Stop Telling a Single Story of African Women

(Adichie 2009) 

I must admit, I chose the topic for my blog before completing the assigned reading. I chose ‘Water and Gender’ because for me it was the topic that my mind immediately brought to life. For me, the topic title evoked images and ideas of women and girls carrying water on their heads, missing school and experiencing gender-based violence. None of my immediate ideas about what my blog might include considered female success or achievement. Why then, as a white woman, were my ideas about gender and water in Africa so overwhelmingly negative? 

 

 Figure 1: An image of an Africa woman carrying a baby and a cannister of water (Source: World Vision 2016)  

Binyavanaga Wainaina’s ‘How to Write About Africa’ addresses exactly the assumptions I made my decisions upon (Wainaina 2019).  Popular media, including TV shows like Comic Relief, tell the story of Africa, as a continent to be pitied, filled with starvation, disease and poverty (Lammy 2017). The collection of headlines below show the kinds of stories that are told about African women and water. 

Figure 2: A newspaper title about African women (Source: Reuters 2016)  

 

Figure 3: A newspaper title about African women (Source: Borgen Magazine 2021) 

 

Figure 4: A newspaper title about African women (Source: The Guardian 2021) 

Reflecting on the representation of African women in particular, Sekyiamah emphasised that ‘people always think of African woman as repressed or constantly pregnant or don’t have sanitary towels or they’ve been cut [genitally mutilated]’ (Sekyiamah quoted in Malik 2022). It is clear that I am exactly the kind of person Sekyiamah is referring to, all of the issues she outlined coloured my reasoning for choosing this blog topic.   

It is fair to say that African women are disadvantaged in many ways, and some of my assumptions, such as women collecting water, are true in parts of the continent. Across Sub-Saharan Africa, women and girls are more likely to bear the burden of water collection than men (Graham et al. 2016: 1). In 2012, it was estimated that in 71% of households in Sub-Saharan Africa without water on the premises,

women and girls bore the responsibility for water collection (JMP UNICEF-WHO 2012: 31). As a result, women spent at least 10 million more hours a day collecting drinking water that men (JMP UNICEF-WHO 2012: 31). The gender-based division of water collection can reinforce other gender inequalities (Hellum et al. 2015: 3). For example, women are more likely to be late to school than their male counterparts, enhancing gender inequality in education (Jumare et al. 2015: 57).  

But exclusively defining a continent by its problems is unproductive. Narratives which present African women as victims who need to be saved strip African women of agency and in turn, act to validate white saviourism (Ama Ata Aidoo in BBC 2014). 

African women aren’t all victims, they are agents of change. In Zimbabwe, Glanis Changachiere, is the founding director of the Institute for Young Women Development. The institute is working to introduce a Gender Equality Bill to challenge the cultural inequalities and injustices that affect young women in the country (Forbes 2021). Women like Glanis contribute to tangible improvements to the lives of African women.  

Considering African issues solely through a negative lens is also ignorant to improvements that are being made. Women’s education has been improving across Sub-Saharan Africa, in both absolute terms and relative to men (Barro and Lee 2013: 189). 

Figure 5: A set of bar charts showing gender disparities in different levels of education (Source: Statista 2022) 

Whilst it is true that Africa faces issues relating to water and gender, it is important to appreciate that Africa can be, and is, defined by more than its problems. Moving forward with my blog I hope to be conscious of biases in media that I read and to empower African voices when writing about African issues.