The gender factor, with a growing presence in development studies and policies south of the Sahara since the 1960s (WID, Women in Development), has taken on a central role as the 21st century progresses. And not only in the world of development and in the construction of global society, but also in decolonial thinking. If this approach is becoming a pillar of the global worldview, despite the controversy it generates in developed societies and despite the disinterest it seems to arouse in many African collectives, it is partly because it is nourished as a fundamental component of the feminist movement, today unavoidable. Decolonialism brings together both the third wave (with the intersectionality of the identity conditions of different women) and the so-called fourth wave (with its activism and its projection in the legal struggle against all forms of gender violence). But they also feed back into each other, so that decolonialism is one of the palpable influences on the feminist movement today.

Surprising as it may seem, this convergence has not led to a generalized deepening of the understanding of the singularities of gender roles and relations in Africa, let alone the activation of the corresponding potentials. Despite the frequent identity-based nuance* of feminist and decolonial cooperation, the accent in the circulation of discourse and the promotion of actions is still generally placed on the individual, as the sole subject of rights. This insistence blurs, if not makes invisible, the collective components of African women’s conceptions and actions, but many studies point out that it does not disintegrate them. Perhaps the policies and projects of empowerment (empowement, autonomisation…) illustrate better than any other this ignorance of local structures, supposedly in pursuit of the well-being of the nodes, the individuals, who build them, who constitute them.

At the risk of simplifying a very complex picture, but in order to stimulate the optimization of the contrast of cases, the panel proposes to compare and interrelate African women’s empowerment strategies, usually in response to state or international policies, with the local forms of power in which these women are inserted. It is not a matter of choice, of course, but of understanding the nature and soundness of the decisions and the lines of force on which they are based. This contrast may or may not be made explicit, but it is difficult not to perceive it in situations of research or cooperation around the gender axis. And the reaction to this multiplicity involves methodological challenges, ethical dilemmas and often ambivalences, the sharing of which the panel wishes to encourage. Both to refine scientific interpretations (knowing that we are working with a lot of qualitative data), and to uncover the political implications of the research (the need for political recognition of collective subjects of rights, with the implications of introducing diversity in the waterline of the rights approach).

The panel is born from the experience of four years of specific research by a GESA team in Lower Casamance (Senegal), a diversified experience but with a single axis, women’s power: on the management of gender-based violence in households, on women’s local, economic and political power, on their role in peace building… From this locally rooted multidimensionality, the team members open themselves to contextualized comparisons with other parts of the continent, with their own background and with mainstream assumptions… The aim is to create synergies and to break the watertight compartments between studies and experiences, between activist intellectuals and grassroots active women, to paraphrase Amadiume.

We speak of African women and not of gender, although we do not intend to exclude from the reflection neither men nor the diversity of sexual orientations that may emerge in the studies. We do so, even knowing the criticism of an Oyewumí Oyeronké, as a starting point for the cases to be contrasted, insofar as the collective categories translatable (more or less reliably) as “women” have a series of collective rights and duties easily distinguishable (though always negotiable) in customary rights, in traditions, in local social crystallizations south of the Sahara.