Why gender representation matters—A conversation with Prof Atanga

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For our recent Her Media Diary Podcast, Episode 20, Dr Yemisi Akinbobola, the co-founder of AWiM, had an insightful conversation with gender and discourse studies scholar Prof. Lilian Lem Atanga. Professor Atanga, whose research interests lie at the intersection of language, gender, politics, and the media in African contexts, is an Associate Professor of Gender and Discourse Studies, formerly of the Department of African Studies of the University of Dschang, the University of Bamenda. She is also a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Florida, USA.  

Since obtaining her PhD in Linguistics from Lancaster University, UK, Prof. Atanga has researched language, gender, politics and the media in African contexts. She’s co-editor of  Gender and Language in Sub-Saharan Africa: Tradition, Struggle and Change (John Benjamins 2013).  

Dr Akinbobola’s interview with Professor Atanga highlights how gender representation and inclusion are instrumental in helping young girls become accomplished women. Read the conversation below.  

I’d like to know who Professor Lilian Atanga is. Let me never ever reduce to the hard work you’ve put into becoming a professor.  

That’s true. Usually, I don’t use the title ‘professor,’ but people get upset with me. They say, “You don’t know what you have. You don’t know what power is in it.” I’m like; it’s not the title that makes me. It is me who makes me.  

If I may just talk about the panel I was at before joining this chat, it was organised by the Association of African Universities, and their title is “Invest in women in higher education,” and there were all these presentations with data. Of course, you know it won’t be impressive. He said we push women, and women have low self-esteem. So, in the chat, I just asked if the policies were good, would you need to push women? Do men get pushed? You don’t have to push men. So why do you have to push women? If everything were good, would women have low self-esteem? Why are women having low self-esteem?  

I found that, when we’re researching African women generally, our histories are not always publicly available. So, let’s go way back to Professor Atang’s history. Tell us about your childhood.  

I was born and raised in Bafut, a village in the northwest region of Cameroon. At the time, my dad was working with an engineering firm. He wasn’t very educated and lived where he worked with my stepmom. My mom wasn’t in the best of health, so she lived in the city. I lived in the village with my older sister and her daughter.  

At the time, she was a mom to me, but today, when I reflect on it, she might have been a woman of maybe 20 or 22, which was really young. I remember they used to do everything for me to look good, such as buying me shoes in an environment where every other child worked barefoot. So when I’m going to school, I’ll take off my shoes and hide them in the bush because I did not want to be the only kid wearing shoes.  

After school, I’d pick up the shoes and wear them, but my feet were always cracked, and they did not understand why since they had given me shoes. In school, I was the most brilliant of all my peers during my seven years of education. I took the first position, and because of that, I was persecuted by boys and teachers. My sister always fought for me, though. She also taught me at home. That’s why I was always the best.  

When I went to secondary school, all my village experiences were behind me. I went to the university in Cameroon and did my masters in Nigeria. After returning to the country, I started teaching at the University in Chang and then for my PhD. I applied to so many universities and scholarships. I got the Commonwealth scholarship, but the university I applied to selected two males. They didn’t select me because I applied independently and got the vice chancellor to sign. However, the university had selected two males and got the vice chancellor to sign. So when these three applications went to the UK, they selected me and told the university to choose one of those males. The university returned to me and asked, ‘Who told you to apply?’ we have our candidates. They were so hard on me that I thought I lost it, but then the UK government wrote to me again to ask me to come for my visa.   

Regarding gender, my dad raised us as equals. There was no woman, and there was no man. When it came to farming, the distribution of labour for girls and boys was the same. There was no discrimination. He went as far as telling us the girls that “your first husband is your job not a man” and he stopped all the girls from getting married until they attained a certain level of education. He even rejected my sister for a certain period because she got married instead of having her PhD. That was the kind of dad I had.  

You mentioned having a lot of pushback when in primary school because of your brilliance. What are your specific memories around that?  

There are two particular memories in what would be my fifth year of primary school. Because I was the best, I was also a teacher’s best friend and assistant. So, when a test is given in class, I’m the one who grades the scripts. After I grade the scripts, the teacher just inputs the marks. When it is handicraft time, I’m the one who supervises the students, and because of that, I create enmity.  

Students blame me for their failures, so this day after school, on my way back home, a group of boys hid themselves on the way. When I got there, they beat me mercilessly. I was beaten because they failed, and to them, I failed them. My sister learned of it and came to school and got all the boys beaten.   

I got promoted to the next class because my intelligence level was higher than my peers. However, one time, one of the teachers was very angry that I had to skip a class and withheld my report card. When I wrote the common entrance exam into secondary school, because my report card was withheld, I was not admitted into any secondary school because they said the new report card I had was fraudulent, which wasn’t true. It was simply a copy from the master copy.   

Having the intelligence level I had, I am not in any way insinuating that my intellectual skills were higher than those of other children, knowing that the learning process has so many variables. I was comfortable knowing that by giving me extra lessons, my sister gave me what all the other kids probably didn’t have.   

I was not even given an opportunity to fail because if I lost one mathematical summation, I received ten beatings for it. I was also well-fed and clothed so my home background empowered me. However, I didn’t have physical strength, I wasn’t muscular, and I was tiny and dainty, so I couldn’t fight my battles. My sister fought my battles and gave me a foundation that moved along with me through life.   

My secondary school was a bit challenging because I was moved from the village to the city, where students dressed better, had more money, and did more things. I no longer had the support my sister was giving me in the village. I was now alone, but notwithstanding, I succeeded; my self-esteem only took a little beat because of the competition.   

If you further reflect on the impacts and the kind of teaching you gained from your sister, how has that foundation contributed to where you are today?  

My sister was the woman who broke all the barriers. She even dated a white guy at that time when white men were still new to my community. She lived a modern life more than other people. She did things that many women don’t do; she fought men.   

When I reflect on myself today, subconsciously, I am like that. One of my battles in life is because I am not feminine enough, not in physical presentation, but in my thinking.  

What is feminine enough? How do we get to that mindset of there being a type of femininity we should embody?  

Again, this is societal cognition. How do you define a woman? I remember my first gender class when I returned with my PhD and decided to teach gender. I asked what makes a woman a woman. They said, “Hey, Madame, what kind of question is that?” I say yes; what makes a woman a woman? They said, “breast and vagina.”  

Then I asked what kinds of things women do. Their answers were all about reproductive roles. I asked if a man could change a baby’s diaper. They said, “No, Madame. How can a man be doing that?”   

These were University students. I said why? So it’s a woman’s job, and I asked a question: If a man changed the diaper, wouldn’t work? They said it would, but men shouldn’t cook. So, this social cognition creates barriers, and we internalise it without question, and then it becomes a norm.   

As recently as five years ago, a professor told me,  

“Prof Lily, you know that we are women. We cannot pretend that we are not women we have to give our men the respect they deserve.” I’m not in any way insinuating men don’t deserve respect. However, I am saying that we tend to lower ourselves to raise our men not because they are better but because they have a phallus.   

Phallus defines a man and nothing else according to such social cognition. When you begin to question and move beyond this social cognition, you become deviant. Someone recently asked my friend, “Has Professor Lillian Atanga gotten married?”  

It’s like I’m lacking something because I’m not married. “I am nothing without a husband,” is societal cognition, but they have not stopped to ask. Is it because a man has never asked her for marriage, or is it because she hasn’t had what she wants?  

What were the influences and what directed you towards Academia? Did you plan to focus on gender studies? How did that journey emerge?  

I got into academia when I was at the University of Boya, and the current minister of secondary education in Cameroon was my professor, Prof. Pauline Nalova Lyonga. She was young, pretty, and intelligent, and her accent was beautiful. She has travelled to be an international visiting professor in many places.  

I’m like I want to be like that woman. Yes, she doesn’t know because I’ve never told her. Then, it was not a critical decision; I just wanted to be like her. It was not that I wanted to be in academia—those are two different things. However, I think that was a foundation. My second interest in gender developed when I returned with my master’s degree from the University of Jos in Nigeria. I had this Reverend father who thought I was better than being a secondary school teacher and he actually got me to register for a PhD in the University of Boya, so when I registered for that PhD, there was a department of women and gender studies. There was this professor who, at the time, was the only one in the gender studies department, and I asked if I could use her library because one of the courses I was doing had to do with gender.  

She had all these gender books, and she let me access them. When I went through the library books, the titles and content I saw left a burning in me, but she would not let me borrow her book. If I had to read, I had to sit in her library and read. That was the beginning. So, the questions I could not ask and answer, the book provided me with knowledge and confidence. So those books were my foundation for gender and taught me that I can ask specific questions even if I can’t have such answers. That was the beginning of my journey into gender studies.  

However, Boya University was very frustrating in the sense that the absence of human resources and financial resources stalled the PhD process.  So, I started looking out of Boya and saw a conference on language and gender; being a linguist, because I initially did syntax grammar, I became interested. Then, I looked at the book of abstracts and the university that organised it, and I was impressed. So, there was this woman, Dr Jane, who eventually became my PhD supervisor, and I wrote to her. I said, “I want to come to your university and spend a term to use your library. I’m doing a PhD and want to work on gender and language.” She said the tuition for a term is £7000. Seven thousand pounds for a Cameroonian? That’s a lifetime salary I can’t afford, so I gave up. I almost gave up the PhD at the University of Boya. Then, I started applying for scholarships. I applied for more than 30 scholarships; that’s how determined I was that year. I got the Commonwealth scholarship and had a partial scholarship from the University of Strasbourg to study.  

However, being English-speaking, I didn’t want to go to France, so I moved to Lancaster not to study gender and language but gender and discourse. I used the critical discourse analysis framework, where you don’t only hear; you question, ask them why, and look for why things are like that.

From your story, I can see many hurdles that you overcame. What would you say were your key motivating factors?  

I’m going to go back to my dad again. My dad didn’t invest materially for me. Like spending money, buying clothes, or buying whatever in life, but my dad’s words haunt me till today. When my dad shares farm portions equally with males and females, he insists we all finish our portions. He would tell you it is the eye that fears work and not the hands, which means that you create all the barriers and that there is no limit to what you can attain if you insist and persist. 

With all the educational barriers in Cameroon, which involved less access to quality higher education, such as doctoral level, at the time, the English-speaking University, which was Boya at that time, had not matured enough for PhD studies. There were also language barriers and overpopulation.   

I also vowed to myself that I would not study again if I had to pay for it myself. It had to be a scholarship, so I applied for over 30 scholarships. I didn’t want tuition to be a barrier for me.  

My PhD proposal took me a year because when I wrote it, I gave it to everyone who could read it to edit. I gave it to professors, colleagues, students, and everyone I could find. I kept effecting changes on it. I tell people I got a scholarship because I identified a problem and a possible solution, which means you don’t just study for study’s sake. You don’t have certification for certification’s sake. You have that certification to solve a problem, and for me, at that time, after seeing the books in Professor Joyce’s office, I realised that there was a problem of understanding women in public spaces.  

This is because women were seen as being private, and my PhD data indicated that even when women are in parliament, they are persecuted for being outspoken. For instance, there was an incidence when a woman spoke, challenged men and criticised the systems. The speaker turned around and told her, “Madame does your husband know you are like this? I will tell your husband that this is what you say.” That is a space where people are supposed to speak on issues, and when a woman spoke on an issue, she was challenged for doing so.  

Your comments show that true representation has been critical to who you are today. So, how do we produce a new generation of people with a positive mindset about the position of women in society?  

We have to stand up for ourselves and other women. I will also argue that, coming from my background, which is very heterosexual and binary, you cannot avoid not being binary. In a recruitment panel at a university where I was present, they kept recruiting males even when there were qualified women. I spoke up and said we have also to recruit women. There is a concept of tokenism, bringing in women for tick-boxing, which I detest. We don’t just want token positions. We want to be substantive. However, we also need to work on our own and not let those barriers hinder us.  

We need to take out that fear factor. We don’t need to whisper our ideas to males to take credit for it. We need to assert ourselves, and part of asserting ourselves is lifting up your finger to say I can do this, not just sitting when you can do it.    

You’ve written about the experiences of women in higher education and you are also an African and a lecturer. What has been your experience in that context of intersectionality where your gender intersects with other forms of identity in the places that you’ve been teaching?  

The United States was a really good context because the class I taught was language, gender, and politics, and it was an undergraduate class. The graduate class had Master’s and Ph.D. students, but given the context of the United States, issues of LGBTQ are pretty prevalent. In my department, there were no black professors. It’s true I did just ten months there, but there were no black professors, and I didn’t particularly have any issues of race.  

In my encounter in my time as an individual at the University of Florida, although I heard stories about it, I didn’t experience racism However, at Lancaster University, I taught English for academic purposes to pre-doctoral international students who are coming in for Master’s and PhD programs I was good I know I am good and when I started teaching.   

There is this Chinese student who worked out of class and gave up the program because he didn’t pay his money from China to be taught by an African yeah, and he left. So after that year, the next year I applied I wasn’t taken. My classmate, who is a Greek, was taken. She is white, and I’m not. However, when she speaks, you have to say ‘pardon or sorry three times before you get what she’s saying. She spoke good English, but she was heavily accented. I can tell you that my accent was two times clearer than hers.  

In this case, my gender identification and race were not an issue. When it comes to issues of race, I think blacks from Africa take it better than blacks who are not from Africa. I again think this is a cognitive thing; we are resilient. We’ve learned to be resilient and forge ahead against all odds.  

I think I’m one of those who focuses on her goals rather than on the environment in which the goals are. I strive to get what I want, but then the African context is very hostile when it comes to sexuality and gender identification, sometimes not intentionally. I didn’t become a full professor in Cameroon because when I submitted my documents for full professorship, the person evaluating my documents told me, “Ah! You have been keeping away from me. Now I have your file. You have to come to see me. I reported to my University but nothing was done.  

Nothing was done. Neither the females nor the males I reported to did anything because the man was a prominent professor of high administrative and academic standing. How do I challenge him when the systems in place do not protect me as a woman? It happens with women in all other fields. It’s not just in academia, politics, or the area I research. There are all those barriers and discrimination. That was sexual harassment of the highest order. It would never go public, and I can even be challenged to tell my own story.   

Your academic focus is in the area of gender and discourse. Tell us more about the kind of work you’ve done, particularly those you’ve found to be impactful.  

Gender has become so salient to me in my research and publication and my teaching. For my research, as I said, I was initiated into gender studies by Professor Joyce and Professor Pauline Nalova Lyonga, who both brought me to teach at the University of Boya in the Department of Women and Gender studies. What motivated me to do PhD in the topic I chose was that there are cults and secret societies, which are the powerhouses like the parliaments and the ministries in the village where I grew up. There’s a cult that they have where women can’t belong. They are the kingmakers. They are the lawmakers and the rulers. Even the King is subject to them because they are my village’s supreme body in leadership. So I asked why only men are members of these secret societies. Why can’t women belong?  

Women cannot partake, but men can. Men can get themselves initiated, and they have all of these ceremonies which give them gifts and power, but women are excluded. When men come, people have to bow, read, and give gifts, but women don’t receive them.   

So, when I started questioning these relations of power, I looked at the modern political systems compared to the government of Cameroon. I saw that the parliament had few women in the ministry as the divisional officers and governors. To date, there are no female governors. So these questions started coming to mind with the few books I had read in Boya. When I went to Lancaster, my project supervisor’s approach was like, ‘you tell me your story,’ and I started telling this story, and she said there you go. That’s your topic. That’s how I got into investigating why women are not in powerful political positions, which are the leadership contexts where decisions are made that affect women’s lives.  

How is it that women don’t get to be part of the bodies that make decisions that affect them? That’s how I got into researching women in politics and leadership. But then language comes because it all happens through language when a mother tells a daughter: “You have to get married and have children, or you have to stay in that house and take care of the children and let your husband do the things.” When that happens, what are you doing to that girl? You are positioning and limiting through the use of words. They keep ringing in that individual’s mind.   

How we present ourselves and the semiotics of language is how they contribute to empowering or disempowering women in decision-making positions, so that has been my niche in looking at women in power. When I went back to Cameroon, for the first several years, maybe five years post-PhD, I worked with someone in the area of media and communication. That was how I got into media outcomes. Then, elections were happening in Senegal and Cameroon, and two things happened in Senegal: They attained gender equality in their parliament. In Cameroon, they were campaigning for parliamentary seats, and because of this, we began looking at how these women were presented in the media in the two countries.

How were they represented? How much time did they have? What was the content of their interviews? What were the kinds of questions that were asked? When the women’s profiles were being written, what was written about them? It became so revealing that even when a woman has broken the barrier of moving into spaces that are deemed to be male species, society still puts a lot of pressure on her, bringing the domestic to the public. Fronting her family, husband, children, and social, religious and cultural connections.  Meanwhile, hardly any social and cultural connections were brought up between the men’s wives and children; their political connections were repeatedly fronted. The question here is, the people asking the questions or writing about these people, what is happening to their cognition when they do these things?  

Have they been socialised so that when they see a woman, they see a man and children in relation to her? On the contrary, when they see a man, they see a leader, the public, and the office.  

With all of that, we realize that the way women are presented in the media has an inherent contribution to her success as a politician. It also, in many ways, plays against a woman because whether you’re female or male, when you vote for a leader, you want a leader who is going to do those political things, not those domestic things. So, when women were presented as domestic, they were not seen as politicians, and then they were not voted as politicians, and both women and men were guilty of the crime of these representations of women. That’s how I got into discourse and media, and women and politics, and all of that.   

What has been your go-to approach in educating a new generation of men and women to think differently about gender?  

My most interesting class was at the Pan-African University of Water and Energy Sciences in Algeria. The Pan African University has really good gender policies. They tried to be as equitable and balanced as possible in the recruitment of students, so the image at worst is 45-55 either way. So, the classes are really gender-balanced. This is a University of Engineers and Policymakers. This means it’s a really big mix of people who are not in social sciences and some people in social sciences. The class I taught that year had students from 34 African countries, so the discussion was on Gender and Human Rights. It was my first time teaching that class, and I went into class. I usually start by just asking questions and getting the mood of the class going. In the course of teaching, there was this debate. Guys from the most conservative African context you can ever imagine, guys who cannot even imagine that they can wash a plate after eating, were present, and we all talked about equality and barriers.  

At the end of the day, when I brought out all the issues relating to gender and how nothing stops a man or a woman from doing something because of the agenda, at the end of that class, the feedback form went to the director of the school. The director said, 

“Professor Atanga, what did you do to these students? I’ve never had a feedback form that is a hundred per cent positive.” The reason is that the approach to teaching gender is not confrontational; it’s expository. You lay out issues. You get them to appreciate the issues, you use their own situations, and you use their mothers and sisters to view things. What stops your mother from being like me that I’m standing here and teaching you? I’m a professor; I’m accomplished. I’ve reached my actualisation level. It doesn’t make me any less of a woman or any more of a woman.   

I can still cook, serve you, and feed you, but not by obligation, not because it’s my duty but because I love you. Those perspectives broke down a lot of barriers, and the guys started thinking otherwise, and the most intense topic was female genital mutilation. Some guys couldn’t imagine how there would be no circumcision. Some guys couldn’t imagine how a woman can have an orgasm. They believe it is not natural. These are things that they don’t even know the alternative.  

Both women and men don’t even know the alternative to that gender problem because it’s been so natural to them. They don’t know the difference between nurture and nature. So, all that learning in my class shaped their mentalities. It shifted their understanding. Even if they were not a hundred per cent into equality, they understood a lot of it. I brought this group of students up because the Muslim students, particularly in class, had a lot of challenges. There is one that I followed until she was doing her PhD. She almost had a divorce because she went for a PhD, and she’s doing the PhD because I am a professor.   

Sometimes, just being you is a lesson on its own. So representation is important. The more people you see in parliament, the more you know you can be one. The more you see people in engineering, the more you know you can be one.  The research I carry out and my publications do not just explain situations. They are seeking understanding without blaming anyone for why people behave the way they behave and say things the way they say. This is because when you do a critical discourse Analysis, you don’t just look at the text; you look at the context of the production of the text.  

Who says that a woman should cook for a man? Or must a woman be married or have a baby? Must a woman give birth to a child, or is giving birth to a child what makes you a woman? Is getting married what makes you a woman, or are you any less if you don’t marry and don’t have children? Are you any less if you get up and give your chair to a man to sit or whisper your right answer to a man to take credit because you cannot speak in public?  

So, these things are contextual, and until we begin to deal with the context, the song of Gender balance will not be enough. It starts from primary school and secondary school. By the time we miss it at the secondary school level, we’ve missed it critically because the children are already made. So, I think that one of the things we need to work on is curriculums at the very basic levels to try to balance the perception of how we see ourselves as males and females.  

What are your parting words for those coming into Academia?  

You don’t have to succeed to please anybody. One of the things I use for myself is that I don’t publish to change the grid. I don’t publish to become a professor; I don’t publish to be appointed. I publish to share knowledge, to expose and teach people. So, if you go into academia and focus on research is bringing out that thing that people don’t know and sharing it with your students, the community, and the world to impact your community and your world, you will be a good academic. If you are going in just to succeed, you may fail. Make it a passion for you and not for your employer.