Are Women in a Position to Challenge Male Power Structures in Africa?

The past months of haggling and compromising in the multi-party negotiations process have finally yielded a transitional constitution to steer Africans into the future (Hay, 53). Though the Transitional Executive Council itself does not formally deal with land issues? two issues dealt with in the constitution have important implications for black women - and black people more generally - living and working on the land in the rural areas. Both issues were intensely contested and debated? and resolved only after demonstrations and representations from organised rural communities? and much lobbying and caucusing in the negotiation forum. Their eleventh hour resolution has significantly set the principles and parameters of a land reform policy (Alavi, 33).

The first issue was the question of the restoration of land to those dispossessed by apartheid. An earlier proposed property rights clause was opposed by rural representatives as entrenching existing property rights and preventing the possibility of the new government undertaking land redistribution and restitution programmes. The positive outcome of the negotiations on this issue means that land redistribution is now rendered possible (though its extent is by no means determined or assured). Further? the bill of rights includes a clause that guarantees restoration of land rights to those whose land was taken away under apartheid schemes (Alavi, 33).

The second issue (of more direct relevance to women) concerns the constitutional relationship between the principle of gender equality and the status of custom? traditional law and culture? aspects of which are inherently patriarchal. It is the latter which presently organises rural women's access to land (as is described further below) (Alavi, 33). The debate on this issue was one of the most contentious in the closing days of the negotiating process. Traditional leaders were demanding the constitutional recognition of custom and traditional law? with its gender inequality unchallenged. Organised women's groups were insisting that gender equality should supersede customary law and culture in the bill of rights (Hay, 53). In the end? the women's caucus within the multi-party negotiating forum? together with strong support from women's groups (including the Rural Women's Movement) won the day. The gender equality provision means? for rural women? the possibility of gaining independent access to land? that is? unmediated by their relationships to male kin.

Given the historic and contemporary centrality of both land dispossession and constraining patriarchal social relations to the onerous conditions of rural production and survival faced by black women in Africa? these negotiated rights signify important - potentially momentous - victories. But the really critical challenge is posed by the translation of these abstract rights into practical? beneficial changes in the conditions of rural women's daily lives (Alavi, 33). How this might happen involves consideration of the ways that land reform policy might address the issues faced by rural women? and of political organisation amongst of rural women? necessary to continue pushing for gender-relevant agrarian reform.

Any generalized notion of "rural women" is a fiction of course. There is no such ...