Feminist Drift: Africa, Gender, and Ambivalent Histories of Human Rights Beyond the State

This essay takes up a brief, important moment in modern African history—1960, the crossroads of Independence movements across Africa and the nascent moment of UN/NGO development discourse around Human Rights and Africa—to think through the national, historical, ideological, academic, and institutional limits of the state and its role in feminist human rights critique. I read The Scar, a 1960, award-winning one act play from Kenyan author Rebecca Njau, as an early scene of ambivalence about feminist human rights, cultural nationalism, and their anticipated critiques. The play offers a theory of “drift”—a disengagement with binaries of national sovereignty and critiques of the Western universalism of human rights in favor of a feminist ethic of ambivalent institutional engagement. Njau’s focus on the simultaneously intimate yet public regulation of women’s bodies allows for distance and ambivalence as part of feminist human rights study beyond statist definitions of political action.