In a Cabinet reshuffle last Friday, Norway reached a milestone in the representation of women in government. The country’s top three political positions – Prime Minister, Finance minister, and Foreign minister – are now occupied by women.
At the
parliamentary level, many more countries have made progress, with Rwanda
having the most women in its lower house in the world, at 62 per cent.
While these developments hold out the promise that countries, including Kenya, which still are struggling to bring the representation of women in politics close to their percentages of national populations, could close the gap, a bigger hurdle exists for women.
That
hurdle is how their place in history is told. They hardly exist in
stories. In recent months, we have seen a big push to improve the
coverage of women in the most influential online encyclopedia,
Wikipedia.
Within Wikipedia
itself, white women are better covered than women of colour. And when
you break it down further, African Americans in history, are covered far
better than African women.
OBSCURE FIGURES
I
have been doing a project of both the famous and obscure figures in
African popular history over the last year, and I was gobsmacked to
realise that thoroughbred horses are better profiled in terms of depth
than African women on Wikipedia. But you have to love the Internet. It
never runs out of surprises.
I was researching Tanzanian nationalist Bibi Titi Mohamed (1926-2000), when an article about her on African Feminist Forum
answered a thousand other questions about why women get shortchanged in
history – and the structures that enabled them to contribute more to
politics.
The article says
that the bulwark of Julius Nyerere’s independence party, the Tanganyika
African National Union (Tanu), were women. In an insight that also
explains politics elsewhere in Africa, it notes that because at that
time hardly any women were employed in the colonial government or formal
work places (companies, etc.), and worked mostly in the informal sector
that the State - then and today – had little control over, the cost of
political activism was lower for them.
ACCUMULATING
The
men feared or hesitated because they would be sacked from their jobs.
Thus the very factors that excluded women from being employed in the
public and private sectors, and thus from benefiting from
accumulating
bureaucratic capital; and where information about them could be recorded
and photographs taken (making it easier to track and arrest), also made
them a more revolutionary force.
In
West Africa, for this reason, market women became a potent force,
organising several demonstrations against colonial governments. (The
lesson for governments is that if you want to prevent revolution, reduce
the size of the informal sector).
However,
women tended to be treated as a mob, and rarely were their leaders
singled out. Or if they were, there was hardly any biographic data. Thus
when you read history, many birth dates of women in African history are
not known, but that of the majority of men is recorded.
A
typical example is Mary Muthoni Nyanjiru, who has been credited with
what some scholars suggest was probably first non-violent protest
recorded in Kenya.
PROTEST
In
March of 1922, Nyanjiru led a protest to Kingsway Police Station (today
Central Police Station) in Nairobi, demanding the release of
nationalist leader Harry Thuku.
The
police fired on the crowd, killing 250 people in what some patriotic
Kenyan bloggers and historians have termed a “massacre”. There are even
dramatic reports of white settlers at the nearby Norfolk Hotel joining
in the shooting of the “natives”.
Nyanjiru
was among the first to be killed. Her story has been celebrated in song
and theatre, and she is indeed considered a hero. Besides the events of
March 16, her profile on Wikipedia notes: “Little is known of
Nyanjiru’s life, save that she was a Kikuyu woman.”
HARRY THUKU
While
there are books and dozens of articles on Harry Thuku, I couldn’t find a
profile of Nyanjiru’s that is even 1,000 words long. And there are no
photographs.
Just artist’s illustrations. No such problem for Harry Thuku, in whose name she died.
In
this digital age, this backdrop is one of the reasons I am sympathetic
to all those socialites and women who flaunt their “provocative”
photographs on Facebook and Instagram.
In
a strange sort of way, they are contributing to correcting the
historical visual injustice of a century when women weren’t
photographed.
The author is publisher of Africapedia.com and explainer site Roguechiefs.com. Twitter@cobbo3
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