Sub-Saharan AfricaWomen in Sub-Saharan African countries have
had an ambivalent relationship with the militaries
of their societies. Since the mid-1990s, African
women have become best known for the creation of
unprecedented peace networks and movements
throughout Africa – a vital response to the rash of
post-Cold War armed conflicts there. Although sta-
tistics on women and militarism are almost impos-
sible to obtain, the clear involvement of African
women with informal militias and informal mili-
taries is disproving Fukuyama’s essentialist stereo-
type (1997) that women are nurturers and not
soldiers and causes us to explore Mead’s concern
with the “unwillingness of most societies to arm
women” (1967, 236). The stereotype that Muslim
women do not participate in the military is also
challenged by the data. In fact, the differential
involvement of Sub-Saharan African women with
the military is not dependent upon religion, but
rather on the nature of ties between the military,
culture, the state, and other institutions of the
society.
The militaries of most traditional African king-
doms were formed through male conscription, and
there was often complementary support given by
women of all classes to the process of military con-
quest by which these traditional states emerged.
Few ordinary women were in the military, and nei-
ther traditional nor modern African militaries con-
scripted women.
Under colonialism, African women were excluded
from the military. European colonizers shaped the
militaries to be institutions that could dominate
and subdue African societies, so they conscripted
men from marginal areas. These men understood
that they were being exploited, but they eventually
came to see the military as a job that could guaran-
tee them some economic security.
This relationship of the Sub-Saharan African mil-
itary dominance over other institutions persisted
until recently, manifesting itself in five main trends.
The first trend appeared in many Anglophone and
Francophone colonies that agitated for independ-
ence, and achieved it through elections and negoti-
ations in the 1960s. A decade later, the army was
strong enough to take over in states with weak elec-
toral or judicial institutions, or where governments
Military: Women’s Participation
were authoritarian and corrupt. Women became
adversaries of the military because of its resistance
to elections, abuse of civilians, and assaults on
women leaders.
The second trend was the appearance of libera-
tion movements where guerilla armies resisted
colonial hegemony in Algeria, Eritrea, Ethiopia,
Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Guinea-
Bissau, and South Africa. In these cases, both men
and women became freedom fighters, and those
women who experienced battle on the front lines
earned status relatively equal to that of men. How-
ever, most women were also a part of the women’s
wing, the women’s auxiliary forces, the nursing
unit, or the equipment suppliers and food brigade
rather than the heads of regiments. This range of
roles still offered women an alternative to male
domination in the domestic arena.
As a subset of the above cases, in both Muslim
and Christian parts of Sub-Saharan Africa where
liberation struggles continued into the 1970s and
through the 1980s, women’s military involvement
depended on the context. In northern Sudan, Mus-
lim women of the National Islamic Front supported
their men fighting against the Christian south (Hale
1996), although more pacifism emerged later. In
Eritrea, some women resisted religious and cultural
conservatism by fighting for liberation from Ethio-
pia in both single sex and mixed units (Coughlin
2000). Muslim and Christian women participated
in a 30-year liberation struggle against Ethiopia
until independence was secured in 1993. They
formed 35–40 percent of the EPLF freedom fight-
ers, 25 percent of the front line combatants, roughly
20–40 percent of the administrative and industrial
occupations, but 50.5 percent of the health fields.
Many women saw the military as a way to alter
their subordinate positions within society, whether
due to class oppression, or sexism. Many Eritrean
women broke out of intolerable marriages by
becoming freedom fighters (Leguesse 1994), and
some married fellow soldiers. In Eritrea, Tsegga
Gaim said: “The gender issue was such a very big
part of this struggle for the women fighters...I
learned in the EPLF not only to fight for independ-
ence, but also for equality” (Stephens 2000). But at
the end of the early liberation wars, women fight-
ers often paid a high price for the breaking of tra-
ditional norms. Most were discharged from the