Abstract
Throughout Africa’s historical and contemporary experience, women have wielded political influence and distinguished themselves at the service of their communities as constituencies and/or individual actors. But they have also been pawns in conflicts. Although sexual violence against women and girls is acknowledged globally as a ubiquitous and atrocious flouting of human rights, this abhorrent phenomenon remains incontrovertible in postcolonial African authoritarian democracies in the throes of internal frictions. This has particularly been the case in the plethora of civil wars that have threatened to derail the destiny of the post-colonial African state. The evolving “Anglophone Cameroon” crisis has again accentuated the plight of women in political wrangles. While warring factions bear some proportion of culpability, available evidence points overwhelmingly to French Cameroon soldiers as the greatest perpetrators of the inhumanity of sexual violence on Anglophone Cameroon women and girls. Employing the indigenous/Native feminist and internal colonialism theories, this paper makes a historical analysis of the psychology of the perpetrators as a counterpoise for the much studied and documented female victims of sexual violence in the Ambazonia war. In the context of this analysis, it argues that the malefactors of this violence constitute for the most part the legacy of Eurocentric patriarchal colonialism in Africa.
Presenters
Womai SongAssistant Professor, History and African and African American Studies, Earlham College, Indiana, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
POLITICS, POWER, COLONIALISM, SEXUAL VIOLENCE, WOMEN, AMBAZONIA
