Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

166
DEMOCRACY TODAY
This is partly due to their continued lack of engagement in critical
issues and partly because of the restrictions imposed on their agency
to act otherwise. The latter arises through being cut off by their ‘older’
counterparts, the continued denial or diminishing of their voices in
a society that refuses to acknowledge this new category with rules of
engagement that depart from the status quo, their lack of transformative
alliances/lack of alliances. Again, a glaring example is the public
sphere (here taken to mean the political space in society). In countries
such as Kenya, Democratic Republic of Congo, Cote d’ivoire where we
have young men congregating in the public space, vying for posts and
representing their communities in various capacities, we hardly witness
women in the same age group engaged in similar political actions.
An analysis provided by African Woman and Child Features (AWC
Features 2004) shows the hard road faced by women seeking entry
into the public sphere. Two articles in a recently realised publication
on Kenya: the struggle for democracy (2007) clearly illustrate the double
edged sword women have to contemplate with when engaged in
governance issues (Nasong’o and Ayot 2007:164 – 196) not to mention
the social boundaries erected to keep young people out of governance
issues at the pretence that they have not come to age (Mwangola
2007:129 – 163). The constitution making process in Kenya is telling in
this regard. Young Kenyan women constituted a univocal ‘yes’ to the
adaptation of the new constitution and some of its guiding principles,
which spoke to issues of social justice, social economic development
and equity in political participation. However, certain political and
church led groups reduced their (young women’s) agenda of seeking
social redress through support of a new constitution that better spoke
to the changing social-economic and political order, to a reproductive
rights debate and demonized the ‘yes’ agenda for pursuing calls for
abortion, increase in the use of contraceptives and rights to ones own
body (divorce, pursuing justice in the case of rape or knowledgeable
infection by HIV/AIDs positive other i.e. criminalisation of deliberate
infection). Such that, the dilemma that is being dealt with is: one the one
hand, an emerging category of young African women with individual
endowments and enhanced individual capacities but societal structures
that have refused to allow them entry. The question therefore is, are
there other windows of opportunity for these young African women