By Mario de Queiroz
LISBON, Apr 12 2007 (IPS)

The rights of women enshrined in the constitutions of Angola and Mozambique are identical. But in practice, there are enormous differences.

The laws of the two largest Portuguese-speaking countries in Africa are non-discriminatory, and should therefore serve the interests of gender equality, but in Angola women often have to demand that the laws also be enforced without discriminating against them.

This is the view of Angolan economics professor and Catholic missionary Ana de Carvalho Rufino e Menezes, better known in her country as Sister Ana, as cited in a lengthy article about the situation of African women in Africa 21, a specialist monthly magazine edited jointly in Luanda and Lisbon.

Mozambique, on the other hand, is one of the 15 countries in the world with the highest representation of women in parliament, at 35 percent. In Africa, only Rwanda has a larger proportion (nearly 50 percent).

Professor Marzia Grassi, an Italian expert at Lisbon University’s Institute of Social Sciences who does research on Portuguese-speaking African countries, told IPS that, in fact, the laws of both countries are equivalent in substance, but the difference is that “in Angola, the situation of women is the least of the government’s concerns.”

Mozambique had the initial advantage of a woman prime minister, Luisa Dias Diogo, “and in recent years outstanding groups of intellectuals have emerged, especially lawyers and sociologists, who have done excellent work in the field of gender equality,” Grassi said.

According to statistics published by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 85 million women and girls living today were subjected to genital mutilation. Most of them were African and Asian women.

Sister Ana was born in Luanda 43 years ago. She acknowledged that there is an élite of women in Angola who are gaining access to education at all levels, to the labour market, and to leadership positions. However, the majority of Angolan women are burdened with material, intellectual, cultural and spiritual poverty, she said.

There is a wide abyss between rural women and urban women, due to inequality of opportunities.

Rural women “are living under the yoke of traditions, customs and certain rites that violate their rights. They are locked into a world that permits no change,” she said, citing polygamy and polyandry as examples.

Polyandry is much less frequent than polygamy. It is described as “an attempt to live in equality with men, an option which could be interpreted as a form of self-promotion, where a women cohabits with several men as a solution for her material welfare,” Sister Ana said.

Genital mutilation “not only prevents but violates a woman’s human dignity,” she said. It is justified in the name of “our ‘African cultural traditions,’ which are discriminatory because dominance and the power of decision-making are conferred on men,” while women are subordinate, confined to the home where their role is to be “figures of protocol and the guardians of tradition,” she said.

Another thing that might help “to understand, but not to justify” the differences between Angola and Mozambique in terms of women’s rights is the comparative magnitude and ferocity of their respective civil wars that broke out when Portuguese colonial domination ended in 1975, said Grassi.

In Angola the civil war did not end until February 2002, a decade later than Mozambique’s. It left over one million dead and four million people displaced, “many more than in Mozambique,” said Grassi, who for 15 years has divided her time between Portugal and its former African colonies in pursuit of her profession.

“In other words, in this respect Mozambique is a decade ahead of Angola, where women were forced to scrape a living, fighting for their own survival and that of their children while their men were at the battle front, from which many of them never returned,” said Grassi.

“Powerful” and “competent” are the terms most often used by Mozambicans to describe their 48-year-old Prime Minister Dias Diogo. She graduated from the University of London with a doctorate in economics, and was a high-level official at the World Bank before becoming minister of planning and finance from 1999 to 2004.

The most likely replacements for Mozambican President Armando Guebuza when his first term of office ends in three years’ time, or after his second term in eight years’ time, are apparently Dias Diogo herself, or Graça Machel, widow of former President Moisés Samora Machel (1975-1986) and now married to South Africa’s historic leader and former President Nelson Mandela.

The differences between the two countries are most marked in the field of urban women and politics. While Angola is below average for women’s formal participation in politics within the Southern African Development Community, Mozambique has a place of honour.

Angola must be content with more modest gains. There are only two women ministers and 10 deputy ministers out of a total of 27 ministries, while women hold 27 out of the 193 seats in parliament.

The most remarkable exception is the powerful Albina Assis Pereira Africano, currently special adviser to President José Eduardo dos Santos.

She was a university student when Angola was still a Portuguese colony and it was difficult for women to get even a primary school education. Now over 60, this qualified engineer broke the mould of her generation and made inroads into a field considered to be an “exclusively male” preserve: management of the oil industry.

Assis still holds the record she established in 1992 when she became the world’s first woman oil minister.

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