Placing African women's history and locating gender

Abstract

African women, whether as subjects or objects (and to a lesser extent as authors) of history, are no longer invisible in African historiography. Despite continuing lapses in awareness,' invisibility is no longer the problem. Several (more or less historical) anthologies have been published since Denise Paulme's ahistorical one of I963 (1960), and the number of monographs and dissertations focusing on the history of women, their social roles and their involvement in major episodes and themes of African history is growing. Detailed studies now exist on the Muslim women of Mombasa (Strobel I979), Ga women traders of Accra (Robertson i987), elite women of Lagos (Mann 1983), Nairobi prostitutes (White I983a and b), working-class women of the Zambian Copperbelt (Parpart I983, I986a, i986b), Shona spirit mediums and peasants (Schmidt I987), and African and European women of Johannesburg (Gaitskell 1979, i981, I982, I983). The themes of women and work, women and class, women and slavery, women and social and economic change, widows, and women and law have all been treated in anthologies. This paper will review the kinds of questions that have been posed, the sources used, the periods emphasized, the vocabulary and social theory used, and the cultural representations of women which have been created. One question here is the kind of visibility which has been given to women, the images created, the representations made and the silences and lacunae that remain. The other is when and how gender has been used as a category of historical analysis and if these same (or other) studies are contributing to an understanding of how African history has been shaped and mediated by gender. The way historians imagine historiography is a cue to how they see their own work, the kinds of questions they ask, the approaches, methods and sources they use, and their wishes and prophecies for the future of their elected sphere. Most telling is how they mark and assume the boundaries and internal divisions of their embraced domain and how they situate it within like and unlike historiographical trends. The expanding literature on African women has twice been reviewed by historians of African women.