Before feminism became a word to debate, African women were already making history.
There is a question I keep returning to: What if the African woman did not need to discover feminism, but needed to rediscover the histories that made her agency possible?
We have become accustomed to discussing feminism in Africa as though it arrived at our shores with books, foreign universities, international conferences and Western political movements. Yet historical scholarship documents African women’s participation in economic production, political life, religious institutions and collective resistance before and during colonial rule (Cyrelene Amoah-Boampong and Christabel Agyeiwaa, “Women in Pre-colonial Africa: West Africa,” in The Palgrave Handbook of African Women’s Studies, 2021; Christine Saidi, Women’s Authority and Society in Early East-Central Africa, 2010).
The conversation often begins with what African women should become, what they should reject, and which ideas they must borrow to achieve liberation.
But I want to begin somewhere else.
I want to begin with the African woman before the label.
Before she had to explain why she wanted to own property, participate in public life, control her labour, resist an unjust ruler or make decisions about her own future. Before her choices were measured against a borrowed image of what a liberated woman should look like.
Who was she? What authority did she hold? What knowledge did she possess? And what happened to the institutions, memories and expressions through which she exercised that authority?
These questions matter because history is not simply a record of the past. It shapes what we believe is possible in the present. The historian Christine Saidi, for example, draws on historical linguistics, archaeology, oral traditions and other evidence to challenge assumptions that precolonial African societies were uniformly patriarchal or that women’s historical authority cannot be reconstructed (Women’s Authority and Society in Early East-Central Africa, 2010).
African women were never one story
To speak of African women before colonialism is not to pretend that every African society was matriarchal, that women enjoyed equal rights everywhere, or that patriarchy did not exist. Africa is a continent of diverse societies, political systems, kinship arrangements and cultural traditions. Women’s experiences varied considerably according to their communities, social positions, wealth and historical circumstances (Miroslava Prazak, “Women, Gender, and Sexuality in East Africa,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, 2020; Saidi, Women’s Authority and Society in Early East-Central Africa, 2010).
But this diversity makes the history more interesting, not less.
Across different African societies, women exercised forms of economic, political, social and spiritual authority. Their roles included farming and trading, managing resources, transmitting knowledge, organising collectively and participating in political and religious life (Amoah-Boampong and Agyeiwaa, “Women in Pre-colonial Africa: West Africa,” 2021; Saidi, Women’s Authority and Society in Early East-Central Africa, 2010).
In some societies, women held formal political offices. In others, their authority operated through market associations, kinship networks, religious institutions, women’s organisations and collective action. Historical accounts of precolonial West Africa, for example, describe women as participants in political, economic, social and spiritual life rather than as a homogeneous group confined to the domestic sphere (Amoah-Boampong and Agyeiwaa, “Women in Pre-colonial Africa: West Africa,” 2021).
Not every woman possessed the same power. Not every tradition protected women’s interests. Yet it is historically inaccurate to imagine African women as passive figures waiting for an external ideology to teach them how to resist.
African women had histories of agency before feminism became the name through which that agency was debated.
This is not an argument against learning from feminist movements elsewhere. Ideas travel, and solidarity across borders can be transformative. It is an argument against treating African women as though they entered history only when somebody else supplied the vocabulary to describe their struggles.
When women’s authority became an inconvenience
Colonialism did more than redraw borders and replace political authorities. It reorganised economies, legal systems, land relations and social institutions. Across different African settings, colonial administrations altered access to land and labour, expanded taxation and wage labour, and sometimes privileged male authorities while overlooking women’s existing political and economic roles (Moses Ochonu, “African Colonial Economies: Land, Labor, and Livelihoods,” History Compass, 2013; “Women and Colonialism,” Oxford Bibliographies in African Studies, 2013).
The consequences were not identical across the continent. Colonial rule encountered different societies and interacted with existing inequalities in different ways. Some women negotiated new opportunities through education, trade, and political participation; others faced new restrictions or the strengthening of existing disadvantages (Prazak, “Women, Gender, and Sexuality in East Africa,” 2020; Tabitha Kanogo, African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya, 1900–50, 2005).
But one question deserves particular attention: What happens when a society’s institutions change, but the authority women once exercised through those institutions is not carried forward?
What happens when women’s knowledge is dismissed, their political participation narrowed, their economic contributions undervalued, and their histories remembered only in fragments?
For me, the word that captures something of this disruption is expression.
Expression is not merely the freedom to speak. It is the freedom to occupy space, exercise authority, preserve knowledge, make decisions, organise collectively and be recognised as a person capable of shaping the world around her.
It is the ability to say no and have that refusal carry weight.
It is the ability to know something without needing somebody else to validate the knowledge.
It is the ability to hold power without automatically being treated as a threat.
Colonialism did not invent every form of gender inequality in Africa. Nor did it erase women’s agency completely. African women resisted colonial rule, negotiated changing circumstances and built political movements. Scholarship on colonial governance also shows how official institutions and records could marginalise women’s experiences, even as women continued to exercise agency within and against those structures (M. Ryan, “‘It Was Necessary to Do Something With Those Women’: Colonial Governance and the ‘Disposal’ of Women and Girls in Early Nineteenth-Century Sierra Leone,” Gender & History, 2023; “Women and Colonialism,” Oxford Bibliographies in African Studies, 2013).
The work of reclaiming African women’s history therefore requires more than celebrating exceptional women. It requires examining the systems that enabled women to act, the systems that constrained them, and the ways both continue to shape our lives.
The women who refused to be silent
Consider Aline Sitoé Diatta, the Senegalese anti-colonial resistance figure and community leader from Casamance.
During the Second World War, French colonial authorities seized a substantial portion of the region’s rice harvest to support the war effort. Diatta, working alongside other market women, encouraged resistance to colonial demands, including refusing cooperation, rejecting compulsory agricultural changes that threatened local livelihoods, and resisting demands connected to taxation and labour (University of Bristol, “Aline Sitoé Diatta: Women’s Anti-colonial Resistance in Senegal,” Black History Month Snapshots).
Her resistance was connected to community survival, agricultural livelihoods, religious practice and the right of people to determine how they lived (University of Bristol, “Aline Sitoé Diatta: Women’s Anti-colonial Resistance in Senegal”).
Her story challenges the idea that women’s liberation must begin with a declaration about gender. Resistance can emerge through the defence of land, food, livelihood, spiritual practice and community autonomy.
A woman does not have to use the word feminism to demonstrate that she understands the consequences of being denied control over her life.
Then there are the Kom women of Cameroon and the Anlu rebellion of 1958–1961.
Historian Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué documents how Kom women mobilised against British colonial interference in agriculture, an area in which women exercised considerable authority, and against the alleged plan by the ruling Kamerun National Congress to sell Kom land to Nigerian Igbo purchasers (Mougoué, “The Anlu Rebellion,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, 2018).
Through the established practices of Anlu, a women’s institution used to respond to violations of the Kom moral order, the women disrupted markets, courts and schools, organised roadblocks and defied both colonial and traditional authorities. Their actions challenged political power locally and colonial rule in the Southern Cameroons (Mougoué, “The Anlu Rebellion,” 2018).
Think about that for a moment.
Women organised. They mobilised their communities. They used the authority available to them to challenge decisions that threatened their livelihoods and land.
They did not wait for permission to become political actors.
Taytu Betul, the Ethiopian empress and political strategist, offers another example of women’s participation in the exercise of state power. During the reign of Emperor Menelik II, she exercised political influence and opposed Italian ambitions to establish control over Ethiopia. Scholarship on the Battle of Adwa also documents the roles of Taytu and other Ethiopian women in mobilisation, logistical support, and resistance to the Italian invasion (Wondim Tiruneh Zeleke, “Achievements of Women during the Battle of Adwa and Its Aftermath: A Case Study of Empress Taytu Betul (1880s–1910s),” International Journal of African Renaissance Studies, 2022; Raymond Jonas, The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire, 2011).
Her history reminds us that African women’s political lives cannot be reduced to domestic life or supporting roles behind male leaders.
These women lived in different societies and historical circumstances. Their experiences cannot be collapsed into one model of African womanhood. But together, they challenge a familiar assumption: that political authority, resistance and strategic thinking are naturally male domains.
The women who organised before the continent’s institutions
The story continues beyond individual women.
In July 1962, African women from fourteen countries and approximately a dozen resistance organisations gathered in Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika, now Tanzania, to establish a common platform for solidarity and mobilisation. The organisation was initially called the Union of African Women and was renamed the Pan-African Women’s Organization (PAWO) in 1974 (African Union, “Founding Mothers”; South African Government, “50th Anniversary Celebration of the Pan African Women’s Organisation,” 2013).
The meeting brought together women committed to African liberation, opposition to colonialism and apartheid, and the promotion of women’s participation in political decision-making (African Union, “Africa’s Women’s Day,” 2022).
It took place a year before the founding of the Organisation of African Unity, the predecessor of today’s African Union (African Union, “Founding Mothers”).
Read that again.
African women were organising across national boundaries to connect women’s participation with the wider struggles for liberation, political representation and social transformation before the continental organisation that became the African Union existed.
They were not simply asking to be included in someone else’s vision of Africa. They were helping shape that vision.
PAWO’s history matters because it challenges the notion that African women’s collective political action is a recent import. Its founding was itself an act of transnational organising: women and resistance organisations came together to establish a common platform for liberation and women’s participation in public life (African Union, “Founding Mothers”; South African Government, “Declaration on the Occasion of the Celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Pan-African Women’s Organisation,” 2013).
And yet, how many of us were taught this history as part of our understanding of African political thought?
How many of us encountered these women before encountering the familiar claim that feminism is foreign to Africa?
I do not think the answer is simply that we have forgotten a few names. I think we must ask how certain histories become central to national memory while others remain at its edges.
Whose political work becomes part of the story of independence? Whose resistance is remembered as history, and whose is dismissed as disorder? Who gets described as a leader, and who gets remembered merely as a mother, wife or supporter?
These are questions about historical representation and the limitations of the archives through which women’s lives are reconstructed. Scholarship on African women’s history has repeatedly drawn attention to the ways colonial records, institutions and male-centred historical accounts have shaped what can be seen and known about women’s lives (Prazak, “Women, Gender, and Sexuality in East Africa,” 2020; Ryan, “‘It Was Necessary to Do Something With Those Women,’” 2023).
Memory is political because what we remember influences what we believe women can be.
Reclaiming the right to define ourselves
I am not interested in proving that African women were perfect before colonialism. No society is beyond criticism, and no historical tradition should be protected from scrutiny simply because it is African.
I am interested in recovering complexity.
We should be able to acknowledge the inequalities women experienced within African societies while also examining how colonial rule transformed existing structures and introduced or reinforced new forms of exclusion. We should be able to learn from global feminist movements without surrendering the authority to interpret our own histories.
Most importantly, we should stop treating African women as a single category with one legitimate path to liberation.
The woman who leads a political movement and the woman who runs a market stall are not necessarily pursuing the same goals. The woman who chooses marriage and motherhood and the woman who chooses a different life do not have to become enemies. The woman who speaks loudly and the woman who exercises influence quietly should not have to prove their worth through the same performance of independence.
Our histories are too rich for that.
African feminism, as I understand it, must leave room for disagreement, cultural specificity, intellectual curiosity and the freedom to choose. It must ask not only whether women have entered institutions, but whether they can shape those institutions. Not only whether women are visible, but whether their knowledge is valued. Not only whether women have rights on paper, but whether they can exercise those rights without punishment.
The African woman before the label was not one woman. She was a farmer, trader, queen, organiser, spiritual authority, political strategist, mother, rebel and knowledge-holder. Sometimes she was several of these things at once. Sometimes she lived within systems that empowered her in one area and constrained her in another.
She was human, complicated and historically situated.
She did not need to be perfect to possess agency.
And she did not need to be called a feminist for her actions to matter.
Perhaps the task before us is not to search for an untouched African past or to reject every idea that travels across borders. It is to recover the histories that colonial disruption, selective memory and narrow definitions of power have made difficult to see.
Because before we ask what the African woman should become, we ought to know something about what she has already been.
The label may change. The history does not begin with it.
