WOMEN IN PUBLIC LIFE

So great has been the change in women’s participation in public life in the modem world that it is all too easy to infer, mistakenly, that women have now for the first time been released from some age-old subjection to men.

There is not wanting evidence that parts of Africa have seen a similar decline from an earlier time when women exercised greater public influence. It is possible to accept this without accepting in full * P. Manis, Family and Social Change in an African City, 1961, pp. 68, 75.

¹ Phoebe N. Ottenberg, ‘The Changing Economic Position of Women among the Afikpo Ibo’, in Continuity and Change in African Cultures, edited by Bascom and Herskovits, 1959, p. 208.

¹ Stenton, op. cit., p. 13. * Stenton, op. cit., pp. 2-3.

⁵ Denett, op. cit., pp. 246-7.

women’s status and law reform

Talbot’s report that the men’s societies among the Ibibio of south­eastern Nigeria were originally women’s societies penetrated and subverted in the past by male spies. Tn the old, old days Ibibio women were more powerful than the men...’* Talbot records the modem importance of the Ebere societies which ‘form the only safeguard of Ibibio women against the tyranny of their menfolk’.³ Among the Karnba of Kenya there were semi-formalized means by which women of a community enforced their views, even interfering with judicial proceedings with success:

‘When the women come thus in a body, beating their drums and carrying boughs in their hands, the men try to k^ep out of the way as much as possible.”

A conflicting picture of the decline of women’s influence is given by the Culwicks, who wrote of the Babena of Tanganyika:

‘Now and again a royal lady of outstanding ability might have her own village...

¹ Talbot, IPomen’s Mysteries of a Primitive People, 1915, p. 196 ff.

¹ Op. cit., p. 190.

¹ Lindblom, The Akamba in British East Africa, 2nd edition, 1920, p. 181.

* A. T. and G. M. Culwick, Ubena of the Rivers, 1935, pp. 138-9.

Of course it does not follow that women in general had a higher status because certain individual women were prominent in public life, even bolding positions of the highest prestige and power. England under Queen Victoria is a sufficient illustration of the fallacy of any such argument. In centralized societies in different parts of Africa, the queen-mother or queen-sister exercising real power is a recurrent phenomenon—found for example in Buganda, Ankole, Bunyoro, Ruanda and Toro.

‘The position of women in Bomu can be judged by the fact that certain ladies of the old Court of the Shehu (the Magira or official mother, and the Magiram. or official sister, who acted as the King’s advisers, though they were not necessarily actually related to him) attained such importance that the British at one time thought of ranking them as second class chiefs and giving them staves of office.’¹ African women have also been notable military leaders, such as for example Queen Zhinga of Matamba; she has her parallels in Aethelflaed of tenth century England and in Akkadevi and Umadevi a century or two later in India. The most amusing and vivid account of a nineteenth century woman chief in Africa is perhaps found in the description by Livingstone of his rebuff at the hands of Manenko?

In more modem times, the political significance of women’s views has sometimes been dramatically expressed, e.g. in the Aba Riots of 1929 in Eastern Nigeria:

‘In the history of the British administration of Nigeria, Ibo women have constituted a unique and unforgettable human force. When they changed almost overnight from apparently peaceable, home-loving villagers into a frenzied mob of thousands who in December, 1929, attacked administration authorities while their men stood passively by, they brought about a sudden interest in the previously little-known

¹ K. Oberg, ‘The Kingdom of Ankole in Uganda* in African Political Systems, edited by M. Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, 1940, pp. 160-1. See further, J. Roscoe, The Banyankok, 1923, chapter VI, pp. 59 ff.

¹ Douglas Botting, The Knights of Bomu, 1961, p.

³ See Livingstone’s Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa, 1857, pp. 275 ff. The relevant parts are included in Livingstone’s Travels, edited by the Rev. James I. Macnair, 1954, pp. 75 ff.

Ibo-speaking peoples. This uprising, precipitated by an unfounded rumour that Ibo women were to be taxed by the Government, arose from uneasiness on the part of the women concerning their economic position. •.’*

Another example of women’s resistance to unpopular administrative measures, in this case real ones, is found in the reaction of the Bafurutse women of South Africa to the extension to them and their sisters throughout the Union of the Reference Book system by an Act of 1952? Today women’s participation in public life may appear to be con­siderably less than that of men—except at elections.

‘It would shock the Ibibio peasant woman to hear that, in Switzerland, women do not have the vote. In many of the polling stations at die last election, more women voted than men.’^{[45] [46] [47]}

Yet this is not a field in which reform of the law would seem to be generally necessary. In the political slogan, ‘One man—one vote’, which has swept Africa in the past decade, the masculine has been taken to include the feminine. Women as well as men have been granted the right to vote, to stand for election and to have access to public offices. Where the progressive extension of the franchise, with property or financial qualifications at different stages, occurred, it was generally provided that married women could qualify to vote in right of their husband’s qualifications (although educational qualifications, where relevant, were of course personal). Some anomalous situations arose: in Buganda before 1962 women were eligible to stand as candidates in elections to the Lukiko but were not eligible to vote! Under the qualified franchise provisions in both the old and the new constitutions of Southern Rhodesia, which include inter alia qualifica­tions to vote based on income, it is provided that a married woman without a means qualification in her own right is deemed to have the same qualification as her husband: but ‘in the case of a man married under a polygamous system, only the wife to whom he has been married for the longest period may be deemed to have the same qualification as her husband’.^[48] In the Northern Region of Nigeria Islamic influence led to the franchise bring withheld from women.

ensuring that women receive political rights in the new Constitution now under preparation (formerly only men were enfranchised, except that some women graduates voted in the Graduates’ Consituency, which has now disappeared).

Despite the general equality of legal rights, women do not in fact appear to take an equal part in government. Thus the proportion of women members of parliaments is consistently low. In 1955 it was estimated that for most countries except the Soviet Union, where women made up 17 per cent of the Supreme Soviet, “the maximum percentage of women elected to the various parliaments seems to be about 5’.[49] Nevertheless, owing to the survival of local prejudices most strongly at village level, it may well be possible for women to play more significant roles in national than in local politics. Can the law assist in this situation? It can be provided that certain seats are reserved in the assembly for women members, or specially created for them, as was done in Ghana as a temporary expedient? The value of such a measure on a permanent basis is open to serious doubt; but apparently unequal measures are sometimes necessary to promote genuine ‘equality’.

The Convention on the Nationality of Married Women opened by the United Nations in 1957 provides in essence for separate nationality for wives, independent of that of their husbands. The British Nation­ality Act, 1948, of course, reverting to the earlier common law, is in accordance with this. It applies in dependent territories in Africa and independent Commonwealth states generally legislate in similar terms. The Economic and Social Council of the U.N. Organization has stated its belief that legal systems which allow the wife only a dependent domicile following that of her husband are incompatible with the principle of equality of the spouses set forward in the Declaration of Human Rights; it recommended that governments make provision to give wives the right to independent domicile? To effect this would women’s status and law reform

involve legislation in most common law African countries where the English rule which does not give such a right is normally followed.

The wish of the participants in the United Nations Seminar on the Participation of Women in Public Life, i960, that wives should have complete freedom to retain their own names or take those of their husbands, does not involve reform of the law in common law juris­dictions, which already afford this right (although the position in customary law is not clear).

With regard to women and the criminal law, the little evidence documented for African territories indicates that, as in other parts of the world, women commit far less crime than men. But for some crimes statistics may, for reasons peculiar to Africa, number more women than men among the offenders: such is the offence of illegally brewing beer, at least in Northern Rhodesia.¹