Pub Date : 2020-04-27DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.387
Christopher A. Conte
Over the long haul of geological time, the natural history of Africa’s mountains is a story of the lithosphere’s rise and fall. For hundreds of millions of years, tectonic forces have heaved up layers of metamorphic and igneous material while wind, water, ice, and gravity combined to open basins, scour valleys, and obliterate rock. The most recent phase in mountain building in Africa began in the Miocene (twenty-three million years ago) and continues today. Some mountains, like the volcanic mountains Kilimanjaro and Cameroon, are only a few million years old. Other highlands, like Tanzania’s Eastern Arc Mountains, derive from crystalline rock formed more than thirty million years ago. As they appear on the landscape today, Africa’s mountains present a mix of old and new landforms covered by a biosphere of resident plants and animals that evolved in the countless niches provided by elevation, slope, temperature, rainfall, and aspect. Human beings, relative latecomers to mountain history, have altered the highlands dramatically. In Africa, mountains attract people. Africa’s mountains do not constitute a discrete subject of study in the discipline of environmental history, though important studies of individual mountain zones do exist. Nor is the historical scholarship limited to the humanities. In studies that are essentially historical in approach, the natural sciences use empirical evidence to reconstruct mountain landscape change under human use. What follows is an attempt to knit together coherently a messy, multi-disciplinary scholarly literature.
{"title":"Mountain History in Africa from the Earliest Times","authors":"Christopher A. Conte","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.387","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.387","url":null,"abstract":"Over the long haul of geological time, the natural history of Africa’s mountains is a story of the lithosphere’s rise and fall. For hundreds of millions of years, tectonic forces have heaved up layers of metamorphic and igneous material while wind, water, ice, and gravity combined to open basins, scour valleys, and obliterate rock. The most recent phase in mountain building in Africa began in the Miocene (twenty-three million years ago) and continues today. Some mountains, like the volcanic mountains Kilimanjaro and Cameroon, are only a few million years old. Other highlands, like Tanzania’s Eastern Arc Mountains, derive from crystalline rock formed more than thirty million years ago. As they appear on the landscape today, Africa’s mountains present a mix of old and new landforms covered by a biosphere of resident plants and animals that evolved in the countless niches provided by elevation, slope, temperature, rainfall, and aspect. Human beings, relative latecomers to mountain history, have altered the highlands dramatically. In Africa, mountains attract people.\u0000 Africa’s mountains do not constitute a discrete subject of study in the discipline of environmental history, though important studies of individual mountain zones do exist. Nor is the historical scholarship limited to the humanities. In studies that are essentially historical in approach, the natural sciences use empirical evidence to reconstruct mountain landscape change under human use. What follows is an attempt to knit together coherently a messy, multi-disciplinary scholarly literature.","PeriodicalId":166397,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History","volume":"72 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132940618","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-27DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.656
L. Day
Yaa Asantewa, the female ruler of Ejisu, a town near the Asante capital of Kumasi in the Ashanti Region of modern-day Ghana, inspired and led an armed resistance to British colonial rule of the Asante Kingdom from April 1900 until March 1901. The only female Asante ruler known to have commanded a national army, she assumed the mantle of responsibility to preserve the Asante kingdom when no male ruler would step forward. Under her leadership, Asante fighting forces developed the innovative technique of building stockades to block all the major roads and paths leading in and out of the kingdom, won numerous battles against British forces, and trapped the British Governor of the Gold Coast in the British fort in the Asante capital for nearly three months. Judged to be about sixty years old at the time she organized the war against British imperial forces, the elderly queen mother is credited with safeguarding the Golden Stool, the symbol of Asante unity, and fostering pride in the Asante nation. She is an international symbol of dynamic female leadership in a bloody struggle against colonial rule.
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Pub Date : 2020-04-27DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.484
Â. Coutinho
Born in Bissau in 1936, Carmen Pereira was the daughter of a Guinean lawyer (one of only two Guinean lawyers at the time). She studied at the primary school in Bissau, and married in that city in 1957. In 1961, following her husband’s flight to Senegal to avoid being arrested as a political agitator, Carmen joined the independence movement led by the PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde), with three small children in her charge. Guinea-Bissau was then a Portuguese colony, with a far-right dictatorship based in the metropole. So-called Portuguese Guinea was about the size of Belgium or Haiti, and had a tropical, hot, and humid climate; most of its inhabitants, who belonged to more than twenty different peoples, were dedicated to agriculture. In the 1960s the majority of Guinea-Biassau’s inhabitants were Animists; there was also a significant Muslim population, and a few, like Carmen Pereira herself, were Catholics. The guerilla war began in Guinea-Bissau in 1963, and lasted until independence was declared in 1974. During this period Carmen travelled to the Soviet Union, where she studied to be a nurse. On her return to Africa she was given responsibility for the Health sector in the South region, where she also became the Political Commissioner for the areas controlled by the PAIGC, as a consequence of her proven leadership skills, and in accordance with the PAIGC’s policy of giving women equal opportunities and rights within the movement. Carmen Pereira is an important figure in African history, principally because she was the only woman to be elected a member of the Executive Committee (formerly the Political Bureau) of the PAIGC, which is itself significant as one of the few African movements for political liberation that led a successful war for independence. In the new state of Guinea-Bissau, Carmen Pereira was elected President of the Parliament, and appointed Health Minister, Minister for Social Affairs, and State Council member. She died in Bissau in June 2016.
{"title":"Pereira, Carmen","authors":"Â. Coutinho","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.484","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.484","url":null,"abstract":"Born in Bissau in 1936, Carmen Pereira was the daughter of a Guinean lawyer (one of only two Guinean lawyers at the time). She studied at the primary school in Bissau, and married in that city in 1957. In 1961, following her husband’s flight to Senegal to avoid being arrested as a political agitator, Carmen joined the independence movement led by the PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde), with three small children in her charge.\u0000 Guinea-Bissau was then a Portuguese colony, with a far-right dictatorship based in the metropole. So-called Portuguese Guinea was about the size of Belgium or Haiti, and had a tropical, hot, and humid climate; most of its inhabitants, who belonged to more than twenty different peoples, were dedicated to agriculture. In the 1960s the majority of Guinea-Biassau’s inhabitants were Animists; there was also a significant Muslim population, and a few, like Carmen Pereira herself, were Catholics.\u0000 The guerilla war began in Guinea-Bissau in 1963, and lasted until independence was declared in 1974. During this period Carmen travelled to the Soviet Union, where she studied to be a nurse. On her return to Africa she was given responsibility for the Health sector in the South region, where she also became the Political Commissioner for the areas controlled by the PAIGC, as a consequence of her proven leadership skills, and in accordance with the PAIGC’s policy of giving women equal opportunities and rights within the movement.\u0000 Carmen Pereira is an important figure in African history, principally because she was the only woman to be elected a member of the Executive Committee (formerly the Political Bureau) of the PAIGC, which is itself significant as one of the few African movements for political liberation that led a successful war for independence. In the new state of Guinea-Bissau, Carmen Pereira was elected President of the Parliament, and appointed Health Minister, Minister for Social Affairs, and State Council member. She died in Bissau in June 2016.","PeriodicalId":166397,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128310222","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-27DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.326
Selma Pantoja
Njinga a Mbande (1582–1663) is the most famous and controversial historical figure in the history of the West-Central Africa region during the 17th century, the region of present-day Angola. Her political trajectory contributes to the understanding of the troubled context of the Portuguese expansion in the region and the establishment of the Atlantic slave trade. The Ndongo state was at the very core of this struggle, a state mainly comprised of the Mbundu peoples. It was also the Queen’s original birthplace and a major area in the dispute for ensuring control of the trade routes between the inland and coastal regions. The Portuguese arrived in the region in 1575, and settled on the coast. Luanda was the first area of the Portuguese occupation. From there the Portuguese waged wars of conquest, moving toward the sertão (hinterland). On the Portuguese side, the action unfolded in the constant attempt to control the sobas, the local authorities, the construction of fortresses in the Mbundu territory, and the wars that were initially meant to obtain captives and form an African Army (Guerra Preta). The army would later serve Portuguese interests in controlling the routes and fairs (i.e., the hubs, or centers, of slave trade). On the Mbundu authorities’ side, even before the queen’s reign, and later on at her command, the struggles took many forms: the deterrence of the fairs’ functioning; the disorganization of the “tax” system, in which the Portuguese charged the sobas; and the welcoming of hundreds of escaped slaves, as well as other central actions such as wars and diplomatic negotiations. Njinga a Mbande took on the title Ngola (1624), the position of greatest authority and prestige in the Ndongo. In 1626, after a major campaign by Portuguese settlers, she was expelled from her territory. But by 1631 she re-emerged as a leader, now in another region, Matamba, an important base for her attacks on the areas controlled by the Portuguese. From this region, she made a peace agreement, governing until her natural death at the age of 82. In the 21st century, historiographical questions abound: how was the leadership of this female figure viewed in terms of legitimacy and gender identity within the power structures of the Ndongo, how was her image publicly projected throughout the region, how did she rise in prominence in European reports, and what was her fundamental impact on the oral tradition of different peoples of West-Central Africa. The presence of Queen Njinga crossed the Atlantic and figures in the imagery of popular and mythical narratives in the Americas.
Njinga a Mbande(1582-1663)是17世纪中非西部地区(今天的安哥拉地区)历史上最著名和最有争议的历史人物。她的政治轨迹有助于理解葡萄牙在该地区的扩张和大西洋奴隶贸易的建立。恩东戈州是这场斗争的核心，这个州主要由姆本杜人组成。它也是女王的出生地，也是确保内陆和沿海地区之间贸易路线控制权的争议的主要地区。葡萄牙人于1575年到达该地区，并在海岸定居。罗安达是葡萄牙人占领的第一个地区。葡萄牙人从那里发动了征服战争，向sert(腹地)进军。在葡萄牙方面，行动表现为不断企图控制sobas、地方当局、在姆bundu领土上建造堡垒，以及最初旨在捕获俘虏和组建非洲军队(Guerra Preta)的战争。这支军队后来在控制路线和集市(即奴隶贸易的枢纽或中心)方面为葡萄牙人服务。在姆bundu当局方面，甚至在女王统治之前，以及后来在她的指挥下，斗争采取了多种形式:对集市运作的威慑;“税收”制度的混乱，葡萄牙人在其中收取sobas;以及对数百名逃亡奴隶的欢迎，以及战争和外交谈判等其他核心行动。恩京加·姆班德(1624年)获得了恩戈拉(Ngola)的头衔，这是恩东戈族最权威和声望的地位。1626年，在葡萄牙殖民者发起的一场大规模运动之后，她被驱逐出了自己的领土。但到了1631年，她重新崛起，成为另一个地区的领袖，马坦巴，是她攻击葡萄牙人控制地区的重要基地。从这个地区，她签订了和平协议，统治直到她82岁自然死亡。在21世纪，史学上的问题比比皆是:在恩东戈的权力结构中，这个女性形象的合法性和性别认同是如何被看待的?她的形象是如何在整个地区公开传播的?她是如何在欧洲的报道中脱颖而出的?她对西非和中非不同民族的口头传统有什么根本性的影响?恩京加女王的出现跨越了大西洋，出现在美洲流行和神话叙事的形象中。
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Pub Date : 2020-04-27DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.451
G. Groenewald
In 1652 the Dutch East India Company founded a “refreshment station” in Table Bay on the southwestern coast of Africa for its fleets to and from the East Indies. Within a few years, this outpost developed into a fully-fledged settler colony with a “free-burgher” population who made an existence as grain, wine, and livestock farmers in the interior, or engaged in entrepreneurial activities in Cape Town, the largest settlement in the colony. The corollary of this development was the subjugation of the indigenous Khoikhoi and San inhabitants of the region, and the importation and use of a relatively large slave labor force in the agrarian and urban economies. The colony continued to expand throughout the 18th century due to continued immigration from Europe and the rapid growth of the settler population through natural increase. During that century, about one-third of the colony’s population lived in Cape Town, a cosmopolitan harbor city with a large transient, and overwhelmingly male, population which remained connected with both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. The unique society and culture that developed at the Cape was influenced by both these worlds. Although in many ways, the managerial superstructure of the Cape was similar to that of a Dutch city, the cosmopolitan and diverse nature of its population meant that a variety of identities and cultures co-existed alongside each other and found expression in a variety of public forms.
{"title":"Culture and Society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1795","authors":"G. Groenewald","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.451","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.451","url":null,"abstract":"In 1652 the Dutch East India Company founded a “refreshment station” in Table Bay on the southwestern coast of Africa for its fleets to and from the East Indies. Within a few years, this outpost developed into a fully-fledged settler colony with a “free-burgher” population who made an existence as grain, wine, and livestock farmers in the interior, or engaged in entrepreneurial activities in Cape Town, the largest settlement in the colony. The corollary of this development was the subjugation of the indigenous Khoikhoi and San inhabitants of the region, and the importation and use of a relatively large slave labor force in the agrarian and urban economies.\u0000 The colony continued to expand throughout the 18th century due to continued immigration from Europe and the rapid growth of the settler population through natural increase. During that century, about one-third of the colony’s population lived in Cape Town, a cosmopolitan harbor city with a large transient, and overwhelmingly male, population which remained connected with both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. The unique society and culture that developed at the Cape was influenced by both these worlds. Although in many ways, the managerial superstructure of the Cape was similar to that of a Dutch city, the cosmopolitan and diverse nature of its population meant that a variety of identities and cultures co-existed alongside each other and found expression in a variety of public forms.","PeriodicalId":166397,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130717564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-27DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.672
E. Tibebe
Emperor Haile Selassie I is a household name in Africa and across the globe. His name evokes a variety of feelings in people. To the radical elite of the 1970s he was seen as despot; for the older generation of the same period, he was a redeemer who restored the nation’s independence. For people of African descent Haile Selassie echoes an iconic significance of pride and black identity. The Emperor was a complex personality, preventing anyone from viewing him from a singular optic. No single conceptual category can encapsulate Haile Selassie; not facile Western constructs such as absolutist, reformer, or modernizer or autocrat. All constructs touch aspects of his many-ness, and none wholly reflect the complexity and multiplicity of his character and actions. His life and political career were shaped by various domestic and external circumstances. Changing local and global dynamics molded his thoughts, actions, persona, and policies. The Emperor presided for the most part of his reign over a nation whose state structure was, by and large, weak: hence the sense of incumbency he felt to guide the process of the nation’s progress under the care of a father figure. Managing the unity of a multiethnic and multireligious nation with a complex history was a political experiment entailing huge responsibilities and challenges. His story is not easy to tell since it is shrouded in paradoxes and ironies. In understanding the Emperor and his leadership style, it is vital to put him in the context of the many-layered history of the nation and the changing political dynamics of Africa. Haile Selassie led a nation rapidly encountering social and political changes in the 20th century while at the same time championing pan-Africanism. Thus, there is a great need to present a full picture and a nuanced contribution to understanding this influential Emperor.
{"title":"Haile Selassie","authors":"E. Tibebe","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.672","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.672","url":null,"abstract":"Emperor Haile Selassie I is a household name in Africa and across the globe. His name evokes a variety of feelings in people. To the radical elite of the 1970s he was seen as despot; for the older generation of the same period, he was a redeemer who restored the nation’s independence. For people of African descent Haile Selassie echoes an iconic significance of pride and black identity. The Emperor was a complex personality, preventing anyone from viewing him from a singular optic. No single conceptual category can encapsulate Haile Selassie; not facile Western constructs such as absolutist, reformer, or modernizer or autocrat. All constructs touch aspects of his many-ness, and none wholly reflect the complexity and multiplicity of his character and actions. His life and political career were shaped by various domestic and external circumstances. Changing local and global dynamics molded his thoughts, actions, persona, and policies.\u0000 The Emperor presided for the most part of his reign over a nation whose state structure was, by and large, weak: hence the sense of incumbency he felt to guide the process of the nation’s progress under the care of a father figure. Managing the unity of a multiethnic and multireligious nation with a complex history was a political experiment entailing huge responsibilities and challenges. His story is not easy to tell since it is shrouded in paradoxes and ironies.\u0000 In understanding the Emperor and his leadership style, it is vital to put him in the context of the many-layered history of the nation and the changing political dynamics of Africa. Haile Selassie led a nation rapidly encountering social and political changes in the 20th century while at the same time championing pan-Africanism. Thus, there is a great need to present a full picture and a nuanced contribution to understanding this influential Emperor.","PeriodicalId":166397,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116773564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-27DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.557
L. Braun
African women’s experiences of migration and transregional movements have long been eclipsed by men’s histories of travel and journeying. However, this certainly does not mean that women have not historically participated in geographical movement, both with their families and independently. Reasons for women’s migratory practices are divergent, and they are informed by a kaleidoscope of shifting historical internal and external sociopolitical forces. Some of these include escape from violent conflict and war, slavery, environmental and economic hardship, and oppressive family constraints. The colonial era marked a period of intense migration in which men were forcibly moved to labor within extractive economies. Women, for their part, sometimes migrated without the approval of their own families, and against the colonial administration’s sanctions. Their experiences were shaped by struggles against all forms of patriarchal authority. As a result of changing demographics and social roles, the colonial city also assumed a reputation among colonials and Africans as a space of moral depravity motivated by consumer culture. Consequently, migrant women often faced stigma when they entered cities, and sometimes when they returned home. Women were attracted to towns and cities and what they came to represent—spaces where new opportunities could be explored. Opportunity came in the form of economic independence, marriage, romantic liaisons, and education. Most migrant women were confronted with being marginalized to the domestic sphere and informal sector. However, many women also acquired and honed their market acumen, amassing wealth which they often reinvested in family networks back in their natal villages, thus revealing circular modes of migration associated with multilocal networks.
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Pub Date : 2020-04-27DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.738
B. Everill
The history of humanitarianism in Africa has been shaped largely by the history of unequal power relations and the struggle between preservative and progressive approaches to the unintended consequences of intervention. As foreign powers and individuals became involved in identifying and aiding African “victims,” both action and inaction were fraught with political consequences that required further intervention. These interventions ranged from direct emergency assistance to longer-term development goals; from military aid to post-conflict state-building and capacity-building; from small-scale interventions by individuals through service missions to annual, multi-billion-dollar governmental aid packages. Although the scale and approach to humanitarian assistance varied dramatically over the continent and across two and a half centuries, humanitarian impulses were consistently based on the desire to help and were also consistently critiqued both in Africa and elsewhere. Imperialism and humanitarianism have been overlapping and interlocking ideologies in the African context, but independent African states, individuals, and marginalized groups have also made use of humanitarian language and ideology to further their own goals and promote their own causes across the modern period.
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Pub Date : 2020-04-27DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.149
Josephine C. Miller
Small communities of Bantu-language-speaking cultivators, and eventually also cattle herders, settled and thrived during the last three millennia throughout nearly the entire African continent east and south of Cameroon. They mobilized the people who did so in many ways, transferring many of them among the groups they formed. Mobility was assumed to be normative. Most they repositioned by mutual agreements protecting the daughters or others they moved as wives, some sought new places voluntarily as clients, and others found themselves involuntarily abandoned, captured, or otherwise isolated and vulnerable to the strangers who took them in. The last group most resembled the people who, in modern societies, we recognize as “enslaved.” However, those who acquired these vulnerable people used them for purposes very different from the plantations and backbreaking labor associated with African “slavery” in the Americas. And they faced futures more varied than the permanently and inheritably enslaved Africans in the New World. This essay sketches these varied purposes and outcomes of enslavement in the context of Bantu speakers’ worlds built around premises that often contrasted with the modern world we take for granted. It adds a historical argument that Bantu-speaking communities met the major challenges in their three-thousand-year history by mobilizing personnel through slaving. This essay follows three broadly defined eras in which Bantu speakers over more than a hundred generations used strategies of slaving to create historical changes. The earliest slaving moved people who were unwanted in their home communities, or destitute survivors of communities that had failed and dispersed, into vulnerable places among the communities of others. As early Bantu speakers gradually grew in number, they intensified collective local strategies to create diverse communities in which they ultimately valued obligating relationships with one another more than they accumulated personal material wealth. Prizing people more than property, they saw themselves as perpetually short of personnel, particularly of women as wives to bear succeeding generations. Politics more than production motivated their quests for males, often clients but also opportunistically supplemented with the destitute and their neighbors’ cast-offs. Dependency was the norm and not a violation of individual freedom, since everyone was beholden to others. Since residential groups and neighborhoods routinely circulated their members in several ways, the distinctions between those moved involuntarily as slaves and others who moved in protected conditions as wives or clients were much subtler than our familiar (though unrealistic) dichotomy of mutually exclusive “slavery” and “freedom.” Despite modern searches for Bantu speakers’ terms cognate with “slavery,” they created no discrete, permanent social condition similar to the institutionalized commercial slavery of the Atlantic. The acquiring group
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Pub Date : 2020-03-31DOI: 10.1093/ACREFORE/9780190277734.013.556
Helen Dancer
African law and justice systems in the early 21st century are the result of over a thousand years of religious and cultural influences and political change on the continent. As customary and Islamic laws became reinterpreted and formalized by colonial states, women experienced the effects of successive periods of religious and political conquest as an entrenching of patriarchal control in the family and personal law sphere. The 20th century saw African women’s resistance rise from the grass roots as an important force for national liberation. African women’s legal activism grew after political independence and African women lawyers were part of global feminist movements. In the wake of dramatic political changes across Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, the global sphere of rights post-1989 became an enabling frame for women’s legal activism. Political transitions to multiparty democracy, the liberalization of African economies, and a wave of constitutional reforms strengthened women’s rights and gender equality guarantees. The 1980s and 1990s saw the founding of regional and pan-African women’s legal activist organizations, including the Action Committee of Women Living Under Muslim Laws and Women in Law and Development in Africa as well as the adoption of the Maputo Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa in 2003. In the 21st century, while social, economic, and legal inequalities persist in spite of many gains for women’s rights, some African women lawyers have risen to occupy the highest echelons of the judiciary in several countries and in international courts.
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