Decolonization, gender, and representation: the first generation of African women parliamentarians

The growing number of African women elected to national parliaments has attracted considerable scholarly attention, yet historical perspectives on the topic remain largely overlooked. Drawing on existing but underexplored literature, this essay reconstructs the emergence of the first generation of African female parliamentarians and shows how women’s presence in parliament was promoted less to expand political representation than to make women publicly visible within a new, postcolonial political order. This history is not only essential to advancing gender perspectives in the study of postcolonial state-building in Africa; it also invites us to rethink the politics of visibility, which has long been a central concern in postcolonial and feminist theory. Focusing on the “exclusive” dimension of the politics of inclusion, the essay argues that decolonization set the stage for an ongoing struggle between visibility and invisibility, inclusion and exclusion, and that these tensions shaped the conditions under which African women operated in colonial and postcolonial parliaments. The politics of visibility were a defining feature of state-building in postcolonial Africa, as they compelled both the state and women’s leaders to define, defend, and continually negotiate the boundaries of their political space.