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SUMMARY:Contesting Compliance\; Tales of ‘Women's Empowerment’ from Ni
 neteenth-Century SW Nigeria  - Professor Andrea Cornwall\, University of S
 ussex
DTSTART:20150126T170000Z
DTEND:20150126T183000Z
UID:TALK56978@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Judith Weik
DESCRIPTION:This Talk is part of the Centre of African Studies Lent term S
 eminar Series: Gender in Africa \n\nDevelopment agencies’ representation
 s of women’s empowerment often make use of the iconic image of brightly 
 clad African women\, cultivating a field\, holding out cupped hands full o
 f grain\, carrying babies\, buckets and firewood. Meshing together the ima
 ge of the African woman as the ‘poor\, powerless and pregnant’ (Win 20
 04) object of development’s rescue and uplift\, with a narrative that po
 sitions such women as ‘agents of change’ (DFID 2012)\, these portrayal
 s invoke and affirm the myth of development\, and with it\, the idea that 
 African women need developing - and that it is development’s interventio
 ns that can “empower” them. The empowered African woman evoked in deve
 lopment agencies’ narrative is supremely virtuous\; she is the quintesse
 ntial good woman\, whose selfless devotion to her family ensures that what
 ever money she is able to make goes on furthering her children’s educati
 on and well-being\, and whose sexuality is contained within heterosexual m
 onogamous marriage. Women who fail to correspond with this idealised image
  of maternal altruism and diligence appear not as anti-heroines\, but as v
 ictims\, trafficked into hopeless sexual slavery or forced into lives as p
 rostitutes by poverty and lack of opportunity. The very possibility that w
 omen might use some of their 'empowerment' to make choices that take them 
 away from the normative roles carved out for them by development agencies 
 is barely even countenanced. Setting understandings of the situation of Af
 rican women purveyed by contemporary development agencies in the longer du
 rée of the colonisation of mores and mindsets by their imperial forebears
  offers an interesting perspective on today’s discourses of the empowerm
 ent of the African woman. This paper looks back more than a century to a s
 eries of scenes of encounters between women and the colonial administrator
  who first set up shop in the town of Badagry\, in what was to become SW N
 igeria under colonial rule\, to whom they and their estranged husbands cam
 e to petition for a dissolution of their marital arrangements. Working wit
 h the transcripts of these cases\, transcribed into the first official civ
 il record book of the colonial administration\, and with subsequent cases 
 brought to courts some miles further into the interior\, I explore the way
 s in which women contested compliance and manifested an 'empowerment' that
  is rarely attributed to the contemporary African woman in development nar
 ratives. 
LOCATION:Seminar Room S1 Alison Richard Building\, 7 West Road\, Cambridge
  CB3 9DT
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