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387 15 The Ideology And Political Economy Of Gender: Women And Land In Nso’ MIRIAM GOHEEN These are trying times in Cameroon as in much of sub-Saharan Africa. Per capita incomes throughout the subcontinent have fallen continuously during the 1980s while prices have increased dramatically. Economic performance and living standards are now significantly worse than in the 1970s (commonwealth Secretariat 1989). In rural Cameroon, the current economic crisis and its consequences are evident in the routine of daily life. Posters in the banks portray an industrious ant piling up savings while admonishing bank patrons to do the same as a prophylactic against the more disastrous effects of the Crise Economique. Women’s wrappers are worn and faded, their voices tired and urgent as they gather around cooking fires to share gossip about market prices and strategies on how best to sell dear and buy cheap to maximize time and money. Taxi parks are crammed full of young boys jostling each other in search of the occasional odd job or just passing time-boys who in better times would be sitting in the classroom--while in the bars men drink palm wine in place of bottled beer and regale each other with financial hard-luck stories, complaining of the salaries and coffee money owed them for the past six months or eight months or year. High prices, low incomes, long waits for salaries and wages already earned: the economic crisis has cast a shadow on the fortunes of most people in Nso’ in western Cameroon. It has settled most heavily on the lives of poorer farmers and women (categories which substantially overlap) and those who depend on them. The importance of women’s informal sector earnings and of crops produced-for consumption to total household income has increased dramatically as have demands on female time and labour. Higher  This chapter was first published in Christina H. Gladwin, ed., structural Adjustment and African Women Farmers (Gainesville, Florida: University of Florida Press, 1991), pp.23956 and is reproduced here by kind permission of the author.  388 prices paid for agricultural products have not increased real rural household income since the markup is accompanied by higher marketing costs, and higher prices for essential manufactured goods and for services such as education and health care. While most men can confine themselves to income-generating pursuits, most women, in addition to being heavily involved in food production and assuming the burden of provisioning the household, take prime responsibility as home managers, child bearers, and caretakers of children and the elderly (Commonwealth Secretariat 1989). Women have borne the brunt of the economic crisis; it is they who have had to find the means for families to survive. Public policy and gender It is unsettling and ironic that national economic and agricultural policy favours elite farmers at the expense of small rural producers, the majority of whom are women. Women’s work in the food sector is a major source of rural family welfare. Furthermore, women’s sales of surplus food represent by far the major source of Cameroon’s commercial food supply (Guyer 1987). Yet arguably, the policies of Cameroon’s current one-party state can best be understood as an attempt to consolidate political hegemony by meeting the interests of the capitalist, professional and upper-level bureaucratic and military classes at the expense of rural smallholders in general and women farmers in particular (Ntangsi 1987, Koopman [Henn] 1989). Agricultural policy, including land allocation and acquisition, is seriously biased in favour of the urban and governmental elite rather than rural smallholders (Koopman [Henn] 1989, Goheen 1988b). Although they respond more quickly and efficiently and positively to new market opportunities by increasing food production than do men, women food farmers are virtually never included in policy discussions and their interests are rarely if ever given serious consideration (Koopman [Henn] 1989). This paper is an attempt to explain why this is true, in particular with regard to access to land, and why in the long run it is such bad policy for this to be so. Ideology regarding gender categories has been a primary stumbling block to women’s access to resources, particularly to land, in the current political economy. The cultural categories of gender in Nso’ today, as in the past, link farming-female-food as a gender marker. The designation of women as primary food farmers and providers has sometimes been problematic but it has until recently effectively encouraged a relative equality and complementarity between male...

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