‘A proper woman, in the African tradition’: The construction of gender and nationalism in Wangari Maathai’s autobiography Unbowed

Abstract

'A proper woman, in the African tradition': The construction of gender and nationalism in Wangari Maathai's autobiography Unbowed This article discusses how Wangari Maathai's life experiences narrated in her autobiography Unbowed offers an opportunity for discussing the contradictions surrounding the perception, place and identity of women in African politics. Against the backdrop of gendered nationalism which glorifies the role and place of women in the construction of nations, the article presents a different reality of how some male leaders of postcolonial nation states like the Kenyan example, silences the voices of women politicians by urging them to behave like 'proper women'. Maathai's autobiography demonstrates that the social construction of womanhood in African politics is influenced by socio-cultural and patriarchal ideologies that construct the ideal African woman as the docile one, the one who does not question male authority. Maathai's autobiography becomes a lens that can be used to view and question the social construction of womanhood versus manhood and the influence on gender power relations on women's participation in the politics of the postcolonial nation states in Africa.

Black, Female, and Divorced: A Discourse Analysis of Wangarĩ Maathai’s Leadership with Reflections from Naleli Morojele‘s Study of Rwandan and South African Female Political Leaders

“…Within such a background, Maathai deviated by showing bravery and courage, traits that were restricted to men. It is not surprising that she was perceived as a non-traditional woman who needed to revert to her gender-assigned position through targeted attacks [10,14,30].…”

“…Female leadership in Africa has duo patriarchal and historical dimensions. Whereas African patriarchy has been faulted with gender inequalities in Africa [10][11][12], the colonial legacy of Western patriarchy on the same has not received sufficient scholarly attention, even in Africa. For example, colonialism impoverished and complicated African women's lives through gendered forms of torture, thefts of ancestral lands, male detentions and murders, adult and child forced labor, displacements, family separation, and restrictions on women's education [2,[13][14][15][16][17].…”

“…There exists a considerable body of interdisciplinary literature on Prof. Wangarĩ Maathai's activism, especially after the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 and the publication of her memoir Unbowed in 2006 [10,[26][27][28][29][30][31][32]. Most scholarship has centered around the gender and feministic dimensions of her activism, and rightly so.…”

Silence, invisibility and agency: concealing pregnancies at school in Mozambique

“…Yet, it is within this constraint that silence may signify agency. Ebila (2015) observes that Kenyan 'good women' are discursively defined as those who are quiet and do not challenge (male) authority. Silence, in other words, is constructed as a form of respect that enables specific forms of identity and belonging.…”

A Quest for the Self and Identity in Two West African Autobiographies: Mary Ashun’s Tuesday’s Child and Helene Cooper’s the House at Sugar Beach

“…Extant research to date, albeit limited, have defined autobiography as a story that details events, achievements, disappointments, griefs, the confidential and even failures through the course of the narrator's life. In other words, autobiography refers to the narrator's life as it has been shaped in the course of time (Lopi, 2008;Ebila 2015;Rondot 2016;Samir Mohammad Ahmad 2019). Incontrovertibly, the autobiography can be said to have three basic aspects that are unique to it as a genre: a non -fictional narrative, the protagonist has to be the author and it chronicles the development of the 'self' through reflection (Lopičić 2008;Man 2012).…”