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Women in Africa's 'new' wars
Editors' blog
Friday October 2nd 2009
In the wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia, women took a prominent role in the fighting, the surviving, and the peacemaking. Yet that, says Professor Amina Mama, has been inadequately documented. Weekly editor Natalie Bennett has been hearing her views
Friday October 2nd 2009
A young female soldier sits outside Monrovia in 2003, just before a rebel attack on the Liberian capital. Photograph: Chris Hondros/Getty Images
One aspect of working at the Weekly that can sometimes be hard to take is dealing day after day, week after week, month after month, with the world's horrors. Over recent years the paper has particularly focused on the violence against women in recent African wars, and the question, spoken or unspoken, that often floats around the office is "why?"
There's no simple answer, of course, but when I learned that Professor Amina Mama, the first chair in gender studies at the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town, was speaking at the London School of Economics, just down the road from the office, it seemed a good chance to get further insight into the horrors of Africa's "new" wars, particularly from the perspective of women.
Her talk included a comparison of the Biafran war with the recent Sierra Leone and Liberian conflicts. The last two, she said, in an age in which the financing of war had been externalised and decentralised, with public sectors shrunk and massive expansion of the shadow economies, had been very different events, and the role of women in the war had been greatly amplified.
Focusing on the RUF (Revolutionary United Front) in the Sierra Leone conflict, she noted that 20-30% of the fighters had been female, while about 25% had been children, almost half of them girls. How did they survive? She cited one study which found that 44% of them had military training and carried weapons. When asked about their roles, 72% said they had been cooks, 68% porters, 60% wives, 44% food producers, 40% messengers, 22% spies (two particularly dangerous roles) and 14% diamond-mine workers.
That showed almost all had been involved in multiple capacities, the professor said, a complexity that post-war reconstruction efforts had failed to acknowledge. "These girls are not showing up for demobilisation. There is not a proper understanding of what is happening to them."
She drove home the reality and danger of their lives by noting that child wives had often been left in charge of compounds and bases, and run reconnaissance drives and raids, yet their roles had been entirely dependent on their liaisons. "If they fell from favour, they were easily sent to the front and disposed of."
In Liberia, Mama said, the role of women in the war had been poorly documented, but there was evidence of their role in the "coping economy" - they had been responsible for feeding their families, developing new methods of food harvesting and processing, and new trading routes.
Yet after the war, there was a concerted effort at "redomestication", and aid efforts had utterly failed to understand the roles women had taken and the skills they had developed. "Women who drove trucks, wielded weapons and ran major trading networks are being offered help to establish microenterprises in hairdressing or tailoring. Programmes show a real lack of imagination. In a region like West Africa this is outrageous; there is a huge cultural capital of skills that is not being utilised."
Women had also played an important role in peacemaking, Mama said, citing particularly the Mano River Women's Peace Union, which did a lot of dangerous, difficult work, talking to warlords out in the bush, getting them to meetings and brokering agreements. Yet after the transition to the formal peace process, the women had been ignored and had to struggle to be included. "It is an old story, but still distressing," the professor said.
She asked: "Why do women resist war?" Her answer was that there were no positives in it for them - there was no room for glory. Women fighters could become notorious, but not famous and respected, she said, citing Black Diamond in Liberia.
On rape as a weapon of war, Mama said that academia had yet to develop a deep analysis of why this had become so central to many conflicts: "We need a deeper understanding of gender, ethnicity and the fomenting of social divisions."
Professor Mama is a founding editor of the first continental academic gender studies journal Feminist Africa, established in 2002.
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