The culture vs rights perspective became part of African gender policies over time. The participants of African regional meetings in 1985 and 1989 adopted common position papers to take to the UN World Conferences of Women. These documents reflected a dynamic understanding of African ‘cultural systems’. The position papers said that although cultures had been weakened by the colonial experience, they retained the potential to promote equal social, gender, and political relations. Political leaders adopted a definition of ‘culture’ which understood that historical ebbs and flows shape the meaning and role of culture in societies.
Despite this, some political actors used ‘culture’ as an excuse to uphold unequal gender power relations and to shut down debate about the oppression of women on the continent. Gendered violence wasn’t addressed in those regional position papers, although it was also absent from global policy documents of the period. Culture has always been a political issue in the governance of Africa, and the newly independent states had the complex task of balancing the destigmatising of their cultures with the demands of the women’s rights movements.
After the end of the Cold War the OAU/AU’s approach to women’s rights aligned with the global discourse. Since 2003, the dominant explanation of gendered violence offered in AU documents is “socio-cultural norms” while other factors like weak legislative systems, increased regional militarisation, or economic factors are ignored.
One notable exception to this trend was the 2003 Protocol on the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa, known as the Maputo Protocol. The Protocol is a positive example of nuance in articulating the relationship between culture and violence. Without demonising African cultures, the Maputo Protocol holds the socio-cultural factors of gendered violence accountable. It clearly states that the ‘elements in African cultures’ that condemn or perpetuate violence need to be eliminated while avoiding the overarching claims about ‘cultures of violence’. The document criminalises female genital mutilation (FGM), and child marriage. The Protocol addresses ‘harmful practices’ rather than ‘harmful traditional practices’ and identifies women’s right to a positive cultural environment.
The Maputo Protocol is an example of how a nuanced approach to the relationships between ‘culture’ and women’s rights is possible, but unfortunately, that nuance was lost in the policy documents that followed.
