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The Politics of Difference and Women's Associations in Niger: Of "Prostitutes," the Public,
and Politics
Author(s): Barbara M. Cooper
Source:
Signs,
Vol. 20, No. 4, Postcolonial, Emergent, and Indigenous Feminisms (Summer,
1995), pp. 851-882
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174885
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The Politics of Difference and Women's
Associations in Niger: Of "Prostitutes,"
the Public, and Politics
Barbara M. Cooper
Introduction
IN T H I S A R T I C L E I will trace out two related phenomena-the
development of women's associations in Niger and the categoriza-
tion and characterization of "married" and "unmarried" women in
the Maradi region of Niger from the late 1950s to the late 1980s.
The dual development of women's associations and reconceptualizations
of women's status within or outside of marriage occurred at the inter-
section of national influences and interests with local circumstances and
cultural categories. Beginning with the creation of the Union des Femmes
du Niger in 1958 and progressing through the emergence of the Asso-
ciation des Femmes du Niger and the Samaria youth association in the
mid 1970s, I argue that women's associations in Maradi have not served
to crystallize a Hausa female subculture of the kind in Katsina, described
by Renee Pittin, into a politically unified social grouping (1979, 21).
Instead, women in this Hausa-speaking region of the Sahel have used the
different women's associations to emphasize age, marital, and status dis-
tinctions among themselves as part of a larger movement to create a
legitimate public persona for both married and unmarried women.
This work is based on oral and archival research in France and Niger in 1988-89
funded through a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Research Abroad Fellowship. Versions of this
work were presented at the African Studies Association meetings in Baltimore in 1990
and in Toronto in 1994. Thanks to Sara Berry, Jim McCann, Ann Dunbar, Donald
Moore, Richard Miller, and Deb Amory for helpful conversations and comments.
Thanks also to the Signs editors and readers whose incisive remarks have prompted me
to rework my argument considerably. All remaining flaws are, of course, my own re-
sponsibility. This work could not have been done without the friendship and coopera-
tion of many AFN women in Maradi, whose own reading of feminism and politics in
Niger's women's associations may differ substantially from mine but to whom I never-
theless am deeply indebted: ina matu'kar godiya ga 'kunjiyar mata ta Maradi; Allah ya
ba ku nasara.
[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1995, vol. 20, no. 4]
? 1995 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/95/2004-0007$01.00
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Cooper THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE
Women thus participate in social transformation not by appeal to
female solidarity or to a shared female culture but by drawing subver-
sively upon existing social forms to generate new possibilities for women
in a changing political economy.
I refer to this extremely contradictory tactic as the "politics of differ-
ence," for it is only by underscoring differences among women that it has
been possible for women in this sexually segregated setting to redefine
marriage, respectable behavior, and access to external political spaces.1
The danger of such a maneuver is, of course, that in emphasizing differ-
ence and in drawing upon existing categories and social forms to generate
new social and political possibilities, there is a risk of heightening ten-
sions among women and reinforcing accepted gender ideologies. Let me
hasten to add that I am not arguing that women as a whole have con-
sciously and deliberately engineered this tactic. To the contrary, I am
suggesting that women's associations in Maradi in the late 1980s re-
flected fissures within the female body politic; in the pragmatics of bring-
ing themselves into visibility and out of silence in this comparatively
conservative Muslim region, women drew upon and emphasized those
fissures. I characterize the politics of difference as tactical not so much
because it reflects the ongoing working out of a conscious strategy but
because it seems important to me to see feminist movements as frequently
provisional and processual, as working in uneven and contradictory fash-
ion toward ends that may not be fully articulated and that cannot always
be achieved through direct and confrontational means. Research on
women in the Muslim world is beginning to reveal the complexity of
feminism in such settings: women may choose to adopt a purely secular
feminism, or they may attempt to work from within Islam to promote
interpretations of the Koran that are more favorable to women, or they
may call upon aspects of local understandings of Islam that they find
liberating (such as veiling, education, and female companionship).2
It would be a serious mistake, I believe, to see feminisms that simul-
taneously draw upon and transform existing ideologies and social forms
as merely exhibiting false consciousness. The challenge for Western-
trained feminist scholars and researchers is to begin to learn how to
listen, not only to one another but also, more important, to women
whose feminism is not enunciated in theoretical language or in familiar
forms. Indeed, women engaged in feminist movement outside the pur-
view of Western institutions may not even regard Western feminists,
1 This study is part of a larger project exploring gender, space, and social position.
For an extended discussion of how to move beyond the confines of the domestic/public
dichotomy in analyzing women's negotiation of space and their means of entry into "ex-
ternal" public spaces, see Cooper 1994.
2 For a survey of recent work, see Moghadam 1991.
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THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE Cooper
whatever their persuasion, as relevant interlocutors. Such feminisms may
be couched in idioms that are not readily recognizable to feminists in the
West, eluding characterization within the divides of cultural feminist
solidarity, radical feminist gender abolition, pragmatic feminist equal-
rights activism, or self-consciously constructed postmodern coalitional
politics. Women in Maradi share with women in feminist struggle else-
where the necessity of living and working with what Ann Snitow has
referred to as the "recurring feminist divide": "In feminist discourse a
tension keeps forming between finding a useful lever in female identity
and seeing that identity as hopelessly compromised" (1990, 17). Maradi
women draw upon their common position as women while simulta-
neously calling into question the unity and stability of the category
"woman." They have played subversively upon the local category "mar-
ried woman" in order to make possible greater female public visibility,
but their invocation of that category inevitably reinscribes local norms
that stigmatize female sexuality outside of marriage.
This article derives from my reflections upon the stresses and torn
loyalties I experienced in conducting research for a social history of
the Maradi region of Niger grounded in questions about women's expe-
riences and female agency. My research was not focused on formal po-
litical associations; in fact, I devoted much of my time in the field to
attempting to make sense of how women have participated in a rapidly
changing economy over the course of the twentieth century. Nevertheless,
because of the particular manner in which I was integrated into the social
scene of Maradi, I found myself pondering the nature of women's asso-
ciations there. In 1988 when I first arrived in the city of Maradi (popu-
lation ca. 80,000), the capital of this largely agricultural region on the
Niger-Nigeria border, local authorities at the Mairie determined that I
should make my contacts with women through the Association des
Femmes du Niger (AFN), the women's wing of the political party in
power at the time. These male bureaucrats reasoned that men would be
less likely to object to my interactions with their wives (some of whom
were in seclusion) if it were clear that my research had been vetted
through the appropriate state-controlled channels.
I was therefore introduced to the women who headed the various
neighborhood subunits of the AFN, and these women then arranged for
me to meet other women in their circle of friends, kin, and neighbors. I
eventually managed to work with many women who were not members
of the AFN, and who indeed knew little or nothing about it, by branching
out from this initial field of women. However, because I had made my
earliest contacts through the women's association, AFN members took
me under their collective wing, and I became something of a mascot for
them whenever the AFN took part in highly visible public events. In a
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Cooper THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE
sense, if they were "my" informants, I was "their" researcher, and my
public association with the AFN must have served them in some impor-
tant way, given their insistence on my presence at these events. What was
at stake here, I wondered? Why was it so important that I stand together
with these women at parades and spectacles?
My puzzlement deepened the better I got to know some of the most
active members of the women's association and as I became more alert to
their ambivalence about the time-consuming activities of the AFN and to
their hostility toward other groupings of women in the city, particularly
toward the young unmarried women who were members of the Samaria
youth organization. While the female members of the AFN and the Sa-
maria were both active at political rallies, they kept quite distant from
one another both socially and physically. This antagonism became most
pronounced when I had to choose my loyalties in a highly public and
visible arena: Would I use my car to transport key members of the AFN
to and from a political rally, or would I carry some of the young women
I worked with who were prominent members of the Samaria? In one such
moment a prominent AFN member remarked to me with contempt that
I would get no good "history" from the women in the Samaria. Having
discovered fairly early on in my research that if I wanted to gain the trust
of women, I would have to forgo my original plan to work with both men
and women, I was somewhat taken aback to discover that I might then
have to choose to ally myself with only one group of women. In the end
it was possible to remain publicly associated with the AFN while working
quietly with some Samaria women. Nevertheless, such moments made it
quite clear to me that any cultural feminist vision of a unified female
sphere in Maradi would not come close to describing the complex rela-
tions among women of differing age, marital status, and occupation and
would in fact obscure some of the most important ways in which women
in Maradi constitute themselves in formal political arenas.
This article represents my own attempt to understand the contradic-
tions I encountered while working with these women. In part it is a
working out of my own sense of disappointment that the kind of female
solidarity so often lauded in research on women and in particular in
research on women in Africa failed so dramatically to materialize in my
own experience. But it is also an effort to take seriously the situatedness
of feminist movement in Maradi: What can a Western-educated feminist
know about what feminist politics should look like for women who
encounter a quite different range of opportunities and constraints from
those the researcher encounters? I was moved to take the activities and
social maneuvering of AFN members seriously as "political" because I
knew from my observations and extensive interviews with many of them
that these were canny, resilient, and perceptive women. After I overcame
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THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE Cooper
my initial disappointment with the seemingly petty divisions within the
female body politic in Maradi, I began to think more carefully about
what larger end these divisions might serve. I began to call upon spatial,
linguistic, and performance analysis to think beyond a reified female
culture toward something that is far more changeable and provisional,
something that draws upon existing ideologies even as it transforms them
through unexpected juxtapositions and alliances.
In this study I will explore a performative and linguistic moment in
which women in Maradi have played upon the dominant ideology of
female respectability in marriage in order to redefine both "respectability"
and what it means to be a "married woman." This performance takes place
in the spatialized realm of the external public gatherings that constitute the
most clearly recognized arena for formal politics. If I emphasize the per-
formative and political element in this study it is because my historical
work on women's shifting roles in the economy has impressed upon me the
urgency of women's increased access to the external public spaces of larger-
scale trade, formal politics, and Western education. Most women through-
out the Hausa-speaking region earn income through petty trade in pre-
pared foods or small quantities of cloth and other trade goods. Women
restricted to their homes rely upon their young daughters to purchase
inputs and to peddle the goods from door to door. Tempering scholars'
enthusiastic depictions of the autonomy and vitality of the Hausa female
subculture and its "hidden economy," Barbara Callaway remarks of
women in Kano: "It should be emphasized .. . that there is little compari-
son between the wage sector and the hidden economy of women. The
incomes of most women would not even support them at a subsistence
level" (1987, 77). To gain access to public-sector employment, larger-scale
trade, and significant education, women in this region must first fight for
the right to conduct their lives openly beyond the confines of their homes.
Unmarried women and the politics of naming
In order to make clear what I mean when I suggest that women in
Maradi have used existing social forms to create new political possibili-
ties, it will be useful to first set out some of the verbal categories available
in Hausa for identifying and characterizing women of different marital
status. As will become clear in a moment, there are important historical,
cultural, political, and economic variations within the Hausa-speaking
region of the central Sudan, which spans both sides of the Niger-Nigeria
border. Hence I will roughly describe some of the language used to de-
scribe and categorize women; the ensuing discussion should demonstrate,
however, that this language is neither fixed nor uniformly deployed by all
Hausa speakers.
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Cooper THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE
The word used for an adult woman, mata, is also used to designate a
wife, much as in French (femme) or in German (Frau) adulthood and
marriage are linked in the words for "woman" and "wife." Prior to her
first marriage (generally at puberty in the Maradi region) a marriageable
girl is known as a budurwa, a term that implies virginity. A married
woman who loses her husband either through divorce or widowhood
may be known as a bajawara, which implies that she and the male kin
who serve as her guardians (with whom she may live and who support
her) are interested in finding her a new husband. Finally, a previously
married woman who earns her keep through sexual favors is known as
a karuwa. Such a woman is likely to live in a house together with other
karuwai, and her means of income is known as karuwanci. Renee Pittin's
research in Katsina (Nigeria) on the female-centered "houses of women"
in which karuwai live reveals that women may enter into karuwanci
temporarily, that they may marry a "client," and that in general women
treat movement into and out of marriages as career moves, with karu-
wanci serving simply as one "career" option among several (1979).
The long-standing institution of karuwanci presents translation diffi-
culties for the English speaker, for although it bears some resemblance to
prostitution, the relative permanence of the sexual relationships involved,
the courtship those relationships entail, and the lack of enduring stigma
that practitioners encounter have prompted most English-speaking re-
searchers to employ the word "courtesanship" instead. Hausa speakers in
Niger, when speaking in French, often use the term une femme-libre to
describe a woman who takes part in karuwanci rather than, for example,
une putin or une prostituee, suggesting that indeed Hausa speakers do
not regard this practice as being entirely congruent with prostitution. In
Maradi, streetwalkers who come from other ethnic groups and who do
not practice the domestic courtesanship women assimilated to Hausa
culture prefer are openly derided and would not be called karuwai;
Hausa speakers sometimes use the French loanword passe-partout to
denote such women. The variations in forms of sex work in Maradi show
some clear parallels with Luise White's work in Nairobi; karuwanci cor-
responds most closely with what White refers to as the Malaya form and
streetwalkers from other ethnic groups follow something more like the
Watembezi form (White 1990). For comparative purposes, then, one
might choose to follow White's lead and analyze karuwanci as one form
of prostitution among several. In this text I shall use the word "courte-
sanship" to refer to karuwanci. I retain the quotation marks, however, to
remind the reader that we, too, are contributing to a debate about the
moral character of karuwanci, sex work, "prostitution," and female
sexuality, even in this act of translation.
This overview of linguistic categories, of course, obscures the ex-
tremely contested nature of naming. A great deal is at stake in which term
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THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE Cooper
is attributed to which women and by whom. There is little ambiguity
about how to name a young girl who has never been married-she is a
budurwa (virgin). Increasingly when a girl manages to continue her
schooling beyond primary school, she might not marry until she is in her
late teens or early twenties. In this case her status is ambiguous: the
possibility that such a young woman has been sexually active prior to her
first marriage complicates the question of whether she could reasonably
be considered a budurwa. In general, however, a girl would be unlikely
to enter into "courtesanship" without first having been married at least
once. It is the large number of women who have been married at least
once but are no longer who present the greatest difficulty to categoriza-
tion. Hausa language does not distinguish a divorc6e from a widow or
provide a broad term such as single woman. For convenience I shall refer
to all such ambiguous women as "nonmarried" in order to distinguish
them clearly from pubescent girls who have never been married. Pittin
asserts from her work in Katsina that while men may refer to any non-
married woman who is not kin as a karuwa, women are more likely to
use the more neutral term bajawara, a word that does not imply "cour-
tesanship." She argues that men's preoccupation with "courtesanship" is
a denial of the female subculture's recognition of nonmarriage as an
acceptable and respectable career option. Women, she asserts, are less
concerned than men are with defining other women in relation to men:
"The women have little emotional, moral, or political investment in the
concept of women outside their husband's houses occupying a negative
or stigmatized position" (Pittin 1979, 98). Women are more likely to use
the word bajawara to describe another adult woman who is living out-
side marriage; men can imagine no option for women outside marriage
other than "courtesanship."
In Maradi in the late 1980s the situation was more complex than
Pittin's account of Katsina in the 1970s. Certainly, men in Maradi char-
acterized some nonmarried women as "courtesans," while women were
more likely than men to characterize some nonmarried women as ba-
jawara. In Maradi today, however, when women refer to another woman
as a bajawara they mean two things: first, that she is living with relatives
and is under the authority of a senior male, and, second, that she and her
guardian are pursuing or anticipating her remarriage. The word ba-
jawara is not any more appropriate than is the word karuwa to describe
an unmarried woman who lives on her own, earns her own keep without
recourse to sexual favors, and has no immediate interest in remarrying.
Bajawara is a more positive term, but it is not a more accurate term.
Consequently, single women in Maradi often maintain the pretense that
they are interested in remarrying simply in order to be called bajawara
rather that karuwai. The problem with conflating the categories of non-
married women by promoting the notion that all nonmarried women
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Cooper THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE
ought to be considered bajawara is that it categorizes women who are
pursuing remarriage with women who have no immediate interest in doing
so. In Maradi, women emphatically consider certain women to be karuwai
with something close to the moral opprobrium attached to the English
word prostitute, although the stigma is of a less lasting character. They also
recognize that there are some women who are not married, who have no
intention of remarrying in the near future, and whose primary source of
income is not connected to sexual favors. These women are the subject of
considerable debate among Maradi women themselves, for if they are not
karuwai and they are not bajawara, what are they?
I will now elucidate how the naming of nonmarried women has
evolved in Maradi by tracing out the development of the political asso-
ciations in which women have taken part during the postindependence
era. It will become clear that the two issues are related, for as women
begin to carve out a political place and persona for themselves, they must
also create an appropriate public image, an image that neither karuwa
nor bajawara adequately captures. This exercise in naming is a political
exercise.
The evolution of women's associations in Niger
In order to make sense of the character and positioning of the primary
women's associations in Niger's postindependence history, let me first
sketch out the rise, decline, and recent resurgence of multiparty politics
in Niger since 1945.3 With liberal reforms in politics in the French colo-
nies following World War II, political parties were formed in the French
colonial territories to send representatives to the new Constituent Na-
tional Assembly in Paris. The Parti Progressiste Nigerien (PPN), which
was formed in 1946 by a group of elite intellectuals from the western
Zarma-speaking region of the country, emerged from a series of complex
and shifting alliances and parties to gain control of the government of the
newly autonomous Republic of Niger in 1958. The PPN leader Diori
Hamani was named prime minister. In the following months the PPN
proceeded to eliminate all opposition parties, reserving all positions for
its own members. Upon Niger's full independence in 1960, Diori ab-
sorbed all the remaining non-PPN politicians into his own party, and
henceforth Niger was a one-party state.
In consolidating his control over the country, Diori gradually alienated
the Hausa traditional rulers, who had continued to serve as the admin-
3 This section is intended to present the reader unfamiliar with Nigerien politics with
a bare outline of the political parties relevant to this discussion. For a more exhaustive
discussion of Nigerien political history, I refer the reader to the sources I used to compile
this sketch: Fuglestad 1983, 147-88; Decalo 1990, 241-84; Charlick 1991, 40-52.
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THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE Cooper
istrative apparatus under French rule and whose networks and power
bases Diori attempted to co-opt through the creation of party committees
in each village. Diori formed a national "animation" agency, which was
to create a pyramid of rural organizations that would replace local gov-
ernments, bypassing the power networks built up by entrenched local
powers. The rural party base would be founded on the state-directed
cooperatives and a state-initiated youth movement.
The Diori regime's complacency and lack of interest in domestic prob-
lems eventually provoked a successful military coup in 1974. Many fac-
tors contributed to the coup, among them resentment of Diori's ties to the
French government, his poor handling of negotiations for partial profits
from the newly developing uranium mines, his alienation of traditional
rulers, and, most important, his administration's cynical and inhumane
manner of distributing relief grain from international donors during the
Sahel drought of 1968-74. The military government that took power
under Seyni Kountche was very popular at first. Kountche used the brief
surge in revenues from uranium to raise the minimum wage, improve
national education, and make rural development and agriculture the
nation's priority (Decalo 1990, 268-69). His regime also developed a
series of local-level institutions to replace Diori's village party committees
with a "development society" based on the support of cooperatives, a
renewed and expanded youth movement called the Samaria Youth As-
sociation, and a series of socioprofessional groups. Like Diori, Kountche
hoped to mobilize popular support and channel political activity while
bypassing any autonomous power bases at the local level (Charlick 1991,
64-67).
As uranium revenues declined, the Kountche regime suffered numer-
ous coup attempts and perennial student unrest, all of which Kountche
survived. When he died in late 1987 of a brain tumor, he was succeeded
by his chief of staff, Ali Saibou. Saibou seemed at first to have a strong
hold upon his position, dealing moderately with student strikes. Saibou
moved ahead with Kountche's plans to build a national charter and set up
a committee to draft a constitution and to set dates for the elections of an
assembly and president. In 1988 he launched a new party, the Mouve-
ment National de la Societe de Developpement (MNSD) to facilitate the
upcoming "civilian" presidential election. In spite of the descrispation
(relaxing) of the Saibou regime, however, intellectuals and farmers alike
were quietly skeptical of the apparent democratization under way; the
MNSD was firmly in the hands of Saibou, and the military government
and the new constitution would be directed, controlled, and finally over-
seen by the military regime, even if a civilian were elected president of the
party. By January 1988 student strikes were becoming difficult to control,
and Saibou began to clamp down on demonstrations by closing the
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Cooper THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE
university, expelling student leaders, and forcing students to evacuate
university housing. In early 1990 the army fired on a demonstration on
the Kennedy Bridge in Niamey, killing a number of students and injuring
others (Charlick 1991, 75). Saibou's difficulties were compounded by
escalating violence between army troops and marginalized Tuareg no-
mads. In May 1990 an attack on the sous-prefecture in Tchin-Tabaraden
attributed to Tuareg "bandits" in which thirty-one deaths were reported
was followed by damaging international news coverage of violent army
reprisals against the general Tuareg population. Allegedly, hundreds of
Tuaregs were arrested and tortured, and many were killed (West Africa
1990).
Popular discontent over the attacks on the Tuaregs, the shooting of
students in Niamey, and austerity measures crystallized in a coalition
between students and labor unions, who joined together to use strikes to
pressure the Saibou regime to initiate a national conference for consti-
tutional reform and to arrange multiparty elections. By March 1991 the
Union Syndicale des Travailleurs du Niger (USTN) labor union had won
an agreement from the MNSD government guaranteeing, among other
things, access to the state media for opposition parties (West Africa
1991a, 524). In an effort to limit the military control over the elections
the USTN forced Saibou to exclude the associations created or co-opted
to form the base for the MNSD (the Samaria Youth Association, the
Association of Traditional Leaders, the Islamic Association, and the Co-
operatives) from the planning commission charged with arranging the
national conference (West Africa 1991b, 818). The MNSD candidate was
defeated in multiparty elections held early in 1993, bringing a coalition
government to power under Mahamane Ousmane, a civilian Hausa stat-
istician from Zinder.
Women's and youth associations have served as a means of mobilizing
and making visible the power bases of the various political parties in
Niger's postwar history. Youth associations in Niger (in contrast with the
student unions) have not been formed spontaneously but were, rather,
created to serve as wings of an existing political party. Youth group
festivities have often served to distract from the vocal complaints of more
politicized student groups and to entertain the large numbers of educated
but unemployed youth. Similarly, until the civilian coup leading to the
1993 elections, there had not been an autonomous or spontaneously
created women's political association in Niger. Prior associations were
created as part of a political party or regime already dominated by men
or were informal self-help and entertainment groupings absorbed into a
political party. Women's groups could symbolize both a party's commit-
ment to modernization and its roots in tradition. The problem that par-
ties have faced in mobilizing women as a party base has been that the
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THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE Cooper
women who have the greatest mobility and visibility within the external
public sphere are precisely those nonmarried women whose character
and status are most ambiguous.
Thus when the PPN attempted to adopt the "courtesans" of Maradi in
the 1960s to form the nucleus of its women's wing, it encouraged a
change in naming. These femmes-libres represented qualities that the
party regarded as signs of a modern, worldly woman. As Jacqueline
Nicolas observed at the time, the "courtesan" "embodies the woman who
has succeeded in freeing herself of the family yoke and has overcome
certain taboos, a woman who lives on her own and who therefore is more
likely to choose for herself the husband who suits her. The 'independent
woman' is used by the PPN as their Egeria-companion and advisor to
the kings! It is the party which had the word 'karuwa' changed to
'zawara'" (Nicolas 1967, 59). The PPN attempted to replace the stig-
matized term for "courtesan" with the neutral term for a woman between
marriages (zawara, bazawara, and bajawara are variants of the same
term) in order to legitimize the single women who served as the party's
visible female base. However short-lived this renaming-certainly it no
longer holds true today-it underscores the importance of nonmarried
women to politics in a Muslim society where very few married women
are in a position to join a political base publicly. Whether they were in
strict seclusion or not, few respectable married women could have been
called upon to parade on national holidays or to promote party propa-
ganda. By choosing the word bajawara to replace karuwa the PPN was
automatically implying that these single women were temporarily be-
tween marriages. These women were to be held up as progressive women
and potential wives, not as women who had chosen a lifestyle that re-
jected or threatened the traditional ideal of marriage. It would have been
difficult then, as it is today, for a young woman to state in any public
manner that she had no interest in remarriage. Like many of my single
female contacts in Maradi today, they would be far more inclined to
profess an interest in marriage, "if only the right man would come
along," while at the same time rejecting successive suitors.4 In part this is
a strategy for finding a compatible or at least compliant husband. But it
is also a strategy for avoiding criticism while maintaining an independent
lifestyle.
The PPN's necessarily ambivalent relationship to "courtesanship"
and independent women is made clearer in a rather Orwellian proposal
made by the Union des Femmes du Niger (UFN), the party's women's
4 This notion of holding out for a husband who suits a woman's choice of lifestyle is
nicely captured in the words of one unmarried woman: "Jusqu'ici je n'ai pas trouve un
soupirant qui cadrerait avec ma vie" (I still haven't found a suitor who suits my life-
style).
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association founded in 1958 under Diori and promoted by his wife Aissa
Diori: "The women of Niger demand that the party and the government
give serious attention to the advancement of women at the national level.
In particular the UFN calls for the creation of a female police force
empowered to oversee urban morals and to prevent prostitution in cities
and urban centers" (quoted in Clair 1965, 139-40). This improbable
proposal is followed by a series of demands that highlight the importance
of women in the family: they further demand "the schooling of Nigerien
women so that they can soon bring their invaluable assistance to the
education of children in the family, to the improvement of hygiene and
nutrition, and to better child-raising practices and home economics. They
also demand the creation of jobs specifically for women, particularly as
stewardesses, waitresses, saleswomen, typists, stenographers, switch-
board operators, police agents, and chauffeurs" (quoted in Clair 1965,
140).
Women's education is proposed and justified here as a means to pro-
mote the well-being of children and to raise the standard of living for
families. The dominance of the existing image of women as primarily
wives and mothers meant that the UFN could only imagine laying po-
litical claim to education and jobs by publicly distancing itself from any
interest in an immoral independent life outside the family. Through this
juxtaposition the UFN implied that immoral sexual activities are the
outcome of women's exclusion from education and employment in the
formal economy: by promoting female jobs and education, the govern-
ment would then encourage women to attend to their proper duties as
wives and mothers.
Having established its interest in morality and the family, the UFN
then went on to make a series of social and judicial demands that have yet
to be fully implemented, modest though they may seem: "The UFN de-
mands that the government facilitate women's entry into judicial, social,
and political careers; the liberation and upholding of women as wives
and mothers; and the recognition by the state and by their husbands of
their right to individual property. The UFN also demands that new leg-
islation on marriage and the marriage contract be instituted guaranteeing
a woman protection from divorce [repudiation] once she has had four
children" (quoted in Clair 1965, 140). The UFN's defense of motherhood
was not feigned: it was indeed interested in promoting women and in
protecting the interests of women as mothers and wives.
In this juxtaposition of "courtesans" carrying the PPN banner and the
cry for upholding women as wives and mothers we see the difficulties in
mobilizing women politically in Niger: the women who are most avail-
able and visible as images of the modern woman at the same time
threaten the accepted family organization. The renaming of karuwai as
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THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE Cooper
bajawara was in part an attempt to minimize the threat of these inde-
pendent women.
It was the UFN that founded the original women's association in
Maradi under the direction of Umma Aguiyar, a well-educated midwife
from the Zarma-speaking region near the capital. Soon after the Maradi
branch was formed, the internal divisions that have characterized the
women's associations there began to emerge. While Madame Aguiyar
acted as the president, the woman who was chosen as her vice president
was Aisha Wandara, the sister of the traditional Hausa ruler of Maradi.
Wandara had briefly held the title Iya, giving her authority over the
members of the bori spirit possession cult when her brother was first
enthroned. Her relative youth and independence, however, got her into
trouble, and she was replaced by another woman of the aristocratic class
after four years in office. Nevertheless, her spiritual and social ties to
the spirit possession cult as well as her genealogical ties with members of
the aristocracy made her an important asset to the UFN. Members of the
cult, with which she remained closely associated, were often "courte-
sans," who as we have seen made up the nucleus of the women available
to join the UFN. Wandara was the union's link to Hausa women, who for
the most part were not as well-educated as Zarma women in western
Niger, and to the "courtesans," who could most visibly represent the
PPN's women's wing in Maradi. Having lost her politically significant
position as head of the bori cult, Aisha Wandara could nevertheless wield
some power by acting as the state's link between a modern structure for
women and the network of women most available to participate in that
structure. By integrating a figure from the local female aristocratic hier-
archy into the UFN, the PPN could make a political analogy between
traditional forms of representation for women and modern forms.
The existence of important titled positions for women in Maradi con-
trasts with the situation in northern Nigeria, where Pittin worked and
where most research on Hausa women has been conducted. Local Ma-
radi practices included women in the political process through titled
positions for a few women in the aristocratic class, while commoner
women could become prominent through the bori spirit possession cult,
still practiced openly here and overseen by the Iya. Independent women
could find some protection from the dangers of marginality through bori
cult membership, so that many "courtesans" were also part of the broad
bori network. Thus the UFN could attempt to temper the possible nega-
tive associations attached to members engaged in "courtesanship" by
drawing on the traditional sanction for bori that, as former head of the
bori cult, Wandara represented. The Iya is chosen from among senior
women in the family of the ruler, and both the king (Sarki) and the Iya
can lay claim to their right to office in part because their family is seen as
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being closely allied with the bori spirits through inheritance: su duk suna
da bori (they all have spirits). Such traditional sanction does not exist in
northern Nigeria, where the cult is practiced very much in opposition to
the desires of the Muslim rulers. The public acceptance of the bori cult,
then, and the female title of Iya altered the nature of women's partici-
pation in politics in Maradi, making it possible for at least one variegated
segment of the female population (including some aristocratic women,
bori members, and "courtesans") to participate in political events.
The early women's association entertained major political figures and
participated in dry-season gardening. However, it is not entirely clear
that "courtesans" had much choice in the matter of their participation.
While the women who acted as leaders of the UFN in Maradi deny that
"courtesans" were coerced into participating, older women often associ-
ate the UFN with "courtesanship," and in an interview I conducted in
1989 one former karuwa gave the following account of the experience of
such women at the time:
HAJJIYA GOBARCI: Back then they took all the women who weren't
married, all the way from here and then all the way down the
hillside, and they had to work a big field down in the valley, a
government field.
B. COOPER: Did you enjoy that?
GOBARCI: How could you enjoy that?! They'd do dances late at
night then, at that time, I had just come out of my marriage. Heav-
ens! You'd do dances for Diori when he came. (Hajjiya Gobarci
1989)5
With Diori's fall in 1974, the UFN slipped quietly into the back-
ground. When Kountche first took power, his government had a repu-
tation for integrity and concern for the rural population devastated by
the Sahel drought. As his regime began building the structures of the
Development Society, local cooperatives and branches of the youth and
women's associations were initiated in areas outside of the capital.
The traditional Samaria youth organizations were revived by the gov-
ernment in 1976 in part to implement major development infrastructure
and in particular to construct wells and classrooms (Decalo 1989, 190).
i This and other interviews on which this discussion is based are available at the
Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University, Bloomington. The names of most
informants have been changed to protect their identities. I conducted unstructured inter-
views in Hausa without an interpreter in women's homes. I came to know most of the
women fairly well through visits, informal conversations, and "participant/observation"
over the course of the year. Much of what I discuss here came out in conversations that
were not "formal" interviews (in other words, we were gossiping) and were not re-
corded.
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THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE Cooper
Samaria comes from the word samari, which means "youth" and, in
particular, "young man." It generally refers to a man who has not yet
gained enough experience and income to marry; it is also sometimes used
by older men to refer to any junior male, married or not. In rural areas,
when an invitation was sent out for men to work collectively on one
another's farms, the Sarkin Samari, the head of the junior men, called
them to work. Unmarried girls would be called by the corresponding
leader of the young women, and while the young men labored the girls
would sing and dance to make the farmwork more pleasurable. Such
collective gatherings or gaya have become rare in rural areas today; hired
labor has replaced the collective workforce.6 Nevertheless the Nigerian
government invoked this kind of collective work and festivity when it
revived the Samaria in 1976.
The Samaria eventually became an important organ to encourage pa-
triotism through the annual Festival National de Jeunesse, where youth
groups from throughout the country competed for prizes for the best
ballets and plays presented on national themes. The festival plays became
an important part of the Office de Radiodiffusion-Television du Niger
broadcasts and consequently had a broad national audience beyond their
local regions. Samaria members were also conspicuous in parades and
generally danced and sang in local celebrations to entertain important
visitors.
The Association des Femmes du Niger (AFN) had a rather different
genesis. In 1975, Kountche used the occasion of the International Year of
the Woman to create a commission to study women's problems and to
hold a series of public debates at the Institute for Research in the Hu-
manities. These debates surveyed important issues ranging from women's
status in the labor force to laws touching on women's rights in the family
to female education. While the efforts of the UFN to promote women's
issues, particularly those of educated urban women in Niamey, were
recognized in passing, the Kountche regime quickly succeeded in rede-
fining the terms of the debate: the interests of rural women were empha-
sized, and, therefore, women's issues were seen as part of a broader
national development agenda. The women's association that emerged,
the AFN, was consequently firmly in the hands of the Kountche regime.7
While the AFN had some success in advancing issues relevant to women,
such as legal and available contraception, other important efforts met
6 The gaya were disappearing in the Maradi region when Guy Nicolas conducted his
research there in the late 1960s. See Nicolas 1975, 188. For the same institution in
northern Nigeria, see Smith (1954) 1981, 59-60.
7 For a fuller discussion of Kountche's control of the early development of the AFN,
see Cooper 1992, chap. 7. For a more positive assessment of the accomplishments of the
AFN, see Dunbar 1991, 69-89.
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Cooper THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE
little success, most notably the AFN's persistent attempts to promote a
family code more favorable to women. Despite Kountche's redirection of
the women's association toward rural women's issues, the leadership and
membership of the AFN remained concentrated in the major urban cen-
ters of Niamey and Zinder. For women in Maradi, far from the capital,
the significance of the AFN lay not in its specific social or economic
programs, which in the end touched their lives only very marginally, but,
rather, in the possibilities the AFN presented for redefining women's roles
and their access to public activity.
Struggling for legitimate independence: AFN and Samaria
Women in Maradi often see the UFN and the AFN as one seamless
whole and use the same Hausa term to refer to both, 'kunjiyar mata
(women's association). Nevertheless, when the AFN was set up in Ma-
radi, Madame Aguiyar kept quietly in the background; any clear asso-
ciation of the AFN with the UFN in the wake of the military coup would
have been dangerous for the survival of the women's association and
possibly for Madame Aguiyar as well. In 1975 Aisha Wandara regained
the titled position of Iya, making her the highest ranking woman in the
aristocratic class. Wandara's acquisition of full authority over the bori
cult and its members, many of them "courtesans," made her the most
logical choice to head the new women's association. Nevertheless, given
the linkage between the earlier women's association and the recently
deposed Diori regime, no one was eager to step forward publicly to head
the successor association. Aisha Wandara described how she came to be
president of the new AFN in the same year that she regained the title of
Iya.
In the end Madame Aguiyar said that she was tired, she said, "I
can't do this anymore." So. She said I should become president, but
I said I didn't want to. But then the Prefet sent to the Sarki [the
traditional chief of Maradi and the Iya's brother], asking why not,
saying I should make myself a candidate. So they made me a can-
didate.... Madame Aguiyar had put away her presidency, she said
she was tired, and that we should choose a new president from
among us. That was in the time of Kountche. So that was that, there
we were: no one was saying anything. So then the Mayor asked the
women: "Don't you women have anything to say? If there is no one
else who wants to be a candidate, there is candidate Iya." He was
reading from a piece of paper. And then everyone clapped and
clapped [to cast their vote for her]. And that was that. (Iya 'Yar
Wandara 1989)
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THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE Cooper
It is clear from this account that both the local public administration and
the traditional authorities, all of whom were male, were actively involved
in creating the new AFN. When the Iya tells this story she tells it with
great irony and humor: when leadership calls, one is not given an op-
portunity to turn it down.
The Iya was chosen to lead the new association for a number of
reasons, one being her previous experience in the UFN. But the more
significant reason was that she represented the intersection of several
differing female interests in Maradi. As the leader of the bori spirit pos-
session cult she represented female power, both political and spiritual:
the AFN, like the UFN before it, needed that local form of power. How-
ever, the Iya also traditionally represents the women of the major aris-
tocratic families of the Maradi court who spend a great deal of time in
her compound. Finally, she also represents women more generally, for
women come to her for advice and help, whether they are members of the
bori cult or not. With the Iya at the head of the association, the govern-
ment was assured of the sanction of an important cross section of Maradi
women.
Despite the apparently seamless transition from UFN to AFN, the
character of the new women's association was radically altered by the
establishment of the Samaria youth movement. The Samaria evoked not
gender but age and seniority as primary elements of social order. By
calling upon the image of the collective work group under the authority
of seniors, the Samaria heightened the differences between young women
and fully adult (senior) women. In rural areas around Maradi the Sa-
maria of the late 1980s in some ways resembled the traditional model in
which unmarried boys and girls worked cooperatively for the commu-
nity. The members were often boys and girls who were too young to
marry and who were called upon to perform collective labor to the
dancing and singing of the girls, which was accompanied by festive drum-
ming. The groups also prepared plays and ballets for the national festival
and helped with development projects such as well digging. In the town of
Maradi proper, however, the Samaria groups had a rather different char-
acter. The membership was notably older; many of the young men were
certainly old enough to marry (twenty-five to thirty-five years old) but
perhaps could not afford to, and in some neighborhoods the girls were, in
fact, young women, most of whom had been married at least once but
were not any longer. Although the Samaria groups occasionally made an
effort at dry-season gardening, their agricultural duties were relatively in-
significant compared with their plays and ballets presented at the Maison
des Jeunes and at the numerous political events that mark the year.
The character of the Samaria groups also varied immensely from neigh-
borhood to neighborhood in the city of Maradi. In the most conservative
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Cooper THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE
neighborhoods, only prepubescent girls were permitted to be members.
In newer neighborhoods, where the availability of rental housing to this
day increases the population of women who are neither living with kin
nor married, the women in the Samaria were frequently "courtesans." In
the newer neighborhood of Sabon Gari, for example, all of the young
women in the Samaria lived in "houses of women" (gidan mata).8 I asked
a Samaria woman whether many of the members were karuwai, and she
responded, "Not all of the women in the Samaria are karuwai, but lots of
them are. Some of them are budurwa [unmarried virgins]" (Binta 1989).
It is striking that she and the other women in Maradi I spoke to never
contended that these nonmarried women were bajawara. Either Samaria
members were "virgins" who had never been married (girls of ten to
thirteen or so) or they were "courtesans." There was no room for any-
thing in between.
The original UFN was frequently associated with karuwai and with bori
members (Nicolas 1975, 214). However, the existence of the Samaria after
1976 altered the composition and range of associations in which women
took part. The women who became members of the AFN were all, at least
in theory, fully adult married women. It was now the Samaria that was
very closely associated with "courtesanship," and the public and sexually
mixed nature of their dancing and plays made the youth groups an ap-
pealing forum for women interested in public display.
One consequence of this division was that by the late 1970s and early
1980s women in the public realm no longer had a single forum in which
to act together in the interests of women. Nonmarried women who were
"courtesans" tended to join the Samaria, while married women and more
"respectable" nonmarried women took part in the AFN. Whereas in the
original women's association many "courtesans" and bori cult members
were participants, the AFN eventually had a less diverse membership. It
is possible that the existence of the Samaria also altered the composition
of bori cult membership. The number of "courtesans" who participate in
the bori cult may have dropped; the newer forum for public display and
the closer association with more modern structures made possible in the
Samaria were more appealing, particularly to young women with some
education. The Samaria of the late 1980s was far more closely associated
with "courtesanship" than was the bori cult, which in the past was con-
sidered the preserve of karuwai. As the "courtesans" shifted to the Sa-
maria, the political utility of the bori cult for female support dropped
significantly. Furthermore, as Maradi has adopted stricter Islamist prac-
tices as trade ties with conservative northern Nigeria increase, the cult
has become a political liability to politicians attempting to unite around
8 For a discussion of such houses in Katsina, see Pittin 1983.
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THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE Cooper
a common Islamic cultural heritage. Once the Iya resigned from the
presidency of the AFN in 1987, the few remaining bori members stepped
into the background, leaving the AFN mostly to educated women, suc-
cessful traders, and their clients.
The Maradi region has been the battleground for competing interpre-
tations of Islam since the founding of the city during the jihad of Uthman
'dan Fodio in the nineteenth century. The rulers of the Maradi region
practiced an adaptive form of Islam that tolerated some practices (in-
cluding female titles, the bori cult, and the separation of state offices from
clerical offices) that the jihadists regarded as un-Islamic. The resistant
forces of the Maradi valley succeeded in holding off the jihadists prior to
colonial rule. Over the course of this century under colonial rule and
since independence, however, the development of transport systems in
Nigeria, the rise of peanut farming, and the flourishing petroleum black
market have tended to foster linkages between the two former
combatants-linkages often solidified by an idiom of Islamic brother-
hood and shared Hausa ethnicity. Today, the merchant class collectively
known as Alhazai (an honorific for men who have made the pilgrimage
to Mecca) is extremely powerful economically and politically; it is among
the wives of this class that stricter seclusion is emerging. Other men
emulate the practices of Alhazai, even when secluded marriage is not
economically feasible.9 The rise of this class clearly has had important
political implications for postindependence governments, complicating
further the question of how to mobilize female support and giving rise to
attempts to bypass or co-opt this merchant base.
One negative consequence of the division of women into the Samaria,
the AFN, and the bori cult was that it undermined any solidarity the
women might have been developing as a unified political group in the
UFN. This fragmentation of women could serve the interests of the ruling
regime, for it would work against opposition voiced by women at a time
when the government was preoccupied with the demands of unruly stu-
dents. Nevertheless, this division had the unexpected consequence of
creating a more expansive political space for married and unmarried
women who were not in fact engaged in "courtesanship." It is not entirely
clear to me whether this space was consciously generated by Kountche
and Saibou or whether it was an unintended outcome of the division
of women between AFN and Samaria.0? Certainly, by generating two
9 Gregoire 1992 documents the recent rise of ties between Muslim traders in north-
ern Nigeria and Maradi.
10 While Hausa-speaking women who are not of the elite educated class frequently
described this phenomenon in passive constructions that imply that some outside force
consciously intervened to separate women into specific groups ("aka raba mata da karu-
wai" [they separated out the women/wives from the courtesans]), women in a position
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Cooper THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE
potential forums in which women could participate, the government
enabled a broader cross section of the female population to become
visible in the political context. It seems probable to me that, while the
separation of women was promoted to make it more possible for married
women to support the military regime visibly, no one anticipated that this
separation could have subversive and politicizing possibilities for non-
married women. How did the creation of two groups give rise to such
possibilities? I will argue that Maradi women themselves seized upon the
occasion provided by these associations to debate, define, and renegotiate
what it means to be "respectable," "married," and an adult "woman."
Debating women
Women who were not members of either the AFN or the Samaria often
confused the two and saw no real difference between them, characteriz-
ing their membership as matan zamani, a euphemism for prostitute that
means literally "modern woman." Members of the AFN, however, in-
sisted on a difference between themselves and members of the Samaria.
Members of the AFN were "married women" who engaged in respectable
behavior. By separating the AFN from the Samaria, the government made
it possible for married women to take part in public political manifesta-
tions without being grouped with unmarried "courtesans."
What is the political significance of this linguistic differentiation? It
enabled the Kountche regime and later that of Ali Saibou to promote a
nationalism founded on the image of women as mothers and wives, even
as it drew upon young women as a powerful form of entertainment and
propaganda, harnessing the image of the "free woman" as an icon of
modernization. For women this also meant that those who were not
"courtesans" could participate in political events, at least in principle,
without damaging their reputations. Married women found a forum
suitable for women of their status. However, the designation of AFN
women as "married women" also made it possible for women who were
not immediately interested in marriage to claim a terrain of public action
without having to pretend to be potential wives (bajawara) under the
tutelage of a senior male. This was new ground that the government,
perhaps inadvertently, made available and that women themselves laid
claim to and reinforced through dialogue among themselves and through
public performative statements about what it meant to be a married
woman.
to know more about actual strategies and directives from the party in power declined to
discuss the subject, which they evidently regarded as politically sensitive. Nothing I have
found in the published accounts from the period clarifies this question.
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THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE Cooper
To return to the issues raised by Pittin in her work, while women had
a sphere of their own and at times a language that reflected their values
as opposed to those of men, the opposition that Pittin found in Katsina
did not emerge in Maradi: one does not find that women refer to non-
married women as bajawara while men call them karuwai. Rather, some
women distinguish between different kinds of nonmarried women,
clearly separating nonmarried women who exchange sexual favors for
gifts and cash from nonmarried women who earn other kinds of income.
Certainly women in Maradi are attempting to create a public arena in
which nonmarried women can participate without being stigmatized as
karuwai. Rather than subsume all nonmarried women into the category
bajawara, however, they have accentuated distinctions among women
and between the kinds of activities nonmarried and married women
engage in to give moral legitimacy to the independence of some nonmar-
ried women.
This act of legitimizing certain kinds of independence is extremely
important for married women as well as for nonmarried women, for if
women who are married are to participate in the public political and
economic domain they must be able to do so without any suggestion that
they are behaving improperly and, in particular, without their being
associated with women who are publicly known to engage in "courte-
sanship" or "prostitution." Where women in the Samaria danced and
sang, AFN women at public gatherings made an attempt to behave in a
dignified manner, clapping and chanting slogans. Women of the AFN
chose behavior suitable to their purported age and marital status. Gath-
erings of the AFN could be very jolly affairs, but the form of the festivity
needed to be distinguishable from that of the Samaria. Where Samaria
women were openly flirtatious, AFN women deferred to men without
being subservient. This image of AFN women had become current na-
tionally, as Janet Beik's observation of the stereotyping of AFN members
for a play in Zinder illustrates: the director instructed the actresses "to
shake hands with the prefet but not to bow over in respect (as tradition-
ally women would do when meeting an important man)" (Beik 1987,
109).
Samaria women had equally clear notions of suitable behavior for
themselves. I asked one karuwa if the "courtesans" could join the AFN
if they wanted to; she responded that they could but that it would be
hard to get along with married women whose husbands might be clients
and that, in any case, "there's no dancing in the women's association,
so it wouldn't be appropriate" (Hajjiya Gobarci 1989). The young Sa-
maria members clearly enjoyed their dances and plays immensely, and
no one seemed to feel that their behavior was inappropriate for their
age or status as young girls and karuwai. One way a "courtesan" could
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Cooper THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE
demonstrate that she was a responsible citizen promoting the interests of
society was to participate in the Samaria. Whereas in the past such
women might have sought safety and refuge in the bori spirit possession
cult, now they could turn to the government-sanctioned Samaria for
legitimation, community, and protection.
While there were many AFN members who were not in fact married,
their approach to legitimating their independence was to behave in a
manner that resembled the married women as much as possible. They
always wore headcloths and veils; they appeared restrained in public;
they sat or stood with the married women in a crowd; they deferred to
the older leaders of the association. They behaved as if they were married
women. Nonmarried AFN members were generally very hard-working
women, who made do with meager incomes and relied in part upon the
generosity of their AFN patrons to help them stay out of "courtesan-
ship." Some originally came from rural areas and had few connections in
Maradi. A few were very successful traders or producers, but the more
successful nonmarried women were invariably older-often old enough
to claim that they were too old to bear children and thus not planning to
remarry. A few were government functionaries whose careers made re-
marriage difficult.
Some nonmarried women in the AFN may have been bajawara, but all
were not necessarily looking for a marriage partner. Their approach,
rather, seemed to be to associate themselves with women who were
responsible, respectable, and married in order to maintain such a repu-
tation for themselves. Since a Maradi woman's status as an adult is so
closely associated with her status as a married woman, by mimicking the
behavior of married women, nonmarried women could establish them-
selves as fully adult women. Ironically, the most subversive implication of
this performance was perhaps that these women were beginning to dis-
associate female adulthood from marriage (the equation of "woman" and
"wife"); in appearing publicly as mata (adult women) and not samari
(youth) they forced the public recognition that some fully adult women
were not, in fact, married. This subversion has the further potential to
disrupt the heterosexist assumptions embedded in the association of full
female adulthood with marriage and childbearing.
It is perhaps worth noting that I, too, was engaged, something less
than fully consciously, in a performance of "marriedness" and "respect-
ability." I covered my head with scarves and wore relatively modest
clothing: opaque skirts that fell below the knee and blouses that covered
my shoulders. I was not feigning marriage, for I was truly married;
rather, I was making visible my marital status in a setting where it might
not have been readily legible otherwise, given my husband's absence for
most of my research. My respectable dress, my independence, and the
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fact that I had appeared before my contacts in the AFN fully approved
through government channels made me, in effect, an excellent prop in
their staging of respectability, marriage, and adulthood. I was close to the
same age as many of the nonmarried women in the AFN, and I publicly
engaged in my own work without participating in "courtesanship,"
which meant that my appearance alongside AFN women could be seen as
an asset. This, I think, explains in part why AFN women insisted that I
join them in the most public of events and why they were dismayed by
any prospect of my squandering this capital by being seen with the
women of the Samaria. Conversely, by encouraging me to be seen pub-
licly with them, they helped me to reinforce my own image as a married
woman.
Participation in the AFN was thus one way a woman could establish
a reputation as an upright adult who behaved respectably, even if she was
not married. This pushing at the edges of an accepted social category-
matan aure (married woman)-is analogous to the stretching of other
kinship and social categories. Just as older divorced and widowed
women, despite their greater freedom of movement, were nevertheless
treated as if they were married women, so these younger women mim-
icked married behavior and, in so doing, helped to redefine it. This verbal
manipulation of categories is similar to the strategy Catherine Coles
observed among Hausa women in Kaduna: younger women manipulated
the category of "old women" (tsofuwa) in order to enjoy the greater
mobility of women beyond childbearing age (Coles 1987). However,
such strategies are not guaranteed success. Popular perception of AFN
women in Maradi was not always generous, and some women in search
of a marriage partner might temporarily bow out of AFN activities to
avoid any possible association with "free women" and to make their
availability for remarriage clear.11
Women argued among themselves about what constituted appropriate
behavior, and their appearance in external public spaces following vari-
ous behavioral norms was a way to create new public norms and per-
ceptions of women. The following interchange in 1989 between the Iya
and her niece, Rabi, illustrates the kinds of debates current in Maradi at
that time. It is typical of many conversations I heard in which the re-
spectability and status of various women was negotiated and established
through gossip. Note the self-characterization of an AFN woman that her
association is an association of "married women," while the Samaria is
for karuwai. The debate is unusual in that I happened to tape it while
11 One of my nonmarried acquaintances who had participated in street sweeping
with married women in the AFN was severely chastised by her family for "going out
with the Samaria." She stopped going to AFN events altogether in order to maintain a
respectable image for potential suitors.
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Cooper THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE
conducting a formal interview with the Iya into which Rabi intruded (lya
'Yar Wandara 1989). I asked the Iya whether there had been many karu-
wai in the women's association when it was started. I used the general
Hausa expression 'kunjiyar mata for "women's association" rather than
either of the French acronyms AFN or UFN.
B. COOPER: When they first started the women's association,
didn't they call upon lots of karuwai to join?
IYA: Karuwai? Yes, at that time the karuwai were put into the
association.
RABI: No, that's not right. They did not put karuwai in!
IYA: Well, they were the ones who weren't in seclusion; there
were lots of them. All the married women were in seclusion.
RABI: No, it's only recently that they've put the karuwai in!
IYA: No, today the married women are the majority.
RABI [challenging]: Where are they?
IYA [amazed at the question]: The married women in the wom-
en's association? There are lots of them! The karuwai were all left
to the Samaria.
RABI: They separated them?
IYA: Yes. Each of the women you see is a married woman who
has a husband. She has the strength of her own home. She may be
an old women whose husband has died; now she isn't a karuwa.
You see, she has her own home, her daughters and children. She's
not a karuwa. There aren't karuwai in the women's association.
(Iya 'Yar Wandara 1989)
Two things strike me about this interchange. First, Rabi, who was not
a member of either the Samaria or the AFN, did not initially see any
difference between the two; because the Samaria was so highly visible,
she thought of the Samaria when she heard me ask about karuwai and
the women's association. Her remark that the karuwai had only entered
the association recently may reflect her memory that when she was much
younger the traditional rural Samaria work groups did not include "cour-
tesans," more common in urban settings. Second, although the Iya knew
very well that many of the women in the AFN were not married, when
she generalized about AFN membership she described the typical AFN
member as a married woman, a woman with 'karfin 'dakinta (the
strength of her own room or home). The expression is evocative, for it
suggests both married women who have enough influence with their
husbands to be able to go out to AFN gatherings, as well as any woman,
married or not, who has the ability to maintain herself and her children
or dependents in a home or room of her own. A woman who has the "the
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THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE Cooper
strength of her own room" does not rely upon a man to pay her rent,
although she may rely upon her children for help. A woman who has
been successful in trade might even own or rent a house herself. The
phrase thus calls to mind a woman with either some economic self-
sufficiency or enough intrahousehold stature to be able to negotiate with
her husband for a degree of independence and mobility.
In the same exchange, Rabi, unconvinced, went on to enumerate
women whom she considered to be karuwai in order to prove that the
women's association included them as members; the Iya explained to her
that each of them was actually in the Samaria. Shifting tactics, Rabi then
got Iya to name women in their neighborhood who were members of the
AFN. Rabi pointed out that several of the women mentioned were not
married. Iya then argued that they were older women who are beyond
marriage age. Finally, Iya mentioned one woman who she conceded en-
gaged in "courtesanship":
IYA: There's only one woman who has done karuwanci. [They
establish the woman in question.] But she isn't a karuwa.
RABI: Good heavens, Hajjiya, she is too a karuwa, I swear to
God!
IYA: Well, just because you are struggling with poverty doesn't
make you a karuwa. So she's having trouble. She just got into it.
RABI: That's not true. She's been at it a long time. She didn't just
start. (Iya 'Yar Wandara 1989)
Iya was willing to make exceptions for a woman who is temporarily
having trouble making a living, but in her own mind she made very clear
distinctions between women who engage in karuwanci and women who
for the most part avoid it.12 Iya could distinguish among degrees of
reliance upon gifts related to sexual favors and among different ways of
associating with men. Rabi was less willing to see these distinctions, and
as a married woman who rarely went out and saw little of how the two
associations functioned, she had little understanding of why Iya would
argue that some independent women are not karuwai. Note that neither
woman made use of the word bajawara, which did not seem to be rel-
evant to the discussion they were having.
This is not just verbal sparring, for much hangs on the issue of whether
a woman, married or not, can take part in public activities-from politics
to trading to education-without the perception of sexual impropriety.
12 One reason it can be difficult to distinguish a karuwa from a nonmarried woman
who lives on her own is that sexual access, even for married women, is closely associ-
ated among the Hausa with gifts, and any courtship, whether sexual relations are in-
volved or not, would also necessitate many gifts from the man.
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Cooper THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE
One of the factors limiting girls' education in Maradi, for instance, is the
perception that it is inappropriate for a young married woman to go out
to school. In a region where girls marry shortly after the onset of puberty,
this perception is a powerful constraint to female education. The use of
young girls as hawkers for married women who cannot leave the home
to carry out their trade also serves to discourage women from sending
girls to school. Of the many battles that the women's associations could
be waging, one of the most important is to earn for women the right to
be seen publicly without being stigmatized morally. As we have seen in
the conversation above, this is a battle that is waged not simply with men
but in debates among women themselves.
Conclusion
Since 1990, Niger has been drawn into the current of multipartism
and democratization sweeping across West Africa; the Ali Saibou regime
was forced in 1991 to cede power to a national conference, which was to
prepare the ground for the democratic national elections held early in
1993. It is, I think, an impressive measure of the success women have had
in contesting external political space that on May 13, 1991, women in
Niamey staged a well-publicized and highly visible protest against the
virtual exclusion of female representation from the National Conference
Planning Committee. While the powerful national trade union had man-
aged to eliminate all other "democratic" institutions created or co-opted
by the Saibou regime from the planning committee (including the Sa-
maria and the Islamic Association), women staged a massive demonstra-
tion in the capital when the AFN was denied any representation. While
the protest was organized and initiated from the Niamey offices of the
AFN, the size of the demonstration and its success in forcing the inclusion
of six women on the planning committee, despite the AFN's affiliation
with the discredited Ali Saibou regime, suggests that women's rights to
assemble in external public spaces and to have a voice in national politics
are now broadly recognized. If the Saibou regime attempted to co-opt
women for its purposes, one might argue that women themselves man-
aged to co-opt the AFN to gain representation for women even once the
party with which it was originally allied had lost credibility.
Whether women will be successful in pressuring the current coalition
government to approve the National Conference's proposed Family Code
and Rural Code, both of which would have significant implications for
the status of women in Niger, remains to be seen.13 The government's
13 I must thank Roberta Ann Dunbar for sharing a study that she and Hadiza Djibo
prepared in Niger during the National Conference. It discusses in detail the rural and
family codes and presents a favorable account of the AFN's efforts since 1975. See Dun-
bar and Djibo 1992.
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THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE Cooper
current preoccupation with enormous financial difficulties (already se-
vere before France's recent devaluation of the West African franc), stu-
dent unrest, and disruption from Tuareg militants makes it unlikely that
women's concerns will be foregrounded in the near future. Nevertheless,
women have demonstrated a willingness and ability to work together and
appear publicly to promote representation of their interests in the na-
tional forum.
The subtle manipulation of verbal categories setting out distinctions
among women and establishing appropriate behavior for women of dif-
ferent status has been important in earning women the right to appear in
such public demonstrations. The solidarity of women in May 1991 may
have been possible only through a prior fracturing of women as a group:
by emphasizing difference and establishing boundaries for behavior,
women could open avenues for a broader segment of the female populace
to appear openly in a political context than has recently been possible.
That women in this instance carried banners of their own choosing rather
than slogans for a male-dominated party shows how powerful this tactic
has been.14
This tactic, however, is fraught with contradiction. By setting them-
selves apart from the karuwai and the Samaria, nonmarried and married
women have played into the cultural stereotype that presents female
sexuality as immoral and that defines proper behavior for women only in
terms of marriage as the norm. The nonmarried woman can retain re-
spectability only as long as she looks and acts in dress and demeanor as
if she were married. By emphasizing differences and divisions within the
female body politic, women also run the risk of emphasizing tensions and
conflicts with one another rather than with men. One thinks of the
karuwa who remarked that it would be hard to get along with the mar-
ried women of the AFN when some of their husbands are clients: the
division between the two women's groups makes it possible for such
women to avoid the immediate friction of meeting one another directly,
but it also heightens the sense that the enemy is "those other women"
rather than the men whose affections, attentions, and (perhaps most
important) incomes are thus divided. If the cohesion of Pittin's female
subculture is largely illusory, nevertheless, the fragmentation of women's
groups itself distracts attention from some of the key sources of friction
in gender relations in Maradi-sexual double standards, polygyny, Is-
lamic repudiation, and early marriage of women. These practices are
14 I do not wish here to reduce the politicization of women in Niamey to merely a
consequence of debates among women in Maradi. Women's participation in politics in
Niamey is a story deserving its own full treatment. I am suggesting instead that part of
what made the women's march of May 1991 possible was the negotiation of a space for
"respectable" women in public political forums by the AFN and that this accomplish-
ment must be counted as quite a considerable success despite other setbacks for the
women's association.
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Cooper THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE
given powerful sanction by their purported origins in Islam in a context
in which Islamist solidarity is becoming an important factor in generating
nationalist sentiment. The force of Islamist ideology in a general climate
of resentment toward Western economic and political intrusion is con-
siderable and has set the parameters within which women in Niger can
realistically militate for change. As the bori cult and the women's asso-
ciations have become separated, women have become distanced from
alternative readings of Islam and spirituality. Consequently, women in
the national associations find themselves subject to a potent Islamist
cultural nationalism with little in the way of spiritual or religious alter-
natives to provide different models for women's roles in religion and
society.
The dangers as well as the promise of the politics of difference have
been evident throughout the transition to civilian rule. The visibility and
audibility of women throughout this process generated a backlash
against young women of precisely the ambiguous status discussed
above-secondary school students of marriageable age. In the market at
Zinder several such women were beaten and stripped because of their
"immodest" dress, and one was hospitalized (West Africa 1993). A pow-
erful measure of the positive potential in the ongoing process of negoti-
ating women's entry into public space is that in such a moment large
numbers of women rallied behind the young women rather than criticiz-
ing them for not dressing and behaving as if they were married women:
once again women in the capital marched to protest these attacks and
succeeded in forcing the government to intervene with police force (Mc-
Carus 1993). While the attacks show how vulnerable single women are
in times of national stress and suggest that Islamist sentiments are grow-
ing not only in Maradi but throughout the country, these incidents also
show how important the work of establishing women's access to external
public space is and how tenaciously women in Niger are now fighting for
that access. This negotiation is still in the process of unfolding, and the
alliances, divisions, and redefinitions women call upon in struggling for
visibility and recognition are likely to shift many times.
The politics of difference underscores rather than erases the very real
divergences within the female populace, emphasizing in subtle ways age
differences and seniority, marital status, education, class, and rural versus
urban origins. The interests of all women in Maradi or in Niger are not
the same and in some cases run directly counter to one another. However,
despite the gains that this strategy seems to have won for women in
Niger, it is not clear whether or how women in Maradi will move beyond
the divide depicted here. Nevertheless, despite the considerable con-
straints women in Maradi encounter-within the household, the local
economy, the national political arena, and the global economy-in terms
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THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE Cooper
of their access to critical resources, mobility, and education, they have
been actively engaged in renegotiating gender relations and have found
means, albeit contradictory, to counter some of the obstacles they face.
To borrow Judith Butler's formulation, this study can be seen as "an
effort to think through the possibility of subverting and displacing those
naturalized and reified notions of gender that support masculine hege-
mony and heterosexist power, to make gender trouble, not through the
strategies that figure a utopian beyond, but through the mobilization,
subversive confusion, and proliferation of precisely those constitutive
categories that seek to keep gender in its place by posturing as the foun-
dational illusions of identity" (1990, 34). In reworking what it means to
be a "married woman," Maradi women are subverting the most taken for
granted of gender categories and enabling alliances between married
women and nonmarried women. This is not, of course, the conclusion of
a struggle but, rather, the emergence of a movement. To have made a
beginning toward staking claim to the right to enter into the external
public spaces of formal politics and large-scale trade is an extremely
important first step toward achieving economic independence and politi-
cal autonomy.
Like Teresa Ebert, I would like to see feminist analysis of culture take
a more critical turn to link cultural and transformative politics. In her
formulation, critique should produce "historical knowledges that mark
the transformability of existing social arrangements and the possibility of
a different social organization" (Ebert 1992-93, 9). I fully agree with
Ebert that structures of systematic exploitation cannot be addressed by
"interventions" that simply read particular localities as "texts" through
which to celebrate the free-floating play of disembodied signifiers. Nev-
ertheless, it seems to me from my work with women in Maradi that it is
not possible to make sense of how unequal socioeconomic arrangements
are reproduced or transformed over time without taking into account
how the key differences through which inequity operates are reconsti-
tuted or redefined. As Ebert herself expresses this issue, "the relation of
signifier to signified is not a free-floating play of signification but an
ideological process in which the signifier is related to a matrix of histori-
cally possible signifieds" (1992-93, 17). Ebert's hostility toward mi-
crolevel analysis suggests that for her the real is located primarily in
macrolevel structures, while microlevel conflicts and struggles for mean-
ing are merely manifestations of broader forces. I believe that such a
theoretical stance is profoundly disabling for any materialist analysis of
female agency and possibility; it dismisses in advance those arenas of
action in which indigenous feminisms are most likely to emerge, in how-
ever contradictory or limited a fashion. In this study I have attempted to
demonstrate that women in Maradi have been engaged in microlevel
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Cooper THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE
redefinitions of difference in an effort to respond to and recalibrate their
own positions within the broader regional and national political
economy. Women engage in this activity precisely because differential
access to key resources falls primarily along lines defined by understand-
ings of proper gendered behavior.
I would argue, therefore, that close consideration of the language and
performances of women is not a retreat into playfulness or a ceding of the
more important ground of larger structural forces in favor of the unpro-
ductive celebration of "localities." Learning to listen means taking seri-
ously the likelihood that women in such local settings know far better
than anyone else what the range of options and constraints available to
them looks like and can best imagine where to begin refiguring those
parameters in their own interests. In writing this piece, I was reminded of
Marjorie Mbilinyi's "learning to listen" to Rebeka Kalindile; part of
learning to listen in that instance meant taking extremely seriously the
threat of physical violence that women in particular settings may expe-
rience as part of the constraints that define what is and is not possible,
what is and is not safe (Mbilinyi 1989). Learning to listen also means
accepting that "women" is not a unified category and that if women
participate in the construction of gender they also participate in the
construction of differences that advantage some women at the expense of
others. Ebert's call to arms is telling: "Critique enables us to explain how
gender, race, sexual, and class oppression operate so we can change it"
(1992-93, 10). But who is the "we" here? And in what sense can all of
these forms of oppression be reduced to a single "it"? If oppressions were
singular and internally consistent, they would be much easier to combat.
The danger of critique as a call to arms, particularly if the author of that
critique is positioned well within the overdeveloped world, is that the
author will be speaking so ardently that she cannot listen, cannot notice
that she is part of the problem. Listening means acknowledging that
sometimes the axes along which difference is defined will appear at first
to be unconstructive, irrelevant, or counterproductive to an outsider who
can not see what is at stake. What is to be hoped is not that "we" can get
the axes to line up properly in a utopian armature of perfect alignments
but, rather, that these differentiations can remain fluid and provisional,
so that further movement may be possible in the future. It may be that the
most important thing I gave back to the women I worked with in Maradi
was to stand in the hot sun with the "married women," wondering just
what all the fuss was about.
Department of History
Bryn Mawr College
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THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE Cooper
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882 SIGNS Summer 1995
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