Women, colonial resistance, and decolonization: Challenging African histories

Abstract

This chapter critiques the androcentrism of African anticolonial narratives and explores how it distorts how scholars understand power and politics in Africa. Despite the extensive literature on African women's contributions to anticolonial resistance, they remain mostly absent from mainstream historical and political analyses of past and current African political landscapes. The chapter argues that this is rooted in African politics scholarship's stubborn lack of systematic consideration and investigation of women as agents in their own right throughout history. Using feminist International Relations scholarship, it explores the theoretical and historical underpinnings of women's erasure from narratives about the emergence of the modern African state. It also argues that the European social construction of gender imposed during the colonial encounter influenced which nationalist spaces of contestations were taken seriously and recorded during the independence process. Therefore, this chapter counters this theoretical gap with evidence of the various dimensions of female agency and their impacts during anticolonial struggles.