Majority of African women are farmers. Most days, they work in the fields all day long aided only by a simple hoe in order to provide basic food for their families. They also work a second labour daily fetching firewood and water, drying, shelling, storing and cooking food and at the same time caring for the children.
A typical rural woman’s day has changed little since the pre-colonial era; rather it is taking a longer time and harder. The social constraints which shaped a woman’s economic and domestic work in the pre-colonial period still holds, although modified by the colonial integration of African rural economies into international economic systems.
Food farming in pre-colonial Africa was almost everywhere; a system of shifting hoe culture. A new field of one to two acres was cleared in forest or bush land once or twice a year. After two or three crops had been produced, the field was abandoned or left to fallow for 15 to 20 years.
This type of farming system required either low population density and plenty of virgin land or the periodic migration of the community to new areas when the land becomes sterile. The perpetual need for new farmland and also the episodic dangers posed to small stateless societies by expanding or slaving states made migration a perennial feature of most people’s lives.
Men’s role in extensive hoe agriculture was commonly limited to the heavy land clearing phase, but they also played a military role in defending and acquiring land, a relatively frequent requirement with shifting agriculture. Women usually carry out all the major farming tasks, breaking up the soil, planting, weeding, harvesting, and carrying the harvest home with little or no male help. Africa shifting agriculture is commonly referred to as a woman’s farming system.
Women do all the field work except clearing. Farming was combined with cattle-keeping in many societies of east and southern Africa. Women usually took the entire responsibility for food farming while men herded the cattle and cleared the land.
The past is still very evident in the contemporary working lives of African women. The relative patriarchal dominance in the household economy combined with continued practices of rural exploitation through low crop prices and high consumer goods prices constrain a woman’s economic options and confine the great majority of rural women to a life of heavy labour and limited welfare.
Women’s economic problems are directly related to changes in their nations and the world’s economic systems, but they are also strongly rooted in the socio-economic traditions of the precolonial era and the colonial policies.
Change is needed on two fronts. The macro-economic forces which act to privilege industrial and urban development over agricultural investment and rural modernization must be redressed. The rural areas are no longer capable of providing cheap labour and export crops to finance urban and industrial growth without serious attention to providing the kinds of investments and expertise that could raise agricultural productivity and rural living standards.
Women’s specific problems of low productivity in food farming, lack of cash to invest in modern agricultural inputs, time and money to provide adequate nutrition for their children, and in most cases, extreme overwork are also related to long-standing traditions which operate at the household and village level.
The problems here are more subtle, commonly ignored or denied by national and local male leaders and perhaps even more difficult to deal with.
The patriarchal household remains a prominent feature of African rural economies. Husbands manage their family farm.
Men keep the proceeds of export crops under their own control and expect that their wives food crops and small cash crop earnings will be used to meet most of the family’s daily consumption needs. Unfortunately, women’s harvests and incomes are often inadequate to meet the heavy responsibilities put upon them.
Furthermore, a woman’s attempts to increase her earning capacity by engaging in independent economic activities is severely limited by lack of time as traditional subsistence and domestic obligations take up eight hours a day from the woman. The problem is compounded by the silent customary practices or prohibitions against a woman’s right to own or control economic resources.
Although, women earnings are much smaller than men’s everywhere, many men still attempt to control the use of their wives cash. Traditional practices such as predominantly male inheritance of land and the belief that children “belong to “their father’s lineage in patrilineal societies, all have continued to limit the freedom of choice and the economic independence of African women.
Although modern legal system offer the formal possibility for the inheritance of land by widows or a woman’s right to shared custody of her children in divorce, actual legal judgments commonly differ according to the traditional customs of the area which routinely deny a woman’s right to land or parental custody. Ignorance, poverty, tradition and outright male opposition are formidable barriers to women’s ability actually to obtain the legal rights they have on paper
African women supply far greater labor input into agriculture. They are the mainstay of the subsistence food supply system. Women have control of certain resources and they have access to personal incomes, but the value of the labour time is lower.
During the cocoa boom they had re-organized family work in a way which was echoed in many other export-crop areas men turned all attention to cocoa, while women took over the cultivation of basic food for the family. Cocoa is still the best source of cash income but women own only four percent of the total cocoa acreage. Women’s food farms are smaller and on poorer land than men’s because women working alone find it difficult to do heavy work.
The time of change for the woman to obtain their freedom is now. Women need modern tools and agricultural inputs in the farms to get enough yields to keep the family going. If they all become weak before something is done to help them then we face the dangers of food crisis once more in the nearest future. Now is the time for action.
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