Forging Ahead without an Affirmative Action Policy: Female Politicians in Sierra Leone's Post‐War Electoral Process
In contemporary post‐conflict Sierra Leone, women have managed to secure 13.5 per cent of seats in parliament – without affirmative action in place, thanks to women's groups' and coalitions' mobilisation and activism. While the political resistance to Sierra Leone having a quota was high, the women's movement has succeeded in forcing the political parties and the government to recognise that it is no longer politically viable to sidestep women's rights, should they wish to capitalise on women's voting power. As women's organisations, in particular the 50/50 group, continue the struggle to introduce a quota, the challenge for Sierra Leonean women is how to ensure that the quota project is not hijacked by the male‐dominated political establishment. To this aim, this article examines the ongoing efforts to politically consciencise women parliamentarians, society and political parties.
Kvinnlig aktivism under och efter krig. En jämförande fallstudie mellan Liberia och Sierra Leone.
During the devastating civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone women’s organizations played an important role for the emergence of peace, and are still influential in the building of equal and democratic societies. In Liberia, however, the women’s movement was more successful in influencing and affecting the warring parties for peace and gender equality and the purpose of this thesis is to outline the reasons behind the different levels of success of the two countries’ women’s movements. Through the theoretical perspective of transversal politics and black and third world feminism I perform a comparative case study by the research design “method of difference” to discern the mechanisms behind Liberia’s successful women’s movements and also to what extent the normative theories function for an empirical study with explaining ambitions. My study shows that the factors behind the Liberian women’s movement, as explained by the theories, are transversal strategies combined with endurance, purposefulness and ideological focus, which the Sierra Leonean women to a greater extent were lacking. The thesis also reveals the need for further development of the employed theories in order to make them more suitable for empirical studies.
Mende and Sherbro Women in High Office
For the Mende and Sherbro of Sierra Leone there is a long tradition of political activity on the part of women. In 1787 when the Sierra Leone colony for returned slaves was established, a Sherbro women named Queen Yamacouba was signatory to that treaty which ceded territory to the British Crown.2 The first District Commissioner in the Sherbro and Mende country, T. J. Alldridge, specifically reported making treaties of peace and amity with two women chiefs in 1889.3 Those women, judging by Alldridge's description, had been in power for several years when he met them and took their political roles for granted.4 In 1970, 10 of the 146 chiefdoms in Sierra Leone were headed by women. The geographic distribution of these chiefdoms is not evenly spread, however, and they cluster in the Southern and Eastern Provinces (Kono District deleted). This is roughly the area occupied by the Mende, and the coastal Sherbro, Krim, Gallinas and Vai people. For the purposes of this paper, I will combine the small group of Krim with the Sherbro, and the Gallinas and Vai with the Mende.s Within the Mende/Sherbro area thus defined, there are 81 chiefdoms, 10 of