Amina Mama,
"Rethinking African Universities: Gender and Transformation"
(page 2 of 7)
The conceptualization of the universities that we proceeded from was
thus not limited to formal academic training function but included an
understanding of universities as institutions that produce and transmit
culture—and shape political and moral values, including gender
ideologies and identities. Universities do not simply turn out
engineers, computer scientists, architects, social scientists,
historians, philosophers and so on. Through what is often referred to as
the hidden curriculum, universities also produce men and women schooled
to be particular kinds of citizens and to uphold particular norms,
values, and assumptions.
Modern universities have only relatively recently begun to take
seriously their responsibilities to provide equally to both women and
men. Initially, the colonial colleges that preceded Africa's
universities were not designed to accommodate women in equal numbers,
even though they did not specifically exclude them. So it was that only
a handful of women attended the case study institutions during their
early years. There was little residential provision and few of the
necessary facilities. To name only the most obvious, women's toilets and
childcare facilities were often not provided, while recreational,
dining, and drinking facilities clearly reflected male sports and
leisure habits. While women's residences have been built and housing
policies adjusted in some cases, there are still many institutions at
which equal numbers of women could not be accommodated in the basic
structure and layout. Indeed, the ongoing struggles for more and better
accommodation, improved security lighting, sexual harassment policies,
maternity provision, childcare facilities, and for women faculty to be
given equal rights to campus accommodations, bear witness to this
fact.
Women who attended the Universities of Ibadan, Ghana, Addis Ababa,
and Cheikh Ant Diop from the 1950s to the 1970s described being treated
as "special"—rather like rare birds, with courtesy and chivalry. They
were not seen as posing any real threat to men's clear dominance, and
they were not always taken seriously as scholars. For example:
While there was never any doubt that the University of
Ghana would be co-educational, both its antecedents and early practices
marked it as a profoundly male space concerned with the creation of
modern African masculinities. The low numbers of female faculty have
improved slowly (Tsikata 2007, 30).
. . . These institutions have been places "of the new-men
for the new-men." In this way, African universities should not be seen
as static, gender-neutral spaces to which women have been benignly and
invisibly added. Rather, these spaces and places are intricately marked
with codes for man-as-thinker, man-as-aggressive-debater,
man-as-athlete, boys-becoming-men, etc. The addition of women to this
men's club is thus not only a statistical but also an extremely
meaningful social and symbolic exercise—which is by its very nature,
dynamic, challenging, and likely conflicted. It cannot be a coincidence
that the dominant position of men remains a quantitative fact of life in
African higher education (Barnes 2007, 12).
During the latter part of the twentieth century, the higher education
sector expanded across Africa as government responded to public demand
and increased the number of institutions from a handful of
colonially-bequeathed colleges to over 600 universities, not to mention
polytechnics, colleges of nursing, and other higher education
institutions. The "massification" of higher education meant that the
overall numbers of women on campus increased, and the disparities in
provision became more evident. Women began organizing to demand improved
conditions of service and more equal treatment during the 1980s (Bennett
2003). The push for gender equality in the universities did not occur in
a vacuum but was part and parcel of the rising feminist consciousness
across the developing world. Women's roles in African development were
increasingly articulated by the growing networks of gender activists, in
the context of the development crisis. The United Nations decade for
women was a product of this international movement that served to
further stimulate gender activism in scholarly arenas, including the
establishment of the initial women and gender studies courses and
research projects in Nigeria and Tanzania, respectively.
However, following the development crisis and the ensuing imposition
of structural adjustment programmes that constrained public spending,
the capacity and quality of African higher education has been severely
compromised, even as gender activism and scholarship have taken root on
campuses.
The African continent has entered the 21st century with the lowest
gross enrolment rates in the world and persisting gender disparities in
enrolment, staffing, and graduation statistics. In effect, the continent
faces the emergence of the "knowledge society" severely short of
highly-trained personnel, with the key institutions that might produce
them in a dire condition—and still characterized by the long-standing
patterns of gender inequality that we set out to investigate.
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