Pedagogies of Feminist Resistance: Agrarian Movements in Africa

In the historical course of agrarian transformation in Africa, the reconstitution and fragmentation of the peasantry along the lines of gender, ethnic, class, and racial divisions which facilitate their exploitation remains a central concern in the analysis of the peasant path, of which the exploitation of gendered labor has been a particularly important concern for feminist agrarian theorizations. In contribution to these debates, this article examines the ways in which feminist concerns have shaped, driven, and defined the social and political parameters of agrarian movements in Africa. Even though agrarian movements articulating gender questions are not generalizable as feminist, their concern with social, political, and economic structures of oppression and their approach to gendered oppression as a political question lends them to characterization as being feminist. Through an examination of the changing forms of women-led agrarian struggles, the article shows how women’s responses to the dominant structures and conditions of colonial and post-colonial capitalist accumulation could be characterized as feminist due to their social and political imperatives behind women’s resistance.