"Wicked" Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa (review)

Although African societies have been characterized as being male-dominated, recent research has by and large exploded representations of African women as always submissive to patriarchal authority and/or as generally conforming to conventional or normative behavior expectations. In this book, for instance, the authors amply demonstrate how women, individually and collectively, have "push[ed] the boundaries of 'acceptable' [or "respectable"] behavior," and in the process effected profound changes in the reconfiguration of gender relations of power in Africa: in essence, women "have always been key to processes of gender production and transformation" (p. 2).

Essentially, the contributions in this volume deal with women's challenges to society's prescribed norms of behavior. The authors examine how African women, literate or illiterate, have defied conventional norms or challenged expectations of "acceptable" behavior. When they do so, when they "disrupt the web of social relationships that define and depend on them as daughters, sisters, wives, mothers, and lovers" (p. 6), they are often stigmatized as being "wayward," "unruly," or "immoral," or, as in the case of prostitutes, are called "vagabonds." Regrettably, the editors and the contributors (except perhaps Okeke, p. 247) use the term wicked to characterize these seemingly defiant, or deviant, or "unruly" women. The editors explain: "Women are labeled 'wicked' when they transgress ideological boundaries such as cultural norms of 'respectability' or material boundaries such as legal restrictions on employment, residence, marriage, and divorce" (p. 8). Alternatively, "'wickedness' refers to a manifestation of feminine power whereby women purposefully and effectively challenge political, social, or cultural constraints on their behavior" (p. 6).

However defined, the term wicked, as an analytical construct, is, in my opinion, inappropriate, perhaps demeaning. The American Oxford Dictionary (1999), for instance, defines wickedness as "malicious," "evil," or "intended or intending to give pain." I therefore reject the attribution of African women's defiance or challenge of social codes of behavior as "wicked," on the grounds that women elsewhere, who ostensibly "transgress ideological boundaries" of conventional or acceptable expectations of behavior, are never labeled "wicked." For example, Euro-American suffragettes, female equal-rights advocates, proabortion activists, and abortionists themselves, are not stigmatized as "wicked." Because such a label tends, rightly or wrongly, to perpetuate the ugly image or stereotype of women in Africa, I would have liked that the editors and authors had avoided it!

There are fifteen chapters in the book, written by established and budding female scholars. Nigeria and Tanzania seem to have received greater coverage, with four and three chapters, respectively, yet other areas covered (one or two chapters each) include the Gambia, Ghana, Uganda, Lesotho, Niger, and Zambia. Obviously, the major concentration is on West and East Africa, mainly the English-speaking African countries. Except for Niger, which is French-speaking, there is no coverage whatsoever on the French- and Portuguese-speaking regions, but, as the editors explain, the selections were not arbitrary: "We would have liked to include more francophone and lusophone material, but we received very few proposals from those areas, despite our international call for papers" (p. xii). Does this explanation also apply to the noninclusion of North Africa?

On the whole, women's assertion of themselves, or defiance of societal norms, could be perceived, as the Lesotho female shebeen singer put it defiantly, as simply "taking care of business" (p. 1). Such behavior(s), manifested in the defiance of patriarchal authority, or in challenges to conventional or social codes, as the authors convincingly demonstrate, stem largely from changes in traditional or modern society. Thus, colonialism, socioeconomic changes, education, the growth of cities, civil wars (as in Nigeria), and so on are fully discussed, as being important factors that engendered women's assertion of autonomy. In the chapter "Women, Marriage, Divorce and the Emerging Colonial State in Abeokuta" (Nigeria), for example, Judith Byfield argues that political and economic changes following British colonial rule significantly undermined...