Empire and Nation-States: Competing Projects

Abstract

The chapter centers on the remarkable analogies between conceptions of women’s roles in society held by the Angolan and Mozambican revolutionary nationalists and the Iberian colonizers. In order to support the revolution, African women were once again called on to transmit cultural values to the next generation. The revolutionary women’s organizations in the Portuguese colonies promoted a new status for women as “the militant, the one in charge of education, the nurse, and particularly the mother who transmits the new education and revolutionary knowledge, instructing the future defenders of the Pátria.” By juxtaposing revolutionaries’ notions of women’s roles in the envisaged independent societies with the Portuguese and Spanish imperial projects, both continuity and revolutionary rupture become visible. While revolutionaries promoted women’s political participation, emancipation and equal rights were in fact postponed to the post-independence era—a clear indication of patriarchal male dominance. Endeavoring to prepare African women for their expected “role in the home, as a wife, mother, and educator of the new generations” was an all-too-familiar strategy.