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All Hail the African Queen!
By Jesse Masai
The passionate, African woman has come from far.
In past days, she tilled the land, bore babies, maintained the home and waited for late-night beatings from her husband.
She waited in the polygamy line for her sexual rights, and was in some African communities considered no less than a child.
“I only found children,” a visitor would say if, upon visiting a home of the Nandi of East Africa, the man of the house had been away.
Children, in such instances, included both actual children and the mothers who had bore them.
Women were informally educated for motherhood, and only in the very rare African society would one be mentored for public service.
In those days, only the excesses of white colonial privilege, typified in the Happy Valley orgies of Kenya and other white highlands on the continent gave a semblance of place for the “exposed” woman on the African continent.
The advent of missionary activity, the nationalist movements that would follow and the dawn of independence from colonial rule on the continent ushered in a new breed of African women.
Environmentalist Wangari Maathai would, in 1972, become Kenya 's first female professor at a time when Azania 's Winnie Mandela was, together with Ghanaian Sally Hayfron, mothering freedom movements against the forces of colonialism and neo-colonialism on the continent.
Other African women, surviving from the heady days of the sexual revolution in the 1960s, were breaking fresh ground across the continent.
While historians have generally glorified male achievements in popular African history, it might be fair to suggest that the re-birth of the continent in the so-called New world Order would have been incomplete without the passionate African woman.
This woman, beyond traditional feminine roles, has been at the forefront of engineering appropriate concepts and technologies for her people; legislation of needed policies and laws as well as the enforcement of required regulations to make her compelling vision possible.
African women of this kind are the unsung, silent heroes of the new Africa , whose pinnacle we almost always mistake for Maathai, the continent's first female Nobel Peace prize winner in 200 6.
These are the women who mothered Rwanda through 1994, and the same persons to whom Nelson Mandela would later, in Hellenic tradition, appeal that they withdraw conjugal rights to force their men to stop Africa 's mindless carnage.
These are the women whose artistic brilliance the world witnessed in Miriam Makeba down to Brenda Fassie and Angelique Kidjo, the women whose sights and sounds leave many an African music lover asking for more.
These are the women for whom Charlize Theron is but a reminder of the immense possibilities they can still exploit in Hollywood and beyond, not to forget that our very own Nollywood is giving the former and Bollywood a good run for their money.
These are the women changing the face of Africa in the global village, helping her negotiate a shared understanding of it against harsh state and non-state actors.
These are the women who recognize Africa 's shared challenges, benefits and responsibilities, and have not ceased praying and working for her good.
These are the women for whom Obaasema is a beacon, and whose passion this print edition can do no sufficient justice in detailing.
These are the women of Africa .
All hail the African queen.
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