As Charles Onyango-Obbo documented in a recent EA article titled “The road that is wet with tears,” there have been numerous attempts on the part of African women to ascend to the peak of formal politics as we know it today.

Female presidency has remained stubbornly elusive for the majority of the world — this is hardly an African problem. Gender is the final frontier. How many women dare to go where depressingly few women have gone before? The lucky, the brave and the few.

While I do my best to appreciate the symbolic — and sometimes even real — gender empowerment effect of having a female supreme leader of all the land, at the end of the day it is too easy for that to lead one trippingly down to the ghetto of tokenism.

Tokenism isn’t just tedious, it is dangerous. It allows the nature of an individual to be extended to a reflection of the character of a whole group, something which puts unconscionable pressure on that person whether their “issue” be race or gender or whatever.
I can’t be the only one who finds the Obamas bizarrely akin to the Huxtables. Real people have bad days, but they sure can’t. First Black Family? Welcome to the hell of perpetual good behaviour.

Speaking of our African context, I am not entirely sure there is enough social infrastructure to support female leadership. For a woman to wield direct and personal power, without apology, is still very challenging for most of our communities to accept.

This has necessitated some well-intended strong-arming, such as through the use of parliamentary gender quotas.

I was saddened to learn during the build-up to the Kenyan elections that although their new Constitution states that no more than two-thirds of one gender should hold elected office, the Supreme Court has seen fit to defer implementation until 2015. There never seems to be enough money or political will when it comes to the default minority.

Although I am dubious about affirmative action, time and experience are convincing me that it might be a necessary evil.

If merit were enough to get a girl or a woman her just deserts, we would be living in an entirely different world. One in which it would be bizarre, frankly, to consider inferiority a natural characteristic of those who are sexed female.

If it takes quotas for us to get there, as flat-footed and inelegant a mechanism as that might be, well then by all means let us embrace them. No more than two-thirds of any system should be dominated by one gender. Watch out, you kitchen party queens.

Quite aside from the real concern with equity, we need minorities in politics. Balance is a key defence against pathological imbalances. I have been developing, of late, some serious concerns about the health of the African President’s Club.

Having come to the world late enough to barely catch the exits of the generation of self-appointed liberators, I bought into the idea of progress. Or at least, progressiveness.

I figured that men who had transitioned from barefoot village boys and chieftain’s sons to the heady pinnacle of Father of the Nation could be forgiven the majestic collapses of their moral and mental capacities.

I figured the few leftovers who weren’t assassinated, exiled or lynched by a furious mob of fellow countrymen would have the good grace to aim for a quiet transition to ancestorship crowned by a tasteful mausoleum and an airport or three named after them.

I figured that beyond the upheavals, we would build on their good works and enable the young, the non-male, the wretched, the millions of Others to inherit the earth.

But here we are in the 21st century, and it looks like it’s going to take quotas to get to that promised land.

Harold Laswell is credited with defining politics as “who gets what, when and how.” Some ideals are not so much a destination as they are a process of deliberate social evolution.

While it is tempting to become disheartened, especially in this era that fetishises rapid “wins,” in truth the game of power cares little for absolute achievement. For what greater work is there for humanity than to strive for that which is slightly out of reach?

Feminism, in its pursuit of a balanced power relation between genders, is about something so much greater than a female president for everyone. Happy International Women’s Day. Happy Women’s Month.

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report, http://mikochenireport.blogspot.com. E-mail: [email protected]