Staying with the Culture Struggle

This article traces how violence against women became a pan-African policy problem through analyzing the African Union's gender equality policies and legislation. Tracing the discourse back to the Organization of African Unity and regional conferences in the 1980’s and 1990’s, the paper shows how the relationship between culture and gender discourses became entangled with processes of decolonization, African political experiments, Cold War dynamics as well as ideologies, and the emergence of African feminisms. The article demonstrates that African women’s rights framework, the Maputo Protocol, takes a nuanced approach to addressing culture in women’s rights context. However, the subsequent policy frameworks fail to follow suit and instead reproduce and oversimplify culture/violence discourse. The article concludes that essentializing African cultures in policy may not be the most effective way to eliminate violence against women.