Silenced Resistance : Women, Dictatorships, and Genderwashing in Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea.

Joanna Allan. Silenced Resistance: Women, Dictatorships, and Genderwashing in Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019. ISBN 9780299318406 (HB), 360 pp.

The field of Western Sahara scholarship has lately been undergoing a minor surge. Since the publication of Stephen Zunes and Jacob Mundy’s agendasetting 2010 work War, Nationalism, and Conflict Irresolution, scholars have been publishing new books on the conflict quite regularly: Alice Wilson’s excellent Sovereignty in Exile came out in 2016; 2018 saw Konstantina Isidoros’ Nomads and Nation-Building (also reviewed in this issue); and 2019 has already seen the release of Joanna Allan’s Silenced Resistance. More work is forthcoming from a number of recent doctoral students. For a conflict involving a relatively small number of people tucked away in a remote corner of the Sahara, this level of scholarly attention is a testament to the complexity of the issues involved. It is worth noting that all three of the books mentioned above – by Wilson, Isidoros and Allan – were written by female ethnographers (Sophie Caratini, writing in French about the conflict, should not be omitted either). There is something about the structure of gender relations in Sahrawi society (Sahrawis are the indigenous people of Western Sahara, although that statement should be understood to come with a number of epistemological caveats) that seems to ensure this will be the case. For one thing, Polisario, Western Sahara’s government-in-exile, has gone to some lengths to present itself to the West as a paragon of liberal Islam, of social and gender equality (for more on this, see Elena Fiddian-Qasimeyeh’s The Ideal Refugees). Women in the Polisario-run refugee camps hold political office, own property and influence the discourse of exile and sovereignty both explicitly and implicitly. Another factor, often also visible in ethnographically similar contexts in neighbouring Mauritania, is the bifurcation in gender-coding of spaces, corresponding to a gendered division of labour: very roughly speaking, men lead in the desert, women lead in the home. A few years ago, attempting to interview a (male) camel herder in Western Sahara, I was surprised to find that, as soon as we entered his family’s tent, the man fell silent and allowed his wife to monopolise the conversation. She, at least, was not the slightest bit intimidated by the presence of a male anthropologist in the domestic sphere, but this pattern repeated over and over in my fieldwork. It is easy to see how this sort of spatial gender-coding might lend female ethnographers a certain degree of more protracted, more subtle and perhaps more comprehensive, access to Sahrawi society.

Something like this tension – Sahrawi men appearing at the forefront, Sahrawi women quietly running the show – runs through much of the recent work. Joanna Allan foregrounds this phenomenon in both of her case studies. Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea are both former Spanish colonies, and therefore share some key aspects from the perspective of resistance and political discourse. In both cases, Allan argues, women, even when relegated to the subaltern, are able to influence male-dominated political discourse and action through interpersonal influence over specific men. This opens a very interesting avenue: women’s resistance is not simply a special case of anti-colonial resistance; it is a creative synthesis of resistance to patriarchies both domestic and imported. In both her case studies, Allan explores how both colonial patriarchy and women’s resistance emerged from a syncretic hegemony that blended pre-colonial norms with imported Spanish hierarchies. In foregrounding this point, Allan moves beyond simple typologies of resistance and domination, pointing towards the possibility of creativity and complexity on both sides. Indeed, as Allan demonstrates, oppressors (in this case the Moroccan regime) often use women’s pain to control men, targeting the female relatives of male community leaders for sexual torture.

Another area in which Allan’s work is innovative is in her selection of the particular contrastive cases. Western Sahara is most often juxtaposed with Palestine or East Timor, contexts of occupation and exile, of sovereignty stubbornly asserted over a long period of time. Allan’s choice of Equatorial Guinea is intriguing, although at times it makes the book feel like two distinct, shorter books which overlap only sporadically. Why Equatorial Guinea? The most obvious interpretation might be that Allan is really a social historian of the Spanish colonial project in Africa, and so her book is about two cases of female resistance to, or in the wake of, Spanish colonialism specifically. Yet her book only rarely gestures at Spanish colonialism as an overarching theme; Allan clearly sees her book as being about women’s resistance, rather than women’s resistance to a specific patriarchal project. If Allan were, say, a historian of North Africa more generally, it might be possible to envision a book covering women’s resistance to colonialism in a particular space (the Hassanophone Sahara, for instance, cutting across two distinct colonial projects) rather than two case studies linked by a colonial project that is not itself unpacked in much detail. It’s clear that Western Sahara holds her interest more; it always comes first in her discussions, is treated in more depth and receives more of her indignation. But this is not much of a weakness, and Allan is a strong enough writer that the seams rarely show. At least part of this structure has to do with the fact that Western Sahara has received so much scholarly attention in recent years; Allan explicitly positions her chapters on Equatorial Guinea as preliminary work, an attempt to ‘brush the earth off Guinean women’s histories of resistance’. This is a fair point, but, if anything, it only further begs the question of what these two case studies have to do with each other.

In approaching such a large and amorphous topic as ‘resistance’, Allan is forced to make choices about what to emphasise: the agrarian context of the two case studies, for instance, receives fairly cursory treatment. Pre-colonial Western Sahara was populated almost exclusively by nomadic pastoralists; Equatorial Guinea, in the same period, depended to a larger extent on sedentary farming. Surely there are interesting things to be said about women’s resistance in nomadic contexts, especially given what we know about the relationship between early agriculture and the emergence of gender stratification.

Allan is clearly aware of this, and alludes more than once to the real or imagined gender equality of pre-colonial Sahrawi nomadism, but this heritage, which intersects to this day with all aspects of Sahrawi society, does not receive the deft critical analysis of which Allan is obviously capable. Power relations do not exist in an ecological vacuum, and the contrasting agrarian heritages of Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea seem like a nontrivial omission. Allan is careful to note that some of this omission is an inevitable result of the type of source material available: even her oldest interview subjects tended to have grown up in cities in Spanish Sahara, and access to pre-colonial Sahrawi nomadic culture is, at best, inconsistent. But this does not explain the omission of nomadism, or indeed food production in general, as a salient point of analysis. In reference to a study of Egyptian Bedouin, Allan observes that ‘sedentarization brings increased patriarchal controls on previously nomadic women’s freedom of movement, while women’s lack of access to the financial resources introduced by the capitalist economy has given Bedouin men a new power over them’. This is surely a sufficiently interesting point to merit a closer look, but unfortunately Allan returns only sporadically to this line of argument. Allan’s big theoretical innovation is borrowed from Corinne L. Mason’s notion of genderwashing:

The idea of genderwashing is rooted in the better-known environmentalist concept of greenwashing. This is the process by which green marketing is used deceptively to promote the perception that a company’s policies, products, or aims are environmentally friendly … Western corporate and state partners use so-called gender equality in much the same way: they abuse women’s empowerment in order to attract investment, increase legitimacy abroad, and divert international attention from the women resisting their actions. Indeed, in this book, I aim to further research on genderwashing by, on the one hand, illuminating how genderwashing serves to silence resistance, and, on the other hand … the authoritarian regime works in partnership with Western states and corporations to genderwash their collective abuses.

This is a fascinating idea to think with, partly because Allan earlier hints at how both Western Saharan and Equatoguinean women occasionally manipulate ostensibly Orientalist images and tropes to further their own resistance, just as oppressive regimes may employ the style of emancipation while neglecting the substance. What emerges is a kind of meta-resistance, in which both oppressor and oppressed borrow from or anticipate each other’s political symbolism. This is a considerably more powerful and flexible frame than the simple typology of resistor and oppressor in more or less open conflict over some particular edict. What Allan has achieved here is an impressive critical lens brought to bear on fascinating ethnographic data. Allan has managed to pull off the rare and admirable feat of writing a book that feels more like a point of departure than the end of a particular story. MATTHEW PORGES Department of Social Anthropology University of St Andrews Email: msp5@st-andrews.ac.uk