1 In 1963, a postcard signed [Mme] Mazurek was sent from Hungary to “Mme Ransome-Kuti”: “I wish great success to the World Congress of Women in Moscow. I am with you in my thoughts and send you all my affection.” [1] The postcard (text in Hungarian, address partly in French) is addressed to “World Congress of Women, 23 Pushkin Street” in Moscow, where delegates from 113 countries, including 34 from the African continent, gathered from 24-29 June 1963. [2] Although the identity of the sender remains unclear, [3] the addressee, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, was a very well-known activist from Nigeria, who had been elected vice-president of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) ten years earlier in Copenhagen. [4]

Fig. 1: Postcard addressed to “World Congress of Women, 23 Pushkin Street” in Moscow

2 At the very moment that the 5^th Congress of the WIDF was taking place in the USSR, the 17^th Congress of the International Council of Women (ICW) was simultaneously being held across the Atlantic, in Washington, from 19-30 June 1963, hosting 51 delegates and 10 observers from the African continent. [5] A Ugandan woman, Pumla Kisosonkole, was elected vice-president of the organization. A Cameroonian woman, Madeleine Mbono-Samba, joined the ICW executive board as a non-voting member. [6] The presence of women from Africa in leadership positions in these organizations, as well as the significant number of African women generally participating in these congresses, was unprecedented. In less than twenty years, women from countries under colonial rule had established themselves on the international stage.

3 By contrast with transnational histories of the Cold War centred on actors from the East and West, [7] this article considers African women activists as fully-fledged protagonists of this history, subjected to political and gender constraints certainly, but determined to make their struggles known beyond national borders. It analyzes their connections with three international women’s organizations: the WIDF, the ICW, and the International Alliance of Women (IAW). In doing so, it aims to enrich a transnational history which, even when adopting a gender perspective and focusing on countries from the Global South, has so far given scant attention to the contributions of African women. [8] By identifying their international commitments in the years after the Second World War, this research will contribute to a transnational history of decolonization that is most often written from a male perspective. Moreover, by focusing on the connections between African women and these international organizations, the article challenges the logic of East and West “blocs.” First, as Kristen Ghodsee has shown for the years 1970-1990, African women did not always follow the diplomatic choices of their countries, whether they aligned with the West, the East, or were non-aligned. [9] Second, they often engaged with several different organizations in order to identify the interlocutors most likely to support their causes, demonstrating what can be called “strategic pragmatism”. This pragmatism also existed among African male activists, particularly political leaders, but they appear paradoxically to have been more constrained than women by the ideological divisions of the Cold War. Considered secondary actors in international politics, African women enjoyed greater freedom from the control exerted over their male counterparts. As distinct from biographies of African women activists detailing their connections to specific organizations [10] or recent studies concerning the relationships between women from the global South and the WIDF, [11] this article examines several international organizations simultaneously. It emphasizes their competition within Africa for the attention of African women activists, and the multi-positionality of the African women activists who responded to their appeals. By focusing on the period preceding the UN women’s conferences (1975-1995), this article also seeks to propose a new chronology for understanding the history of international women’s activism. [12]

4 This study endeavors, to the fullest extent permitted by the available sources, to adopt the perspective of African women activists participating in international organizations. For what reasons and with what goals did they engage with the ICW, the WIDF, or the IAW? [13] How did they negotiate their place between anti-colonialism, national logics, and tensions related to the bipolarization of the world? The women discussed here are not numerous, they generally came from educated backgrounds and possessed the educational and even economic capital that allowed them to correspond with women from around the world, to travel, and to participate in international congresses. While the focus is on territories formerly under British and French colonial rule in West Africa, other African countries are considered when their relevance to the international organizations under study becomes apparent.

5 The international organizations in question had different ideological stances and varying degrees of historical recognition. [14] The ICW, founded in 1888 in Washington, is the oldest transnational women’s association. [15] The International Alliance for Women’s Suffrage was established in Berlin in 1904 and became the International Alliance of Women (IAW) in 1946. Very active during the interwar period, both organizations entered a period of dormancy during the Second World War and reconstituted themselves after the conflict. Although they sought to unite women from around the world, they had been founded in Europe, the United States, or the British Commonwealth (Canada, Australia, New Zealand). Despite some openness to countries in the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America in the 1930s, these organizations reproduced global power relations. During the Cold War, they claimed a stance of “political neutrality” that imperfectly concealed their desire to promote the values of the “free world” and to combat the influence of the WIDF. The latter emerged after the Second World War, and was founded in Paris in 1945 at the initiative of women resistance fighters and anti-fascists who were close to communist parties, but also came from diverse backgrounds. [16] Pacifist and anti-imperialist, the WIDF affirmed from its inception the right of all peoples to self-determination. All three organizations, in order to establish their influence globally, took an interest in women from countries under colonial domination as early as 1945. African women began to connect with them, starting in 1947, seeking platforms to denounce colonial violence and discuss women’s rights. [17] Fully-fledged political actors by this time, they travelled, wrote, expressed themselves in international assemblies, and navigated between the two blocs, balancing ideological adherence with a desire for independence.

6 To write this history, material was gathered on three continents, from various archives. In Africa, colonial sources were consulted at the National Archives in Senegal (ANS) and Ghana (PRAAD) and were compared with various private archives and witness accounts from activists in Nigeria, Guinea, Madagascar and Cameroon. [18] In Europe, WIDF archives were consulted at the Archives départementales of Seine-Saint-Denis, La Contemporaine in Nanterre, and the colonial records in the British National Archives at Kew (TNA). The collection of the Women’s Library at the London School of Economics was useful for studying relations between the IAW and African women activists. In Belgium, the archives of the ICW registered at the CARHIF (Archival Centre for the Documentation of Women’s History) offered a rich resource concerning the African women’s councils and their relations with the ICW, the IAW and the WIDF. [19] In North America, the digitized “Sophia Smith Collection (SSC)” offered numerous documents about international organizations. [20] Based on these various sources, the analysis is divided into three chronological sections: the years 1947-1951 offered a first contact with a world becoming polarized; the years 1951-1957 witnessed the hardening of the Cold War and a ricochet of effects for African women activists; the period 1957-1963 was marked by the intensification of relations between African women activists and international organizations, but also by an autonomous affirmation by African women activists who had now become citizens of independent nations and were determined to regroup in order to make their voices heard.

First contacts in a polarized world (1947-1951)

7 In 1947, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti travelled to London with a delegation of the nationalist party, the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), tasked with discussing a reform of the Nigerian constitution with the British authorities. [21] On this occasion, she met with members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who told her about the WIDF’s activities. [22] As president of the Abeokuta Women’s Union, an urban women’s organization founded in 1946 to support women’s rights and to fight against colonial abuses, [23] Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti took an interest in the WIDF, becoming the first woman from West Africa to correspond with the organization.

8 In the years that followed, other African women activists established contacts with the ICW, IAW and WIDF. They were motivated both by a desire to have their causes more widely known and by an interest in the struggles, lives and writings of women in other parts of the world. Connections were often made through women from the colonial powers. Parallel to this, in the context of the Cold War, international women’s organizations were competing for influence in Africa which seemed like a space to be “conquered” ideologically.

9 African women activists initially turned towards the WIDF. While it had been founded at the initiative of the Union des femmes françaises (UFF), an organization close to the French Communist Party (PCF), the WIDF intended initially to transcend political rivalries and bring together women the world over in the name of antifascism, pacifism, and the defence of women and children’s rights. [24] Such ideas were not very different from those of the longer-established women’s international organizations, but right from its inception, WIDF’s position on colonization disturbed the world view of those associations. At WIDF’s inaugural congress in 1945, [25] women from three colonies took the stage and spoke out. The Vietnamese representative of the Union des femmes indochinoises in Paris denounced colonial oppression in her country. Female delegates from Morocco and Algeria also spoke up. [26] These were isolated speeches, but totally new for an international women’s organization.

10 In fact, since their earliest days, neither the ICW nor the IAW had given much of a place to African women. Their geographical reach at the end of the Second World War reflects this lack of interest. Having been implanted in two colonies of Southern Africa (the South-African Union since 1911, South-West Africa since 1938), the ICW spread its influence into Nyasaland in 1945, and Southern Rhodesia in 1946. However, its interlocutors in these countries were all white women. In the case of the IAW, only the South African Union became a member in 1913, joined by Rhodesia in 1929. [27] Defining themselves as apolitical, these organizations kept their distance from national problems specific to their member countries, as is evidenced in tensions that arose in the 1930s with the Egyptian Feminist Union, which after having joined the IAW in 1923, called unsuccessfully for the organization to support the cause of Palestinian women oppressed by the British. [28]

11 At the opposite end of the spectrum, the anti-imperialist orientation of the WIDF grew stronger between 1946 and 1951, drawing more and more African women activists into their group. In the French colonies, the countries where the communist presence was well-structured were the first to enter into contact with the organization. The Union des femmes de Tunisie and the Union des femmes du Madagascar became members, while there were regular exchanges also with the Union des femmes d’Algérie. In 1946, the executive committee of the WIDF decided to assemble documentation on the “problems concerning the women of colonial countries and racial minorities”, [29] and Jeannette Vermeersch, a member of the central committee of the PCF, wrote to Nina Popova, President of the Antifascist Committee of Soviet Women, to propose the creation of a special commission on the colonies. The idea took concrete form in 1947 and a research commission on African and Asian women was created, while the WIDF Bulletin published a long article by Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti on the repression of women by British forces in her country. [30] In the spring of 1948, the WIDF began distributing information from the first women’s committees of the Rassemblement démocratique africain (RDA) in Côte d’Ivoire. [31] For these activists, the WIDF made it possible to see their struggles against colonial repression represented on an international scale, and to benefit from a platform for discussion, for example, of unequal pay as between African and European women, or about requirements in terms of education and health.

12 These initial exchanges between African women activists and the WIDF were of concern to the ICW and the IAW. In 1946, the leaders of these organizations got together to discuss a project dating from the 1930s to join forces and create a united voice, so as to be present in the “new countries” where, according to their point of view, no well-organized women’s groups yet existed. The exclusion of the Yugoslav branches from the WIDF following Tito’s break with the USSR in 1948, and the reinforcement of the connections between the WIDF and Maoist China in 1949, accentuated the rivalries. Discussions about merging the ICW and IAW intensified in February 1949, and during its 15^th Congress organized in Amsterdam in July 1949, the IAW invited Jane Vialle, senator for the French colony of Oubangui-Chari, to speak about the question of strengthening connections between the IAW and – as they framed it – “the less developed” nations. [32]

13 At the same time, in December 1949, a group of women from the Gold Coast sought information from the National Council of Women of Great Britain about possible affiliation with the ICW. The American president of the ICW, Jeanne Eder-Schwyzer, responded by sending detailed documentation, but this first exchange was not followed up. [33] Ransome-Kuti, for her part, declined for over five years invitations from the WIDF to affiliate officially, under the pretext that her organization in Nigeria wasn’t ready to participate in international conferences. [34] In reality, she was not enthusiastic about the WIDF’s communist connections, and wished to develop links internationally, while remaining independent. [35] Some African women made other choices, like Gisèle Rabesahala of Madagascar and Célestine Ouezzin Coulibaly of Côte d’Ivoire, who travelled to Beijing to participate in the conference of African and Asian Women organized by the WIDF in December 1949. [36] Both of these women belonged to African parties that were close to the PCF. Gisèle Rabesahala, the daughter of an important family in Tananarive, was given the nickname “the Red Virgin” by the French authorities. [37] Célestine Ouezzin Coulibaly, a primary school teacher, was responsible for organizing women in the pro-independence RDA. [38] Upon her return to Côte d’Ivoire at the beginning of 1950, while anti-communist repression on the part of the French colonial authorities was intensifying, she doubled down on public appearances, speaking out against the colonial oppressors, which ultimately led to her spending a month in prison. [39]

14 The initial post-war connections built between international women’s organizations and African women activists therefore took the form of epistolary exchanges or participation in international congresses. Having arisen originally from the desire of the international organizations to broaden their influence on a global scale, and of African women activists to make known to the world and reinforce their anticolonial and/or feminist demands, these exchanges began to take different forms in the 1950s. International anti-communism, the accentuation of the Cold War, but also the growing presence in Africa of anticolonial struggles and repressive colonial violence weighed upon the efforts of African women activists to make international contacts.

Constraints on international activism (1951-1957)

15 In the early 1950s, with the Cold War at its height, the spheres of influence rigidified on a global scale and the international women’s organizations entered more and more into the logic of Eastern and Western blocs. In January 1951, the headquarters of the WIDF was expelled from Paris and relocated in the Soviet sector of Berlin. In this context, the affiliation of African women activists to the organizations of East and West and their participation at international events generated suspicion amongst the authorities. Some women were nonetheless able to travel to European capitals, while others were prevented from doing so by the colonial administration or by African political parties who either supported or thwarted the work of women activists, depending on their nationalist imperatives. In the British colonies, where the social fabric of women’s organizations was more developed and diversified, that seems to have allowed women activists to multiply their strategies for overcoming such obstacles.

16 Accordingly, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti chose to self-finance her trip to Vienna for the International Conference for the Defence of Children organized by the WIDF in 1952 and to travel as an individual, rather than as president of her organization, [40] while the Senegalese Marianne d’Erneville had her visa refused by the French colonial authorities who viewed her as a bridgehead of “red” propaganda in French West Africa (AOF). [41] The following year, at the third Congress of the WIDF in Copenhagen, only two African women were present amongst the 1,990 representatives of 67 countries, the authorities of the Gold Coast and Cameroon having refused to issue passports and visas to women activists. [42] Despite these constraints, and being eager to create concrete connections with Africa, the WIDF in Copenhagen elected Ransome-Kuti as one of the vice-presidents of the organization, the first and only African woman to occupy such a position of responsibility in an international organization. [43] Confronted with the WIDF’s activism, the ICW and the IAW intensified their own initiatives.

17 The women’s organizations of Uganda (in 1951) and then Tanganyika (in 1952) affiliated with the ICW, while discussions continued about a potential fusion between the ICW and the IAW that would allow them to bring together in a single organization 47 national women’s councils: according to the IAW bureau in September 1952: “this would be very significant for female influence in international action.” [44] The mandate of the Danish woman, Ester Graff, who became the fourth president of the association (1952-1958), was devoted to fostering the connections with Asian and African countries. [45] Parallel to this, in 1952, the American Rose Parsons – vice-president of the ICW beginning in 1954 – founded in her New York apartment a women’s pressure group called the Committee of Correspondence (CC), whose main objective was to “rally women of the free world to counteract communist propaganda.” [46] Its aim was to monitor closely the activities of the WIDF, with the objective of providing counter-propaganda but also, beginning in the second half of the 1950s, to enter into contact with African women activists, and to “serve as a centre of information exchange between women leaders the world over, by introducing them to one another.” [47] The idea was to invite African women leaders to become “friends” of the group, to sign up for a mailing list to receive material and to support one another for international travel.

18 This Western advance into Africa was particularly visible in Nigeria. In this important country in West Africa, the ICW, the IAW and the CC multiplied their initiatives, and came face to face with experienced Nigerian activists who, however, had their own strategies. Elizabeth Adekogbe, a columnist, teacher, and politician affiliated with the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons and president of the Women Movement [sic] (WM) founded in 1952, initially sought an affiliation with the ICW. [48] This membership was seen as a way to impose herself on the national political scene and counteract attempts to take over her movement by the majority political party in the then Western Region of Nigeria, the Action Group. Elizabeth Adekogbe wrote to the National Council of Women of Great Britain, as the women activists in Ghana had done four years earlier. [49]

19 Correspondence began between Mrs Cowan, secretary of the National Council of Women of Great Britain, Miss Gmur, executive secretary of the ICW and several British women based in Nigeria, to gather details about the WM. On 27 November 1954, the Movement, renamed for the occasion the Nigerian Council of Women, became a member of the ICW and thus the first national council of women from West Africa to join the organization. [50]

20 At the same time, the IAW turned towards the government of Western Region of Nigeria via the Colonial Office in London, seeking contacts with the women’s organizations. [51] The government chose Gladys Tanimowo Ogunlesi, aligned with the Action Group and president of the Women’s Improvement Society (WIS), a local organization with deep roots that addressed non-political questions. [52] This was how Ogunlesi came to represent Nigeria in the first cycle of international training courses for women organized by the IAW in Denmark in 1954. [53] The WIS then joined the IAW at its 17^th congress in Colombo (17 August – 1 September 1955), the first assembly of the IAW organized in a formerly colonized country. [54]

21 In the meantime, anti-communist politics continued to intensify in Africa. A British investigation into “red” influences in the colonies and Commonwealth countries in Africa described Ghana and Nigeria as the two countries most at risk of communist indoctrination. [55] That year, the WIDF also lost its “consultative” status at the ECOSOC of the United Nations. Despite this, the Federation’s influence continued to develop in Africa. In June 1955 in Lausanne, at the World Congress of Mothers of which the WIDF was a partner organization, thirteen African women activists figured amongst the 1,000 delegates and guests from sixty different countries. Although they were in the minority, there had never been so many African women present before.

22 Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti next went to Beijing to participate in the Council of the WIDF (1956), a trip sharply criticized in the London Times. [56] Obviously much moved by this voyage, she struck up a correspondence with the National Federation of Chinese Women upon her return. As Tsao Meng-chun, a secretary of the Chinese organization, wrote her in a friendly letter, “The women of China and of Nigeria will from now on advance hand in hand, in the interest of the defence of world peace and women and children’s rights.” [57] When questioned by the police, Ransome-Kuti denied having participated in the WIDF conference. Despite this denial, in 1957, the Nigerian Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa refused to renew her passport, invoking the risk of possible indoctrination of other Nigerian women. [58]

23 In the 1950s, the competition between women’s organizations, now more deeply involved in the logic of East-West blocs, began to affect African women activists’ access to forums for exchange and encounters, and the support that might bring them international visibility for their national struggles as well as opportunities to speak out, free from internal political surveillance and control. Two years after the Bandung Conference, the achievement of independence by Ghana (formerly Gold Coast) on 6 March 1957 marked a turning point. While both blocs attempted to assert their influence in newly independent African nations, the women’s associations of the new states followed their own national and international strategies, or preferred to establish closer links with other African countries.

The dawn of independence: international competition, national constraints and pan-African feminism (1957-1963)

24 Between 1957 and 1963, 25 African countries gained political independence. In this context of liberation, the international women’s organizations invested more than ever in attracting African women’s associations to their cause. Correspondence between the African women’s organizations and the leaders of the WIDF, the ICW, and the IAW demonstrate the great diversity of relationships that grew out of this moment. Competition increased during these years, not only between the WIDF and the “pro-Western” organizations, but between the ICW and the IAW as well. Several African activists, mostly English- rather than French-speaking, positioned themselves between these two Western networks in order to increase their options. Inside the African countries, women activists’ choice to associate with one or another network increased tensions between such activists themselves, or between them and the new independent governments. Despite these tensions, a new dynamic also emerged during this period of effervescent politics. Following upon the “spirit of Bandung”, women activists across West Africa decided to unify, then to join together with women from the whole continent, independently of North/South dynamics or the political tensions produced by the new national governments. [59] This emerged in resistance to the fact that in negotiations for independence, African male politicians were more determined than ever to control relationships between women activists in their countries and certain international organizations.

25 In Sierra Leone in 1961, when the Sierra Leone Women’s Movement (SLWM) wanted to invite its “Soviet friends” of the WIDF to the independence celebrations, [60] Sir Maurice Dorman, the British Governor-General, who had been designated to oversee the transfer to independence, refused to grant visas to the representatives of the WIDF. The prime minister of Sierra Leone, Milton Margai, suggested instead that the SLWM invite the IAW. The question was the subject of heated debates within the SLMW, that finished by regretfully but pragmatically accepting this proposal: “After all, we had won our independence and no longer needed to kowtow to the British.” [61] Despite the political control exercised over the work of the women activists, they sought to keep their options open, to maintain multiple alliances and to resist unwanted requests to create affiliations.

26 In such a context, the proselytizing by the Frenchwoman Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux, president of the ICW from 1957-1963, failed to convince certain African women. [62] Throughout her mandate, she deployed considerable energy attempting to persuade the national councils of African women to join her organization. Although it was presented as an international forum for cooperation and exchange, the ICW showed little interest in the lived situations of African women. Despite cordial exchanges, and while certain women did participate in the work of the ICW, others were more reticent or simply stayed in dialogue with both the ICW and the IAW, as a way to multiply their options.

27 This was the case in Ghana. In 1958, the Federation of Ghana Women (FGW), joined the IAW but also requested affiliation with the ICW. In the month preceding the ICW congress in Istanbul (23 August – 1 September 1960), Dr. Evelyn Amarteifio, secretary of the FGW and member of the Committee of Correspondence, [63] became the privileged interlocutor of the ICW. Rose Parsons wrote several letters asking her for help in convincing other African women’s councils to join. In a friendly tone, she wrote to Amarteifio in February 1960:

28

I do so believe that, if the ICW does not […] seek the cooperation of its Latin American, African, Middle-East and Far East councils, we will be of little value in the future. We need your help in this, Evelyn, because I feel you have this forward vision. This may seem like a dream of Utopia, but I think it is possible if we really want this, and really work for it. [64]

29 This friendship came to a sudden end, however, in the following months. Under pressure from the Ghanaian government, the FGW was dissolved prior to the Istanbul congress and Evelyn Amarteifio did not respond to numerous letters sent to her by various members of the ICW. In September 1960, the Ghanaian government created a new national women’s organization, the National Council of Ghana Women, composed of women close to the government. Evelyn Amarteifio explained to Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux the internal difficulties and her desire to continue the exchanges with the ICW, but Lefaucheux, interested only in her efforts to fend off the influence of the WIDF, had already mobilized several of her contacts to affiliate the ICW with the new state-approved women’s organization: “We must avoid the new Organization affiliating with the WIDF and we may have little time to lose,” [65] she wrote to Rose Parsons. Despite this insistence, Ghana did not join the ICW until 1969.

30 Neither were the personal connections between Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux and certain women from former French colonies sufficient to bring all of those organizations into the ICW. While preparing for the Istanbul congress, Lefaucheux got in touch with the Union des femmes du Togo (Ufemto) created in October 1959 and officially recognized in January 1960. [66] Their president, Dina Olympio, and general secretary, Marguerite Trenou, asked what procedure to follow in order to participate in the congress. [67] Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux also invited to Istanbul an observer from Gabon [68] and one from Senegal, Émilie Mathurin. Fourteen African women delegates from the national women’s councils and four observers (from Liberia, Senegal and Togo) were finally present. [69] Directly after the congress, representatives from both Senegal and Togo continued to exchange with Lefaucheux, but their organizations did not officially join the ICW. In 1962, Marguerite Trénou wrote to Lefaucheux that she had not managed to convince her colleagues:

31

I had trouble with several of our Togolese contacts, who prefer to ensure the Association has solid roots before engaging in international movements. Despite all my efforts, I was not able to convince them of the contrary. [70]

32 While national women’s councils affiliated with the ICW were established in Congo-Brazzaville and in Gabon, Lefaucheux came up cold in Mali, where the leading woman politician, midwife Aoua Keita, did not appreciate what she saw as an attempt by former colonial powers to meddle in their affairs. [71] On top of that, the socialist orientation of the Modibo Keita regime made it easier to connect with the WIDF, whose delegation had been received in 1961 and which set up an executive office in Bamako in January 1962. Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux also attempted to extend her contacts with Senegal, but was constrained to work with voluntary groups in the context of national politics. During the cycle of studies for representatives of the African women’s associations that Lefaucheux organized in Yaoundé in July 1962, Senegal sent two delegates: Fatou Gueye, designated by the Assemblée des femmes sénégalaises, and Caroline Faye, teacher and future deputy, chosen and financed by the Senegalese government. [72] Beginning in 1963, Lefaucheux wrote also to Annette M’Baye d’Erneville, a pioneering journalist in Senegal from 1956, founder of the journal AWA, Revue de la femme noire. In her letter, Lefaucheux deplored “the slowness of the women’s associations in French-speaking Black Africa to participate in international work, while there are so many active branches in the English-speaking countries,” and regretted that things remained “always at the conversation level”. [73] Annette M’Baye d’Erneville responded that one must wait “a bit longer” to affiliate Senegal because the “situation of the Senegalese women’s associations remains still to be defined.” [74]Lefaucheux’s frustration is evident in the exchanges that followed. After the Conseil national des femmes du Cameroun and the Association des femmes du Congo joined the ICW in 1962, the ICW finally managed to enrol officially Gambia, Sierra Leone and the Union des femmes du Niger during the General Assembly in Washington in 1963. If the presence of African women at the international congresses allowed the international organizations to claim a “global” reach, it was also a decisive opportunity for those who met up there to exchange and develop their own Pan-African project from the late 1950s.

33 Following the Bandung Conference and the Conference of Afro-Asian Solidarity (Cairo 26 December 1957 – 1 January 1958), women from Africa and Asia participated in the first Asian-African Conference of Women in Colombo in February 1958. [75] In June of the same year, the Fourth Congress of the WIDF in Vienna provided an occasion to discuss the possibility of regrouping, first between women of West Africa, then on Pan-African scale. Jeanne Martin Cissé (Senegal), Bassata Djire Dembele (French Sudan), Gertrude Omog and Marthe Ouandié (Cameroon), and Rachel Razafindramisa (Madagascar) were among the first representatives of 70 countries. [76] After this meeting, the future founders of the Union des Femmes de l’Ouest Africain (UFOA) met up in September 1958 during the first Black African Youth festival organized in Bamako, Mali. There they again discussed their project, finally realized during the inaugural Congress of the UFOA (Bamako, 20-23 July 1959). [77] In 1958, it was also during an international congress, organized this time by the IAW in Athens, that the Nigerian Felicia Adetowun Ogunsheye, the first African woman elected to the executive council of the IAW, proposed the idea of a new conference bringing together for the first time French-speaking and English-speaking African women activists. Organized with economic assistance from the IAW and UNESCO, this conference opened in August 1960 in Ibadan, Nigeria. [78] Following the meeting, the activists met up again in Guinea, (20-30 July 1961), and founded the first regional council, named the Council of West African Women. While this congress would quickly disappear from view, because of the nationalist imperatives of the member countries, the idea of a Pan-African women’s organization remained. [79]

34 It was in July 1962 in Dar es-Salaam, the future capital of Tanzania, that they would create the Pan-African Women’s Organization (PAWO). Representatives from thirty African countries, gathered together at this first Conference of African Women, affirmed their unity and their independence from the political orientations of the two blocs, choosing to initiate contacts, in complete freedom, whether with the ICW, the WIDF, or the IAW. As Jeanne Martin Cissé, General Secretary of the Pan-African Women’s Organization explained at its inception:

35

We have effectively agreed to collaborate with all these different organizations, because we believe that independently of problems of ideology, race, or beliefs, the women of the world must unite. What unites them is, in our opinion, greater than what might divide them. […] The Conference of African Women should not thus confine or isolate itself – after having found our sisters on the Continent – it should rather hold out a sisterly hand to women the world over. [80]

36 The African women present in Dar es-Salaam were inventing a new women’s internationalism, independent of the logics of the Cold War, a space that was temporarily free also from political and gender constraints.

37 During the two first decades of the Cold War, the relationships created between various African women activists and the IAW and the ICW (close to the West) and the WIDF (close to the Soviet bloc) demonstrated that African women activists carried their anticolonial and feminist struggles beyond national borders. In the context of an increasingly polarized world, the ICW, IAW and WIDF attempted to expand their influence in Africa and to associate local women’s organizations with their cause. However, this bipolar vision of international feminism came up against the strategies of African women activists who were most likely to respond to whichever organization was most invested in their local struggles. Sometimes, local activists opted for multiple affiliations in order to maximize their international reach. National, and even nationalist, imperatives sometimes drove their decisions, but most of the time women’s international activism took a different path than that defined by the political leaders of their countries. While the Iron Curtain was not the defining factor for African women activists, international politics nevertheless weighed on their engagement: colonial administrations and/or male politicians in the colonies as well as in the independent nations constrained, reorganized, or controlled to a certain extent which international relations were feasible. After two decades of meetings and exchanges with women the world over, African women activists opened up, in the early 1960s, to new forms of internationalism between African women and women from other nations of the global South. Without revoking their connections to older international women’s organizations, they sought out new forums for discussing their national and Pan-African concerns in a way that would be less determined by the power struggles of the Cold War and free from all forms of ideological colonial heritage.

38 This article has proposed an alternative transnational history of the Cold War and decolonization, by recounting the experiences of African women activists. Thus, it invites historians to take a more nuanced approach to the history of international women’s movements, and to revisit the chronology of North-South exchanges after the Second World War. It demonstrates too how the international women’s associations and the numerous African women’s organizations, often presented as politically neutral, [81] were drawn into the logic of East-West “blocs.” Finally, it situates the activism of African women in a global history of feminist movements, many aspects of which still remain unexplored.