Gendering Ethnicity in African Women’s Lives

Description

Do African men and women think about and act out their ethnicity in different ways? Most studies of ethnicity in Africa consider men’s experiences, but rarely have scholars examined whether women have the same idea of what it means to be, for example, Igbo or Tswana or Kikuyu. Or, studies have invoked the adage “women have no tribe” to indicate a woman’s loss of ethnicity as she marries into her husband’s community. This volume engages directly the issue of women’s ethnicity and makes stimulating contributions to debates about how and why women’s movements have a unifying role in African political organization and peace movements. Drawing on extensive field research in many different regions of Africa, the contributors demonstrate in their essays that women do make choices about the forms of ethnicity they embrace, creating alternatives to male-centered definitions—in some cases rejecting a specific ethnic identity in favor of an interethnic alliance, in others reinterpreting the meaning of ethnicity within gendered domains, and in others performing ethnic power in gendered ways. Their analysis helps explain why African women may be more likely to champion interethnic political movements while men often promote an ethnicity based on martial masculinity. Bringing together anthropologists, historians, linguists, and political scientists, Gendering Ethnicity in African Women’s Lives offers a diverse and timely look at a neglected but important topic. Jan Bender Shetler is a professor of history at Goshen College. She is the author of Imagining Serengeti and Telling Our Own Stories: Local Histories from South Mara, Tanzania. Introduction: Women's alternative practices of ethnicity in Africa / Jan Bender Shetler -- Part One. Forming interethnic alliances. Gendering the history of social memory in the Mara Region, Tanzania, as an antidote to "tribal" history / Jan Bender Shetler -- Living ethnicity: gender, livelihood, and ethnic identity in Mozambique / Heidi Gengenbach -- Part Two. Constructing new forms of identity. Re-reading the 1835 "Fingo Emancipation": women and ethnicity in the colonial archive / Poppy Fry -- New African marriage and panethnic politics in segregationist South Africa / Meghan Healy-Clancy -- Women and non-ethnic politics in East Africa, 1934-1947 / Ethan R. Sanders -- Part Three. Promoting gendered domains of ethnicity. Gender and the limits of "Ndebeleness, " 1910-1960s: Abezansi churchwomen's domestic and associational alliances / Wendy Urban-Mead -- "Women were not supposed to fight": the gendered uses of martial and moral Zuluness during uDlame, 1990-1994 / Jill E. Kelly -- Sorting and suffering: social classification in post-genocide Rwanda / Jennie E. Burnet -- Part Four. Performing gendered ethnic power. Matriliny, masculinity, and contested gendered definitions of ethnic identity and power in nineteenth-century southeastern Nigeria / Ndubueze L. Mbah -- Shaming men, performing power: female authority in Zimbabwe and Tanzania on the eve of colonial rule / Heike I. Schmidt -- Muslim women legislators in postcolonial Kenya: between gender, ethnicity, and religion / Ousseina D. Alidou -- Afterword: Reflections on gender, ethnicity, and power / Dorothy L. Hodgson.