envisaged as the opportunity for men to be restored to full masculinity and citizenship, with women installed in their homes as suitable wives. In many nations, women were left with the limited legal status of minors and deprived of basic rights, in the name of 'culture'. Women may not have been explicitly excluded from the new State, or the national universities, but their access was constrained by the persistence of European gender ideologies, no matter how inappropriate to African conditions.  
It was not until the second and third generation African professoriate that objections were raised, first to protest the underrepresentation of women, and secondly, the manner in which the purportedly 'neutral' masculine cultures of African universities continued to present particular difficulties for women students and professors. It was not until the 1980s that the epistemological challenges presented by androcentric methodologies in mainstream teaching and research would be addressed, through the establishment of feminist teaching and research.  
The development crisis galvanized feminist research in Africa (Mama, 2005). Many of Africa's women professors share women's desires for justice. This may explain their concentration in the related fields of law, political science and public policy, education and international development studies. In this respect, African women, like their male colleagues of the same second and third generations, are predominantly forward-looking, carrying out critical analysis of the injustices and inequalities that continue to divide so many African contexts. However, the trajectories of African epistemologies are not linear, as can be seen from the ways in which intellectual discourses of the present carry traces of the major ideological contestations and debates that shaped earlier pan-African perspectives on the world.