The Innovative and Collective Capacity of Low-Income East African Women in the Era of HIV/AIDS: Contesting Western Notions of African Women

Abstract

Historically, African women have been viewed through a colonizing and Eurocentric lens emphasizing poverty, oppression, and suffering. A postcolonial, feminist approach to our two qualitative studies with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected women in Malawi and Kenya led us to depart from this discourse, highlighting women's capacity. Through this article, not only is a forum created for African women's voices to be heard as subaltern knowledge leading to transformational change, but also health care providers are made aware, through women's words, of how they might capitalize on grassroots women's movements, particularly in resource-poor communities, to implement effective HIV prevention and treatment strategies.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the women in Kenya and Malawi who took the time out of their busy days to share their experiences of living with HIV and what these experiences meant to them and to their families. Our gratitude also goes to Patricia D. Lofton for her assistance in formatting this manuscript for publication. Funding for the research for this article was provided by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Research Growth Initiative (RGI) 3 to Lucy Mkandawire-Valhmu, and from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee RGI 4 to Peninnah Kako. The write up of this article was made possible partly from an award from the University of Wisconsin System Institute on Race and Ethnicity to Peninnah Kako (2011). This article was first delivered as a paper presentation at Columbia University at the conference entitled “Towards an Intellectual History of Black Women,” April 28–30, 2011.

Notes

1. Shamba is a Swahili word for farm, field, or garden. In addition to women owning their own farms or gardens where they grow their family food, women may provide informal labor to someone else's shamba in exchange for food or cash to buy food. Rural women in particular may perform a day's labor in the field of another subsistence farmer who is able to pay them.