Introduction
The year 1975 was designated by the United Nations (UN) as International Women’s Year (IWY), bringing questions about the status of women to the forefront of the international development agenda. During the first UN World Conference on Women, held the same year in Mexico, the National Council for Women and Development (NCWD) was established in Ghana as a ‘national machinery to advise government on all issues affecting the full participation of women in national development’ (Dolphyne Reference Dolphyne and Oppong1987: 213).Footnote 1 The Ghanaian council was created to promote women’s rights as a commitment to the IWY and the subsequent UN Decade for Women (1976–85), with Annie Jiagge and Florence Dolphyne at its helm. Jiagge chaired the NCWD from 1975 to 1981, while Dolphyne acted as vice chair. Dolphyne then replaced Jiagge until 1986, when the council board was dissolved and reorganized by the sitting military government. Following the spirit of the concurrent, dominant international discourse on the concept of Women in Development (WID), the NCWD aimed at integrating Ghanaian women into national development (Mensah-Kutin et al. Reference Mensah-Kutin, Mahama, Ocran, Ofei-Aboagye, Okine and Tsikata2000: 12). Soon after its establishment, the NCWD commissioned an array of studies, investigating family structures, employment, education and training, laws, customs and inequities in marriage systems and women’s position in agriculture and production. The studies informed the council’s understanding of Ghanaian women’s lives and problems and made it an advocate for changes in legislation and to enhance income-generating activities for Ghanaian women. The NCWD had ‘important repercussions for the Ghanaian feminist experience’, representing a ‘major landmark’ in the history of women’s activism in Ghana (Prah Reference Prah and Arnfred2005: 33).
In this article, I explore the mobilization behind women’s issues and rights in Ghana during the 1970s and 1980s, tracing conceptions of ‘African women’ and their position in what contemporary intellectuals saw as an unequal and unjust world. I investigate two Ghanaian women’s rights advocates, both central figures in the history of women’s activism in Ghana, who personally experienced the challenges of gender inequalities. I first explore late Justice Annie Jiagge (1918–96) and her writings from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, dealing with the condition of African women and women’s rights nationally and internationally. Second, I examine the 1991 book The Emancipation of Women: an African perspective, authored by linguist Florence Dolphyne (1938–), supplemented by an interview with Dolphyne that I conducted on 4 October 2021. Dolphyne’s publication offers an exposition and evaluation of the work carried out by the NCWD during the Decade for Women, in which both Jiagge and Dolphyne took part.
Methodologically anchored in global intellectual history, with its recent calls for a more inclusive intellectual history, this study addresses the understudied question of how African actors shaped the intellectual history of the modern world (Moyn and Sartori Reference Moyn and Sartori2013; Earle Reference Earle2018: para. 45). Exploring the writings of Jiagge and Dolphyne, I am interested in their conceptions of inequality and ideas such as ‘African women’ and ‘an unequal world’, as well as the connections between these at a time that, internationally, was shaped by debates on inequalities between rich and poor nations and an increased focus on the global plight of women. Nationally, in Ghana, the 1970s and 1980s was a period of economic decline and political instability, marked by a few civilian governments interrupted by several military coups and regimes (Alagidede et al. Reference Alagidede, Baah-Boateng and Nketiah-Amponsah2013: 6–7). I engage with the notions of ‘woman’ and ‘African women’ as actor categories – that is, empirically grounded categories used by the historical agents themselves (Moyn and Sartori Reference Moyn and Sartori2013: 5)Footnote 2 – mobilized by Jiagge and Dolphyne for a certain purpose, telling us something about how they understood the role and position of African women in the contemporary world. Furthermore, I challenge the periodization of the 1970s as an apolitical time (Tsikata Reference Tsikata, Hansen and Ninsin1989: 80–1) and the 1980s as an era of ‘quiet activism’ (Amoah-Boampong Reference Amoah-Boampong2018: 48) in Ghanaian women’s history. Instead, I argue that, through their writings and participation in organizations such as the NCWD, Jiagge and Dolphyne actively rearticulated Ghanaian and African womanhood (a term they did not use themselves), both nationally and internationally, placing ‘women’s issues’ within the framework of an unequal world system. Central for both Jiagge and Dolphyne was their critique of African women seen only as mothers, wives and homemakers and the constraining effects of certain customary laws and practices. This was coupled with a criticism of global economic inequalities keeping African societies – and, hence, African women – in a disadvantaged position.
Mainstream African historiography has been critiqued for its androcentrism, privileging male representation, and its focus on ‘great male narratives’. This has resulted in women remaining largely invisible in what Malawian historian Paul Tiyambe Zeleza has called ‘malestream’ African history (Zeleza Reference Zeleza and Oyěwùmí2005: 207; see also Allman et al. Reference Allman, Geiger and Musisi2002; Falola and Amponsah Reference Falola and Amponsah2012; Bouka Reference Bouka, Yacob-Haliso and Falola2020; Mama Reference Mama2020). In a Ghanaian context, Allman (Reference Allman2009) has shown how Hannah Kudjo, one of Ghana’s leading woman nationalists in the struggle for independence during the 1940s and 1950s, was written out of history. Proposing an agnotological approach (asking questions about what we do not know and why), Allman highlighted the need not only for reconstructing absent female agency but also for directly challenging the agnotological fissures that make female actors invisible in mainstream histories. Acknowledging the importance in laying bare the structures that prevent female agency in historical narratives, and taking note of the well-established historiography that since the 1970s has sought to write women into African history (for an overview see Allman et al. Reference Allman, Geiger and Musisi2002: 2), this article sheds light on specific women intellectuals grounded in post-independence Ghana and their ideas of an unequal and unjust world and African women’s position within it. It takes part in the important task within African historiography of making visible how women and questions of gender shaped historical processes.
Unearthing a piece of Ghanaian intellectual history on a gendered and unequal world, this article focuses on the lifeworlds and writings of women’s rights advocates Jiagge and Dolphyne. While both have been described as ‘unsung heroes’ of Ghanaian history (Sutherland-Addy and Ansah Reference Sutherland-Addy and Ansah2018: iv) and recognized through several biographical works, I provide, to the best of my knowledge, the first systematic exploration of the writings and thinking – specifically ideas on inequality and injustice – of these two women.Footnote 3 Appreciating the celebratory style and importance of the existing biographical work, in this article I offer a critical exploration and contextualization of the two intellectuals and their ideas on inequality, focusing on the situated and embodied nature of their intellectual interventions. Here, I am inspired by feminist standpoint theory, which emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. Feminist standpoint theorists, such as Nancy Hartsock, Dorothy Smith, Patricia Hill Collins and Donna Haraway, challenged the hegemonic knowledge production, implying an unacknowledged masculine, white and Eurocentric position. They argued that knowledge was both geographically and epistemologically situated and embodied (see, e.g., Haraway Reference Haraway1988; Hekman Reference Hekman1997). Everybody sees, feels, thinks and expresses something from somewhere. Drawing also on gender historian Joan Scott, I approach Jiagge and Dolphyne as ‘sites’ – historical markers – through which ideological and conceptual contestations, tensions and innovations can be examined, sites that are situated geographically and epistemically. I am interested in the intersecting contexts of Jiagge’s and Dolphyne’s thought productions and their composition as historical actors (Scott Reference Scott1997: 16). By examining their respective lifeworlds through biographical sketches, the intersections between the embodied – i.e. the experienced, which is also linked to the spatial – and the ideological are explored (Hunt Reference Hunt2014).
In what follows, I first briefly unfold the historical trajectory of women’s activism – that is, ‘organized, structured advocacy and activities’ (Akurang-Parry Reference Akurang-Parry2004: 464) – in Ghana to better position the ideas of Jiagge and Dolphyne. Second, I examine their writings, unearthing their conceptions of African women and women’s issues and rights in an unequal society (nationally) and world (internationally). The investigation of their written works, ideas and conceptualizations are accompanied by biographical notes, as well as a recent interview with Dolphyne, and situated in the specific time and place within which they were formulated. Third, I show how Jiagge and Dolphyne, through their engagements with concepts of gendered and global inequalities, evoked what I argue was a ‘third space of enunciation’ – a concept developed by Indian postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha (Reference Bhabha2004), denoting a postcolonial space of contestation within which ideas of postcolonial African womanhood could be expressed, challenged and rearticulated. From this in-between, third space, Jiagge and Dolphyne actively addressed and contested notions of and tensions between ‘the traditional’ and ‘the modern’, discrepancies between the ‘first’ and ‘third’ world, as well as global dynamics of economic inequalities.
Women’s position and activism in Ghana: a brief historical overview
According to many scholars, the position of African women changed during formal European colonization, as indigenous structures were reshaped and replaced by colonial ones, neglecting the status of women within their local communities (Allen Reference Allen1972; see also Fallon Reference Fallon2008: 22, 29–30; Allman Reference Allman, Lentz and Nugent2000; Mikell Reference Mikell1989; Reference Mikell1984). Emphasis has, for example, been placed on the superimposition of Victorian values of domesticity and their transforming and disempowering effects on the position of African women (Prah Reference Prah and Arnfred2005: 28–9; Amoah-Boampong Reference Amoah-Boampong2018: 32). Yet, challenging what he has termed the narrative of the ‘retrograde steps’ hypothesis, emphasizing a marked decline in the status of women in African societies during the twentieth century, Boni (Reference Boni2001) has argued that it is important to question the seeming self-evidence of this decline and the often under-documented idea of a more egalitarian, ideal precolonial past that tends to support this thesis. As per Boni, neither the position claiming that gender inequality is a universal feature of human societies nor the idea of an idealized and ahistorical past seems to bring us closer to understanding the historical roots, changes and continuities of gender hierarchies. Nonetheless, he underlined that, in some respects, African women were increasingly penalized by twentieth-century dynamics (ibid.: 16, 36–7). Indeed, Grier (Reference Grier1992) has unearthed how the colonial state reinforced particular, disadvantageous roles for women that drew on existing, pre-capitalist gender relations, benefiting the interests of metropolitan capital and patriarchy.
The colonial period in Ghana saw the foundation of several associations concerned with the affairs of women, such as the Native Ladies of Cape Coast (Akurang-Parry Reference Akurang-Parry2004), established especially by elite women. Many of these often upheld an image of the Victorian ideal woman, being foremost a wife and mother (Amoah-Boampong Reference Amoah-Boampong2018: 32). During the late colonial period, women in Ghana (as elsewhere in Africa) joined the various independence movements that ultimately brought formal colonialism to an end in 1957. The loyal support of Ghanaian women traders, for example, was central in the advancement of independence leader Kwame Nkrumah and his political party, the Convention People’s Party (CPP), and fundamental in the establishment of the women’s section of the party in 1951. Just like the women traders, the CPP Women’s League was not organized around specific gendered issues, but it played a key role as the support pillar of the party. Nkrumah and the CPP encouraged the participation of women in politics and supported girls’ education by making education compulsory for all school-going ages. In 1960, three years after independence, a new women’s organization was established, the National Council of Ghana Women (NCGW), a merging of the CPP Women’s League, the Ghana Federation of Women and smaller women’s groups (Prah Reference Prah and Arnfred2005: 29). The following year, in a speech, Nkrumah stated:
[I]n the factories, shops, on farms, in the university, in departments and ministries, and all aspects of our national life, and at all levels of party activity, the Ghanaian Woman must make her presence felt. The NCGW gives a great opportunity to all women to serve their party and country and to make a useful contribution to the total African struggle! (Nkrumah cited in Tsikata Reference Tsikata, Hansen and Ninsin1989: 79)
Yet, according to Amoah-Boampong (Reference Amoah-Boampong2018: 33), with the creation of a single women’s organization, Nkrumah and the CPP were able to gradually disempower women and depoliticize women’s issues by focusing on welfare and educational policies, not directly addressing women’s rights. Investigating ideas of womanhood during the Nkrumah regime of the early 1960s and the launch of the National Family Planning Programme by the Busia government in 1970, Ashford (Reference Ashford2020a; Reference Ashford2020b; Reference Ashford2022) has also shown how gendered nationalism was articulated through women’s roles as mothers of the nation, not directly the enhancement of their rights. The idea of women as mothers was linked to progressive attitudes and the notion of ‘modern motherhood’, enveloped in a rhetoric of modernization that pitted ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ against each other. As will become clear, these tensions also influenced the writings of Jiagge and Dolphyne.
Thus, from 1957 until 1966, Ghanaians experienced a time when problems of gender inequalities were taken up and revised at a political level and ‘first attempts’ were made towards the legitimization and institutionalization of women’s and gender issues (Prah Reference Prah and Arnfred2005: 30). Following the coup d’état in 1966, which overthrew Nkrumah and the CPP, the period between 1966 and 1981 was shaped by political instability, leading to the erosion of the rather marginal achievements that women won during the initial post-independence period. As per Tsikata (Reference Tsikata, Hansen and Ninsin1989: 80–1), this chapter in Ghanaian history signified an ‘apolitical’ period with regard to the women’s front. Yet, as this article emphasizes, it was during this period that the NCWD was set up, encouraged by growing international attention on the plight of women across the globe (Prah Reference Prah and Arnfred2005: 33). The international attention and debates around these issues were piloted especially by the UN and its new-found focus on WID in the mid-1970s – a new approach that was motivated, inter alia, by the work of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) during the 1960s (Zinsser Reference Zinsser2002: 145) and the seminal book by Danish economist and UN employee Ester Boserup, Woman’s Role in Economic Development, published in 1970.Footnote 4 The NCWD also emerged at a time when, locally, there had been an increased focus on questions regarding women and their position in Ghanaian society, making it, at the time of its creation, ‘a promising, non-partisan vehicle for advancing a feminist agenda, particularly where there was a non-existent political women’s front’ (Prah Reference Prah and Arnfred2005: 34).
By the mid-1980s, however, the NCWD was silenced by the sitting military regime through the formation of the 31st December Women’s Movement in 1982, headed by First Lady Mrs Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings. Once more, the Ghanaian agenda on women’s issues was hijacked by the political party in power (Mama Reference Mama1995). Amoah-Boampong (Reference Amoah-Boampong2018: 48–9) has argued that the 1980s was an era of quiet activism and state co-optation before the rebirth of women’s activism in the early 1990s, facilitated by a wave of democratization and the inauguration of Ghana’s fourth republic. However, as we will see, the condition of women was certainly being contested and politicized by intellectuals such as Jiagge and Dolphyne during the first decade of the NCWD.
In light of this brief historical overview of women’s activism in Ghana, what follows is a deeper exposé of the ‘apolitical’ and ‘quiet’ 1970s and 1980s. As Jiagge’s and Dolphyne’s work and writings on ‘African women’ and their position in an unequal world show, these decades constituted an important and indeed not so quiet period shaped by growing international attention to women and gender inequalities. I argue that the 1970s and 1980s in Ghana saw a vernacularization of the international discourse, as these global debates were brought into Ghanaian reality by advocates such as Jiagge and Dolphyne, while they also sought to infuse the international debate with an African and Third World perspective.Footnote 5 I show how Jiagge and Dolphyne continued to reimagine African womanhood through a lens of modernization, operating with a tension between restraining elements of ‘tradition’ and desirable progress through education and knowledge acquisition. They actively advocated for women’s rights by challenging the one-dimensional role of women as mainly mothers. While urging that many traditions and customs were ‘detrimental to women’ (Jiagge Reference Jiagge1986: 45–6), however, they also emphasized the importance of African traditional and cultural values – a return to these could, according to Jiagge, ‘correct the imbalance that has placed a premium on the capacity to imbibe foreign culture’ in a world that was unjust and unequal (Jiagge Reference Jiagge1984: 183).
Annie Jiagge: promoting women’s rights in Ghana and abroad
Annie Ruth Jiagge (born Baëta) was born on 7 October 1918 in Lomé, Togoland (now Togo) into a well-off family of Portuguese Brazilian descent. At the age of six, Jiagge moved across the colonial border to the town of Keta in the British Gold Coast Colony (now Ghana). Here she stayed with her grandmother, who lived in the mission house of the German Missionary Sisters, while gaining an English education. Jiagge’s grandmother’s ‘German training’ and strong Christian principles influenced Jiagge from a very young age, staying with her throughout adulthood (Atobrah and Awedoba Reference Atobrah, Awedoba, Ansah and Sutherland-Addy2018: 5–6). Since formal schooling at the time (during formal colonization) was mainly organized by missionaries, schools were also spaces where students, including Jiagge, cultivated identities as modern Christianized individuals (Sackeyfio-Lenoch Reference Sackeyfio-Lenoch2018: 32). Indeed, missions were central in the development of the Gold Coast Colony and in shaping ideas of masculinity and femininity among converts across the continent (Meyer Reference Meyer1997; Miescher Reference Miescher2005: 48).
From 1933 to 1937, Jiagge completed her teacher training at the prestigious Achimota College. Achimota strived to nurture a particular ‘modern’ African leadership that was ‘Western’ in its intellectual attitudes but embedded in African culture – educated, nonetheless, within a predominantly British and Christian framework (Coe Reference Coe2002; Yamada Reference Yamada2018). Ambivalences between the ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ certainly shaped Jiagge’s formative years. After Achimota, Jiagge decided to pursue legal studies in London. Studying what was considered a ‘male profession’ at the time, Jiagge experienced several episodes of male chauvinism, as male contemporaries continuously questioned whether she – as a woman – was capable of becoming a lawyer (Vieta Reference Vieta2000: 54–5). In 1950, after having finished her studies and having been called to the bar, Jiagge returned to the Gold Coast, becoming, three years later, its first woman magistrate. Within an impressively short time, she rose from the lowest rows of the bench to the top. In 1961, she was appointed High Court judge – one of the first women in the Commonwealth to attain this position – and, in 1969, Appeal Court judge (Atobrah and Awedoba Reference Atobrah, Awedoba, Ansah and Sutherland-Addy2018: 5–18; Skinner Reference Skinner2019).
By the 1960s, Jiagge’s career had also brought her onto the international stage. From 1962 to 1972, she served on the UN CSW – in 1967 as its rapporteur and the succeeding year as the president of the commission. She played a key role in drafting the Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women and authoring its introduction, which led to the adoption of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in 1979 (Atobrah and Awedoba Reference Atobrah, Awedoba, Ansah and Sutherland-Addy2018: 31–2). Jiagge undoubtedly shaped the work on the advancement of women carried out internationally through the UN in the 1960s and made a significant contribution to international law by helping devise women’s rights as human rights (Skinner Reference Skinner2019). It was, according to herself, during her time on the CSW that she was ‘hit with the problem of women’ (Snyder and Tadesse Reference Snyder and Tadesse1995: 18).
Alongside her engagements at the international level, Jiagge was also active in her home country. She had functioned as the legal adviser of the NCGW, established in 1960 by Nkrumah and the CPP. She was also central in establishing the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in Ghana in the mid-1950s, serving as local president from 1955 to 1960. In 1947, through her engagements with the YWCA, she became associated with the World Council of Churches (WCC), an ecumenical institution and ‘fellowship of churches’ established in 1948 (Atobrah and Awedoba Reference Atobrah, Awedoba, Ansah and Sutherland-Addy2018: 35, 51–2; Vieta Reference Vieta2000: 58–9). In 1975, she was the first African woman to become a WCC president. Jiagge was indeed ‘a crusader for gender equality, even before the age of gender activism’ (Atobrah and Awedoba Reference Atobrah, Awedoba, Ansah and Sutherland-Addy2018: 36) – an advocate for women’s rights formed by her intersectional positionality as an elite, Christian and Ghanaian woman.
Women’s rights and the mortgaged future of Africa
In the chapter entitled ‘Looking towards the future’, published in 1975, the same year as the creation of the NCWD, Jiagge unfolded the role of women in general and in Africa specifically. Jiagge opened the chapter by underlining that women ‘need not be economically, socially, politically or even spiritually dependent on men’, since ‘[m]odern technology has reduced the premium on masculine prowess’ (Jiagge Reference Jiagge1975: 425). Addressing obstacles to the advancement of women (such as customary practices including polygamy, dowry and widowhood rituals, as well as the lack of professional and educational training, illiteracy, and economic and political dependence on men), Jiagge challenged what she called ‘social attitudes’ towards womanhood and the one-sidedness of the traditional ideals of women as mothers, homemakers and pre-school teachers. She stressed that ‘the traditional belief that women have only limited potentialities in limited spheres has the effect of distinction drawn between men’s work and women’s work and crossing the line of demarcation becomes a problem’ (ibid.: 426). Already in 1969, Jiagge had insisted that ‘the need to free the woman from the psychological strain and anxiety to which she has been subjected by traditional beliefs and practices is an urgent one’ (Jiagge Reference Jiagge1969: 77). Jiagge clearly saw some aspects of ‘tradition’ as a hindrance to the emancipation of African women. Instead, political maturity, acquired through education, was necessary in order to enable women ‘to play a more effective and meaninful [sic] role in society’ (Jiagge Reference Jiagge1975: 430). Jiagge’s position was in line with the contemporary view of the NCWD, at a time when, nationally, women-related issues were not at the forefront of Ghanaian government matters.
A main approach of the 1970s within the dominant international discourse on WID was that of anti-poverty, which saw poverty as the main problem facing women in developing countries (Mensah-Kutin et al. Reference Mensah-Kutin, Mahama, Ocran, Ofei-Aboagye, Okine and Tsikata2000: 5). Seemingly informed by contemporary and surging discourses on the global issue of neo-colonialism and underdevelopment, led mainly by Marxist-inspired, left-leaning scholars and dependency theorists both inside and outside Africa, Jiagge underscored that ‘[t]he wealth of Africa’ was being ‘exploited by others to provide affluence and comfort in other countries’ (Jiagge Reference Jiagge1975: 430).Footnote 6 In a world shaped by global inequalities, the advancement of women, Jiagge claimed, held ‘great promise for the future’ (ibid.: 431). Emphasizing that African women ‘cannot wait until their family commitments are over before taking an active part in public life’ (ibid.: 430), she made it clear that the emancipation of women was part and parcel of the full emancipation of the African continent.
Jiagge expressed similar ideas in the article ‘Exploitation of women in third world perspective’, published in 1976. In this article, based on a talk she gave in 1975 at the WCC’s Fifth Assembly plenary presentation on ‘Women in a changing world’ in Nairobi, Jiagge also pointed at the interlinkages between gendered inequalities and global ones – that is, inequalities between what she labelled the developing and developed world. Jiagge termed these ‘the real deep issues of injustice’ (Jiagge Reference Jiagge1976: 46–7). Viewed from the perspective of the ‘Third World’, discrimination against women and gendered inequalities were ‘just’ some of the many manifestations of global injustices. This did not mean that gendered inequalities should be neglected as yet another problem, but that these should be dealt with as issues interlinked with other inequalities, including racial, legal and economic ones. This standpoint, Jiagge emphasized, was a dividing factor between women from the developed world and the developing world at the first World Conference on Women in Mexico, which she attended, as some women from the developed world thought that women from the Third World were too occupied with development issues.Footnote 7 Addressing the position of women in society was important; however, this should not ‘be treated in isolation’, Jiagge urged (ibid.: 47). The foremost problem of the contemporary world was one of global injustices, such as racial discrimination as well as political and economic domination, and women’s position was one component of these. Highlighting the connection between the emancipation of the ‘Third World woman’ and the eradication of global dimensions of injustice and inequality, Jiagge concluded: ‘To women of the Third World, the liberation of women is meaningless unless it releases the dynamic power of women to fight for peace. Peace today lies in the struggle for a new world economic order and not in the armament race, or even charity’ (ibid.: 48).Footnote 8
Jiagge thus sought to place the question of the advancement of women, ‘a subject in vogue’ and ‘a major issue in the world’, in the cadre of another ‘major issue’ of the 1970s, namely the question of an unequal international order that disadvantaged the Third World and, due to problems of economic decline and debt, ‘mortgaged [its] future’ (Jiagge Reference Jiagge1975: 429; Reference Jiagge1976: 47). Jiagge’s call for a ‘new world economic order’ came at a point in time when the demand for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) was being mobilized by newly independent countries, concerned about the underlying structures of underdevelopment and unequal accumulation, at the UN (Dehm Reference Dehm2018). At the first World Conference on Women in Mexico, the link between the status of women, development and the NIEO was accentuated by members of Third World countries (Zinsser Reference Zinsser2002: 146). The 1970s saw enhanced debates about global redistribution and, in the wake of the NIEO, the oil embargo by OPEC, which challenged existing power dynamics, and negotiations between ‘the North’ and ‘the South’, the future looked brighter from a Third World perspective and the possible realization of global equalization seemed not too far ahead (Christiansen and Guichon Reference Christiansen and Guichon2022). For Jiagge, the liberation of women was central to the concurrent call for change from Third World countries.
Jiagge’s Christian faith also shone through in much of her writing. Outside the UN and the NCWD, the ‘venue’ and audience of Jiagge’s interventions were in many instances associated with the WCC – a product of the ecumenical movement that emerged in the early twentieth century as a ‘modernist project’, focusing on the unity of humanity (Lodberg Reference Lodberg1999). Equality was a key concept for the WCC, and from the late 1960s the idea and moral imperative that ‘no person, created in the divine image, should be victimized against based on his or her racial background’ shaped the organization (Welch Reference Welch2001). This was evident in the WCC’s establishment of the Programme to Combat Racism (moderated by Jiagge) – a political, anti-apartheid programme that supported independence movements in Southern Africa from 1969 to 1994. Jiagge’s emphasis on global injustices should therefore also be read in light of this ecumenical context, as in many cases she addressed an audience driven by Christian values, morality, justice and the idea of a united world.
In 1984, after a decade of severe economic decline, Jiagge published the article ‘The cry of the poor’.Footnote 9 The economic difficulties triggered by the oil crises of the 1970s, which had hit hard globally but had gravely affected African economies, had deteriorated further during the 1980s. According to contemporary intellectuals, the African continent was in a condition of crisis (Browne and Cummings Reference Browne and Cummings1984; Luke and Shaw Reference Luke and Shaw1984; Adedeji and Shaw Reference Adedeji and Shaw1985). In 1983, Ghana had embarked on its much contested journey of structural adjustments, more or less imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, in hope of much needed economic stability. In the aforementioned article, featured in the journal International Review of Mission, published by the WCC, Jiagge reiterated the continued issue of a gap between rich and poor nations, and, like many of her contemporary African intellectuals, she stressed the inadequacy of the international aid paradigm of the 1960s, pointing at the subversive mechanism of neo-colonialism in the contemporary, unequal world.
The enemy was indeed the same as in the struggle for political independence. Colonial self-interest after independence operated in the more subtle and smooth form of neo-colonialism … It is becoming clearer that the third world cannot be incorporated into the global economic system without first a radical change of that system itself. (Jiagge Reference Jiagge1984: 177)
Exemplifying gross global inequalities, Jiagge portrayed the lives of some of the poorest Ghanaians in the mining towns of the Ashanti goldfields, contrasting their lives in abject poverty with the many millions of dollars gained by the exploiters of these goldfields, transnational corporations from industrialized countries. This unequal relationship was, Jiagge claimed, like that of ‘a big bully cruelly beating up a defenceless child’ (Jiagge Reference Jiagge1984: 179).
Addressing the churches of both industrialized and developing nations, Jiagge argued that, while the industrialized countries should make way for structural changes to the international economic order, developing countries should ‘break the poverty circle’ through the rediscovery of ‘the African world view and way of life’, traditional values and self-reliance. Self-reliance, she accentuated, had the necessary ‘psychological and liberating effect’ on the ‘colonial mentality’ that still characterized the neo-colonial dynamics of the post-independence era (Jiagge Reference Jiagge1984: 180, 182). Interestingly, we see how traditional, African values are here highlighted positively. Clearly, the notion of ‘tradition’ was an ambivalent one.
Jiagge’s attention towards the concept of self-reliance fitted the trend of the time. In 1980, through the Organization of African Unity, African leaders had put forth the Lagos Plan of Action of the Economic Development of Africa 1980–2000. Advocating for economic self-reliance and resistance to free market economics, but without encouraging a revolutionary uncoupling from the global capitalist economic system, the action plan reiterated concerns about the hindering impact of neo-colonialism on African development. The ideas behind the Lagos Plan clearly reflected the intellectual beliefs of Adebayo Adedeji, the executive secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) from 1975 to 1991, also the main architect of the plan. Described as the Nigerian counterpart to the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch, Adedeji argued that Africa could not reach economic growth without converting its inherited colonial production structures and basing its development on the concept of self-reliance, following an African-centred development paradigm. The rediscovery of a sense of cultural self-confidence was crucial, Adedeji claimed, to overcome Africa’s psychological dependence on former European masters (Adebajo Reference Adebajo, Oloruntoba and Falola2020: 268–9).Footnote 10
However, the concept of self-reliance was not unique to the Lagos Plan. According to Browne and Cummings (Reference Browne and Cummings1984: 26), its history can be traced back to at least the 1960s and connected to articulations of popular economic development ideas such as the centre–periphery model, growth without development and underdevelopment. During the 1960s, the first president of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, also famously spearheaded the idea of self-reliance and African socialism as laid out in the Arusha Declaration of 1967. For Nyerere (Reference Nyerere1967), the idea of ‘education for self-reliance’ built on a critique of the inadequacies and inappropriateness of colonial education. In Ghana, the Operation Feed Yourself programme, piloted by the Acheampong regime during the 1970s, was also anchored in ideas of self-sufficiency and reliance (Girdner et al. Reference Girdner, Olorunsola, Froning and Hansen1980). In 1986, once again invoking ideas of self-reliance, Jiagge argued that it was up to women themselves to take up the liberation struggle. ‘[T]here are few examples of oppressed people being freed by others. The real liberation struggle takes place in the camp of the oppressed,’ she powerfully claimed (Jiagge Reference Jiagge1986: 45). This was, however, at a time when the defeat of the NIEO and the era of Reaganomics, giving way to ‘the neoliberal development agenda’, had been signalled (Prashad Reference Prashad2013: 78–9) – possibly making reiterations of self-reliance seem even more urgent.
Having unfolded Jiagge’s efforts to place the cause of African women within the framework of an unequal global order, let us now turn to our second protagonist.
Florence Dolphyne: women’s issues and the African perspective
Florence Abena Dolphyne was born in Achinakrom on 1 March 1938, twenty years after Jiagge, in the Ashanti region of the Gold Coast. Like Jiagge, her father was a reverend. After having attended the Methodist high school Wesley Girls’ in Cape Coast, in 1955 Dolphyne and six other girls continued their sixth form at Mfantsipim, an all-male school. They were the second cohort of girls to do so. At Mfantsipim, Dolphyne, who had never before been taught by male teachers, experienced how both she and the staff grappled with this new constellation. In 1958, a year after Ghana’s independence, Dolphyne started her undergraduate studies in English at the University of Ghana. Being a university student in a newly independent country that was ‘in the process of establishing itself and gaining recognition as a major African country’, Dolphyne has described how they were ‘groomed’ to be ambassadors for the country (Dolphyne Reference Dolphyne2021: 40). During the first year of university, while waiting for the Volta Hall – an all-female residence – to be built, Dolphyne and the other female students lived in the university’s first mixed-sex hall, experiencing again the tensions around being only a few women among a majority of men. In 1962, having been awarded a postgraduate scholarship at the School of Oriental and African Studies, she left Accra for London. In Britain, Dolphyne was met with hospitality and friendliness, but also encountered episodes of racialized discrimination. She met many who ‘had never interacted with an African before’ and who ‘asked so many unusual questions’ about African society (ibid.: 62–3). Back in Ghana, in 1965, Dolphyne started working as a lecturer at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Ghana. In 1996, she was promoted to full professor and was the first woman in the history of the university to become pro-vice chancellor (Dolphyne Reference Dolphyne2021: 1–90; Owoahene-Acheampong and Ansah Reference Owoahene-Acheampong, Ansah, Ansah and Sutherland-Addy2018: 259–64). Dolphyne’s career, just like Jiagge’s, was characterized by many ‘firsts’, in her case as a female academic during the initial decades of independence.
From early on in her life, Dolphyne was interested in issues surrounding women. Already during her undergraduate studies, Dolphyne had volunteered as part of the Students’ Social Services, visiting female patients at Accra’s psychiatric hospital. Poverty and domestic violence were among the main factors that had triggered the patients’ conditions; for Dolphyne this experience was ‘a major eye-opener … about the plight of women in our society’ (Dolphyne Reference Dolphyne2021: 94). On her return to Ghana from Britain, Dolphyne joined the Voltarian Association, a group of female students at the University of Ghana committed to promoting girls’ education. This group later evolved into the Ghanaian Association of University Women, and from 1970 to 1976 Dolphyne acted as its president. In 1975, she became the first vice chair of the NCWD.
The emancipation of African women
In 1987–88, while on sabbatical leave at Fourah Bay College in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Dolphyne had the opportunity to write down her experiences of being part of the NCWD during the Decade for Women, which had ended a few years earlier in 1985. The written form of her reflections was published in 1991, in her book The Emancipation of Women, in the aftermath of the economic recession of the 1980s and at a time when Ghana was on the verge of a phase of democratization. The book was, according to herself, ‘an attempt, by someone closely associated with activities for women in Ghana during the Decade, to explain what she believes women’s emancipation means to African women’ (Dolphyne Reference Dolphyne1991: xiv). She wanted to ‘make people realise that this women’s issues thing is not just a foreign idea from Europe that we are copying’.Footnote 11 In the book, Dolphyne first addressed several customs and traditions within African societies (marriage, bridewealth, child marriage, polygamy, purdah, widowhood, inheritance of property, high fertility and female circumcision) that underscored the inequality between men and women and hindered female emancipation. She explained these issues – from a clearly stated African perspective – and offered various solutions to how they could be dealt with, modified or even in some cases eradicated, enhancing the position of African women. The second part of the book provided an exposition of different women-centred activities carried out by the NCWD. Lastly, in the final chapter, Dolphyne outlined ‘the way forward’ in the quest towards the advancement of African women.
In the book, taking as her point of departure the international dialogue on the condition of women, facilitated by the Decade for Women, Dolphyne underlined the importance of women across the globe to work together ‘to fight the injustices that society has subjected them to for centuries’ (Dolphyne Reference Dolphyne1991: ix). However, at the mid-decade World Conference on Women in Copenhagen in 1980, which Dolphyne attended, differences in viewpoints again became apparent between women’s rights advocates from Western and African countries. This polarization of opinion was especially visible when it came to the topic of traditional practices in African societies such as polygamy, bridewealth and female circumcision. ‘Both groups were equally of the opinion that these practices were an obstacle to the emancipation of women in the African continent,’ Dolphyne acknowledged in the preface, but ‘[w]hat they were not agreed on were the measures to be taken to eradicate them and the timing of such measures’ (ibid.: x). While the women from Western countries pushed for the immediate illegalization of such practices, Dolphyne explained that the African women’s advocates, emphasizing the cultural significance and rootedness of these practices in African societies, argued that education rather than immediate eradication would be the more sustainable way forward. With her book, she ‘wanted to at least first of all explain why it [traditional practices] is done. So, people don’t just condemn it … And also, to let people know really the harm.’Footnote 12
Addressing traditional practices and their hampering effects on the status of women, Dolphyne pointed out that instead of banning practices such as female circumcision, which would simply force them underground due to their cultural importance, a viable alternative had to be found. As an example, Dolphyne argued that a way to prevent the issue of child marriage, which violated the right of women to freely choose a spouse, referencing Article 16, 1(b) of CEDAW, was to specify a minimum age for marriage and a minimum number of years – at least nine – of compulsory schooling. Key in these matters was a ‘change from within’ societies themselves to find better alternative practices (Dolphyne Reference Dolphyne1991: 38). Ignorance, Dolphyne argued, had ‘made women accept the inferior position to which they have been relegated by society for centuries’ (ibid.: 56). Instead, the twofold agenda of (legal, political and social) empowerment and education would help African women establish the necessary self-confidence and critical mind – a ‘necessary change in attitude’ that would lead to the modification and, where needed, eradication of traditional practices obstructing the rights of women (ibid.: 94). Here, we notice again the vocabulary of self-reliance, widely used at the time in development discourses, finding its way into debates on the advancement of women. A rekindling of self-confidence through education and knowledge-gaining, to counter ignorance, was also emphasized.
In The Emancipation of Women, Dolphyne thus carefully tackled issues connected to women in African societies from a distinctively African perspective – as an African women’s advocate familiar with many of the issues. But, like Jiagge had stressed before her, Dolphyne underlined that, for women in the Third World, all issues were ‘women’s issues’ linked to the broader framework of politics:
For all these women, the issue of women’s emancipation cannot be separated from the politics that brought about their particular situation. For all of them, the major problem is one of survival, and a necessary prerequisite for an improvement in their condition is that for the Palestinian women, a satisfactory solution to the politics that created the war situation in the Middle East must be found. For the South African women, the structures that suppress people on account of the colour of their skin in racist South Africa just have to be dismantled; and for the women in the developing African country, the inequities inherent in the present trade relations between industrialized countries and raw-material-producing Third World countries must be dealt with. (Dolphyne Reference Dolphyne1991: xii)
As evident from the above, Dolphyne, like Jiagge, emphasized the importance of connecting gendered inequalities and the position of women in African societies within broader frameworks of international politics. In a world of racial discrimination, warfare, poverty and unequal trade relations – an issue that had taken centre stage in the 1970s and 1980s – there was, Dolphyne argued, ‘more at stake than the question of who cooked the dinner or changed the baby’ (Dolphyne Reference Dolphyne1991: xiv). The lack of economic prosperity within African countries, and in countries of the Third World in general, encumbered the emancipation of women along with society as a whole. For Dolphyne, the emancipation of African women was closely linked to global politics, the problem of underdevelopment in Third World countries, and the quest for national development in post-independence African countries.
Positioned in-between
In the following, I unfold how Jiagge and Dolphyne, in their writings, evoked a Bhabhaian ‘third space’ within which conceptions of ‘women’s issues’ and postcolonial African womanhood could be expressed, contested and rearticulated.
The concept of an in-between, ‘third space’ – a postcolonial space of enunciation and contestation formed by fluidity and hybridity – was developed by Bhabha in his 1994 publication The Location of Culture. ‘Driven by the subaltern history of the margins of modernity’, Bhabha sought to ‘rename’ the postmodern from a postcolonial position (Bhabha Reference Bhabha2004: 252). Postcolonial existence, Bhabha argued, is defined by ‘living on the borderlines’, enabling the formation of ‘innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself’ (ibid.: 1, 2) – in-between spaces of enunciation where understandings of culture as primordial unity or fixity can be ‘appropriated, translated, rehistorized and read anew’ (ibid.: 37). Bhabha’s notion of the third space emerges, according to Ikas and Wagner (Reference Ikas, Wagner, Ikas and Wagner2009), as a new positioning that arises from the tensions between two differentiated spaces: the colonial and the indigenous. Through a double negation, choosing neither one nor the other, a mixing of the two produces the third space of enunciation, indicating an in-between space of postcolonial subjectivity.
I argue that Bhabha’s concept of in-between, third spaces is a fruitful tool to further understand and unfold the writings and ideas of Jiagge and Dolphyne. Both Jiagge and Dolphyne, writing at different times but shaped by similar experiences, such as the work carried out by the NCWD during the 1970s and 1980s, addressed issues related to women in African societies and in the Third World at large. Challenging the one-dimensional conception of women as wives and mothers, and addressing tensions between ‘the modern’ and ‘the traditional’, as well as the neo-colonial dynamics shaping the contemporary world, they invoked the nuances and multiple layers of inequalities that form the realities and struggles of African women – actively reimagining and rearticulating African postcolonial womanhood in several ways.
Jiagge and Dolphyne defined the condition of women in African societies as one situated within a terrain of manifold modalities, such as gendered inequalities, traditional beliefs and practices, imperialism, neo-colonialism and underdevelopment. One such modality, affecting African womanhood, was, as Dolphyne pointed out, the contrast within African societies between, on the one hand, Westernized, educated women in urban areas and, on the other, rural, and often illiterate, women living a life tightly interwoven with ‘traditional’ culture, which created internal inequalities between women (Dolphyne Reference Dolphyne1991: 1). According to Jiagge, this contrast was a reproduction, at a national level, of ‘the growing gap between the rich and the poor nations of the world’ (Jiagge Reference Jiagge1984: 176).
Second, both Jiagge and Dolphyne actively, but ambivalently, addressed ‘traditional practices’ in African societies. While both of them acknowledged their impeding effects on women’s emancipation and the importance of modifying and even eradicating specific traditional practices that violated women’s rights, both also urged that the question of altering such practices was a daunting and difficult task – not a matter of simple abolition. As Jiagge emphasized in the mid-1980s, a note of caution with regard to customary practices and traditional attitudes was crucial, since ‘these issues are linked with the culture of the people and better dealt with by the nationals affected’ (Jiagge Reference Jiagge1986: 46). As we have seen, she was clearly writing at a time characterized by robust discourses on a contemporary ‘African crisis’ as well as ideas of African self-reliance – where issues were ‘better dealt with’ by the countries and people affected by them, not through imposed foreign models.
Third, central to the thinking of both Jiagge and Dolphyne was the importance of speaking from an African – and Third World – perspective, requesting ‘women’s issues’ to be viewed as a part of global issues of development, economic inequalities and neo-colonialism. Addressing the inequalities between women in developed and developing countries, Jiagge astutely levelled a question at women’s rights activists of the First World: ‘How can anyone who belongs to and benefits from her country’s system of economic strangulation ever complain of any discrimination against herself without at the same time seeking to lighten the burdens of those oppressed by her own country?’ (Jiagge Reference Jiagge1976: 46). Jiagge seems to emphasize the crux of the matter here by pointing at the global economic inequities that affected women differently across the globe.
As evident from the above, Jiagge and Dolphyne nuanced the idea of ‘African women’ by actively placing them within a framework of multiple overlapping and interconnected dynamics.Footnote 13 African women were more than wives and mothers and had to be educated in order to fully recognize their rights and possibilities. For Jiagge and Dolphyne, the answer to the empowerment of African women was not solely to be found in ‘modernist models’, simply eradicating traditional practices and the cultural foundations of the women, nor in a ‘traditionalist view’ that confined women to be merely mothers and caretakers; rather, it was somewhere in-between the two. Issues surrounding African women were interlaced by both neo-colonial structures, feeding poverty tendencies and global inequalities on an international level, and ‘traditional’ ideals, aggregating gender inequalities within African nations. In their rearticulations of postcolonial, African womanhood, Jiagge and Dolphyne challenged the position of First World women’s rights activists and the global structures of economic exploitation as well as ‘traditionalist’ views within their own society. Addressing mechanisms of both national and international inequalities, Jiagge and Dolphyne appropriated, re-historicized and read anew the position of African women, evoking what one could call an ‘in-between space’ where the many intersecting elements affecting the lives of women in postcolonial Africa could be articulated.
A reconceptualization of African womanhood
The work carried out by the NCWD during the international Decade for Women, under the leadership of Jiagge and Dolphyne, represents a major landmark in Ghanaian women’s history. Vernacularizing the global discourse on women, through their work and writings, Jiagge and Dolphyne helped advance the recognition of women’s specific interests within Ghanaian society at a time when women’s rights were not at the forefront of governmental affairs. More importantly, they made it clear that – from an African and Third World perspective – the lives and struggles of African women had to be understood within their specific cultural settings. Besides, the question of the emancipation of women was intimately interwoven with questions of global inequalities and injustices. According to Jiagge and Dolphyne, gendered inequalities, the results of ‘centuries of discrimination’, had to be fought through the empowerment and education of women, enhancing their self-reliance (Jiagge Reference Jiagge1976: 44). Change ‘from within’ was necessary. Their ideas on how to enhance women’s rights actively drew on contemporary discourses and vocabularies employed within modernization theories and ideas of progress as well as development thinking, where notions of self-reliance and African-centred, indigenous alternatives were central.
Both Jiagge and Dolphyne emphasized that ‘women’s issues’ in postcolonial African societies were composed of many intersecting modalities, such as gender inequalities, traditional beliefs and practices, neo-colonialism and underdevelopment. In effect, the lived lives of African women played out in-between these intersecting dynamics. Mobilizing this conception, they intended to educate African women, and the population in general, but also women’s rights activists of the ‘First World’. In addressing and reformulating womanhood within postcolonial, African societies, Jiagge and Dolphyne evoked an in-between ‘third space of enunciation’, from within which they could ‘read anew’ the complex positionalities of African women in the unequal societies and world they inhabited. According to them, African women were positioned between ‘the modern’ and ‘the traditional’ (with tradition seen as both constraining women’s rights but also engendering the basis for self-reliance), between national specificities and international generalities, exploited by centuries of male dominance in society, on the one hand, and by former colonial metropoles in an economically unequal world on the other. Advocating women’s rights, they actively challenged the one-dimensional idea of women as wives and mothers that had been underlined by previous governments in the early independence period.
The lives and stories of Jiagge and Dolphyne, as central figures in Ghanaian postcolonial thinking on global and gendered inequalities, show us how women’s rights advocates wrote, thought and fought for the plight of women, both nationally and internationally, during the 1970s and 1980s. It was a time of economic decline and ‘developmental crisis’ across the African continent, while also being an era of enhanced attention, internationally, towards women’s rights and gender inequalities. This is the story of two well-off, Christian, educated women, who themselves personally experienced and battled the dynamics of gendered inequalities, while actively engaging in the national and global fight for women’s emancipation. With their intellectual interventions, Jiagge and Dolphyne invoked ideas of an unequal society and world and pointed at the complex positions of African women within them, from their positions as Ghanaian, Christian and elite women. African women were, according to them, positioned in-between intersecting dynamics of ‘traditional’ beliefs, aggregating gender inequalities within African nations, and neo-colonial structures, feeding poverty tendencies and global inequalities.
Acknowledgements
This work was funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark under grant 8047-00068B. I would like to thank Christian Olaf Christiansen, Casper Andersen, Kate Skinner, Gerardo Serra, Sofía Mercader, Ludvig Goldschmidt Pedersen, Valdemar Nielsen Pold and Johannes Lundberg for valuable comments on earlier drafts. I am also grateful to participants at the online colloquium ‘Beyond Eurocentrism in Intellectual History’ (2–4 September 2021) for stimulating comments and questions on a preliminary version of this article.
Mélanie Lindbjerg Machado-Guichon is a PhD candidate working in the field of African intellectual history. Her PhD project investigates how Ghanaian intellectuals have conceptualized the idea of an unequal world since Ghana’s independence in 1957.
