Cultural Confrontations, Women Navigation into Peace Process and the Role Lessons for Africa First Ladies

Abstract

Prejudiced gendered cultural arrangements have continued to either restrict or exclude contemporary Nigerian women in public space as in most Africa States. This is socially shaped by the dominant patriarchal authority across different Africa societies with Nigeria as no exception. Even with the Nigerian women’s feminist strives, little break through from these cultural arrangements have been meaningfully attained. The changing gender relations experience of women varied across different African contexts, yet in Nigeria, with the emergence of the Nigeria First Lady in 1984 and with successive Nigeria First Ladies, some significant penetration of women through these cultural arrangements was achieved. This was due to several campaigns for and by Nigerian women re-perception of themselves, re-orientation about their feminine personality and their societal gender status in different sectors of Nigeria societies as the economic, politics, education, arts, media-journalism, and technology and science. This increasing presence and participatory role-positions with power have however not extended significantly to formal peace processes. They have been left with little place in informal peace process. For the demanding need to expand the peace process for Nigerian women and Nigeria First Lady inclusion, this article present lessons of women from conflicts contexts such as Sudan, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Angola, Northern Ireland, where women were able to break through prejudiced gender cultural institutions and behaviors that had barred the women from peace processes. This was attained through their collective resilience to redefine the peace processes for women inclusion since they realized women were most victims of such violent conflict contexts. Such lessons can be capacity development strength for Nigeria women and other Africa women with which they can adopt manipulative persuasion to penetration prejudiced gendered cultural arrangements for women inclusion in formal peace process in Nigeria and they rest of Africa. With this background, this article is organized and presented in four sections with introduction as the first, successive Nigeria First Ladies: the tension between role idealism and realism as second politics of role struggle for public profile or role collaboration for peace action as third, and the lessons of women in mediation elsewhere for Nigeria and other Africa countries in security and peace approach as the fourth section.