Women are making advances here,” said Mercy Anyoka, 29, a supervising clerk at a Nairobi bank. “I know more women who are entering the job market and are advancing. But you have to understand that most of our society is rural, and in the rural areas the old values are prevailing. There, it will take more time.”

Even in the rural areas, the effectiveness of women, drawn together in Kenya’s powerful Mandeleo ya Wanawake (Women’s Progress Movement), is becoming more significant. For example, dozens of foreign-sponsored development projects--using money from both government and non-government sources--have focused on rural women’s organizations. There are now about 8,000 of them in the country.

“We simply find the women’s organizations the most effective groups in the country,” one Western aid official said. “They are committed. They work hard. They get things done. And we bypass the government bureaucracies, eliminate a lot of corruption and get the money out where it does some good.”

Through their Mandeleo groups, Kenya’s rural women have concentrated mainly on projects to make money--handicraft cooperatives, food marketing cooperatives--but they have also set programs for education, medical care and even informal savings and loan associations.

Working together, they have raised money to construct their own markets, build schools, dig wells, buy trucks to haul produce and, in general, to spread the word and set an example for their neighbors. The word must be spreading. About 300,000 Kenyan women (out of a rural female population of about 8 million) belong to an active Mandeleo organization.

Throughout rural Africa, women have always dominated the marketplace. In West Africa, particularly, market women have been regarded as a powerful economic force.

In recent years, with Ghana’s economy in wreckage, Ghanaian market women have provided virtually the only commerce in the nation and were much maligned in the process.

After taking over the government of the country in his second coup in 1981, Flight Lt. Jerry J. Rawlings launched a campaign against the market women. He accused them of price gouging and had their main market in the capital of Accra bulldozed to the ground.

But the gesture was symbolic. The market women simply moved along the surrounding sidestreets, and their power remains--only slightly diminished.

Still, women are virtually non-existent in the councils of power in Africa. Clara Oshinulu, a Nigerian representative of the African-American Institute in Lagos, says the result is the woeful standard of progress on the entire continent.

“Women are being left out in policy, planning and managerial levels,” she said. “Therefore, there is tremendous human wastage. Progress is retarded. People ruling on this continent equate women with physical labor, and they forget we have a brain.”

Bola Kuforiji, an executive of a Lagos manufacturing firm who was recently appointed president of a major Nigerian bank, sees things in a more optimistic light. “There is hardly a field of endeavor,” she said, “where you do not find Nigerian women.”

Nevertheless, she added: “Nigerian men are no different from men all over the world--in other words, it is difficult. But once you prove yourself, show that you have ability, integrity and can perform effectively on the job, your male counterparts respect you.”

Kuforiji’s assessment, however, comes from the perspective of success--still a long way out of reach for 175 million African women.

Politics, for example, is a male dominion in Africa. Of the 170 seats in the Kenyan Parliament, three are held by women (two of them appointed by the president). Thirteen years ago, there were two women members of Parliament.

Basic Concerns

Here in Kiambu, where the women sit beside the road waiting for the bus, the concerns are more basic.

Even the question of wife-beating is not all that important, the women said.

Mary Nyambura shrugged it off. “If they are annoyed, they beat you,” she said.

Did her husband beat her?

“So many times,” she answered.

Why didn’t she leave him?

“Because I love him. Besides, when he does it, it is only because he is annoyed. It is not important.”

What is important is that Lucy Njeri (whose husband has not had a regular job in eight years) needs 1,850 shillings (about $120) a year to keep her oldest son in school. She has so far come up with 1,350 shillings, and her son was sent home from school recently until she comes up with the remaining 500. That is the issue on her mind at the moment.

For Nyambura, it is feeding her two children. That, she indicated, is woman’s fundamental problem.

“We are searching for our children’s food, struggling for our children’s lives,” she said. “What else is there?”