Free women: Kinship, capitalism, gender and the state in Botswana

In Africa today, radical changes are taking place in social relations, particularly in relations between women and men. Capitalism is heavily implicated in these changes. Capitalism forcefully recruits labor from kinship-organized relations of agricultural production, replacing the collective nexus of subsistence farming and herding with the individual wage. When women move into wage labor, their new individual wage-based economic independence, operating within the urban context of greater personal autonomy, creates the conditions in which women's rights consciousness and discourse may emerge. However, such consciousness can only produce effective women's rights movements when “good enough” democracy exists. Botswana offers a good case for observing these processes of change because it combines a wealthy, rapidly growing capitalist economy with a democratic political system and effective government.; In the past 20 years Botswana's women's rights movement has successfully challenged numerous discriminatory laws, significantly increased the percentage of women in political office, created women's centers, and fostered public discussion and policy changes on many gender issues. The emergence and success of this movement is rooted in the history of the colonial and post-colonial political economy of Botswana. The division of labor in Tswana agro-herding requires boys' and young men's labor for herding; girls have been freer to attend schools because of the short farming season. Young men have been recruited for South African mining. After independence in 1966 Botswana embarked on rapid diamond-based economic development, creating wage jobs that were filled by professional and working class women starting in the 1980s. These groups provide the leaders and supporters for the women's rights movement.; The capitalist-forced transition from agro-herding to wage labor can be conceptualized as a shift from a dominantly “kinship”-organized system to a dominantly “gender” system, a shift from a system in which identities, control and appropriation are primarily constructed in kinship terms (“father's brother,” “husband's mother”), to one in which identities and relations of power are primarily constructed in terms of oppositional and unequal “genders,” “women” and “men.”{09}The discourse of “gender” displaces the discourse of kinship, and provides the form and rationale for free women to organize for equal rights.