Women and the Remaking of Politics in Southern Africa: Negotiating Autonomy, Incorporation, and Representation

Women and the Remaking of Politics in Southern Africa: Negotiating Autonomy, Incorporation, and Representation. By Gisela Geister. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2004. Pp. 240. $37.50/ £19.95/ euro28.00 / SEK 280 paper. In the 1990s women's representation in many Southern African parliaments significantly increased, and gender issues were forced into public debate. Gisela Geisler attempts to assess the significance and problems of changes in women's formal governmental participation and in policy, focusing on selected countries within the Southern African Development Community. The great strength of Geisler's work lies in her extensive interviews with women in politics. More than a hundred women shared their experiences and their evaluations of their parties, governments, and organizations with her, often in pithy and provocative ways, and she supplements these interviews with extensive culling of local newspapers during the 1990s for additional quotations. Her use of direct statements by African women activists produces lively, sometimes blowby-blow accounts in her chapters on the South African women's movement, on women's leagues/wings, on women's desks and ministries, on women's organizations and movements, and on women politicians. However, her chapter on nationalist and national liberation movements unfortunately tends to blur the differences between these two very different roads to political independence, and there, as in other chapters, we read more about failures than successes. Geisler conveys women's determination to make changes and obviously wishes them well, but her emphasis on "results to date" rather than on the direction of change produces a fairly negative picture. From this perspective, women's leagues or wings are captives of parties. Women's desks and gender machinery are underfunded, overextended, marginalized, and distrusted by activists. Women's organizations and movements (NGOs) recruit and encourage women to run for office and then complain that the women elected pursue only party lines but not "women's interests." Women's organizations maintain autonomy from political parties to promote gender issues, but lack unity. They primarily represent urban, professional women and have difficulty reaching rural women. Women in office complain that women's organizations don't support them once they are in office, or don't even support them with money for election, and claim that only they, through their parties, represent rural women. Her accounts of women's political struggles read well. But she tends to generalize in ways that leave out particular countries. Regarding the country I know the most about from my own twenty years of research, I kept writing "not in Botswana" in the margins: e.g., in Botswana, the Women's Desk worked closely with NGOs; women's wings of parties were not created during the anticolonial struggle, but only in the 1990s in response to pressures by women politicians and NGOs; and there is considerable overlap of membership and cooperation of women party activists, women in NGOs, and women in the national gender machinery, producing more cooperation than conflict. Missing, unexpectedly for an author who bases part of her claim to authenticity on her twenty years of experience in Southern Africa, is the political context of what being Frontline States has meant for gender policy within Southern Africa (e.g., ignoring security and refugee issues), or the significance of the anti-apartheid struggle for South African feminists' continued loyalties to the ANC or for evaluations of gender representation (e.g., simply counting the number of women in Parliament regardless of the politics of the parties they represent). Geisler's core chapters on women in politics provide much food for analysis, but unfortunately the quality of analysis does not match the quality of her narrative. Geisler is certainly right that more collaboration and cooperation would likely produce both happier women politicos and more gender-sensitive policies and enforcement. …