Student Life
For students, the campuses are key institutional sites for the production and reproduction of contemporary gender identities, sexual cultures, and practices. In the context of unquestioned heteronormativity, the widespread belief that women are on campuses to attract and find suitable husbands has persisted. With the “marriage market” becoming increasingly competitive, many women students perform domestic services such as ironing, washing clothes, and cooking for eligible male students. However, marital “success” is widely understood to be conditional on women not “over-qualifying” themselves on the academic front. High academic performance is viewed as “unattractive” to prospective male partners, as has also been reported by previous observers (see also Gaidzanwa 2001, Pereira 2007, and Manuh et al. 2007). The majority of women students also tend to avoid any kind of association with women’s groups, lest they be stigmatised as feminists and damage their prospects. Economic insecurities—not to mention intellectual and psycho-social insecurities—are implicated in the reportedly widespread sexual transactions occurring between young women and their senior male students and/or faculty members.
Faculty-student relations are imbued with gender dynamics that often include sexual overtones. Attention has been drawn to the commonality of sexual transactions between female students and male faculty, and the associated tensions. Sexual harassment and abuse appears to be commonplace on African campuses, whether or not it is named as such.
The prevalence of harassment—particularly of women refusing advances and invitations—also affects women. Interview data reveal that women students are subjected to verbal intimidation by their male counterparts, especially if they are regarded as being “too talkative”—if they dare to shine in the lecture halls and seminar rooms. The simple act of walking unescorted across campus, for example, to use the libraries in the evenings, is experienced differently by women than men.
The University of Addis Ababa has a history marked strongly by national political changes that are reflected in the gender and ethnic profile of the institution. Women students are subjected to labelling, sexual stereotyping, and sexual harassment that often traverses ethnic and class lines. The effect has been to induce fear in female students, who daily face the possibility of sexual assault, rape, and the threat of dismissal (or actual dismissal) from the university (Tadesse in African Gender Institute 2007). Sometimes refusal to accept sexual advances ends in disastrous situations. For instance, a girl by the name of Sosina Berhe was killed by a male classmate when she refused to go out with him (Tadesse in African Gender Institute 2007, 10).
The Ethiopian researchers estimate that over 90% of incidents go unreported. Women students fearing reprisals prefer to seek protection from male students sharing their ethnic or regional background. The interplay of class, ethnic, and sexual politics is manifest in the attrition rates experienced by women students, and exacerbated by male students derogatorily referring to all women students as “the five P’s” by which they mean “poor, peasant, preparatory programme participants.”
There has been concerted policy activism on sexual harassment on several campuses in recent years, and this has illuminated the difficulties of developing and implementing effective policy strategies for the time being; women who attempt to resist harassment are likely to be threatened, humiliated, and stigmatised (Bennett 2005).
In the context of neoliberal economic policies that reduce subsidies to students, the income disparities between richer and poorer students are intensifying rather than diminishing, with gendered consequences for student livelihood options.
Other challenges that particularly affect women arise from the pervasive and often deeply conservative religious discourses arising from the Islamic and Christian fundamentalist movements currently dominating many campuses. Odejide (2007) details the way in which religious associations have replaced the previous secular tutorial system on the Ibadan campus, to such an extent that not being part of one fellowship or another is likely to impact academic performance.
The case study of the University of Ibadan looked at the gender implications of the growing prevalence of religious fellowships on the campus. This is a reflection of a wider national context in which transnational religious movements have flourished in Nigeria, with large swathes of the populace joining either Islamic fundamentalist or Christian evangelical movements, deepening religious divisions and conflicts in recent times. At UI, over 37% of students are currently registered with religious bodies. These not only serve evangelical and pastoral functions but have grown to fill the gap left by the collapse of the tutorial system—and largely displaced more secular forms of student association and academic support. The study found that the religious associations on the University of Ibadan campus not only espouse highly conservative gender ideologies but also serve disciplinary and social regulatory functions that see their members exercising surveillance over women’s behaviour and comportment, including their dress styles.1 Religious fundamentalism, both Christian and Islamic, has taken root in the associational life of students, it takes the form of deeply conservative gender norms that exclude women students from leadership and infantilize them.
Women students continue to be widely perceived as “quarrelsome, less academically gifted than the male students; as shallow thinkers, and as malicious . . .” (Odejide 2007, 54).
- Indeed, dress codes have since generated nation-wide controversy, as a result of a woman Senator’s attempt to introduce a bill that would have inscribed these in law, had the women’s movement not put up public resistance this year (2008). [↩]
