商品詳細

African women have a long history of political involvement reaching back to anti-colonial struggles but often the ardour with which they supported national liberation was not acknowledged after independence, leaving them to fight the struggle for representation and personal liberation on other fronts. The study looks at these struggles in Southern Africa, where the last ten years have seen the most pervasive success stories on the African continent. It traces the history of women's involvement in anti-colonial struggles and against apartheid, analyses the post-colonial outcomes and examines the strategies that have been employed by women's movements to gain a foothold in politics. It looks in detail at the experiences of women both in and with the women's wings of political parties through the early years of independence up to today, discusses the successes and failures of national machinery for the advancement of women and analyses the activities of women's movements over time. Extensive material from Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia and South Africa is compared and juxtaposed, as women politicians and women's movements learned from each other's experiences over time. The study also critically addresses the uneasy relationship between the women's movements and the state, and between women activists and women politicians as they have negotiated cooptation, integration and exclusion. Based on an extensive literature review and innumerable interviews.