An explanation of the Yoruba understanding of rationality, its immediate connection to practical ethics, and its roots in oral Yoruba traditions.
Gender and the Economy
In 1987, more than a decade before the dawn of queer theory, Ifi Amadiume published the groundbreaking ‘Male Daughters, Female Husbands’ to critical acclaim. This compelling, enduring, and highly original book argues that gender, as constructed in Western feminist discourse, did not exist in Africa before the colonial imposition of a dichotomous understanding of sexual difference. Amadiume examines the African societal structures that enabled people to achieve power within fluid masculine and feminine roles. At a time when gender and queer theory is viewed by many as overly focused on identity politics, this apt text not only warns against the danger of projecting Western notions of difference onto other cultures, but also questions the very concept of gender itself.
Philosophy and Oral Tradition
From: Sophie Oluwole: Celebrating the Radical Spirit of African Philosophy, By Tunji Olaopa
In Philosophy and Oral Tradition (1997), Sophie Oluwole urges us to return to Africa’s oral tradition as the source of excavating an authentic foundation of Africa’s intellectual culture which the West has tried so hard to undermine and destroy. One argument that underlies the relevance of Africa’s oral tradition is that the traditional and cultural practices of the past must have been guided by some form of logic and rational principles which not only predate the Western scientific canon, but which cannot also be subsumed totally under it.
What Does Being in the World Mean? Thinking Life and Domestic Bonds in the Twenty-First-Century Africa
This paper explores the mutations of the domestic bonds in contemporary Africa. Tanella Boni argues that the economic and social globalization led to a transformation of familial relations. These changes have forced a redefinition of the nature of positions and relationships within families. The desire to cope with these changes has led to the implementation of adaptive strategies, producing familial entities characterized by more complex relationships but still retaining their hierarchical structures and inequalities.
Feminism, Philosophy, and Culture in Africa
African feminisms emerge out of a heterogeneous context. Because Africa’s globalization has been ongoing for centuries now, African women pay a steep price for it, all while the patriarchal order remains firmly in place. The many African feminisms, however, cannot be boiled down to “gender” or a “gendered approach”, since that word does not mean much if it is not being applied to a set of facts. Indeed, it seems that “gender” serves to unravel the causes of the inequalities, injustices and harms that women must face. While there is, among African women, a desire to throw off the colonial yoke by thinking of ourselves through the paradigms of a pre-colonial past, it is also worrisome that theoretical reflection is often too far away from the situations in which most African women find themselves. A language barrier separates African feminists from one another.
Gendering African Philosophy, or: African Feminism as Decolonizing Force
Although feminist authors and publications abound in other disciplines on the continent, professional African philosophy is overwhelmingly male dominated, with a conspicuous absence of feminist and gender themes. To redress the situation, du Toit and Coetzee consider the choice between applying globally dominant feminist frameworks to issues and debates in the African context or outright immersion in the masculine field of African philosophy in order to open up spaces for feminist questions in dialogue with indigenous worldviews and philosophical positions. In this chapter the authors focus on the second option, in line with recent calls to more authentically contextualize philosophical practice on the continent. The chapter examines the themes of sexual agency and motherhood. Grounded in this way, African feminist philosophy emerges as a potentially powerful source of critique and partner in dialogue with the more established strands of feminist thought.
Old Wives’ Tales and Philosophical Delusions: On ‘the Problem of Women and African Philosophy’
This article represents a response to ‘the problem of women and African philosophy’, which refers mainly to the absence of strong women’s and feminist voices within the discipline of African philosophy. I investigate the possibility that African women are not so much excluded from the institutionalized discipline of philosophy, as preferring fiction as a genre for intellectual expression. This hypothesis can be supported by some feminists who read the absolute prioritisation of abstraction and generalization over the concrete and the particular as a masculine and western oppressive strategy. Attention to the concrete and the unique which is made possible by literature more readily than by philosophy, could thus operate as a form of political resistance in certain contexts. If fiction is currently the preferred form of intellectual expression of African women, it is crucial that the community of professional philosophers in a context like South Africa should come to terms with the relevance of such a preference for philosophy’s self-conception, and it should work to make these intellectual contributions philosophically fruitful. In the process, we may entertain the hope that philosophy itself will move closer to its root or source as ‘love of wisdom’.
Women, Wealth, Titles and Power
In 1987, more than a decade before the dawn of queer theory, Ifi Amadiume published the groundbreaking ‘Male Daughters, Female Husbands’ to critical acclaim. This compelling, enduring, and highly original book argues that gender, as constructed in Western feminist discourse, did not exist in Africa before the colonial imposition of a dichotomous understanding of sexual difference. Amadiume examines the African societal structures that enabled people to achieve power within fluid masculine and feminine roles. At a time when gender and queer theory is viewed by many as overly focused on identity politics, this apt text not only warns against the danger of projecting Western notions of difference onto other cultures, but also questions the very concept of gender itself.
Visualizing the Body: Western Theories and African Subjects
The “woman question,” this book asserts, is a Western one, and not a proper lens for viewing African society. A work that rethinks gender as a Western construction, The Invention of Women offers a new way of understanding both Yoruban and Western cultures.
Author Oyeronke Oyewumi reveals an ideology of biological determinism at the heart of Western social categories-the idea that biology provides the rationale for organizing the social world. And yet, she writes, the concept of “woman,” central to this ideology and to Western gender discourses, simply did not exist in Yorubaland, where the body was not the basis of social roles.
Oyewumi traces the misapplication of Western, body-oriented concepts of gender through the history of gender discourses in Yoruba studies. Her analysis shows the paradoxical nature of two fundamental assumptions of feminist theory: that gender is socially constructed and that the subordination of women is universal. The Invention of Women demonstrates, to the contrary, that gender was not constructed in old Yoruba society, and that social organization was determined by relative age.
A meticulous historical and epistemological account of an African culture on its own terms, this book makes a persuasive argument for a cultural, context-dependent interpretation of social reality. It calls for a reconception of gender discourse and the categories on which such study relies. More than that, the book lays bare the hidden assumptions in the ways these different cultures think. A truly comparative sociology of an African culture and the Western tradition, it will change the way African studies and gender studies proceed.
(Re)constituting the Cosmology and Sociocultural Institutions of Ọ̀yọ́-Yorùbá
The “woman question,” this book asserts, is a Western one, and not a proper lens for viewing African society. A work that rethinks gender as a Western construction, The Invention of Women offers a new way of understanding both Yoruban and Western cultures.
Author Oyeronke Oyewumi reveals an ideology of biological determinism at the heart of Western social categories-the idea that biology provides the rationale for organizing the social world. And yet, she writes, the concept of “woman,” central to this ideology and to Western gender discourses, simply did not exist in Yorubaland, where the body was not the basis of social roles.
Oyewumi traces the misapplication of Western, body-oriented concepts of gender through the history of gender discourses in Yoruba studies. Her analysis shows the paradoxical nature of two fundamental assumptions of feminist theory: that gender is socially constructed and that the subordination of women is universal. The Invention of Women demonstrates, to the contrary, that gender was not constructed in old Yoruba society, and that social organization was determined by relative age.
A meticulous historical and epistemological account of an African culture on its own terms, this book makes a persuasive argument for a cultural, context-dependent interpretation of social reality. It calls for a reconception of gender discourse and the categories on which such study relies. More than that, the book lays bare the hidden assumptions in the ways these different cultures think. A truly comparative sociology of an African culture and the Western tradition, it will change the way African studies and gender studies proceed.