How a Cameroonian university is unintentionally producing African feminists, and why it must be more intentional

Abstract

Since its proliferation in the 1970s, Women's Studies programmes have been investigated for their potential impact on students, particularly their capacity to rouse feminist awareness and identity. From such investigations, an array of scholarship attests to the remarkable impact of Women Studies programmes in raising feminist-critical consciousness and igniting activism in students. However, the majority of such studies are American-centric and their findings generally depict Western/liberal-feminist impressions. This paper reports a 2015 empirical study that engaged graduates and the (then) current students of the University of Buea’s Department of Women and Gender Studies in a similar investigation of the influence of feminist studies. The research aimed to verify if these students/graduates would recount experiencing a similar impact of their academic programme given the more conservative Cameroonian contexts and determine if this Women Studies programme, being African-based, enabled distinctly African-feminist impressions. The study found that the informational influence of the department’s undergraduate programme (though recognisable) was compromised by the normative influence of the Cameroonian context in which it is taught and the department’s inadequate commitment to African-feminist thought. Responses revealed that participants struggle to reconcile what they study and how they are socialised resulting in varying degrees of convenient feminist ideation. Surprisingly, in compromising between their informational and normative influences, participants unintentionally portrayed African-feminist leanings as put forward by African-feminist ideologies like Complementarianism, Stiwanism, Nego-feminism, etc. This paper discusses the implications of the study’s findings with regards to both the broadness of African-feminist thought and the teaching of women’s studies in this context.