African Women and Politics: Knowledge, gender, and power in male-dominated Cameroon, by Emmanuel Konde
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The invisibility of women in historical texts has stimulated the emergence of the sub-field known as women's history whose aims, among other things, consist of challenging male bias in the construction of historical knowledge as well as (re)writing women into historical accounts that consciously or inadvertently exclude them. Despite this salutary initiative, women's history remains marginal in academia, particularly in Africa where the project of history writing is not only relatively recent but also informed by ideological interests that privilege male representations. In this book Emmanuel Konde explores the rise of women in Cameroonian politics during the colonial and post-colonial periods, as they grappled with patriarchal structures that sought to relegate them to the realm of economic production and reproduction. Konde argues that in pre-colonial Africa power was wielded by old men who exercised monopoly over ‘ritual knowledge’ – to which younger men were gradually permitted access as they grew older. According to Konde, ritual knowledge was the anvil on which pre-colonial political power rested. The assumed relationship between ritual knowledge and political power is problematic and receives little or no critical analysis. With the emergence of colonial rule, Konde argues, Western education supplanted this old order, providing a new basis for political power. The initial beneficiaries of this new ‘magic’ were young men – who eventually rose to the upper echelons of power when the colonists departed. Given their own patriarchal orientation, colonists established an alliance with African men to exclude women from Western education – hence the marginal role of women in African politics. However, this book is not a lamentation about women's marginalization in Cameroonian politics but, rather, a social history of the rise of educated women to the public sphere.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.025 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".