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10.1057/9780230116276 - Gender Epistemologies in Africa, Oyeronke Oyewumi
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Gender Epistemologies in Africa
10.1057/9780230116276 - Gender Epistemologies in Africa, Oyeronke Oyewumi
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Gendering Traditions, Spaces, Social Institutions, and Identities Edited by Oyèrónk Oywùmí
10.1057/9780230116276 - Gender Epistemologies in Africa, Oyeronke Oyewumi
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Gender Epistemologies in Africa
GENDER EPISTEMOLOGIES IN AFRICA
Copyright © Oyèrónké. Oyeˇwùmí, 2011. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–62345–3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: January 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.
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All rights reserved.
10.1057/9780230116276 - Gender Epistemologies in Africa, Oyeronke Oyewumi
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For Leymah Gbowee Whose inspirational leadership reminds us that to act is to pray.
10.1057/9780230116276 - Gender Epistemologies in Africa, Oyeronke Oyewumi
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Acknowledgments
ix
List of Contributors
xi
Introduction: Gendering Oyèrónk" Oyeˇwùmí
1
One
Two
Decolonizing the Intellectual and the Quotidian: Yorùbá Scholars(hip) and Male Dominance Oyèrónk" Oy&wùmí Gender in Translation: 2fún4etán Aníwúrà Adélékè Adé(k)
Three Ode to Patriarchy: The Fine Line between Praise and Criticism in a Popular Senegalese Poem Marame Gueye Four
Five
Six
Women and Leadership in Nigerian Islam: The Experience of Alhaja Sheidat Mujidat Adéoyè of Ò@ogbo David O. Ogungbile
9 35
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Engendering Critical Spatial Literacy: Migrant Asante Women and the Politics of Urban Space Epifania Amoo-Adare
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Outsiders Within: Experiences of Women Academics in Kenya Njoki M. Kamau
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10.1057/9780230116276 - Gender Epistemologies in Africa, Oyeronke Oyewumi
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CON T E N T S
Contents
Seven Self-Image and Self-Naming: A Discursive and Social Analysis of Women’s Microenterprises in Senegal and Mali Marieme S. Lo Eight
Nine
Ten
Irua Ria Atumia and Anticolonial Struggles among the Gı˜ kJyJ of Kenya: A Counternarrative on “Female Genital Mutilation” Wairimu ˜ Ngaru ˜ iya Njambi
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NAKABUMBA: God Creates Humanity as a Potter Creates a Pot Christine Saidi
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Beyond Gendercentric Models: Restoring Motherhood to Yorùbá Discourses of Art and Aesthetics Oyèrónk" Oy&wùmí
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Index
239
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viii
Grateful acknowledgement is made to all the contributors who heeded the call and allowed me to include their papers in this anthology. I received a small grant from the Stonybrook University Fine Arts, Humanities, and Social Science Initiative (FAHSS) which paid for some of the technical aspects of manuscript preparation. Special thanks to Mechthild Nagel, the editor-in-chief of Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies, for giving us permission to publish “Engendering Critical Spatial Literacy: Migrant Asante Women and the Politics of Urban Space” by Epifania AmooAdare, and to Marta Granatowska of Sage Publications for allowing us to reprint “Irua Ria Atumia and Anticolonial Struggles among the GTkJyJ of Kenya: A Counternarrative on ‘Female Genital Mutilation’ ” by WairimJ NgarJiya Njambi, which first appeared in Critical Sociology. Thanks are also due to Lauren Pandolfelli, who has been a dedicated research assistant. Finally, I want to thank my friends: Diana Cassells for her unwavering support and contribution at many levels during the process of writing and preparing this anthology; Audrey Gadzekpo, and her daughter Nubuke Amoah, for allowing me to use the photograph on the cover. I hope that this is a book that Nubuke would be proud to stand in front of. We acknowledge the following publications for permission to reprint material: David O. Ogungbile. “Religious Experience and Women Leadership in Nigerian Islam,” JENDA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies: Issue 6, 2004. Copyright © 2005 Africa Resource Center, Inc.
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AC K NOW L E DGM E N T S
x
Acknowledgments
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Njoki M. Kamau. “Outsiders Within: Experiences of Kenyan Women in Higher Education,” JENDA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies: Issue 6, 2004. Copyright © 2005 Africa Resource Center, Inc.
10.1057/9780230116276 - Gender Epistemologies in Africa, Oyeronke Oyewumi
Adélékè Adék is Humanities Distinguished Professor at The Ohio State University, Columbus. He is the author of Proverbs, Textuality, and Nativism in African Literature (1998) and The Slave’s Rebellion: Literature, History, Orature (2005). Epifania Amoo-Adare is a research specialist with Reach Out to Asia (ROTA), where she conducts academic and policy-based research in Qatar. She has a Ph.D. in Education from UCLA and is also a RIBA part II qualified architect. Her dissertation research entitled Akwantu, Anibuei ne Sikasεm: Asante Women’s Critical Literacy of Contemporary Space was a study on how Asante women’s migration to Ghana’s rapidly urbanizing capital had transformed their household configurations, sociocultural practices, and sense of place. Marame Gueye is Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Literatures in the Department of English at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. She earned her doctorate in Comparative Literature from SUNY Binghamton in 2005, and was the recipient of the Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in African Studies at Vassar College from 2004 to 2007. Njoki M. Kamau is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Women’s Studies, University of Minnesota, Duluth. Marieme S. Lo is Assistant Professor in Women and Gender Studies and African Studies at the University of Toronto. She earned her M.Sc. and Ph.D. from Cornell University, and held a visiting fellowship at the University of Oxford. She has authored numerous scholarly papers and critical technical reports. Wairim$ Ngar$iya Njambi is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and Sociology at the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College, Florida
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CON T R I BU TOR S
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Contributors
David O. Ogungbile, Ph.D., is a Senior Lecturer in Comparative Religion in the Department of Religious Studies, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria. He was a Fellow at the Harvard University W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research (2007–2009). He is the co-editor with Sola Akinrinade et al. of Rethinking the Humanities in Africa, The Humanities, Nationalism and Democracy, and Locating the Local in the Global: Voices on a Globalised Nigeria. His recent works include the edited volumes Creativity and Change in Nigerian Christianity (2010) and Nigerian Indigenous Religious Traditions in Local and Global Contexts (forthcoming). He is working on a manuscript Cultural Memories, Performance, and Meanings in Indigenous Festivals and Celebrations among the Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria. Oyèrónk* Oy+wùmí teaches sociology at Stony Brook University. She is the author of the award-winning The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, and is currently working on a book titled What is the Gender of Motherhood? Christine Saidi has recently joined the History Department at Kutztown University, where she teaches African history courses as well as world history. Saidi received her doctorate in African History at UCLA, and her areas of research include both African gender dynamics and precolonial social history. She is the author of a recently published book, Women’s Authority and Society in Early East-Central Africa (Rochester University Press, 2010).
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Atlantic University. Her work has appeared in edited collections, and in journals such as Australian Feminist Studies, Feminist Theory, NWSA Journal, Meridians, Gender and Society, and Critical Sociology.
Gendering Oyè rónke.´ Oyeˇ wùm í
It has become axiomatic that gender is socially constructed: that the social differences between males and females are located in social practices, and not simply in biological facts. Gender differences cannot be reduced to nature. In my earlier work, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Oy3wùmí 1997), I documented the social construction of gender in Yorùbá society and emphasized that gender is not only socially constructed but also historical. The issue of the historicity of gender cannot be overstated, given that in the Western dominant discourses, gender is presented as transhistorical and therefore essentialist. Studies of Africa should not rely on Western-derived concepts to map the issue of gender in African societies, but instead must ask questions about the meaning of gender and how to apprehend it in particular times and places. Thus, the problem of gender in studies of Africa is fundamentally an epistemological one. The book Invention contributed to a new understanding of how history and bodies intersect in the social construction of African spaces. Most importantly, it problematized the disjuncture between intellectual histories of bodies in African societies and the everyday meanings that bodies may or may not carry in these localities. The present anthology responds to the paucity of theoretically engaged studies of gender in Africa by gathering together a variety of studies that are engaged with notions of gender in different African localities, institutions, and historical time periods. These studies take seriously the idea that in order to understand the structures of gender,
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I N T RODUC T ION
Oyèrónké. Oy"wùmí
and gender relations in Africa, we must start with Africa. Also, in order to develop valid theories of gender, all types of experiences from around the world must be documented. If structures of gender emerge out of particular histories and social contexts, we must pay attention to the continuous ways in which gender is made and remade in everyday interactions and by institutions. In this sense, then, “gender” is actually more about gendering—a process—than about something inherent in social relations. The papers in this anthology span a wide range of societies, cultures, historical time periods, and disciplines. Most of the papers are products of original research that has not been published elsewhere. A number of them are pioneering in that they interrogate gender in subjects and institutional sites that have in the past not invited much gender analysis in African studies: notably Epifania Amoo-Adare’s paper on gender and the construction of urban space, and David Ogungbile’s consideration of women’s leadership role in Islam. The focus on elite African women in a number of the papers is also a welcome corrective to the overwhelming focus on African poverty and the victimhood of women. The overrepresentation of African women in much of the literature as desperate victims robs them of agency, which in turn often leads to a devaluation of African experiences of resistance and nullifies African females as a resource for developing feminist ideas and theories. A focus on elite women also sharpens our engagement with gender issues as we explore the intersection of class and ethnic privilege in relation to gender disadvantage. Some of the questions the papers in the collection ask are: What do histories, traditions, uses of space, cultural productions, and institutions tell us about notions of gender in particular times and places? What meanings do men and women attach to their own everyday social practices, institutions, and cultural productions? What are the implications of these for our understanding of gender as a social category or as a facet of identity, and even the process of gendering itself? What do they tell us about the lived experiences of males and females in these societies? The Order of Things In the opening essay, “Decolonizing the Intellectual and the Quotidian: Yorùbá Scholars(hip) and Male Dominance,” Oyèrónké. Oy3wùmí examines the internalization of male dominance in Yorùbá academic discourses and within the intellectual community itself. By focusing
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on issues of translation of Yorùbá oral tradition, she draws our attention to the ways in which colonial gender categories have become part and parcel of Yorùbá daily life in spite of the fact that these categories and constructs are historically recent imports into Yorùbá society. She then looks at how the imposition of male dominance on Ifa, an indigenous body of knowledge, has created distortion, inaccuracies, and most significantly the demonization of women with serious ramifications for their freedom of worship, in particular. Oy3wùmí firmly links the ongoing process of creating patriarchy to the failure to decolonize. She advances the concept of historical feminism as a necessary step in the struggle to take back our history, and to transform social relations. In the next essay, Adélékè AdéRkS is even more focused on translation and its impact on Yorùbá writing. In “Gender in Translation: (fún*etán Aníwúrà,” he contends that discourses of gender in Yoruba life and culture have not considered fully how translations of categories from the language of scholarly discoveries, particularly English, shape the classification and explanation of observed social phenomena. The primary evidence revolves around the many ways in which the life of Ìyálóde UfúnWetán Aníwúrà (ca. 1825–1874), a high-ranking female chief in precolonial Ìbàdàn in Nigeria, is deployed in accounts of the evolution of “woman-being” in southwestern Nigeria. AdéRkS focuses on the linguistic, cultural, and philosophical ramifications of the depiction of gender matters in Akínwùmí ÌW^lá’s Yorùbá play (fún*etán Aníwúrà: Ìyálóde Ìbàdàn, its two English translations, and its most recent film adaptation. The translation problems analyzed in this paper include textual considerations that affect the inter-medial translations a creative writer faces while working from sources in oral traditions and written, typically Christian, nationalist histories. The paper also discusses inter-epochal translations that are present in all the versions regardless of language and medium. Both Oy3wùmí and AdéRkS’s essays suggest that translations of Yorùbá life into English inevitably result in what one might call an ode to patriarchy, as various Yorùbá writers and intellectuals write male dominance into social categories, historical events, and translations of oral traditions. In the third essay, literary critic Marame Gueye presents another facet of male self-aggrandizement in a different African society. In “Ode to Patriarchy: The Fine Line between Praise and Criticism in a Popular Senegalese Poem,” she interrogates a popular poem known in Senegal as Fatou Gaye’s Song. This poem was composed by a man named Eladji Gaye as a way of mourning his wife, Fatou. While singing the praises of Fatou, Gaye’s text parallels taasu, a panegyric oral
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Gendering
Oyèrónké. Oy"wùmí
form where praise and criticism are often hard to dissociate. The poem, and the only known interview of its author, are panegyric accounts of Fatou’s life even as they are criticisms of women in general. Although the poem on the surface is a song for Fatou, it is in many ways a selfish gift, because it mainly praises Gaye himself, and patriarchy in general. It is interesting how the male author of the poem, the interviewer, and the two commentators, both designated marriage experts, who are all men, use Islam to undergird patriarchy and then create new forms of sexism based on their interpretation of Islamic texts. In the next essay, we see that the alliance between Islam and patriarchy is not inevitable. Scholar of religion David O. Ogungbile documents the experience of a remarkable woman who is an Islamic leader in Òcogbo, Nigeria. This paper focuses on the status and role of women in Nigerian Islam, offering a case study of Alhaja Sheidat Mujidat Adeoye, the founder and leader of the Fadillulah Muslim Mission. It discusses the religious experience of Alhaja Sheidat, which motivated her to found a movement and introduced a new expression into the tradition, thus causing an alteration in religious stereotypes within a religiously pluralistic community. What is remarkable is her rejection of the patriarchal traditions of the Islamic community in Òcogbo, where women were not even welcome to join in prayers in the mosque. Alhaja Sheidat claimed a divine experience that led her to found and lead the Fadilullah Muslim Mission, with its own ministry and an established mosque that came to enjoy a huge following among indigenes as well as visitors to the city. The impact of her movement is so great that the street in which it is located is known as Fadilullah Street. This paper examines the uniqueness of the practices of Alhaja Sheidat vis-à-vis the religious experience that gave birth to her movement. It investigates her activities and practices, her acceptance within the Muslim religious and Yoruba patriarchal community, and public responses to her movement. In the age of modernity, the impact of dominance of gender constructs in everyday life cannot be overstated. Yet very little has been written about gender and the construction of space in African societies. As a result, ignorance and illiteracy on this subject abound, a dangerous situation given how the organization of space has power to locate and circumscribe women, as in the exclusion of muslim women from mosques in Òcogbo. Beyond religion, however, “Engendering Critical Spatial Literacy: Migrant Asante Women and the Politics of Urban Space,” Epifania Amoo-Adare educates us on the power of spatial configurations in our everyday social practices and ideological
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constructions of place and identity. In this theoretical paper, AmooAdare delineates an area that has received little attention in African writings: the politicization of space. More importantly, she shows that black women the world over are disproportionately represented in unsuitable and inadequate urban spaces and are also underrepresented in urban development decision-making processes. As an architect and a migrant Asante woman who has lived in a number of global cities, Amoo-Adare believes it is important to develop a critical literacy on black women’s urban spatial conditions by conducting research that recognizes the spatial nature of socioeconomic life and as a consequence would reveal the possibilities for radical change in the politics of space. To this end, she investigates how migrant Asante women’s household configurations, sociocultural practices, and spatial self-perceptions have changed in Ghana’s rapidly urbanizing capital city, Accra, in order to engender a timely praxis of critical spatial literacy. The university has been one giant space where women have been faced with considerable difficulties in entry. Nevertheless, they are facing up to these challenges, as Njoki M. Kamau tells us in her study of the lives of Kenyan women, particularly academic women in higher education. The data suggest that women academics’ career experiences are largely shaped by both indigenous gender role expectations and Western hierarchies of gender subordination. Unsurprisingly, women’s career development lags behind that of their male counterparts due to lack of support, exclusionary practices, and an inhospitable environment. Yet the study also shows that academic women are active social agents in shaping their careers, as well as their personal and social lives. As active agents of social change, they cross gender boundaries by resisting, overcoming, subverting, juggling, and adapting the subordinate roles assigned to them as women. In yet another empirical study of women’s occupational activities, Marieme S. Lo concentrates on microenterprises in two African nations. In “Self-Image and Self-Naming: A Social Analysis of Women’s Microenterprises in Senegal and Mali,” Lo interrogates homogenizing accounts of women’s microenterprises that do not take into consideration the perspectives and personal accounts of female entrepreneurs. Such emic perspectives convey intrinsic meanings, self-concepts, and differentiated identities that counter assumptions of uniformity. The paper thus argues that the prevalence of sociocultural clues and symbols in women’s microenterprises, ref lected in their names, compels a situated analysis of their internal structures, dynamics, and meanings. Naming strategies, a distinctive feature of such microenterprises, call for
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Gendering
Oyèrónké. Oy"wùmí
a discursive analysis and social ontology of women’s microenterprises. Using several theoretical frameworks, this paper provides a multifaceted lens to examine the social embeddedness of women’s microenterprises and the creative and culturally adaptive strategies women entrepreneurs exert to assert agency in constantly shifting sociopolitical and economic contexts. The last three papers are concerned with history: its documentation, interpretation, and uses. “Irua Ria Atumia and Anticolonial Struggles among the Gekfyf of Kenya: A Counternarrative on ‘Female Genital Mutilation,’ ” by Wairimf Ngarfya Njambi, analyzes cultural and political mobilization centering on irua ria atumia in the anticolonial struggles in Kenya, looking more specifically at the Gı˜kfyf ethnonation. While a currently hegemonic eradication discourse presents female genital practices as proof of these women’s oppression and domination, the history presented here demonstrates that irua can serve as a means of empowerment and resistance. Irua ria atumia instilled a cultural ethic of courage among Gı˜kfyf women, and became a rallying cause in struggles against British rule when officials attempted to ban the practice. This essay shows why we must not view cultural practices simply in terms of domination and conformity but rather as ways in which individuals and groups as agents strategically reinvent themselves. In “NAKABUMBA: God Creates Humanity as a Potter Creates a Pot,” Christine Saidi tackles debates about the gendering of history, especially the sexist biases of scholars as they affect the interpretation of precolonial history of various communities in East-Central Africa. The study looks at both potting and potters (which are associated with the female gender) and underscores the significant role potting technologies play in the early social history of the region. Saidi challenges the generally accepted understanding of the role of both ceramic technology and ceramic producers in African history. She also disputes the works of some Western scholars, who after examining both iron smelting and potting imposed faulty “paradigms” such as a strict gender division of labor and the resulting “technology hierarchy” onto African societies. The myth of a rigid, absolute African sexual division of labor creates facile analyses of very complex social institutions and is self-perpetuating, as the lack of research on potting rituals shows. The evidence found in the more recent history of East-Central Africa does not show that potters or ironworkers perceived themselves as competitors for power or that the technologies were in opposition to each other. In fact people, male and female, were working together
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to overcome harsh environments and survive as communities in the region. In the final essay, Oyèrónké. Oy3wùmí, like Saidi, takes up the gender fictions of scholars who claim a widespread gender division of labor in African art and artifact making in which “clay is for women, and iron is for men.” She argues that such gendercentric models in the interpretation of African life and cultural artifacts are the result of the continuing dominance of Western paradigms in African studies. Focusing on writings on Yoruba classical art of Ife, she exposes blatant male privilege in the interpretation of art by art historians. The evidence that she uncovers shows that art, like other domains of Yorùbá life, was not delineated or organized on the basis of body type, also known as gender. Because of the lineage division of labor in the society, which she had detailed in an earlier work, the idea that the creators of the exquisite Ife art were male is unfounded. Oy3wùmí goes on to show that in fact social and ritual practices surrounding creation and procreation are intertwined, and that motherhood is understood as artistry in real, philosophical, and spiritual terms. Children, Oy3wùmí argues, are the ultimate work of art in Yoruba culture, and mothers are privileged in its creation. The authors in this volume are engaged with documenting and analyzing the gendering of African traditions, spaces, social institutions, and identities. Their contributions show that gendering is not merely a static artifact but also a continuing process that is made and remade through personal experiences in everyday life—a process in which all are implicated. A gender epistemology that takes the process of gendering seriously necessarily incorporates resistance. As we go to press, the emergence of African women in leadership positions in all walks of life, most notably in the political arena, heralds new beginnings that take us back to the future. Reference Oy3wùmí, Oyèrónké.. 1997. The invention Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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Gendering
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ON E
Decolonizing the Intellectual and the Quotidian: Yorùbá Scholars(hip) and Male Dominance Oyè rónk´ Oyeˇ wùm í
Much has been written about the various impacts European colonization has had on Africans and the consequent ways in which we must decolonize in order to overcome its ill effects. Thus we have discussed the need to decolonize the mind as well as the body. Over the years, I have also been struck by the huge gap between African intellectual pursuits and on-the-ground realities, the yawning gap between the knowledge that we produce and the everyday, between the political and the personal, if you will. I have wondered why very little of what we write has to do with our ordinary lived realities. As a gender scholar, the promise of gender studies for me is indeed to bring everyday life, the ordinary, into the purview of our engagements in African studies. As a researcher focused on Yorùbá traditions and society, I find that questions of gender and everyday life coalesce very tightly on the origins of gender categories in language, religion, and culture, the place of gender in the oral traditions, gender categories as a colonial imposition, the origins of male dominance in contemporary life, and the ways in which all these factors manifest in, and continue to shape, Yorùbá scholarship. Elsewhere, I have shown that in regard to Yorùbá traditions, gender categorization emerged during the colonial period. In identifying gender as a colonial category, my concern is not so much to displace culpability for contemporary male dominance to the British colonizers, but rather to begin to recognize and tease out the ways in which the colonial legacy has been internalized and is being
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CH A P T E R
Oyèrónk$ Oy%wùmí
reproduced. Secondly, I want to focus attention on local groups that are beneficiaries of the colonial dispensation and may therefore be invested in its patriarchal legacies. By male dominance in scholarship, I do not merely mean the presence of a higher number of male scholars than female, although this, too, is important. My concern is with the following ideas that are increasingly a part of the discourse on Yorùbá traditions and social practices: that male superiority is the normal order of things, if not the natural way of organizing human society; that the socially constructed categories of men and women derive from Yorùbá traditions, and consequently, that there are many important historical Yorùbá institutions from which women are excluded. With regard to spiritual culture, male dominance is manifest in the idea that Olódùmarè (the supreme spiritual force) is human and gendered male, that the Ò rì ,a` (deities) and ancestors—the two other main principles of Yorùbá spirituality—are predominantly male, and that males are privileged in human affairs. This kind of patriarchal thinking is contrary to the evidence that is available to us from the oral traditions, sociopolitical institutions, and indeed continuing current social practices. Male dominance in certain realms of contemporary life should not be read back into history, because there is no evidence in the tradition itself to support these patriarchal positions. In my book The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (OyBwùmí 1997), I show that gender categories are not ontological in Yorùbá culture and traditions. I discuss at length the origins and perpetuation of male dominance in contemporary Yorùbá society and the need to challenge it at every turn. This essay continues that process of resisting the ongoing patriarchalization of our lives, history, and traditions. Beyond the academy, Yorùbá indigenous religion, Òrì,à worship, has gone global. Consequently, Yorùbá religious scholarship is enormously important because of the people in Africa and the Diaspora and persons of non-African descent around the globe who are devotees of Ò rì,à. Because of those for whom these questions are matters of religious faith in the first instance, it is important for us to be especially careful in our translations of language and culture. The process of committing religious text that has been, until recently, oral into writing is especially fraught with missteps, misrepresentations, and downright inaccuracy. Thus the importance of critically scrutinizing translations of the originating texts of the religion and spirituality cannot be overstated.
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Yorùbá language constitutes the base of Ò rì,à worship; many nonnative adherents of Òrì,à devotion rely on the translations of sacred texts by native Yorùbá speakers in order to fulfill the demands of the religion. A Cuban-American Santera brought home to me so profoundly the importance of paying attention to language when she said, “You speak the language of the Òrì,à: the language of the Gods.” In my work, I have always appreciated the significance of the gender-free nature of Yorùbá language in the light of our current gender-saturated world. I have systematically documented the fact that the language is nongendered par excellence: pronouns are nongendered, most names are not gender-specific, and kinship terms are not gendered; thus there are no single words translatable as the English son, daughter, brother, or sister. Most importantly, Yorùbá pronouns and kinship terms do not encode gender. What they do encode is seniority, based on relative age, a ref lection of the fact that seniority is the most important principle for the social organization of status and hierarchy (OyBwùmí 1997, 42). However, Yorùbá oral traditions and cultural life are systematically being reproduced in English, a male-privileging language. In this paper, then, my focus will be on Yorùbá traditions, the ways in which gender considerations in the scholarship shape the interpretations of long-standing ideals and practices, and the place of male dominance in the intellectual community. Finally, I will consider how this factor inf luences how scholars interact with one another. The first part of the paper examines the ideas of Yorùbá sociologist Akinsola Akiwowo and the relationship of these ideas to the social context in which they were produced. In the second half of the paper, a conference at Harvard on Ifá, the Yorùbá system of knowledge, becomes an opportunity not only to examine these sacred texts, but to consider the meaning of the lessons from Ifá and Òrì,à traditions in our current context, and more generally to probe the ways in which scholars produce knowledge and interact with one another. The degree to which colonial categories have been internalized and have become very much a part of everyday life, even as the culture itself refuses to recede completely but continues to assert itself, is an interesting issue. Elsewhere, I have documented the fact that the Western-educated intellectual community in the colonial situation is the most colonized. Gender being a colonial category in Yorùbá cultural practice, it is within this class that the colonial legacies of racialization, male dominance, and gender discrimination are most realized. The three issues are, of course, intertwined. In essence, the scholarly community and university create the field for a sociologist of gender and knowledge to
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Decolonizing the Quotidian
Oyèrónk$ Oy%wùmí
interrogate these questions. By Yorùbá scholarship, I mean interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary scholarly writings in English centered on Yorùbá religion, oral traditions, history, cultural practices, and social institutions. Because Yorùbá language is so central to this enterprise, the writings of native speakers of Yorùbá are fundamental to the field of study. Here, I am quick to acknowledge the important work done in Yorùbá studies by nonnative Yorùbá speakers although their work, scholarly or otherwise, is not my focus. What Manner of Community? In his inaugural lecture titled “Àj\bí and Àj\gbé: Variations on the Theme of Sociation” (Akiwowo 1983), delivered at the University of Ife, Nigeria, in 1980, Nigerian sociologist Akinsola Akiwowo presents a number of sociological concepts that he derived from Ifá, the Yorùbá system of knowledge.1 He then proposes the use of these concepts in analyzing human society and the different forms it may take. Akiwowo goes on to discuss the inherent nature of social conf lict and social change in society, the role of intellectuals, and the need to use knowledge to remake our problem-ridden world. More interesting is his identification of five social rights to which each human being is entitled. Human society is meaningful, he says, only if these values are consciously sought as common goals. A lot has been written about the usefulness of these concepts in sociological analysis, and to Akiwowo’s contribution to what International Sociology 2 ethnocentrically calls indigenous sociology, as if Weber or Durkheim’s sociology did not spring from the concerns of their German and French localities, respectively. In this essay, however, my interest in Akiwowo’s sociology lies elsewhere in his lecture though not unrelated to his concern about solving social problems. In the preamble to the lecture, Akiwowo gives us a portrait of his home department, the sociology department at the University of Ife, which he spent his career building as the founding chairman. The statement is striking for its gender explicitness and for what it reveals about the university community in which he was writing at the time, as well as Akiwowo’s own views of male dominance in contemporary Nigerian life: The Department has become known in the faculty as the department in which the female teaching staff members have outnumbered
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Decolonizing the Quotidian
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This statement is sexist and patronizing of women, and because it invokes a number of stereotypes about them, it is prejudicial at a number of levels: 1. Akiwowo expected all hell to break loose because there were more females than male faculty in the sociology department, which he sees as an unnatural state of affairs. Male dominance to him is the norm, which is demonstrated by the rest of the departments in the university. 2. Akiwowo gives credit to the male staff (faculty) for tolerating the presence of a higher number of females, who have upended the natural order of things. In a sense he is saying that the females are out of place and the males have been nice enough to live within this unnatural state. In essence, he claims that the social organization of the department has not been irreparably damaged by conf lict between the males and females, who are the interlopers; hence his recognition of the magnanimity of the men in the department. 3. At another level, he may have been thanking the males for keeping the department viable in spite of the females, whose very presence and behavior have been stereotyped as conf lict-generating and quarrelsome. In the second sense, conf lict among the women has not damaged the social organization of the department because the males have done a good job of holding up the department in spite of the quarrelsome females. 4. Akiwowo assumes the intellectual inferiority of women; hence his surprise that “our female colleagues . . . maintain their own as intellectual equals without fuss.” He then proceeds to compliment them on their fine sensibility. 5. The implication of this multilayered gender stereotyping and discrimination is that the male faculty (Akiwowo included) in the department of sociology at the University of Ife is doing society a favor by tolerating the overwhelming number of females.
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the males by one. In a male-dominated society, it is a credit to the male staff that the social organizational structure of the Department has not been irreparably shredded by conflicts. It is also a clear evidence of the fine sensibility of our female colleagues that they maintain their own as intellectual equals without fuss (Akiwowo 1983, 7) (my emphasis).
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Oyèrónk$ Oy%wùmí
Human society provides for each member who makes it up, five categories of inalienable social values which constitute the goal of human collectivities. These are: a. b. c. d. e.
Ire àìkú (the value of good health till old age) Ire-owó (financial security) Ire >k>-aya (the value of intimate companionship and love) Ire >m> (the value of parenthood) Ire aborí ?tá (the value of assured self-actualization)
Since the ultimate aim of Akiwowo is to create a society in which all members have access to ire gbogbo, the five basic social rights he derives from Ifá, was the professor aware of the fact that male dominance has a direct impact on whether the female faculty and indeed females in society realize their own ire gbogbo? Given the much-lauded male dominance in both the department and university, what was the quality of “sociality” for the female faculty, and indeed all females at the university? Akiwowo betrays no awareness that male dominance may contribute to the conf licts that tear the social fabric apart and create their own “social problems that Nigerian sociologists should address themselves to in teams” (1983, 32). Finally, Akiwowo identifies five social problems that need the sociologist’s urgent attention: (a) the phenomenal rise in the number of the mentally ill; (b) the ebb and f low in the tide of armed robbery; (c) the rising mortality rate of young adults from the age of 25 to 45 years, (d) the unabating abandonment of Nigerian children by young mothers; and (e) the discovering of self-evident truth in the world around us to which the nation can hold political leaders and upon which the new ajobi and ajogbe must be founded (1983, 32–33). Against the background of my earlier discussion of male dominance and male privilege, I am especially struck by the fourth problem on his list: “the unabating abandonment of Nigerian children by young mothers.” The fact that it is young mothers who are singled out for blame in the abandonment of children leads one to ask: who and where are the fathers of these children? Since he refers to the women as young
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Akiwowo’s statement leads one to ask what the quality of sociality in his department and the University of Ife was like. Explicating Ifá texts in the lecture, he writes (1983):
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mothers, does this not suggest their immaturity, and hence their own abandonment by some invisible men? In fact, he may be putting the cart before the horse in regard to the source of these problems, and by so doing, handicapping the ability of the society to solve them. The fact that these young females are having children is a sure sign of a prior social problem, their own victimization by men. The fact that Akiwowo fails to notice this problem suggests that his acceptance of male dominance as the natural order of things, and male privilege as its expression, may have contributed to his failure to hold males—the missing fathers—culpable for the problem of abandoned children. The young mothers are children, too. The point is that challenging male dominance is not merely a superficial pursuit of disregarded female faculty. In fact, continuing male dominance has deep and expansive implications for solving social problems and indeed for transforming society, and for enthroning the kind of good society that Ifá enjoins. But Ifá itself has not been free from gender assault. We will interrogate the patriarchalizing of Ifá in the next section. Gendering Ifá at Harvard: All in a Day’s Work The Harvard Conference on Ifá (HCI) convened in March 2008. The conference was titled Sacred Knowledge, Sacred Power and Performance: Ifá Divination in West Africa and the African Diaspora. The HCI was a well-attended, particularly interesting meeting because of the ways in which it bridged the variety of gaps between town and gown, intellectuals and practitioners of divination, Africa and Diaspora, sovereigns and their subjects, performers and academics. The yawning chasm that remained was between Yorùbá oral traditions and the interpretations of Western-educated scholars. Much of this gap is a gender disparity, and it is this that I wish to address in this section. The conference on the opening day especially was a microcosm of a Yorùbá community with the presence of ten traditional Yorùbá rulers (>ba) from Nigeria; many prominent Yorùbá personalities, including the governor of ghun state of Nigeria; eminent scholars; and drummers, singers, and dancers. I saw the conference at Harvard as an occasion for elucidating issues of gendering,3 male dominance, and fraternity in the Yorùbá intellectual community. The commonality between Akiwowo’s focus in his inaugural lecture and the concerns of the conference community is immediately apparent, and is twofold. First, like Akiwowo, the Yorùbá conference scholars are focused on Ifá texts, analyzing them
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Decolonizing the Quotidian
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and deriving truths from them. Secondly, most of the native-speaking Yorùbá scholars who presented papers at the conference had spent time at the University of Ife as students, faculty, or both. In fact the convener of the conference, Jacob Olupona, who now teaches at Harvard, used to be on the faculty at Ife. Quite a number of the younger scholars were students of the older ones. Most of the native-speaking Yorùbá scholars received their Ph.D. from North American universities in disciplines such as English, literary studies, philosophy, anthropology, history, and religion. Most of them today are tenured faculty in North American universities, including Harvard. Wande Abimbola, the most prominent and prolific Ifá scholar and one of the persons to whom the conference was dedicated, had not only spent his academic career at Ife, but he had also become the vice chancellor (president) of the university in the 1980s. The point of interest here is that the male-dominant milieu of the University of Ife that Akiwowo inadvertently described so well has had a hand in the socialization of the most prominent scholars of Yorùbá.4 One of my male colleagues who had been a student at Ife and who also attended the conference told me that the Harvard conference did feel like a University of Ife reunion. In short, this was the quintessential Old Boys’ Network,5 whose normal way of doing business necessarily results in, and perpetuates, all sorts of sexism and gender exclusions. Consequently, the following questions roiled my mind at the Harvard conference: What is the role of Yorùbá scholars in the process of patriarchalizing the traditions? Why is it that postcolonial intellectuals who profess a nationalist interest in the promotion of language, culture, and traditions do so much to subvert it? As a Yorùbá and a student of the culture, I thought that the conference would be a wonderful opportunity to directly address many of the scholars who have been in the forefront of interpreting Yorùbá religious and cultural traditions. My long-standing research on the continuing imposition of male dominance through language and translation, on the introduction of male privilege to institutions and practices that do not in and of themselves embrace gender exclusivity or male privilege, and on the promotion of values that denigrate females made it imperative to address gender issues. My goal was to pose the question to the assembled scholars as to why male dominance and gender exclusivity continue to mark scholarship on Yorùbá religious and cultural traditions despite the fact that patriarchy is not rooted in the oral traditions these writings purport to be interpreting. I thought the question of which language Ifá speaks and what its implications are for our understanding of contemporary gender inequality was an apposite one to address at
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Given my thesis that gender is a colonial category and therefore not ontological to Yorùbá religious and cultural practices, and given that Ifá is a hugely important system of knowledge and wisdom in Yorùbá traditions, it is the logical source to go to make enquiries about particular developments in Yorùbá society. Thus, my goal in this paper is to investigate what Ifá can tell us about gender. In the classic interrogation mode used to consult Ifá, I want to ask kíni Ifá wí nípa j$Fdà? At the same time, how gender is implicated in Ifá as knowledge system, as social and ritual practice, and as cultural institution in a changing world will engage our attention. As soon as I saw the conference program, it was clear that very little if any attention would be devoted to addressing questions of gender whether in the languages in play, the gender of the diviners, the gendering of forms of divination, the assigning of sex to the Ò rì,à, or even the gender of intellectuals who have chosen for themselves the role of interpreters of Ifá to the world. Despite panel titles like “Epistemology and Ifá,” “Ifá in the Americas,” and “Ifá and Aesthetics,” there were no papers being presented by these panels that sought to address gender questions. Not surprisingly, my paper, whose main subject is about epistemology, was not included in the panel on epistemology, but was ghettoized with another paper under a panel titled “Women and Gender in Ifá,” scheduled to take place from 6:45 to 7:45 p.m. at the end of a full day of “conferencing.” The panel was the only two-person panel of the whole conference, or shall I say two-woman panel. On further examination of the program, I knew there was gender trouble ahead. On the first full day of the conference, the third panel of the day, titled “Ifá in Comparative Perspective,” was assembled. One senior scholar presented a paper on Islamic tradition in Ifá. A very interesting paper, it also spoke to the historical reception of Islam in Yorùbá society. In this presentation, the academic reiterated a claim that Yorùbá people and indeed many African communities were receptive to Islam when it was brought into their communities because of the convergence between Islamic culture and African cultures. I raised my hand and made the observation that despite the fact that this statement about the similarity between Islamic and African cultures has become so
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this conference. With these ideas in mind, I accepted the invitation to the conference and submitted an abstract for a paper titled “Ifá Speaks: Gender(ing) Epistemologies in Yorùbá Divination Discourses, History and Social Practices.” My abstract expressed the following ideas:
Oyèrónk$ Oy%wùmí
accepted as to become a cliché, I question the veracity of such a broad and unqualified claim. With regard to Yorùbá society, I pointed out, there is an absolute gulf between the way in which Islamic cultures insist on removing women from public spaces and the contrasting Yorùbá social organization in which females dominate the most public spaces, such as the streets and the markets.6 I then posed the following question: From the perspective of which gender is there a convergence between Islamic and Yorùbá traditions, and why? The professor refused to entertain my question, saying that he could not understand why I chose to bring gender into the discussion. Furthermore, he said, I had no business bringing up gender questions, since the gender panel is not until six o’clock! We were not going to “do gender” until six o’clock! I was shocked by his response not because of the level of sexism and ignorance it displayed, but because of how comfortable he was in exhibiting such abject sexism and ignorance so publicly. It reminded me of Akiwowo’s celebration of male dominance at Ife. In short, he felt that he was among “friends” who shared his views on gender. This scholar was right, because no one else raised further questions. My interpretation of the professor’s retort is that as far as he was concerned, gender issues were irrelevant to the conference and were pertinent only during the discussion of what he termed the role of women in Ifá. The implication was that my question was out of place, and that I seemed ungrateful, considering that the organizers of the conference had been generous enough to allocate space—a panel—to women to discuss the “role of women in Ifá.” But what about the role of men like the professor himself in Ifá? Are men not a gender? The professor promptly dismissed my questions and went on with what he considered the important business of discussing Ifá, determined not to be distracted by real, live women, or sacred women in oral texts. By the time the prophetic six o’clock rolled around, it was clear to me that my presentation would generate some strong reactions. Much of my paper focused on the writings of Wande Abimbola, who is the foremost scholar of Ifá because of his output, along with his devotion to globalizing the divination system and the practice of Òrì,à worship. Abimbola, apart from being an intellectual, is also a babalawo (a diviner). In fact, the conference was dedicated to him and the late Berkeley anthropologist William Bascom, another pioneer of Ifá studies. I do not want to reproduce my whole presentation at Harvard here, since it is being published elsewhere; however, I want to extract my comments on Wande Abimbola’s work in order to address the reactions
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to my paper and what they may say about male dominance in Yorùbá scholarship, and indeed in the scholarly community.
In any discussion of gender issues in the Yorùbá world, Ifá included, the question of language looms large due to its all-important role of language as a medium of communication and the linguistic gender gap that exists between Yorùbá (the source language) and English (the target language). Since much of the Yorùbá cultural homeland fell to British colonization in the nineteenth century, one main legacy of this history is the dominance of English as the scholarly and second language of Yorùbá people. William Bascom had called Ifá (the divination system) the communication between God and man, but oftentimes published Ifá texts read like the (mis)communication between the queen of England and her native subjects. Where are the Ò rì,à, the ancestors, and their gender-free values in these translations? Much of the research on Yorùbá culture, history, and social practices has been done in English, which is essentially a process of translating Yorùbá into English. Yet while Yorùbá names, pronouns, kinship categories, and occupational categories do not display gender markings and many historical persons and spiritual figures betray no gender identity, many of the published sources of Odù (units) Ifá have presented to us indifferent translations that do not take this gender gap between the two languages into account. The upshot of these sloppy translations is that they create gender categories and male dominance, just by the very act of writing Yorùbá life into English. Thus Olódùmarè, who in the Ifá world is neither human nor gendered, has been turned into a man, and many of the mythical diviners named in Ifá are made into men through the ubiquitous use of “he,” an English gendered pronoun alien to Yorùbá. These pronouns in turn infuse personal names that are originally not associated with any particular body type into gender constructs. One cannot exaggerate the degree to which a simple act of linguistic translation can distort history and reality so thoroughly, an observation which of course suggests that there is nothing simple about translation. We need to take it seriously. A good example of what I call the ubiquitous “he” and the attendant gendering and imposition of male dominance can be seen below. Both the verse in Yorùbá and its English translation are taken from Wande
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The Language of Translation
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Oyèrónk$ Oy%wùmí
1. Ó ní 2. Oníkoko logún 3. Alágbàjà l\gbrn 4. Oníkolo làádsta 5. A díá fún gdúnm ` bákú 6. Tí í h\m\ bíbí Àgb\nnìrègún 7. Wsn ní ó rúb\ nítorí ikú 8. Ó he é 9. Ikú ò pà á 10. gdún m ` bá kú 11. Ejio ti gbádìwo mi l\ 12. Adìwo mi 13. Adìexrànà 14. Tí mo fi’í lo 15. Lejio gbé l\ 1. S/he said (my translation because Abimbola did not translate this line) 2. He who has koko facial marks has 20 markings 3. He who has àbàjà facial marks has 30 markings 4. He who has kóló facial marks has 50 markings 5. Ifá divination was performed for gdúnm´bákú 6. Who was the son of Àgb\nnìrègún 7. He was asked to perform sacrifice 8. In order to avert imminent death 9. He was asked to offer sacrifice of one ìrànà hen 10. He did so 11. He did not die 12. He started to dance 13. He started to rejoice 14. He started to praise his Ifá priest 15. While his Ifá priest praised Ifá. Two problems are immediately apparent in this translation: “O,” the Yorùbá third-person pronoun, which Abimbola translates as “he” in lines 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, and 14, is not gender specific in Yorùbá language; there is no indication of whether the subject is male or female. The best translation of the subject in these lines is “the one who” or “s/he,” as I translated it in line 1. In line 5, we are given the
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Abimbola’s Ifá: An Exposition of Ifá Literary Corpus (1976, 61).
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name gdúnm ` bákú, which, in keeping with Yorùbá tradition in which proper names rarely indicate gender, does not tell us the anatomic body type of the subject. But we see Abimbola’s intention very clearly when in line 6, he tells us that gdúnm ` báku is the son of Àgb\nnìrègún (which is another name for the Divination Deity). There is no justification whatsoever for translating ,>m> in line 6 into the gender-specific “son”; in the Yorùbá original, ,>m> simply means “be the biological child of Àgb\nnìrègún.” Àgb\nnìrègún can be tagged male because from other sources, we know that it is another name for {rúnmì là, the divination god himself. There is nothing inherent in “Àgb\nnìrègún” that tells us it is the name of a male personage. There are no genderdriven words for son or daughter in Yorùbá. Curiously, in one footnote, Abimbola himself tells us that gdú nm ` bákú is the name of a person, but he does not claim that it is the name of a male person. The net effect of this kind of translation, which is typical of the rendering of Ifá texts in this book and others written by Abimbola and many other Ifá scholars, is to present a world that is almost exclusively male, a view that is contrary to Ifá and Yorùbá realities. Translation and Imposition of Alien Values The issue of translation goes beyond language. Arguably the most egregious aspect of this mistranslation of cultures is the imposition of Western and Christian values in the interpretations of Yorùbá cultural and religious institutions. This is an old problem, and there has been some awareness of it, most especially in regard to the transformation of Èhù, the Deity of Uncertainty, the receiver of all Ifá sacrifice, into the out-and-out evil Satan of the Bible by Christian missionaries (many of them of Yorùbá origin) in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, however, in regard to personages and roles associated with females, there has not been the same awareness and consequent rejection of the imposition of Euro-Christian norms and values as a way of derogating and demonizing them. Many current Yorùbá scholars appear to be the Christian missionaries of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which is a paradox given the fact that intellectuals like Wande Abimbola do not claim to be devotees of the Christian faith; he is himself a babalawo, an Ifá priest. The points of convergence between the nineteenth-century Yoruba Christian missionaries and the twentyfirst-century scholars are clear and multiple. First is the male dominance and male privileging of Western education to which we have all
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Decolonizing the Quotidian
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been subjected. Elsewhere, I discuss these issues at length in the case of Samuel Johnson, the pioneering Yoruba historian (OyBwùmí 1997). Second is the male dominance embedded in the so-called “world religions,” especially Christianity. The third point is the colonial heritage encompassing both education and religion, which also defines secular life across the world today. The focus of discussion in this section is on the person of àjé., erroneously translated as “witch” and subsequently represented as witches as in the European traditions of witch hunting. The identity, role, and function of àjé. in Ifá, and in Yorùbá society as a whole, are at best poorly understood by many scholars who have written about these issues. At worst, many analyses of àjé. betray antifemale stances, and these writings express Christian values held to heart by our scholar-interpreters of the Yorùbá world. In his inf luential treatise Ifá: An Exposition of Ifá Literary Corpus, Abimbola writes that Yorùbá beliefs in supernatural powers are of two types: good and evil; that is, from the point of view of what these powers do to, or for humans (my emphasis). He elaborates that the good supernatural powers are of two types: the gods (Òrì,a`) and the ancestors (òkú ?run) (1976, 151). The evil supernatural powers are also of two kinds: the ajogun (belligerent enemies of man) and eníyán or OlOyO (witches). He goes on to explain that the witches are known as PlPyP because they can assume the form of birds, and most damningly that “the witches have no other purpose in life than the destruction of Man and his property. They are therefore the arch enemies of Man”7 (1976, 152). We notice that àjé. are given a series of names in the Ifá verses that Abimbola chose to present: eníyán, OlOyO, ajogun. But who are the witches? Their identity is fully f leshed out in a more recent paper titled “Images of Women in the Ifá Literary Corpus,” a paper that Abimbola first presented when he was a fellow at the W E.B Dubois Institute at Harvard. We soon discover that Abimbola’s witches are women. He writes (1997, 403): As ènìyàn (humans), a woman shares all the qualities of other humans. A woman while functioning at this level, is a friend, a lover, a mother, a queen, a market woman and a wife. But as eníyán, she becomes àjo—a blood-sucking, wicked, dreadful cannibal who transforms herself into a bird at night and f lies to distant places, to hold nocturnal meetings with her fellow witches who belong to a society, which excludes all men.
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Because of time constraints at the conference, my presentation centered on the interpretation of Ifá texts and the fundamental question of the logic of the categories that Abimbola used to delineate Yorùbá worldsense. It is clear from this subsequent elaboration that Abimbola’s delineation of the Yorùbá understanding of the “supernatural” evil types, from the point of view of what they do to humans, is actually a gender dichotomy in which “women” are grouped with those who do evil to “humans.” Are women humans? Can women be classed as human beings if they are also classed among those who do harm to human beings defined, by implication, as men? This makes no sense whatsoever in Ifá and the larger Ò rì,à traditions. Let us break it down: because the good supernatural forces (gods and ancestors) also include females, because gods and ancestors are not gender-defined categories, and because the category ènìyàn is the designation of all humans— male and female in—in Yorùbá language and culture, on what basis, then, does Abimbola’s dichotomy make sense? On what basis does this schema work? Furthermore, in whose interest and for what purpose is this dichotomous interpretation being fashioned? If females are present in all these spiritual and social categories (humans, ancestors, gods), surely Abimbola’s typology collapses on itself. It is obvious that the fabricated dichotomy functions as a vehicle to impose gender, and then to demonize women as a group. This representation expresses gender prejudice of the most virulent kind. There are many more things to say about Abimbola’s interpretation of àjo in Ifá verses, including the selectiveness of the evidence he presents to bolster his interpretation of àj$ as evil beings, even though the sign of their evil ways in the Ifá texts presented by Abimbola in this work is at best ambiguous. The biggest gap in Abimbola’s account is in the omission of copious Odù (units of the Ifá corpus) and religious texts that celebrate the beneficence of àj$ in Yorùbá culture. {hun, the great Mother-God of waters, one of the primordial Òrì,à is the iconic àj$, she is worshiped for her àj$ powers: to give children, nurture them, and provide the resources to look after them. In fact, another name for her is àj$ >lQm>(Mother-àjo). {hun is the Divine Àj$. In his monograph on Òrìhà {~un and the worship of the god in Ò~ogbo, George Olusola Ajibade records much evidence showing {~un devotees’ representation of the deity as Àj$ and Supreme Mother in their songs, prayers, and rituals. The mistranslation of àj$ as “witch” notwithstanding, in a section titled “{hun as Witch,” he writes (Ajibade 2005, 93):
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(Our group is a group of rich people Our group is a group of owners of children Our group is not a group of thieves The group of Osun witches are the owners of children Follow Osun, to dance with) so that you will be blessed wth children to dance with) The point of emphasis by these women group is that, {hun is a witch who uses her power to bless people with children and riches. Although he discusses {hun, Abimbola does so in a section of his paper “Images of Women” in which he presents “women as mother,” and leaves the iconic àjé. out in the section in which he writes about “women as àjé..” The reason is obvious: in order to maintain his representation of àjo as evil, he could not include {hun, who, being one of the primordial deities in Ifá and Òrì,à worship, is recognized widely for her goodness and benevolence. This is what Abimbola (1997, 404) says about {hun: One of the most prominent images of mother is that of {hun . . . {hun is fondly remembered as Oore Yèyé (the generous mother). Up till today when one mentions the name of {hun among the Yorùbá, people salute her with a shout Oore Yèyé o! Abimbola’s characterization of àjé. as evil leads me to conclude that he has turned Yorùbá àjé. into the European witch, and then it’s a case of giving a witch a bad name and hanging her!8 As a matter of fact, the gendering of àjé. as female is also problematic considering that in Yorùbá traditions and social practices, àjé. encompasses both males and females. In everyday Yorùbá usage, àjé. is not a gender-specific category, although it is increasingly associated with females in contemporary popular stereotypical discourse. In interviews I conducted in Ogbomoso, one diviner9 told me that àjé. is not a gender-specific term, and àjé. actually denotes a gifted person, a person of extraordinary talent and powers. The word àjé. literally means “one who is efficacious”; the
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During Òhun festival in Òhogbo, a group of women do sing songs that reveal that {hun is a witch and that most of the women if not all of them, who are her devotees are witches as well. There are devotees of {hun who sing on the grand finale day of {hun festival, One of their songs says:
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verb jé. speaks to efficacy and the ability to be effective and make things happen.10 In their studies of knowledge, belief, and witchcraft in Yorùbá society, Barry Hallen, J. Sodipo and W. V. O . Quine (1997 expose a distinction between contemporary popular stereotypes of àjé. and the views of knowledgeable sages like the oní,ègùn (healers) with whom the two scholars engaged in philosophical discussions. According to the oní,ègùn, àjé. are not just women, and in fact some of them insisted that there are more male àjé. than female (1997 103). The Hallen and Sodipo study deals comprehensively with some of the questions I raised earlier about Abimbola’s representation of àjé. ; the conclusion of their study is worth quoting (1997 117): We conclude by asserting that “witch” is not a representative translation of àjé.. Àjé. are men. Àjé. is not quintessentially evil. Àjé. does make use of medicine. And, most importantly, àjé. may be a good person—intentionally benevolent, using their extraordinary talents to benefit mankind. That àjé. has come to be closely associated with females in many people’s minds needs further interrogation. From my perspective, it may not be unconnected with the fact that àjé. has become conf lated with witches of the Western and Christian traditions, whose norms and practices became internalized in Yorùbá religious and secular life following European colonization and the global dominance of ideas, thoughts, institutions, and practices deriving from the West. Everyday Varieties of Sexism At the Harvard conference, the reaction to my critique of Abimbola’s work was swift. First, Abimbola conceded that his earlier translations of Ifá were problematic because they resulted in the gendering of Yorùbá persons and values in ways that are not necessarily part of the tradition. He urged me, however, to look at his later work, in which he claims he gives women their due. I do not find such an assessment correct, because the paper in which he declares that àj$ are cannibals and nonhuman is from his later work. Then he went on the offensive, declaring that the question I posed (from whose perspective is the Yorùbá understanding of the supernatural dichotomized into two) is a sign of my failure to decipher the differences in tones between the words ènìyàn (humans) and eníyán (witches), which led to my misreading of the words. On the
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contrary, there was no misreading or misunderstanding on my part. The tonal differences in these words did not matter to the argument that I was making. My concern was with the logic of his categorization, the sense of his dichotomy, not the naming of spiritual forces. Because of his strong reaction, I thought I had been very effective in my critique when I heard him declare angrily that I needed to take a beginner’s Yorùbá course—“Yorùbá 101” were his exact words—as a prerequisite to understanding his interpretation of Ifá. My thinking after Abimbola’s insulting outburst was that if the learned professor himself could not correctly translate simple Yorùbá pronouns and kinship terms into English, then he should join me in taking Yoruba 101. But who is qualified to teach the course? That is another question. So, indeed, Yorùbá 101 for everyone, since the language that so powerfully conveys ways to talk to the gods is being appropriated and used to exclude, change the past, and recreate the world in ways that are antithetical to Ifá values and traditions. By all means, let the mothers reclaim the mother tongue. By the end of the session, I realized that some other scholars were already taking sides. One person accused me of saying that in Yorùbá language literacy, tones and diacritics do not matter. Nothing could be farther from the truth. This was a clear attempt to discredit me and impugn my credentials. Anyone who speaks, reads, and writes Yorùbá knows how critical tones are to making the language intelligible, since the same written word can mean different things depending on the tone as indicated by the diacritics. It was this knowledge that led me to insist on diacritical marks on Yorùbá texts in a book I wrote more than a decade ago, The Invention of Women. In fact, in the note on orthography in the book, I stated the following: “I have used tonal marks on the Yorùbá words because without the diacritics, those words do not make sense” (OyBwùmí 1997, xxiii). At that point in the conference, I could see that in the minds of Abimbola and other like-minded male scholars, my identity had become conf lated with that of the witch, and unfortunately, it seemed that the most profound statement in my richly argued paper turned out to be “give the witch a bad name and hang her.” The grievous sin I had committed was to expose a masculine paradigm that shows up in knowledge production about Ifá and Òrì,à traditions, an androcentric worldsense that contravenes the values of the gods, the belief system, the rituals and language of the body of knowledge called Ifá. In his inaugural lecture discussed earlier, Akinsola Akiwowo had commended the male professors in the sociology department at the
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University of Ife for holding the peace in spite of the presence of a good number of “out of place” female faculty. We could not say that much for some of the Harvard professors at the conference; unruliness was the game here. Perhaps the most dramatic moment of the conference occurred when another senior professor who is on the Harvard faculty, sitting at the back of the auditorium, stood up during my presentation and proceeded literally to shout me down. His ostensible reason was that the delivery of my paper had exceeded the allotted time. Yet, he was not the chair of the panel, and the chair had given me a few more minutes to conclude my presentation. What is remarkable is that despite the fact that the altercation between this professor and me went on for a couple of minutes, no one called him to order. I had to do so myself in order to conclude my presentation. I started to wonder: what is it about the water at Harvard that fuels these eruptions of masculine privilege or just plain uncivil behavior? It seems as if the legacy of Larry Summers,11 former president of the university who had declared an inherent male superiority in the sciences, dies hard. The conference must go on, and it did. All these events, however, reinforced for me the necessity of continuing to interrogate my immediate intellectual communities and how gender plays out in the ways in which we experience it, and most importantly to determine how to change this terrible state of affairs. At the beginning of the Harvard conference, I had directed a question at a couple of colleagues, fellow presenters who were also personal friends of mine, as to why I was the only female native Yorùbá speaker on the program. They jokingly retorted that I should enjoy it while it lasted. But for me, there was no joy. My study of British colonization and the privileging of males in the acquisition of Western education, which I documented in Invention, is a good place to start to answer that question, but that is not half the story. The writings of Akiwowo and Abimbola and the happenings at the conference begin to f lesh out some other aspect of the problem. It is clear that the university is a major site for the making and reproduction of (post)colonial society, and that has not changed much, especially where the colonial, the global, and modernity have converged. Thus far, I have been laying out intellectual ideas and exchanges deriving from contradictory scholarly interpretations of Ifá. Another aspect that has been very much a part of the discussion is the social interaction of Yorùbá academics at conferences. For a gender scholar, Yorùbá scholarship, along with the academic community and society, provides an unusual opportunity for witnessing the systematic way in
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which male dominance is constructed. With regard to the institution of language, the process is easier to see, and it is being done one concept at a time, one word at a time, right before our eyes. In the following section, I shift particular attention to social interaction among the scholars themselves. My experience and observations at these meetings are instructive enough. When two Yorùbá scholars meet at conferences (HCI was not an exception) anywhere in the world, as soon as we recognize each other as Yorùbá we are more likely than not to speak the language to each other. If one does not speak the language after initial introductions, it is a sign that one does not understand the language or that one wants to maintain a distance for whatever reason. Once we start addressing one another in the language, the choice of pronoun and the appellation we call each other display each person’s understanding of our place in the hierarchy of seniority that Yorùbá pronouns encapsulate. Yorùbá pronouns do not do gender, but they do express age hierarchy. For one thing, a junior person in the hierarchy cannot (if the social intercourse is to remain civil) address the senior by name. I have noticed that there is a difference between the ways in which quite a number of junior Yorùbá colleagues address senior female Yorùbá colleagues and senior male scholars. This kind of behavior suggests a certain disregard for the accomplishments of females. On several occasions I have had to call my junior colleagues to order because they addressed me as a`Stí, a Yorùbá reworking of the English word “auntie” to mean older female relative. My objection to this appellation is that these colleagues are persons that I hardly know, and sometimes am just meeting for the first time at a professional conference, yet they promptly show their “respect” for my age by naming me a`Stí. In contrast, they never address their senior male colleagues “uncle” or bùr?dá (another Yorùbá variation on the English word “brother” meant to signify older male relative). Herein lies a double standard biased against females. When I told a male junior colleague not to call me àStí, he was shocked and distressed that he had offended me (which was not his intention) and could not understand why àStí was inappropriate or offensive to me. But as soon as I asked him what he called senior male colleagues, he got the picture, telling me that he referred to his senior male colleagues as TgbQn if they were a few years older than he, or Prof 12 (as in Professor) if they were much older. I then asked him why he could not use either term to refer to me in this f luid Yorùbá dance of hierarchy. He got my point and subsequently calls me Prof, the same way he, as well as I, refer to senior Yorùbá colleagues, male or female. UgbQn is the
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Yorùbá kinship term for senior relation or friend, and it is not gender specific in everyday Yorùbá usage. However, today in some circles, the way in which this word is increasingly used to refer only to males calls for resistance of this gendering at the most micro level. I am not the only one who has noticed the shift in language. I have heard other female colleagues complain of the same kind of untoward treatment from both junior male and female colleagues alike. It is a case of gendering of authority to the detriment of females in a world where this had not been the case historically and linguistically. I want to reiterate the point I made more than a decade ago: “We can begin to talk about the linguistic gendering of authority in Yorùbá life. This is happening through the adoption of English-derived words and through the genderization of Yorùbá words that were once non- gender-specific” (OyBwùmí 1997, 163). The multifaceted ways in which European colonization affected different groups of Africans has been well documented; the uneven effects of colonial policies across the states carved out by the European exploiters are well known. Mahmood Mamdani writes eloquently about the multilayered nature of the colonial state, which meant that the task of decolonizing for Africans at the moment of independence had to be equally complex if it were to be effective. He writes: “The core agenda that African states faced at independence was threefold: deracializing society, detribalizing the Native Authority, and developing the economy in the context of unequal international relations” (1996, 287). I could not agree more with Mamdani. However, he makes a huge omission in regard to the fact that the colonial state was also a male-dominant state; colonial racism and colonial sexism were intertwined in complex ways. The European colonizers not only had favorite races and “tribes”; they also had a favorite gender. In the same way that colonial capital (material and cultural) was generated for whiteness across Africa, similarly, it was accumulated for the male gender. In effect, at the moment of independence, Africans had an additional task of transforming the structures of male privilege and female exclusion that had been laid down. Besides, if democratic transformation is to be total and inclusive of all citizens, if women are not to remain just subjects and subjected, gender factors must be taken into account at all levels. Africa’s colonization by Europeans in a sense was a gift to white people, and a boon for both white and African men, albeit in varying degrees. For the colonizers and their inheritors, it is a gift that keeps on giving. However, for African men, it is a toxic gift. And alas, those who would transform Africa are also the class and gender beneficiaries of the
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Conclusion: The Need for Historical Feminism Despite my commitment to eradicating gender inequality, I am not in total agreement with what I call establishment feminism in all its guises. Feminism has been put forward as the ideology to overcome male dominance. But feminism circulates with a lot of qualifications, not to talk of baggage! There is Western feminism, black feminism, white feminism, multicultural feminism, and global feminism, to name a few varieties. I have found it difficult to embrace any of these concepts easily. My main point of disagreement with mainstream feminism is the genderism embedded in much of the discourse. What is genderism? It is the idea that male dominance in human affairs is universal and timeless. It may well be universal today, but it is also historical, having come into being in different places at particular points in time. I do not accept the assumption in both feminist and “old school” patriarchal discourses that male dominance “has always been there.” In Yorùbá societies, male dominance is not timeless. To accept its timelessness is to be genderist, a case of imposing gender on times and places in which there were no socially constructed gender distinctions. If anything, what my work shows and insists on is the dated (pun intended) nature of male dominance in the Yorùbá world. Gender, as I have repeatedly argued, is not only socially constructed but also historical. By implication, male dominance, the main expression of gender construction in our time, has a “sell-by date.” In fact, that date has expired. But what are we doing to throw it out? That is the question. If we accept uncritical feminist accounts based on a Western ahistorical construction of gender, we deepen the abrogation of Yorùbá worldsense because in accepting Western constructions of gender as timeless, we nullify both our history and our values of non-gendered categories and social relations. Significantly, then, I remain open to the idea that there are many cultures like Yorùbá around the world where historically gender was not a social category. Unfortunately, accounts of such societies have been assimilated into the Western-dominant gender paradigm.13
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colonial state. This is at the core of why male dominance continues to gain footholds and to expand in our current dispensation. In this paper, I have attempted to show the macro and micro levels at which sexism and racism are deepening even as we mount resistance against these evils on a global scale.
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Consequently, I propose historical feminism as the kind of feminism that is needed to address the problems I have articulated in this paper. Since male dominance has become a fact of life around the world, the need to organize to overcome it cannot be gainsaid. But the type of feminism we abide by is also crucial to understanding the nature of the problem, its scope, and the resources available in local communities to challenge all the interlocking forms of dominance. Notes 1. Such knowledge is presented in the form of divination stories, which claim “divine origins and expressly assert the authority to make proclamations regarding the essential being of every object and idea, from the beginning of time and extending into the limitless future” (Adeeko 2008, 3). Ifá tradition constitutes a document of Yorùbá culture even as it documents the culture. Traditionally, the way to access this information was through divination presided over by diviners called babaláwo. Today, access to the information is multiple and various: through divination, interviews with diviners, or reading scholarly books that have sought to compile the Odù, or chapters of Ifá knowledge 2. International Sociology published a collection on the theme of creating indigenous sociologies, which featured Akiwowo’s work (see Martin Albrow and Elizabeth king 1990). 3. I use “gendering” rather than “gender” to underscore the ongoing and continuous ways in which gendered consciousness, behavior, and categories are reproduced. 4. The University of Ife, in more ways than one, is a mecca for Yorùbá history and scholarship. The university is located in the ancient city of Ile-Ife, {hun State, Nigeria, which is regarded as the cradle of the Yorùbá, and indeed the cradle of humanity. The university was founded in 1962 as the University of Ife, and was renamed Obafemi Awolowo University in May 1987 in honor of Obafemi Awolowo (1909–1987), the first Nigerian premier of the defunct Western Region of Nigeria. Awolowo was also the university’s founding statesman and first chancellor. 5. The idea of the Old Boys’ Network refers to how male elites (and elites in general) reproduce themselves across time and in a globalizing world across space. 6. Discussions of the similarity between “African” cultures and Islamic cultures often centers on the fact that both cultures incorporate polygamy (multiple wives) as part of the marriage system. Polygamy is almost invariably characterized in academic and elite discourses as inherently anti-women if not misogynistic. Elsewhere (OyBwùmí 1997, 61–63), I have shown that polygamy, like monogamy, is not inherently anti-women; it all depends on how the society regulates marriage by spelling out and enforcing the rights and obligations of all the parties involved. More importantly, in my own research on comparative family systems, I have come to the conclusion that societies that offer a polygamous option of marriage are better able to serve the interest of women as a group, because they give more women access to marriage, motherhood, and intimacy. Perhaps the greatest lie being told about Westernized and Christian forms of marriage is the huge number of women who are left out of marriage and legitimate expressions of sexuality, something so vital to their well-being. The attendant crisis and anguish this is generating is a feminist issue that has been overlooked and therefore unresearched. For many Africans, and indeed in societies around the world in which women value and are committed to becoming mothers, it should be clear that the restriction on marriage and marriageability that monogamy engenders continues to be detrimental to women’s well-being.
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7. It is instructive that he uses “Man” as if it is the so-called “universal” or inclusive man, which feminist writings have exposed as rarely universal in intent. In this context, Abimbola’s use of “man” should be taken literally as excluding women. 8. I discuss all this fully in the paper I gave at HCI. 9. Babalawo AkalaIfá, Ogbomoso, July 21, 2008. 10. The English word “genius” would be an apt rendering of the meaning of àjé. in Yorùbá. Since a number of interpreters of Yorùbá ideas have this predilection for uncritical assimilation of English, I thought we could invent a new synonym for àjé. —àjé. nius, and ‘ jenius for short. 11. At an economics conference in January 2005, Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers triggered controversy when he suggested that the relative paucity of women in science and engineering professions is due in part to “innate differences” between men and women. 12. In my discussion with a male colleague about these issues, he drew my attention to the fact that there is a higher appellation than Prof in the hierarchy; it is “professor àgbà ” (elder professor). This name would apply to scholars who had written many books and won wide recognition. It occurred to me that Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Laureate, would be the ultimate “professor àgba.” The term ?j?gbQn (sage) seems to have fallen into disuse, I suspect because of its associations with wisdom emanating from the spiritual and the sacred. 13. See, for example, my discussion of different cultures in “De-confounding Gender” in Signs 1998.
References Abimbola, Wande. 1997. Images of women in the Ifá literary corpus. In Queens, Queen Mothers, Priestesses and Power: Case Studies in African Gender, ed. Flora E.S. Kaplan, 401–413. New York: New York Academy of Sciences. ———. 1976. Ifá: An Exposition of Ifá Literary Corpus. Ibadan, Nigeria: Oxford University Press. Abiodun, Rowland. 1989. Woman in Yorùbá religious images. Journal of African Cultural Studies 2(1): 1–18. Adeeko, Adeleke. 2008. “Writing” and “reference” in Ifá. Paper presented at the conference Sacred Knowledge, Sacred Power and Performance: Ifá Divination in West Africa and the African Diaspora at Harvard University, March 2008, in Boston, Massachusetts. Unpublished. Ajibade, George Olusola. 2005. Negotiating performance: {hun in the verbal and visual metaphors. Bayreuth African Studies Working Papers, Vol. 4. Bayreuth, Germany: Institute of African Studies. Akiwowo, Akinsola. 1990. Contributions to the sociology of knowledge from an African oral poetry. In Globalization, Knowledge and Society: Readings from International Sociology, ed. Martin Albrow and Elizabeth Kind. London: Sage Publications/International Sociology Association. ———. 1983. Ajobi and Ajogbe: Variations on the theme of sociation. Ile-Ife, Nigeria: University of Ife Press. Albrow, Martin, and Elizabeth King, ed. 1990. Globalization, Knowledge and Society: Readings from International Sociology. London: Sage Publications/International Sociology Association. Bascom, William. 1991. Ifá Divination: Communication between Gods and Men in West Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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Hallen, Barry, J. Sodipo, and W. V. O. Quine. 1997. Knowledge, Belief and Witchcraft: Analytic Experiments in African Philosophy. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Mamdani, Mahmood. 1996. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. OyBwùmí, Oyèrónké.. 1998. De-confounding gender: Feminist theorizing and western culture: A comment on Hawkesworth’s “Confounding gender.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 23(4): 1049–62. ———. 1997. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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Decolonizing the Quotidian
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Gender in Translation: fúnetán Aníwúrà A dé lé kè A dé ` k
A kìí gbà ‘gbàgb ki ‘gbàgb má gba nkan lw ni (We do not take to Christianity without Christianity taking something of value from us.) The epigraph to this paper could easily be mistaken for an adulatory epithet on an altruistic system of channeling needs for the mutual benefit of all: whosoever desires Christianity can pick it up, and Christianity replenishes its store by what the convert gives up. It soon becomes apparent on close examination, however, that the poetry in the proverb conceals an uneven swap; the convert surrenders a defining substance that the belief system remakes into only what can serve its interests. The sentence patterning indicates that the convert “takes,” the belief system “takes,” and neither gives back. Christian monotheism supervises, as it were, a taking contraption that dispossesses the convert of something of value in exchange for a structure of unreciprocated, one-way acceptance. I selected this proverbial saying for the epigraph because it captures the spirit of my argument in this article: discourses of gender practices in Yorùbá life and culture are yet to consider fully how translations of categories from the language of discovery, particularly English, shape the classification and explanations of observed social phenomena. My primary evidence will be the many ways in which known snippets of the life of Ìyá lóde :fún<etán Aníwúrà (ca. 1825– 1874), a high-ranking female chief in precolonial Ìbàdàn in Nigeria, are deployed in accounts of the evolution of woman-being in southwestern
10.1057/9780230116276 - Gender Epistemologies in Africa, Oyeronke Oyewumi
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CH A P T E R
Adélékè Adé#k
Nigeria. I am focusing on the linguistic, cultural, and philosophical ramifications of the depiction of gender matters in Akínwùmí Ì
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Ìyá lóde fún etán Aníwúrà in Power and Gender The earliest written historical account describes :fún<etán Aníwúrà ’s high office, iyálóde, as “queen of the ladies.” According to Johnson (1997, 77), “the most distinguished lady in the town” who occupies the office is mandated to serve as the main representative of women in “municipal and other affairs.” Bolanle Awe (1977, 147) concurs: “the Iyalode became not only the voice of the women in government but also a kind of queen who coordinated all their activities. She settled their quarrels in her court and met with them to determine what should be the women’s stand, for instance, on such questions as the declaration of war, the opening of new markets, or the administration of women at the local level.” :fún<etán Aníwúrà, the second person to hold that office in Ìbàdàn, fell out of favor with the head chief, Látòósà, who encouraged two of her slaves to assassinate her on June 30, 1874. Forced to confess to the killing, but refraining from exposing their mastermind, the slaves were publicly executed for murder on July 10, 1874 ( Johnson 1997, 392–93). Látòósà, in defiance of his council of chiefs, engineered :fún<etán’s killing because she failed to hide her displeasure at the general’s unbridled warmongering, the most troubling expedition being the unprovoked assault against Ado in December 1873 and January 1874.1 :fún<etán’s predecessor and pioneer, Ìyá lóde Subúlá, also came to a disastrous end when, after being in office for about a decade, “she lost her wealth and was deposed from office in about 1867” (Denzer 1998, 9). Besides her name, Ìyáclá, :fún<etán’s reluctant successor is hardly remembered in the traditional chronicles (Denzer 1998, 13). The first three ìyálóde on record at Ìbàdàn were either disgraced or forced out of office. Few historians have offered any explanation for this, or for why the steady rise of the inf luence of the office and the escalation of its definition as a “women’s affair’s” position over the next half century after :fún<etán’s reign coincided with the establishment and growth of colonial rule. In 1893, the Ìyálóde’s council had only three other official members, all of them females, bearing military titles, although their authority was mainly “civil”; it expanded to 12 members in 1965 and 24 in 1997 ( Johnson 1997, 77; Denzer 1998, 45).
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of inf luence is Nkiru Nzegwu’s exposition in Family Matters (2006) of the poverty of a truly comparatist temperament in transnational gender studies. I have adapted for sociolinguistic analysis Nzegwu’s expansion of Ifi Amadiume’s differentiation of mono-sex and dual-sex systems.
Adélékè Adé#k
It is quite likely that the office was a mid-nineteenth-century invention in Ìbàdàn, although, as Awe argues in “The Ìyá lóde in the Traditional Yorùbá Political System,” (1977, 150–57), similar institutions existed in older Yorùbá kingdoms such as Ilesa, Ondo, and Ijebu. The stormy tenure of the first set of ìyálóde in Ìbàdàn could have been a sign of the unsteady character of political steps that were being taken to manage socioeconomic inequities that were manifesting in gendered terms. After all, the state in Ìbàdàn depended heavily on constant war making, which required a disproportionate number of able-bodied males to fight for their living in distant lands over extended periods of time. It is not impossible that the ìyálóde office was meant to address genderimplicated problems whose origins are not unrelated to overwhelming male ascendancy in the war economy. If this was the case, the inf luence of the women’s point of view, which the iyálóde’s cabinet was meant to channel, was rather limited because she was the only member of her council that could sit with other principal chiefs in determining the affairs of the city-state. Awe (1977, 148) points out: “In theory she was acknowledged as the representative of all women and in all cases was free to comment on all policy matters. In practice, however, she suffered from one big disadvantage: she was always outnumbered as the only female in the crucial decision-making body.” While there must have been some reasons for the institution of a unique, exclusively female, council of chiefs with titles of battle commanders, although their duties are mainly civil, these have not been of major interest to historians. The main scholarly focus has been on the longevity and durability of political institutions that prosecute women-specific interests. Literary drama stirred popular interest in the ìyálóde office in 1970 with the publication of Akínwùmí Ì<lá ’s play, four years after it won the top writing prize of the Yorùbá Studies Association (gb# Ìjìnl# Yorùbá ) and by which time the ìyálóde council of chiefs, under Chief Olowode Adebisi Abeo, had almost tripled its original membership (Denzer 1998, 6, 45). The published play was widely adopted at all schooling levels and used as a required text in the literature curriculum of examination bodies. The year 1981 was a crucial one for the popular dissemination of :fún<etán as the emblem of feminized high-handedness and the association of her name with a characteristic belligerence of women in power. That year, Bankole Bello made a feature-length movie based on the play, and the Ì
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Oladeji’s English translation of the play was published in 1992. In the intervening years, television productions of the play were broadcast in Yorùbá-speaking states of Nigeria. A French translation was issued in 2003. When Pamela Smith’s translation was released in 2005, fúnetán Aníwúrà became the only secular literary text translated twice from Yorùbá into English. That the wide dissemination of Ì
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Gender in Translation
Adélékè Adé#k
have transmuted :fún<etán the historical personage and recoded the meaning of her life to fit prevailing prejudices on gender relations as they have been nurtured by schooling, religion, ethnic slurring, and gender stereotypes. In a revealing example of the deep percolation of the negative evaluation of :fún<etán in popular imagination, a magazine reporter, in 1994, put the then newly installed ìyálóde, Wuraola Akanke Akintola, on the defensive by reminding her that her most famous predecessor, :fún<etán, exemplifies the incompatibility of women and high office. Ìyá lóde Akintola, probably having had no access to the scholarly nuances offered by Johnson, Akinyele, and Awe, responded thus: “That was her own choice in the way she wanted to exercise her powers. Even though the Ìyá lóde had the power to take initiatives, this did not imply that she should misbehave. In :fún<etán’s case that was what she wanted to do. And it was not that there was nobody to put her under control, she had made up her mind not to listen” (quoted in Denzer 1998, 12). Ìyá lóde Akintola is obviously quoting the popular cultural view of her predecessor as circulated in the inter-medial and interlingual translations of Ì
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niece, nephew, brother, sister, and the like, a fact OyRwùmí argues should be interpreted to mean that “anatomic categories are not used as social categories” (1997, 29) in Yorùbá. Conventions established through more than a century of practice do not ease the burden and, as OyRwùmí further insists, might have refashioned fundamentals of Yorùbá life and culture into what they are not. English texts about Yorùbá societies are replete with “sons,” “kings,” “patriarchs,” and “queens,” although it is hardly noticed that the dictionary conceptions of these words derive from contexts that cannot ref lect the world they ostensibly translate (OyRwùmí 1997, 31–49; 157–79). Within the upside-down economy of Yorùbá/English translations involved in gender studies, the Yorùbá source code is disfigured and recomposed while the target language, English, is often left unchanged. Inventing novel ideas for the source language and culture of study through incorrectly calibrated translations complicates comprehension in fúnetán Aníwúrà. The problems begin to show early in the different phrases used to translate Ì
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Gender in Translation
Adélékè Adé#k
Older English definitions of ìyálóde in both bilingual dictionaries and Johnson’s history f lounder around the extent to which gender should count. Johnson writes that the iyálóde represents the woman’s viewpoints in the council of chiefs and could therefore be called “the queen of the ladies.” But the phrasing of this observation is such that the office seems to merely confirm the social eminence already enjoyed by whoever holds it. In Johnson’s terms, the title was typically “bestowed upon the most distinguished lady in town” (1997, 77). That is, the ìyálóde office elevates the city’s most distinguished female into “the queen of the ladies,” and she could only have been a queen in the figurative sense because Ìbàdàn was unique among historically significant nineteenthcentury Yorùbá political formations in its rejecting hereditary nobility rights in its appointment of rulers. Perhaps more important, other parts of Johnson’s History do not refer to high-ranking female officials as queens. Even in his beloved fy that has a “king,” Johnson identified important “royal” spouses by their titles, simply calling them wives or referring to them derogatorily as members of the king’s “harem.” The Dictionary of the Yorùbá Language, first published by the Church Missionary Society in 1913, also shines more light on attributes of the oficeholder than the functions of the office: “a lady of high rank, the first lady in a town or village.”4 This description, too, fails to help clarify whether the high social ranking results from the office or the office merely affirms an already acquired high social status. The Dictionary’s use of the “first lady” to indicate high social standing further blurs the picture when the meaning projected is transposed into the Yorùbá “source” society. The ìyálóde is never conjugally related to the male holder of the highest political office, or the “first man.” In other words, if the Dictionary is right, the ìyálóde would have been a “first lady” without a “first man.” R. C. Abraham’s (1958) newer Yorùbá-English dictionary defines the ìyálóde as a “civic title” held by the leader of the Ìyá lóde Society who also doubles as “Head Woman” and leader of a civic society in “every township” in the “ggbá country [sic].” Her activities include gathering women “for public discussions about their concerns.” The dictionary adds the following short narrative: “They formerly owned slaves. It was a woman’s duty [in the Ìyá lóde Society] to see that her husband was well provided with food, weapons and ammunitions. A rich Ìyá lóde used to ensure that all the warriors of her township had the best guns Lagos [the colonial capital] could produce.” This bizarre attempt at a definition translates into sexist English-language assumptions whatever Abraham gleaned from his Yorùbá-speaking collaborators: that
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the ìyá lóde’s procuring arms and ammunition for the township army is like a wife preparing her spouse’s food. The connection between food, weapons, ammunition, and women’s high office are left unexplained. In other respects, however, Abraham’s dictionary raises two important questions: (i) Is the ìyálóde a regional office and not a pan-Yorùbá institution, and (ii) doesn’t the arms-supply association indicate that this was an institution created during the long Yorùbá wars of the nineteenth century? The definition offered in Isaac Delano’s AtúmA Ede Yoruba (1958), the only monolingual Yorùbá dictionary, is unencumbered by the pervasive metaphorization found in bilingual explanations straining to make intelligible in English an idea that is well outside its sociolinguistic parameters: olóyè obìnrin ní ìlú tàbí láàrin gbC, olóri àwEn obìnrin (a female chief in a town or a civic group, head of women). These definitions imply that there can be more than one type of ìyálóde, some with townwide authorities that cover male and female, others controlling sections that could consist of females only or associations that are not gender specific. The lexical items involved in the translation difficulties discussed above—a simple prepositional phrase made up of two nouns, ìya´ (mother or older female) and òde (outside or public), and one preposition, ní (at, on, in)—are not esoteric words. The translation problems pertain to the gender-role connotations of the possible English equivalents. As noted earlier, “mother-in-the-streets” makes no sense in colloquial English, although that could be a correct, literal version of the Yorùbá terms. “Mother-of-external affairs” acknowledges the semantic extensions of òde (outside or public). The translation knots get really hard with the nonsensical result of associating motherhood (ìyá ), outside-ness (òde), and gender spheres. Bilingual dictionary writers, nationalist and feminist historians, and literary translators recognize that motherhood in traditional English speech connotes domesticity. These translators know also that it is possible to correlate domesticity with some spatialized Yorùbá kinship terms like ìyálé (the most senior wife of the household, lineage, or patrilineage [literally, “mother in the home”]) and baálé (the oldest male offspring of a patrilineage [literally, “father in the home”]). In this line of thinking, the ìyálóde is über-ìyálé. The correlation of social space and gender role breaks down, however, when it is realized that the ìyálé’s obligations and allegiances extend to the entire patrilineage and not just to the wives and daughters of the household. That the ìyálóde does not extend the ìyálé function is even clearer in the fact that while the latter, being a wife, is by definition
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Gender in Translation
Adélékè Adé#k
from outside the patrilineage where she “rules,” the ìyálóde could be a native of the city or an “immigrant” (typically by marriage) from another place. While the ìyálóde need not have been an ìyálé, or the most senior wife in lineage, the leading male in the council of chiefs is required to have led a lineage and been recognized as worthy of leadership. We arrive at an impasse here. The ìyálóde is not to the city (the public) as the ìyálé is to the household. This office is also not a female equivalent of the office held by the senior male chief. It is difficult, even without the evidence in Delano’s dictionary, to accept the normative translations that say the office serves women exclusively.5 The meaning conundrums noted above are present in the English translations of fúnetán Aníwúrà. According to Oladeji, the ìyálóde, in addition to their distinction in business and leadership, must be “highstrung and forceful individuals” who should be “tough, strict, and domineering because they are expected to monitor and control the activities of all females during all public occasions” (Ì<la/Oladeji2005, vi). Leadership in this model is repressive, autocratic, and androgynous, terms that make traditional sense in extended English literary and cultural idioms but miscarry when used to capture :fún<etán’s differently stratified society where age, regardless of sex, denoted significant authority (OyRwùmí, 110–12). Oladeji’s definition imagines the ìyálóde to be a phallic female who needs a big stick to “lord” it over her women. Written about a decade after Bankole Bello’s film release and several television adaptations of the play, Oladeji’s words re-translate iconic, visual portrayals of :fún<etán as a gap-toothed, wiry, implacable, tragic character into the general, historically true representation to which his English translation and Ì<là ’s play are loyal. Critics often state axiomatically that gender constructs vary across cultures, locations, economic strata, and historical periods but, in order to avoid the charge of essentialism, quickly proceed to make pronouncements that pay no heed to difference (Nzegwu 2006, 157–97). We rarely pause to consider how the language of theorizing and reporting discoveries overwrites observable colloquialisms of difference.6 My extended discussion of the (un)translatability of ìyálóde is meant to highlight the grossly inequitable, but inadequately interrogated, linguistic and discursive environments in which terms of African gender are constructed. As the examples discussed above illustrate, the necessary translation decisions that scholars must make for the sake of intelligibility usually defer to the interests of the socially dominant and intellectually prestigious target languages of reporting, such as English. In the hands of the most skillful and theoretically aware—that is, ideal—scholar, the
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Gender and Thematic Framing in the Prologue to fún etán Aníwúrà Drama is ordinarily driven by direct discourse, with each event acted out for the most part and the plot unfolding in the interaction of character, place, and discrete actions. When a narrator appears outside of the proper drama to explain events, as in the prologue to fúnetán Aníwúrà, the intrusion functions, like a device that manages the play of chance in interpretation, to prevent meaning from f lowing in whatever direction it pleases. Ì<lá ’s original play opens with a prologue in which a character summarizes the political environment of the events that are about to unfold and thus becomes an agent of cognitive oversight to pilot the audience and readers to a preferred perspective on the actions. That strategy succeeds in this play because the summary view of :fún<etán promoted by this figure is the one that survives in popular perception and gets translated into English. The original play stipulates that the prologue should be narrated by a female (obìnrin kan) (1970, vii), a sex specificity that contrasts with sex-neutral terms used in the descriptions of social turbulence reported by the character. The female narrator summarizes the communal anxiety about the uncertain existence caused by the ceaseless war-making and high-handed abuses of power by city leaders. Oladeji’s translation elides the narrator’s sex but infuses masculinity into the political anxiety troubling the city. In the concluding lines of the prologue (2005, 3), the self-references of the commoner who started as a gender-free speaker suddenly become male: Who installed the robber as market chief? Who employed a burglar as night-guard? No man can unravel the mysteries. Or do you know the answers? So let us sit and wait With patient expectation As God works his purpose out.
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gender “neutrality” of ordinary Yorùbá speech that allows :fún<etán Aníwúrà to stake legitimate claims in her fight against fellow chiefs has a very slim chance of translating successfully into the English language, where expressions drip with gendered calculations. This is the fraught reality that confronts Ì<lá and his translators.
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Adélékè Adé#k
These lines would perhaps have passed unnoticed had the sex of the speaker not been left unmarked at the beginning of the speech. Although Smith chooses sex-neutral terms in her translation of the narrator’s perplexity—“These confusing mysteries defy pat answers” (2005, 63)—she, too, switches away from that track in the concluding lines and substitutes the English language’s generic male terms (“man” and “he”) for the second-person plural used to voice the narrator’s perspective in Yorùbá. Thus we have: “Indeed, a man’s house is his home; there/ He can expect not to break his neck in his own bed/ Except perhaps he happens to reside next door to Ìyálóde :fún<etán” (Ì
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I am going home now, A man does not expect to be strangled in his own bed Except if he lives next door to the Ìyá lóde.
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having children and summarily executes any that f lout the rule. She satisfies her unpredictable urges by shedding blood with complete disregard for rules. The play’s two explanations for these behaviors are witchcraft and childlessness. As the explanation goes, :fún<etán repudiates all ethical obligations—except to her friend, Àjí lé —because she is barren and refuses to take advantage of other opportunities that the society affords her to fulfill the yearnings a normative adult is expected to have for nurturing young ones. Because she acts without feeling toward others, her community in the play interprets her antisocial behaviors as sure signs of her membership in the society of witches. In short, childlessness drives her into the cult of witches. Thus, Ìtáwuyì, practically :fún<etán’s leading male slave, says, “ni tí kò bá bí irú ni, kò lè fCràn ni/ ni tí ó bá ti rí ìkúnlC abiyamE rí/ Kò ní fokùn dán EmE #dá wò/ Mé o mA pé ìyá yìí kò lóyún àárA dalC rí.” (“Certainly no woman who has experienced the pangs of childbirth/ Will ever tie a noose around the neck of another human being/ Certainly not around the neck of someone else’s child” [Ì
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Gender in Translation
Adélékè Adé#k
English versions redirect, unintentionally perhaps, Látòósà ’s reiteration of :fún<etán’s edict against slaves’ having children (Nni tí yóò bímE [whosoever will have a child]) to a rule meant only for female slaves. The Yorùbá terms in the original text ref lect the gender neutrality of :fún<etán’s decree and its application. But the English translations render the rule as anti-woman, although in the play world :fún<etán executes both male and female slaves who attempt to have children. Pronoun choice in the translations ref lects Látòósà ’s (and Ìtáwuyì ’s, too) malicious interpretation of events and, though perhaps unintended, channels empathy against :fún<etán. By casting the draconian law as targeting only women, as the English-speaking Látòósà does, the translations affirm the accusation of unbridled and unnatural evil directed at :fún<etán in other utterances. The English translations help Látòósà turn readers against his political enemy far beyond the facts stated in the original text, where sex is incidental and not essential to why :fún<etán exercises power so wickedly. In a revealing soliloquy toward the end of the play, :fún<etán quotes a proverb on age, rank, and comportment to reiterate the correctness of her violent, but not improper, daredevil acts: “Bí il# bá ká àgbà m,/ Ó yC kí ó èe àgbà ” (1970, 77). The sense portrayed in these close-to-final words before she kills herself is that when an honorable, self-respecting, ranking elder is trapped in an embarrassment, the concerned should obey the etiquette of age and rank without considerations for the pain or loss one would have to self-inf lict. Oladeji translates the proverbial commentary thus: “An elder should know the path to honor when he is forced into a corner” (Ì<lá 2005, 50); in Smith’s words, “If an elder finds himself forced into a tight corner,/ He should know how to extricate himself with dignity” (2005, 146). Pronoun choice implies here that the power to appropriate a general observation on worthwhile living belongs to only men. It recodes :fún<etán’s self-understanding of iron will as one more instance of her usurping male prerogatives. In the Yorùbá environment of the original play, not even the most determined of :fún<etán’s opponents deny her rank, age, and status as an elder.7 The inherent sexism of the language used in the above episode also appears in the depiction of :fún<etán’s female slaves, who speak like pathetically unaware users of language at the beginning of the play. Adétutù and Àwrró exchange thoughts about a slave’s suffering in general and in :fún<etán’s household. These are not minor characters, their social status notwithstanding. The play founds the protagonist’s moral culpability and readies her for a tragic fate with the depiction of
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Gender in Translation
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BC# ni ìyà ní ó Qj mí báyìí! Ò ìC wà lóòrùn, ní máa jC C Qk? Eléyìni wà ní bòoji tí óQgbéjú gbéré .... A kì í háa wáyé ni mo wá bí? Ibi tí bàbá gbé yanrí, EmE ò mE b# BC# ni àkúnl#yàn ni àdáyébá (1). Oladeji translates these thoughts into: “The world is arranged so unfairly! Somebody labors his heart out in the sun. Afterwards a different person sits in the shade making derisive faces as he reaps all the fruits of the labour . . . Am I to blame that I was born? It is true one man’s destiny is different from another’s and a father’s fate is different from his son’s. Destinies are chosen in heaven by all men” (1992, 5). The translation disrupts comprehension because Adétutù sounds as if she does not know that she is not a man. The passage is about Adétutù, the words are hers, and nowhere in the play do her male compatriots suffer a worse fate. Yet, her proverb-laden generalizations are gendered male. In perhaps the most egregious instance, Adétutù observes that: Ayé ìyà mà ni ayé rú o! Bí inú m´bí rú kò gbEdA fi hàn Bí inú rú dùn àdùndChìn, èèwA rú ko gbEdA rérìnín àsàsàmAsì (1–2). Oladeji converts these into: “A slave’s life is a life of pain and sorrow! If he is happy he dares not show it. No matter how happy he may be, a slave dares not indulge in hearty laughter” (1992, 5). Farther down in the passage, Adétutù compares necklaces to ropes used for tethering slaves: “rú kò lrùn ìl#k#, àfi tokùn.” Still, Oladeji abandons the sex of the self-referring character and the grammatically imposed gender neutrality of her words, and translates her thoughts as “His neck is made for ropes and not for beads” (Ì<lá/Oladeji 1992, 5). According to Smith, “A slave’s life is a life of pain and sorrow!/ If a slave feels anger, he dares not vent it/ If he is truly happy, he’s forbidden any mirth whatsoever” (2005, 65–66). But she translates the necklace line as “A slave’s neck is
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her merciless execution of Adétutù, and Àwrró’s bold, but futile, daring to poison :fún<etán and foment a slave revolt provides the popular basis for the military chiefs who later finish the job. Regarding her life as a slave, Adétutù says:
Adélékè Adé#k
made for tethers not for necklaces” (2005, 66). Word-choice miscues in both English translations lump the female slave and her female owner as unaware users of proverbs. The language of the translation operates as if general observations, especially when they appear in proverbial forms, must bear male references. When Àwrró recalls her freeborn past as “èmi EmE onílé, EmE Elnà, EmE oníl#” (“I, a worthy offspring of controllers of the land”), Oladeji’s translation calls her “heiress of a prosperous and wealthy man” (1992, 5) and attaches prosperous birth to a patrimony that is completely absent in her words. This contrasts with Smith’s more attentive words: “well born heiress, descendant of a prosperous and wealthy clan” (2005, 66). I do not intend to argue that the lack of gender marking in the Yorùbá pronominal system invalidates the use of gendered rendering in English. My contention is that translations do transport unintended ideological male dominance into situations that do not indicate them. Monolingual readers of the English translations cannot but see illegitimacy when an expression that ordinarily refers to a child born to unmarried partners (“EmE àlè ”) is converted to “bastards.”8 For a selfaware Yorùbá-English bilingual, the tendency to associate universality and generalizations with the masculine will provoke concerns about the truth value of the knowledge that English-speaking scholars produce about their society. Illustrious progeny (EmE) is translated as “offspring” (and not “sons”) in the praise poems of the male war chiefs and male slaves but as “daughter” or “heiress” when female slaves speak of their proud birth. Thus, Àwrró is an “heiress” but f<útúndé is an “offspring of Mogaji.” The “whole world” (“gbogbo ayé ”) becomes “all men,” and the almighty (Elédùwà) is God. A person of royal birth (orí adé ) is called a “prince”; an obstinate person (alágídí ) is a “wicked man.” The talkative Àwrró is “the hag”9 (Ì
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or “person” in the proverb that approximates how humans propose and the almighty in heaven disposes (“rírò ni ti ènìyàn/ Míe m´b lw Vlrun Vba”) registers as “man”: “But though man can make his plans, it’s God who makes things come to pass.” When a male slave voices his doubts about :fún<etán’s humanity as he speculates on her ostensible pleasure in the summary execution of expectant slaves—“Ènìyàn ni ò sArA tàbí bEra?” (2005, 42)—Oladeji uses a context-specific pronoun: “Was that a woman who spoke, or Lucifer?” (2005, 29).11 But the reworking of “person” into “a woman,” although the context seems to justify it, disregards the speaker’s malice. The translation thereby colludes once more with :fún<etán’s opponents who have already concluded that the protagonist is an unfulfilled, barren woman who, left unchecked, will make all women barren. The tendency of sexist language in English translations of this play to obstruct comprehension is further noticeable in other terms used to demonize :fún<etán. The English versions of the iyálóde’s praising herself as an unfathomable, sublime, entity (èèm) (62) after she rejects the warrior chiefs’ demand that she should go into exile depicts her as “Satan” (Oladeji 1992, 41) and “the devil” (Ì<lá/Smith 2005, 132). Her chosen imagery of self-praise, èèmA, does not connote the unappeasable evil that “Satan” represents in Christianized English.12 Properly contextualized, :fún<etán’s phrasing ref lects the other chiefs’ underestimation of her considerable clout and capacious will. In other less obvious misdirected inf lections, amorous friendship (yànrC [25]) becomes “choose a girl-friend”; the elder (àgbà [35]) becomes “wise hunter” or “wise man”; the proverb that says an older or more powerful person is still below the almighty (ajunilE kò lè ju Vlrun lE [35]) is translated variously as “you can’t terrorize men and bully God” (Oladeji 1992, 25) and “a man may play superior to his fellowman, but not with God” (Smith 2005, 100). However, when :fún<etán explicitly boasts that she is greater than men—“Èmi obìnrin tó ju Ekùnrin lE” (77)—Oladeji compares her to other women: “the greatest of all women” (Oladeji 1992, 50)! Hubris and Two Concepts of Being in Yorùbá Three years after the initial publication of fúnetán Aníwúrà, two professional philosophers, Barry Hallen and J. O. Sodipo (1986), launched a research project aimed at understanding the Yorùbá theory of knowledge as indigenous self-ref lection encodes such in everyday language. Their research design involves recording and analyzing conversations
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with traditional male medicine makers (oníègùn) whose skills distinguish them as thoughtful, careful users of language and introspective observers of the reasoning patterns that govern life in their “Yorùbá ” environment. The university-based professional philosophers believed that the organic philosophers could help them understand the basis of “Yorùbá ” thought and action through ordinary language exchanges on what constitutes knowledge (ìmA) and belief (ìgbàgb). In the most systematic analysis of the conversations, Hallen (2000) synthesizes responses about being, knowing, believing, and acting into a “moral epistemology” in The Good, The Bad, and The Beautiful.13 He gathers from his informers that the Yorùbá moral scale divides individuals into two groups: bad humans (ènìyàn burúkú) and good humans (ènìyàn rere). In this order, motivation for an utterance or action is determined on the basis of how the presentation fits into the community’s accumulated fund of evaluations about the individual speaker and the claims asserted. “Bad humans” lie habitually, pick quarrels for no just reasons or causes, steal, and are miserly. They “deliberately and consistently choose to prey upon others in an immoral manner in order to satisfy their own desires” (2000, 76). They pursue their needs monomaniacally, without giving any thought to the effect of their acts and utterances on other people. Because they don’t always choose their victims for cause, their malice is “impersonal, or better, omnipersonal” (2000, 84). The good human will not kill willfully or lie persistently against the prompting of the conscience, or #rí Ekàn. In the language of Hallen’s (2000) analysis, :fún<etán is a “bad type” of human, ènìyàn burúkú. She declares a single-handed opposition to the Almighty, whom she accuses of damning her with infertility. She rejects all pleas for mercy from family, friends, and fellow chiefs when Adétutù is discovered pregnant. She holds on to absolute autonomy, regardless of prevailing sociation rules, until her end in a suicide. Her self-justifying words at the moment she kills herself—“Èmi ni mo ni rú mi/ Tí mo pá,/ Èmi náà ni mo sì ni #mí mi/ Tí mo fC gbà” (I owned my slave/ That I executed,/ And I also own my life/ That I am about to take” (77–78)—echo what she told the family members who came to plead for Adétutù ’s life under the pretext that she was impregnated by the ìyálóde’s younger brother: “Gbogbo nkan le padà ní ayé/ Bí-n-ó-ti-e-nkan-mi-nìyí, kò mà padà./ Bí ó til#padà níbòmíràn,/ Kì í e ldA èmi fúnetán.” (Everything in the world might change/ I-am-going-to-dispose-my-property-in-any-manner-I-desire does not./ Even if it changes elsewhere,/ That will not be the case with me, :fún<etán [46].) :fún<etán’s radical autonomy is incompatible with the
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“Yorùbá ” account of normative being that Hallen distilled from conversations with oníègùn and also with what obtains in other parts of the play. Within that Yorùbá “moral epistemology,” :fún<etán, the “bad human” (ènìyàn burúkú), deserves her tragic fate. Indeed, Látòósà, her main political opponent, alleges “ìwà aburú ” (odious behaviors) against her at the last meeting held by the male chiefs before they attack her. The very broad classifications of “Yorùbá ” moral epistemology cannot justify the sexed distribution of virtues and vices highlighted in the English translations discussed above. If we agree to call :fún<etán a female bad type (obìnrin burúkú) and the opposing chiefs as male bad types (Ekùnrin burúkú), the sex identifiers will be mere adjectives and will still not have explained why even the Yorùbá original translates sex-neutral elements of daily life noted in written history and in oral traditions as fundamental features of woman-being. To understand that element of the play, we have to shift attention to how Ì<lá (1970) codes observations about :fún<etán’s times in forms that ref lect the gender environment of his play’s production era. Quiet agreement—or good-natured disagreement—with menfolk defines women in all versions of the play, including the Yorùbá original. The pregnant Adétutù does not take any onstage initiative to save herself and leaves all intrigues to her lover, Ìtáwuyì, a male slave who cannot help himself. Tòrò, :fún<etán’s sister-in-law, accepts all insults thrown at her by Ògúnníyì, a younger acquaintance and her husband’s friend. Females who do not defer to men in all things, beginning with the ìyálóde, provoke unqualified resentment from their male compatriots. Greed reportedly drives Mojí, Tòrò’s friend and wife of the rude, though hilarious, Ògúnníyì, to abandon her husband. For the habit of expressing her mind freely, Àwrró is distrusted by male slaves who accuse her of talking too much, although when it comes time to poison the ìyálóde, she strikes the first blow in the attempted slave mutiny while Ìtáwuyì, the alpha male slave, squirms in the wings. Àjí lé, the ìyálóde’s only friend, has no regard for her husband, whom she derides as bound to ill luck (olóríburúkú [10]) for not heeding her sound advice that he stop game hunting at his advanced age. :fún<etán, of course, heads the pack of “undesirable” females. She is a cantankerous slave owner, a veritable witch (ògbólògbó àjC), an inexplicably wicked person (ìkà), a profound cheat (arCnij ), a treasonous rabble-rouser (atúlùú), and a reckless killer (apànìyàn). The play contains other troubling translations of traditions that skew perception against women who will not ordinarily be in Hallen’s class of bad humans. Men decide disputes with forceful
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physical contests; favored women exchange insults and wound each other with innuendoes. According to Láwcyin, one of the warmongering chiefs, a woman should not dare to upset the political order in the city: “Kíni kí á ti gb pé obìnrin kanoo/ Àní obìnrin lá sánlà sàn,/ Ni ó Qda gbogbo wa láàmú báyìí ” (57). (How should it be told that one woman/ That one ordinary female/ Troubles all of us so much.) Gender perversion allegation escalates in the next scene when Ìtáwuyì and other slaves try to rouse themselves for insurgency: “Kíni àwa gan an til# Qe?/ Bí ó ti wù kí ó lágbára tó,/ Mebí obìnrin lá sán ni?/ Bí ó ti wù kí Ekùnrin kéré tó,/ Kì í e gbC obìnrin mCwàá. (What actions are we [men] taking?/ No matter how powerful this person might be/ Isn’t she a mere female?/ Regardless of how inconsequential one male might be/ Ten females added up are never up to a match.) Ìtáwuyì ’s words, mainly strung together from hackneyed sayings, assert ostensibly unassailable features of women’s universal being. When it comes to the assured fate of women in conf lict with men, both high-ranking male warrior chiefs and no-rank male slaves are in complete agreement. Overall, the play’s gendering of interactions in a manner skewed against women suggests that the presentation depicts events as they were in the mid-nineteenth century, when it is probably just overlaying twentieth-century relations on the littleknown-about times past. But the play’s larger reality subverts the men’s allegedly traditional sexist thought. Ìtáwuyì ’s words, for example, are full of hollow and patently false observations. This character is a chattel holding of the person he denigrates as belonging to the effete sex (obìnrin lásán), and his social status provides proof that sex does not naturally preclude repression. His enslavement belies the facts of his thoughts and exposes outrightly the absurdity of his ontological assertions about woman-being. Ìtáwuyì is so afraid of :fún<etán that he could not summon enough “manly” nerve to claim his paternity of Adétutù ’s pregnancy while his lover was alive! Soon after making this empty boast, he beseeches a female slave, of the allegedly inconsequential sex, to poison the fearsome ìyálóde, also of the effete sex. Since even Látòósà, :fún<etán’s most powerful political opponent, never belittled her as “mere woman” when they battled each other, we have to dismiss Ìtáwuyì as insincere and classify him, too, as a bad type (ènìyàn burukú). The other male slave, f<úntúndé, who spins the gender-inferiority yarn during the short-lived slave uprising, is not different from Ìtáwuyì. On the basis of sex alone, he casts doubts on Àwrró’s reliability for the task of leading the slave mutiny: “Gbogbo wa la mA pé àwEn obìnrin/ Kò ní gògoQgò tí a
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QfArA pam sí.” (We all know that females/ Lack the organ [the larynx] in which to keep secrets [61].) It looks as though there is a crisis of knowing here. On the one hand, the patterns noted above are consistent enough to support the view that in spite of the lack of gender-specific general references in Yorùbá language, sex-related disparities are not strange to the play’s “Yorùbá ” context. It seems as if males follow certain ways, and females follow others. The patterns also suggest that only the bad types, like :fún<etán, cross the bounds of propriety. The :fún<etán of this play, either in the Yorùbá original or in English translations, is a bad person (ènìyàn burúkú). On the other hand, the textual evidence is insufficient to prove that :fún<etán’s “Yorùbá ” environment recognizes and treats her as if her “badness” emanates from her being female in the ways some of her clearly bad, male opponents have labeled her. Tragic Badness: Ontological or Epistemological? Sex makes a rare appearance in one of the statements offered by Hallen’s “Yorùbá ” philosophical interlocutors when the discussion shifts to morality and beauty: Tí ènìyàn bá QlE sí ilé EkE ní àtij, a máa QsE pé ìwà ni ‘kí o bá lE, kí ó má bá wà lE.’ a máa QkE orin kan ‘iu Qmú àlùmAn, Ag#d#Qmú àlùmAn, obìnrin tí ó dára tí kò níwà asán ló jC, tí ó ní wà lójú tí kò ní ìwà asán ni’ (170). (“If someone [a woman getting married] is going to the husband’s house in the olden days, they would say, ‘Go with character (ìwà) and not beauty (wwà).’ We used to sing a song: ‘There are deceptive plantains [fruit that looks good on the outside but proves to be rotten on the inside]. A beautiful woman without a good [moral] character (ìwà) is of no real value.’ If she has beauty (wwà) of the face and has no character (ìwà)—it [her beauty] is of no real value” [116].) This passage is about different forms of showing, forms of being in the society. One form relates to outer, proportional, physical and necessarily pleasant appearance. The second form also concerns pleasantness, but this time it proceeds from how (or what) others believe their interactions with the showing make them feel. A human being whose interactions with others are abrasive, even if he or she is physically pleasing to behold, is not desirable. Hence, Hallen concludes that the
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“Yorùbá ” evaluate character (or social appearance) “on the basis of a pragmatic criterion—of the thing’s utility to human society in general or to the individuals dealing with a specific situation” (2000, 119). In Hallen’s system, the means to desirable, normative “being” in Yorùbá discourse involves exercising moral diligence in verifying claims shared with others. A normative “Yorùbá ” individual preserves his or her usefulness (and goodness) by sharing only information verified by his or her sensory experience (ìmA) or that believed (ìgbàgb) to have been so experienced by credible others. Ideally in this environment, a claim based on sensory experience is more valuable than one that is dependent on the credibility of others. However, because it is impractical for individuals in even the smallest communities to traffic only in direct experiences, usefulness (ìwà) and goodness are critical for normative social intercourse. When, as quoted above, Látòósà alleges odious being (“ìwà aburú ”) against :fún<etán, he is insinuating that her behaviors are “un-useful” (and not good) for the ruling norms of the city. Her estrangement from her larger family is even more so. Her unprovoked challenge to the Almighty, and her defying the request of other chiefs for a change in behaviors, belong to the same category. It is also in this sense of usefulness that Ìtáwuyì ’s belittling :fún<etán as “mere woman,” or the gendered distribution of virtues and vices noted earlier in both the Yorùbá original and the English translations, jars the senses. The abnormalities imputed to being female do not derive from “Yorùbá ” lived patterns in the play. Associating femaleness with effeteness connotes ontological disabilities that are beyond the individual’s control. In Yorùbá language, this ontological mode of apprehending being is also called character (ìwà). It is this second sense of character (ìwà) that binds :fún<etán, Àjí lé, Àwrró, Adétutù, Tòrò, and the market women as the inessential sex (obìnrin lásánlàsàn). This is also the subtext of the brief appearance of sex in the dialogue excerpt quoted above but which Hallen does not interrogate further. Hallen’s analysis systematizes the epistemic character (ìwà), the socio-moral measure by which individuals are judged as credible, useful, and good (dára) or otherwise. Left out of systemic consideration is the meaning of the other form of showing (ìwà), ontological normativity, the one that subtends the destructive sexist allegations of :fún<etán’s social inferiors and political opponents. In Yorùbá speech, humans show in four forms: (i) as a creature (#dá ); (ii) as a factual phenomenon or ontological character (ìwà); (iii) as an entity circumscribed by one’s perceived socio-moral character, or epistemic usefulness according to Hallen (ìhùwàsí ); and (iv) as an
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entity defined by characteristic physical acts and gestures (ìe) within the society. These forms of showing and or apprehension attach to a restricted series of grammatical predicators. Thus, creating, inventing, or fabricating something tangible is phrased as e #dá or dá #dá: for example, Èdùmàrè ló #dá gbogbo wa (The Almighty created all of us) or Òun ló dá #da wá (It invented our existence). This predication extends in colloquial speech to manufactures: e.g., Ìran wEn ló Q#dá aE (Their lineage makes textiles). Factual existence is predicated baldly with wà: e.g., Wn wà (They are/exist). Presenting through behaviors that can be evaluated within the socio-moral scale carries a verbal phrase that implies cultivation or initiating: e.g., MElá hu ìwà burúkú kan lánàá (pclá grew a bad socio-moral character yesterday; or in colloquial English, pclá behaved badly yesterday). Physical actions and gestures are commonly predicated with e (to do): e.g., Dá Efúnjó e kísà lójú agbo (Dá
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conduct or existence) is barred. The other root morpheme for creation, dá, attaches to a lot of nouns to form verbs—dáre (absolve), dCkun (limit), dá lùú (found a polity), dábàá (propose), dáhùn (answer)—but not to ìwà. It seems as if ìwà —as factual existence or as socio-moral conduct—is phonologically by itself. I would like to speculate that the sexed terms of reference by which :fún<etán is described in Ì<lá ’s original play refer discursively to meaningful motions (ie) that constitute a recognizable set of socio-moral (epistemic) behaviors (ìwà) and, given the contradictions and inconsistencies of those making the allegations of “badness” against her, do not equate the ontological differences (ìwà) implied in the English pronominal system. :fún<etán’s acts are behaviors that derive from living in Ìbàdàn at a point in time and not features of creation, the quasi-genetic and unalterable features of human existence that are described in colloquial Yorùbá speech as àdám and that Hallen’s informants refer to as ìpín (primordial allotment).14 Women are not supposed to f loor men in a fight, but :fún<etán enslaves them. When confronted by Ìtáwuyì, she mesmerizes him with superior incantatory prowess and kills him off with only a little effort. At the last chiefs’ meeting, Láwcyin feigns perplexity over :fún<etán’s perversion of a woman’s inherent softness or calmness (#rA). In reality, however, the complaint is about her acts and epistemic behaviors (ìe and ìhùwàsí ).15 The warrior chiefs and the slaves, both vested antagonists of :fún<etán, blame her for incorrigible unwomanlike actions (ìe) but exaggerate these as violations of woman’s inherent nature (ìwà). In short, malice drove :fún<etán’s antagonists to translate features of epistemic character into ontologically determined conduct. Correcting Mistranslations For the 2005 video movie adaptation filmed by Tunde Kelani, the cinematographer of the 1981 celluloid version, Akí nwù mí Ì<lá authored a screenplay that mitigates the popular demonization of Ìyá lóde :fún<etán Aníwúrà and responds to the concerns of feminist historians about the original play’s role in how she is perceived. The seriousness of purpose that went into the revision could be estimated in the very high caliber of stars who acted minor roles in the film. Kà rí mù Adépjù (a.k.a. Bàbá Wá ndé), a top-echelon star in Yorùbálanguage theater and film, plays Akí nkúnlé; Tóysí Arígbábuwó, an eminent actor in literary and popular dramas, acts as a war chief;
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AdébáyG Fá létí, a denizen of Yorùbá high literary arts, acts the role of Akí ngbadé; and À làbí Ògúndépò, a highly esteemed neotraditional poet, is the Praise Singer. The new movie provides a fuller context for the ìyálóde’s acts. The playwright himself serves as the co-narrator of the prologue, which now places Ìbàdàn within a larger nineteenth-century Yorùbá history and emphasizes its being a slave state: “Ì bàdàn QmCrú, rú r# náà QmCrú ” (Ìbàdàn captures slaves, and its slaves also capture slaves), it is reported. The female co-narrator reminds the playwright to speak of important female political actors, including warriors, like xm<á and Ìyá ffà. Civil unrest defines Ìbàdàn in the new prologue, and :fún<etán is not an anomaly but a fitting emblem of her times. She does not unleash death on her people indiscriminately but is just another belligerent leader among many in a war-prone state. The narrated prologue segues into the protagonist’s confident, calm, and businesslike strides among a retinue of women, members of Ìyá lóde-in-council, with her complaining about Látòósà ’s warmongering. She sits in council with co-chiefs and is present when the vendetta against FGkG, a chief who has fallen out of favor, is engineered by Látòósà, the supreme leader. The opening sequence includes, as historians have insisted the case was, :fún<etán telling her followers that she is tired of contributing to war efforts. The new :fún<etán has a married daughter, xmtóysí, who died at childbirth. She is a doting mother to all, including her slaves, one of whom gave birth to a set of twins and with whom she rejoices wholeheartedly after giving her a sack of money in congratulations. xmtóysí ’s death devastates :fún<etán. She develops insomnia and migraine and will not take medicines for the ailments; she is so profoundly depressed, she wants to die. Her decree against slaves’ having children came to her as a whim when she heard a baby crying during her mourning period. Even Ìtáwuyì confirms in a conversation with his friend that “Ìwà ìyá e## yí padà ni” (The old woman changed suddenly only recently). According to f<úntúndé, her sadness is understandable because xmtóysí ’s death is like a devastating loss suffered at the twilight of one’s life, òfò alC. The heinousness of the alleged misdeeds in the play text is thus significantly reduced. Adétutù and Àwrró behave like true friends toward each other and both consider running away after Adétutù becomes pregnant. The Tòrò-Ògúnníyì comic interlude that berates women generally, and Ògúnníyì ’s wife specifically, has been removed. While Ìtáwuyì contracts Akinkule’s help to save Adétutù, as in the published play text, Àwrró also approaches Àjí lé, :fún<etán’s
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only friend, for intervention. In the new film, women make efforts to aid each other. Perhaps most significantly, :fún<etán dies in her home and is not disgraced as a captive at Látòósà ’s court. She walks calmly into her boudoir and poisons herself, as any person of her status, historically speaking, should after suffering a political disgrace. Látòósà frees her slaves but decrees, as history relates, that the household otherwise be left intact for the family. The new film repudiates insinuations of :fún<etán’s fate being the result of women’s lacking nature violated. The emphasis of the tragedy now rests unmistakably on political treacheries aggravated by the behavioral peculiarities (epistemic ìwà) of a main player. With the new film, Ì<lá seems to want to reiterate that gender, at least in :fún<etán’s Ìbàdàn, is epistemic, historical, and malleable. No sex in the most recent incarnation of :fún<etán Aniwura’s story is effete just for being female. Unfortunately, translators of the original text do not have the playwright’s freedom to rewrite.
Notes 1. See also Akinyele 1951, 281. 2. The closest act to a “misbehavior” that Johnson recorded, and that Awe (“Ìyá lóde Aníwú rà ”) has challenged, is her ill treatment of slaves. According to Johnson, Ìyá lóde :fú n<etá n “had an only daughter who died in childbirth in 1860 and since that sad event took place she became strangely cruel to all her female slaves found in an interesting condition, using all cruel means to cause forcible abortion, most of which ended in death” (1997, 393). See Adérk (2005, 145–56) for how Awe’s defense of :fú nzetá n overlooks the slaves’ plight. 3. Evidence about Ìyá lóde’s activities also indicate that the term could be “mother or all or mother of external affairs” or, in practical terms, the mother “in charge of dealings between members of the society and outsiders” (The Ìyálóde, 145). According to Denzer, ìyálóde is the title of the “most senior” office in the “female hierarchies of chief ” (1998, 1) in Ì bàdà n. Anna Hinderer gives an eyewitness account of how the ìyálóde settled women’s problems in 1854 (1873, 110–11). 4. Awe also lists superior material wealth as a qualification. Other attributes of typical ìyálóde in Ì bàdà n are advanced trading skills learned from close female relatives, a relatively small number of children, and generally obscure spouses. 5. This discussion has benefited heavily from conversations with Oyèrónkw OyRwùmí. See also The Invention of Women (1997, 109–112). 6. How, for example, should the necessarily convoluted self-understanding of a male believed by his grandmother to be an incarnation of her own mother (i.e. the man’s great grandmother) and thus addressed as “mother” by this woman be depicted in English language? Should a translator refer to this character with the male pronoun, or should the translator allow for a female pronoun when the grandmother talks about her “mother” who is also her “grandson”? 7. All her slaves call her “ìyá,” the proper address for older women of childbearing age and the one gender-related term about which the two translators disagree most obviously. While
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8.
9.
10. 11. 12.
13. 14.
15.
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Oladeji chooses a literal equivalent, “mother,” Smith code-switches, keeps the Yorùbá word, and explains it in an endnote. See Oladeji (1992, 6, 10); Smith (2005, 75). Smith seems to be uncomfortable with that English term and when :fú n<etá n first uses it to put down her slaves verbally, Smith renders it as “imbeciles” (2005, 68). This is the most egregiously sexist in the Oladeji text. In the Oxford English Dictionary, a hag is “an evil spirit, daemon, or infernal being, in female form: applied in early use to the Furies, Harpies, etc. of Graeco-Latin mythology; also to malicious female sprites or ‘fairies’ of Teutonic mythology.” Smith: “acting the fool as if he’s the only father the world has ever known” (2005, 73); Oladeji: “the only father in the world! Wretched father of a worthless son” (1992, 9). Smith, as usual, is more observant of the gender implications of her word choice: “Was that a human that just spoke or was it a demon?” (2005, 106). Abraham (1958) translates èèmA as “worry,” expression of “fancy” or wonderment, or even extraordinariness, and the Church Missionary Society (CMS) dictionary interprets it as “strange occurrence.” Although colloquial usage sometimes implies monstrosity, it is in the sense of violated precedence and not the irremediable malevolence implied by “Satan” or “evil.” Moreover, the original play does not use the often translated deity of chance, È <ù, permanently mistranslated as Satan in Christianity. Of course, both translators write È <ù as Satan. See also Hallen and Sodipo (1986), part III of Hallen’s African Philosophy (2006). Hallen does not distinguish well enough the difference between epistemic ìwà and ontological ìwà. He presents the latter more or less as an aesthetic, art historical, sociological problem. Hallen also accepts his informants’ ideas on knowledge (ìmA) at face value. But ìm is never evident as such—that is, as things experienced and cognized directly—as if meaning in the “Yorùbá ” world is a simple matter of sensory feeling. The meaning of meaning was not pursued at all in the dialogues. That meaning, and therefore knowledge, is a function of mediation appears starkly in the insights offered by the oníègùn when they stress the importance of inú (inside, inner wisdom) and speak about the centrality of orí and ìpín (destiny), two deductions that cannot be experienced directly but are central to knowledge (ìm) about individuals. Ìtáwuyì berates :fú nzetá n as “mere woman” (obìnrin lá sánlà sàn) to evoke nature violated. But the first line of this quote indicates that woman’s alleged nature (ontological ìwà) manifests itself in acts (epistemic ìwà).
References Abraham, R. C. 1958. Dictionary of Modern Yoruba. London: University of London Press. Adéèkó, Adélékè. 2005. The Slave’s Rebellion: Fiction, History, Orature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Akinyele, I. B. 1951. Iwe Itan Ibadan ati Die Ninu Awon Ilu Agbegbe Re bi Iwo, Oshogbo, ati Ikirun. 3rd ed. Exeter, UK: James Townsend & Sons. Awe, Bolanle. 1992. Iyalode Efunsetan Aniwura (owner of gold). In Nigerian Women in Historical Perspective, ed. Bolanle Awe, 55–71. Ì bàdà n, Nigeria: Sankore Publishers & Bookcraft Ltd. ———. 1977. The iyalode in the traditional Yoruba political system. In Sexual Stratification: A Cross-cultural View, ed. Alice Schlegel, 144–60. New York: Columbia University Press. Bowen, T. J. 1857. Central Africa. Adventures and Missionary Labors in Several Countries in the Interior of Africa from 1849 to 1856. Charleston, SC: Southern Baptist Publication Society.
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Delano, Oloye Isaac O. 1958. AtúmA ede Yoruba. London: Oxford University Press. Denzer, Laray. 1998. The Iyalode in Ibadan Politics and Society, c. 1850–1997. Ì bàdà n, Nigeria: Humanities Research Center. Hallen, Barry. 2006. African Philosophy: Analytical Approach. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. ———. 2000. The Good, The Bad, and The Beautiful: Discourse about Values in Yoruba Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hallen, Barry, and J. O. Sodipo. 1986. Knowledge, Belief, and Witchcraft. London: Ethnografika. Hinderer, Anna. 1873. Seventeen Years in the Yoruba Country: Memorials of Anna Hinderer. 3rd edition. London: Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday. Ì
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T H R E E
Ode to Patriarchy: The Fine Line between Praise and Criticism in a Popular Senegalese Poem M aram e G ueye
The essay focuses on a popular Wolof poem that emerged in Senegal in the late 1960s or early 1970s and saturated the national radio. It is generally known in Senegal as “Fatou Gaye’s Song”; as result of that, I chose to title the poem “Fatou Gaye.” The poem was delivered in Wolof and probably written in Wolofal, and all translations unless otherwise stated are mine. Although when the poem was written is not clear, according to Margarite Thiam, a retired journalist at the Senegalese National Radio where it was initially recorded, it was between 1965 and 1968. For several years, the author of the text was anonymous. As a result of this fact, there was a plethora of stories about his identity and where he lived. Most of those stories turned out to be unfounded, for in the winter of 2007, I had the luck of finding in the archives of the Senegalese National Radio the only recorded interview that the author had ever done. The journalist who conducted the interview was the late Eladji Mada Seck, who was known for his interest in Senegalese folklore. According to Margarite Thiam, Seck was also the one who facilitated the initial recording of the poem on cassette. At the end of the interview, Seck confirmed that the person who read the poem was Ablaye Gaye Thiadiga, a cousin of the author. This interview shed much light on the poem and the author, but most importantly, it changed, challenged, and sometimes confirmed many of the views on the meaning and function of the text. However, the researcher in me regretted the fact that the author died only a few
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years ago and that during my frequent visits to Senegal, he was in Thiadiaye, only one hour away from my hometown of Kaolack. The invisibility of the author exposed how little attention the Senegalese, especially scholars, paid to the poem. One cannot help but wonder: if the poem were written in French, would the author have faced such anonymity? The probable answer is no, because if a Senegalese had written such a poem in such a deep French, he or she would have sparked the same interest that poets such as Senghor and the like have enjoyed. This neglect of the origins of the poem and the lack of interest in the text as a whole by Senegalese scholars and literary critics is evidence of how Africans tend to abandon their national literatures and languages and instead focus on European literary discourses. Although it is evident that the poem was written in Arabic script,1 its language of delivery was Wolof and hence not considered of much scholarly interest. The general public was mostly interested in the so-called deep Wolof it was delivered in and the male biases that the poem seemed to reinforce. Senegalese, especially men, used it as a didactic tool. Fatou was set up as a role model that every Senegalese woman should emulate. The complete submission to the will of their husbands that the poem was advocating was a norm- and Fatou’s attitude toward Eladji Gaye was something that every married woman was taught she should strive to attain. For most women, however, the poem had a different meaning. They thought it did not have a single author and that it had been conspired by men to reinforce women’s subordination and control their conduct within marriage. To them, a person like Fatou could never have existed. The idea that a man wrote such a text to praise his wife was a false one and was meant to set the bar too high for women, luring them to “slave” for their husbands in order to get a praise song like Fatou’s. Though they admired her qualities, they understood Fatou to be a fictional character whose attributes were exaggerated by men (the collective authors). Such diverging views along gender lines set interesting points by showing the ambivalence of the poem’s status as a “praise song.” It is obvious that the text does praise Fatou, and the author goes to great length in talking about her qualities and the vital role she played in his life, his household, and the community at large. However, it is not free of sarcasms as well as direct and indirect criticism of other people. It is also a lengthy lament that underscores the guilt of the author and holds lots of contradictions, especially when it comes to gendered
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understanding of the role of men and women in marriage. One initial general assumption was that Eladji Gaye abused Fatou until she died and he decided to praise her out of guilt. Although such claim has not been verified, the text does show hints of abusive behavior on the part of the author. He often admits having been a difficult husband and having acted like “the authority” he repeatedly refers himself to be in the poem. Thus the poem becomes a way of acknowledging his guilt without openly admitting to it. As much as the poem was beautifully crafted, I could not overlook the way it advocated male supremacy. After hearing it played on the radio for years, I came across an audio copy of it during my senior year in college in 1996, when I was specializing in African literature and learning how to read and write Wolof. Like most Senegalese, I went to school learning French, English, German, and even Arabic but was never given the option to study Wolof. In our coursework as students in African literature, we had to take a class in Wolof. It was in that course that my interest in oral literature started. As a native Wolof speaker who just been introduced to the reading and writing of the language, the transcription and translation of the text became a personal task for me. I was amazed that the Wolof language was so beautiful and that the author had the genius to create rhymes and melodies that until then I thought possible only in European languages. This poem allowed me to embrace my native language, which was considered by many Senegalese intellectuals as “backward” or as the language of the private sphere. Wolof was barely spoken in offices and other public places where the “educated” gravitated. Knowing how to speak French was a sign of prestige. It was also during my research at the time on the wedding songs of the griottes from the Saloum region that my feminist awareness got sparked. This became a turning point in how I viewed the poem. Soon after collecting wedding songs and understanding how they constitute a feminine epistemology on womanhood in Senegal, I started to pay more attention to the message of the poem, thus shifting my interest from its linguistic aspect to the gender dynamics and biases that it was articulating. My first transcription and translation of the poem date to the late 1990s, when I was a senior in English at the University of Dakar. Since then, I have revisited it numerous times, changing and correcting things as I continued my research on the text. Over the years, every summer I visited Senegal, I learned something new about the poem and its author during conversations with both
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Ode to Patriarchy
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men and women. But Eladji Mada Seck’s interview with the author constitutes my most valuable finding yet in my ongoing research. In 2008, I stumbled on the interview with the author of the poem in the archives of the RTS (Radio Television Senegalaise). This interview is a gold mine of information about the events that sparked the production of the poem, the author, and how his text was received by his other wives. In the rest of the essay I look at how the poem, together with the only known interview of the author, are panegyric accounts of Fatou’s life while also being criticisms of women in general. Eladji Gaye’s text continuously shifts from praise to criticism, framing Fatou as the exemplary wife and condemning or even looking down upon any woman who expresses any kind of resistance to men’s abuses within marriage. In the interview, both the author and Eladji Mada Seck, the interviewer, repeatedly suggest that men are women’s “masters” on earth and in heaven and therefore are meant to be “worshipped,” just as Fatou worshipped the author. They also imply that any woman who fails to do so is wrong. For this reason, I understand the poem to be a taasu in the tradition of the “satirico-laudatory” female panegyric genre practiced by Wolof women. But both text and interview go beyond taasu and become accounts of Wolof gender epistemology. I understand gender epistemology as knowledge and ways of thinking about gender. While mourning the loss of his wife, Eladji Gaye repeatedly admits to abusive behavior on his part. Nevertheless, such admission does not prevent him from saying that husbands are meant to be worshiped and that they are the authority, hence denying any wrongdoing on his part. Thus, his mea culpa is coupled with a sense of male entitlement based on gender roles within the Islamized Wolof household. But interestingly in many places, his text contradicts such male supremacy because it frames Fatou as the pillar of Gaye’s household and his world in general. Taasu: To Praise or Not to Praise Most studies of African panegyrics focus on praise poems that are often the recital of a person’s genealogy or epithets, such as the Yoruba oriki, the Zulu izibongo, or the tagg practiced by the Wolof. Not much has been written about the fine line between praise and criticism. In his study of the tanbasire, a genre of praise poetry performed by women in positions of servitude in the fifteenth-century
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There is a very subtle relationship between praise and satire. A performer, at the same time that she is praising one person, is always provoking another, by incorporating into her formalized narrative some impromptu malicious remarks. One such panegyric genre is the taasu. Taasu are often improvised selfaggrandizing poems composed by Wolof and Laobe women in Senegal during family ceremonies and other female gatherings. These poems are highly personalized but can also be performed for a patron, usually a woman. Taasu can include tagg, but they mostly focus on the attributes (often exaggerated) of the person being praised. They are often solo performances where the singer uses the audience as chorus. Although drums can accompany the performer, they are not used until the very end, when the performer is ready to dance, or at moments to create rhythmic refrains. Although in the past the genre was primarily female identified, today men perform it at family ceremonies, and there is a very similar male genre performed by wrestlers called baakk. Both baakk and taasu are selfpraise that is meant to boost the identity of a performer vis-à-vis rivals. For this reason, they are not free of direct or veiled attacks against such rivals. In Wolof culture wherever one sings someone’s praises, one is highlighting someone else’s shortcomings. The most accurate definition of the genre comes from Cheikh Thiam, who calls it “satiricolaudatory” because the practice of gaaruwaale is utilized within taasu in order to attack, respond to,or criticize an adversary or rival. Gaaruwaale is a speech form whose real addressee is not the one the speaker seems to be addressing. In Selfish Gifts: Senegalese Women’s Autobiographical Discourses, the major published work that focuses on taasu, Lisa McNee (2000) does not give a complete definition of the genre but examines how the practice of gaaruwaale is more prominent in polygamous households, where the success of one wife is the downfall of another, as the following Wolof proverb states: The peace of mind of a woman is a co-wife who dies during the harvest season. (Saggoy jiggen mooy wujj wu dee ca ngoopte.) While the saying communicates how co-wives never wish good things for one another, its most important message is that the downfall of one wife is the success of another or vice versa. Thus while taasu often start with someone’s praise, they do not necessarily continue or end as such, and if on the surface they appear as praise there
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West African kingdom of Jaara, Mamadou Diawara alludes to this fact (1989, 125):
Marame Gueye
is often an underlying satirical message that is decipherable based on the context of performance. Because Eladji Gaye confirms in his interview that Fatou was not his only wife, her praise song is simultaneously a gaaruwale for the other co-wives. As he himself puts it in the poem, “those who are not smart cannot tell praise from insult,” thus expressing the fine line between the two. Fatou the Good Wife, the Good Mother, and the Caregiver Like most taasu, Fatou’s poem is primarily a praise song that parallels the typical behavior of mourners who tend to idealize their lost ones by remembering only the positive aspects of the subject’s life. Eladji Gaye enumerates Fatou’s numerous qualities and most of his laudation focuses on her roles as the good wife and mother, the two major attributes of women. As wife, Fatou was the perfect companion. She stood by her husband and made him appear to the outside world as someone who was accomplished and successful and whose household was happy and prosperous. The pillars of the wall of comfort she built around me are falling down. I have looked for the veil of discretion she covered me with but did not find it. Fatou completed me and as soon as she left I became incomplete. This complementarity is not just on the sexual or reproductive levels. Fatou’s attitude shows that Wolof women are indeed very central to the running of the household. Although the husband is viewed as the head of household, his contribution is more on the financial level. Wives are in charge of organizing the household, including the welcoming of guests and the care of extended family members who live in the home. I established this household and Fatou brought her hospitality and support. Fatou is gone, I will pawn the house. Fatou’s relationship to Eladji Gaye epitomizes the Western saying that “behind every successful man there is a woman” or, as feminists like to articulate it today, “next to every great man stands a great woman.”
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According to Wolof gender ideology, women play the role of cheerleaders for their husbands, and there is the belief that one recognizes a good wife through her husband’s appearance and how harmonious the household looks to outsiders. The above stanzas speak to how as a wife, Fatou helped create such an environment. Although most times the image of the perfect household is only illusory, the culture advocates sak or sutura, which is the idea of make-believe or being discreet. Fatou covered my f laws among my peers Telling me “you can sell or pawn anything I own when you need to.” Often, women carry the burden of making the household look harmonious by finding ways to supplement the husband’s financial contributions and covering his shortcomings. Wolof women are notorious for accumulating gold jewelry as a way of investing for the future of their children or for difficult times. But often this gold is used to bail out husbands in trouble or to help out with the financial upkeep of the household should the husband lose his job or have a poor harvest. Besides being materially and emotionally supportive of her husband, Fatou is the perfect example of contemporary Wolof society’s image of a good and submissive wife as conveyed in Eladji’s words: She never went out of the house unless I sent her. She never pestered me with questions, she was smart not to bother me. She never talked back at me, she never made fun of me. Islamized Wolof gender ideology advocates women’s seclusion and voicelessness. Married women are expected to always remain home. As the authority, the husband’s words are not to be challenged or questioned. There is a child–parent relationship between the wife and the husband. Even if the latter is wrong, the wife should not talk back at him or question the veracity of his statements. A husband’s word always takes precedence over his wife’s. Gaye’s poem shows that Fatou was not only a supportive wife but a great co-wife. In the interview, he recounts how she always abided by the traditional rules of polygamy. In order to create harmony in
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polygamous households, Wolof tradition requires that younger wives respect and view the senior wife as their elder. Gaye tells the anecdote of how Fatou showed that kind of respect by always cleaning her senior wife’s room before taking care of her own. She also would take the meals she cooked into the senior wife’s room. Wolof families eat around one bowl and in polygamous households, women take turns cooking. The fact that Fatou took the food to the senior wife’s room for everyone to have the meal 2 there symbolizes her respect for her. Although Gaye says meals in the senior wife’s room during Fatou’s cooking turns made him look weak as a husband, he does praise Fatou’s attempts to live peacefully with her co-wives, an attitude that most junior wives do not have anymore. Fatou’s behavior toward her senior wife shows that she did not view the latter as a competitor, but rather she understood her to be her older sister, as recommended by Wolof traditional rules on polygamy. Besides being a good companion to her husband and a respectful cowife, Fatou was an exemplary mother to everyone in the household. “She taught me how to take care of the famil”. This reaffirms the idea that in Wolof culture, like in many African communities, wifehood cannot be dissociated from motherhood. In The Black Woman CrossCulturally, Filomina Steady states that (1999, 29): [e]ven in strictly patrilineal societies, women are important as wives and mothers since their reproductive capacity is crucial to the maintenance of the husband’s lineage and that it is because of women that men can have patrilineage at all. While I agree with this statement, I find that African women’s centrality as mothers goes beyond bearing children for the husband’s lineage. Women such as Fatou encapsulate a concept of motherhood that transcends childbearing. The Wolof word njaboot gi, which I translated into “family,” encompasses the extended family with nephews, nieces, and other relatives who might be living in the house. To acknowledge that Fatou taught her husband how to take care of the household as a whole testifies to her wisdom as a mother and caregiver and reinforces the notion that in African communities, mothering is not always directed at biological children. It is common to see children being reared by women who are not their biological mothers. The Wolof have a practice called sedd, whereby a woman or a family gives away a child to a relative or friend and is completely removed from how the child is raised. The person to whom the child is given is his/her
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mother and has complete control over his/her care and upbringing. Thus a mother is not always the one who gave birth. There are several kinds of mothers in Wolof culture, and a child can have numerous mothers who each serve a function in his/her life. For example, talibes, children who attend Koranic schools away from home, often have many mothers in the places where they go to study. Part of their training is to go around begging for their food and materially contributing to their teacher’s household, where they are interned. Thus having several mothers helps in creating equilibrium in their lives away from home. One mother can guarantee them lunch everyday, another dinner or clothes, while yet another might allow them to take a shower at her home or even provide them with a place of hiding should they run away from teachers, who are notorious for being very abusive of these trainees. Thus, Fatou is the symbol of the good mother who not only cares for her children but is also a mother to all who need care and help. As Steady rightfully argued, this role is not dissociated from her status as a wife because, as Eladji Gaye testifies, “She looked at me with the same eyes my mother looked at me.” Fatou loved with the same unconditional love of a mother. She was able to look beyond any kind of abuse and forgive any wrongdoing on the part of “her children” the way mothers often do. As mother, she was the strength of the household. The pantry is empty, where am I going to find food? The mother has left, where am I going to feed from? In line 146, Gaye reinforces the image of the mother as nurturer by comparing Fatou to the saaxx, a small hut that serves as pantry in rural areas where the grain to be consumed until the next harvest is kept. This metaphor is very powerful and shows that Wolof women are central to the physical and emotional nourishment of the household. Using the same tactic in line 150, the author compares Fatou to the mother whose breast he sucked, reiterating his dependency on her. This praise is at the same time a lament because as a male in a predominantly patriarchal culture, Eladji Gaye, like most Wolof husbands, was not much involved in the upbringing of his children. If I am loyal, I would rather cry than see her children’s tears. If I were the one who died, no one would be anxious about the children’s fate.
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Marame Gueye
If a mother’s work (in marriage) is food for her children, I know they will not envy anyone. The author uses a popular Wolof proverb—a mother’s work (in marriage) is food for her children [liggeyi ndey añup doom]—to assert that for the sake of her children, Fatou has “worked” hard to insure them a future through her submission to their father and will thus guarantee his and Allah’s blessings upon them. In practice, this proverb makes motherhood the primary reason for Wolof women’s submissiveness within marriage. The “worshiping” of husbands is only for the sake of one’s children. According to Wolof gender codes, a woman’s devotion to her husband guarantees a good future for her children: “May her children live long to receive the blessings from my prayers” Fatou’s motherly attributes and her capacity as a caregiver was also extended to visitors. In polygamous households, the woman whose turn it is to cook often takes care of guests, but in Eladji’s words, Fatou was always available to welcome guests regardless of whether it was her turn or not. Fatou took good care of my guests and never delegated tasks. Her hospitality and kindness also went beyond guests and relatives. She was kind to domestic animals and seasonal workers, who in most households are considered strangers and whose interaction with family members is often business-based. The servants and animals are just as worried as me. The house was always full with strangers, Today they have made her death a reality and they no longer stop by. In the interview, Gaye tells the story of how Fatou used to help his workers get extra money by selling the wood they gathered while they were away working on the farm. People would tell her,”You have so much time to waste.” And she would reply,”I am worshipping Allah
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Wolof women serve as the primary caregivers to their children. Because of the latter’s future, they are willing to suffer the most abusive situations within matrimony.
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She was so generous that she gave to those who didn’t ask. She gave to the poor. She would lend to those who didn’t have and would not boast about it or pester them for repayment. Fatou the Noble and Beautiful Woman According to Gaye, Fatou’s behavior with everyone is normal because of her social background. In the tradition of taasu and praise poetry, he traces her ancestry and points out her good birth, placing her at the top of Wolof social hierarchy. As a person of noble background, Fatou’s good behavior emanates from her nobility. She was not of ordinary birth because Damel3 was her ancestor (line 157). Fatou came from the buur family, which was the category of nobles from which rulers were chosen. Because Wolof society is very hierarchical, nobility is something to boast about. Although colonialism and its aftermath deprived nobles of their fortunes and aff luence, most Wolof of noble birth still cling to their aristocratic background, especially in praise poetry. It is believed that those who come from a noble background cannot or should not commit shameful acts. When the Wolof say that a person is not a noble (ki du gor), they are often saying that whatever shameful act the person committed is not an act of nobility. On top of tracing Fatou’s genealogy to the rulers of the Kingdom of Cayor, Gaye also places her within the two venerated families of religious leaders in Senegal. Her religious background was also not small because she was the descendent of religious clerics. She did not have any grandparent who did not establish a Koranic school. Whoever knows Mawdo Malick4, knows Modou Karim her father, Whoever knows Serigne Touba 5 knows Modou Gadji her grandfather. This connection between Wolof aristocracy and Islamic clerics is not random because indeed, both religious leaders mentioned in the above
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with this act of kindness and it pleases the head of the household.” Gaye also praises Fatou’s generosity toward her neighbors:
Marame Gueye
stanzas come from pretty much the same family of rulers of former Wolof kingdoms. However, its usage in the context of praise poetry or taasu speaks to how in contemporary Wolof society, an Islamic aristocracy has formed, often overshadowing any other traditional Wolof social status. Although people still like to boast about a noble background, it is more prestigious to claim descent from a family of religious clerics. In the interview, Gaye takes such claim much farther by tracing his and Fatou’s genealogy to Abu Bakr, the first caliph of Islam. He recounts how as a Moor from Mauritania and a descendent of Abu Bakr Siddiq, their ancestor Babacar Gaye, also a religious cleric, left his country of birth over a dispute. When he arrived at the bank of the Senegal River, the fisherman who took people to the other side would not take him across. So he recited some verses from the Koran and blew on his walking stick, dipped it in the waters, and the river parted, creating a sandy path for him and his followers. Such acts, Gaye recounts, earned their family the praise name Gaye Mool.6 This mythical story traces their genealogy to Islam and represents their ancestor as a saint, thus allowing Gaye to self-praise, which is very typical of taasu. The ancestor’s miracle parallels that of Serigne Touba, who is believed to have said his prayers over the ocean when his French captors forbade him to set his prayer mat on their vessel. Gaye also emphasizes both Fatou’s physical and moral beauty: God matched her personality with her looks. She was beautiful without showing it off. During taasu performances, women singers often highlight the subjects’ beauty in a vigorous attempt to represent them as extraordinary persons. Fatou embodies such perfection. On top of her moral, religious, and intellectual qualities, she was physically beautiful. A Wolof proverb states that often when a woman is physically beautiful, she has hidden failings of which men should be wary. As the saying goes: Admire a woman but do not trust her ( Jigeen soopal te bul woolu). Fatou challenges such notions because she is perfect at all levels: Fatou was religious, loyal, and hospitable, She was smart enough to avoid reprimand, She was beautiful without showing it off, She was genuinely generous, She was patient without being foolish. She was quiet without being mean.
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The Fine Line Between Praise and Criticism This seemingly exaggerated praise of Fatou is in tandem with the criticism of his other wives and any woman who is not like Fatou. As most taasu show, the subject is set apart from the group through the highlighting of her qualities, which ultimately contrast with the lack in others who are possible rivals. As mentioned earlier, this aspect of taasu is mostly known as gaaruwaale. In his frustration over the premature death of his wife, Gaye seems to be pretty careless about how his praise of her might affect others. It was shocking to learn through the interview that Fatou was not Eladji Gaye’s only wife and that when the poem was issued, his other wives were alive and in the household. This finding turns Fatou’s praise into a message with double meanings. Despite Gaye’s efforts in the interview to deny that some statements in the poem were directed at his other wives, it is hard to not view them as such. In the context of polygamy, women have a tendency to see each other as rivals and compete at many levels. Singing Fatou’s praises and representing her as the exemplary wife would likely make her cowives jealous and question their own behavior. While lines such as “whoever does not like Fatou’s song will no longer be welcome in this house” would have been viewed as a harmless reaction to the loss of his beloved wife, the possibility that it could be addressed to her co-wives and rivals turns it into a gaaruwaale. The author anticipates such a possibility and therefore denies it. But even if the co-wives were sorry for Fatou’s death and might have sympathized with Gaye, they were likely to be bothered by his excessive praise of her and his show of preference for her. They have every reason to feel undermined, because the very fact of their husband celebrating Fatou and losing his mind over her death is enough to send to them the message that he valued her more. This is also apparent in the interview, where Seck asked him about how his other wives felt about Fatou’s song and he replied: There were times when some gossips were asking them if I valued Fatou more. But they are women who know authority and their
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This representation is definitely the reason why most women saw her as a fictional character. She was just too good to be true. Eladji Gaye often tries to fight such assumption. Several times during the interview, he reiterates that whatever he said about Fatou is true and that there are more wonderful attributes he left out.
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This statement confirms that for Gaye, Fatou was the standard and that his other wives had a long way to go in order to deserve a song like Fatou’s. Gaye further undermines his other wives by completely denying their presence and the possibility of their filling Fatou’s shoes: “The mother has gone, where am going to feed from? The general of my army has fallen, I should surrender my weapons”. Although no two women are alike or play the same role in polygamous households, Gaye makes it look as though his life ended with Fatou’s death and that his relationships with his other wives are meaningless. He takes this farther by asserting that his life no longer has meaning and that he just is going to let go: I am no longer running, I am no longer walking fast, My friends, I am actually dragging my feet. I no longer see atop the trees any fruit that is worth stretching my hand for. Some insecure folks might think I am talking about them But anyone who does not like Fatou’s song, I wish you die. Those who are not smart cannot tell praise from insult. I am only recounting Fatou’s good deeds before she died. The author is fully aware that his words can hurt, but he doesn’t seem to care much. This is typical of gaaruwaale, where the performer or speaker does not want to blatantly name her addressee but would spare no effort to make the latter identifiable by giving as much information as possible to her audience, yet always leaving room for denial of any attack should the person complain. The last stanza quoted above is the author’s attempt to justify his carelessness and show that he is only speaking the truth. However, the fact that Fatou was his second wife makes such “truth” more hurtful for his other wives because in Wolof gender ideology, senior wives are often the ones that husbands give such praise because they are the ones who were there since the beginning and might have suffered the ups and downs of life with him. Husbands also tend to favor their newest
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elders told them that I was a loyal man and that if they behaved like Fatou, even if they died before I did, I would sing their praises like I did with Fatou. So they stayed put and renewed their efforts much more.
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The granary is empty, where am I going to find food? The general of my army has fallen, I must surrender my weapons I would reply: “When the master jeweler has left, what is the use of the apprentice if not to clutter the forge?” Although he clarified the last line by stating in the interview that it was not directed to anyone but meant that Fatou was the master jeweler and he was the apprentice, it is obvious that the other wives could appropriate this message and view it as if they were the apprentices to Fatou. While messages to his other wives are mostly veiled or insinuated, Gaye’s attack on other women who are not like Fatou is pretty blatant. To him, there are only two categories of women: the good ones and the bad ones. The first category, to which Fatou belongs, worship their husbands: Wherever one sings Fatou’s praises one would recognize the good women. They would say: let’s worship our husbands much more and emulate the good women. The second group is those who refuse to view men as God’s extension on earth, and Gaye uses Fatou’s poem to reprimand them: The bad women would hear it and say: “Men are hypocrites. I do not care about heaven or earth because I have it all,” The bad women used to tell her: “this is not kindness, it is foolishness. Fatou, demand your rights, if he divorces you someone else will marry you.” According to him, any woman who challenges male domination is a bad woman. The so-called bad women must have seen signs of abuse to advise Fatou to demand her rights. They resist gender codes that turn husbands into masters and wives into their slaves. These “bad women” see divorce and eventually remarriage as options to an abusive marriage. This position is against contemporary Wolof gender practices where spouses, especially wives, are coached to avoid divorce at all cost,
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wife, which means that Fatou’s song was a terrible insult to Gaye’s latest wife at the time.
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turning them into perpetual victims in the hands of abusive husbands and in-laws. Also for fear of being labeled a “bad woman,” wives shy away from any resistance; they internalize their victimization and suffer in order to get their husbands’ praises, hence paradise7 and a prosperous future for their children. Fatou’s response to the “bad women” confirms that many women believe they are inferior to their husbands and see marriage as a way of worshiping God and abiding by the rules of tradition: She would reply: “I have not come to showcase my good birth or my beauty, I have not come to join an equal, When one sees one’s master, one should worship him, otherwise one would lose. Whoever wants the jewels and the gold can have them. I know if I go to heaven with more thanks from my husband, when you join me there, you will envy me,” “If Sharia did not recommend marriage or if it were not a tradition we inherited, No one would count me among their household to test my limits or abuse me.” Thus, Fatou herself is not denying the possibility of abuse; she sees it as inevitable in marriage, as vested in her understanding of Islam and traditional gender codes. Such a statement and the advice given by the “bad women” parallel the long-held assumption by some Senegalese that Eladji Gaye’s poem was a mea culpa because he abused Fatou until she died. Even if he didn’t physically abuse her, Gaye’s strong belief that women are inferior to men suggests a chauvinism that most likely would make him treat Fatou and his other wives as inferior and subordinate beings. Despite the lack of evidence for such a claim, the text shows several signs of abuse by Gaye. He acknowledges having been difficult to live with and his sense of guilt is apparent throughout. I used to try to push her limits in order to make sure she was genuinely kind or that she was faking it, Fatou would end up taking care of me like a disciple. I would do whatever I wanted and she would say nothing until I was ashamed to look her in the eyes. I took her for granted and my household was not peaceful, but Allah had a plan.
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It is then obvious that guilt is one of the reasons for the poem. The author’s statements of pain, such as “whoever is not sad about Fatou’s death, I wish you were dead,” are an exaggeration that seems to be guilt-driven. Although it is valid to mourn one’s love, it is another thing to curse those who do not sympathize with your plight to the point of wishing them dead. Selfish Gift But the author’s sense of guilt seems to be overshadowed by his strong chauvinism, which makes the poem more about him than about Fatou. Although he beautifully praises his wife and does his mea culpa in the process, he is not apologetic about his male supremacy and more than once reiterates that he was entitled to it. He often refers to himself as the “authority” or the one who is “responsible” for his wives. Thus, the poem is in many ways a gift to himself and his fellow Senegalese males. In Selfish Gifts, Lisa McNee rightfully argues that taasu are selfish gifts that are vested in an exchange relationship whereby the performer offers her art and self while the audience or patron offers money or other material possessions. Although Fatou’s poem can be viewed as a gift to her, I understand it to be more of a reward when one looks at the gender dynamic within which it was produced. Gifts can be given without a prior act from the receiver, while rewards are repayment for a service rendered, whether benevolently or with the expectation of some sort of recompense. Within the Islamized Senegalese culture, marriage for women is “work,” for the complete submission to their husbands is something they should seek to accomplish as long as they live. A husband’s thanks and a positive testimony for a job well done are a passport to paradise for a wife. However, it is often said that a husband should not thank his wife while “she is at work.” This means that thanks from a husband come only when she dies. There are instances, though, when husbands publicly thank their wives, especially during family ceremonies such as the marriage of a daughter or on the occasion of the wife’s departure for the pilgrimage to Mecca. Such thanks become rewards for women, because those
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The sin I have committed against God for him to punish me with Fatou’s death, I think about it every day to the point that I can no longer lead prayers.
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who are not deemed “good wives” do not receive them. They are also selfish, because often the husband who is giving the thanks is publicly viewed as a grateful person who is worthy of whatever sacrifice the wife made. This is apparent in the interview. In his introduction, Eladji Mada Seck, the interviewer, says that Fatou’s poem was a gift to all Senegalese women for their submissiveness, hinting that they should in fact feel worthy of Eladji Gaye’s creative kindness. After the interview with the author, Seck had a discussion with two male guests, Alassane Fall and Eladji Mansour Gaye, who were supposedly very experienced in marriage affairs. When asked what they thought about the poem, Alassane Fall replied: Fatou Gaye was a good woman, but Eladji Gaye is also a good man because Fatou has done her wifely duty, but for Eladji to publicly recount it for all to get enriched from it is noteworthy. It is noteworthy that no females were invited to give their opinion of the poem. Both commentators make Eladji Gaye the focus of the poem and imply that he did not have to praise Fatou in public, and that his doing so was proof of his goodness. While a woman’s submission is her “duty,” a man’s open gratitude is sign of his generosity. In the already mentioned statement about his other wives’ reaction to Fatou’s praise, the author in his own words communicated the idea that he is a loyal person and would praise any wife who deserved it. The poem thus is a praise of Fatou only on the surface, for throughout, Gaye does not cease to reiterate his belief that husbands are the “masters” and wives are the “slaves,” and that in order to be admitted to Allah’s coveted paradise, the latter have to worship the former. Gaye’s chauvinistic views obscure his praise of Fatou, turning it into a validation of male supremacy: She obeyed my orders from morning until night. She knew I was me, she knew she was her.8 The author believes that the relationship between husband and wife is hierarchical and that he was the superior one. In the interview, he gives an interesting analogy of how he understands such a relationship: Fatou’s behavior toward me was that between a neeno and her noble patron. Because when a neeno is in the presence of her noble
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patron, she would recount all the good deeds of the latter’s forefathers and would forget the bad ones. I really like such an attitude in a married woman whereby she would highlight her husband’s qualities and cover his f laws. This comparison underscores his beliefs that husbands are superiors. The interview, while shedding light on many assumptions about the poem, also confirms Wolof gender biases. The poem, the interview, and the subsequent comments by the two male guests are examples of Senegalese men’s own taasu or self praise-an ode to patriarchy. The interviewer, a male, asks leading questions that parallel the author’s chauvinist ideology. Eladji Mada Seck: So Fatou would always tell you what pleased you and avoid what you did not like? Eladji Gaye: Yes, just like I said it. At the end of the interview, Seck made the following concluding remarks: “All Senegalese women are like Fatou -Be assured that this song belongs to all Senegalese women. And we hope that all Senegalese women will emulate Fatou’s behavior because for a woman, her husband is her master on earth and in heaven.” Both Gaye and Seck seem to agree with this line of thinking and confirm that their understanding of gender is based on an Islamic viewpoint that advocates that women are inferior to men. Men Are Watches, Women Are Watch Repairers Despite this blatant claim of male supremacy, Gaye contradicts himself in the poem as well as in the interview by admitting that Fatou was in fact the one who occupied a position of authority and centrality: I was a watch, Fatou was the watch repairer. She had advanced me until I became your peer. Men are only watches, women are their repairers. Women, men are only watches, women are their repairers.
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Ode to Patriarchy
Marame Gueye
The metaphor in the lines above is very interesting, because it contradicts his representation of Fatou as a meek and submissive wife. The relationship between the watch and the watch repairer is one of complete dependency. The watch (husband) is in a passive position while the repairer (wife) is an active agent. The watch depends on the repairer in order to keep up with other watches. Therefore, women are the doers and men are the receivers. Fatou’s centrality to the household in her role as a wife, caregiver, and caretaker challenges gender divides that advocate her subordination and represent her as a the inferior one. Before I buried Fatou I was the man, now I am a wimp, I cheer other men. When I buried the noble woman I knew I would be null. Fatou Gaye’s poem is a rich text that illuminates gender roles and expectations in Senegal. It is a taasu that praises Fatou as a mother, a wife, a good neighbor, and a woman who seems to transcend the ordinary. Based on the author’s panegyric laudation, Fatou is represented as a multidimensional woman whose qualities transcend reality, thus falling in the tradition of taasu subjects whose qualities are amplified by performers. According to Eladji Gaye, Fatou’s behavior within the marital institution is an example for every Senegalese woman to emulate. The author sets her up to be the perfect wife and denigrates any woman who is not like her. Like a taasu, her song incorporates praise and criticism. Gaye’s other wives and other women who challenge male supremacy are labeled “bad women,” thus unworthy of praise. However, the praise song is not just about Fatou. While Eladji Gaye’s praise of his departed wife seems to stem from apparent guilt over his treatment of her, he nevertheless claims he is entitled to her submission. Using an unfounded Islamic view on the relationship between men and women, Gaye represents husbands as “masters” and wives as “slaves” whose salvation depends on the formers’ blessings. He validates his chauvinistic behavior and at the same time sings his own praises. For him, his creative work is a reward for Fatou and proof of his generosity. As her husband, he did not have to praise her for doing her “wifely job.” However, although Gaye advocates male supremacy and represents Fatou as the subordinate, he continually contradicts himself throughout the poem. It is clear that Fatou was the pillar of his household and the one who “made” himself into who he was in the community. Thus his poem is convoluted and shows how complicated gender
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roles in Wolof society are. This text raises many questions that require further investigation.
1. Although I have not come across a written copy of the poem, the chanted style in which it is read suggests that it a text written in Wolof using Arabic script. This style is called Wolofal and is very famous among Senegalese scholars who attended Koranic schools. 2. In polygamous households it is usual that people eat a communal area or in the veranda of the wife whose turn it is to cook. 3. Damel was the title of the ruler of the Wolof kingdom of Cayor. 4. The founder of the Tidjani brotherhood based in Tivaoune, Senegal. 5. Serigne Touba or Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba was the founder of the Mourid brotherhood based in Touba, Senegal. 6. Mool is the Wolof word for fisherman or boatman. According to Gaye, when his ancestor completed his miracle, one of his followers told him “I did not know you were a mool,” hence the nickname Gaye Mool, which became a praise name. 7. According to Islamized Wolof gender codes, women gain paradise through worshipping their husbands. 8. She knew her place as the subordinate and recognized him as the authority.
References Barber, Karin. 1991. I Could Speak until Tomorrow: Oriki Women, and the Past in a Yoruba Town. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Diawara, Mamadou. 1989. Women, servitude and history: The historical traditions of women in servile condition in the kingdom of Jaara (Mali) from the fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. In Discourse and Its Disguises, ed. Karin Barber and P. F. de Moraes Farias, 109–137. Birmingham University Center of West African Studies, UK. Gueye, Marame. 2004. Wolof wedding songs: Women negotiating voice and space through verbal art. Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Binghamton. McNee, Lisa. 2000. Selfish Gifts: Senegalese Women’s Autobiographical Discourses. Albany: State University of New York Press. Nnaemeka, Obioma, ed.1997. The Politics of (M)Othering: Womanhood, Identity, and Resistance in African Literature. London: Routledge. Okpewho, Isidore. 1992. African Oral Literature: Backgrounds, Character, and Continuity. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Steady, Filomina, ed. 1999. The Black Woman Cross-Culturally: An Overview. Rochester: NY, Schenkman Books Inc.
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Notes
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FOU R
Women and Leadership in Nigerian Islam: The Experience of Alhaja Sheidat Mujidat Adéoyè of Ò#ogbo Davi d O. O gungbi le
In recent years, there has been an explosion worldwide of interest in gender issues, especially pertaining to women’s status, position, and role both in institutions and in society at large. Academic literatures burgeoned with theories on the origins of gender inequality, gender stereotypes, and the role of culture and religion in the structuring of inequality. Perhaps more than any other discipline, religion appears to be at the center in the growing interest in women and gender studies. Nigeria, one of the most populous African countries, has a high percentage of Muslims among its population. Scholars of religion, particularly church historians and African Christian theologians, have done significant research on Christian female religious leaders, most importantly among the Evangelicals, Pentecostals, and Charismatics (Arulefela 1994; Bateye 2001). But despite the significant presence of women in Nigerian Islam, no serious academic attention has been given to their importance in the Nigerian religious community. While it is true that both the early Islamic subordination of women and the patriarchal sentiments of Nigerian culture still inf luence the religious sensibilities of Muslims in Nigeria, there is strong evidence that Muslim women are making an impact both in public life and in society as a whole. This paper will examine the status of women in Nigerian Islam by focusing on Alhaja Sheidat Mujidat Adéoyè,1 the founder and leader of
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CH A P T E R
David O. Ogungbile
Fadillullah Muslim Mission (FMM), ÒEogbo, in southwestern Nigeria. The FMM was a movement born out of a religious experience considered to be strange in Islam. The paper explores the distinctive religious experience of Alhaja Sheidat and the resultant founding of the Fadilullah Muslim Mission, ÒEogbo, which enjoys huge patronage both from the people of the city and the numerous visitors who come from other parts of Nigeria. It investigates her religious activities and practices, such as praying, fasting, prophesying, healing, and therapeutic rituals; her acceptance within the Muslim religious and patriarchal communities; and public responses to her in religio-cultural and interreligious contexts. The study uses a multidisciplinary approach that combines anthropology, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. Women in Early Islam Montgomery Watt looked at the position of women in the earliest Islam, using anthropological evidence to show that the culture of the Arabic community from which Islam emerged had no regard for women. However, he explained, “the position of women was improved at various points by Muhammad and the new religion he proclaimed” (Watt 1991, 161). It is noteworthy that the Koran enjoins the equality of men and women. Not only does Islam recognize Ā isha 2 to have “played an important part in the early years of Islam” (Bowker 1997, 1043), but Prophet Muhammad gave a deep honor to women and mothers. When asked “whom one should most honor, he replied three times, ‘Your mother’, and only then added, ‘Your father’ ” (Ibid.). However, Hossein Nasr explained, “the role of women is seen as being more in the preservation of the family and upbringing of children” (Nasr 1995, 461). With regard to Islam in Nigeria, because the cultures and religious worldviews of southern and northern Nigeria are distinct, it would be wrong to assume that Muslim women throughout Nigeria have similar status and roles. My attempt here is not a detailed treatment of these differences, but rather an overview of the religious environment. Islam had contact with Hausaland around the eleventh century but gained prominence in the fifteenth century, when as Ayesha Imam noted, “Islamic inf luence and political power came to be strongly associated” (Imam 1994, 124). As Islam gained prominence among the ruling groups and rich merchants, the seclusion of women became a status symbol, and women’s formal roles began to lack recognition. During the colonial period (1862–1960), seclusion was used as a means
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of resistance, most especially against the British colonial authority’s heavy taxation. Thus, there was an adaptation of local customs of the Bori—spirit possession—into Islam to produce a different kind of identity, which was designated Hausa-cum-Islamic identity, with women assuming a somewhat hidden status and roles. In the 1980s, as Muslim women began to recognize the effect of seclusion on their political and civil rights, they began to form themselves into groups like the Federation of Muslim Women Association of Nigeria (FOMWAN), which tries to “redefine Islamic discourses on women while maintaining legitimacy with existing religious and state authorities” (Imam 1997, 124). Commentators and writers on Muslim women have always emphasized pronouncements from the Koran and the hadith on issues relating to marital relations and injunctions imposed on women, with their roles and status in religious administration and leadership seen as secondary and as subject to both human and divine ordinances. Islamic Movements and Societies: Muslim Women in Òogbo Islam was introduced to ÒEogbo in the 1820s but made its permanent footing in the 1850s during the reign of Oba Ataoja of ÒEogbo, Oladejobi Oladele, Matanmi the First (1854–64). However, the main Islamic movements did not f lourish in ÒEogbo until the second quarter of the 1900s. Traditional Islamic movements that spread across the most notable communities in Nigeria could generally be classified into four categories: (a) conservative movements, (b) liberal movements, (c) liberation movements, and (d) mystical movements. These classifications are based not on the beliefs, tenets, and pillars of Islamic faith, but on the practices of these movements in relation to those of what could be termed “orthodox” Islam. The other factor is their pragmatic approaches and reactions to contemporary social realities, including the cultural milieu in which Islam finds itself: challenges to gender segregation, age groupings, educational interests, and emphases on theology and rediscoveries. Among the “conservatives” are the Lánasè Islam and Bámidélé Islam. The Ahmadiyyah, Nawair-Ud-Deen, and Ansar-Ud-Deen movements are in the “liberal” group. The Isabat-UlDeen movement is an example of the “liberation” movements, while the “mystical” movements may take from all those movements or may include individual devotion to spiritual experiences. The most prominent Muslim groups in ÒEogbo are part of the “liberal” movement,
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Women and Leadership in Nigerian Islam
David O. Ogungbile
perhaps because of the Yorùbá worldview, which emphasizes human communality and blood relationships. Ethno-national identities are considered more binding than religious affiliation. Liberal movements also include those groups that are more interested in the renewal and revitalization of Islam. In ÒEogbo as in other parts of Nigeria, most known Islamic movements were founded and led by men, as is the practice in traditional Islam. However, political, religious, social, and psychological factors fostered the introduction, growth, and development of Islam in ÒEogbo. One factor that is germane to this study was the formation of socioreligious Muslim societies and associations, among which were the Egbe Bínúkonú3 and Egbe Alásàláátù. The Egbe Alásàláátù, perhaps the first Muslim women’s group, was established in the early 1870s. Membership in this society, with their subgroups in various parts of the town, is open to married women, widows, and divorcées. The society is controlled by what members describe as a central executive committee consisting of officers elected among them. The head of the executive council is designated the Iya Suna. Her duties involve creating religious awareness among members, admonishing them on the proper attitude toward religious services, and leading in the “washing” of female corpses, as the Koran stipulates that corpses should be washed only by people of the same sex. The Iya Suna was also charged with organizing members for full participation in rites of passage such as naming, marriage, and funeral ceremonies. A second official, the Iya Adinni, disseminates information among members. Also prominent in the group is Olori Oniwaka, Waka,4 leader of the chorus singers. As the Egbe Alásàláátù society was gaining prominence, members carved out a sitting space for themselves in some sections (Ratibi) of mosques. This was frowned upon by some of the Muslim leaders, notably Muqadam Ayeniromo, Alfa Kanpa of Idi-Omo, and Alfa Latunde of Idi-Omo in ÒEogbo. According to them, “women were not even expected to come into the mosque, talk less of forming a society.”5 Alhaja Salamotu Olobekan, having just returned from the holy pilgrimage in Mecca, informed the men in the mosque that women ought to be recognized in Islam since both men and women performed the hajj. Alfa Kanpa of Idi-Omo argued that although women were given the opportunity to perform the hajj, they could do so only in the company of their husbands. However, another Muslim cleric, Imam Tijani of Obatedo, granted the Alásàláátù women the opportunity of free association with the Ummah, the Muslim community, but appointed a man, Alfa Ajini of Idi-Omo, as their instructor and lecturer.6 During
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our research, we were aware of discriminatory attitudes among men toward women in the ÒEogbo Muslim community, and in all likelihood the situation would be similar in other parts of Yorùbáland, as it would in other parts of Nigeria. Women are not given any true religious leadership roles, in spite of the fact that their activities are more visible in the social sphere as singing became a prominent function for them, where the aesthetic and emotional expression of culture in African communities takes place. The focus of this paper, Fadilullah Muslim Mission, is a unique Islamic movement in Nigeria. Unlike in other Muslim movements, its leader, Alhaja Sheidat Mujidat Adéoyè, lays claim to divine manifestation reminiscent of the Aladura brand of Christianity among the Yorùbá. In addition, the therapeutic patterns of this movement are found to have some basis in religio-cultural practices within the Yorùbá community. Alhaja Sheidat is making a tremendous impact on the community, and her organization is of considerable relevance to people in the town. In addition, her leadership of the movement has produced a new religious expression of Islam in ÒEogbo. In order to properly situate our discussion of this woman and her movement within the ÒEogbo-Yorùbá religio-cultural context, we must look at the phenomenon of religious experience as fundamental to founding the movement that she now leads with such powerful charisma. Alhaja Sheidat was born into Mogbà Compound of ÒEogbo in Osun State. The date of her birth remains unclear. She attended elementary school but was not exposed to formal Koranic teaching. However, because her parents were practicing Muslims, she could practice the most rudimentary aspects of Muslim prayer, usually learned through imitation. Alhaja Sheidat was married in 1980 to Abdul-Lateef Adéoyè, an indigene of Abéòkúta, an electrician by profession and a practicing Muslim who was an active member of the Sherif-Deen Movement. Alhaja Sheidat traded wholesale in bagged rice and beans, traveling to the northern states of Nigeria to purchase foodstuff. Her store was at Oluode market in ÒEogbo, where numerous customers came to buy food items from her. This used to be one of the major markets where foodstuff, including daily food items, was sold. The Religious Experience of Alhaja Sheidat Mujidat Adéoyè According to Alhaja Sheidat, one day in her store when she was with customers, she was seized by certain spirit and soon became a full-time
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Women and Leadership in Nigerian Islam
David O. Ogungbile
Muslim missioner, healer, and leader of the movement that emerged from her spiritual encounter. How does religious experience become important in the life and operation of a religious leader? How does this experience inf luence the movement that such a leader establishes? How does religious experience give form and shape to religious practices? Observers and commentators on religious practices usually focus on religious expression, which is the fruit, and not on religious experience, the roots, basing their judgment on the popular biblical dictum “by their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7, 16). Historians of religion are interested in both the experience and the expression. They focus on experience, as it gives meaning, form, and shape to all the dimensions of religious phenomena. Most religious leaders and founders, including Pentecostals/Charismatics and Evangelicals in Nigeria, trace their charisma to an encounter with the Divine that is personal, intense, transitory, and numinous, allowing them to claim that their movement is based in eternal truth. Sheidat’s spiritual journey began with her encounter on the evening of August 23, 1997, when while selling foodstuff she was suddenly caught in a frenzy. She “ordered” her co-wholesalers and the multitude of hawkers and customers who surrounded her to cover their heads with scarves. For minutes, she was screaming and shouting, and her behavior was interpreted to be a manifestation of some mental derangement. The audience began to fear for her and became apprehensive of this manifestation. Sheidat, however, started to recite “Lai lah, illah ‘llah” (“There is no God but Allah”). In this state of spirit-possession, she started to prophesy. When she regained consciousness, her colleagues told her what had happened to her and how she was prophesying. She herself was stupefied, more so because although she was brought up as a Muslim, she was only a nominally practicing Muslim at the time. Moreover, Adéoyè pointed out, she could not at all read the Holy Koran. There was also no known antecedent of spirit seizure among the Muslim of ÒEogbo. This practice could be found only among a group of Christians called the Aládurà or “praying people,” notably of four main denominations, the Cherubim and Seraphim Church, Christ Apostolic Church, Church of the Lord, Aladura, and Celestial Church of Christ, all having a Yorùbá origin. The Aládurà are regarded as a Christian denomination. Sheidat was led back to her residence at Ìsàlè Aro. When she got home, she narrated her strange experience to her husband. The husband, now known as Alhaji Abdul-Lateef Adéoyè, a staunch Muslim and a leader among the Sherif-Deen Muslim Movement, was equally astonished
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since such an experience was strange to him. Notwithstanding, Mujidat Adéoyè engaged in a seven-day fast and prayers. At the expiration of the seven days, she began to prophesy to people. She prayed for those who came to her, and she would not charge or request monetary gifts for services rendered to her clients. Surprisingly, despite her initial recognition in the community, Sheidat and her husband did not show much enthusiasm and were reluctant to embrace what they considered a strange experience. They sought to dismiss it, and insisted on continuing their normal way of life. This reluctance was reminiscent of biblical figures such as Moses and Jeremiah, except that in this case, the figure was a woman. Soon, moreover, when Sheidat began to experience mysterious disappearances of the monies she made from her sales and losses of portions of her inventory, she became gripped by fear. In contrast to her trading success before the spiritual experience, her business started to decline as her clients dwindled. She recounted that no matter how long she stayed in her store, she was unable to sell much of her goods and returned home in anger. Furthermore, each time she traveled to buy goods from the north, she lost money and foodstuff, running her business into deficit. On the other hand, during this same period, she had many unsolicited clients who came to her to request prayers, claiming they had been led to her by mysterious and strange inf luences. Two issues were bothering Sheidat. The first was economic. Would this new calling mean that she would have to abandon her trading activities? If she accepted this call, what would she live on? The second concern had to do with the practice of praying and prophesying. How would she administer the prayers to the clients, this being a new kind of experience for her? She claimed not to have seen a Muslim engage in such a practice, neither had she received any divine instruction on the step-by-step process of how to address the needs of her clients. These misgivings notwithstanding, she reluctantly performed these divine tasks, and her clients testified to the accuracy of her prophetic revelation and the efficacy of her prayers. Also, while she stayed home performing the divine mission, her fellow traders would sell her foodstuff for her and bring the proceeds to her at home. Realizing that her needs would be taken care of, she decided to yield to the divine call. Her clients began to multiply, and her reputation for efficacious prayers and prophecies led to the emergence of a new congregation. Searching for a name for the group, Sheidat and her husband consulted the Holy Koran and adapted a name from a story that helped to explain how a
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When there comes to them a Sign [from Allah], they say: “We shall not believe until we receive one [exactly] like those received by Allah’s Messengers.” Allah knows best where [and how] to carry out His mission. Soon will the wicked be overtaken by humiliation before Allah, and a severe punishment, for all their plots. Those whom Allah [in His Plan] wills to guide, He makes their breast close and constricted, as if they had to climb up to the skies: this Allah (heaps) the penalty on those who refuse to believe (Surat 6, 124–25). The surat refers to unbelieving generations who would mock the works of Allah and reject the signs He gives to convince them of His greatness. These generations, which would dictate to Allah how He should do His work in His universe, are described as being deaf and dumb, in the midst of profound darkness and headed for ruin. Allah continues to send His messengers with signs, however, so that the unbelieving will not hold Him responsible for troubles that will soon befall them and furthermore, that the generations would reserve no right to dictate to Him how He would do His work in His universe. This surat, according to Alhaja Sheidat and Alhaji Adéoyè, illustrates the inexplicable nature of Allah’s work, as evident in the emergence of the movement founded and led by a woman who is bestowed with the gift of working miracles. Secondly, it exposes those who adopt a negative and disdainful attitude toward the work of God, especially as manifested within a patriarchal community that questions women’s leadership. And thirdly, the verses and the story demonstrate the unrestricted working of Allah, explaining why the experience of Sheidat should therefore be seen as Àmì 6l7run, the sign from Allah,7 which is revealed in her miraculous works and efficacious prayers and validates her spiritual experience. The sign then becomes a testimony to the divine appearance of the Holy One that is strange and new in Islam. Therefore, Alhaja Sheidat’s movement was then called Fadilullah, a contraction of the Koranic expression Ash-ah-min-Fadil-ul-llah, Ash-ah-dul-Fadil-ul-rubi-l, meaning “this is the sign from God.” 8
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woman like she could assume such a nontraditional role in Islam. This story from the sixth surat of the Holy Koran, titled “An’am” or “The Cattle,” shows how Allah can act as He wills both in His world and in the lives of human beings:
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Alhaja Sheidat now heads and directs the Fadilullah Muslim Mission. Formerly a lady of fashion who loved dressing in various kinds of apparel and jewelry, she now dresses in a white gown with a f lowing scarf, signifying the purity of God and her desire for simplicity. Allah, she claimed, had prescribed her white apparel, instructing her to jettison all worldly fashions. Fadilullah Mission represents a rather unusual expression of Islam in the ÒEogbo community. First, it was founded by a Muslim woman. Second, it was founded as a distinct prayer movement within Islam. It is committed to problem solving, not only for Muslims but also for people of different religious traditions. What started at Ìsàlè Aro in a small room has grown into a large congregation such that they now have a fairly big mosque9 and a personal house on an eight-acre plot in the Òkè Ayépé area of ÒEogbo, which Alhaja Sheidat and Alhaji Adéoyè had bought to build their own home before Alhaja’s divine call. The mosque can accommodate about 2,000 people with tents constructed around it during the annual retreat and prayers, when temporary sheds are built for the ummah’s (congregation’s) use. The impact of this movement is so great that the street leading to the place has taken the name of the movement, Fadillulah Street. One of our principal informants, Alhaji Araokanmi,10 a nonmember, who has his own house along Fadilullah Street, remarked on the astonishing popularity of this movement among the indigenes and non-indigenes of ÒEogbo who troop in daily to Alhaja Sheidat for prayers. She continues to attract her members, clients, and a yearning population who are faced with diverse existential, physical, and metaphysical problems ranging from misfortune to barrenness to lunacy. The Practice of Praying and Divine Healing Prayer is central to the life and ministry of Alhaja Sheidat Adéoyè. She engages herself in constant prolonged personal and private prayers and fasting, even joining her band in a seven-day prayer and fast, which began two weeks after she delivered her baby. She was involved with the members throughout the period of her pregnancy. She holds a 41-day prayer once a year, beginning in July and running through the anniversary of the founding of the movement on
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Sheidat Mujidat Adéoyè and the Fadilullah Muslim Mission
David O. Ogungbile
August 23. She also organizes a regular fortnight prayer meeting for members. Sheidat emphasizes that her power comes only from prayers and fasting, and she avoids magical practices such as those allegedly used by traditional African healers, Muslim clerics, and some brands of “spiritualist” Christian healers.11 People come to Sheidat both from within and outside ÒEogbo with various problems such as barrenness, blindness, deafness and dumbness, and protracted illnesses. During our research, we noted that although her clientele includes both males and females from all religious denominations, females are more numerous. The fact that female clients usually outnumber male may be due to the fact that problems associated with infertility, childbearing, and women’s health and the negative social meanings associated with a protracted wait for suitors all have profound implications for women’s well-being. As a result, women patronize healers of all varieties. Yorùbá people generally hold as having a bad destiny a woman whose marital or procreation life is faced with unresolved crises. Whenever such healers provide solutions, the beneficiaries, as a matter of “divine duty,” spread the news. Sheidat attends to clients every day of the week except on Friday, which she chooses for her rest and for the Jumat service. Her hours are from 9:00 a.m. until all the clients have been attended to on any given day. She also has a band of assistants who attend to clients on her behalf on not-too-difficult cases. They are called afàdúràjagun (prayer warriors), or prayer-band. All their activities are done in and around her mosque. Sheidat also organizes prayers for different categories of people. Pregnant women hold their prayer meetings on Tuesdays. Congregational prayers for members and visitors are held every Thursday from 3:00 to 6:00 in the afternoon and every Sunday from 11:00 in the morning to 3:00 in the afternoon. The Sunday prayer is called Àdúrà Ì#égun (prayers for victory). There is a fortnight prayer meeting from Friday evening through Saturday morning. A seven-day prayer held annually between May 10 and May 17 includes prayer and fasting through morning and evening. Sheidat does not encourage the practice of giving testimonies, which she sees as a form of advertising. She believes that any client or member who is a beneficiary of her healing activities would not need to be prompted, as in a formal testimonygiving occasion, before he or she would broadcast to the numerous people who may need such help. Sheidat’s prayer services are extemporaneous and are often interspersed with choruses expressing a strong belief in the efficacy of prayers
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and their power to change an “otherwise unchangeable” condition sealed in destiny. When one’s destiny is considered unfavorable, her followers assert, prayer can always be used to change it. One traditional belief among the Yorùbá is that each individual chooses his or her fate before being born into the world, and this preordained fate is regarded as the determining factor in each person’s existence. Thus, one’s success or failure in life is predestined (Abimbola 1976, 113; Idowu 1996, 180; Ogungbile 2001, 206–207). One of Sheidat’s choruses expresses her deep-seated belief in the power of prayer over destiny: Bi kádàrá ò ba gbè mí, K’àdúrà ò gbè mí, Olúwa K’àdúrà ò gbè mí, Bi kádàrá ò ba gbè mí, K’àdúrà ò gbè mí, Òjò ti n pa’gún bi, se b’jjj ti pk/2x A-lé-ni-bá-ni-bá’re l’lml aráyé/2x Bi kádàrá Ò bá gbè mí, K’àdúrà Ò gbè mí. Translated: Destiny may not favor me, Let prayer avail for me, Lord, Let prayer avail for me. Destiny may not favor me Let prayer avail for me, Lord; It has been long since the vulture has suffered from the rain/2x The wicked ones of the world always drive one to meet his/her fortune/2x So, destiny may not favor me Let prayer avail for me. Alhaja Sheidat prescribes and uses olive oil, water, sponges, and toilet soap for therapeutic purposes. Prescriptions are usually given extemporaneously and spontaneously during prayer sessions. Clients usually bring kegs or other containers that are used to fetch water. The prescribed items for any particular client are chosen based on an essential and symbolic connection between these items and the client’s problem. For example, if a revelation is made that someone’s problem has been caused by having swallowed a mysterious object in
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Women and Leadership in Nigerian Islam
David O. Ogungbile
a dream, prayer is offered over a container of water, and the person is told to drink it. If someone has been diagnosed with a bad destiny, a ritual bath is usually recommended. The client is told to bring up to seven sponges and soap, all of which are prayed upon. The client is instructed to go to the river to wash her or his head a specific number of times, usually seven times or multiples of seven or three. The Mission has a stream very close to the mosque, which is used for clients who receive prescriptions for ritual bath. However, Alhaji Adéoyè pointed out that a client might decide to go to her or his own stream or river of choice for the prescribed ritual bath. A person may also be told to rub the ailing part of her or his body with consecrated olive oil. Members are restricted from going to traditional healers to seek any other help. At the regular daily 9:00 morning prayer “clinic,” clients queue up, sitting on benches that are arranged outside the mosque. Clients enter one after the other to explain their reason for coming to Sheidat. She prays extemporaneously and then explains any revelations that she might have received during her prayer. She prescribes appropriate remedies, which the clients then perform. Sheidat does not charge any fee for prayers offered but accepts thanksgiving, gifts, and free-will offerings from clients. Fadilullah in Its Religio-cultural Context and Expression It is important to mention that Fadilullah Muslim Mission asserts its claim to Islam by following certain practices in the mosque. For instance, in keeping with tradition, Sheidat has an imam who conducts the Friday Jumat service in her mosque. The fact that Alhaja Sheidat Mujidat Adéoyè was born into a Muslim family and had been a nominally practicing Muslim is typical among her contemporaries of the same social status in the ÒEogbo community. Her husband, Alhaji Abdul-Lateef Adéoyè, had also been an active member of a popular Muslim society in ÒEogbo, Sherif-Deen Muslim society. According to Alhaja Sheidat and her husband, some Christian groups have offered her money to join their fold, because they felt that such spiritual experience as hers belonged in their own religious denomination. The fact that she refused to accept the offers shows her commitment to Islam. Despite having been discouraged and persecuted by some leaders of Islamic movements, she bluntly refused the gifts offered
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by her Christian enticers, insisting that she will remain a Muslim. Furthermore, Sheidat and Adéoyè, fully convinced of the authenticity of their mission, found their root in the Holy Koran, which provided a name for their movement. However, the spiritual climate from which the Fadilullah Mission emerged had strong indigenous traditional religious and Christian inf luences. ÒEogbo is the home to many devotees of Osun, Ifa, Obataala, Sango, and Egungun, and traditional practices are dominant at both the institutional and casual levels. The festivals of these deities, particularly of Osun (the Mothergod), who represents a kind of hegemonic civil faith of the people, are intense and imposing, on the royal throne as well as on the populace. These devotees engage in daily, weekly, and annual patronage of the shrines where they collect sacred water from the Iya Osun, Osun chief priestess, and Awowo Osun Busanyin, the chief priest of Osun Busanyin (Ogungbile 2003a). ÒEogbo is also characterized by a strong Christian presence, particularly of the popular Christ Apostolic Church (Ile Agbara Adura), situated at the Agricultural Settlement, Oke Osun, in ÒEogbo. There are four big halls at the Oke Osun site, while another large edifice serves as a spiritual home for numerous clients at the Ogo Oluwa Station Road in ÒEogbo (Ogungbile 2003b). It is here that Deputy General Evangelist E. O. Babalola offers healing to people experiencing diverse psychological, physical, and spiritual problems. Constant praying and fasting as well as intensive use of water for therapeutic purposes are noteworthy in this church. The fact that the Fadilullah Muslim Mission borrows from the two religious traditions mentioned above explains in part both the positive response of the public to the mission and the misunderstanding or misinterpretation of its practices. The religious experience of ecstasy, for example, is often demonstrated by women in the Christ Apostolic Church and other Aladura churches as well as among the devotees of Osun and other deities. The mission’s mode of service, praying activities including praying assistants, afadurajagun; number of days praying and fasting, and choice of the days and hours for prayer are notable paradigms of the Aladura movement. The use of sacred objects, especially holy water,12 olive oil, consecrated sponges and soaps, and ritual baths in streams, expresses a very strong connection both with the Aladura brand of Christianity and devotees of Osun and other prominent deities. These overlapping practices illustrate the permeability of religious traditions among the residents of ÒEogbo.
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As the case of Alhaja Sheidat Mujidat Adéoyè shows, religious experience is crucial to the emergence of women in the new expression of Islam in Nigeria. Religious experience is capable of altering stereotypes in religious beliefs and practices, just as authenticity can situate any movement in spite of prejudices and biases. Culture is very important in responding to religious experience and expression, and religion, if given its rightful position, can offer constructive solutions to spiritual, metaphysical, and psychological problems. This paper suggests that spiritual experience is a potent aspect of religious leadership and that women are always relevant, though they are often stereotyped and excluded from the leadership of the world religions, such as Christianity and Islam. The academic study of religion should focus more clearly on local experiences in order to properly appreciate the varied roles of women, especially in Islamic religion and spirituality. Given the historic role of religion in delineating women’s inequality, studies such as this one serve to reveal their leadership capacities and will enlighten other disciplines on the role and status of Muslim women in politics, in the economy, and in society as a whole. Notes 1. Throughout the text we will refer to her as Alhaja Sheidat or just Sheidat. Both Alhaja and Sheidat are titles. Alhaja is a title taken by Muslim women who have performed the pilgrimage to Mecca; Alhaji is its male counterpart thus her husband is Alhaji Adéoyè. Sheidat is the female counterpart of Shaykh. This is the name that members and clients of her movement call her in various combinations. 2. Aisha bint Abi Bakr (614 CE) was married to Prophet Muhammad after Khadija died. Muhammad admitted that Aisha was his favorite. It was claimed that revelation often came to him while he was in her company. She joined a growing opposition party against Uthman, the third caliph. After Uthman’s assassination, she, together with Talha and alZubayr, took control of Basra and in December 656 fought against Ali b. Abi Talib, the successor to Uthman. She was quoted as being the source for many hadith, especially those concerning Muhammad’s personal life. See Bowker 1997, 35. 3. Egbe Bínúkonú was founded in 1864. See Gbadamosi 1978, 53–54. 4. Waka are a special kind of patterned lyrics and rhythms commonly associated with Yorùbá Muslim women. 5. Personal interview with Alhaja Humani Akanke Bello, Ile Lemomu Oluode, Òsogbo, January 18, 1998. 6. Ibid. I acknowledge the assistance of Mr. Fatai Araoye Bello (920392), my Part IV student. 7. Ash-ah-min-Fadil-ul-llah, Ash-ah-dul-Fadil-ul-rubi-l (“this is the sign from God”). This expression comes from the sign God showed to the generation of Prophet Sahliu. The generation of Sahliu asked him to show them a sign that Allah had truly sent a message to them. Allah caused a cow to descend for the prophet to show to the people. The people asked him to explain this strange appearance. He told them that it was a sign from Allah, but
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Conclusion
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9. 10. 11.
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the people still rejected it. Although they began to fear that this large cow would consume all the water, still they rejected this sign. Allah then told them that if they rejected it, they would be punished (Koran 6, 125). Personal interviews with Alhaja Sheidat Mujidat Adéoyè, founder of the Fadilullah Muslim Mission, and Alhaji Abdul-Lateef Adéoyè, husband of Sheidat Mujidat Adéoyè, Fadilullah Street, Òkè Ayépé, ÒEogbo, June 2002. They moved into this mosque in the year 2001. Personal interview with Alhaji Fatai Araokanmi, Fadillulah Street, Oke-Ayepe, ÒEogbo, June 2002. The supposed magical elements alluded to include àfòse (speak-and-cause-to-be), olúgbohùn, hàùntúrú, and tírà. Àfòse and olúgbohùn are magical voices of imprecations, which are used to cause things to happen. They are commonly used by traditional medicine men. Some among the Aladúrà movement use Olúgbohùn. Hàùntúrú is the practice of inscribing Arabic letters or statements on a slate, which is then washed off. The resulting liquid is drunk by the client to effect a curse, most often on one’s enemies. Tírà are Arabic causative inscriptions wrapped and tied with cloth strings and kept as a protection against any unforeseen incident or accident. Hàùntúrú and tírà are commonly found among Muslim herbalists. Although the late Alhaji Harun Ajisebiyawo, the founder of the Jamat-ul-Musli-inah, a popular ÒEogbo Muslim missioner, was famous for the use of water, his practice was not as organized as that of Alhaja Sheidat.
References Abimbola, W. 1976. Ifa: An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus. Ibadan, Nigeria: Oxford University Press. Arulefela, O. A. 1994. Women in the church. In The Anglican Church in Nigeria (1842–1992), ed. J. A. Omoyajowo, 156–73. Lagos: Macmillan Nigeria Publishers Ltd. Bolaji O. Bateye, 2001. Women Christian religious leaders in southwestern Nigeria. Ph.D. diss., Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria. Bowker, John (ed.), 1997. “Women” The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions. (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press): 1041–1044. Gbadamosi, T.G.O. 1978. The Growth of Islam among the Yoruba: 1841–1908. London: Longmans. The Holy Bible, (KJV), 1958 Philadelphia, PA: The National Bible Press The Holy Qur’an, n.d. Marmaduke Pickthall Translation Imam, A. M. 1994. Politics, Islam and women in Kano, northern Nigeria. In Identity Politics and Women: Cultural Reassertions and Feminisms in International Perspectives, ed. V. M. Moghadam, 123–44. Boulder/San Francisco/Oxford: Westview Press. Nasr, S. H. 1995. Islam. In Our Religions, ed. Arvind Sharma, 425–532. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Ogungbile, D. O. 2003a. Yoruba cultural identity: A phenomenological approach to Osun festival. In Religion, Science and Culture, ed. P. A. Dopamu and E. A. Odumuyiwa, 179–96. Ilorin, Nigeria: A Publication of the Nigerian Association for the Study of Religions. ———. 2003b. Myth, ritual and identity in the religious traditions of the ÒEogbo people of western Nigeria. Ph.D. diss., Obafemi Awolowo University., Ile-Ife, Nigeria ———. 2001. Eerindinlogun: The seeing eyes of sacred shells and stones. In Osun across the Waters: A Yoruba Goddess in Africa and the Americas, ed. M. Sanford and J. M. Murphy, 189– 212. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Watt, W. M. 1991. Women in the earliest Islam. Studia Missionalia 40: 161–73.
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Women and Leadership in Nigerian Islam
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F I V E
Engendering Critical Spatial Literacy: Migrant Asante Women and the Politics of Urban Space Epifania A moo -A dare
The power of spatial configurations in our everyday social practices and ideological constructions of place and identity cannot be denied. When it comes to issues of power and socio-physical space, women of predominantly African descent were and still are at the bottom of the barrel (at which level classism, racism, and sexism violently intersect). This phenomenon is evident in various forms and degrees all over the world, especially within the urban context. Thus you will find that women of African descent are often in the majority at the bottom of the urban power hierarchy in ‘third-world’ cities, such as Accra, as well as in diasporic cities, such as Los Angeles. The unequal development of urban space is clearly represented in the low spatial positioning of these women. This positioning also has grave implications for their struggle for place in the social construction of spatiality, their understanding of their urban social practices, and their identity construction. As an architect and a woman of African descent who has always lived in African and diasporic cities, I am particularly interested in how Black1 women’s social and economic lives have been constituted, situated, and enacted in Western urban spatiality. I believe that Black women the world over are disproportionately represented in unsuitable and inadequate urban spaces and are also disproportionately underrepresented in urban development decision-making processes. As a Black female architect intent on imagining and constructing radical architectural counternarratives within hegemonic spatial politics, I agree with
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Epifania Amoo-Adare
I believe that architecture is also informed by the politics of space. It is essentially about the power structures that fund the white male middle-class architects who make up the body of the profession in Britain today. They create the physical environment in which we live and reinforce through their designs their problematic definitions of women, Black people and the working classes. White middle-class architects reinforce through the built form, their stereotypes of how Black and working class people live. Inevitably the buildings they produce ref lect a limited response to the arts and to the social life of the people they design for and by doing so, limit the life choices of Black people and the working class. This call to spatial awareness is an example of what I call critical spatial literacy. It is the ability to read codes embedded in the urban built environment in order to understand how they affect social life and to determine if there is a need for transformative spatio-political action. Haque speaks specifically to the British context and to an issue that is far more complex and complicated than the black-white binary that she implies; however, her argument is relevant in many parts of the world because the forces of globalization have created certain Western information f lows, fragmentation, and pace that often replace previous traditional communities and places (Carter, Donald, and Squires, 1993). For example, housing development in the ‘Third World’ that results from rapid urbanization is often laden with Western, male, middleclass conceptions of how people in a contemporary city must live in order to serve a capitalist economy. This occurs through the wholesale adoption of Western design, architectural practice, building technology, and concomitant social and ideological constructs. For this reason, I believe that critical spatial literacy as a praxis provides the tools for documenting and analyzing Black women’s urban spatial conditions just about anywhere in the world. It provides a transformative materialist interpretation of spatiality (a critical literacy of space), which recognizes the spatial nature of socioeconomic life and as a consequence would reveal the possibilities for radical change in the politics of space. To this end, I will discuss and recount experiences surrounding my investigation of how migrant Asante2 women’s household configurations, sociocultural practices, and spatial self-perceptions have changed in Ghana’s rapidly urbanizing capital city, Accra. I will also present my findings on Asante women’s personal constructions and articulations of
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Haque when she says (34–35):
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Research Praxis Based in a Womanist Positionality My interest in Asante women’s spatial experiences is rooted in the feminist understanding that “. . . feminist researchers begin their investigation of the social world from a grounded position in their own subjective oppression” (Weiler 1988). The personal provides an experiential ground from which a theoretical understanding can be made of material structural circumstances. As an Asante woman who has lived in Accra, my personal experience provides a ground from which theoretical understandings can be made of Asante women’s structural circumstances in Ghana’s capital. I also make this assertion from a womanist positionality, which recognizes that critical consciousness must incorporate racial, cultural, national, economic, political, and sexual issues into a philosophy that is committed to the survival and wholeness of an entire people (Ogunyemi 1985; Walker 1983). I am also an Asante woman who presently lives in an urban diasporic context in Los Angeles, California. I have always lived in urban centers3 and I have found that my understanding, negotiation, manipulation, and ownership of space (real and imagined) is often predetermined and confined by the prescribed, colonized, gendered, racialized, and classbased social relations of global capitalism. As a woman and as a member of a minority group, I am particularly disadvantaged within the politics of space: I have been privy to a minority and female experience of discrimination by design of a predominantly Western built environment (Weisman 1994). I experience this discrimination from location to location despite my access to professional and academic architectural discourse and privilege. Albeit restrictive, each discriminatory circumstance is often mediated by my very specific combination of gender, ethnicity, class position, and architectural privilege; thus, the discrimination I experience varies in nuance and degree. It is from these relational liminal spaces that I have been able to develop my own critical spatial literacy, i.e. an understanding of the dominant ideologies that inform Western urban architecture, which then enables my imagining of alternative socio-physical spaces.
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space and place in response to their urban lived experiences. In presenting my work, I will describe the significance of research praxis based in a womanist positionality, the construction of social life in a capitalist spatiality, and the importance of a critical literacy of space on and by Asante women living in Accra.
Epifania Amoo-Adare
For example, during my preliminary architectural training in London (from 1987 to 1990) I found that my personal experience of alternative household configurations, namely my Asante grandmother’s communal matrikin house, provided me with concrete examples that contested the Eurocentric and hegemonic spatial conceptions we were being taught, such as the belief that nuclear house spatial configurations and women’s roles in those private spaces was a universal norm. Within my grandmother’s Asante courtyard house, located in Kumase, there were very different sociocultural practices and selfperceptions around gender. For example, a woman’s ability to share her child-rearing responsibilities with her abusua (extended matrilineal family) rather than bear the urban financial burden of child care gave her a different conception of what work she could do outside of the family home. And yet in contemporary Ghana, it is those Western nuclear household models that prevail in housing development within large urban centers, such as Accra. In 1991, while working on a publicly funded building project in Accra as an assistant site architect, I personally experienced the ludicrous extent to which Western models of architecture were uncritically used in new housing development. In the design of the project’s 76 “middle-class” housing units, there was an extensive use of nuclear house designs and imported construction materials, from the light fittings to the concrete used to build the houses. In Ghana, just as in other parts of the third world, the uncritical use of Western design always goes far beyond the practice of using imported building materials and technology to the formation of new ideological constructs of what is good housing and, further still, what are suitable household configurations for that housing. An example of this is how in the Accra community, at that time, those houses sold like hotcakes despite the expensive and impractical use of Western building design and technology, such as the laying of imported English carpets on expensive imported Italian f loor tiles in a tropical climate. This was because the community desired what is conceived as modern (Western) and therefore prestigious and valuable properties. My mother’s households created both in Accra and the Diaspora contrasted sharply with my grandmother’s because of my mother’s adherence to Western spatial constructs and ideologies. I grew up in a nuclear household that intermittently accommodated my mother’s relatives, who came to help her with her child-rearing responsibilities and to improve their education or employment opportunities. My mother’s staunch Catholicism that adhered to rigid notions of “eternal marriages” and the husband as the “head of the household” pulled
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taut against the f luidity of my grandmother’s three sequential marriages and female-dominated compound house. This created in me a schizophrenic conception of what my role as an Asante woman must be, should be, and could be. It was this amorphous reality that jarred against the prescribed, tidy Western definitions of what a “normal” family house design is and informed how I negotiated my own constructions and conceptions of space and place while living in London. The example of the tension between my grandmother’s house and my mother’s was just one reason for my renegade architectural stance that began to develop during the final two years of my six years of architectural training, when I began to redefine my architectural role in the politics of space by creating architectural designs that served as alternative political pedagogical texts to the hegemonic Western architectural models taught as the norm. I resisted the predominant practice of architecture students replicating spatial representations of Western technology, a global economy, the universal adoption of the International Style, and the self-glorified architect, by interrogating the political and educational aspects of architecture through my work. In addition, I looked for architectural ideas and concepts that ref lected the specific socioeconomic, spatial, and political needs of various ‘thirdworld’ conditions, for example, as can be found in Hassan Fathy’s (1973) regionalist architectural work in Egypt and Charles Correa’s (1989) in India. At that time, I developed a critical literacy of space as an academic survival mechanism in order to decipher the political ideologies that were hidden in architects’, planners’, and developers’ building practices and inscribed in their spatial constructions. In that process, I also realized that my singular understandings and/or actions were insignificant in the spatio-political makeup of things and that perhaps substantial socio-spatial justice would be enabled if more than just the members of the building profession understood, reinvented, and owned the vocabulary of the built environment. I began to question how a postmodern spatio-political language could be encouraged and nurtured in the general public, especially in those who were the most spatially disadvantaged. Simultaneously and most importantly, I also questioned and began to investigate what my role, as a female architect of African descent, should be. Should I serve society as an “expert” with architectural designs that sought to transform the dominant status quo, or would a social justice agenda be better enacted by my facilitating and enabling critical spatial literacy in the general public? As much as I was drawn to following the community-oriented, collaborative feminist architectural praxis of the likes of Matrix (1984;
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1986), I began to believe that a Black female architect like myself would better contribute to her community by creating arenas within formal and nonformal education for their own critical readings of the built environment, which may lead them to finding ways to change it themselves. It is these experiences that led to my academic transition into the field of education to further understand the pedagogical role of the built environment. Here, I enact the reality of this already dreamt spatial imaginary of my diasporic, African, female, architectural permutation by conducting research that is rooted in the praxes of critical pedagogy, feminist methodology from a womanist positionality, critical social theory as informed by postmodern geography, and postcolonial theory because I am interested in shifting, rather than just inhabiting, the marginality of the boundaries or edge conditions of architecture. In redefining what it means to be an architect, I also include insights from my architectural training as well as my personal experience of invisible homelessness and being socially housed, in the United Kingdom, to do what I call renegade architecture, outside the confines of institutionalized architectural practice. Therefore, I argue for the development of critical spatial literacy. I take as my founding assumption that the built environment has a pedagogical nature that either induces individuals to conform to the established organization of mainstream society or provides a resource for the successful empowerment of individuals (and most importantly, collectives) against that society. A critical literacy of space is an important project. It is the development of a critical understanding of the politics of space, for example, determining and documenting what kinds of Western European social insights are encoded in the Ghanaian urban built environment, how that built form may reproduce and/or contest dominant foreign spatial ideologies, and how this contestation requires an ability to “critically read the world” (Freire 1983/1991; 1970/1996). In describing the importance of the act of reading the world, Freire (1983/1991, 140–41) tells us how his first act of reading was of the socio-physical world, i.e. the “average Recife house,” where he was born, “encircled by trees.” This world presented for him his first reading of texts, words, and letters that were “incarnated in a series of things, objects, and signs.” He perceived this spatial world through the immediate spatial environment in relationship to his family, through the language of his elders’ beliefs, tastes, fears, and values and through a link between his world and wider contexts. Freire further tells us that in learning to improve his perception and understanding of that spatial
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world by reading it, he became familiar with it and also managed to diminish certain fears he had of it. Freire’s conscious act of reading the world is especially crucial in this era of intense globalization where many of the spatial worlds that African people live in change to contrast sharply with that of their elders’ beliefs, tastes, fears, and values. It is to this end that I make an argument for a critical spatial literacy project, especially for women of African descent, to critically read their urban spatial world in order to understand the profound implications of its transformative effects. For this reason, I argue that research into African women and their families’ spatial experiences cannot simply be a theoretical and/ or empirical endeavor. Instead, it must be a womanist spatial research agenda with a pedagogical praxis that is informed up front by a critical literacy of gender, ethnicity, and space. In other words, it must be an endeavor to develop critical spatial literacy, which is a praxis rooted in a critical understanding of the dynamics of the social construction of postmodern urban space and the spatial construction of social life, its practices, and its identities. In this definition, it reinforces the centrality of critical consciousness in a womanist positionality. I envisage a critical literacy of space as a theorizing practice with which to understand the local grounded theories that emerge out of our particular socio-spatial identities, urban lived experiences, and spatio-political struggles. Capitalist Spatiality and the Construction of Social Life In any given society there is a natural inclination for provision of shelter as a basic human requirement. The successful provision of shelter is essential to the physical, sociological, cultural, psychological, and economic well-being of every human being. Individuals’ need for shelter, and how they design and build it in response to the geographical, climatic, and socioeconomic conditions in which they live, serve to root them in a particular cultural practice (Howell and Tentokali 1989). Obtaining adequate shelter is especially important for women, who are often responsible for children and the elderly. This global female need for housing was acknowledged at the Fourth World Conference in Beijing, in September 1995. At that time, a platform was proposed defining housing as a social and economic investment and as an essential institution that roots women in place and culture (Hermanuz 1996). Yet we find that especially in the modern urban context, there is far less awareness of built forms and space than, for example, in a traditional
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community (Tuan 1977). It can be argued that one cause of this lack of awareness is urbanization, especially the restricted opportunity for active participation in the urban development process. Active participation in the development of built forms and space is important, as it is representative of individuals’ ability to make spatial decisions and place in their community, and it has implications for their political positioning in social relations of power. Spatial awareness is crucial, especially within capitalist urban contexts where there is an unequal development of space. Keith and Pile (1993) argue that the logic of capital produces an uneven development of space, which is both a direct consequence and cause of the unequal distribution of power and resources along class, racial, and gender lines (Hayden 1995; Massey 1994; Weisman 1994). In fact, geographically uneven space is an essential condition of capitalist spatiality, as it is the concretization of capitalist relations of production and division of labor (Soja 1985). In a capitalist spatiality, dominant capitalist groups oftentimes constrain the economic and political rights of individuals, communities, and nations by restricting and defining their access to space (Hayden 1995). In many instances it is the poor, women, ethnic minorities, and children that are subject to restrictive spatial allocation and movement within urban capitalist contexts. This is demonstrated by the fact that those who are often either homeless or living in inadequate housing—in both the economic global “North” and “South”—are women, ethnic minorities and their children living in urban centers (Albelda and Tilly 1997; Bauhmohl 1996; Bergholz 1993 Daly 1996; Dhillon-Kashyap 1994). Indeed, in a postmodern geography, many of us become the social effects of dominant groups’ spatial constructs. The planned built environments that we inhabit are embedded with other people’s meanings of housing, leisure space, a business district, and the like. The built form creates a predisposition in us toward particular spatial functions and practices from which social identities are ascribed, whether or not we choose to contest, subvert, or reject them. Furthermore, as Howell and Tentokali (1989) determined from their experience in conducting cross-cultural studies on domestic privacy, Western urban spatiality confronts certain cultural heritages with new models of space and household transactions. Western design and modern construction technologies challenge household behaviors in many new urbanizing societies and reconstitute what is imagined and constructed as family life (Asiama 1997; Pellow 1992). This is certainly the case in modern-day West African countries, which are challenged with spatial and social structures that are the result of at least three superimposed
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cultural stratifications: the traditional and preindustrial phase, the colonial experience, and the postcolonial economical-political structure (Boserup 1970; Konadu-Agyemang 2001). Each of these realities varies from country to country, and everywhere the position of women and their families depends on the interplay of these three elements (Boserup 1970). In traditional West Africa, the compound and the family it encompassed was usually the minimal unit of political organization, and decisions within the compound had implications for the wider political units in villages and in towns. In effect, the Western notion of the house being female and private versus the outside being male and public was nonexistent in West Africa. Thus, women could exert direct political inf luence over males or they themselves play important political roles by virtue of their positions of authority, power, or inf luence in their natal and/or affinal compounds (Sudarkasa 1994). For this reason, it was common for women to have important roles within patrilineages as well as matrilineages in West Africa. The onset of colonization, modernization, and urbanization reconfigured space, including households, in West African countries along an uneven spatial development that favored urban centers over rural settlements. The urban center/rural periphery split consisted of the siphoning of human resources and economic surplus from the rural countryside and smaller towns and cities into the colonial urban cores. This produced the tendency in populations to migrate from rural areas to urban centers in search of jobs, as they still do in droves today. Furthermore, within the urban centers men were favored over women in terms of the allocation of economic and political power in the new capitalist industrial settings, as colonial administrators projected their own Western gender constructs in making and maintaining their relationships with West African societies. This favoritism produced changes in traditional social relations between West African men and women within and among families, as a public/ male versus private/female spatial construct was instituted to complement capitalist colonial economies. In addition, most of the houses built in the urban cores were for nuclear families, which did not encourage the migration of extended families but rather that of smaller conjugal family arrangements led by men. This uneven development was an important factor in some West African women’s increased dependence on their spouses, as epitomized in Oppong’s (1974/1981) study of marriage among the matrilineal elite in Ghana. It was also a factor that reduced West African women’s economic autonomy and public role (Pellow 1977), especially as they moved to live with their men in urban
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conjugal household configurations that served as the smallest units of capitalist production. The uneven development of space in West Africa is clearly expressed in Ghana’s capital city and its present state of housing and infrastructure underdevelopment, which has its roots in British colonialism. The housing problems in Accra are not only a colonial legacy caused by urbanization policies that were insensitive to the local cultural context, but also a result of the failure of successive governments to derive appropriate housing policies and their incorporation of Ghana into a global capitalist economy (Konadu-Agyemang 2001). Accra is the largest of Ghana’s ten urban centers. The population in Accra is 1,657,856, of which 57.1 percent (i.e., 843,516) are female (Government of Ghana 2000).5 In the city of Accra, females head 30.5 percent of households, even though there are nearly as many males as females (KonaduAgyemang 2001).6 Accra alone accounts for 30 percent of the urban population of Ghana and 10 percent of the country’s total population. In fact, Accra has the highest rate of urbanization in Ghana and one of the highest in West Africa (Konadu-Agyemang 2001). Housing occupancy rates are high in Ghana’s capital. In 1990, the United Nations Development Program and the Ghana government conducted a survey in Accra that found that the average number of persons per room was 2.9—greater than the United Nations standard of 2.5—and that 46.3 percent of the city’s households occupied single rooms, which was often all they could afford to rent. This lack of space has grave implications for Ghanaian women living in Accra because they spend more time in their houses than the men do (Asiama 1997). Uneven urban development in Accra has had an effect on residential units, lineage groupings, rules of descent, and inheritance (Robertson 1984). These effects are also experienced in other parts of Ghana; for example, the land tenure system in Asante society has undergone change. Land now has an economic value, which was not the case in traditional Asante society. The strong links that existed between land ownership and Asante social and political structures has weakened. Land ownership structures no longer support the continuation of the kin group, and kinship ties are being weakened. In its place, the conjugal family has begun to assert itself against abusua (extended matrilineal family). This means that Asante women’s relationship with their kin group has altered, especially in terms of inheritance and dependence on their spouse versus their abusua (Asiama 1997). As a result, Asante women living in urban Accra provide an ideal population group and setting for the development of critical spatial literacy on how Accra’s urban built
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environment affects household configuration, sociocultural practices, and spatial self-perceptions. These women are often migrants, with a reduced likelihood of access to land and property than they would have in the Asante region. Research in this location and with this population group contributes to an understanding of the postmodern condition of uneven urban development due to fast-encroaching Western (capitalist) urban spatiality and its challenging effects on women’s homes and daily practices. Migrant Asante Women and Accra’s Urban Spatial Politics From December 2001 to January 2002, I began developing a critical literacy of space on Asante women living in Accra by conducting a small-scale study. In particular, I interviewed three Asante women and three other Akan women, who all live in nuclear-family household configurations as a consequence of moving into urban Accra.7 This was either by themselves, with their children, or with their husband and children. They had all, in contrast, previously lived in abusua (extended matrilineal family) household configurations in their respective hometowns.8 Often, this was with their mother, their sisters and brothers, and their mother’s sister’s children and their siblings. None of the women moved to Accra without some form of prior accommodation and work arrangement. They also strongly advised against anyone moving to Accra without making those arrangements in advance. The women moved to Accra to live initially with sisters, husbands, or friends, who provided them with opportunities to come to live in the city. They have since moved into their own places that many of them own with spouses or alone. These transitions occurred over the long periods of their residence in Accra (15 to 32 years). The women described how living in Accra was markedly different from living in their hometowns. They all stated that Accra was a hard place in which to survive;9 as one woman stressed, “Accra’s inside is hot!”10 Her support for this description of Accra was the exorbitant rents, high utility and food costs, and corruption. Despite this perception, they preferred to remain in Accra versus go back to their hometowns, because it provided them with educational and employment opportunities and the ability to have one’s eyes opened.11 In all circumstances, the importance of enduring the struggle in Accra was to gain the finances to build a place of one’s own, even if
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Engendering Critical Spatial Literacy
Epifania Amoo-Adare
it is a humble chamber-and-hall arrangement. The women were also quick to say that the ideal configuration of family, to live in their Accra homes, was small and often nuclear. When asked if they would encourage their abusua to live with them, their first responses were negative; however, remembrance of the Akan traditional belief that one cannot say one has progressed in life if one’s abusua’s progress is not simultaneously encouraged produced the concession that abusua with some form of education, skill, or money could stay temporarily only as a way of introducing them into Accra’s hectic lifestyle. Most of the reasons given for discouraging abusua to stay were pragmatic and financial, such as not having enough money and space for one’s own immediate family let alone the extended one. There were also some attitudinal responses that categorized abusua who came from the women’s hometown as not sophisticated enough to withstand the norms of city life, thus liable to annoy their city-dwelling relatives and/or embarrass them socially due to ignorance. The annoying and/or embarrassing abusua were often racialized as backward or “bush” relatives, who had not yet achieved the Western “eye-opening” sophistication of their city peers. This preliminary research suggests that Accra’s urban built environment is a text that is transforming Asante female household configurations, and thus sociocultural practices and notions of what an ideal family should be. In this context, which I term as Western urban spatiality, I hypothesize that there is a need for critical spatial literacy in order for individuals to understand how the built environment is embedded with codes that both constrain and enable one to participate in the design, construction, and/or definition of space. To test this hypothesis, I conducted a more specific and rigorous ethnographic study in the summer of 2003 that began to define this complex problem that is experienced by Asante women and their families and is embedded in multiple systems. I also started to identify and explore the factors associated with the problem by answering the following key research questions: 1) To what extent have Asante women experienced substantial household transformations as a consequence of migration to rapidly urbanizing Accra? 2) What are some of the changes in Asante women’s family practices as a consequence of household transformation? 3) What is their spatial self-perception as a consequence of household transformation (i.e. a sense of place)? 4) How has critical spatial literacy inf luenced their understanding and negotiation of Accra’s urban space and the spatial changes it has effected? Initial analysis of a further 30 interviews conducted with Akan women, 19 of whom are Asante, reinforces the findings in the first
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study that Asante women are subject to economic struggle in rapidly urbanizing Accra, which is also transforming their households, social roles, and identity. However, the women all strongly believe that they are in full control of their quests for “ani bue,” opened eyes, and all else that Accra has to offer. These women repeatedly asserted that they were in control of their destiny because they believed in making the “impossible possible.” They talked of the importance of “ani εden,” being forceful, and of “hyε den,” the act of strengthening oneself, as prerequisites to any woman’s “mmo den bo,” progress. Many of the women especially attributed their successes to ani εden, which they described as being an intrinsic Asante trait. In addition, they obtained their hyε den through various sources, such as God, church, or social groups, faith in oneself, and ever so rarely abusua. Oftentimes, the idea of turning to abusua in times of need was mocked or derided as being an unrealistic and undesired concept. The women went as far as describing themselves as pioneers in many different arenas, to the extent that one woman asserted that it was the Asante who had taught Accra’s indigenous inhabitants how to own property. She argued that other ethnic groups were more willing to share their Accra homes with relatives or other tenants, while an Asante family’s main objective was to live in their own property with their immediate family. In fact, many of the women were adamant about keeping abusua at bay, especially out of the marital home, and never saw fit to question their embracing of nuclear family configurations in place of maintaining homes with abusua or any other variation. This was in keeping with the results found in the previous study. Engendering Critical Spatial Literacy Today, more than ever, social struggle within the urban context is inscribed in spaces from which people construct place out of their particular social relations. Place, then, can be viewed as particular, unique moments in networks of social relations and spatial understandings. It is especially in these places or moments that women experience the postmodern condition and the ravaging effects of rapid urbanization differentially and unequally (Massey 1991; 1994). As a result, in everyday feminist struggles for social and political justice there is a growing awareness of the need for an explicit application of informed strategic spatial practice derived from an analysis of spatial configurations, concepts, and ideologies. For example, this shift in awareness can be
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Engendering Critical Spatial Literacy
Epifania Amoo-Adare
observed in the politics of place that is being advanced by women using new information technologies for social struggles over health, environmental, and violence-against-women issues (Harcourt 2001). It is also widely argued that space is important in the construction of the female subject and in gendered subjectivity and identity (Mohanram 1999; Rendell 1999). However, there has not been a natural and comfortable insertion of concerns among women of African descent, living in the Diaspora, into this feminist movement and its struggles (Amos and Parmar 1984; Carby 1999; Collins 1990; hooks 1989, 1991; Hull et al. 1982; Lorde 1984; Spivak and Grosz 1990). Furthermore, there has been contestation against the use of Western feminist gender constructs to analyze “Third World” female conditions and to impose international gender and development policies on us (Amadiume 1995; Arndt 2000; Mohanty 1998; Oy\wùmí 1997, 1998; Saadawi 1997). In addition, oppositional responses—such as womanism (Ogunyemi 1985; Walker 1983)—provide ideologies for contemplating how feminism as it stands is enriched by women of African descent’s contestations, experiences, and voices, but do not provide explicit strategies for developing informed spatial practice through a critical literacy of space. As a consequence, there has not been explicit theorizing of how spatial configurations affect the daily lives of women of African descent. There has also been very little empirical research on women of African descent’s urban lived experiences (both on the continent and in the Diaspora), in order to enrich and inform a critical pedagogy of space that maps the spatial dimensions of “women’s issues.” From this context, I argue for research on women of African descent’s lived experiences that utilizes the essential pedagogical praxis of critical spatial literacy to analyze and comprehend the profound spatial effects of a global economy, such as uneven urban development and the identitydisorienting consequences of rapidly changing landscapes. Utilizing critical spatial literacy as praxis to research Asante women’s lives in Accra means that it is not enough to take their contemporary everyday practices for granted as they assert ownership over the urban spaces that transform traditional ways of living. Instead, and as a result of this research, I have begun a conversation (first with my informants and now with the reader) to discuss the consequences and implications of the transformative power of Accra’s urbanity. In doing so, we must analyze how the continued dismantling of traditional notions of physical and ideological abusua affect conceptions of Asante female identity both inside and out of Asante culture and national heritage, especially as Asante women position themselves against the racial-, gender-, and
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class-based terms of Western capitalist designs and ideologies for living in contemporary society. We must also investigate the schizophrenic nature of an Asante female identity that now translates itself through Western concepts of the good economics of maintaining nuclear family configurations while simultaneously adhering to the Akan ethic of always supporting abusua, albeit in a temporary fashion. Understanding how new Asante homesteads, social practices, and identities are being reconstructed must lead to a greater awareness of how we then project these changes onto our immediate environments and other places to which we are connected. This critical awareness of what constitutes one’s local context has significant global implications, particularly in these times, when lived spaces are increasingly permeable due to social networks, communication, and the constant movement that takes place. Through this process, we would begin to engender a timely praxis of critical spatial literacy. Further more, as womanism is about the survival and wholeness of an entire people through critical consciousness, investigating and scrutinizing the components of migrant Asante women and their family’s spatiality contributes to a global understanding of gendered, urban, lived conditions and informs transnational feminist practices that seek to transform the politics of uneven development of space. Notes 1. I use the capitalized word Black to denote the political construct “Black” versus the descriptive term “black.” 2. In Ghana, one of the principal ethnic groups is the Akan, within which are the Asante. 3. I have lived in Nairobi, Accra, London, and Bristol, and now live in Los Angeles. 4. Matrix was a multiracial, feminist architectural cooperative and research network, established in 1980. Their organizational structure was that of a worker’s cooperative in which each employee was both an employee and director of the company, who earned equal pay and had an equal say in its running. Matrix worked collaboratively and intimately with women’s groups in London to design and construct buildings that met their specific needs, such as the Jagonari Education Resource Centre and the Harlow Women’s Refuge Centre. Whenever working with their female clients, Matrix’s main objective was to always empower them to take control over the design and development of their own environments. 5. The source of this data is the National Population Census, which is carried out every ten years. The 2010 census was to take place in March; however, in January delays to the process were anticipated. According to the Accra Metropolitan Assembly website, it is estimated that 2.5 to 3 million people participate in socioeconomic activities within Accra currently. 6. According to the last Ghana Living Standards Survey (Government of Ghana 2008), 28.1 percent of households in Accra are headed by females; indicating a decrease in percentage from 2000. 7. Two of the women are Fante and the other is Assin. It is possible to make inferences about Asante female experiences from Akan women’s and vice versa because Asantes are part of the larger Akan group, which is linguistically and culturally homogeneous. However, there
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Engendering Critical Spatial Literacy
8.
9.
10.
11.
Epifania Amoo-Adare
are some significant attitudinal differences among Asantes as a consequence of their historic political dominance in Ghana. Typically, the compound house was designed as a series of rooms that enclosed an open-air courtyard. Abusua family members used the rooms allocated to them as their own bedrooms, with the occasional connected living room area, and shared the bathroom, kitchen, and courtyard spaces with each other. The courtyard often served as the main space used for eating together, entertaining guests, and for other social gatherings. This is in their various occupations, as follows: a fresh fish seller, a cassava seller, a dried fish seller, a cosmetics dealer, a retired senior bank manager, and a dressmaker who is also a well-known actress in local television productions. This phrase is a transliteration of her expletive in Asante-Twi, “Accra emu y ε hyew!” To say that the inside of a place is hot often refers to how difficult that place is to be in, e.g., it is as difficult as being in a boiling pot of water. This phrase is a transliteration of the Asante-Twi expression “ani bue,” which refers to an increase in cultural awareness with a tint of social sophistication.
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Freire, Paulo. 1996. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. London: Penguin Books. (Original work published in 1970.) ———. 1991. The importance of the act of reading. Trans. Loretta Slover. In Rewriting Literacy: Culture and the Discourse of the Other, ed. Candace Mitchell and Kathleen Weiler, 139–45. New York: Bergin & Garvey. (Originally published in 1983.) Government of Ghana. 2008. Ghana Living Standards Survey: Report of the Fifth Round (GLSS 5). Accra: Ghana Statistical Service. ———. 2000. 2000 Population & Housing Census: Provisional Results. Accra: Ghana Statistical Service. Haque, Shaheen. 1988. The politics of space: The experience of a Black woman architect. In Charting the Journey: Writings by Black and Third World Women, ed. Shabnam Grewal, Jackie Kay, Liliane Landor, Gail Lewis, and Pratibha Parmar, 34–39. London: Sheba Feminist. Harcourt, Wendy. 2001. Rethinking difference and equality: Women and the politics of place. In Place and Politics in the Age of Globalization, ed. Roxann Prazniak and Arif Dirlik, 299–322. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Hayden, Dolores. 1995. The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hermanuz, Ghislaine. 1996. Housing for a postmodern world: Reply to Alice T. Friedman. In The Sex of Architecture, ed. Diana Agrest, Patricia Conway, and Leslie Kanes Weisman, 233–40. New York: Harry N. Abrams. hooks, bell. 1991. Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press. ———. 1989. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. London: Sheba Feminist. Howell, Sandra, and Vana Tentokali. 1989. Domestic privacy: Gender, culture, and development issues. In Housing, Culture, and Design: A Comparative Perspective, ed. Setha M. Low and Eric Chambers, 281–97. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hull, Gloria T., Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, ed. 1982. All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press. Keith, Michael, and Steve Pile. 1993. Introduction: The politics of place. In Place and the Politics of Identity, ed. Michael Keith and Steve Pile, 1–40. New York: Routledge. Konadu-Agyemang, Kwadwo. 2001. The Political Economy of Housing and Urban Development in Africa: Ghana’s Experience from Colonial Times to 1998. Westport, CT: Praeger. Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister Outsider. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. ———. 1991. A global sense of space. Marxism Today, June: 24–29. Matrix. 1986. Building for Childcare: Making Better Buildings for the Under-5s. London: Matrix and the Greater London Council Women’s Committee. ———. 1984. Making Space: Women and the Manmade Environment. London: Pluto Press. Mohanram, Radhika. 1999. Black Body: Women, Colonialism, and Space. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 1998. Under western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. In Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat, 255–77. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ogunyemi, Chikwenye Okonjo. 1985. Womanism: The dynamics of the contemporary black female novel in English. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 11(1): 63–80. Oppong, Christine. 1981. Middle Class African Marriage: A Family Study of Ghanaian Senior Civil Servants. London: George Allen & Unwin. (Original work published in 1974.) Oy\wùmí, Oyèrónke.. 1998. De-confounding gender: Feminist theorizing and western culture, a comment on Hawkesworth’s “Confounding gender.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 23(4): 1049–62.
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Oy\wùmí, Oyèrónke.. 1997. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Pellow, Deborah. 1992. Spaces that teach: Attachment to the African compound. In Place Attachment, ed. Irwin Altman and Setha M. Low, 187–210. New York: Plenum Press. ———. 1977. Women in Accra: Options for Autonomy. Algonac, MI: Reference Publications. Rendell, Jane. 1999. Introduction: Gender, space. In Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction, ed. Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner, and Iain Borden, 101–111. London: Routledge. Robertson, Claire C. 1984. Sharing the Same Bowl: A Socioeconomic History of Women and Class in Accra, Ghana. Bloomington: Indiana University. Saadawi, Nawal El. 1997. The Nawal El Saadawi Reader. London: Zed Books. Soja, Edward W. 1985. The spatiality of social life: Towards a transformative retheorisation. In Social Relations and Spatial Structures, ed. Derek Gregory and John Urry, 90–127. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, and Elizabeth Grosz. 1990. Criticism, feminism and the institution. In The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym, 1–16. New York: Routledge. Sudarkasa, Niara. 1994. Female employment and family organization in West Africa. In The Black Woman Cross-Culturally, 8th ed., ed. Filomina Chioma Steady, 49–64. Rochester, VT: Schenkman Books. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Walker, Alice. 1983. In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose. San Diego: Harcourt Brace. Weiler, Kathleen. 1988. Women Teaching for Change: Gender, Class and Power. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Hadley. Weisman, Leslie K. 1994. Discrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
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SI X
Outsiders Within: Experiences of Women Academics in Kenya N joki M . K amau
Earlier studies on women’s education in Kenya, including Kinyanjui (1978), Maleche (1976), and Eshiwani (1985), all seem to agree that the number of female students drastically thins out as one ascends the educational ladder, girls perform more poorly than boys in science subjects, have low educational aspirations, are grossly underrepresented in higher education particularly in the university. Available statistics show that even fewer women have access to the graduate level. For example, during the 1989/90 academic year at Kenyatta University, 227 of the students admitted to graduate programs, only 54 (4.2 percent) were women. These figures are important because it is from this insignificant pool of graduates that academic women will be drawn. This reveals that women’s chances of getting a research or teaching post at the university level are very limited. It should be noted that although increasing enrollment and hiring of women at all levels of the educational system is important, it should not be confused with equality. Evidence gleaned from literature shows that even in countries where equality of access is achieved, approximated or more women become segregated into distinct areas of study. This sex differentiation of the curriculum constitutes a major mechanism in reproducing sexual division in labor, particularly at the professional level. Moreover, as Robertson (1985) clearly indicated, possession of Western formal education creates a new dilemma for African women. The colonialists initially introduced formal Western education to
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CH A P T E R
Njoki M. Kamau
the male gender, with an express aim of serving the need for manpower development. When it was later introduced to some few colonial Kenyan women, it was an education for adaptability, whereby the African woman was encouraged to remain the custodian of African culture while at the same time internalizing nineteenth-century Victorian capitalistic patriarchal ideas about domesticity and a woman’s place. In Kenya, therefore, women’s lives began to be shaped and continue to be shaped by both old forms of indigenous culture and Westernization forms that live side by side, at times in clear lines of confrontation and at times with blurred distinctions. In this paper, I examine the lives of Kenyan women in higher education and in particular, academic women. The data suggest that women’s academic career experiences are greatly shaped by the interlocking nature of the continuities and discontinuities of the indigenous genderrole expectations and Western hierarchies of gender subordination. The data illustrate that women’s career development lags behind those of their male counterparts due to lack of support, exclusionary practices, and an inhospitable environment. At the same time, the data indicate that academic women are active social agents in shaping their careers, as well as their personal and social lives. As active agents of social change, they cross gender boundaries by resisting, subverting, juggling, and adapting the subordinate roles assigned to them as women. Women who teach and conduct research in Kenyan universities seem to experience remarkably sharp contradictions and dilemmas as they try to disentangle themselves from a dependent role in a capitalistic patriarchy. These tensions and conf licts are shaped by societal gender-typed attitudes and academic women’s efforts to intervene in their social conditions. Academic women continuously attempt to redefine their identities and to adjust, resist, negotiate, and subvert their sex-typed roles in an effort to make the academe work for them. By virtue of their position and higher education, they are in a privileged position compared to the majority of their sex, and even to the majority of their male compatriots; but they are greatly disadvantaged when compared with male academics in the same institutions. In particular, the general society and the university community view these women with ambivalence. They are expected to excel and model their biological role as “good” wives, mothers, caregivers, and custodians of African culture. At the same time, they are expected to behave as Western-educated women, be goal-oriented, assertive, competent, and productive in the academic world, just like their male counterparts. This duality works to the disadvantage of Kenyan female academics. In
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Methodological Questions The data I present are part of a qualitative field study that I conducted in Kenya between January and August of 1993 and updated in the summer of 2002. I now turn to the research process. There is a dearth of methodologies and theories that are historically oriented, geographically specific, and grounded in the experiences of African women. Given the diversity of women’s experiences in the various classes, religions, and ethnic groups in Kenyan society, and the fact that existing feminist literature on African women privileges the rural over the urban (Zeleza 1993, 108), I had to use a combination of research methods in order to capture the experiences of academic women. It is usually assumed that Western formal education is a panacea for all Kenyan social problems. As such, female professionals are assumed to have made it and therefore, experience or pose no problems. This tiny, privileged elite attract very little attention, if any, from the research community. It is ironic to note that immeasurable community and family resources as well as a significant part of the national educational budget are spent on putting these women through the education system, yet there seems to be no interest in researching the returns from these huge investments, nor the lived experiences of these women. In the third world, and Kenya in particular, few researchers are interested in people at the top. Research is almost always conducted with people at the bottom. My study focused on this specific Kenyan elite. This research project stemmed from my personal experiences and observations in Kenyan universities. I chose to combine ethnographic-qualitative feminist methods in order to allow the research participants to identify, describe, question, and analyze the problems they experience in their daily lives both as women and as academics. Feminist research is often, although not inevitably, conducted within a qualitative paradigm. Webb (1993, 423) argues that feminist research is research on women and for women. Quoting Klein (1993), she writes, “I define research for women as research that tries to take women’s needs, interests and experiences into account and aims at being instrumental at improving women’s lives in one way or another.”
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the university, their presence is neither resented nor welcomed. They are perceived as outsiders within the sacred grove, intruders, incompetent and sometimes ridiculed as unfeminine.
Njoki M. Kamau
I also used this research methodology because it does not only take women’s needs, interests, and experiences into account, but treats research subjects as knowing subjects whose knowledge must be respected. It claims explicitly that there is no form of knowledge from a disinterested perspective. This perspective, therefore, allows both the researcher and the research participants to be actively involved as both informants and investigators in a democratic process. As an academic woman born and raised in Kenyan society, the issues I investigated are of a particular concern to me and I believe to the academic women in the study, too. I agree with Reinharz (1983, 176) that “The research problem must be of sincere concern to the researcher and of sincere concern to the subjects so that they will collaborate in the uncovering of the phenomenon.” In order to enter the women’s world and understand their perspectives, I interviewed 24 academic women in an in-depth manner, observing and shadowing them in their natural situations so that they could talk of things that deeply concerned them and express their feelings and emotions. Each academic woman was interviewed for two sessions. Each session lasted two hours or more. Every woman was observed or shadowed for a day or two. I also analyzed secondary data, which have enriched the findings presented in this paper. Data gathered from both primary and secondary sources was analyzed thematically and triangulated. I use pseudonyms such as Angela, Maria, and Angelina to protect the privacy of my research respondents. It is to these findings I now turn. Career Development: The Politics of Promotion Almost two-thirds of the academic women in this study perceived themselves as fighters interested in the genuine transformation of gender relations within the university. These women believed that there exists covert or hidden discrimination against women in the four national universities despite the fact that the universities pride themselves on rules, regulations, and promotion criteria designed to ensure fairness and equity. In their view, female academics continue to be marginal both numerically and in terms of prestige and status in the university. Although men and women were paid an equal salary at the entry point of their academic careers depending on their qualifications and experience, in the long run, men end up being paid much more than women and occupying senior and prestigious positions in
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the university hierarchy. The women are aware that men get promoted faster than women and are more likely to be appointed to positions of authority such as chairs of departments, deans of faculties, directors of bureaus, heads of schools, principals of colleges, and vice-chancellors and deputy vice-chancellors. To illustrate their disadvantaged status and detail their exclusion, the women often pointed to the fact that all the vice-chancellors and their deputies at the five national universities were male. All the deans of faculties at Kenyatta and Nairobi University were male. Women are underrepresented among the academics as well as the administrators. Of the 2,356 total academic staff in the five universities in 1993, only 450 (19.1 percent) were women. This finding parallels the underrepresentation of women among academic staff in developed countries such as Canada and Britain (Acker 1992). As in other countries, women are overwhelmingly found in junior positions as lecturers, assistant lecturers, and tutorial fellows. For example, of the total academic women, 86 percent were concentrated in the lower ranks. The majority of these women were overrepresented in the faculties of arts and education. Only three women were full university professors, and they were in the traditional women’s fields of home economics, religious studies, and education. Table 6.1 illustrates this unequal pattern of gender representation. Table 6.1 Academic Staff Representation in the Five Kenyan National Universities by Designation and Sex, August 1994 Designation Full Professor Associate Professor Senior Lecturer Lecturer Assistant Lecturer Tutorial Fellow Graduate Assistant Total
Male
Female
Totals
69 155 347 924 135 135 141 1,906*
3 14 46 243 40 43 61 450*
72 169 393 1,167 175 178 202 2,356*
*These numbers do not include academics at Laikipia campus and the Department of Agricultural Engineering at Jomo Kenyatta University College of Science and Technology, due to social and technical difficulties. Only the heads of department could release the staff list for reasons they termed as sensitive information. It was impossible to track the responsible heads. Their numbers are few, and I believe the omission will not in any way affect the findings in this study. Source: I computed these figures from departmental lists, and counter-checked them against the lists of the deans of faculties and the university calendar during the months of June to August 1994. Universities do not keep up-to-date lists of employees divided by gender.
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Outsiders Within
Njoki M. Kamau
It is important to point out that even the seeming overrepresentation of women in the lectureship position is a new phenomenon. In the mid-1980s, Kenyans witnessed the sudden change of the whole education system from seven years of primary education, four years of secondary education, two years of advanced secondary education, and three years of university education (7-4-2-3), a system inherited from British colonial rule and in place since 1963 when Kenya became independent, to a North American system of eight years of primary education, four years of secondary education, and four years of higher education (8-4-4). With this abrupt change, three additional universities were set up but with no attendant qualified staff. What followed was a high turnover among senior male academics, who went to head the newly established universities and their new departments and faculties. This exponential expansion of university education was a blessing in disguise to the majority of women academics who for years had been blocked in the junior position of tutorial fellowship. Many women in possession of a master’s degree, who had earlier tried to get themselves hired in the university but were rejected, were hired in the wake of these new developments. Promotion criteria were relaxed, and movement from a tutorial fellowship to a lectureship required only two years of continuous university teaching plus presentation of academic papers in departmental seminars and proven ability to pursue doctoral work. Thus there was an inf lux of female academics into the universities in the mid-1980s. During the same period, blocked women were either promoted within their university or moved to the new ones in search of better promotional prospects. However, during my fieldwork, the majority of the women who were part of the 1980s inf lux were utterly disillusioned. Initially they considered themselves “lucky” to have been hired. Now they perceive themselves as “ghettoed,” “hemmed in,” “hedged in,” or “locked in” lectureship positions without much hope for promotion. Their entrance into the university teaching positions and accelerated promotion to lectureships has been a dead end. Departmental establishments coupled with a lack of research funds continued to ensure that these women remain locked in junior lectureship positions.1 For example, some women complained that their doctoral theses stagnated because they lacked funds to conduct fieldwork. They were constantly advised to use their own money with the promise that the university would reimburse them when funds became available. The women lacked these extra funds.
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I am one of the lucky lot . . . beneficiaries of the expansion of the university system during the 1980s . . . I consider myself lucky because one of the most difficult hurdles for a woman is to get one hired in the university. . . . I got my master’s degree in the 70s. I applied for a position for five consecutive years with no results. Once the McKay Report was out, universities out of the blue sprung up. Tutorial fellowships were advertised. I at once applied. It was a God-sent opportunity. I secured a position. Two years later, I completed my probation and applied for lectureship, permanent and pensionable status. I am glad one senior colleague had advised me on how to prepare. . . . I presented papers in departmental seminars, had an excellent teaching record and of course defended my Ph.D. proposal. All went well. I was promoted to lectureship without fuss. That was in 1986. I have been in the same position for the last eight years. I feel like I am hemmed in this rank . . . No money for research or basic necessities for teaching . . . According to the university establishment there are only eight positions in my department for senior lecturers. Currently none is vacant. . . . Maybe I should consider a departmental transfer. . . . that too is difficult. You see I am “kaput,” I am done. I am locked in this lectureship position [laughs jokingly]. Maybe I will be promoted when one of them [a senior lecturer] resigns or decides to die. From Regina’s narration, it becomes quite clear that the academic promotion process is quite long and hard for both men and women. However, women’s promotions take much longer not only because they are newcomers to the academic world and therefore lack the necessary formal and informal negotiating skills, but also because they have to depend on the goodwill of senior male academics. Regina tells us that a male colleague coached her on the tips to success. These unwritten rules are not readily accessible to all academic women. Moreover, this dependency on male academics might pose serious threats to women who may seek to establish their own autonomy and independent career paths. The women academics are trailblazers and as a group lack numeric power and lack female models to support them or to emulate, and therefore, face very stiff competition for the rare openings with little or no support from the established male academic elite. Senior
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One such disillusioned academic is Regina, who describes herself as a hard worker, goal oriented and ambitious. She narrates:
Njoki M. Kamau
positions are overwhelmingly occupied by men, who rarely resign; therefore, very few openings occur. In the study, the women believed that the way the university is organized, structured, and operated works to the advantage of male academics. Promotion criteria are not simply based on merit. Promotions are not only gendered, but are also highly dependent on ethnicity, brotherization,2 and professional and political patronage. Angela, a senior lecturer who described herself as a warrior determined to continue fighting for a worthy cause, explains: The stated promotion criteria emphasize quality publications in reputable journals, excellent teaching for a continuous number of years and contribution to the university life. . . . Other extraneous factors do come into play when promotions come for review. . . . Factors such as loyalty to the university leadership and ability to inf luence levers of power are connected to who is a Luo, Kikuyu or Kamba [ethnic groups in Kenya] . . . all these factors come into play when promotions are being considered. . . . I can provide examples of many men and a couple of women who have been promoted not on merit but on the basis of factors beyond the stated promotion criteria. These women maintained that it was simply incorrect to perceive the promotion criteria as independent and fair. They knew far too many persons who had been promoted because they were “good boys,” as well as some women who were sponsored by senior male colleagues with whom they were romantically involved or because they were perceived as “good girls.” In their view, however, these extraneous variables beyond the stated promotion criteria tended to work mainly to the disadvantage of female academics and to the advantage of male academics. Male academics accumulate advantages in the sense that they are more likely to be well connected to the political system, more experienced in the university politics, and more involved in academic networks and more often than not have wives who take care of their social, emotional, and domestic needs. As such they have both formal and informal support and the time to devote to their academic pursuits. Edna, a senior lecturer who described herself as embattled, depicts the promotion criteria as “a political document which is used to curtail women’s upward mobility within the university.” She decried the many social cultural and structural barriers put
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. . . the fact that I am a senior lecturer is as a result of years of protracted struggle . . . I have served in this university [where she teaches and the interview was conducted] with dedication. I was among the first women hired as academics. That was in the mid70s. . . . The men do not believe a woman could be competent. After all, they argue, “what can a woman tell us.” It’s an oligarchy. The same men have been running the university for years. The same men are virtually in all committees and when it came to publications they exchange information among themselves . . . You feel terrible when young men join the staff and quickly get promoted. Senior male profs co-opt junior males to do background research, submit an article for a certain book or nominate their kind for awards and scholarships . . . they turn around saying women are not aggressive, hardworking or determined. Tell me, how can you achieve when you are excluded or barriers, obstacles, are put on your way? It’s all too hard, but I just knew I did not have a lot of choice and I kept trying and only last year they were convinced and gave me my lectureship. They want to make it appear that women are only good at producing and nurturing babies and taking care of the home. . . . They keep reminding you that you are a woman and a woman’s place is in the kitchen. . . . I tell you don’t believe them. It is our Kenyan culture which privileges men. . . . Women in this university and elsewhere work extremely hard, but they lack the recognition. Men in this university and particularly male professors cannot acknowledge that some women are better than them all. The women in no uncertain terms argued that the cut-throat competition for the few positions in the academic hierarchy was biased against them because they encountered negative sociocultural attitudes from senior male colleagues who were determined to see them only as women, irrespective of their academic productivity. The women mentioned that it was not unusual to encounter sexist academics who challenged and undermined their authority, devalued their work and ideas, and questioned their credibility. At times women’s accomplishments were dismissed as an outcome of having a sexual relationship with a senior male colleague. Regina, for instance, complained that
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in the way of academic women’s career development and spoke of her own difficulties:
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I completed my master’s with shining grades. What apalls me today is the head of my department. He continuously keeps asking me—“Oh! Who supervised your master’s project?” and when I tell him Abdul supervised me he retorts: “No wonder you got an A grade. He wanted to marry you. Is that right.” . . . He makes me feel very nervous. . . . . He reminds me of male students when I was an undergraduate. They used to undermine our accomplishments by arguing that women were lucky by the fact that they could get “Markisi ya chupi” [underwear marks], meaning that women students could secure higher marks by offering sexual favors to male professors. . . . This kind of attitude makes the strongest of us women extra cautious and this kind of limits what one can achieve. And as if supporting Regina’s fears, Angela asserted that some male professors are even afraid to support women academics openly for fear of raising suspicions. Speaking of her own denied promotion, she asserts: For a woman in this university you have always to be on guard. . . . I vividly remember when I approached Professor Njama and requested him to write a referee letter for me. . . . First he told me that his letter may disadvantage me because it might be interpreted by the administration that he was trying to support me, first because we hailed from the same ethnic community and two, I was a woman. I still persuaded him to support me, but he refused. I did get another professor to referee me . . . at the interview I remember I was asked two questions around my personal life which I thought were in bad taste. I never got the promotion, but I believe it was for personal reasons. . . . When you are frank, aggressive and determined, they [university administrators] always think you must be having some powerful social contacts or taller godfathers.3 On several occasions I have been questioned about godfathers unknown to me. From stories such as Angela’s and Regina’s, we see that some male academics devalue their female colleagues’ hard work and intelligence and hint that women academics use their sexual favors to secure high grades and, therefore, are not quite qualified. This kind of attitude
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the head of her department kept undermining her academic worth. In her words:
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discourages many women from trying. In terms of promotions, women’s qualifications are under far more scrutiny than those of their male colleagues. Rathgeber (1991, 60) arrived at the same conclusion, arguing that the school authorities expected female student physicians to fail. When they did succeed, their success was explained by claims that their grading had been less severe, or that they had used sexual attraction as an unfair advantage. This undervaluation of women’s achievements is carried into the professional lives of female academics. Lack of Time: Excessive Academic and Administrative Workloads Not only do the academic women encounter negative social attitudes that impact on their career development, they are overburdened by excessive academic and routine administrative work that leaves them with no time for publishing. Lack of publication in turn means their careers stagnate. Repeatedly, the women quoted the overused cliché that “you either publish or perish.” The women again and again told me that although both men and women had a relatively equal workload, their own promotional prospects were limited by lack of time. Time was perceived as a critical resource that needed to be strictly “economized,” “managed,” and “wisely budgeted.” This lack of time was tied to the structural, organizational, and administrative limitations and conditions so peculiar to universities in some of the developing African countries. Most of the women complained of high enrollment rates in the university without the university making an effort to match both the physical and human resources to these high rates. As such, the lecturers as well as the students spend phenomenal amounts of time in the library scrambling for the few textbooks available. Specifically, the women felt overextended by the large class sizes, heavy teaching loads, administering of examinations, and grading of students’ continuous assessment tests as well as the marking of final examinations. On average, the women interviewed had about 20 hours of lectures per week. The preparation for these contact hours meant a huge amount of time spent in the library in an effort to make comprehensive notes because students lacked enough or appropriate textbooks. The students depended to a large extent on the lecture notes. Some of the women reported having to teach day and night to make up for lost time in times of academic unrest (strikes).4 Some not only complained about lack of resources
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Outsiders Within
Njoki M. Kamau
but also of the male hierarchical organization of the university, which disadvantaged the women as a group and as junior academics. As junior academics they were expected to serve faithfully as “academic housewives,” doing most of the boring and repetitive clerical jobs in the departments. These tasks included computing of students’ final grades in a given department, timetabling, and serving on goodwill committees. Since most of the female academics were either at the rank of lecturer or tutorial fellow, they were inadvertently involved in these boring, time-consuming exercises while most of the male academics served on important brainwork committees or pursued their research interests, as aptly illustrated by Mwende’s comments: In this university it is not automatic that a student proceeds from first year to second year or to third year and so forth. There are conditions. A student must score an average mark to be allowed to proceed to the next year . . . This means a lot of work, particularly for these junior members of staff who automatically get into the examination committee . . . After members of the teaching staff complete grading their papers it is the work of the examination committee to find an average grade for each student. This is a particularly tedious process of crunching numbers. I particularly dislike adding numbers with no calculators available . . . Then sorting of the student papers either alphabetically or according to students’ registration numbers . . . This process can take weeks working on a daily basis. I remember one time we worked on Saturday and Sundays. What is annoying is that some senior male academics, in spite of grading their papers, deliberately refuse to arrange their script alphabetically or otherwise and expect us [members of the examination committee] to sort the scripts for them. I clearly remember an incidence whereby a male professor handed his scripts all mixed up . . . The chairman of the department excused this professor on the basis of age and that he was stressed out and without shame or blinking asked the members of the committee to sort out these scripts. I was particularly furious but I was made to understand that this is a training ground and that all other senior professors have endured this exercise. I had the privilege of working with the members of the examination committee in one of the core departments of the faculty of education in one of the universities. As a member of the university teaching community (and a former colleague) I was allowed to enter, mingle,
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sit and work, and observe the examination committee at work for two days. The work involved manual sorting of hundreds of scripts in the required order, moving scripts from their safe stacks at room corners to tables where examination officers meticulously matched various scripts to be sure they belonged to one candidate, calculating the grade points on scratch paper, and entering the average grade on a master student list that was prepared by the administration. After transferring marks from the students’ scripts to the master list, they then took the scripts back to their safe corners. There were incidents of scripts missing or getting displaced, which caused a lot of anxiety in the room. Entering of marks would be temporarily halted until the missing script was found. The search could take hours or even a day. I was particularly moved by these individuals’ ability to make fun of their predicament. They joked and laughed about their junior positions and ridiculed senior male academics, whom they accused of arrogance and misusing their senior status to shirk working in the examination room. What was most revealing was the fact that this department comprised 36 members of the teaching staff and only five of these were women. All five women academics were involved in the examination committee, which they all loathed and described as time-consuming, boring, repetitive, and mind-boggling. Computing of marks was manually done because the university lacked basic computer technology. Even simple calculators were rarely in use in the examination room when I carried out my observations. In the absence of efficient technology, which would improve the efficiency of the university and save phenomenal amounts of time, the women, the majority of whom were junior academics, were called upon to provide this clerical labor. Although one of the five women was a senior lecturer, she was actively serving as an assistant examination officer, while the chief examination officer was a male professor who played no more than an overseer role. Sophia, who had served on the examination committee for several years, was cognizant of the fact that to climb up the academic ladder, this was one of the rituals to be endured. However, when her name was put up on the timetable committee she decided to check how duties were allocated. To her dismay, she found that women academics were overburdened with clerical work (done by hand) while male academics were involved in committees that required brainwork. When Sophia questioned this sexual division of labor, her head of department told her, “We thought that you are seeking gender equality.” Gender equality for this departmental head meant overworking the women such that they would have no time for other academic pursuits. Despite these difficulties, the
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Outsiders Within
Njoki M. Kamau
women were prudent in their judgments. When I asked them why they do not quit these tedious committees, each in her own way mentioned that these responsibilities were important training grounds and useful for mention in a curriculum vitae. However, they maintained that male academics were represented on the most prestigious committees and that publications carried more weight during promotion reviews than excellent teaching or involvement in several committees. As a senior lecturer, Edna had served on several committees but was glad she no longer served on the examination committee. She expressed pity for those junior academics not so fortunate: I would say that I have served on several committees in this university. . . . I am so glad that I no longer spend countless hours in the examination room. It is too demanding and I hated mathematics. . . . I sympathize with those serving in there [the examination room] but it is part of the process. To move up the academic ranks these are some of the small prices one had to pay. . . . all professors in this university would testify that they all worked in that room. . . . Now that I am a senior I am involved in several other committees but none as physically demanding as the examination committee. In view of the excessive academic and administrative demands on the women’s time, their situation is made more complicated by the fact that they are expected to play other critical domestic roles as wives and mothers. Suffice it to say here that the academic women, each in her own way, explained that they experienced both intra- and inter-role conf lict at the university and at home. They have become experts in juggling roles and balancing acts, but by the end of the day they are left with little or no time for working on academic publications. They were clear in their view that no amount of excellent teaching or service to the university would lead to promotion, particularly to senior lectureship, without publication. Processes of Exclusion Unlike the North American universities where information concerning conferences, publications, seminars, research grants, and the like is readily available through scholarly journals, membership in learned societies and associations, Internet, and other academic publications as well as on university bulletin boards and even on some faculty members’ office
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doors, this is not usually the case in the Kenyan university. Most of the female academics complained that they experienced career disadvantage because they lacked or were excluded from sources of information. Most of the women said that the universities they worked in did not own a press or even a single scholarly journal. Even when a university owned a journal, the issues were short-lived due to lack of finances to maintain the subscriptions. Moreover, these journals were run by a clique of males who supported each other and a few of their female friends. Due to lack of publishing houses or local journals, both female and male academics are forced to look beyond the national borders if they are to get published. The women believed that this state of affairs favors male academics because most of them earned their graduate degrees or most of their education in Western universities, and as such were better informed as to which journals to send their papers. More often than not, the male academics were friends of male editors of international journals who also co-opted them as overseas members of the editorial board. Male academics, therefore, are better connected locally, regionally, and internationally, and thus are more likely than women to get crucial academic information. In view of the male academics’ connections with the Western universities, they are more likely to be paid-up members of learned associations and societies in the Northern hemisphere. Male academics, therefore, not only get access to publishing information but also control what information is to be shared publicly or through informal networks. What is ironic, however, is that even the few women academics who had earned their higher degrees in the Western world did not seem well connected to the Western academics or to be members of learned associations and societies in the Western world. Nevertheless, I gathered the stories of some few female academics who had succeeded in publishing not only because of the support of male academics but also because of their international affiliations. These women had earned their higher degrees in universities abroad and were active members of international bodies. They were reluctant to share information concerning publishing or conferences with other female academics. These women, as Angela put it, “succeed by withholding information from other female colleagues whom they perceive as competitors.” Academic women in this study maintained that publishing is a political act rooted in informal networks. The few academic journals available in East and Central Africa are male-dominated journals. The male editors, the reviewers, and professors form a clique, and it is not
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Njoki M. Kamau
Whether we accept it or not, publishing is a political act. I have had a couple of my articles turned down on the pretext that they are poorly written . . . I can tell you Msingi Journal, or The Journal of East and Central Africa or even the International Journal of Comparative and International Education must give your article a favorable review, [and that your article must] meet certain standards and articulate a certain point of view . . . If they [reviewers or editors] know you, your article might get a favorable review. Some men in this university went to school with some editors of prestigious journals in Europe or North America and they get their articles published often. If you are unknown your article is overscrutinized . . . Women lack connections. More often than not they are not members of learned societies or associations and as such do not receive information about call for papers or conferences. . . . In most cases men [academics] in this university are decisive as to who get published and who does not. We know of a few women here who get requested occasionally to contribute a chapter or an article . . . It is interesting, in fact funny, that a mediocre male colleague got his articles published when mine was turned down . . . I had a chance of discussing with one of the male professors who is also an editor of an East African journal, who conceded that they sympathize with male colleagues who are in need of publications. The women compared publishing to secret societies where only certain individuals are allowed in. In their view, only chosen individuals were sponsored into certain academic journals while others were not. This point is aptly articulated by Maria, who was involved in two research projects during the time this research was conducted. When I asked her, “Are you involved in any research at the present time?” she reframed my question and then elaborated: I think the critical question here is not whether I am involved in any research or not. I think the question you should be asking here is whether women get access to research funds, have access to information, access to current journals . . . who gets published and who doesn’t and why? Who attends conferences, seminars, workshops and who doesn’t and why? . . . When you get answers to these questions you will realize that it’s all politics. . . . To get into
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unusual to get some professors publishing again and again in successive issues, as put by Edna:
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the publishing world you have to be supported, to be introduced, and coached by some experienced academic guru. . . . You need research funds, and for that, too, you need support. It is not automatic. . . . You also need f lexibility in time for fieldwork. . . . Things are changing. Donor agencies are demanding that before they dish research money to all these senior academics, they must involve a junior female as a co-researcher for capacity building. . . . I am a beneficiary of these changes. That is how I am lucky I am involved in these two research projects. When I pushed Maria further on these issues, it became quite clear that a kind of patron-client system was in operation in the Kenyan universities. Maria and others like her were very firm in their belief that to get ahead, even the male academics depended on academic patronage. Ability to publish was attributed to access to information, availability of research funds, hard work, and sufficient time. Support by male academics was an added advantage. Women are rarely senior academics or power brokers in the university. Women have a minority status and are also young professionally. Sociocultural expectations dictate that men and women be “segregated,” and so female academics are excluded from informal academic networks. They are thus cut off from important sources of information very necessary for career advancement. Moreover, most of the informal information is shared in social places that career women are not expected to frequent. The academic women argued that a strong sexist culture existed in Kenyan society where women who frequented social places like bars, unaccompanied or accompanied, are perceived as women of loose morals. Men are free to frequent all social places, ranging from Masandukuni beer joints to the Sheraton Hotel, with no moral sanctions.5 A strong male bonding/ fraternity exists in the universities so that it is a common practice, for example, for a young junior male academic to invite old and experienced male professors for drinks and nyama choma parties without any strain. Conversely, it would be difficult for a female academic, whatever her designation or marital status, to invite male colleagues to social places without risking the invitation being misunderstood as a sexual one. In any case, these parties are often held at times when women are expected to be at home. A married woman would need her husband’s permission to be out late at night. Meanwhile, men participate in social interactions where academic ideas are exchanged and information about conferences, seminars, research funds, and even tips on how to get into
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Njoki M. Kamau
The information does not get to the women academics because they are limited. Most of the times men meet for nyama choma after work hours. Women, particularly married women, are not expected to frequent drinking places. Even when not prohibited there is the moral question. . . . Some academic things get discussed there. . . . I believe a man feels comfortable to release information to another man . . . They [men] say, “Women have crooked words,” meaning that women seldom keep secrets. Popular wisdom, like that of the Agikuyu people, tells us “Mundu wa kuiya na mutumia akenaga akua” [translated to mean ‘‘if you steal with a woman you will only be relieved when she dies”]. . . . Since women are absent from these sources of information, they do not get it. . . . In these informal meetings the men discuss and plot together. . . . When they come for staff meetings, they have already agreed on certain positions. They speak in one voice. . . . This is how they build each other and maintain academic power. . . . You know in our society whether we deny or accept it, we still believe a woman’s place is in the kitchen . . . therefore, if you are somebody’s wife he will leave you home. . . . If there is any information he is supposed to bring it to you. From Atieno’s narrative, a picture emerges as to why women’s academic careers stagnate. As women they are expected to belong to the private domain, just like their mothers and sisters. A man, as the breadwinner and head of the family, is expected to play the public role, bringing home information as well as perfecting his career. Academic women, just like their illiterate sisters who work tirelessly in the cornfields, are constructed as male dependents, and, therefore, are not seen as needing or deserving academic promotions as much as the men. They, too, are expected to wait for information to trickle down to them. The academic women were aware that it was a contradiction in terms to expect women with such amounts of education, exposure,, and experience to fit into the prescribed role of a “traditional housewife.” This expectation in their view was an exercise of male privilege, domination and social control. Edna, who acquired her Ph.D. from a
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the right books, get published, and get promoted are leaked. From these interactions, academic networks and associations are formed. Atieno, a senior lecturer, captured this exclusion of academic women vividly:
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prestigious university in England, critiqued the exclusion of academic women from social places as a sham. She managed alone for four years in England, but now she was not treated as a responsible adult. She lamented: “Who controlled my movement, my morality while in England? It is all too ironical.” This exclusion and social control of academic women is not peculiar to Kenya. Obbo (1980) witnessed the same pattern in her study of Ugandan women. She observed: Professional women became further trapped in double standards that distinguished “good” and “bad” women. . . . It was particularly difficult for married as well as unmarried women to go out to bars or restaurants and enjoy themselves alone or with friends, males or females, without being suspected of being prostitutes. Some resorted to advertising their motherhood by packing their children into the Mercedes Benz, Peugeot or Citröen and driving around the town (Obbo 1980, 14). Even the possession of a Ph.D. does not unlock the doors for academic women. Sophia, an associate professor with a doctorate, narrated to me an incident in which she had spent a whole day at a workshop with male colleagues in her department. At the end of the day, she gave two junior male colleagues and a senior male academic a ride in her car. They asked her to drop them at a certain social joint (drinking place). They bade her and another female colleague good-bye. When she inquired why the women were not invited to summarize the day socially since they had spent the whole day working together, the response dismayed her: “He told me, ‘These places are not ideal for women of your caliber and we thought you may not be interested. . . . In any case we thought you may want to get home early.’ ” The absence of women is apparent even within physical social spaces at the university. During my fieldwork observations, the absence of females from the senior common rooms was remarkable. I recollect vividly the loneliness and uneasiness I experienced in the senior common room of one of the universities. Men walked in and out, alone or in groups. Usually they engaged each other in animated discussions and I thought about joining in. But being the only female, I refrained from doing so. I became self-conscious about my presence there and hoped other women might come in to neutralize my feelings of being in a minority. After some time, two women entered the common room and sat at a table near mine. I was relieved. I became more comfortable
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Outsiders Within
Njoki M. Kamau
and I was able to listen to their discussion (which was carried on in low voices) as well as hear what the men were arguing about in loud voices. What was interesting about this observation was that even the discussions and the spaces we occupied were gendered. Men sat or stood near the counter, arguing and teasing each other about their work. The two women sat at a corner near where I was sitting, and their discussion centered on family matters. Rarely did I come across two academic women in the senior common rooms I visited discussing academic work. The following field notes may serve to highlight further women’s exclusion from academic networks: I arrived a few minutes to 3 p.m. I sat in one of the corners so that I could not be too obtrusive and at the same time, I wanted to have a good vantage point. The place is clean. Comfortable seats are in place except for two long tables (which I later gathered were used for indoor games). The atmosphere is very relaxing, very good music. . . . Men enter in twos, threes or simply in a group. Some stand, others sit. They shake hands, laugh, hug and talk in loud voices. . . . At the counter all types of drinks are displayed neatly. Tusker, Pilsner, whisky, Coke, etc. . . . I notice most of the men are drinking beer and some Coke or something else. . . . Three women enter and I am happy that I am not the only woman in the room. They make themselves comfortable at a table near mine. . . . I notice two of them being served soft drinks and one tea. . . . I overhear mentions of children . . . school, homework . . . I decide to pay more attention. I wonder whether I should join them . . . at this time I become keenly aware of my presence in this place. I feel guilty that I am spying on people. . . . I feel the odd person out. . . . I wonder why men and women segregate even when in one room . . . I notice new groups forming. Some groups speak in very low tones, others in high tones . . . then suddenly I feel a tap on my shoulder. It’s my friend from the Sociology Department. He knew I was waiting for him. He apologizes for being late. We discuss work, family, my presence there . . . then I ask him why are there so few women here? He looks surprised. He looks around, then answers, “Career women are not normally expected to be in public places. It is not considered to be right. . . . They must exercise some discretion.” I become more and more convinced of how deep gender stereotyping is entrenched. Women must be home while boys socialize, network and deliberate on issues (Field Notes, March 16, 1993).
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Even when women are included in academic networks, it is on male terms. Some of the women who had worked with men believed that the only reason why women were being asked to be co-researchers with senior male academics was due to changed funding policies. The international donor agencies, to promote capacity-building, were insisting on funding only research in which junior female academics were co-researchers. Although these women felt this was a positive move and would indeed give them a chance to develop their research skills, they also expressed feelings of anxiety and despair. To fit into the “boys’ club” they had to deal with sexist jokes, derogatory remarks that contained constant reminders that after all, they were women, and they even had to familiarize themselves with male games like football. Anna, one of these academics, told me of how she had to force herself to watch football or other men’s programs on television because every time the team met for research progress reviews, the first few minutes would be devoted to discussion of such interests. But whatever social and personal sacrifices and adjustments the women made, they felt they were still not quite accepted. As Anna put it: “They [men] invite you in but at the same time make it too difficult for you to stay in. They make you feel an outsider within the university. They leave us in an ambiguous state.” Anna argued that physical inclusion in discussions or research projects does not guarantee actual participation. In her words: “Women are expected to accompany men as ‘handbags’ but not to challenge or contradict them. They are expected to listen and compliment.” Other women gave several examples of incidents at workshops, seminars, or research project meetings where they could rarely be heard and the male academics ended up speaking to themselves. Wanja, another such woman brought onto a research team, gave up trying to be part of these networks after experiencing psychological exclusion: You have to be extraordinarily strong to maintain your hold in some of these committees. You have to deal with the perception that you are a woman and therefore different from your male colleagues . . . most of the times you are the only woman in a big meeting. Then you attend some of the workshops, where there are two or three of us women. You speak your point of view. They [participants] are quiet, as if you have said nothing . . . I remember for example a workshop we attended four years ago. I hoped to raise some research concerns . . . I did not think that research funds
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were fairly distributed . . . I did not raise the issue. The climate was not right . . . What I hated most was the way they [the male academics] would whisper, beckon to each other as if in a form of conspiracy. . . . You are only expected attend the workshop to ascertain their point of view. They call each other aside to discuss as if you are a stranger . . . these days even when they invite me I don’t attend. I have refused to be a cheerleader. From Wanja’s account, we realize that these women are not mere victims; they are active subjects. Realizing that her presence in these workshops was not beneficial and that her inclusion was only symbolic, Wanja consciously withdrew. She refused to be “a cheerleader.” Although this act was an important political statement, it impacts negatively on Wanja’s career development. In search of self-dignity and identity, she cuts herself off from a research network useful for development of skills, ideas, future publication, and sponsorship into the position of an honorary male. Wanja is in a double bind. Whichever exit she chooses, she is bound to lose. Even if she had chosen not to withdraw, there is no evidence to show that she might have progressed. Her presence on the committee, however token, would be used to justify claims of gender equality within the system. This would imply her participation in perpetuation and maintenance of her own oppression and that of other academic women. Alternatively, her resistance to oppression and her eventual withdrawal can be used to further the view that women cannot take a challenge or perform even when given an opportunity. In fact, Wanja explained that around her university she is usually pointed out as a woman who cannot meet academic challenges. Her withdrawal is perceived by male academics as a sign of weakness and personal failure, and her behavior is said to be typical of all women. This exclusion of academic women from academic networks and their subsequent career disadvantage are discussed by O’Leary and Mitchell (1990). Although they are writing about American academic women, I find their findings support my own. They report that high research productivity depends greatly on collaboration. O’Leary and Mitchell argue that male scientists are better connected than female scientists. Women are rarely sought out by their male counterparts, and thus their publication rates remain lower than those of men. Advantages of networking have been reported for men, who say that informal conversations with colleagues are their primary source of ideas and inspirations. O’Leary and Mitchell show that as far back as the seventeenth century,
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networks of academics (“invisible colleges”) existed. The members of the network functioned as gatekeepers, controlling finances, reputations, and the fate of new scientific ideas. Toren (1991, 169) has noted the same pattern of women’s exclusion from academic networks in Israel and the powerful effects of social interactions, mutual perceptions, stereotypes, expectations, and collaboration: The nature and rate of interaction and research collaboration between faculty women and men in academic institutions are strongly inf luenced by mutual perceptions, stereotypes, expectations and evaluation of performance as well as by propositional sex composition. In most scientific work most of the important factors contributing to accomplishment and success are the interaction and exchange of ideas among colleagues. Individuals who are excluded from these formal and informal networks (invisible colleges) usually perform less well and are less productive . . . Those who comprise the numerical minority, and have inferior diffuse status, encounter resistance on the part of the majority to accept them as equals. In the academic work setting, this means that women would be isolated to some extent from these informal networks, financial and psychological support, performance opportunities and power. It is important to note at this point that the few Kenyan women in positions of senior lecturers and professors (63 out of 454 women) (see table 6.1) were scattered across departments, campuses, and colleges that were geographically miles apart. The universities lacked crucial communication systems such as telephones and e-mail, which made it difficult for women to share information or support one another. Unlike female academics, the males were found in all departments and in all ranks, including administrative ones. With their large numbers, buttressed by an existence of a strong male culture, male academics supported each other and had greater probabilities of upward mobility than their female colleagues. Academic Mentoring/Sponsorship The women repeatedly linked their slow production rates and subsequent slow promotion rates to the lack of an academic mentor or
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sponsor. A good relationship between a junior academic and a senior academic was referred to as a “catalyst” or “passport” to success in academia. The women believed that it was particularly difficult for them to establish and maintain a good working relationship over time with mentors/sponsors (senior academics) who were overwhelmingly male. Mentorship is as old as society. According to Webster’s New International Dictionary, a mentor is a wise and faithful counselor. A mentor is one who gives advice, states guidelines, warns of faults, and instructs. Gitterman (1986), elaborating on this definition, sees mentorship as an intense relationship between someone who is knowledgeable in a specific discipline and a novice in the field. A mentor helps the mentee sort out his/her thoughts in a nonjudgmental way. A mentor advises and encourages the novice to get on during the initial stages of career development. A keen interest in professional growth augments a personal interest in the mentee’s career. It is this kind of close, nonjudgmental, personal relationship with a wise guru or academic godfather or godmother who instructs, guides, and supports that some of the academic women in this study complained they lacked. The feeling was strong among these academic women that in comparison with their male colleagues, they were given less support, not taken seriously, ignored, trivialized and targeted for blame. The women explained that being someone’s “boy,” being in the right books, and being loyal to certain academic gatekeepers were some of the enablers of career development. The women maintained that senior male academics preferred to sponsor their own kind. They told me of cases where their male colleagues were promoted faster than they were because they received favorable recommendations, information, and social support from senior male academics that were not readily available to the female academics. Sometimes women benefited indirectly. Angela, a senior academic, told me about a classic case of males sponsoring males. Her male colleague was being sought out for sponsorship and promotion, but since she was more qualified than he, the department had no choice other than to promote both of them. In her words: In an ideal situation, the stated criteria should be followed . . . but I feel in this university the more lobbying, the more connected you are, the more close you are to these people [professors], the better your chances. . . . I will provide you with an example here. In 1987, I memorably remember that I was due for promotion in my department together with another colleague who incidentally is
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my friend. . . . We completed our master’s together in this department [where this interview was conducted.] . . . through the grapevine this male colleague learnt that we were expected to have published or presented some academic papers in the departmental seminars. We were also supposed to have defended our Ph.D. proposals. . . . Neither the chairman nor the dean of the faculty had made this information available to me. Nevertheless, this colleague of mine shared this precious information with me. . . . We quickly decided to write and present papers to beat the deadline. . . . His presentation was scheduled earlier than mine. During this presentation, I will never forget that day. The seminar room was packed to capacity. The chairman of our department, a full professor and a personal friend of my colleague, had invited all the full professors and senior academics not only in our department but from the whole Faculty of Arts. . . . they had all gathered to hear my colleague’s presentation. . . . Incidentally the chairman of our department supervised this colleague of mine’s master’s thesis. . . . You know how men build each other. . . . But to my surprise when the day came for my presentation, the attendance was poor. The conspicuous absentees were my chairman and his fellow friends. . . . I felt slighted, but the presentation went well. . . . I got promoted along with my colleague. . . . I later came to gather that the chairman was pushing for the promotion of his “boy,” my colleague, and since I had outperformed him in my master’s grade they had no choice than to promote both of us. . . . That is why I tell you that promotions in this university are not fair. It depends on who knows who. From Angela’s narration, it becomes quite clear that junior male academics are singled out for mentorship. As Angela tells us, “the chairman of the department dragged all senior academics to witness and support this colleague of mine.” This amounts to sponsored mobility. Conversely, women academics get a raw deal. During Angela’s presentation, the chairman conveniently absented himself and attendance was poor. This amounts to sex discrimination. Angela was promoted only because they could not find a better way to explain or dismiss her qualifications. Her story suggests that for a woman to be promoted to the same rank as a man, her accomplishments must be clearly better than his. This devaluation of women’s accomplishments has its origins in the prevalent Kenyan gender ideology. A strong patriarchal cultural system
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exists that condones abusive gender communication and even allows open expression of hostility and contempt toward women. It is not uncommon to hear or read statements from members of parliament or cabinet ministers devaluing women. For example, in 1979, when members of parliament were debating the failed Marriage and Divorce Bill, Mr. Wabuge, one of the parliamentarians and an ex-ambassador of Kenya to the United Nations, stated that a wife should be beaten as it was a pleasure to her, and a way of expressing love in Luhya [one of the ethnic communities] customs: “If you beat your wife probably after doing something wrong, it would only be by accident if you break her ribs,” he told the house (Asiyo 1989, 45). To my surprise, during my discussion and interviews some Luyha women seemed to subscribe to this idea. In 1991, Mulu Mutisya, a cabinet minister, told another minister, “You are like a wayward wife and your position can only be occupied by a woman” (Maina 1992, 14), while in the same year Nicholas Biwott, one of the powerful ministers, described members of an opposition party as behaving like women rejected by men who group together in search of clients (Maina 1992, 2). Arap Soi, another cabinet minister, summarized: “Women must be forever led. It is quite absurd and perturbing the way modern women are clamoring for public office . . . contrary to the important considerations of the natural law” (Maina 1992, 11). These archetypal chauvinists got the support and blessing of none other than the former president, “his excellency” Daniel Toroitich Arap Moi, who on December 12, 1991, during a Jamuhuri Day (Kenya’s independence day) address, told the crowds that the f low of authority in an African society was clear: women never surpassed men (Maina 1992, 1). The lack of support for Kenyan female academics echoes findings in both European and North American studies. O’Leary and Mitchell (1990), Moore and Sagaria (1991), and the Chilly Climate Collective (1995) all show that women are unsupported; that men support one another; that women are excluded from male academic networks; that women experience a chilly climate; and that women lack mentors and sponsors and as a result, lack informal information and resources, and are shut off from job prospects, research information, and professional opportunity and services. These studies identify the important role played by a mentor in the professional life of a mentee. Sponsors or career gatekeepers are seen as extremely valuable for one’s upward achievement. Corcoran and Clark (1986) specifically stress that the academic gatekeeper plays an important role in introducing promising and favored protégés to powerful circles of colleagues, promoting them, showing them the ropes, and providing opportunities to operate successfully among the powerful.
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Even when women have an impeccable academic record and are indeed promoted to senior academic ranks, their promotions do not bring the prestige, power, role, or status commensurate with their positions. Their status continues to be determined by negative stereotypical images about women in general. They continue to accumulate career disadvantage through the numerous acts of academic exclusion. As an example, women are rarely chosen as university thesis supervisors. The women in the research maintained that supervision of either a master’s or doctoral thesis was an added advantage for one’s lateral and vertical career development. The supervision process provided an ample opportunity to generate, share, and try out new ideas and thus sharpen intellectual skills and establish academic clout and sometimes lifetime friendships. The women believed that thesis supervision helped one to gain courage and confidence and broaden academic horizons, and in this way acquire the necessary experience to proclaim academic authority. The number of candidates an individual successfully supervised was seen as an important factor in boosting one’s academic social and personal esteem. It was also an important factor particularly if one was to put oneself forward for further promotions. Maria showed her bitterness in this regard: Selection or appointment is not a neutral act. In some departments the chairmen of departments allocate or choose supervisors for students. . . . I am tempted to believe that the heads of departments assign thesis supervision to their friends . . . those colleagues they believed were more qualified. . . . In other departments the students choose their supervisors but their choice must be ratified, sanctioned by departmental head and postgraduate committees. . . . The fact that I have been in this department for ten years and as the only specialist in [my field] and no one has approached me for supervision makes me believe [here she laughs] that these people [both male academics and students] do not believe that I am capable. From Maria’s narration, we begin to see that even being a specialist in a certain field does not boost a woman’s status. Maria is the only specialist in her department in a particular area, and for ten years she has not been asked to supervise even a master’s project. She was conscious of the fact that her knowledge was under question. She felt “these people do not believe that I am capable.”
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Thesis Supervision and Student Responses
Njoki M. Kamau
The women gave me several examples of men who had equivalent qualifications to their own but were involved in thesis supervision while the women were not. The women felt that they were discriminated against on the basis of their gender. At one university, for example, Sophia, a lecturer, personally introduced me to two of her male colleagues, who she later told me held master’s degrees, as she did. She was employed in the university two years before they were hired. Nevertheless, those two colleagues had supervised at least three student projects. She felt that she had been overlooked. Sophia expressed dissatisfaction with the secrecy and speed with which supervision was allocated. Although she considered these two male colleagues to be her friends, she found out only by sheer accident that they were supervising these projects. She felt slighted by the co-coordinator of the relevant program, a person she had thought was her friend and supporter over the years. From the women’s evidence, it was clear that both students (even females) and senior male academics preferred male supervisors to female supervisors. Sopiato, a senior lecturer, speaking from her own personal experience of exclusion, perceived the reasons why women were not preferred as thesis supervisors or committee members as follows: As the only woman and a senior lecturer in this department for now three years, it has become clear to me that even female students are not attracted to female professors. . . . I have witnessed over the years both male and female students constantly consult my male colleagues. . . . I have learnt that students are looking for powerful, well-connected, and reputable professors who can later prop them in the job market. . . . Women academics are not that well connected to the outside world. . . . Secondly, there is this feeling, how can you be supervised by a woman? . . . Our society is male-dominated and women are not really seen as knowledgeable . . . few students and even fewer males would opt for a female supervisor. . . . A couple of women students have requested me to sit on their committees but not a single male student has ever approached me. Sopiato’s marginalization is even more pronounced because even the female students were looking for established, well-connected academics whose reputation and social contacts would give them an easy passage into the job market. It is common knowledge that students supervised by certain academic heavyweights get hired as tutorial fellows in the
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university immediately after completion of their master’s thesis. Others have been sponsored for jobs outside the university on the basis of their being students of Professor X or Y. The majority of the female academics maintained that they were constrained because they were not well connected with the political system. They had no academic inf luence, and their impact was rarely felt at the university or in the outside society. As women, they were perceived as subordinates, whether they were professors or graduate assistants. Students’ actions and choices of male supervisors, prudent as they may appear, impact negatively on women’s academic careers. This kind of situation made many academic women I encountered express a sense of being outsiders. The women suffered tensions, anxiety, vexation, and serious selfdoubts as they tried to reconcile their contradictory and ambivalent existences. They were happy that they were university lecturers, earned a high salary, and conducted successful seminars and lectures, but at the same time they were unhappy that their abilities were not recognized. Some felt that since they were excluded from thesis supervision, they were not clear whether they were despised or liked, valued or devalued as persons or as academics. They witnessed the same clique of males travel from conference to conference, workshop to workshop, and supervise almost all the theses in the faculty. The women’s fears, anxieties, and ambivalences were compounded by the fact that women were not normally expected to be highly qualified. The women felt that they were perceived as an anomaly by the majority of the students and by some male academics. Some women narrated to me incidents where they believed they were unfairly booed, asked to go home, or shouted at to waacha urembo [stop being glamorous] by students in the lecture theaters simply because of their gender. The women believed that in the minds of the students, all academics, and particularly doctors and professors, are males. A number of women told me of cases where they were perplexed by students’ reactions. Some students went to their offices expecting to find male professors, only to be embarrassed when they realized the lecturer they had come to see was a woman. Maria’s experience illustrates this position: Before I established myself in one of the child development courses, I faced a lot of hostility. It was a second-year course. As soon as I entered the lecture theater, the room would be filled with boos and shouts of “go home, go home.” I was not surprised because I did my undergraduate in this university [where she was teaching and where this interview was conducted] and I remember we used
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to send home lecturers who did not deliver their lectures well. . . . I was, however, surprised when on another day the students shouted waacha urembo [stop modeling/being feminine]. I realized there was a gender angle in this shouting . . . Some two first-year students came to my office. They wanted to see Dr. Domingo. Incidentally, Domingo is my husband’s name, and I believe these students expected to meet a male. . . . I cannot forget the pangs of pain I experienced when these students asked me politely whether they could see Dr. Domingo. . . . After it dawned on them I was Dr. Domingo, they could not hide their frustrations. One went as far as asking, “Are you really Dr. Domingo?” . . . I was hurt. . . . One said, “I am sure it’s a mistake.” They apologized and left. . . . Three days later one of the students returned to my office, apologizing that they had been informed that the geography professor was a male. . . . We sorted out the mess and I advised the students on the course prerequisites. This anecdote tells us that women are not expected to be university professors. Students’ attitudes can be best understood by considering the situation of the majority of Kenyan women. Most Kenyan women are illiterate and of the few who work in the formal sector, the majority are secretaries, nurses, and primary school teachers (Republic of Kenya 1993a). These students may not have encountered many female teachers in their advanced levels, particularly if they were in a boys-only school. They therefore could not possibly understand how a woman could be a university professor. This unequal gender ideology perpetuated in Kenyan society leads these students to ask, “Are you really Dr. Domingo?” Rathgeber (1991) corroborates the findings in this study. In her study on female physicians in Kenya, she found that female medical doctors were slighted by their patients who referred to them as “nurse” or “sister.” This indicates that societal stereotypical attitudes determine how women in professions are perceived and treated. Sexual Harassment Maintaining a good relationship with one’s academic or university supervisor was repeatedly cited as a crucial asset to an individual’s career progress. Academic supervisors were perceived as potential career mentors. They play an important role, particularly in the hiring and the
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promotion process for their students. Their reference letters were considered to be invaluable. However, a majority of the academic women complained that they did not enjoy a close working relationship with their male supervisors. The women told me stories of how their studies were slowed down or had to be stopped in order to sort out differences between themselves and their supervisors. Most of these differences were sparked by sexual advances, sexist jokes, passes, and comments that made it difficult to manage the day-to-day working relationship. Some of the women were forced to change supervisors, or to keep off the university premises for a time. Anna narrated to me how her supervisor, a man she completely trusted, all of a sudden developed a sexual interest in her. He went as far as suggesting marrying her, even though he was already a married man. Her being skilled and strong in character helped her ward off these unwanted sexual advances. She and her supervisor then had to renegotiate their working relationship. They decided to recruit a male friend of the supervisor to act as a buffer, and under his direction, Anna completed her master’s thesis. However, the credit for supervision went to the man who’d harassed her, because he was the assigned university professor. Anna told me that she did not officially complain because if she did, she would be ridiculed as a stupid woman who cannot take jokes and who publicly tells everything. Speaking out or complaining about such acts would be seen as a sign of weakness. A woman is expected to carry herself “decently,” meaning that she is not a “big mouth.” In any case, women are expected to accept and even be happy that somebody is attracted to them. The majority of the women decried the advantage male professors take of them. They argued that it was not likely that a woman would complete a thesis process without some bruises. If supervisors make sexual advances and you turn them down, they told me, they could dismiss you as a weak candidate. Angela ruefully remembers her own experience: I liked my supervisor a lot. My colleague used to tell me that I was lucky to be supervised by him. He was concerned and used to prod me ahead . . . But one day I took my work to his office. He beckoned me to sit on a sofa beside him. My senses told me something was very wrong. . . . I could not believe my senses. I was utterly shocked by what was unfolding. . . . He touched me and I told him that I was married. He told me that he is also married. . . . I told him I was probably more married than him. I brandished my wedding ring, hoping to convince him. . . . In fact I had
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just gotten married, about six months ago, and he was one of the invited guests. . . . You are afraid to report these incidences. It only makes life difficult for you. You become a laughing stock. . . . It is extremely difficult, painful and disorienting because it is from the same supervisor you may be expected to get a recommendation from for further training or for promotion purposes. Angela, who described herself as hardworking and a no-nonsense academic, shared with me that her promotion from tutorial fellowship to the position of lecturer has been delayed for years. This delay was a result of psychological and sexual harassment from her thesis supervisor. She tried to be tactful and skillfully turn his abuses into lighthearted jokes, hoping that he might understand and stop misbehaving. She also did not want to jeopardize her academic career: “All I wanted was to complete my master’s and forget this man. I used to pretend that I did not understand his insinuations. I played dumb but that did not help.” The last straw was when this man went to her office. He did not enter, even though she opened the door and ushered him in. He simply stood by the door. After much reluctance, he finally entered but did not make any effort to close the door behind him .After a brief conversation, he twisted everything and told her, “I know you do not like poor men like me. You only date rich men. I understand that you now drive a Subaru.” Angela told me she felt as if she were completely undressed in a marketplace. She was sure her colleagues in adjacent offices or passing by must have overheard this nasty talk. She was so offended and hurt that she could not hold herself together. In tears, she passed through the departmental secretary’s office and told her, “I am quitting this program. Professor Xuma has been harassing me and I cannot take it anymore.” However, after thinking seriously about the problem, she went to her department the following morning determined not to quit. She officially reported the matter to the departmental head, who advised her to forget the issue and quickly changed supervisors for Angela. This was tantamount to beginning her thesis project all over. It took her four years to complete her master’s degree instead of the usual two years. During the interview, it became quite clear that although Angela had decided to concentrate on the future, she was worried that her former supervisor, as one of the senior professors in her department, might negatively inf luence her promotion. The respondents’ voices suggest that sexual harassment is a common phenomenon in the Kenyan universities. However, since gender is not
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a politicized issue in these universities, terms like “sexual harassment” or measures like sexual harassment policies are nonexistent. Unwanted sexual advances, according to the respondents, are seen as part of what happens in a working environment and not something to worry about. The women are not expected to complain and if they do, they might jeopardize their own reputation and status. But it is clear that the women do not like these advances and they employ such strategies as playing dumb, turning the advances into jokes, or being tactful in an attempt to ward them off. The women knew very well that if they had to report these incidents, it would only be to other senior males who might neither understand nor sympathize. They even feared that they might be blamed. This chilly climate is very unsettling and destroys the congenial relationships expected in a university. The women are put on the defensive. Some women told me that they keep away from certain sexist male colleagues who have a reputation for harassing women. This avoidance approach, though the most logical thing to do, may work to the detriment of women’s career advancement. As was discussed earlier, academic women are excluded from male academic networks, but at times women manage to extract useful information from some of their colleagues. If women increase their social and physical distance, they may be completely cut off from the politics of the university and from informal sources of information. The dilemma here is that the majority of the women told me they had to frequently consult with their male colleagues on certain academic matters. They also complained that some of these males harass them sexually and would prefer to consult with their own menfolk even if the men are mediocre. The question that remains unanswered here is how these women academics can escape their predicament. They seem trapped in a double bind. To consult with their male colleague and in fact to maintain a working relationship may mean their getting access to some beneficial information. However, this consultation may be seized as an opportunity for sexual harassment. Conclusion From the respondents’ analyses, I argue in this paper that most of the academic women believe that the university is unfair and undemocratic. They maintain that they are perceived and treated as outsiders within the academe. They are marginalized in academe. Their careers develop at a slower rate compared with that of their male colleagues. Their ideas
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Outsiders Within
Njoki M. Kamau
are excluded in shaping the university policies. They are also excluded from the university leadership. Women’s abilities and accomplishments are challenged, undermined, and devalued. Their lives are also constrained by a strong male culture in the university as well as in the general society. Women are first perceived in their biological roles as mothers, wives, or girlfriends and are accepted only as male helpmates. Inadvertently they are relegated to what I refer to as academic housewives. They not only experience psychological and sexual harassment from their male colleagues, but abusive communication and negative attitudes that make the academic climate less congenial and less collegial. This hostile climate affects academic women’s productivity. Lack of productivity in turn serve to confirm that women do not belong in the academe. However, these women do not capitulate to the patriarchal design in the Kenyan academe. In this paper, I show that these women employ various strategies to make the academe work for them. As resilient social actors, they subvert, resist, adapt, and appropriate the strong male culture in Kenyan academe in an effort to create spaces for self-definition and personal empowerment. The thesis of this paper, therefore, is that although Kenyan academic women experience a host of barriers put in their way, some do survive and thrive. Notes 1. Departmental establishments: In each teaching department, positions are established in a hierarchical and pyramidal manner. For example, in a department like Educational Foundations the establishment is two full professors, three associate professors, five senior lecturers, 26 lecturers, nine tutorial fellows, and three graduate assistants. Unless a professor or any academic terminates his/her services, these positions rarely fall vacant irrespective of anyone’s qualifications. This means an individual could be overqualified in a certain position but cannot be promoted because there is no opening. 2. Brotherization is a concept commonly used in Kenya to refer to some situations whereby to be hired, promoted, or even admitted into training colleges or other such places of learning, one has to know another person in a position of inf luence. The term denotes a situation where one is expected to help members of his/her clan, relatives, and friends before extending help to strangers. In my mother tongue, Kikuyu, this situation is referred to as Kimenyano, or “he who knows who gets favors.” This can best be understood as sponsored or ascribed mobility, as opposed to contest mobility. For more information on contest versus sponsored mobility, see Banks 1976; Ballantine 1983; and Waller 1965. 3. Taller godfathers are perceived or real figures thought to inf luence a woman to act decisively on her own and act boldly or aggressively. The concept is intended to discredit the idea that a woman can act definitively without any support from male figures. 4. Strikes, or student disturbances as they are usually referred to, are a common phenomenon in Kenyan universities. Students are forcefully sent home for weeks and at times almost a year,
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after clashing with the university administration. Armed police personnel are usually deployed to expedite the process. Sometimes makeup courses are necessary upon their return. 5. Masandukuni is a Kiswahili word meaning “boxes.” Kenyan society is socially stratified. There are vaticans (high rich areas) and hovels. In these very poor places, people sit on boxes as they drink, hence the term masadukuni. Most of the senior men are known for frequenting these drinking joints, which are less formal but more lively and exciting socially than places in the richer areas.
References Acker, Sandra. 1992. New perspectives on an old problem: The position of women academics in British higher education. Higher Education 24(3): 57–75. ———. 1990. Teachers’ culture in an English primary school: Continuity and change. British Journal of Sociology of Education 11(3): 257–73. Asiyo, P. 1989. Legislative process and gender issues in Kenya. In Women and Law in Kenya, ed. M. Mbeo and O. Ombaka, 41–49. Nairobi: Public Law Institute. Chilly Climate Collective, ed. 1995. Breaking Anonymity: The Chilly Climate for Women Faculty. Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Corcoran, M., and S. M. Clark. 1986. Perspectives on the professional socialization of women faculty: A case of accumulative disadvantage? Journal of Higher Education 57(1): 20–23. Eshiwani, G. S. 1985. Women’s access to higher education: A study of opportunities and attainment in science and mathematics education. Journal of Eastern African Research and Development 15: 91–110. Fox. M. (1989). Women in Higher Education: Gender differences in the Status students and scholars. In J. Freeman (ed), ( pp.238–255). Palo Alto; CA: Mayfield publishing. Gitterman, G. (1986). Mentors in nursing. Unpublished thesis, University of Toronto. Toronto Kinyanjui, K. 1978. Education and formal employment opportunities for women in Kenya: Some preliminary data. In The Participation of Women in the Kenyan Society, ed. Achola Pala, Thelma Awori, and Abigail Krystal. Nairobi: The Kenyan Literature Bureau. Klein, R. D. 1983. How to do what we want to do: Thoughts about feminist methodology. In Theories of Women’s Studies, ed. G. Bowles and R. D. Klein, 88–104. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Maina, W. 1992. Women’s participation in public affairs in Kenya: The real battle is against cultural stereotypes. Law Monthly (February): 121. Maleche, Albert. 1976. A new status for women in Kenya. East African Journal, 28–31. Moore, Kathryn M., and Mary Ann D. Sagaria. 1991. The situation of women in research universities in United States: Within the inner circles of academic power. In Women’s Higher Education in Comparative Perspective, ed. Gail P. Kelly and Sheila Slaughter, 185–200. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Obbo, Christine. 1980. African Women: Their Struggle for Economic Independence. London: Zed Press. O’Leary, Virginia E., and Judith M. Mitchell. 1990. Women connecting with women: Networks and mentors in the United States. In Storming the Tower: Women in the Academic World, ed. Suzanne Stiver Lie and Virginia E. O’Leary, 58–73. London: Kogan Page. Rathgeber, E. M. 1991. Women in higher education: Access and choices. In Women’s Higher Education in Comparative Perspective, ed. Gail P. Kelly and Sheila Slaughter, 47–62. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
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Outsiders Within
Njoki M. Kamau
Republic of Kenya. 1993a. Demographic and health survey. Nairobi: National Council for Population & Development. Reinharz, S. 1983. Experiential analysis: a contribution to feminist research. In Theories of Women’s Studies, ed. G. Bowles, and R. Duelli Klein. London: Routledge. Republic of Kenya. 1993b. Economic survey. Nairobi: Central Bureau of Statistics, Ministry of Planning & National Development. Riria, J. 1984. Education for all: The neglected half. BERC Bulletin 8: 7–10. Robertson, C. 1985. A growing dilemma: Women and change in African primary education 1950–1986. In Women and Development in Africa, ed. Gideon Were. Nairobi: Were Press. Toren, N. 1991. Women at the top: Female full professors in higher education in Israel. In Women’s Higher Education in Comparative Perspective, ed. Gail P. Kelly and Sheila Slaughter, 165–84. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. United Nations Development Programme. 2001. Kenya human development report. Nairobi: UNDP. Webb, C. 1993. Feminist research: Definitions, methodology, methods, and evaluation. Journal of Advanced Nursing 18(3): 416–23. Zeleza, T. 1993. Gendering African history. Review of Women and the State in Africa, ed. Jane L. Parpart and Kathleen A. Staudt. African Development 18(1): 99–117.
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Self-Image and Self-Naming: A Discursive and Social Analysis of Women’s Microenterprises in Senegal and Mali M ari e m e S. L o
Introduction Female entrepreneurship is not only an evocative metaphor of a genderized economic venture and a mantra in development discourses. It hinges on the long tradition of women’s economic activities traced back to earlier collective formations such as female members of rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs), Ekub in Ethiopia, Esusu in Nigeria, Susu in Ghana, chikola in Kenya, stockkvel in South Africa, tontine in Senegal, and Nietamusso in Mali (Lo 2005; 2007). Historically, West African women have been portrayed as small-scale and informal traders (Assie-Lumumba 1998; Summerfield and Aslanbeigui 1998), goddesses of the West African markets, and long-distance traders because of their legendary mobility and savvy trading skills. However, the current development agenda centered on female entrepreneurship is historically located, following structural changes and the inf luence of macroeconomic policies. The new configuration of female entrepreneurship in development programs and discourses responds to different imperatives, far from the long tradition of women traders and their indigenous practices. Strong claims are made about female entrepreneurship, its impacts on poverty alleviation, and women’s economic standing and empowerment in development narratives and discourses.
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CH A P T E R
Marieme S. Lo
These claims are specific to particular discourses embedded in shifting socioeconomic policies and practices (Republic of Mali PRSP 2002; Republic of Senegal PRSP 2003; Yunus 1997; World Bank 1996; Hulme and Mosley 1996). They purport to improve women’s livelihoods (Robinson 2001; Johnson and Rogaly 1997; Rogaly 1996), increase household income and social security (Hulme and Mosley 1996), and promote women’s socioeconomic empowerment (Holvoet 2005; Littlefield, Hashemi, and Morduch 2003; Mayoux 1999; Hashemi, Schuler, and Riley 1996), and further contribute to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (Littlefield, Hashemi, and Morduch 2003). While there is much congruence on the imperative to address gender inequities in economic development and uphold fundamental economic rights and entitlements, female entrepreneurship promotion through access to microfinance has emerged as a panacea and an “engine of growth,” within a reductive schema and with little questioning of the differing socioeconomic contexts to which it applies. Charmes (1998) characterizes women’s microenterprises as units of production, mainly the primary economic units of the informal sector, characterized by: 1) a small size of operation, 2) reliance on family labor and local resources, 3) low capital endowment, 4) labor-intensive technology, 5) limited barriers to entry, 6) a high degree of competition and an unskilled work force, and 7) acquisition of skills outside the formal education system. Daniels, Mead, and Musinga (1995) focus on a number of employees to differentiate among micro and small enterprises and medium enterprises. These definitions convey a fixed and invariant perception and characterization of women’s enterprises based on levels of capitalization, size, and labor. What is lost in these definitions is the heterogeneity of needs, aspirations, capabilities, and self-concepts of women’s microenterprises, a direct consequence of the hegemony of formal models in economics. While useful for technical differentiation, the unidimensional and fixed definitions negate the multiple positions of women entrepreneurs, the intersection between gender and entrepreneurship, the social differences and positioning within microenterprises themselves, and the values and motivations sustaining such ventures. Such limitations render invisible their social and relational functions, the complexities that undergird their organizational structures, and their attempts to circumscribe the competitive and uncertain nature of entrepreneurship. The dynamic interactions between enterprises and the gendered identity of women entrepreneurs are hardly broached. I contend further that even the basic internal structure, social relations,
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and intra-women dynamics elude a cogent analysis, given the current postulate on women’s microenterprises, perceived through the prism of a marginal unit of production in the predominant instrumentalist approach to economic development. This paper addresses this lacuna, by focusing specifically on the social meanings and cultural interpretation of female entrepreneurship and the names of women’s microenterprises. I argue that the prevalence of sociocultural clues and symbols in women’s microenterprises, ref lected in the names, compels a situated analysis of their internal structures, dynamics, and meanings. Naming strategies, a distinctive feature of such microenterprises, for instance, call for a discursive analysis and social ontology of women’s microenterprises to convey alternative epistemologies on women’s enterprises. Such an analysis captures the emergent, f luid, and intersecting characteristics of women’s microenterprises that span the social, economic, and political domains, thereby expanding their taxonomy. The naming strategies also provide a way to analyze the disjuncture between normative constructions of meanings and the social functions of women’s microenterprises. Such a subtext helps to uncover their assigned value and rationality, and the intricacies of gender relations and dynamics at work in the context of entrepreneurship. Interposing several theoretical frameworks, this paper thus provides a multifaceted lens to examine the social embeddedness of women’s microenterprises and the creative and culturally adaptive strategies women entrepreneurs exert to assert agency in constantly shifting sociopolitical and economic contexts. Self-image, self-naming, and identity construction among women entrepreneurs emerged as central characteristics during my empirical research conducted in five regions of Senegal in consecutive periods from 2002 to 2009, involving a sample of 50 women’s microenterprises in Dakar, Saint-Louis, Thies, Fatick, and Kolda and four regions of Mali (Bamako, Segou, Mopti, and Koulikoro). The field research sites crosscut urban, peri-urban, and rural areas. Rather than conceptualizing the urban, peri-urban, and rural setting as fixed spatial boundaries, I argue for the f luidity and continuity between these scale and sites, albeit differentiated. Such settings are imbued with a variety of language, imagery, and symbolism deriving from the oral traditions, a marked characteristic of the region and the population of the study that is predominantly illiterate. The female adult literacy rate is estimated at 33 percent for Senegal and 18.2 percent for Mali, according to the Human Development Report 2009. In these settings there are a variety of languages and registers arising from the prevalence of oral traditions.
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Self-Image and Self-Naming
Marieme S. Lo
Central to this analysis is the relationships between women’s microenterprises and their social and cultural contexts. By exploring this relationship, the paper seeks to extend the theoretical understanding and categorical definitions of women’s microenterprises, illuminating their communicative dimensions and sociocultural embeddedness. My analysis seeks to convey the contextuality of gender theorizing, captured though the emic, i.e. first-person, accounts of women entrepreneurs. The paper is structured in four parts, following the introduction, which conveys the larger conceptual and theoretical debates about women’s microenterprises. It interrogates homogenizing accounts of women’s microenterprises that elude the very perspectives and personal accounts of women entrepreneurs. It uncovers emic perspectives that convey their intrinsic meanings, self-concepts, and differentiated identities, thereby countering assumptions of uniformity. This deconstructive and discursive approach serves as analytical foci to critically examine reductive narratives and constructions of women’s microenterprises, predominantly centered on their economic functions and rationality, which construe them as bounded and static systems. Next, it locates women’s microenterprises in Senegal and Mali and articulates their formation process, raison d’être, and intersecting gender dynamics. It then shifts to the analysis of self-naming, to unveil the discursive meanings and representations of women’s microenterprises to convey their complexities and social and cultural embeddedness, and to illuminate the changes, continuities, and discontinuities in gender relations. The paper concludes by broadening the discussion of the epistemological, theoretical and practical implications emerging from a reinterpretation and deconstruction of women’s microenterprises, viewed through their names as social referents. The Raison d’Être of Women’s Microenterprises One key issue this paper queries concerns the social meaning and raison d’être of women’s microenterprises.1 Women’s microenterprises do not emerge from a vacuum. From their inception, the microenterprises are either internally driven from the agentic creativity of women themselves or externally induced by microfinance institutions. The self-financing mechanisms2 suggest a creative, context-specific, and socially sanctioned resource mobilization, allocation, and utilization mechanism. Members contribute fixed weekly or monthly amounts to pool funds, taking the aggregated lump sum to finance individual or collective
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income-earning activities on a rotating basis. The self-induced process3 ref lects a self-selection schema whereby women choose among trusted relatives, kin, friends, and acquaintances to pool collective resources and form a tontine or economic interest group (GIE). This is aligned with the indigenous credit system prevalent in many traditional societies (Niger-Thomas 1995; Ardener 1995; Bortei-Doku and Aryeetey 1995; Kane 2001; Lo 2005). However, this self-selection is not inherently democratic and can lead to exclusionary practices and occurrences of marginalization between women, when potential members are excluded from the group or reduced to their socially ascribed role based on the caste system. The caste-based social stratifications in Senegal and Mali, derived from the traditional division of labor, and revealing a few common characteristics to the rigid hierarchy of social groups including marriage restrictions found in India, for instance,4 compound gendered dynamics (Lo 2008, 422). Common sayings such as “a dime and a dime go together, a dime and a penny do not mesh,” recorded in both Mali and Senegal, are evidence of the selective and exclusive dimension of women’s self-selection processes. Recognition of this exclusive process is essential to account for heterogeneity in needs and aspirations, social positions, and the enmeshment of gender within other key social determinants such as caste and social hierarchy On the other hand, the process is externally driven by credit providers who require a collective body of borrowers, which leads to homogeneity for loan conditionality as a deterrent to individual credit allocation. The credits allocated vary and carry variable interest rates based on the credit scale, credit repayment history, delinquency rate, and microlenders’ policies. The credit intermediation reveals “rigid arrangements” and power dynamics between female entrepreneurs and microfinance agencies, whereby credit intermediation becomes a site of power struggle and dependency. Recent years have witnessed a growing trend toward commercialization, marketization, and financial solvency and efficiency, clearly the application of a free-market philosophy leading to a drift away from the initial pro-poor rationale of microfinance, the slow displacement of informal indigenous tontines, and the predominance of formal microenterprises. This trend leads to questioning whether female entrepreneurship serves an instrumental purpose aligned with a neoliberal market logic that, according to Rogaly (1996), targets women as accessories rather than expands economic access for women to alter gender biases in economic development. Similarly, Rankin aptly questioned whether “microcredit constitutes social citizenship and women’s needs in a manner consistent
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Marieme S. Lo
Sites and Sectors of Activity of Women Entrepreneurs The vast majority of female entrepreneurs in Senegal and Mali involved in the informal economy tend to be confined to survival activities, with limited possibilities for capital accumulation. The predominant sector of activity of women’s microenterprises comprises food processing, the transformation of local cereals and agricultural commodities, commercial market gardening, and the marketing and trade of iconic objects of cultural identity, arts, and crafts. In both countries, women entrepreneurs are adding value and marketing local and traditional products to develop cottage industries and markets for material culture. A large majority of the women’s microenterprises are involved in mixed activities comprising market gardening, cereal transformation, animal husbandry, and craft production. In the view of many women entrepreneurs such as S.B.D. in Senegal, options for income-generating activities are limited to a few activities and a narrow range of consumer goods: those that “[they] know the best, and sectors where [they] have tremendous experience and skills. Since our ancestors, we have been in charge of transforming millet, sorghum etc . . . . We can do it to make money. We do it every day.” For women entrepreneurs in nonagriculture-based sectors, such as T.K.L. in Senegal, the choice is limited to “activities that can be done at home, in our backyard. They are easier as [the women] can still work around the house and fulfill [their] duties to the family. These duties come first, and then [they] can devote time to the activities of the group.” Women entrepreneurs manage production, reproduction, and household maintenance concomitantly. Therefore, the dichotomy between the public and private sphere may not hold true for the women entrepreneurs in this study, as they navigate between the household and the market, which, in many cases, is an extension of the household activities (Lo 2005). However, prevailing gender norms and ideologies about what women and men do in the Bamanan Malian and Wolof Senegalese cultures and how their activities and roles are to be valued, combined with market-based impediments, determine largely the economic opportunities to which women entrepreneurs have access. Only
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with a neoliberal agenda” (2001, 20). The “making” and rhetoric of gendered entrepreneurial subjects are thus sites of contestations that emanate from the very ideological premise of microfinance and female entrepreneurship in development narratives and practices.
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two of the women’s microenterprises studied are involved in sectors of activity like construction, salt extraction, and mill-husking operations. This trend confirms the pattern of confinement of women’s microenterprises to less lucrative and more precarious occupations, and marginal subsectors (Lo 2005; ILO 2002; Beneria 2003; Fried 1998). Reasons for their confinement in the informal economy stem from conjugated factors including gender-based disparities in access to financial resources, barriers to entry in lucrative sectors of activities, social stigma on gender roles and expectations, and “masculinist” discourses on entrepreneurship. More pervasive, however, are unquestioned assumptions about illiteracy—the propensity to construct illiterate women entrepreneurs as technically deficient, especially when low educational attainment is considered a key contributing factor to their confinement in marginal subsectors in the informal economy (ILO 2002). This is emblematic of the educational ethos that views learning and knowledge within a fixed and Platonist framework that conveys a normative and polarized classification of the knowledge system (Lo 2005). The preeminence in knowledge creation of episteme, which refers to theoretical, systematic, and scientific knowledge, claims permanence and does not systematically accommodate evolving techne, the practical productive knowledge (Flyvbjerg 2001) that enterprising women accumulate through their practice, formative years of apprenticeship, and experiences. Indeed, negative stereotypes conveyed about illiteracy supersede the experiences and endogenous knowledge that women entrepreneurs reveal to mitigate risks and vulnerability and circumscribe both gender-based and contextual impediments that circumscribe their agency (Lo 2005). In fact, it is well argued that women entrepreneurs fall back on indigenous knowledge for survival (Emeagwali 2003), considering the long tradition of trading in West Africa. Skills, everyday knowledge, and survival tactics, largely derived from the apprenticeship system, are passed on from generation to generation. It is an asset for women entrepreneurs who have learned social behavior, technical ability, and trade through informal channels enmeshed in everyday practice. Considering the multigenerational composition of women’s microenterprises, knowledge and skills are shared along gender lines. Observing women entrepreneurs’ daily activities reveals the multigenerational linkage and mentoring of younger women who perform defined activities as an initiation to trade, marketing, and routine market transactions. The apprenticeship is an aspect often neglected in the analysis of illiteracy, its impacts on female entrepreneurship, and its broader implications in framing a situated epistemology.
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Self-Image and Self-Naming
Marieme S. Lo
In this context, the few women entrepreneurs who venture into nontraditional sectors defy strong-held assumptions about gendered economic positions. Indeed, a few of these women seize limited opportunities for occupational change. As D.S., a woman entrepreneur in Mali, suggests: “We started in petty trade and street vending of cola nuts, shea butter, and seasonal fruits; now we are selling sand, bricks, and cement.” When people asked us “What do women have to do in the construction business?” we responded with a strong work ethic and commitment to success. We have learned what men were not doing well: organizing collectively. In contrast to the men in the sand extraction business who operate on an individual basis, we were convinced that we could do better by organizing collectively.” The road to success has been thorny and not straightforward. Several critical incidents have permeated the trajectory of WASA: having to dispel skepticism and mockery from potential service providers and contractors; cultural stereotypes; abuses due to the women’s novice status; and contract breach, usury, and exploitation. The women have managed nonetheless to position themselves as valid competitors in the construction business with a heightened sense of consciousness of their position, assets, and vulnerability. Operating still within gender-based constraints, hiring men for manual labor, yet controlling the production chain from sand extraction and transport to distribution and sale, these women entrepreneurs devised adaptive strategies to seize new economic opportunities to change the status quo, and proudly list their major achievement: the construction of a bank headquarter in Bamako. Owing to the dynamic networks of women in the construction business, their f lexible mode of operation, labor subcontracting, and peer mentoring of interested women, a few women are decisively entering nontraditional sectors and seizing new business opportunities. Such factors ought to be recognized to encourage women’s entry into these sectors, facilitated by intra-women solidarity. The same trend is noticeable in Senegal with women entrepreneurs involved in service provision, as well as operating such businesses as millhusking, salt extraction, and telecenters, thereby making inroads in traditionally male-dominated sectors. These cases suggest gradual occupational change that challenges fixed notions and the intractability of the gender division of labor, and offers a pathway to change, through women’s collective agency to circumscribe both gender-based impediments and structural challenges inherent to the informal economy.
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Precarity is a defining characteristic of the informal economy and the survival economy, and a dominant frame of reference among many women entrepreneurs. An expression in the Senegalese context that captures such a characterization associated with the informal sector and aptly conveys the meaning of survival is Goorgoorlu in Wolof, or l’art de la débrouille in French—literally “the art of making ends meet.” This translates also into Yengu Yengu, meaning “being active and mobile, and on the move”—a meaning conveyed by many women interviewed, and one that is highly suggestive of their intrinsic motivations to take action and not be confined to the role of a domestic diva, awaiting the daily handout and allowance, i.e. la dépense quotidienne (Lo 2005). Goorgoorlu is not only a concept imbued with semantic meanings, it is personified and has become a common fixture in the daily life of many Senegalese households. It embodies also a famous cartoon character, a man, and the hero of a popular television comedy series, “Goorgoorlu” in his daily struggle to meet the basic needs of his family. It conveys eloquently the tribulations and vicissitudes of life, the daily struggle to satisfy household consumption needs, as well as social norms of behavior and expectations, defining the gender relations between “Goorgoorlu” the character and husband, and his wife, “Diek.” While “Goorgoorlu” typifies prominent assumptions about gender roles and relations situated in a patriarchal system that places the onus of household survival on the head of the family, such a view is altered discursively and contested by the very practices of women entrepreneurs. Many women entrepreneurs refer now to Jiggen Jiggenlu, a marked and distinctive gendered identity, imbuing the popular idiom Goorgoorlu with a gendered interpretive meaning and archetype, to shift the meaning of survival into a gendered terrain, conveying a reality of survival that is not intrinsically male, but female too. The struggle to earn a living and provide for the household is not the sole responsibility of the male, following ascribed gender roles. These appear more f luid and shifting and become more apparent through the observations of women’s economic activities, and when attuned to the meanings they assign to their roles and economic pursuits. This suggests also the changing nature of gender roles not only in daily practices, but also at the discursive level. In daily practices, women entrepreneurs show a reluctance to spontaneously disclose their income, portfolio size, and profit. “Our business is doing Nank Nank; Doni Doni, i.e. [so-so!]” is a leitmotiv among women entrepreneurs interviewed in Mali and Senegal. Superstition and mystic
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Meanings of Entrepreneurship and Its Gender Implications
Marieme S. Lo
rituals, added to the fear of a bad omen for their business, “the evil tongue,” permeate their daily practices. However, such practices reflect strategies to exert power and control over their resources and to protect their assets from control and appropriation by males or in-laws, considering the contentious nature of property rights and entitlements and social expectations. These constitute adaptive mechanisms to deal with tremendous demands on their income, especially from “extended families and in-laws or acquaintances,” and to manage competing imperatives between capital accumulation, social reinvestment, and gender-based social expectations. Gender, Authority, and Entrepreneurial Decision-Making Women entrepreneurs are situated in social structures in which decisionmaking and authority rest predominantly in men’s control. To engage in income-generating activities, for instance, two-thirds of the members of the women’s microenterprises such as T.K.L. in Malika (Senegal) report “having to ask for their husbands’ or fathers’ permission” on the grounds that “without their blessing, they would not at all, or easily, engage in income-generating activities.” Women entrepreneurs recognize the pressure to conform to socially and culturally assigned roles, expectations, and behaviors, which transfer to their economic activities. Most of them contend that negotiating men’s approval is a prerequisite. Without such “blessing and permission, endless trouble and conf lict occur,” according to Y.Y.K. members in Bandiagara, Mali: When I wanted to join the village women’s association to start a collective garden, my husband at first opposed it. But I was persistent, knowing that I could convince him. When he was off-guard and complaining about the expenses and lack of money, I suggested to him that if I earned an income, it could help the family a great deal. It was only then after a few hours of ref lection that he accepted. I am glad that I did not do without his permission, as there are many cases of divorce in the village just because of that. Soliciting and often negotiating the husband or father’s permission falls along the line of cultural norms, behaviors, and expectations in the dominant Bamanan and Wolof cultures. The norms specific to a place and ethnic group determine largely gender relations that are both unequal and prejudicial to women entrepreneurs’ self-efficacy.
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For many women entrepreneurs such as F.T. in Bandiagara, “it is the same when we have to defer to the husband’s wisdom to choose the name of a newborn, or to decide if children should be sent to school, or even what to cook for lunch; we have to follow the norms.” As A.F. in Kolda (Senegal) concurred: “it is expected from women in our village and culture to ask for permission and to consult the head of the household, the Borom keer, the owner of the house, for important decisions.” Deferring to the husband or father, who is the head of the family and patriarch, is a manifestation of the patriarchal system whereby women’s differential positions affect their decision-making autonomy and opportunities to engage in income-generating activities. However, a qualitative difference emerges based on the meaning of such acts, especially when “consulting the head of the household is a courtesy.” Men do support women’s entrepreneurial endeavors. They perceive the direct and indirect benefits of women’s increased income, “as they are the first one to benefit from it,” argued K.L. in Malika. Women entrepreneurs praise their husbands for their support and success, even though the men play an indirect role in their business performance. While the dominant views of women entrepreneurs converge with cultural assumptions associated with patriarchy and unequal gender roles, they also support the argument raised by Sow to recognize diversity in women’s experiences and positions (Sow 1997). Although women entrepreneurs are in differential power positions, manifestations of patriarchy and subordination are not uniform among them. Some women ask for their husband’s “permission,” while other just ask for “blessings.” This dichotomy reveals the heterogeneity of women entrepreneurs’ positions. Subtle nuances and unwritten codes of social interactions permeate gender relations. This raises questions of whether women entrepreneurs exercise a social power, a form of diarchy, considering their indirect and diffuse power and coping strategies to resist differential status and patriarchal order. What is perceived as acquiescence to patriarchal subordination may well be covert strategies, the deployment of a persona to offset their differential power position. Self-Image and Self-Naming: Multiple Meanings of Naming Strategies To manage social expectations, risks, and uncertainties associated with the informal economy, women entrepreneurs develop work ethos to circumscribe both social pressures and threats and competition among
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Self-Image and Self-Naming
Marieme S. Lo
aspiring women entrepreneurs. In both Mali and Senegal, shared characteristics consist of the social values that women entrepreneurs embrace, a high sense of self-worth, collective identity, and pride; the centrality of trust, cohesion, as well as shared work ethics: “Tying honor to the success of their collective activities.” Binding commitments and motivation for success to preserve individual and collective values such as “pride and respect” are culturally derived, social, and ethical values, strongly held and shared by the women in attempts to circumscribe impediments inherent to the precarious nature of the informal economy (Lo 2005). Recognizing that creditworthiness requires a certain way of being and acting and the projection of a positive self-image, women entrepreneurs in this study seem to have developed a cult of image evident in the emergent pattern in name selection, and the significance attached to representation and recognition. On the one hand, such attitudes illustrate their adaptive strategies to adjust to a changing environment, especially the greater selectivity for credit allocation and competition from peers. On the other, they convey women’s efforts to exult a positive self-image, thereby countering predominant assumptions about their behavioral impediments, such as being averse to risk. The emphasis laid on the naming of women’s microenterprises stems from a closer attention to the Senegalese and Malian cultural contexts, marked by a predominance of oral traditions. Throughout the research process, it became clear that women’s microenterprises entailed more than the sum of their members and that they are not a bounded and static system. I was reminded of the fact that in West Africa, “your name says it all.” It is not a random choice, but a strategic decision to personify hope, a positive self-image, and selfcharacterization. Context-specific complexities bring variation in the social organization and behaviors of women’s microenterprises. Cultural precepts and tradition, far from being vestiges from the past, are very much a part of the ferment of women’s microenterprises that exhibit a superstructure and ascendancy of a traditional social organization, with a set mode of operation, aligned with cultural practices. Women’s microenterprises are not disembodied from the sociocultural economic and political context; rather, they epitomize social actors whose behaviors are often conditioned by culturally and socially acceptable norms. Differentiation Strategies among Women’s Microenterprises In-depth interpretive analysis also shows that names attached to women’s microenterprises are not simply evocative metaphors. The name
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selection is a strategic decision to mark difference, to gain recognition, and to establish credibility, creditworthiness, and respectability. It is also in reaction to the homogenizing design of externally driven women’s microenterprises, and an attempt to subvert the power hierarchies framing discourses of “otherness” and “subjectivity.” “There are so many of us trying to do the same thing. It is necessary to mark a difference,” said many women interviewed. A strategy for self-differentiation among women’s microenterprises in a resource-scarce and competitive environment, the tactical selection of names expresses the group identity, self-concept, and resource mobilization strategies. On the other hand, it reveals the f luidity of identity and a communicative dimension, mediated by the name, a symbol and signal to external stakeholders such as donors, government agencies, and microfinance institutions, as well as their peers. In this respect, women entrepreneurs exhibit “performative” dimensions, a subtext to the original marketing strategies employed, and an astute assessment of direct and indirect competitors, in order to have an edge. Women reveal great virtuosity in language use, a culturally mediated framing of their conception of women’s microenterprises, inscribed in the rich lexis of oral traditions and the vernacular. Marketing strategies redefined by these women encompass more than product differentiation, having the right product delivered to the right people through the right channels. They entail reputation and selfpositioning vis-à-vis key stakeholders who drive resource allocation, enabling or inhibiting their entrepreneurship. Long-term profitability of such strategies entails not only monetary return, but also recognition and visibility. According to many women entrepreneurs such as K.L., in Malika, “to have Baraka, i.e., grace, or little money with a good name, is better than success in anonymity.” Equally important is the recognition of divergent interpretive possibilities, accounting for the intersection of variable social positions, social interests, and aspirations among women entrepreneurs. Naming and Self-Conception The prevalence of cultural clues and symbols in women’s microenterprises stand out in observation and interactions with members in their social settings. While homogenizing accounts are pervasive in the literature on women’s negative self-image and lack of self-confidence, cited obstacles to women’s underperformance, women interviewed in this study provide evidence to the contrary (ILO 1997). They reveal
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Self-Image and Self-Naming
Marieme S. Lo
embodied identities that defy assumptions of uniformity and fixity. The name selection suggests a conscious effort to portray a positive self-image, a collective identity, as well as an attempt to reinforce their agency within macro-level structures that impede their self-efficacy. For example, A.K., a woman entrepreneur in Kolda, reported: “Sending a signal and a positive signal to all our partners and competitors, as well as our husbands, is important to anticipate suspicion and self-doubt.” Names such as “Determined to Work”(Taku liggey) or “Committed and Determined to Work for Our Pride and Dignity”(Fass Nigue) assume a textual and semantic significance. On the other hand, they embody a symbolic power. Illustrative of this point is the following statement from F.T., a woman entrepreneur in Mali. She explains: We choose the name of our organization very carefully. We know that in our culture and situation, names are never randomly selected. When you hear our name, you can easily figure out what we stand for and what our motivations and hopes are. There must be no mistake! According to social psychologists (Katz and Gartner 1988), such intentionality and positive attitudes are predictors of human behavior. Predicting success and embodying such motivation in one’s behavior positively inf luences the outcomes. The women’s intention and determination to become successful and to enhance their perceived selfefficacy (Bandura 1986) are evident in the name selection to convey public awareness of their qualities and capabilities. Expected outcomes of such a subtle medium of communication entail recognition, respectability, and greater visibility. Such a proactive anticipation of external reactions indicates a degree of self-awareness of vulnerability and differential power. It also illustrates women’s cognitive capabilities for self-promotion and positioning, as indicated by statements from several female entrepreneurs such as K.L., who stated: You are perceived based on how you present yourself. We have to do whatever we can, given our limited means. We do not have f liers, radio, or access to TV, but we are visible. Our name resonates well across villages and weekly markets (lumas). Not many credit agents want to talk with a small GIE, so far from Dakar. They do not come to see for themselves what we are doing. When we go to Pikine to meet the microfinance agents, we have to show that we are no small herringbone, but a big and worthy bone.
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It appears that under the name selection, women entrepreneurs convey a critical understanding of their unequal position in relation to stakeholders such as microlending institutions and an awareness of their responsibility to prove their creditworthiness and credibility. Such strategic use of language for self-positioning dispels the myth about their lack of capacity; rather, it suggests self-empowering behaviors. It converges also with Sidikou’s (2001) account of women’s reliance on verbal art and rituals as expressive sites of their internal struggles and attempts to subvert oppressive forces. It hinges as well on Sougou’s (2008) concept of transformative narrative. Reference and Attributive Functions of Names Out of the 50 women’s microenterprises interviewed, 70 percent are named after a patron, either a political or a religious figure, or embody a cultural reference and shared ethical values. Thirty percent choose the name of a locality. The patronage trend seems to be more prevalent in Senegal than in Mali, where only eight out of 20 are named after a patron and 11 after a locality. Malian women entrepreneurs in this study seem more guarded about political patronage, invoking the separate sphere of their entrepreneurial ventures and the political arena, and the disjuncture between women’s political movement that appears to be highly centralized and dominated by “the intellectual elite of Bamako.” The marked differences between women’s microenterprises’ positioning in Senegal and Mali may stem largely from intersecting variables including the political history and democratic governance that enable or inhibit women’s associative movement, cultural, and economic contexts, and economic opportunities offered to women entrepreneurs (Lo 2005). The prevalence of a single-party regime, which tightly controlled the formation and registration of associations and non-governmental organizations until 1991, inhibited the development and formalization of associative movements in Mali.5 The political environment, governance structure, and level of democracy affect the trajectory and life histories of women’s microenterprises, including their vocality and visibility. Clearly, women’s microenterprises are situated at the interstice between shifting political and social contexts and economic structures, the macro structures within which women entrepreneurs attempt to shape a defined identity, exert agency, and negotiate change through both discursive strategies and their entrepreneurial practice. However, cultural
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Self-Image and Self-Naming
Marieme S. Lo
communalities transcend these differences. References to a cultural value-system and commonly held values such as “pride, commitment, solidarity, dignity, and hope,” prominent in the names’ selection, reveal their attributive and social cognitive self-labeling. On the other hand, names such as Teggal Jigen, which means “dedicated to women’s status and well-being,” Japo (solidarity and mutual support), and Yactu: Yan Yirikuma (Association for the Promotion of Women) reveal an adherence to strongly held values, vision, and shared goals instrumental to collective action. The names convey a discursive projection and positioning, as well as an embodied identity, that suggest a relational and dynamic interaction with their sociocultural and economic environments. Self-labeling conveys a code of behavior, ethos, and practices to avoid dissonance with the declared values of transparency and honesty. Japo, i.e. women’s solidarity and mutual support, renders more explicit feminist solidarity and sisterhood ideals within the group, sharing the same interest, but not necessarily across all women’s microenterprises operating in an increasingly competitive structure. Furthermore, references to a place, such as Fatoma, Plateau Dogon, Malika, reveal women entrepreneurs’ strong sense of place, identification, and attachment to a locality. This elicits their sense of purpose and their centrality in the development of a locality: a village, community, or region. In contrast, the patronage reference suggests an adaptation to local or national-level power configurations, but interestingly leads to a disjuncture between the fixed and codified name selection and the constantly changing nature of the political landscape and players. Selected patrons reveal a mix of political leaders, mostly women, considered as champions, or inf luential political figures, or a spiritual leader. This practice is an attempt to establish a positive identity with powerful and inf luential figureheads, with the hope that such an association will bring positive outcomes such as fame, recognition, and support to the organization. It may suggest that women look to successful women as role models, not necessarily successful male entrepreneurs, to emulate change and high performance. Such desirable and actively pursued outcomes are both tangible and intangible. Gaining recognition, credibility, respect, and greater visibility matter to women entrepreneurs, as they confer local prestige. Additional fringe benefits, institutional and financial support, such as credit, equipment donations, and food aid redistribution during periods of food shortage in the Sahelian context, are sought after by many women entrepreneurs through the patronage system.
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Language is not neutral. It is value-laden and a conveyer of cultural identity and social condition. A sociolinguistic lens provides a rich and contextual grounding of women’s microenterprises and their multifaceted dynamics. It also reveals the social beliefs that permeate the women’s microenterprises. Women entrepreneurs exhibit distinctive qualities as they reveal an awareness of structural impediments, such as power differentials with the microfinance institutions, and adopt responsive and culturally sanctioned coping strategies. Women’s microenterprises in this study, then, exhibit the ascendancy of a traditional social organization, with a set mode of operation, aligned with set cultural practices (Lo 2005). However, at the same time, they are challenged to adopt constitutive elements of a formal organization modeled according to generic training modules and blueprints on “how to form an organization,” for instance. Overall, they provide evidence of a strong predominance of traditional over new and learned organizational operations that need to be acknowledged and appraised to inform context-relevant theorizing, ref lexivity, and cogent practices. The Trap of Patronage The propensity to personify the women’s microenterprise and embrace a chosen reference is neither random nor unconscious. Yet, patronage can be problematic. The politician’s patronage proves particularly risky. Many women’s microenterprises named after a former minister in the Senegalese government cannot reinvent themselves and relinquish their allegiance without negative consequences. The change in power since 1999 in Senegal has forced many politicians out of office, leading to a backlash and reversal of fortune for many women’s microenterprises. The name bears reference to past glory, power, and inf luence, and becomes a trap during regime change. It proves to be an effective strategy for many to reap short-lived dividends but compromises their long-term gains, even closing future opportunities for support due to the politically evocative references. While a sign of commitment, it also induces an opportunity cost for future investment and support. Along with patronage, pressure for political cooptation poses the real dilemma of political participation, considered a threat to women’s performance by both microcredit agents and supporting NGO members in Senegal and Mali. Another drawback of patronage relates to the politicization of women’s microenterprises, which
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Self-Image and Self-Naming
Marieme S. Lo
does not necessarily help them negotiate and advance their strategic interests. Their instrumental use for electoral constituency-building is recognized by many supporting NGOs and credit agencies as an impediment to their autonomous development, competitiveness, and performance. Patronage may be “the Sesame key” to open the doors of local leaders. However, “it is ineffectual in attracting external donor funding,” cautioned a credit agent. The patronage of a religious leader seems more constant, yet its actual impacts are hard to measuretangibly. The following excerpt from a woman entrepreneur in Senegal provides evidence of the risks involved in choosing a name. It also illustrates a learning experience for many women. Sharing of experiences and learning from either positive or negative experiences occurs frequently among women entrepreneurs. Such exchange provides opportunities for critical ref lection guiding future actions and decision-making. She stated: It was easy for us to have credit. We were always well received at the Ministry. We never needed to ask for an appointment. The frequent visits that A.N. paid us made us more visible, respected, and valued. We were invited everywhere and courted. Now that she is no longer in power, we feel trapped, but we cannot change our name. We need to keep our loyalty. It is not the same. A few members have left, but I will not give up. I share our experience with many other women. The advice I can give to many sisters in economic interest groups is to choose their name carefully and not for present gain, but to envision a future for themselves with or without the person they have in mind. Opportunities to advance their political interest that are often theorized do not materialize for many women entrepreneurs. According to credit agents and other NGO members, “women’s microenterprises are used as support and outlet for politicians, instead of actively promoting and pursuing their own self-interest in the political arena.” Women’s organizations are sought after for their electoral weight and their formidable mobilization capacities. Yet their mobilization may not yield tangible desiderata and safeguard their economic interest, considering that their participation in politics is often perceived as nominal, ref lecting images of women as “socialite[s] providing some folklore” to confer to political events an “air of festivity” (Fall 2006, 234). This places female entrepreneurship at the interstice between commoditization,
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Conclusion An interpretive analysis of the naming strategies of women’s microenterprises unveils their consciously differentiated motives, self-concepts, and relations to the external environment. Through the process of defining a self-image, woman entrepreneurs have proven their creativity and self-ref lexive capabilities for adaptation, as well as the heterogeneity of their positions and interests. Their efforts to present a positive self-image generally remain unnoticed, considering the scant attention given to their group formation processes, self-conception, gendered identities, and internal dynamics. However, they do challenge and ultimately transcend gender and structural constraints and the overarching instrumental rationality in entrepreneurship development, to assert their own priorities and intrinsic interests. Thus, conceptual, theoretical, and operational oversights lead to misguided assumptions that ignore or misconstrue the social reality and conditions of woman entrepreneurs, their inherent strengths and vulnerabilities. A misunderstanding of their motivations, identities, aspirations, and visions leads to ineffectual and inappropriate characterizations of, and responses to, their entrepreneurial practice. Such responses might greatly improve in relevance by addressing the cultural attributes and social contexts in which women’s microenterprises are embedded. Creating structures, values, and practices that encourage and support change in microenterprise development begins with an all-important shift of paradigm and perspective in the ethos and assumptions underlying such ventures. The assumptions of an ahistorical and a-gendered universal homo economicus and entrepreneur archetype are untenable and conceptually limiting, and thus should be systematically questioned. Conceptually, to counter reductionism, assumptions of polarities will need realignment as women entrepreneurs are not solo economic actors, abstracted form their social economic and cultural contexts. Cultural norms and practices are imprinted in their daily practices, conveying the notion that women’s microenterprises are social entities, and entrepreneurship a social activity, and discursive terrain within which
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political instrumentation, and gender politics that hampers their potential to concomitantly advance their economic and political interests. This hinges also on a negative “griotization” of woman entrepreneurs, whose collective identity and entity serve extrinsic interests and further subordinate their own interests and endeavors to risky political games.
Marieme S. Lo
women entrepreneurs attempt to assert agency and negotiate change in gender relations. Assumptions of universality, based predominantly on the ontology of Western thought, infringe upon a critical analysis of the cosmogony and existential realities of women entrepreneurs in different social and cultural contexts. Women entrepreneurs are not disembodied homo economicus. They reveal critical and insightful perceptions of the inner working and complexities of the economy, demonstrated through their behaviors such as naming strategies, and the selected social and cultural referents they choose to define and achieve their socioeconomic objectives. As such, the choice of paradigm has to enfold the multifaceted social realities in which women entrepreneurs are immersed and account for the social ideals and collective selfidentities that characterize these entrepreneurs in such contexts. The approach is not only technical, but also an epistemological one to lead to consequential theories and praxis. Accounting for heterogeneity and contextual relevance is a sine qua non condition to avoid pitfalls and dysfunctionalities prejudicial to the initial intentions to enhance women entrepreneurs’ economic rights and to bridge the gender equity gap in economic development. Equally important is the discursive rendering of the rich and contextual vocabulary that reframes fixed gender concepts, emanating from the lived experiences, practices, and emic accounts of women, from their own epistemological standpoint. It entails questioning universalizing gender assumptions (OyWwùmí 2005) and challenging silences and invisibilities (Nnaemeka 2005). It also implies greater ref lexivity to uncover epistemic blind spots as well as the complexities and dynamic character of female entrepreneurship and frame alternative epistemologies of female entrepreneurship. It is therefore useful to grasp the internal dynamics of women’s microenterprises and to take into account the realities and location of different groups of women’s microenterprises, and individual women within such organizational structures, enmeshed in broader social structures of inequality. Members of a microenterprise share common goals; they share also different and sometimes conf licting social interests and statuses that credit crystallizes (Lo 2005). This inherent contradiction in women’s microenterprises hardly surfaces through an analysis of gender relations only. It becomes more evident when the analysis extends to intra-women dynamics and interrelations ( Lo 2005). Furthermore, the existential realities, plight, and resilience of the vast majority of West African women entrepreneurs identified are compelling evidence to be critical of development orthodoxies, and to search for alternative and ontological responses beyond the fixity of current
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postulates. Implicit in this quest is the need to challenge the ascendancy of the dominant system of interpretation of women’s microenterprises to enable an emic rendering of knowledge, interposing multiple frames of references, especially the insights and first-person accounts of women entrepreneurs themselves. It implies also questioning, reframing, and recasting assumptions and practices, and gaining deeper insights into women’s microenterprises’ life-world to convey greater ref lexivity on the changing nature of gender relations and the categorical definitions. It also entails interrogating epistemological and philosophical postulates starting with a critical assessment of the intersection between gender, the social realities, self/collective identities, institutional structures, and overarching macroeconomic structure within which gender identities are formed, contested, negotiated, and affirmed. Notes 1. Women’s microenterprises comprise more than 90 percent of all microenterprises (UNIDO 2001; World Bank 1996), the lowest scale in the continuum of the micro, small, and medium enterprises. 2. Such mechanisms range from endogenous revolving savings and loans (ROSCAS) or “Merry-go-rounds” in Kenya, channeled through entities such as tontines in Senegal and Mali, analogous to the tontines or “Njangi” groups in Cameroon or SuSu clubs in Ghana, to name a few. See Ardener and Burman (1995) for an extensive analysis of ROSCAS. 3. In this study, members of one woman’s microenterprise in Mali were exclusively widows, while others dwell on kinship-based membership, rely on in-kind-contributions and family labor, and prefer women-only memberships. Noteworthy is the fact that men are generally not members per se; they are, however, visible in the administrative and managerial activities of women’s microenterprises, based on contract agreements for specific services such as reporting and accounting procedures. 4. Cf. Sheth and Mahajan (1999) and Gupta (2000), among others, for a thorough analysis of the caste systems in India. One of the marked ways in which India differs from Senegal pertains to religion, as the caste system does not permeate or determine religious practices and rituals in predominantly Muslim communities in Senegal. 5. The restriction, later lifted by the Decree of December 8, 1997, a more progressive policy framework, allowed greater freedom of association. Later, in 1999, effective changes of political regime, and democratic and decentralization policies, enabled the emergence of community organizations and the mushrooming of women’s economic interest groups.
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Littlefield, Elizabeth, Syed Hashemi, and Jonathan Morduch. 2003. Is microfinance an effective strategy to reach the Millennium Development Goals? http://www.idlo.int/texts/IDLO/ mis7533.pdf. Lo, Marieme S. 2008. Beyond instrumentalism: Interrogating the micro-dynamic and gendered and social impacts of remittances in Senegal. Gender, Technology and Development 12(3): 413–37 (special issue). ———. 2007. Self-image and self-naming: A discursive analysis and social analysis of women’s microenterprises in Senegal and Mali. Paper presented at the 50th annual meeting for the African Studies Association, October 18–21, in New York. ———. 2005. Understanding and capitalizing on social learning: An asset–based approach to capacity-building and development of women’s microenterprises in West Africa. Ph.D. diss., Cornell University. Mayoux, Linda. 1999. Questioning virtuous spirals: Microfinance and women’s empowerment in Africa. Journal of International Development 11: 957–84. Niger-Thomas, Margaret. 1995. Women’s access to and the control of credit in Cameroon: The Mamfe Case. In Money-go-rounds: The Importance of Rotating Savings and Credit Associations for Women, ed. Shirley Ardener and Sandra Burman, 95–110. Washington, DC: Berg. Nnaemeka, Obioma. 2005. Bringing African women into the classroom: Rethinking pedagogy and epistemology. In African Gender Studies: A Reader, ed. Oyèrónk_ OyWwùmí, 51–66. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. OyWwùmí, Oyèrónk_. 2005. African Gender Studies: A Reader. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rankin, Katharine N. 2001. Governing development: Neoliberalism, microcredit, and rational economic woman. Economy and Society 30(1): 18–37. Republic of Mali. 2002. Republic of Mali. Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP). Republic of Senegal. 2003. Republic of Senegal. Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP). Robinson, Marguerite S. 2001. The Microfinance Revolution: Sustainable Finance for the Poor. Washington, DC: World Bank. Rogaly, Ben. 1996. Microfinance, evangelism, ‘destitute women’, and the hard selling of a new anti-poverty formula. Development in Practice 6(2): 100–112. Sidikou, Aissata G. 2001. Recreating Words, Reshaping Worlds: The Verbal Art of Women from Niger, Mali and Senegal. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Sougou, Omar. 2008. Transformational narratives: Hearing/reading selected Senegalese folktales by young women. Research in African Literatures 39(3): 26–38. Sow, Fatou. 1997. Gender relations in the African environment. In Engendering African Social Sciences, ed. Ayesha Imam, Amina Mama, and Fatou Sow, 251–70. Dakar: CODESRIA. Summerfield, Gail, and Nahid Aslanbeigui. 1998. The impacts of structural adjustment and economic reform on women. In Women in the Third World: An Encyclopedia Of Contemporary Issues, ed. Nelly Stromquist, 332–40. New York: Garland. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). 2010. Overcoming barriers: Human mobility and Development. New York: UNDP Human Development Report 2009. http:// hdrstats.undp.org/en/countries/data_sheets/cty_ds_SEN.html. United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO). 2001. Women entrepreneurship development in selected African countries. Working Paper No. 7. Vienna: UNIDO. World Bank. 2006. Development Story. Microcredit: An Innovative Way to Help Poor People Improve Their Lives. Washington, DC: World Bank. http://youthink.worldbank.org/4teachers/pdf/ development/story-dev-microcredit.pdf ———. 2001. A Source Book for Poverty Reduction Strategies. Washington, DC: World Bank. ———. 1996. Bangladesh Rural Finance Report No. 15485-BD. Washington, DC: World Bank Agricultural and Natural Resources Division.
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World Bank. 1996. Implementing the World Bank’s Gender Policies: Progress Report No 1. Washington, DC: World Bank. Yunus, Muhammad. 1997. The Grameen Bank story: Rural credit in Bangladesh. In Reasons for Hope: Instructive Experiences in Rural Development, ed. Anirudh Krishna, Norman Thomas Uphoff, and Milton Jacob Esman, 9–24. West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, and New Delhi: Vistar Publications.
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Irua Ria Atumia and Anticolonial Struggles among the Gky of Kenya: A Counternarrative on “Female Genital Mutilation” Wai rimu˜ Ngaru˜ iya Njam b i
Introduction The message that is typically conveyed in contemporary discussions of what is now problematically called “female genital mutilation” (FGM) is that these disturbing traditional practices, rooted in the domination of women by men, are a significantly widespread psychological and physical health threat to young women and girls in Africa. Fran Hosken, a persistently vocal critic of such practices since the 1970s, regularly employs terms such as “backward,” “barbaric,” and “primitive” to establish the unacceptability of FGM, a label that she herself coined (e.g., Hosken 1980, 1982, 1993). A host of other authors have since pursued this theme of unacceptability, seeking eradication and agreeing with Hosken that these practices amount to a mutilation not only of genitalia, but also of women’s sexuality. The assumption underlying all is that such harmful practices are vestiges of tradition that have no place in a world that is moving rapidly toward modernization (see, e.g., AAP 1998; AMA 1995; Daly 1978; Dugger 1996; El Dareer 1982; El Saadawi 1980; Equality Now 1996; Hosken 1980, 1982, 1993; Koso-Thomas 1987; Lightfoot-Klein 1989;
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CH A P T E R
Wairim Ngariya Njambi
Rahman and Toubia 2000; Schroeder 1994; Toubia 1993; Walker 1992; Walker and Parmar 1993; WHO 1997); once African women who perform FGM can be taught to see beyond the cultural blinders imposed by their traditions, the story goes, they surely will oppose such barbarity. While that story is currently hegemonic, it suffers from its overgenerality and failure to see complexities of such practices in different places and times. My goal in this paper is to present a complication in the standard story of FGM, which tends to ignore varied histories and meanings, by describing circumstances under which so-called FGM can be viewed alternatively as a form of empowerment and resistance, shedding an oversimplified image of unambiguous women’s oppression. I discuss the Gı˜ kKyK1 practice of irua ria atumia na anake 2 in Kenya and how it became a focal point in anticolonial struggles from the 1920s through the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s, emphasizing a series of events that began with what came to be known as “the female circumcision controversy.” Irua ria atumia na anake denotes the initiation ritual of becoming women and men among the Gı˜ kKyK people: irua stands for “initiation ceremony” while atumia translates as “women,” and anake as “men.” Irua ria atumia na anake takes place simultaneously for girls and boys at ages 16 and 18, respectively. Rather than being a site of women’s oppression and domination, irua ria atumia (women’s initiation) promoted an ethic of boldness and courage that provided a sociohistorical platform for women to engage in militant anticolonial activity in ways that were perceived as coequal with men. Additionally, irua ria atumia na anake promoted a sense of sexual freedom for both women and men in its association with the practice of ngwko (described below). I contend that these initiation practices are closely connected to the success of the Mau Mau struggle, and that irua ria atumia in particular provided an important basis for women’s vital participation in the movement. Stories I grew up listening to from women who actively participated in the Mau Mau struggle suggest that without women’s participation, the movement probably would not have been as successful. They spoke proudly of the courage they displayed in their various spying and scouting assignments and the secret coded language they learned when they took their Mau Mau oaths. These women also sang bitter songs of their ruthro, or resentment, toward athng (a derogatory nickname for white people that implies a lack of skin or skin that is burned) who brought misery and destruction to their lives and families. To these women, irua ria atumia did not brutalize their bodies and sexuality—colonizers
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and their various agents did. In bringing this historical account, I am pointing out that feminist depictions of female genital practices3 in Kenya (and elsewhere) badly misinterpret these practices as they are understood locally, and furthermore ignores the role they played in rebellions, such as Mau Mau. On the one hand, women participated in Mau Mau to protect their way of life that was so intricately related to the initiation rituals threatened by colonialism. But perhaps more profoundly, irua ria atumia stood at the very center of Gı˜ kKyK identity formation that fueled the intensity and cohesiveness of the Mau Mau uprising. I suggest that irua ria atumia can be read as a truly feminist practice aimed at women’s equality, promoting a bravery that contemporary feminists should embrace, rather than disparage. To the contrary, such mobilizations have been ignored by many feminists who remain wedded to presumptions about Western women’s liberation in contrast to “third world women’s” oppression (Mohanty 1991), and implicitly side with colonial rulers who attempted to eradicate female genital practices, while turning a blind eye to the brutality of colonialism itself. When certain authors, such as Boyle (2002) and Gruenbaum (2001), discuss colonialism, it is not to criticize brutality toward Africans but to suggest how it failed to abolish female genital practices. African men, on the other hand, such as Jomo Kenyatta, are figured as Western-educated and self-appointed leaders who manipulatively encouraged circumcision rather than cooperate with the colonizers to abolish such practices (Gruenbaum 2001, 25). Boyle writes in advocacy of eradication: Missionaries of the Church of Scotland mobilized against the practice among the Kikuyu of Kenya in 1906 but merely politicized the issue rather than decreasing its occurrence . . . Jomo Kenyatta, who later became Kenya’s first president, took this opportunity to cast the practice in a favorable light . . . In part because of Kenyatta, the attempt to eradicate FCG [female genital cutting] among Christian converts in Kenya was temporarily abandoned. (2002, 39–40) Referring to the same period, Shaw states, “Clitoridectomy, an operation on women’s bodies, became a symbol for the ‘pure’ or true Kikuyu. But it must be remembered that it was a symbol first used by Western-educated male leaders to stir their constituents against the discipline of the colonial state and its churches, and later became a rallying point for the Mau Mau rebellion” (1995, 65).4 At the same time such
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Struggles among the GUku˜ yu˜ of Kenya
Wairim Ngariya Njambi
authors do not emphasize the colonial brutality and white supremacy that was imposed on Kenyans, including Gı˜ kKyK women. And although Shaw (1995) expresses criticism of colonialism, she nonetheless also presents Gı˜ kKyK women as the pawns of men, as the above quote indicates. By discussing an alternative account regarding the practice of irua ria atumia na anake, my paper does not support the notion of separate, isolated cultures with “authentic” values and traditions that need to be protected from outside interventions. Rather, my paper points out a persistent colonial legacy that is embedded well within the feminist discourse of eradication: one that presumes a nonreciprocal right of a “civilized” West to intervene in the (presumably backward) cultural practices of its Others. As a way of challenging such accounts, the following section discusses irua ria atumia na anake plus the various related sexual activities that were considered important and empowering to both Gı˜ kKyK women and men. I then move to a discussion of irua ria atumia na anake’s role in the mobilization of Gı˜ kKyK anticolonial resistance that began in the 1920s, and that eventually lead to Kenya’s independence in the 1960s. By offering this historical account, I hope to shed light on the agency of Gı˜ kKyK women in particular who drew upon the meanings and lessons of irua ria atumia to establish their places in the history of their culture and of anticolonial resistance. Irua Ria Atumia Na Anake and Ngwko Sexual Practices The emergence of Gı˜ kKyK ethnicity about 500 years ago was the product of migration and settlement in their current homelands in Central Kenya and a blending of cultural inf luences (MKriKki 1974). Cultural practices and values emerged and blended as a result of contact with ethnic groups such as the Maasai, the Akamba, and the Ndorobo, among others (Kershaw 1997; MKriKki 1974). Oral history suggests that the practice of irua ria atumia was adopted from neighboring groups such as Athi and Gumba, from which the Gı˜ kKyK also learned many other cultural traits (Ogot 1976). Although the details of such origins remain sketchy, oral history suggests that irua ria atumia initially was a strategic move on the part of Gı˜ kKyK women to challenge men’s monopoly of such an important ritual performance as irua, which historically provides enormous access to social, political, and economic mobility (Njambi 2004). Since its origins, the irua ritual for both women and men has been a central element in the construction of Gı˜ kKyK identity.
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For women, the physical aspect of irua, which involves the cutting of the hood that covers the clitoris by a mruithi (circumciser), signifies the entrance to womanhood, and as indicated earlier takes place at around the age of 16. As an integral part of the ritual, after the irua ceremony both women and men would be sent to thukuru—the indigenous equivalent of a boarding school—for several months, where their healing would be monitored and where they would learn important skills, including lessons about sexuality. It is during this time that a selected committee of middle-aged women and men taught the initiates the practice of ngwko, which involved controlled sexual encounters among the newly initiated, Gı˜ kKyK dances for men and women, domestic lessons, and other social skills. The introduction of ngwko was important because it played the dual role of preventing premarital pregnancies while acknowledging premarital sexual needs and desires at the same time. As Kenyatta states, “In order not to suppress entirely the normal sex instinct, the boys and girls are told in order to keep good health they must acquire the techniques of practicing a certain restricted form of intercourse, called mbani na ngwko (platonic love and fondling)” (1959, 149). And as Shaw points out, ngwko trained Gı˜ kKyK women “to respond to a wide range of bodily sensations, and . . . the period of socially sanctioned responses” (1995, 79). Women were not just trained to explore their bodies for various forms of sexual stimulation; young men and women were trained to satisfy each other through ngwko. After those lessons were taught, these newly adult women and men were then ready to participate in communal sexual activities where they would take multiple sexual partners in a one-night session in order to receive a high level sexual excitement encouraged in ngwko (see Kenyatta 1959; Kratz 1994; Njambi 2004; Shaw 1995). Besides ngwko, irua ria atumia na anake also ensured that a sexual relationship between members of the same age-set (cohort) of initiates would continue to take place for the rest of their lives, despite their marital status. For example, it is commonly known among the Gı˜ kKyK that historically if a man came to his wife’s hut and found a spear implanted at the entrance, it meant that she was sexually engaged with another man of her age-set and the husband had to simply walk away and come back later. In this sense, not only were women and men of the same age-group free to engage in sexual encounters with one another during their lifetimes, but the bond that was forged through the irua would ensure a lifetime supply of emotional, spiritual, and economic support.
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Struggles among the GUku˜ yu˜ of Kenya
Wairim Ngariya Njambi
The general colonial view, however, was that all these practices were primitive and immoral. Edgerton explains, “Circumcised women did not lose their ability to enjoy sexual relations, nor was their child-bearing capacity diminished. Nevertheless, the practice offended Christian sensibilities” (1989, 40). At the same time, these missionaries were especially horrified by the practices of ngwko and the forms of sexually suggestive dances (such as mthrg and ndumo) that accompanied irua ria atumia na anake, which they referred to as immoral and un-Christian (see Cole 1959). As Kratz notes, “in Kenya, for instance, debates about circumcision began as soon as missionaries arrived, and were framed within the question of whether (and which) local customs violated standards of Christian behaviour and had to be condemned and eliminated” (1994, 342). According to Kershaw, although the early missionaries “had allowed their adult converts a certain latitude in Kikuyu practices,” later missionaries with a “fundamentalist clergy had become stricter, particularly opposing polygyny and female circumcision. It interpreted Western monogamy and male circumcision as compatible, but polygyny and female circumcision as incompatible, with Christian doctrine” (1997, 190). This incompatibility was applied to Gı˜ kKyK practices of women marrying other women as well (see Njambi and O’Brien 2000). Irua ria atumia in this sense was strongly opposed “by a number of inf luential European institutions—missionary, sentimental pro-African government, educational and medical authorities” (Kenyatta 1959, 125). For years, Kenyatta adds (1959, 130): [T]here has been much criticism and agitation against irua of girls by certain misinformed missionary societies in East Africa, who see only the surgical side of the irua, and, without investigating the psychological importance attached to this custom by the Kikuyu, these missionaries draw their conclusion that the irua of girls is nothing but a barbarous practice and, as such, should be abolished by law.
Irua Ria Atumia Na Anake and Legacies of Gky Contention Despite the perceptions of Christians, the initiation of both women and men had “enormous educational, social, moral, and religious implications” (Kenyatta 1959, 128). Becoming a woman or man in Gı˜ kKyK
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society was not determined by birth but by a series of initiation ritual markings that would continue to take place throughout one’s lifetime, beginning with irua. Every initiated generation was identified by a unique age-set, or riika, name that documented a particular historical event that took place at the time their irua initiation occurred. For instance, women and men who were initiated when the anticolonial Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) was formed were remembered as riika ria aregi a KCA, or the age-set of KCA resistance. In this sense, irua ria atumia na anake played an important cultural and political role of situating both women and men in various social and political positions both as members of their society and as guardians of their history and culture inscribed through this body practice. Women’s political power was not diminished by participating in irua, but rather, irua could provide an avenue to its enhancement. During the precolonial and colonial eras, a number of Gı˜ kKyKfemale leaders such as WangK Wa Makeri, WairimK Wa Kı˜nene, Njoki Wa Thuge, NjKngKrK, and Ndiko Wa Githura, among others, are said to have demonstrated their power by conducting irua ria atumia na anake in their own homesteads against Gı˜ kKyK customary law that prohibited individuals, both men and women, from taking such an action. Such determinations were restricted to athuri a kiama, or ruling elder men and members of a senior council, who had the right to decide when and where irua ria atumia na anake would be held (Kershaw 1997). Ndiko Wa Githura, for example, not only made her homestead a center for irua ria atumia na anake, but her inf luence was so great that when she decided to migrate from one region to another during the colonial upheavals, the whole village would follow her. As Njau and Mulaki suggest, “Her departure from Gatundu was followed by an exodus of almost all the villagers who felt unsafe without Ndiko’s protection” (1984, 12).5 Colonial opposition to irua ria atumia was both religious and economic. Missionaries were concerned that irua ria atumia (not irua ria anake) hindered conversion to Christianity. On the other hand, the combination of irua ria atumia na anake and ngwko (and other social and domestic lessons) took months to complete, and as Kershaw points out, “settlers were already concerned that the extensive rituals of male and female circumcision interfered with the f low of labour” (1997, 190). Settlers were not even satisfied with a compromise that had been reached in a 1922 baraza (meeting) in Kiambuu between the Local Native Council (LNC) and missionaries “to confine initiations to two months a year” (Kershaw 1997, 190).
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Struggles among the GUku˜ yu˜ of Kenya
Wairim Ngariya Njambi
Additionally, settlers and missionaries wanted to prevent irua ria atumia na anake from becoming a mobilizing force for Gı˜ kKyK solidarity and resistance against the colonial regime itself, and sought “to stif le what was seen as incipient rebellion” (Kershaw 1997, 189). The colonial state and missionaries became even more adamant about the abolition of irua ria atumia once the Kikuyu Central Association’s (KCA) anticolonial activism became popular among the Gı˜ kKyK throughout the rural and urban areas in the 1920s (Edgerton 1989; Kenyatta 1959; Kershaw 1997; Maloba 1998). The KCA was created as a more radical, Gı˜ kKyK-centered outgrowth of a preceding group, the East African Organization, which was led by the well-known activist Harry Thuku. This increase in organized anticolonial activism in the face of land confiscations and cultural suppression helped generate what came to be known as the “female circumcision controversy.” In the late 1920s, the colonial state in collaboration with missionary leaders announced the abolition of irua ria atumia (but importantly not irua ria anake) as well as the ngwko practices that were an integral part of the overall initiation (Kratz 1994). Gı˜ kKyK people vehemently resisted this abolition, even those who had adopted Christianity and British education, to the dismay of colonial officials. The irua ria atumia issue became a critical mobilizing force in generating Gı˜ kKyK anticolonial sentiment, which was promoted by the KCA (Edgerton 1989; Kenyatta 1959; Kershaw 1997; Kratz 1994; Maloba 1998; Odhiambo and Longsdale 2003). The power of irua to mobilize owed partly to its close connection to Gı˜ kKyK identity, as it “symbolizes the unification of the whole tribal organization” (Kenyatta 1959, 129). The condemnation of irua ria atumia became a vehicle that drove the Gı˜ kKyK nationalist agenda, with many people joining the KCA struggle (Edgerton 1989; Maloba 1998). Maloba explains the KCA’s growing inf luence during the female circumcision controversy between 1929 and 1930: It became the chief advocate of Kikuyu cultural traditions and the necessity of female circumcision. This appealed to a large section of people and won it a lot of temporary supporters. In championing the circumcision issue, the KCA appeared responsible and respectable to both the young and old in Kikuyu society who were worried about the loss of their cultural heritage at the hands of Christianity as taught by white missionaries. (1998, 48) When missionaries and colonial administrators banned the children of supporters of irua ria atumia from their schools and churches in 1929,
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most Gı˜ kKyK insisted on building their own independent schools and churches where they could teach their children without interference from the missionaries, creating sites where the planning and strategizing of anticolonial activities could be carried out (Edgerton 1989; Kenyatta 1959; Kershaw 1997; Kratz 1994; Maloba 1998; Peterson 2003). It was in such independent schools where serious lessons of the Gı˜ kKyK culture and lessons of nymbo cia aregi, or political songs of resistance, were taught more openly and freely.6 In other words, the ban on irua ria atumia engendered a chain of anticolonial activities among the Gı˜ kKyK that eventually, by the late 1940s and 1950s, laid the groundwork for the Mau Mau armed struggle, leading later to the end of British colonialism in Kenya. Mau Mau, Oathing, and Irua Ria Atumia Na Anake According to Edgerton, “Mau Mau, the first great African liberation movement, precipitated what was probably the gravest crisis in the history of Britain’s African colonies” (1989, vii). This resistance movement “that has come to pass down in history as Mau Mau was essentially an uprising of the peasants of Kenya (principally from Central Province) against the colonial state, and its policies and agents in 1952” (Maloba 1998, 1). But the colonizers were not convinced that Mau Mau posed a serious threat to the colonial regime and at first dismissed it as small, isolated pockets of criminal gang activities led “by a few disgruntled educated Africans who wanted to use their uneducated kinspeople to advance their own selfish political aims” (Maloba 1998, 1). The general attitude of the colonial administrators, as Maloba points out, “continued to be that Africans were bound to benefit from colonial rule. Colonialism, so it was argued, had brought with it the benefits of education, religion, modern commerce, and government, and it had rendered the invaluable service of drawing Africans into the mainstream of human civilization and away from the pervasive barbarism which had hitherto enveloped the African continent” (1998, 1). Colonizers in this sense could not understand why Africans were not expressing gratitude, but instead voiced resentment. As Edgerton explains, colonialists “were proud to have raised the benighted Africans out of their barbarism by gifts of Christianity, education, public health, and peace, and they were furious that the Africans were not ‘grateful’ ” (1989, 30). Colonial writings regarding the resistance movement continued to decry the ungrateful attitudes of Africans, blaming what they saw as manipulative leaders for the unrest. Unsurprisingly, therefore, writings
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Struggles among the GUku˜ yu˜ of Kenya
Wairim Ngariya Njambi
about the Mau Mau “at the time when it occurred, were essentially undertaken by what can, in retrospect, be termed enemies of the movement. These were essentially local white settlers who painted it as dark and satanic in content and inspiration” (Maloba 1998, 9). As Maloba has shown, white settlers engineered a colonial state propaganda through their official reports that played “on what was seen as the dark side of the movement; the oaths and their administration, and, of course, the maiming of the cattle and killings in the rural areas” (1998, 10). According to Maloba, by refusing to see “that they were dealing with a genuine expression of frustrated nationalism, the colonial state and its agents looked at and interpreted the actions of Mau Mau as criminal acts” (1998, 10). While this “propaganda was aimed at creating horror among lawabiding citizens by describing unimaginable crimes attributed to the fighters” (Maloba 1998, 10), what made the colonizers appear even more benevolent and morally responsible by contrast was their condemnation of irua ria atumia. They depicted irua ria atumia as instruments of female sexual oppression and of unchanging barbaric tradition, while “refraining as far as possible from mentioning atrocities committed by these troops or the Home Guards” (Maloba 1998, 109). Whatever internal conf licts, contradictions, and setbacks plagued Mau Mau, and there were many, it was foremost a nationalist and anticolonial movement that largely consisted of poor peasants and landless men and women. These women and men joined the Mau Mau because they found their conditions under the colonial regime intolerable and hoped to end British rule. It was the political issue of nationalism— triggered by economic hardship, land deprivation/alienation, cultural suppression, imposition of taxes, killing, villagization, terracing, sexual abuses and rape, racism, and forced labor—that was at the heart of the Gı˜ kKyK revolt (concerns that were equally shared with other ethnic groups in Kenya) (Edgerton 1989; Kershaw 1997; Kratz 1994; Molaba, 1998; Odhiambo and Longsdale 2003; Ogot 2003).7 By revolting, they demonstrated that white supremacy could be fought. And to organize their resistance, they turned to oaths, or muma—their most powerful and innovative tool of mobilization. Oathing had been part of Gı˜ kKyK initiation ceremonies including irua ria atumia na anake even during the precolonial era (Maloba 1998). And although oathing and irua ria atumia na anake are not the same thing, the two are related in significant ways; to take any oath, one must already have gone through initiation of irua ria atumia na anake. Even as a part of the irua process, the new initiates must take an oath committing them
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to a code of behavior to which they vow to adhere as Gı˜ kKyK adults. For women, what seems like a purely physical process of cutting the tip of the clitoral hood through irua ria atumia, when combined with oath taking forms the necessary requirement for taking any additional oath later in life, including that to become a Mau Mau resistance fighter. The specifically anticolonial oathing practices began in the 1920s, and the most basic form employed between the 1920s and 1940s was muma wa igano. This was an oath of unity and solidarity among the Gı˜ kKyK in their struggles against the colonial regime and was administered virtually to all initiated men and women (Clough 1998; Edgerton 1989; Maloba 1998; Otieno 1998). Prior to the Mau Mau rebellion, as Maloba points out, muma wa igano was given to the Gı˜ kKyK general public “with the intention of secretly uniting, disciplining, and fostering political consciousness among them. It was a recruitment drive, secretly extending political consciousness and commitment to the nationalist struggle” (Maloba 1998, 102). When the Mau Mau rebellion emerged in late 1940s and early 1950s, muma wa igano was upgraded to require not just unity and solidarity, but also loyalty on the part of oath takers as they prepared to take on more serious militant responsibilities. It is for such purposes that muma wa mbatuni, or the warrior oath, was introduced (Clough 1998; Edgerton 1989; Maloba 1998; Otieno 1998). Muma wa mbatuni was the most advanced oath and was administered to those who took up arms to fight for the land (brri) and freedom (wyathi). And although muma wa mbatuni varied from place to place and according to the tasks one was supposed to complete after taking it, it was commonly agreed by the oath takers that it was stronger and much more demanding compared to muma wa igano (Clough 1998; Otieno 1998). After taking muma wa mbatuni, “They swore never to be afraid of waging war against the white man, to recover ‘stolen lands’ ” (Maloba 1998, 103). Most importantly, they swore to die or to kill for the movement’s cause. Bravery became even more instrumental with muma wa mbatuni, for the oath taker had to now also be willing to kill anyone, including their own family members, who sold out Mau Mau secrets or assisted the white man in the killing of Mau Mau fighters. By taking oaths, Mau Mau initiates became “purified” and redefined as Gı˜ kKyK karnga, or “true” Gı˜ kKyK, with a new dedication to free themselves from European domination. Importantly, the word karnga relates back to the 1929–30 “female circumcision controversy,” for it was during this controversy that those who were opposed to the colonial ban on irua ria atumia first utilized the karnga concept to mobilize
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Gı˜ kKyK people against colonialism. As Clough points out, “The title of ‘Gı˜ kKyK karnga,’ which set Mau Mau initiates apart from the unoathed, is also historically significant because it was the name chosen for themselves by the opponents of the missions’ anti-cliterodectomy campaign of 1929, distinguishing them from others who accepted the missions’ direction, the irore (thumbprinters)” (1998, 100). Two decades later, karnga was reappropriated in the intensified political climate of Mau Mau. The connection between Mau Mau and irua lies not only in this political history, but also in the intertwined meanings and significance of initiation, particularly in instilling a culture of bravery and boldness among Gı˜ kKyK women and men alike. Mau Mau oathing was commonly referred to as irua ria ker, or the second irua, because “those who had taken the oath called themselves ‘circumcised,’ not just true Gı˜ kKyK but true adults, separate from the uninitiated, who [metaphorically] remained children in Mau Mau eyes” (Clough 1998, 100, citing Kaggia 1975). The fact that the Mau Mau oathing is referred to as irua reinforces the centrality of irua ria atumia na anake to anticolonial struggles and in Gı˜ kKyK culture more generally. To engage in anticolonial activities as a Gı˜ kKyK literally meant to have gone irua initiation. Gı˜ ky Women’s Contributions to the Mau Mau Movement Women, like their male counterparts (including my own relatives), joined the movement because of what they perceived as their national obligation, and by taking oaths, they vowed to die for their land and freedom from colonial domination. As with men, irua ria atumia and oath-taking rituals prepared women physically and psychologically to participate bravely in the Mau Mau movement. Recruitment into the Mau Mau ranks did not differentiate on the basis of gender. As Gachihi (2003) states, “when one talks of recruitment of the Kikuyu women into Mau Mau, one is not talking as though this was a separate exercise from the recruitment of other members [i.e., men] into the movement” (cited in Maloba 1998, 177). In some ways, women were involved in multiple wars all at once. With men away, home became a battlefield for many women who struggled to feed their children with little means, protect and defend their families and homes, and protect their lands from landgrabbing settlers and loyalists (Elkins 2003). And as Elkins states, “as a result of the women fighting on two fronts—the civilian war on the
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one hand and for their family and home on the other—the brutalities of the Emergency [that the colonial state imposed on Kenyans during the Mau Mau struggles] became part of the daily routine. Kikuyu women had to find a way to cope with both, at the same time” (2003, 215). Besides having their own lands confiscated and being forced into labor camps, “sexual abuse pervaded the villages, and women of all ages— including the elderly and the very young—constantly negotiated their fear of the home guards with their loyalty to Mau Mau” (Elkins 2003, 216). Nowhere is this experience made clearer than in the account of one woman who survived the ordeal: Since our home was not very far from the forest, the soldiers would always pass nearby, as they went into the forest to look for Mau Mau. If they happened to meet a woman or a girl, they would not hesitate to rape them. Sometimes they would even rape a woman and her daughters. Also, while beating us and telling us to produce Mau Mau who were in our houses, they would harass the women and girls, and rape them . . . They would sometimes squeeze women’s breasts with pliers, or swing women by their long hair. Other times, one would be interrogated while lying on the ground, with a soldier stepping on her neck, while others would beat her all over her body. Then one would be allowed to sit upright, and tell everything. If she still refused, she would be beaten again. Many died this way. (cited in Elkins 2003) Mau Mau women were involved in a variety of active roles in the movement including scouting/spying, smuggling guns, supplying food and medicine, recruitment, administering oaths, and combat (Edgerton 1989; Elkins 2003; Maloba 1998; Odhiambo and Longsdale 2003; Otieno 1998). These were difficult tasks involving significant risk and even the possibility of death. This boldness and bravery in the face of danger was grounded in the combination of irua ria atumia na anake and oathing practices, as exemplified in the case of Wambui Waiyaki Otieno. As a great granddaughter of a powerful Gı˜ kKyK anticolonial resistance leader (Waiyaki Wa Hinga), Wambui explains, “Scouting or gathering intelligence was not a simple task, and the War Council knew that without scouts no war would be waged or won . . . The scouts were the ones who arranged the whole attack, including details such as the number of attackers required and the weapons to be used, from which direction to attack, and in which direction to run in case of trouble” (Otieno 1998, 42). She explains, “scouts had to be women”
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because of their ability to appear innocent and to disguise themselves quickly with various paraphernalia items “such as wigs, various uniforms, buibui (the caftan-like dress and head cover worn by Muslim women), and makeup” (Otieno 1998, 38). Besides fighting for land and freedom from European domination, Wambui also had deep-seated “resentment of the brutal treatment [her] great-grandfather Waiyaki Wa Hinga had suffered at the hands of the colonialists” and “was prepared to do anything to avenge him” (Otieno 1998, 33). After taking oaths, and being arrested several times for scouting, Wambui “was chosen to lead a group whose sole responsibility would be to obtain firearms, since the demand for guns was rising as [Mau Mau] activities intensified” (Otieno 1998, 38). She also describes her scouting activity when she “furnished the relevant information to the Mau Mau and the subsequent battle became the biggest the Mau Mau had ever launched against a colonial installation. It came to be known as ‘The Great Battle of Naivasha’ and is still remembered by many. The whites and their collaborators died in large numbers, for we had taken them completely unaware” (Otieno 1998, 42). Such activities corroborate Edgerton’s point that “courage was not a male monopoly among the Mau Mau” fighters (1989, 128), and that “[w]hen they were caught, as they sometimes were, they resisted the terrible tortures of their captors so courageously that General China [of the Mau Mau] wrote that they [women] were braver than men” (1989, 128). The kinds of torture that women faced when they were caught include rape, sodomy, killing, having their breasts crushed, food deprivation, and hard labor (Edgerton 1989; Elkins 2003; Maloba 1998). As Elkins suggests, “In an effort to extract intelligence, sodomy with bottles, snakes and vermin were commonplace, as were beatings and verbal assaults” (2003, 216). Similarly, Edgerton writes, “Women were cut, beaten, and burned, and in addition they had their vaginas stuffed with stinging nettles, penetrated by snakes, or filled with boiling water” (1989, 163). Women were also forced “to bare their buttocks and sit on a wire mesh that had been heated red hot over a charcoal burner” (Edgerton 1989, 188). Such sexual atrocities were performed by white policemen, white settlers, and African homeguards, and were carried out in villages and detention centers where they had total control of both Gı˜ kKyK women and men. Although they suffered great abuse, women, as Maloba (1998) suggests, were essential to the movement, which would not have succeeded without their contributions and cooperation. Importantly, the ability to bravely face such dangers is built upon the practice of irua ria atumia
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na anake; for the initiation to truly occur, one must endure bravely and without f linching whatever physical pain that may be experienced during the ritual. In Gı˜ kKyK culture, this bravery is often presented as a benchmark for other expressions of bravery. There is a common Gı˜ kKyK phrase, gkinya ithanj , that is often used to emphasize one’s courage in a given situation, such as those faced by women during the Mau Mau struggle. Translating as “having gone to the river to face one’s irua,” one using the phrase is saying, “I faced that situation bravely, just as I had faced my irua” Conclusion Far from being a story of women’s mutilation and domination, irua ria atumia, like irua ria anake, is inscribed in this history of resistance as an empowering process. Irua for women and men is directly interwoven with Gı˜ kKyK identity formation and group unity, as well as the sense of bravery that is translated into other everyday life practices. Since becoming a woman or a man was not determined by birth, irua ria atumia na anake provided men and women with the necessary ingredients for facing the world with courage that extended throughout their lifetimes. Because initiation practices were so central to Gı˜ kKyK everyday life, the colonial state’s ban of irua ria atumia readily became a focal point of anticolonial resistance, allowing women, like men, to actively engage in the struggle. In colonial Kenya from the 1920s onward, the white settlers and missionaries structured the female circumcision controversy on familiar colonialist presumptions about who is civilized and hence authorized to act on behalf of the Other, a common justification for colonial rule that often focused on the protection of women from the backward traditions enforced by native men (see Mani 1990). This presumption continues today through the efforts of well-intended, Western-minded, but culturally blinded feminists and institutions that seek to eradicate such practices.8 As Boyle points out, second-wave feminists in particular had been vocal and confrontational in suggesting that female circumcision practices are “a tool of patriarchy and a symbol of women’s subordination . . . [and] argued that [FGM] was sadistic and part of a global patriarchy conspiracy” (2002, 46). Yet, the empowering history described here of irua ria atumia and its connection to anticolonial resistance is unrecognizable from this view, which reinforces stereotypes of “third world women” rather than illuminates complexity.
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Struggles among the GUku˜ yu˜ of Kenya
Wairim Ngariya Njambi
Close scrutiny of the implications of such overgeneralized, colonialinspired accounts are necessary if feminism is to be meaningful to different women in different places. Such scrutiny has already begun, with recent critical scholarship that questions the veracity of common claims about so-called FGM. Shweder, for example, points out that “the alarming claims and representations by anti-FGM advocacy groups (images of African parents routinely and for hundreds of years disfiguring, maiming, and murdering their female children and depriving them of capacity for a sexual response) have not been scrutinized with regard to reliable evidence” (2002, 218; see also Abusharaf 2000; Ahmadu 2000; Diallo 2003; Njambi 2004, 2008, 2009; Obermeyer 1999). In the case of female genital practices, taking complexity seriously means in part paying close attention to local voices and their accounts, not because they represent unmediated “truth” but because they are often pushed to the backseat, as the “more pressing” need to keep genitalia in their “natural” state is considered paramount. Notes 1. The term Gı˜ ky is the indigenous spelling of what is more commonly referred to as Kikuyu. These terms refer to the predominant ethnic group in the central highlands of Kenya. 2. As a member of this ethnicity, I prefer to employ the Gı˜ kKyK phrase that describes these practices as a means of emphasizing localization, thereby avoiding overgeneralization and stereotyping associated with more common labels. The term “circumcision,” for instance, is highly problematic in the case of the Gı˜ kKyK because it does not capture the complexities that are associated with irua, including the assignment of age-sets, and the associated ngwko practices (nonpenetration sexual acts that involved multiple partners). 3. Following Judith Butler’s notion of “performativity,” I prefer “female genital practices” as a general phrase in order to undermine the idea of a “genitalia” that exists prior to its various discursive formations. In this sense, genitalias, whether circumcised or not, are products of particular cultural, political, historical performances that gave them not only their meanings but also their materiality (Butler 1993). 4. Often terms like clitoridectomy, FGC, and circumcision are used as synonyms even though such terms vary significantly in their meanings and implications: Shaw’s use of “clitoridectomy,” for instance, imposes connotations that are inappropriate in the Gı˜ kKyK case. I discuss the issue of terminology elsewhere in greater depth (Njambi 2008). 5. “These villagers followed her and settled at Thogoto thus forming a new village known as kwa mbari ya Ndiko (the area of Ndiko’s family group) or kia Ngunu, which was another name for Ndiko’s village in Gakoe” (see Njau and Mulaki 1984, 12). Today, Ndiko is remembered through a primary school that was named after her when she died. 6. When I was growing up, one of the anticolonial songs that was commonly sung in my school and in my village went like this: Mthng kar krim atia woimire kwanyu tar knd, Ka woimire mt igr, w kharrka th, which translates, “White person/man, what kind of a fool are you? You came here with nothing. Did you come from the top of a tree and fall straight down?” 7. Ogot crucially asserted that “the processes of constructing ethnicity and tradition during the colonial period were not confined to the Kikuyu. In Western Kenya, for instance, the
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early 1920s marked the rise of a new generation of Africans with new perceptions of what could and should be done with their lives: Reuben Omula, Simeon Nyende, Ezekiel Apindi, Jonathan Okwiri, Joel Omino, Paul Mboya, Musa Nyandusi, Ooga Angwenyi, OnsongoAngwenyi, Paul Agoi, Joseph Mulama, Jeremiah Awori, Cheborge arap Tengecha, etc. These leaders had grassroots support, and they directed and coordinated the development of national consciousness in the region, which was stimulated to a large extent by local rural grievances and aspirations” (2003, 12). 8. For many, including in women’s studies classrooms, the universal story of women’s oppression continues to be simple and uncomplicated: practices of female genital practices, veiling, purdah, polygyny, sati, and footbinding, practiced mostly in third-world countries, are understood as symbols of universal male domination. Predictably, such presumptions of universal victimhood allow relatively powerful women in dominant countries to speak unproblematically on behalf of, and to define problems (as well as solutions) for, women in less privileged positions (see Mohanty 1991).
References Abusharaf, Rogaia. 2000. Revisiting feminist discourses on infibulation: Responses from Sudanese feminists. In Female “Circumcision” in Africa: Culture, Controversy, and Change, ed. Bettina Shell-Duncan and Ylva Hernlund, 151–67. Boulder, CO: Lynn Rienner Publishers. Ahmadu, Fuambai. 2000. Rites and wrongs: An insider/outsider ref lects on power and excision. In Female “Circumcision” in Africa: Culture, Controversy, and Change, ed. Bettina ShellDuncan and Yiva Hernlund, 283–312. Boulder, CO: Lynn Rienner Publishers. American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). 1998. Female genital mutilation: Policy statement (RE9749). Pediatrics 102(1): 153–56. American Medical Association (AMA). 1995. Female genital mutilation. Journal of the American Medical Association 274(21): 1714–16. Boyle, Elizabeth Herger. 2002. Female Genital Cutting: Cultural Conflict in the Global Community. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York and London: Routledge. Cole, Keith. 1959. Kenya: Hanging in the Middle Way. Oxford, UK: Church Army Press. Clough, Marshall S. 1998. Mau Mau Memoirs: History, Memory, and Politics. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Daly, Mary. 1978. Gyn/Ecology: The Metathics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon Press. Diallo, Assitan. 2003. Paradoxes of female sexuality in Mali: On the practices of magnonmaka and bolokoli-kêla. In Rethinking Sexualities in Contexts of Gender, ed. Signe Arnfred, 173–94. Uppsala, Sweden: Nordic Africa Institute. Dugger, Celia W. 1996. U.S. frees African f leeing ritual mutilation. New York Times, April 25, p. 1. Edgerton, Robert B. 1989. Mau Mau: An African Crucible. New York: The Free Press. El Dareer, Asma. 1982. Women, Why Do You Weep? London: Zed Books. Elkins, Caroline. 2003. Detention, rehabilitations and the destruction of Kikuyu society. In Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms, Authority and Narration, ed. E. S. Atieno Odhiambo and John Longsdale, 191–226. London: James Curry; Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers; Athens: Ohio University Press. El Saadawi, Nawal. 1980. The Hidden Face of Eve. London: Zed Books. Equality Now. 1996. Spin, 11(12), March.
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Gachihi, Margaret Wangui. 1986. The role of Kikuyu women in the Mau Mau. M.A. thesis, University of Nairobi. Gruenbaum, Ellen. 2001. The Female Circumcision Controversy: An Anthropological Perspective. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hosken, Fran. 1993. The Hosken Report: Genital and Sexual Mutilation of Females. 4th ed. Lexington, KY: Women’s International Network News. ———. 1982. The Hosken Report: Genital and Sexual Mutilation of Females. 3rd ed. Lexington, KY: Women’s International Network News. ———. 1980. Female Sexual Mutilations: The Facts and Proposals for Action. Lexington, KY: Women’s International Network News. Kaggia, Bildad. 1975. Roots of Freedom, 1921–1963: The Autobiography of Bildad Kaggia. Nairobi: East African Publishing House. Kenyatta, Jomo. 1959 [1938]. Facing Mount Kenya. London: Secker and Warburg. Kershaw, Greet. 1997. Mau Mau from Below. London: James Curry; Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers; Athens: Ohio University Press. Koso-Thomas, Olayinka. 1987. The Circumcision of Women: A Strategy for Eradication. London: Zed Press. Kratz, Corinne A. 1994. Affecting Performance: Meaning, Move, and Experience in Okiek Women’s Initiation. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press. Lightfoot-Klein, Hanny. 1989. Prisoners of Ritual: An Odyssey into Female Genital Circumcision in Africa. New York: Haworth Press. Maloba, Wunyabari O. 1998. Mau Mau and Kenya: An Analysis of a Peasant Revolt. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mani, Lata. 1990. Contentious traditions: The debate on sati in colonial India. In Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, 88–126. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 1991. Under western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. In Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, 51–80. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. MKriKki, Godfrey. 1974. A History of the Kikuyu, 1500–1900. London: Oxford University Press. Njambi, WairimK Ngaruiya. 2009. “One Vagina to Go”: Eve Ensler’s Universal Vagina and its Implications for African Women. Australian Feminist Studies 24(60): 167–180. ———. 2008. Rescuing African Women and Girls from Female Genital Practices: A Benevolent and Civilizing Mission. In Burden or Benefit? Imperial benevolence and its legacies, ed. Helen Gilbert and Chris Tiffin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Njambi, Wairimu NgarKiya. 2004. Dualism and female bodies in representations of African female circumcision: A feminist critque. Feminist Theory Journal 5(3): 281–303. Njambi, WairimK NgarKiya, and William E. O’Brien. 2000. Revisiting ‘woman-woman marriage’: Notes on Gikuyu women. NWSA Journal 12(1): 1–23. Njau, Rebeka, and Gideon Mulaki. 1984. Kenya Women Heroes and Their Mystical Power, vol. 1. Nairobi: Risk Publications. Obermeyer, Carla Makhlouf. 1999. Female genital surgeries: The known, the unknown, and the unknowable. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 13: 79–106. Odhiambo, E. S. Atieno, and John Longsdale, ed. 2003. Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms, Authority and Narration. London: James Curry; Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers; Athens: Ohio University Press. Ogot, B. A. 2003. Mau Mau & nationhood: The untold story. In Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms, Authority and Narration, ed. E. S. Atieno Odhiambo and John Longsdale, 8–36.
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London: James Curry; Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers; Athens: Ohio University Press. ———. 1976. Kenya before 1900. Nairobi: East Africa Publishing House. Otieno, Wambui W. 1998. Mau Mau’s Daughter: A Life History, ed. Cora Ann Presley. Boulder, CO: Lynn Rienner Publishers. Peterson, Derek. 2003. Writing in revolution: Independent schooling & Mau Mau in Nyeri. In Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms, Authority and Narration, ed. E. S. Atieno Odhiambo and John Longsdale, 121–54. London: James Curry; Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers; Athens: Ohio University Press. Rahman, Anika, and Nahid Toubia. 2000. Female Genital Mutilation: A Guide to Laws And Policies Worldwide. London: Zed Books. Schroeder, Patricia. 1994. Female genital mutilation—A form of child abuse. The New England Journal of Medicine 331(11): 739–40. Shaw, Carolyn M. 1995. Colonial Inscriptions: Race, Sex, and Class in Kenya. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Shweder, Richard A. 2002. What about “female genital mutilation?” and why understanding culture matters in the first place. In Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies, ed. Richard A. Shwerder, Martha Minow, and Hazel Rose Markus, 216–51. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Toubia, Nahid. 1993. Female Genital Mutilation: A Call for Global Action. New York: Women, Ink. Walker, Alice. 1992. Possessing the Secret of Joy. New York: Harcourt Brace. Walker, Alice, and Pratibha Parmar. 1993. Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women. New York: Harcourt Brace. World Health Organization (WHO). 1997. Female genital mutilation, Fact Sheet No. 153. Geneva: World Health Organization, http://www.who.int/inf-fs/en/fact153.html.
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N I N E
NAKABUMBA: God Creates Humanity as a Potter Creates a Pot Chri sti ne Saidi
. . . potters are of low socioeconomic status, [and] pots are often viewed as worthless bits of household paraphernalia . . . (Rice 1991, 436) Introduction In East-Central Africa,1 both potting and potters were significant in the early social history of the region, and this importance challenges the generally accepted understanding of the role of both ceramic technology2 and ceramic producers in African history. Thus this study also disputes the works of some Western scholars who, after examining both iron smelting and potting, imposed faulty “paradigms” such as a strict division of labor by gender and the resulting “technology hierarchy” onto African societies. Since the basis for both a new historical analysis of potting and a fresh examination of previous literature is found in the early social history of East-Central Africa, this article starts with a brief social history of early East-Central Africa as a backdrop. The focus of this study is on the technological, religious, and social centrality of pots, potters, and potting followed by a brief recap of iron smelting traditions of the region in order to complete the picture of technology and the accompanying social institutions in the longue dure’e’ of East-Central African
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CH A P T E R
Christine Saidi
history. Key to this research has been all the terms, descriptions, and histories related to me by the various elders in the region who have kept potting traditions alive. A potter who showed me the technological elements of potting was Mama Mary, who still makes pottery the traditional way. She lives in a rural village near Mbala, Zambia, and I met her through the people working at the Moto Moto Museum. Her pots are sold at the museum, which is located in rural Northern Province, Zambia, and is dedicated to maintaining local arts and culture. In 1998, as part of my research on the history of the technology and rituals of potting in East-Central Africa,3 I spent several days with her. She agreed to allow me to watch and even videotape her process for manufacturing pots. But before she could make the pots, we needed fresh clay. So I agreed to go to Kalambo Falls, the closest and best source of clay in the area, to get some. Archeologists from both the colonial and early postcolonial periods knew about Kalambo Falls, a site well known for layers and layers of pottery remains that represent the various communities that had lived there continuously for over 2,000 years. But in the last 20 years no one has put much money into doing archeological work in this area, and it is only because of African scholars like Mr. Sosala, who pays the village youth a few kwachas when they find artifacts, that the research continues.4 We hired a few of the young men to dig clay. There were no potting rituals on that day, but we collected almost 100 kilos of clay. When we returned from Kalambo Falls with the potting clay, Mama Mary was delighted. She told us, “Yes, this is the best clay in the whole area.” I watched as she worked the clay, blending in finely crumbled potsherds as temper. I asked her about potting traditions. She answered that she was a Christian and didn’t know much about the rituals. Later in another village I would meet Mama Chanda, who did know the potting rituals well. Mama Mary’s very skilled fingers started pulling up the sides of the pot in perfect symmetry, no wheel and no coiling. As she finished the pot, she reached for an old dried corncob and some sticks to create the distinctly Luangwa designs.5 She then dried the pots for a few days. Once they were dry, she slowly and with great skill piled pots, tree branches, and leaves in a pattern that would sustain the even baking of the pots by the fire. A young man, who was her son-in-law, helped her with the large tree branches. She told me that no woman could set this fire if she was on her period or if there was a heavy wind (the latter for obvious practical reasons). She lit the fire, and after a few minutes she used a long stick to pull out the pots that were done. Over two dozen
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pots were perfectly fired that day. As I watched the entire process I realized that except for the corncob, pots could have been produced like this over 2,000 years ago. Mama Mary would sell pots to the Moto Moto Museum, and this day to me. We all hoped that some of the young women watching this transaction, seeing the passing of money for pots, might be inspired to continue the technology.6 Mama Mary, creating a perfectly symmetrical pot using only her hands, seemed to embody the East-Central African belief that a potter making a pot was a metaphor for God creating life (in Bemba and Bembarelated languages, God was called Nakabumba) (Saidi 2010, 131).7 Older women and men living in rural East-Central Africa spent hours patiently explaining to me the traditions, beliefs, and skills involved in creating pots. As I watched Mama Chanda perform potting rituals and Mama Mary manufacture pots, I realized that most of the scholarly writings on potters and potting were based on a Western mythology of male dominance—Africans were never consulted. Yet even 40 years after the entire region had been f looded with cheap pots from China and India, there were still a few Africans who had firsthand knowledge of the importance of potters, pots, and the process of potting to EastCentral African social history. After my first few conversations with older people in the rural areas of Zambia, it became very clear that the researchers had not asked even basic questions of potters, or elders for that matter, about pot making in the history of East-Central Africa. So I began an exhaustive search of all the linguistic, archeological, and ethnographic evidence on pottery in the region. The following history is a result of the oral traditions and skills of East-Central African elders and that research. Potting in African History Potting and pots have been essential to most African agricultural economies. Pot making may well have been more important to early African societies than the later development of iron smelting. The Saharan Neolithic potters of almost 11,000 years ago were also among the earliest peoples to employ grain collection and cultivation (Ehret 2002, 76–77). Thus the African people8 who innovated the collection and later the cultivation of grains most likely developed ceramic technologies. Pots were used for water collection and storage, food storage, salt production, and most importantly cooking the grains. The ability to cook grains and other foodstuffs must have been almost as important
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NAKABUMBA
Christine Saidi
an innovation as agriculture itself.9 Throughout most of Africa grains or roots are pounded into f lour, then are cooked into porridge or a thicker consistency like that of mashed potatoes, and eaten as a major staple, usually served with a protein and/or vegetables when available. Ceramic pots were used to do this well into the twentieth century and were replaced by cheap, imported tin and iron pots only in the last 50years. From the Sudan belt, ceramic technology then spread gradually wider across Africa. Pottery making was already a well-established women’s technology among the proto-Bantu, who resided in southern Cameroon in the late fourth and early fifth millennia BCE. The very earliest Bantu verb “to fashion a pot” appears to have been *-mat (Bostoen 2005).10 From the Sanga-Kwa period of Bantu history of the middle or later third millennium BCE, however, a new verb, *-bumb, replaced *-mat. The use of *-bumb is universal in East-Central Africa as well as in most of the rest of the Savanna Bantu-speaking Africa. Several noun roots for different kinds of pots also go back to protoBantu or its later descendant, proto-Savanna Bantu, showing that, from well before the last millennium BCE, Bantu-speaking potters made a variety of wares. Pottery production was already a well-entrenched part of culture among the earliest Bantu settlers arriving in East-Central Africa more than 2,000 years ago, while iron smelting was acquired at a later date. From the beginning of Bantu settlements in the region, possibly as early as the fourth or third century BCE, pottery making would have become and remained the most salient technology for the needs of daily life. In East-Central Africa, pot making was an ancient group activity. Pots were most probably made by groups of women for a very long time, as the striated grinding grooves found exclusively on rocks in East-Central Africa indicate (Derricourt 1986, 27–31).11 These grooves are striated in form, close to water, away from villages, and are made of a variety of stone types including granite, volcanic rock, sandstone, and quartz. There are no common stories about the origins of these grooves: some people say they are footprints people made when the rock was still mud, or places where elephants rubbed their penises, or where chiefs’ wives grinded their grain. Most early archeologists thought that these grooves were places for men to sharpen metal axes and hoes. But practical experiments to test this hypothesis showed that this was not possible. The wide variety of oral traditions and the fact that none of these traditions really gives a plausible suggestion as to their historical use may indicate that in fact the grooves come from
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a distant past. Another explanation is that they were a part of a secret ritual no longer observed, since most grooves “are not associated with settlement material” in areas away from domestic spheres (Derricourt 1986, 27). Robin Derricourt, an archeologist, has suggested what seems the most probable explanation. After observing women grinding clay for pottery in northern Nigeria, he proposed that this activity was just the kind of work that could have created the grooves. The fact that all the grooves are located near water provides further support to this explanation, since pottery needs water, where as iron sharpening or grain grinding does not (Derricourt 1986, 30).12 The linguistic and archeological evidence shows the antiquity of pottery production in East-Central Africa, but in order to understand the significance of potting in this region, it is necessary to give a brief historical sketch of the societies and social institutions. Early East-Central African Societies East-Central Africa is the wide expanse of savanna extending from the Zambezi River across modern-day Zambia, adjacent parts of Malawi, and the southeastern portions (or Katanga Province) of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The people living in East-Central Africa are members of four branches of the Savanna Bantu language family (Saidi 2010, 52–55).13 The first are the Sabi (named after their unique word for fish), which include the Bemba, Lamba, Lala, Tabwa, Ushi, and other related peoples; the second is the Central Savanna, who are the Luba, Sanga, and Kaonde, among others; the third are the Ila, Tonga, Soli, and Lenje, and are named as a group, the Botatwe; and the fourth are the Fipa, Lungu, Mambwe, and Chewa, from the Mashariki group. The social institutions were (and to a large extent still are) matrifocal. In the long-term history of East-Central Africa, matrifocality meant ideologically that sex was not a basis of status or hierarchy. During the precolonial era the original ancestor of each clan was a woman, a mother. Inheritance and identity came from one’s mother’s line, and all children belonged to the mother’s family. Most14 of these peoples have historically been decentralized and had subsistence-based economies. Matrifocality included an economic philosophy that all surplus should be distributed to relatives who were connected in a metaphorical womb. Greed and selfishness were among the greatest sins.
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NAKABUMBA
Christine Saidi
The typical matrifocal social unit was the grandmother, daughters, and their children—and there may or may not have been husbands living with them. People married through a system called, imperfectly, “bride service.” For a young man to marry, he was required to live with and work for his mother-in-law. At the dawn of colonialism, a young man worked from five to seven years for his mother-in-law to show that he was a hard worker. He also had to father at least two children. The act of marrying was a process, not an individual event, in these societies. While there was a “wedding” celebration, , marriage in the western understanding was not fulling realized until the ceremony ending mother-in-law avoidance was observed for the young husband. Marriage in East-Central Africa was processional and involved several years of co-habitating and various ceremonies. In the West one is either married or not married, thus this processional marriage was never really understood by the colonial anthropologists, and they tended to refer to it simplistically as “trial marriage.” Mother-in-law avoidance was a crucial aspect of a young “husband’s” life. He was not allowed to speak to her, he had to show great deference when he saw her, and if she was walking down a path, he had to find another route. Only after several years and a few children could the young man participate in the ceremony to end many of the restrictions. After the ceremony he, his wife, and her family could decide if the young family should remain in the wife’s village, move to the husband’s mother’s village, or start their own villages. If the husband wanted to leave the village, often divorce ensued. The colonial government of Northern Rhodesia passed laws to lessen the mothers-in-law’s control of male labor.15 Female initiation ceremonies, chisungu, were the most important religious events within these societies. There was one ceremony when the young woman had her first period and a final ceremony when she felt the movement of her baby in her first pregnancy. The life stage of a woman from her first period to her first pregnancy is called yadi [mwali16] and can be linguistically reconstruct back almost 5,000 years to proto-Bantu. A young woman would have a marriage ceremony sometime during that life stage, but remained mwali until her first pregnancy. For almost all the peoples in Central and East Africa, the first successful pregnancy gave both mother and father the first step toward elderhood. About 2,000 years ago, the ancestors of the peoples living in EastCentral Africa innovated a new word and concept for God, Leza. Leza, or The Creator, in East-Central Africa was derived from the word
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In the beginning there existed two sexless persons. One of them had been given two parcels, with the order not to open them before the two had reached mutual understanding and friendship. In one were hidden the masculine attributes of the Divine and in the other the feminine. After some time one of the parcels began to smell badly, so the one who carried it threw it away and opened the other one. At once he was endowed with divine masculinity and he became man. His new masculinity caused him to desire the other person, but the latter could not respond. Realizing that it had something to do with the discarded parcel, the second person returned to Lesa, who gave her the gift of female sexuality. With it Lesa gave her three further presents; a) the ownership of the seed (mbuto), b) Trusteeship of the Sacred Hearth (Ishiko) and c) The knowledge of the bored stone (Libwe, implements to protect her mate, like axe and spear, symbols of his virility).18 Potters and Potting Rituals Honoring Leza is an intricate aspect of the potting rituals of the peoples of this region, as I observed when Mama Chanda, a potter from a small village near a river outside of Mbala, allowed me to follow her on a four-kilometer walk to a secret place known only to senior potters. There she gave me permission to videotape the ritual involved in removing the first clay from a new source, a very sacred place. When we reached the clay source, she knelt down. She explained that in the past there would have been several female potters doing the ritual. She carefully removed some clay and made a small pot, explaining, “The small pot is for Lesa [God] and for the ancestor potters.”19 I followed her back to the village as she moved effortlessly with fresh clay in a basket on her head. In the past, the regulations and traditions for removing clay from a virgin source required a level of secrecy, as a very old woman in a Kaonde village near Solwezi explained to me. She lived in a small village nestled in a thinly wooded area and according to her older brother,
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meaning “to be fed,” which connotes a very nurturing God. While one synonym for God was Nakabumba, God was conceptualized as non-gendered,17 and so were humans in the beginning, as the following oral tradition shows (Hinfelaar 1994, 28):
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Oh yes, in the old days, we potters were very careful to guard our clay source. Men, children, and menstruating women were never allowed to come with us. If they did, the pots would crack when they were fired. And we never let the younger potters come to the source until they had proven they were dedicated and accomplished potters. But no one has been able to pot here for a long time, maybe 40 years, because the clay sources are so far away.20 Some of the ritual prohibitions surrounding clay collection show features strongly reminiscent of customs adopted at a much later date by ironworkers. Professor Mwewa Kadongo, from the University of Lubumbashi and a Bemba from Katanga Province, told me: Ushi and Sanga women, here in Katanga, have always excluded men and children from gathering new clay. My grandmother told me that women could not have sex or be on “their time of month” when collecting clay, or else when the pots were fired they would crack.21 BaJudith,22 a Bemba elder, implied that a potter had to also be a mother. She told me that only “mature” women could participate in the ritual. Several potters said that first and foremost, not all women become potters. It appears that even in the earliest periods, potting would have been a technology practiced by a minority of women. Several of the potters I interviewed implied as much. Mama Judith 23 is direct in her comments, saying that a few women, who were lucky, became potters. The ones with the calling would dream of an ancestor potter and would subsequently learn the techniques and rituals from this ancestor in dreams. In summation, men, children, and menstruating women were not allowed at the clay sites, and the potters had to abstain from sex before going there to dig clay. The archeological evidence of many rock grooves away from living areas may well indicate that at an earlier period, potting rituals included the collective working of the clay. Only women who were experienced potters and had become mothers were allowed to participate in the collection of clay and its ritual. Younger potters were restricted from coming to the clay sources until
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“She was older than Jesus.” She had recently become blind, but once had been a well-respected potter and proudly told me:
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they had proved themselves to be dedicated and skillful in their work. And finally, not all women could be potters.
Potters made more than pots; the best potters, added Mama Judith, were also responsible for fashioning the figurines used in chisungu (Saidi 2010, 107–108), the girls’ initiation ceremonies. Here, artistry and ritual expression conjoined in the products of the potter. The most thorough research on chisungu was done by Richards (1982) and several missionaries,24 and these chisungu studies cover a period from 1939 to 1960. The majority are clearly written from a colonial perspective, but are useful in that they describe some of the items made for the initiation ceremonies. Over 80 clay figurines were described by witnesses as elements of the ceremonies (Richards 1982, 104). These clay figurines, mbusa (meaning “things handed down”), were used to help girls understand their roles in their societies. Prior to each ceremony several women, who were experienced potters, went out into the bush and started to make the ceramic mbusa figures. The mbusa made from clay was presented in two different forms. The first was the fired clay, which was usually painted white, black, and red. Some objects crafted were everyday items such as pots, mortar and pestle, or even animals, while other clay figurines were of schematic symbols and historical characters. Each ceramic piece had a name, a song, and a meaning that might not have been obvious from its shape. The second form of mbusa were large models of unfired clay, which were often decorated with seeds. At the Illondola White Father’s Mission in Northern Province, Zambia, I saw a picture of one of these items. It was a spiral with spokes decorated with seeds and looked exactly like recurrent designs found in the rock art of the region. The young initiate was forced to walk around and on the piece without breaking or harming it. After the ceremony, these particular unfired mbusa were destroyed. On the last night of the ceremony, the girl was presented with a specially made pot that she was to use to cleanse herself and her husband after marital sexual intercourse. The proper use of the pot, it was believed, insured her health and that of her husband and children. She was also required on the last day to jump through large hoops made of clay, branches, and seeds. The girl by this action was considered spiritually transformed and educated by the elder women, and then passed her
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The Use of Pots in Rituals
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Wayina-kamwale, inogo yalala, inogo yalala Ngailale! Nakawumba imbi! Ukuwumba temilimo! (O’mother of the yadi, the pot is cracked, the pot is cracked Let it be cracked! I’ll mould another! Moulding is not work !) Thus a young woman who has started her first period, but is not initiated, is metaphorically a cracked pot. In a matrifocal region where the initiate would produce the future clan members, the molding of a new pot or the firing of the unfired pot represented the transformation of the girl by the older women into a potential mother for the clan. The Ila, a matrifocal cattle-keeping people of southern Zambia, used pottery and potting clay differently in their chisungu ceremonies. First, a hole was dug out in the middle of the girl’s initiation house, and around the edge were broken pottery shards. The young initiate would spend months throwing the pieces into the air and trying to get them into the hole. Much of the time she would sit on the ground with a whole pot between her legs (Smith and Dale 1920, 22–23). The final part of the Ila chisungu ceremony involved the father of the initiate killing an ox by shoving potting clay down its mouth and nostrils. It was believed that if the ox made a sound prior to its death, the girl’s father would be cursed with bad luck. Then all the men, except her father, left, and the initiate was supposed to jump over the dead ox carcass. If she could not, her father would place her on his shoulders and jump with her over the ox (Smith and Dale 1920, 22–23). The agriculture-based Bemba used clay with grain on it, while the Ila, who depended heavily on their cattle, employed clay as a means to ritually sacrifice an animal. While female initiations were significant elements of the religious life of the peoples of East-Central Africa, the importance of potting and potters can be seen in other areas of religious life. God, as we have seen, is alternatively called Nakabumba, literally “female,” “potter,” and
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first step toward the hierarchy of women. “She is no longer a weed, a piece of rubbish or an unfired pot,” (Richards 1982, 69) declared the Bemba women at the end of a first chisungu ceremony. Lamba women sang the following songs at the beginning of chisungu in the early twentieth century (Doke 1931, 150):
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“Creator,” and Bemba female elders remembered a time “before the centralized Bemba chiefs” when women still had power: “God was made present on earth by the women who created pots, homes, and clay figurines for the initiation rites” (Hinfelaar 1994, 12–13, 15). Kabumba wa Mapepo in Bemba is the “initiator of worship,” symbolizing woman’s role as the conduit to God. In this case the root *-bumba, which originally meant “potter” or “potting clay,” has acquired a new meaning, “the leaders of worship.” Another Bemba legend tells of how man lived originally in grass houses and “woman taught him how to use the clay of the termite-hill to construct a mud and wattle house” (Hinfelaar 1994, 12–13, 15). Pots were also broken and thrown into the graves of the recently deceased. An elder would purify the village after death; first, the elder would go to the forest to look for remedies. Then the elder would return with a piece of broken pot deiscarded in the previous village and she/he would make a new fire at the entrance of the village where the funeral procession had passed. Finally, the elder placed potsherds with the remedy over the fire. After this, the village was freed from death.25 Pottery pieces were used in a similar ceremony along with ritual sexual intercourse, to purify the family of the deceased in East-Central Africa and the surrounding East African communities. Potsherds were also buried at the site of a new village. From the comparative cultural evidence, this kind of usage must go far back, at least 2,000 years. Pots broken and placed in a grave, and potsherds buried at a new village site, are obvious examples of the religious use of pots, and archeologists should be able to identify them in the future, if motivated to do so. While pots played a significant role in many aspects of life in EastCentral African societies, so did potters, especially in political and social terms. Many of the oral traditions of the region speak of dominant potter and potting-clay clans in the past. The importance of these clans was verified by several elders living in a village along Lake Mweru in Luapula Province. They told me that there were many people around there who belonged to the potters’ clan (pronounced mumba in this area). “They used to be important here—they still are, but not as much as before.” But potters did not just come from that clan; there were potters from every clan.26 Numerous oral traditions from East-Central Africa speak of victories in the last 400 years of the Nyendwa [Vagina] clans over the Bumba/Mumba [Potting Clay or Potters’] clans (Ahmed 1996).
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The tale begins long ago when Lake Mweru did not exist. The lake was formerly a plain with seven hills that were called Kilwa Island [sic]. The Twa [gathering and hunting peoples known in the West as “pygmies”], the original inhabitants, lived on these hills. Two Ushi (Bantu-speaking agriculturalists), Kaponto and Matanda, resided on the Luapula upstream nearby, and both were members of the Clay Clan (Mumba). Each had a daughter who was playing near the water. Kaponto’s daughter threw Matanda’s daughter’s doll into the water and lost it. Matanda demanded Kaponto’s daughter in repayment. Kaponto refused and as a result he/she traveled south and saw Kilwa Island. Kaponto and her/his people unintentionally set fire to the grass. Soon the entire island was in f lames. All but two of the Twa died in a fire set by Kaponto’s people. The Twa demanded compensation for the deaths. But the Twa and Kaponto’s people discovered that they were both from the Clay Clan, so no compensation was necessary. The clay or potting clan in this oral tradition is the political unit that united the Bantu-speaking agriculturalists and the Twa. Most Bantuspeaking peoples, as they moved into a new area, needed to honor and accommodate the original people. Therefore the fact that both groups belonged to the same clan shows the importance the clay/potting clans had in earlier political relations. The Twa also were considered to be the maintainers of the territorial spirits in the land, and the shared clan must also have indicated the important spiritual impact the Bumba/ Mumba clans had on the peoples of the region While the potting clans were politically, socially, and spiritually important, the proto-Savanna Bantu word root for potting clay, and potter, *-bumba, has been expanded to mean female-headed social groupings (the matrifocal social unit) in most East-Central African societies. Nouns built on *-bumb- mean variously family, female relatives, or groups of sisters living together in most East-Central African languages.27 In the Nsenga and Bisa languages, the word also signifies “family” or “woman’s family.” In Nyanja, Tumbuka and Chewa *-bumba means “a group,” “the masses,” or “the common people”—and “ family,” particularly the woman’s family.28 Among the Chewa, the root word
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In Luapula Province, the oral traditions concerning the close relationship between the agricultural and gathering and hunting peoples (the Batwa) also involves the clay clan (Cunnison 1959, 34–40):
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*bumba, when placed with the Bantu person prefix, means a senior female relative who “has ritual responsibilities which empowers her to preside over all functions pertaining to the birth of children and puberty rites for the young mature woman” (Mtonga n.d., 4). In most of these examples, the word for potter has been expanded to include the important women who control female initiation and significant groups of women. All the peoples mentioned above are matrifocal, and therefore groups of related women are a power base in the clan or lineage. But the application of bumba to broadly speak of people, the masses, indicates how the term cannot be universally gender specific. For example, when -bumba is used to signify a woman’s family, the grouping necessarily includes males as well. Why the word for potter and potting clay and the act of potting would become synonymous with words for social organization, primarily of women, and the initiator of worship raises interesting questions for future research on the relationship between potting and social relations in Bantu-speaking Africa. Iron Smelting, Potting, and Nonhierarchical Gender Relations In parts of East and West Africa among various Afro-Asiatic and some Niger-Congo–speaking peoples, male ironworkers and female potters married, forming separate castes, guilds, or lineages (OyXwùmí 1997, 68). While there are potter clans in East-Central Africa that consist of people who may or may not be potters, there were no separate castes or clans in which all the members produced iron or pots or both. Iron production and potting was done by people from various clans, and there is no evidence that potters only married iron workers as was the case in areas where potters and ironworkers formed a caste . Ironworkers and the smelting of iron played an important role in many Bantu-speaking societies in recent history, but potting and potting technology seems to have played a more central role in the long-term history of most social institutions. Interestingly enough, ironworkers adapted some of their ritual restrictions from potting, since pottery production in the expanding Bantu societies preceded the development of iron smelting by thousands of years. About 500 CE, ironworking became a new technological factor in the history of East-Central Africa. The smelting process everywhere across the region was subject to a number of prohibitions. A universal restriction on iron smelters was that they had to refrain from sexual
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Christine Saidi
activity while involved in producing iron. If smelting failed, it was blamed on the fact that one of the ironworkers had had sexual relations during the process. The Ushi regarded sexual intercourse by any of the workers as adultery toward the kiln. The Lamba smith was “forbidden to have sex with his wife the night before smelting begins lest the metal stay soft and never harden” (Saidi 2010, 149–50).29 In addition, women were not allowed to participate in a smelt, and menstruating women in particular had to stay far away, or else similarly the smelt would fail. This set of restrictions in part mimics and in part is a mirror image of the prohibitions that surrounded the ritualized part of potting, the collection of clay. The practitioners of the craft, the female potters, had to refrain from sexual relations when they were gathering their material, the potting clay, just as ironworkers were to refrain from sex during the production of their material, iron. Menstruating women had to be kept away from the process in both technologies. Mirroring the potters’ requirement that no men be allowed near the clay when it was being gathered, the smelt required that no women be involved directly in the smelting. The potting prohibitions were wider, though: children and younger women not fully skilled yet as potters were also not allowed to approach the site of a virgin clay source. It would be a mistake to attribute these similarities to potters’ imitating ironworkers, since clearly potting is a far older technology. Potting would have had its own rituals and traditions already in place. Now, as a general historical rule, when a new technology—or for that matter, any new set of cultural traditions with ritual dimensions—arrives on the scene, its practitioners cannot simply ignore existing ritual authority and practice. The belief systems of the early Bantu-speaking societies especially inclined them to this kind of accommodation (Klieman 2003).30 Long-accepted ritual authority had to be recognized, paid due respect, and to the extent possible, co-opted by practitioners of newer but comparable activity, as in the story of the Ushi and the Twa above. Many of the iron-smelting rituals not only used the same restrictions as potting rituals, but also were based on motherhood imagery. EastCentral African peoples occupied the center of a distribution of ironsmelting furnaces that were “overtly gynecomorphic” (Herbert 1993, 32–36). The Chokwe, Lunda, Lucazi, Yeke, and Luyana (Lozi) who reside west of the East-Central Africa homeland; the Barotse and Shona in Southern Africa; the Bena and Kinga of the southern highlands of Tanzania; the Fipa and Lungu of the border areas between Tanzania and Zambia; the Chewa of Malawi; all Bemba-related peoples; the
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Botatwe; and the Luba and Kaonde of southeastern Congo all made iron smelters in the image of a woman giving birth and/or used the same terminology in the smelting process as was used in childbirth. The distribution of this set of features shows that iron smelting among the peoples of East-Central Africa of the first millennium already ritually evoked the imagery of motherhood and female reproduction (Saidi 2010, 135). What is clear from the evidence available is that the iron-smelting furnaces of the “gynecomorphic” tradition were symbolic of a pregnant woman. The Kaonde placed the furnace in the position of a woman giving birth (Herbert 1993, 75). The Eastern Luba made furnaces decorated with breasts and from which “the actual extraction of the molten metal takes place in such a manner as to represent a birth” (Roberts 1976, 68). The Fipa marked the completion of the furnace with ceremonies like those on a wedding day. They said after loading the kiln, “she has conceived,” and as the process took place, the body of the furnace was covered with a black cloth just as a woman would be while giving birth (Herbert 1993, 59–60). The Tonga of Malawi threw a piece of afterbirth into the furnace to aid in smelting. Among the Nsenga, “smelters buried a medicine in the layers of green wood in the furnace called chibele, breast” (Herbert 1993, 72). The Tabwa furnace was referred to as the “mother of twins”—the birth of twins was a ritually positive event in Tabwa society (Petit, 1993). The corollary inference that can be made from this evidence is that, wherever and however far back in time this furnace type can be found in the archeology, the application of birthing terminology and the accompanying rituals invoking birth would have been essential elements in the smelters’ activities. The Chewa, to draw on an example from recent history, were linguistically very specific about the process. While the furnace was being built it was called a pot, but once it had its basic structure it was called mwali (a woman at the *-yadi life stage, from puberty to first viable pregnancy) (Saidi 2010, 82, 101–104). The interior of the furnace was the stomach and the slag was called feces (Herbert 1993, 120). Soon after the establishment of iron smelting in East-Central Africa, a highly important new tool of cultivation, the iron hoe, was invented in the first millennium BCE. The hoe spread widely in the later last millennium BCE in East Africa, and probably from east to west across East-Central Africa by early in first millennium CE (Ehret 2002, 267–68). This new implement, specifically for women’s work, would have enhanced women’s capacity for digging savanna soils and
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preparing fields for grain cultivation. But in adopting the hoe, women’s productivity in agriculture came to depend for at least one essential tool on ironworkers. While the invention of pots was essential to the innovation of agriculture, the development of the iron hoe increased agricultural production greatly. Men who made the hoes and women who tended to control agricultural technology in Bantu-speaking societies worked together to produce more food for their societies. Archeological evidence shows that pots were also essential elements of the iron-smelting process.31 While pots played a role, women furnished the raw iron and other metals. Osteological assessments of bodies found in ancient copper mines of East-Central Africa and the gold mines of southern Africa indicate that women were the miners as long as 1,500 years ago (Kent 1988, 143). Before the age of iron, women potters would already have held a long-established ritual authority over the extraction of minerals from the earth stemming from their much more ancient position as extractors of clay for potting. Ironworkers could restrict women from participation in the smelt, but women in the early periods would have retained authority over the soil and its contents and the pottery needed, thus over the materials needed by the smelters. It is most likely through this relationship that women became responsible for digging metal ores out of the ground during the early years of metallurgy in East-Central and Southern Africa. The Myth of Iron Producers versus Pottery Producers The observations that men smelted iron and women manufactured pots led to the “discovery” of the African sexual division of labor by gender, which in turn has created, in the minds and writings of Africanist scholars, technological and gendered hierarchies. Once Western scholars were able to categorize certain technologies as female or male, they then “knew” which was more important than the other within African societies. Since gender relations in the West tend to be viewed in dialectic opposition (see OyXwùmí 1997, 7), “obviously” those who produced pots and those who made iron were in conf lict with each other. And in Western culture, males dominate in technology, or at least in the minds of twentieth-century scholars. Thus the division of labor by sex coupled with competing technologies led to a full-blown paradigm based on the belief that man’s technology, iron making, was more important than potting, a woman’s handicraft. This
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entire “analysis” took place outside of Africa, with little or no African input. Ironworking and pot making in East-Central African history did not ref lect this “universal” African gendered division of labor. Both the rituals and the technological process of iron smelting required physical and spiritual help from female sources. Female-made pots were often essential to the development of the iron smelter, and many furnaces were made entirely of ceramics; there is archeological data to show that this was true in the distant past. The archeological evidence also indicates that the ore for the smelt was most probably dug out by female miners. Thus two aspects of the smelting process depended on female labor. Since the technological skills and rituals of potting precedes iron smelting by thousands of years, the adoption of potting rituals and restrictions by ironworkers would indicate at least a spiritual connection between the two technologies. Finally, the iron-producing process required the spiritual invocation of motherhood, testified to by the gynecomorphic smelters. None of the potters I interviewed spoke of male participation in the production of pottery, but when Mama Mary fired the pots she used her son-in-law as a helper. Whether this ref lects a historical role sonin-laws played in the firing process still needs research. But in EastCentral Africa, men did produce clay items. Among the Tonga and the Ila, men made the clay pipes for smoking tobacco. Men in these societies cultivated tobacco, a crop introduced from the Americas to East-Central Africa in the 1600s (Ehret 2002, 354) and that may be the reason men could produce the clay pipes. Some men among the Chewa and Nyanja-speaking peoples belonged to a secret masked society that danced during female initiation and funerals called Nyau. Nyau dancers, when masked, made clay objects similar to female initiation items. Not only could the masked Nyau dancers make clay items, they could even hit their mothers-in-law. The masks made them spirits, not human; therefore they were able to act in ways males never could under normal circumstances in Chewa societies (Rita-Ferreira 1968, 20–24). While women overwhelmingly created clay objects, under certain circumstances men could also make clay items and may have even helped in the firing of the clay. In dissecting this concept of “male iron producers versus female potters” as a microcosm of African social history, Herbert’s book Iron, Gender and Power (1993), an exhaustive study of the ethnographic, historical, and archeological studies on iron smelting in Africa, needs a thorough examination. Herbert’s analysis conjures images of potting
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and ironworking as hierarchically gendered technologies in Africa. Ironically, I have used some of the same sources as Herbert’s, but when coupled with African oral traditions and my own research the conclusions are radically different. Herbert writes repeatedly that the smith and the smelter are always male (1993, 25). Interestingly, in her book the claim of universal maleness for iron smelting and smithing is followed up with a discussion of oral traditions from various and distant African ethnicities such as the Hausa of Northern Nigeria, the Rwanda of East Africa, and the Lunda of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who all say that ironworking technology and ritual were brought to their respective societies by an older woman (Herbert 1993, 25). In the same paragraph, the author muses about the possibility that firing of pots led to the understanding of how to smelt iron. Yet she concludes, “In any event, they [oral traditions] refer to times so firmly in the past that they have no apparent relevance to current practice” (Herbert 1993, 25). So even though in recent history ironworkers say the technology and rituals originally came from a woman elder, it has no bearing on the theory that ironworkers were always male. There is a Chinese saying, “Be careful not to cut off the toes to fit the shoe.” So once the “ gendered division of labor” becomes the basis for “understanding” gender relations in Africa, all evidence must fit into this restrictive paradigm. In this study the gynecomorphic smelters indicate the non- or dual gender of iron production, but to Herbert, these smelters mimicking childbirth only proved her thesis of male dominance (1993, 228): . . . [T]he iron smelter constructing his furnace and summoning all the forces at his command to make it bear iron demonstrates his control of both sides of the procreative equations, male and female, father and mother. Again, two studies based on similar evidence reach dramatically different conclusions. Western scholars like Herbert start with the premise that African women have always been oppressed and have never had significant social power; therefore the so-called African sexual division of labor serves to impose that oppression. Herbert’s research is steeped in a Western worldview, as shown by her need to cite the French anthropologist Claude Meillassoux (1970, 365) to support her premise: The great historical enterprise of man (male) has been to gain control of the reproductive functions of women and at the same
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While his work is an interesting commentary on Western societies, does it ref lect African history? Herbert seems to think so, and that the African gendered division of labor found in ironworking is a symbol of male power over female power in African societies. She explains (1993, 228): This conceptualization [iron demonstrating male control of the procreative forces] brings together precisely the interplay of genders and of ancestors and living that are at the heart, I believe, of African notions of power generally. Female power is not denied; it is appropriated or assimilated because male power alone would be inadequate to the idiom of reproductive and regenerative power encapsulated in iron working. To Herbert and many other Africanists, iron smelting was the perfect metaphor for male control of both female reproduction (spiritually and physically) and the society as a whole. They reasoned that all evidence of cooperation or female input is just part of the appropriation of female power within African societies. This meant that in the minds of Western scholars, African men had social and political power over African women, and to maintain this control they had to forbid women from participating in the smelting of iron. Women excluded from iron smelting were left with only the “domestic handicraft” of potting. And the myth continues: “The potter simply does not rank with the smith or hunter.” (Herbert 1993, 218). The belief that potters were somehow less respected than ironworkers has been reinforced and perpetuated by Western anthropologists, archeologists, and historians, all of whom believed that their lack of data on potting rituals meant that they were correct in downgrading potting to an insignificant “handicraft.” Nigel Barley argues that in West Africa, the “smith obsession” of archeologists “has deformed the literature on the West African ritual implications of potting” (1984, 99). Archeologist Olivier Gosselain (1992, 559–86) found in his research among the Bafia potters of Cameroon that when old women were asked about potting rituals, they explained them in great detail. His work and this study reveal that there were important potting rituals in distinctly separate parts of Africa.
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time to contain the power that they draw from them. To this end they have employed every means: violence, war, education, slavery, law, ideology, and myth.
Christine Saidi
The concern for the preservation of iron smelting techniques led a variety of archeologists to diligently seek out old men who could perform the work of smelting and the rituals associated with making iron. Over the last 50 years, they have filmed, videotaped, and recorded every aspect of the process. Yet, there have been few similar recordings of the technology of pot making. These few attempts have been made only recently, well after the necessity for traditional pots was eclipsed by cheap imports. Unfortunately, as a result, many of the potting rituals may have been lost, and this is particularly distressing considering the real importance of potting to African economic, cultural, and religious history. The myth of a rigid, absolute African sexual division of labor creates facile analyses of very complex social institutions and is selfperpetuating, as the lack of research on potting rituals shows. African history challenges the universalism of Western categories. In recent years, and probably long ago, men and women did different tasks, but the sexual division of labor, as described by Africanist scholars, implies more than different jobs. It instead conjures images of gender wars, males and females struggling for social dominance. The evidence found in the more recent history of East-Central Africa does not show that potters or ironworkers perceived themselves as competitors for power or that the technologies were in opposition to each other. In fact people, male and female, were working together to overcome harsh environments and survive as communities in East-Central Africa.32 Africanists can debate about how important iron smelting was to East-Central African history, but since the production of iron required both the spiritual blessings of the institution of motherhood and the iron ore that was dug from the earth by women, it was not exclusively a “male” technology. While in more recent times the smelting of iron was physically done by men, oral traditions relate that iron processing was actually taught to men by an elderly woman. Finally, iron producers must have adopted potting rituals into their manufacturing process since potting technology predates iron smelting by hundreds of years in the region. Once strict divisions of labor and gendered technological power struggles are shown to be part of a mythology created by Western scholarship, the history of technology in early East-Central Africa reveals males and females possibly doing separate tasks, but working together for the survival of their people.
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1. Zambia, Katanga Province in Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Western Malawi. 2. When I first started this study, I used the word “technology” in effect to counter the label of “handicraft” or “domestic product” placed on pottery production. In most of the literature, the term “technology” was exclusively used to describe iron smelting and blacksmithing. But as my research deepened, I realized that the term “technology” was also limiting. English dictionaries define technology as “techniques for manufacturing and productive processes and the sum of a society’s practical knowledge, especially with reference to its material culture.” Potting and pot making is a technology in the sense that it dramatically transformed economic life in African societies of the past, but it also became interwoven into the social, cultural, and religious life of the people. Since there is no equivalent word in English, I ask the reader to understand the term “technology” in a broader context that can contain all the different roles potting plays, and has played, in African history. 3. In 1998, I received a Senior Researcher’s Fulbright for research on potting rituals in Zambia. 4. Mr. Sosala gave the villagers more kwacha if they did not remove the item from the environment, therefore giving them a basic understanding of archeology. Mr. Sosala was the historian attached to the Moto Moto Museum, who taught himself archeology. 5. Luangwa pottery tradition has been produced for at least the last 1,500 years and is the most popular pottery style among traditional potters in East-Central Africa. See Saidi 2010, 41, 66–70. 6. Mama Mary, Moto Moto Museum potter, Mbala, Zambia, July 12, 1998. 7. Na- is the female prefix, ka-is an honorific, and bumba is the potter. See Saidi 2010, 80–85. 8. In Bantu-speaking Africa the vast majority of potters are female, but there are a few exceptions, such as the Ndembu of the Democratic Republic of Congo. 9. Prior to the invention of pottery, food was cooked on rocks (like bread) or in animal skins. See Ehret 2002, 64. 10. This study provides a detailed presentation and historical analysis of the lexicons of pottery and pottery making in Bantu-speaking Africa. 11. These grooves were found in the north of Zambia, largely within the Zaire River Basin, and they are in abundance in the Luapula Valley. Grooves in rocks have been found in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Angola, but theses grooves have no internal striations like the ones from Zambia. The difference could be based on the various kinds of temper in the clay that were worked. 12. He concludes that the production of the grooves during pottery making fits the limits of explanation. Grooves would reach a point where the depth and striations would have an unwelcome effect on the smooth working of clay and require their abandonment; pressure and gravity were used; repeated demotion is used in working clay; a hard rubbing stone on the clay would create the section of the grooves; quartz extrusions from clay could create the striations with adequate force. 13. See language charts. 14. The Eastern Luba and Chewa from the 1600s, and some Bemba clans from the 1800s, are the only exception to this. See Saidi 2010, 71–73. 15. The colonial government of Northern Rhodesia needed a great deal of male labor for the copper mines and plantations—and they had to compete with mothers-in-law for the labor of young men. Their response was to pass laws stating that only marriages that were secured
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Notes
16. 17.
18.
19. 20.
21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.
29.
30. 31.
Christine Saidi
with the payment of a brideprice, not bride service, were legitimate. And this “brideprice had to be paid in colonial currency” (Saidi, 2010, 72). Mwali is the East-Central African form of the proto-Bantu root, *yadi. *-na is the prefix meaning female, -ka is a prefix meaning “honored one” (non-gendered) and –bumba means “potter.” Leza is also referred to as Mufyashi Wine Wine (“the most excellent parent”). In this translation, God is “neither and both” mother and father. In the complex theology of religion in East-Central Africa, God is conceptualized as dual gendered or beyond gender. See Hinfelaar 1994, 9. Some elderly women related this tradition to Hinfelaar, whereas the men at the Bemba royal court told the story of the origin of human suffering quite differently. They claimed it was the result of “a woman lifting her pounding-stick too high out of pride and so causing the separation of heaven and earth, of the Divine presence and the human reality” (Hinfelaar 1994, 28). Mama Chanda, small village, 16 kilometers from Mbala, Zambia, July 1, 1998. Old Kaonde potter, small village, 32 kilometers from Solwezi, Zambia, May 12, 1998. In precolonial times, villages in East-Central Africa often moved. The reason for the constant change was thought to be the slash-and-burn agricultural techniques, but possibly clay sources also played a factor in the location of a new village. The British colonialists needed settled villages for population control and labor resources; therefore they forced permanent settlements on the East-Central Africans. Mwewa Kadongo, Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo, November 11, 1998. Illondola, Zambia, August 14, 1998. Mama Judith, an 80-year-old Bemba elder, Ilondola, Zambia, August 9, 1998. See Hinefelaar 1994; Corbeil 1982; Etienne (no date); and (no author) La Femme Bemba. See VI Death, Mama Mary Mumba, Nchelenge, Zambia, September 5, 1998. Bemba, Bisa, Lala, Nyanja, Chewa, and Nsenga. The recorded Sabi ref lexes all denote female relatives or group of sisters (Lamba ibumba, Bemba, Bisa, Lala mbumba; Nsenga li-umba). Nyanya-Cewa mbumba, Tumbuka bumba, Saidi 2010, 77–78. Also see Scott and Hetherwick 1951, 284. The Tumbuka pronunciation bumba shows an initial b, where the expected first consonant should have been *w or have dropped out entirely; therefore it was probably a loan word from Sabi-speaking peoples. The matrifocal East-Central African belief held male adultery, especially if the wife was pregnant, to be very dangerous. “Infidelity on the man’s part would result in labour problems and/or death for the woman” (Saidi 2010, 149–50). If a woman died in labor before the birth of the child, it was considered to have been caused by the infidelity of the husband. This was a particularly grievous act, because if a man did commit adultery during his wife’s pregnancy, he still had the option of securing medicine to cleanse her and the fetus. If she was having a hard labor, the husband was always questioned about infidelities since there may still have been time to give her medicine. Among the Bemba, when a woman dies in childbirth, her husband must take the unborn child out of its dead mother and bury both separately. Then, one of his sisters must marry in the dead woman’s clan. The husband is considered a murderer and unclean. To cleanse himself from his “crime,” he is required to replace his dead wife and move in with his in-laws. “The wife’s clan will never consent to him marrying another woman in the clan, so he either becomes celibate or he becomes an outcast” (Saidi 2010, 149–150). Sexual intercourse was therefore adultery against the smelter, which was very serious and mimicked the dangers of adultery during pregnancy and childbirth. Chapter 3 discusses this extensively. Pots in smelters from the seventh century CE in Katanga province were discovered by Pierre de Maret, 1988 comments at the African Studies Association, Madison, Wisconsin. The Babungo of the Cameroon put two pots in the smelter (see Fowler 1990). In 1998 near
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References VI Death. (no date). White fathers’ inquiry. Lusaka: White Fathers Archive, File10. Ahmed [Saidi], Christine. 1996. Before Eve was Eve: 2200 years of gendered history in EastCentral Africa. Ph.D. diss., University of California at Los Angeles. Barley, Niger. 1984. Placing the West African potter. In Earthen ware in Asia and Africa, ed. John Picton, 93–103. London: School of Oriental & African Studies. Berns, Marla C. 1993. Art, history and gender: Women and clay in West Africa. The African Anthropological Review: 129–48. Bisson, M. S. 1974. Prehistoric copper mining in north-western Zambia. Archaeology XXVII: 242–47. Bostoen, Koen A. G. 2005. Des mots et des pots en Bantou: Une approche linguistique de l’histoire de la ceramique en Afrique. Franfurt am Main: Peter Lang Publishing Group. Corbeil, Jean J. 1982. Mbusa the Sacred Emblems. Original manuscript. Mbala, Zambia: Moto Moto Museum. Cunnison, Ian. 1959. The Luapula Peoples of Northern Rhodesia: Custom and History in Tribal Politics. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Derricourt, Robin. 1986. Striated grinding grooves in central Africa. South African Archaeological Bulletin 41: 27–31. Doke, Clement. 1931. The Lambas of Northern Rhodesia: A Study of Their Customs and Beliefs. London: George Harrap & Company Ltd. Ehret, Christopher. 2002. The Civilizations of Africa: History to 1800. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. ———. 1998. The Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World History: 1000 BC to AD 400. Oxford, UK: Currey Publishing. Etienne, F. 1962. Native Customs: A Study of the Babemba and the Neighboring Tribes. Lusaka: White Fathers’ Archive, Section 111/17. Fowler, Ian. 1990. Banugo: A study of iron production: Trade and power in a nineteenthcentury Ndop plain chiefdom. Ph.D. diss., University of London. Gosselain, Oliver P. 1992. Technology and style: Potters and pottery among the Bahia of Cameroon. Man 27(3): 559–86. Herbert, Eugenia. 1993. Iron, Gender and Power: Rituals of Transformation in African Societies. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Hinefelaar, H. 1994. Bemba-speaking Women of Zambia in a Century of Religious Change (1892– 1992). Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill. Kent, Susan, ed. 1998. Gender in African Prehistory. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press. Klieman, Kairn. 2003. The Pygmies Were Our Compass. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. La Femme Bemba. (no date). Manuscript, Kuigisha, Illondola, Zambia: White Fathers Archive File 111/17. Meillassoux, Claude. 1970. Le male en gesine, ou de l’histoicite des myths. Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines 19: 355–80.
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Kalambo Falls, Zambia, while gathering potting clay I found two pottery shards with iron slag attached. 32. For example, in agricultural production, women’s technological knowledge of farming was united with men’s smelting of iron farming implements to improve food production for the entire communities. See Saidi 2010, 203.
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Mtonga, Napopa. (no date). The drama of Gule Wamkulu. M.A. thesis, University of Ghana, Legon. OyXwùmí, Oyèrónk` 1997. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1992. Mothers not women: Making an African sense of western gender discourse. Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley. Petit, Pierre. 1993. “Rites familiaux royaux. Etude du systeme ceremoniel des Luba du Shaba.” PhD diss., Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, 1993. Poewe, Karla. 1981. Matrilineal Ideology: Male and Female Dynamics in Luapula, Zambia. London: International African Institute. Richards, Audrey. 1982. Chisungu: A Girl’s Initiation Ceremony among the Bemba of Northern Rhodesia. London: Faber and Faber. Rice, Prudence. 1991. Women and prehistoric pottery production. In The Archaeology of Gender: Proceedings of the Twenty-second Annual Conference of the Archaeological Association of the University of Calgary, ed. Dale Walde and Noreen D. Willow, 430–38. Calgary: University of Canada. Rita-Ferreira, A. 1968. The Nyau brotherhood among the Mozambique Cewa. South African Journal of Science, January: 20–24. Roberts, Andrew. 1976. A History of Zambia. New York: Africana Publishing Company. Saidi, Christine. 2010. Women’s Authority and Society in Early East-African History. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Scott, D. C., and A. Hetherwick. 1951. Dictionary of the Nyanja Language. London: Lutterworth Press. Smith, Edwin, and Andrew Dale. 1920. The Ila-speaking Peoples of Northern Rhodesia. London: MacMillan and Co.
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Beyond Gendercentric Models: Restoring Motherhood to Yorùbá Discourses of Art and Aesthetics Oyè rónk´ Oyeˇ wùm í
Gendercentric models are rife in African studies, and African art historical studies are no exception. Approaches that assume a genderdichotomized view of society are necessarily male-dominant, because in our time, patriarchy is the main expression of gender divisions. Two claims emerge from this biased branding of African art: first, that traditionally in Africa only men make art or engage in the production of important art; and second, that materials for making art are genderspecific: metals are for men, clay is for women, so goes the refrain. In fact, the second claim is actually expressed as a restriction against women’s use of iron, and there is no obverse understanding that men are or can be constrained from using any material, including clay. Being male is assumed to be, everywhere in “traditional Africa,” a mark of privilege, if not license. The effect of this antifemale stance is to place women at the receiving end of the gaze. But how and where did the claims that women are not artists, and that materials for making art are gender identifiable, originate? Many of these genderist and sexist ideas are based on observations of white adventurers, colonial ethnographers, missionaries, and colonial officials whose ethnocentric biases are very much tied up with their dominant positions and ideas about white racial and cultural superiority. Much of their intellectual engagement with Africa has been about how
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CH A P T E R
Oyèrónk! Oy"wùmí
to fit African lives into their prefabricated theories. Despite the fact that some of the most reprehensible early European racist ideas about Africans have been thoroughly discredited, sexist notions have not. But this is not to say that racism and sexism are not intertwined. Why, then, do the most egregious gender-discriminatory claims continue to gain traction? Three main reasons are immediately apparent. First, many of the assumptions that white cultural imperialists and colonizers made about African art and societies have been left largely unquestioned. Embraced as received scholarly ideas, such claims are repeated across time and space by contemporary writers of all stripes, including Africans. Secondly, I suspect that some African male scholars have also embraced such sexist statements because they erroneously believe that to do so favors them today, as a gender-identified group. Finally, many scholars continue to treat gender categories and gender dichotomies as natural, and therefore take expressions and practices of male dominance for granted in any time or place in which they are found. Decades of research have shown that gender is historically and socially constructed. I make a distinction between what I call genderist and sexist claims. Genderism is the idea that gender categories in human organization are timeless and universal. Sexism is discrimination on the basis of sex stemming from the idea that males and females are inherently different. More importantly, the homogenization and consequent miniaturizing of Africa’s many nations, peoples, and cultures are the first indications of the problem of overly broad generalizations. Such universalizing about the continent is difficult to sustain, if not totally irrational. With regard to art and artistry in particular, these kinds of continent-wide generalizations are simply meaningless. Fundamentally, the most egregious part of the problem is the way in which such sweeping statements place the whole of the continent under the Western gaze, arrogantly reducing such a huge, diverse entity into one place and a single unit of analysis. As soon as one attempts to apply those statements to particular cultures and specific places, one discovers that such claims are false, or at best wanting. For example, in a paper on “African” ceramics, Jerome Vogel writes: “Throughout Africa, pottery is made primarily by women.—Men do make pots among a few groups, like the Hausa of Northern Nigeria, but this is an exception (2003, 80–81).” The idea that millions of Hausa men and women are among “a few groups” is laughable, and begs the question: who made the rules from which millions of Hausas are an exception? Certainly not Hausa people. From the perspective
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of Hausa communities in which men make pots, there is nothing exceptional about it, because there is no such rule. It is just a fact, not an exception. The exception exists only in the glazed eyes of the Western beholder. We have since discovered more “exceptions” across the continent to this European and North American–made rule that African men do not make pottery: in Ghana, Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Zambia, we find men sculpting clay in a variety of ethnic groups and nationalities (Berns 1993, 141). In the face of these biases, distortions, misrepresentations, and misunderstandings, it is clear that we must develop and highlight Africacentered approaches. Over the years, a number of African scholars have advocated for indigenous paradigms in apprehending art and artistry; here are two examples. The cultural studies scholar Olabiyi Yai admonishes us that in approaching African art, we must examine all taken-for-granted assumptions even if they are foundational to our disciplines, and that we must take indigenous discourses on art and art history seriously in our discussions (1994, 107). Similarly, art historian Rowland Abiodun advises that in the study of African art, we must try to understand an artwork in its cultural depth, as the expression of local thought or belief systems (1994, 39). Taking seriously the cautionary advice of both Yai and Abiodun, my goal in this paper is to interrogate prevailing gendered approaches to traditional Yorùbá art and art history, and then, drawing from Yorùbá cultural values and social practices, elaborate the relationship between art and motherhood, procreation and artistry. In The Invention of Women (1997), I show that gender is not an ontological category in the Yorùbá world. In contrast, in Western thought gender is assumed to be ontological, and therefore timeless and universal. Consequently, the institution of motherhood in Western and scholarly discourses that derive from their dominance is represented as paradigmatic of female gender. But in the Yorùbá ethos, motherhood is not about gender. The presence of categories that have to do with procreation and motherhood does not necessarily suggest the inherent nature of gender categories. In fact, as I argued in an earlier work, gender in Yorùbá society is a colonial category that emerged during the period of European ascendancy and dominance. Gender by definition is a duality: it is about two categories in relation to each other, often oppositionally constructed. Motherhood in the Yorùbá worldsense is a singular category that is unparalleled by any other. Fatherhood is not its counterpart. The roots of gender categories in contemporary Yorùbá society are colonial.
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Oyèrónk! Oy"wùmí
Globally, Yorùbá art is one of the most recognized and celebrated African arts. It is seen as one of the most important in representing the antiquity, mastery, and depth of knowledge on the continent. Consequently, there is no better place to interrogate some of the most pressing issues in African art historical studies than in this setting. In Yorùbá art studies, we see a different facet of the problem of gendering and sexism in interpretation of African art. What we find here is a conundrum. In the early twentieth century, a collection of lifelike terra-cotta and brass sculptures were excavated in and around Ile-Ife, the Yorùbá ancestral home. These sculptures are regarded as exquisite pieces of “high” art bearing the mark of civilization. Because many of the sculptures are made of clay (terra-cotta), it became a problem for the interpreters of African art who use the gendered model of women use clay and men use metals. Because Western art distinguishes between male art and women’s craft, expressing an antifemale stance, pottery making in Africa as in Europe has been reduced to a “domestic” craft, thus rendering difficult any acknowledgment of female authorship of great art. What, then, are Western scholars to make of Ife terra-cottas, which are regarded as fine art but made of clay in a society in which these scholars have a priori declared that “clay is for girls, and metals are for boys”? Let us consider these questions. For five decades after the excavation of the Ife sculptures, no question was raised about the gender identity of the ancient artists because it was assumed that men had made the pieces. Art historian Henry Drewal finally posed the gender question. In his paper “Ife: Origins of Art and Civilization,” he asked (1989, 71), “Were the creators of these exquisite works women or men?” His immediate answer is puzzling enough, given that the sculptures date back to the eleventh century. Drewal writes that “an analysis of the sculpting technique used in the terracotta suggested that the artists were male” (1989, 71). What analysis? Whose analysis? What technique? No, Drewal did not do the “gender test” on these terra-cottas himself; he attributes the gendered analysis to Frank Willett, an archeologist, in a footnote. On consulting the authoritative Willett text, we discover that his “analysis” is based on mere conjecture. According to Willett, because the internal surface of the terra-cotta sculpture is rough and unfinished, it is distinguishable from women’s domestic pottery, which is invariably smoothed inside and out. Therefore, he concludes, the terra-cottas could not have been made by women (Willett 1967, 77).
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Two questions immediately come to mind: How do we know that Yorùba pottery is made by women and only women? And how does smoothness and roughness of the surface of pottery become a measure of the gender identity of artists? Drewal correctly surmised that the finish of the pieces could not tell us about the sex of the artists; what it tells us is “only that pots and sculptures serve different functions” (1989, 71). Even then, one of the sculptures represented an exception to the Willett-made rule that Yorùbá pots have smooth exteriors but the terra-cottas have rough exteriors. At least one of the terra-cotta heads “has such a smooth interior” (Drewal 1989, 71). Based on this observation, Drewal finally dispenses with Willett’s claim that the sculptures had been made by men and only men. He writes that because the Yorùbá tradition that women, not men, work the clay is deeply rooted, he could not discount the possibility that female artists made the Ife heads. Given that the Yorùbá world was not gendered or dichotomized into male and female, we have to question Drewal’s bold claim that Yorùbá have such a gendered tradition. Neither Drewal nor any other scholar has accounted for such gender claims about Yorùbá art. For Drewal, as a logical outgrowth of his gender model, evidence of Yorùbá women’s hands in the Ife terra-cotta could not be ignored. However, Drewal did not stop there. Given the grandness of these works of art, he could not leave the men out as their co-creators. Despite his earlier assertions about Yorùbá women’s monopoly of clay art, he could not grant women the sole authorship of these exquisite sculptures. He concluded therefore that (1989, 71) “artistic efforts done by both men and women cannot be ruled out in the case of Ife art,” thus bringing resolution to the European and –North American–created gender question of the anatomic identity of the ancient Ife artist, a question that in origin does not derive from Yorùbá art, values, or social practices. In her paper titled “Art, history, and gender: Women and clay in West Africa” (1993), Marla Berns questions male dominance in the interpretation of African art, and challenges the refusal of scholars to grant women authorship of figural sculptures, including the Ife pieces. She points out that even the description of such figural clay sculptures as terra-cottas to distinguish them from pottery maintains the hierarchy that the former is art and is of a higher order than the latter, which are said to be made by women (Berns 1993, 134). Berns then goes on to commend Drewal for breaching the tradition of male-dominant interpretations when he recognized Yorùbá women’s role in co-creating the Ife sculptures.
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Beyond Gendercentric Models
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However, while I would note Drewal’s recognition of Yorùbá women’s role in the production of Ife art, I question any suggestion that his interpretation is less male-biased or problematic. For one thing, he insists that men shared the making of the clay sculptures with women, but neither he nor other art historians would subject the corresponding metal sculptures to any gender tests; it was clear to them that the brass heads that were found in the same archeological dig were made by men, and men alone. But how do they know this? Both Berns and I are concerned about male dominance in the interpretation of African art, which has resulted in denying women mastery and authorship of important works, while at the same time downgrading their artistic production to the level of craft (Berns 1993, 135). However, Berns does not question the gender-dichotomized interpretation of African art. If anything, she states categorically, “There is little doubt that sexual difference accounts for who makes what kinds of art in Africa” (1993, 130). This statement is baseless, and is no different from Willett’s claim that because “domestic pottery in the whole of Africa is normally made by women of the community, the terracotta sculptures are likely to have been made by men at Ife” (1967, 77). We have already mentioned the millions of exceptions to this claim that have been found all over the continent. More specifically, I am concerned not only about sexism, but also genderism—the idea that gender categories are operational in the organization, production, and appreciation of Yorùbá art historically. In traditional Yorùbá society, there is no universal category for females, which you can label “women of the community.” Females who are born into a lineage (female 1m1) belong to a different and superior category than females married into the same lineage (wives), and the interests of these two female groupings are often different and are sometimes opposed. Females born into the lineage are grouped together with their male counterparts as 1m1 ilé and their interests are presented as one and the same, in contrast to that of ìyáwó ilé (wives married to the males of the lineage). We see ìyáwó ilé artists in action in art historian Bolaji Campbell’s account of shrine paintings in Yorubaland. In the book Painting for the Gods: Art and Aesthetics of Yorùbá Religious Murals (2008), he documents and analyzes shrine paintings in different Yorùbá towns. In his discussion of Oluorogbo lineage shrine paintings in Ileife, Campbell writes: “The iyawo’le, that is, the women married into the household who are mandated to paint the shrine walls, begin the arduous task of the procurement and preparation of the necessary materials for the paintings” (2008, 80). He further points out that “women
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married into the Oluorogbo lineage are very enthusiastic about participating . . . it is believed that the divinity would accede to most of their manifold requests, including money, health, and the gift of children” (2008, 84). The genderism and sexism of Africanist art historians, feminist and nonfeminist alike, is certainly an issue. The more fundamental problem, however, is their ethnocentrism, which allows them to make such arrogant and gratuitous statements, reducing Africa to one place, one unit of analysis, in the face of evidence that many societies do not fit their theories, and that many more that have been branded are unresearched. In essence, they are dismissive of African categories and understanding of their own cultures. The gendered paradigm is inseparable from their Eurocentrism. Such a model has made it extremely difficult to study Africa, African art, art history, and aesthetics in all their continental variety and the multi-various local models that may or may not have to do with gender. With regard to Yorùbá visual arts, it is interesting to note that two generations of art historians have underscored the idea that “Yorùbá culture has its own built-in internal mechanisms and theories of critical evaluation” (Campbell 2008, 14). Regrettably, however, many of these scholars do not seem to understand that gender dichotomies are not inherent in Yorùbá art; rather, gender models are part of the critical apparatus that they have inherited from the European and American intellectual tradition, and such impositions must be recognized as such. What do Yorùbá history and culture tell us about the provenance of art and artistry eschewing the unfounded gendered Western impositions on a people, their aesthetics, and cultural products? The twisting and turning of Drewal and Willett that we see in their attempt at establishing the gender of Ife classical artists is a function not of the art in and of itself, or of Yorùbá social practices; rather it is due to the erroneous assumption that in ancient Yorùbá society, artistry was organized around the male and female anatomy. This could not be farther from the truth. In the past in Yorùbá towns, specialized occupations such as pot making, smithing, and the like inhered in particular lineage groups, not individuals as men or women. Within such lineage guilds, male and female members are free to participate at will and according to mode of entry into the family, birth, or marriage, as was noted with the shrine paintings. As I pointed out earlier, in the European-derived art historical literature, clay and metals draw the lines of distinction between female craft and male art, respectively. But this was not the line of distinction
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in Yorùbá society. For example, some of the Ife naturalistic sculptures were made of brass and some were made of clay, though all of them seem to have been from the same time and place. Brass is associated with the `aun, a female deity. In Yorùbá stories of creation, the god `bàtá lá, the creator divinity, is represented as male in some Yorùbá localities and female in others. S/he is said to make humans with clay and then use Ògún’s implements (iron) to delineate and refine their features. Ògún is a male divinity. The fact that fbàtá lá is depicted as male in some Yorùbá communities and female in others suggest that his or her gender identity is not important to the role attributed to the creator god. In my earlier work, I have shown that anatomic distinctions in Yorùbá culture are incidental and do not define social hierarchy, occupations, and functions (Oygwùmí 1997). The point is that in Yorùbá social organization and practices, clay and metal are not opposed at any level. Studies of Yorùbá metal sculpture bear this out. In art historian C. O. Adepegba’s (1991) detailed study of Yorùbá metal sculptures, we learn the following facts: 1. The most common metal in old Yorùbá sculpture is brass, which is an alloy. 2. Copper, lead, and iron are some of the other metals used. 3. Some metals are associated with certain Òrìaà and their votaries: Ògún (iron), fbàtá lá (lead)/òjé, `aun (brass/id;). 4. Yorùbá smiths are known as àgb=d> but jewelsmiths who work on nonferrous metals are distinguished from blacksmiths. Adepegba continues (1991, 20): Smiths are however more popularly known by their lineage names: asude in Ibadan and Ilorin, esude in Edomowo and isude in Ogbomoso. In Idomowo as well as in Obo Ayegunle, brasscasting was more or less a community profession. The entire people of Idomowo are known as esude ma gbowo oya, egbowo ide. This lineage-based specialization is very much in line with my analysis in an earlier study (Oygwùmí 1997), where I show that specialized professions and crafts were the prerogative of specific lineages in the polity. The division of labor here was lineage-based in that lineage membership, not anatomy, was required to practice such professions. In the study that Adepegba conducted in the 1970s across Yorùbá land,
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For example in Idomowo, the only traces of the survivors of the old brasscasters are a few goldsmiths who find their new craft very close to the family occupation and more rewarding. In Obo Ayegunle, only two of the brasscasters who worked in the town in the early 1970’s remain. The situation in Ogbomoso is almost the same. In fact the only artisan who is still actively engaged in figure casting learned the craft from the Isude. In Ibadan, the remaining women who sell products of brasscasters display their goods as a kind of family glory (1991, 21). One cannot overemphasize the need to pay attention to history and social change and the vacuums that are created and are often filled with the gender-prejudice of our newfangled postcolonial world. Fortunately, the male bias in the documentation and analysis of Yorùbá art and art history has not passed unremarked. Art historian Rowland Abiodun made the point that even though “much of Yorùbá religious activity and aesthetic concerns appear to be male-dominated, we have not much authority from Yorùbá oral traditions and visual art for assuming that this picture is accurate” (1989, 2). Abiodun’s perceptive comment notwithstanding, he, too, partakes of gender exclusion. For example, in a volume he co-edited titled The Yorùbá Artist (1994), only one chapter recognizes the artistry of Yorùbá females, and it characterizes them as verbal and not visual artists. No doubt verbal artistry is highly valued in Yorùbá society, as it should be, but this does not mean that the full range of female artistry should go unrecognized. Another dimension of the inherited Eurocentric gender model is apparent in the work of other Yorùbá art historians such as Babatunde Lawal and Bolaji Campbell, who are quick to embrace fbàtá lá (the creator God who molded humans) as a male divinity, discounting the traditions that identify the god as female. Although Campbell acknowledges that fbàtá lá is recognized as female in some Yorùbá communities, he chooses to represent him/her as male because one Ifá “divination text does not suggest that fbàtá lá was a female divinity” (2008, 125). Here we get a glimpse of the kind of choices that scholars make that result in the manufacture of gender models for the
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he documents the disappearance of most of the centers of brass casting and points out some of the changes that were well under way where the art form was still present. Because these findings are important for understanding Yorùbá traditions and the rapid social change in these traditions that was under way, I will quote him at some length:
Oyèrónk! Oy"wùmí
Yorùbá where such notions are alien. Campbell acknowledges the possibility of a more recent move toward patriarchy when he writes that the shift in gender of the Òriaà fbàtá lá may be due to males’ sudden rise to prominence during the European colonial period. Regrettably, he does not incorporate this insight into the larger body of his study of Òrìaà shrine paintings, and ultimately reproduces the Eurocentric patriarchal model at points in his study where the question of gendering needed to be squarely addressed (Campbell 2008, 124–25). Ìyálewá: The Art of Motherhood Representations of motherhood in Yorùbá culture have artistic dimensions. Consequently, in this section I want to consider the linkages between art and motherhood, and the larger meaning of motherhood in the traditions. But before I get to Yorùbá constructions of motherhood, inescapably, we have to note that in the gendercentric European model that have dominated interpretations of Yorùbá art, motherhood is paradigmatic of female gender. Though female reproduction is a human universal, the meanings attached to motherhood are diverse across cultures. Western accounts of motherhood reduce it to a gender category: mother is represented as a woman first and foremost, a category that is perceived to be customarily disadvantaged and oppressed because women are subordinated to males, who are the privileged group. The traditional Yorùbá elaboration of motherhood is radically different, and is anything but gendered. The complexity of the Yorùbá portrayal of motherhood will emerge shortly in an examination of art and artistry. Art historian Babatunde Lawal comments on the connection between art and motherhood (2001, 500): Yorùbá identify a work of art as ona, an embodiment of creative skills, implicating an archetypal action of fbàtá lá, the creativity deity and patron of Yorùbá artists. The process of creating a work of art is called onayiya, a term implicated in the prayer to the expectant mother. Ki orisa ya ona re koni. (May the orisa fashion for us a good work of art.) He continues, explaining that the fact that “the female body mediates creation has led some to translate ìyá, the Yorùbá word for mother, as someone from whom another life is fashioned or the body from which
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we are created” (2001, 500). Indeed, Ìyá is the term for mother in Yorùbá language and it implicates the verb ya, meaning “to draw, to carve, or to fashion.” For Yai, another scholar, the concept is best captured in expressions such as “ya ère (to carve), ya àwòrán (to design or paint)” (1994, 113). Lawal, however, gives an unduly passive interpretation of Yorùbá expressions about procreation by portraying the role of mothers as if they are bystanders (vessels) rather than co-creators of the child with the deity, fbàtá lá. The greeting to an expectant mother (“may òrìCà fashion for us a good work of art”) not only refers to fbàtá lá (the creator deity), but is also directed at the orí (inner head, seat of destiny) of the hopeful mother. The greeting is an invocation to the orí of the expectant mother to support and bless her through the arduous process of birthing a child. Orí in Yorùbá spirituality is a deity in its own right. Symbolized by the physical head, it is recognized as the seat of fate for each human being, and the original source of one’s destiny. As Ifá divination texts tell us, there is nothing that happens to a particular human being that is not supported by his or her orí. For traditional Yorùbá, in moments of danger, the first god to be invoked is one’s orí, followed by an appeal to the orí of one’s mother. Ori’yaami (my mother’s orí ) is the ultimate cry of alarm, warning, and sorrow in Yorùbá society, uttered by anyone in distress. In the culture at large and more specifically for expectant mothers, there is no moment of greater danger than the birthing of a child. Hence pregnancy is a period during which the orí is constantly invoked by family members and well-wishers alike. The first and subsequent constant greeting to the new mother and her family members is ; kú ewu 1m1—greetings for surviving the dangers of childbirth. Consider this description of the traditional birthing process: Tí inú ìkúnl= abiyam1 bá E t; obìnrin, àw1n òbí r= yóò t=ní sí yàrá fún un. W1n yóò kó àkísá aC1 tí wGn ti lò sí itòsí, w1n yóò wá mú 1C; abíw!ré tí wGn tí gún pamG fún un, yóò l1 fi w= ní =hìnkùlé. L=hìn èyí, yóò w1 iyàrá, yó wà lórí ìkúnl= sórí ;ní. Ìyá r= yóò máa kù w1lé, kù jáde, CùgbGn ekukáká ni alábàágbé ní Id=d= yóò fi mG. Síb=síb=, kò sí Gna tí ará Id=d= kó fi ní fúra nítorí pé ojú ìyá yìí kò ní j1 t’èèyàn. N´Ce ni yóò máa mú igbá tí yóò máa mu àwo; aù.gbGn ará Id=d= kò ní s1 pé àwon rí i. N=kIIkan ni ìyá yìí yóò máa l1 wo 1m1 r= ní iyàrá, tí yóò máa b; orí, b; òriCà pé kí OlGrun y1 òun (Olabimtan 1986, 139). When the expectant mother is in labor, the parent (grandmother) will gather scraps of cloth or other disused clothing nearby and she will be provided with a piece of abíw!r! soap [formulated to
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facilitate the birthing process] that had been prepared beforehand. She will proceed to take a bath. Afterwards, she will return to the room, kneeling on a mat in what is the [Yorùbá] cultural birthing posture. [Meanwhile], her restive mother will be pacing up and down, going in and out of the house. But hardly would other residents of the compound know what is going on. Still, given the mother’s strange demeanor, it is almost impossible for the neighbors not to suspect that something is amiss. She remains restless but her neighbors will pretend not to notice. Once in a while, she will check on her daughter in the room, invoking her ori, entreating orisa, that the Owner of the Heavens will pull them through (my emphasis). In Yorùbá cosmology, the moment of pre-earthly creation (of individual humans)—àkúnl=yàn—and the moment of procreation—ìkúnl= abiyam1—are regarded as one and the same. Though the two moments are separated temporally, they are visually represented by ìkúnl= abiyam1, a pose that is prevalent in Yorùbá art. Accordingly, ìkúnl= abiyam1 refers to the kneeling of a mother in labor. Art historian Abiodun explains that the kneeling nude woman figure symbolizes humanity choosing its destiny in heaven (otherworld) (1989, 12). I could not agree more with the sense that in Yorùbá culture mothers are representative of humanity, ungendered. This Yorùbá conception is in stark contrast to the male-as-norm of the Western gendercentric model in which only men can represent universal human attributes. It is obvious that there is a huge gap between the Eurocentric worldview that is used to interpret Yorùbá images and the Yorùbá depiction of their own art. When the kneeling sculpture of a Yorùbá woman is viewed through a Eurocentric male-dominant lens, the image that is seen is one of a woman (wife, inferior, subordinated creature) kneeling down, a pose that is viewed as one of subjection. For the Yorùbá and the traditional artists who created those images, however, they are representing a powerful spiritual pose assumed by a mother, a powerful human being, kneeling in front of the supreme Being, representing each and every member of the human race: her children. Here, motherhood is an inclusive category; mothers have male and female children and therefore are universal representatives of the human. Centering Yorùbá experiences of motherhood reveals that motherhood is not merely an earthly institution: it is otherworldly, preearthly, pregestational, presocial, prenatal, postnatal, and lifelong. Thus the relationship between a mother and a child is timeless. The
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previously mentioned process of pre-earthly creation—àkúnl=yàn, the moment of choosing one’s fate in the otherworld before each human makes that journey to the world—is quintessentially a ritual of choosing one’s mother. The connectedness of motherhood and aesthetics continues through the physical birthing process and postpartum care of the infant. All these processes are regarded as 1nà yíyà —making art— among other things. Postpartum care of the infant in the first months of life requires continuous molding (analogous to the molding of clay) of the head into a beautiful shape. But of course, the most aesthetically pleasing sight is the child, in and of itself. We see another linkage of aesthetics and motherhood in Abiodun’s description of the epa masks of northeastern Yorùbá land (1989, 14): In the helmet masks of north-eastern Yorùbá (sometimes known as elefon or epa) a common theme in the superstructure is the kneeling of a woman with two children, sometimes called Otonporo, the pride of elefon. During a festival at Ikerin, it is singled out for praise, she is an embodiment of all that can be considered beautiful in Yorùbá context. Beauty in this context includes the gift of children, which most women pray for during the festival. Otonporo is painted with black, red, yellow and white colors to make her beauty visible even at a distance. Children are emblematic of beauty in Yorùbá representations, and mothers as earthly co-creators of these beauties have a unique role to play in the life of their children, and hence the community. The vagina is also called Ìyámàpó, a name that arises from its creative role in molding heads as babies pass through the birth canal. In the Òrìnà pantheon of divinities, there is one named Ìyámàpó. Her role as mother and artist are wonderfully linked. We see this in the yearly festival of Íyámàpó, a rock-dwelling deity in Igbetti. At the festival, the worshipers sang a song of prayer to the Great Mother that she might never lose the tie (oja) that fastens her children, the townspeople, securely on her back. Ìyámàpó is regarded as the tutelary deity of artists, particularly of potters and dyers (Westcott and Morton-Williams 1958, 221–24). Art as Visual Oríkì Thus far, we have been considering Yorùbá elaboration of the aesthetic functions of motherhood, and the role of mothers in the creation of
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Beyond Gendercentric Models
Oyèrónk! Oy"wùmí
living art, also known as children. But the culture also recognizes their role in the production of both visual and verbal art. I contend that the dominance of females in the making of oríkì (praise poetry) and shrine paintings stems from their unique role as mothers. In reality, the impetus for visual and verbal arts is one and the same: these beautiful creations represent adornments for the gods, and herald the celebration of their greatest gift to humans—children. Because mothers are central to the process of creation and procreation, it is not surprising that their artistry often f lows from it. Because each and every one of us is born of a mother, no one male or female is excluded from participating in or enjoying the inheritance of the mother, including her artistry. Cultural studies scholar Olabiyi Yai proposes that (1994, 107): When approaching Yorùbá art, an intellectual orientation that would be more consonant with Yorùbá traditions of scholarship would be to consider each individual Yorùbá art work, and the entire corpus as oríkì (praise poetry). —Oríkì is an unfinished and generative art enterprise. Because mothers are central in the everyday production and reproduction of both children (as living art) and oríkì, Yai’s concept of visual oríkì is wonderfully brought to life (pun intended) by children who are the visual oríkì rendered by their mothers to the lineage of the child’s birth. In everyday Yorùbá life, mothers continuously verbally adorn their art, and their ministrations intensify at certain times in the lives of their children, such as when a daughter is giving birth. Giving birth is one of those difficult times. Reciting a person’s oríkì has the effect of arousing one to action so that one can put forth an excellent performance. Mothers use oríkì to praise, to build up, to adorn their children and raise their self-esteem. Similarly, in the realm of religion, mothers as iyawo’le are charged with the annual painting of òrìCà shrines, an undertaking that they describe as performing ;wà òrìCà, a process of imbuing, beautifying, and investing the sacred spaces of the òrìCà with honor (Campbell 2008, 101). Images painted on wall shrines are, in the words of one artist, aC1 òrìCà —clothing for the òrìCà, adornment for the gods (Campbell 2008, 120). According to Campbell, these rituals of periodic renewal and painting serve as a bond that unites members of a particular lineage (2008, 120). Who better to enact these rituals of lineage renewal than mothers who are the reproducers of the lineage?
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The idea that authorship of particular artwork is difficult to establish is a major theme in African art studies. Hence the paradoxical claim that historically, African artists have been anonymous and male. But anonymous to whom? They were certainly not nameless to their mothers, patrons, and communities. The lack of individual identification of some traditional African artists has correctly been attributed to racial and cultural prejudice of the early European ethnographers, who rarely asked the question of “who made this” work of art (Walker 1994, 91). Equally important is the fact that establishing individual authorship of art is very much tied up with its commodification, and the pecuniary interests of collectors. My concern in this paper has been to expose motherhood as yet another avenue, a route to making all forms of art. Motherhood should not be understood as a collective blanket of anonymity. Rather, there is no more individual relationship than that between a mother and each child, a bond that motivated motherartists to engage in different kinds of visual and verbal arts. As documented, we see that in some cases, the process has been institutionalized in their roles as mothers of the lineage. The irony is that even though the African artist was said to wear a mask of anonymity, everyone could tell he was male, albeit a nameless male. Because of this male bias in the establishment of the provenance of traditional African art, it is clear that the only anonymous artists were female; in that vein, then, the role of mother as artist was anonymous. Consequently, today we can name Anonymous as mother. Because she has been decolonized, she can reclaim her name as Motherartist. References Abiodun, Rowland. 1989. Woman in Yorùbá religious images. Journal of African Cultural Studies 2(1): 1–18. Abiodun, Rowland. 1994. Introduction: An African (?) art history: Promising theoretical approaches in Yorùbá studies. In The Yorùbá Artist: New Theoretical Perspectives on African Arts, ed. Rowland Abiodun, Henry Drewal, and John Pemberton, 37–48. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press. Abiodun, Rowland, Henry Drewal, and John Pemberton, ed. 1994. The Yorùbá Artist: New Theoretical Perspectives on African Arts. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press. Adepegba, C. O. 1991. Yorùbá Metal Sculpture. Ibadan, Nigeria: Ibadan University Press. Berns, Marla. 1993. Art, history and gender: Women and clay in West Africa. African Archaeological Review 11: 129–48.
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Conclusion: Anonymous Is Mother
Oyèrónk! Oy"wùmí
Biebuyck, Daniel. 1969. Tradition and Creativity in Tribal Art. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Campbell, Bolaji. 2008. Painting for the Gods: Art and Aesthetics of Yorùbá Religious Murals. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Drewal, Henry. 1989. Ife: Origins of art and civilization. In Nine Centuries of Yorùbá Art and Thought, ed. Allen Wardwell. New York: The Center for African Art and Harry N. Abrams. Drewal, Henry, John Pemberton III, and Rowland Abiodun. 1989. In Nine centuries of Yorùbá Art and Thought, ed. Allen Wardwell. New York: The Center for African Art and Harry N. Abrams. Herreman, Frank, ed. 2003. Material Differences: Art and Identity in Africa. New York: Museum of African Art. Lawal, Babatunde. 2001. Aworan: Representing the self and its metaphysical other in Yorùbá art. The Art Bulletin LXXXIII (3). Olabimtan, Afolabi, ed. 1986. Akojopo Iwadii Ijinle Asa Yorùbá. Ibadan, Nigeria: Macmillan. Oygwùmí, Oyèrónkt. 1997. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Vogel, Jerome. 2003. African Ceramics. In Material Differences: Art and Identity in Africa. New York: Museum of African Art. Edited by Frank Herreman, Walker, Roslyn Adele. 1994. Anonymous Has a Name: Olowe of Ise. In the Yoruba Artist: New Theoretical Perspectives on African Art, edited by Rowland Abiodun, Henry J. Drewal and John Pemberton, 91–106, Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press. Westcott, J. A., and Peter Morton-Williams. 1958. The festival of Iyamapo. Nigeria Magazine 58: 212–24. Willett, Frank. 1967. Ife in the History of West Africa. New York: McGraw Hill Book Company. Yai, Olabiyi. 1994. In praise of metonymy: The concepts of “tradition” and “creativity” in the transmission of Yorùbá artistry over time and space. In The Yorùbá Artist: New Theoretical Perspectives on African Arts, ed. Rowland Abiodun, Henry Drewal, and John Pemberton, 107–118. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press.
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abusua (extended matrilineal family), 104, 110–13, 115 Accra, 5, 101–4, 110–18 built environment, 102, 103, 105, 106, 108, 112 household transformation, 112 housing development, 102, 104 nuclear household models, 104 rapidly urbanizing, 5, 102, 112–13 uneven urban development, 110, 111, 114 Academic women, 4, 119–23, 125, 127, 129, 132–3, 135–8, 140, 142, 147, 149, 151–2 adaptive mechanisms, 164 Aesthetics, viii, 161, 223, 228–9, 235 afadurajagun (prayer band), 94, 97 Africa, 1–2, 6, 10, 15, 29, 32–3, 36, 61–2, 109–10, 116–18, 133–4, 154, 161, 176–7, 195–6, 238 agency, 2, 6, 157, 161–2, 168–9, 174, 176 Age–set, 183, 185, 194 Aládurà movements, 89, 90, 97, 99 albeit differentiated, 157 Anticolonial, 6, 179, 180, 182, 185–91, 193–4 Archetype, 163, 173 Asante courtyard house, 104 Asante women, 101, 111 Ascendancy of a traditional social organization, 166, 171 ascribed gender roles, 163
aspirations, 156, 159, 167, 173 Assumptions, 40, 42, 158, 161–3, 165–6, 168, 173–5 autonomy, 52, 118, 165 awareness of their responsibility, 169 Bamako, 157, 162, 169 Bamanan, 160, 164 Behavioral impediments, 166 Black feminism, 30 Black women, 101–2, 116 blueprints, 171 Borom keer, 165 British colonialism in Kenya, 187 capitalist spatiality, 103, 107, 108 low spatial positioning, 101 unequal development of space, 101, 108 uneven spatial development, 109 Western spatial constructs, 104 Chikola, 155 Christ Apostolic Church (C.A.C.), 90, 97 Christian values, 21, 22, 39 Christianity, xii, 22, 35, 61 cogent practices, 171 a collective identity, 166, 168, 173 Colonial brutality, 182, 109 Colonization, 9, 19, 25, 27, 29 commitment, 96, 162, 170–1, 189 commonly held values, 170
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I N DE X
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communicative dimension, 167 Competition, 125, 127, 156, 165–6 competitive environment, 167 competitors, 162, 167–8 complexities, 156, 158, 166, 174, 180, 194 consciously differentiated motives, 173 context-relevant theorizing, 171 Credit, 13, 149, 155, 159, 166, 168, 170, 172, 174–8 Credit-worthiness, 166, 167, 199 critical assessment, 175 critical spatial literacy, 4–5, 101–15 critical literacy of space, 102, 103, 106, 107, 111, 114 critical pedagogy of space, 106, 114 reading the world, 106, 107 spatial awareness, 102, 108 transformative materialist interpretation of spatiality, 102 crosscut urban, peri-urban, and rural areas, 157 cultural and economic contexts, 169 cultural attributes, 173 Cultural precepts and tradition, 166 cultural value-system, 170 culture, ix–x, 7, 33, 35, 40–1, 62, 85–6, 89, 98–9, 120, 127, 135, 141, 152–3, 160, 165, 168, 182, 185, 187, 190, 193, 197, 229–30, 232–4, 236 daily hand out and allowance, 163 daily practices, 163–4, 173 Dakar, 65, 157, 168, 176–7 decision-making, 38, 101, 165, 172, 176 Decolonizing, 2, 9 democratic governance, 169 development, 88, 122, 153–7, 159–60, 169–70, 172–4, 176–8, 195, 201, 211, 214–15 development discourses, 155 development orthodoxies, 174
different imperatives, 155 differential power positions, 165 Differentiation Strategies, 166 dignity, 48, 168, 170 discourses of otherness, 167 discrimination by design, 118 Discursive, viii, 6, 155, 157–8, 163, 169–70, 173, 177, 194 discursive level, 163 Disembodied, 166, 174 disembodied homo economicus, 174 disjuncture between women’s political movement, 169 divergent interpretive possibilities, 167 Doni Doni, 163 dysfunctionalities, 174 earn a living, 163 economic opportunities, 160, 162, 169 economic pursuits, 163 economic rights, 174 Egbe Alasalaatu, 88 Egbe Binukonu, 88 Ekub, 155 electoral constituency-building, 172 electoral weight, 172 embedded, 102, 108, 112, 156, 173, 182 embodied identities, 168 emic accounts, 174 enable or inhibit, 167 enabling, 105, 167 entrepreneur archetype, 177 entrepreneurial ventures, 169 entrepreneurship, 155–7, 159–61, 163, 167, 173–4, 177 epistemic blind spots, 174 epistemological and philosophical postulates, 175 epistemological standpoint, 174 Esusu, 155 Ethiopia, 155 existential realities, 174 expressive sites, 169
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Fadillulah Muslim Mission, 4 Fatick, 157 Female circumcision controversy, 180, 186, 189, 193, 196 Female entrepreneurship, 155–7, 159–61, 174 Female genital mutilation (FGM), 6, 179 Female genital practices (FGP), 6, 181, 194 feminism, 114, 116, 118, 194–6 feminist, 36, 39, 43, 58, 116–18, 121, 153–4, 170, 181–2, 195–6 architectural praxis, 105 Matrix, 105 gender constructs, 4, 19, 44, 109, 114 methodology, 106, 122 practices, 1–2, 4–7, 35, 120, 155–6, 159–60, 163–4, 166, 170–1, 173–5, 182 struggles, 6, 169, 218 understanding, 1, 6, 51, 158, 169, 177, 199, 204–5, 216, 219 womanist positionality, 103 womanist spatial research agenda, 107 field research sites, 157 fixed spatial boundaries, 157 formalization of associative movements, 169 formation and registration of associations, 169 fringe benefits, 170 gender, 1–7, 10, 32, 35–7, 40–6, 48–50, 53, 60–2, 64–6, 69, 72, 76–9, 81–3, 85, 87, 103–4, 107–9, 114, 116–18, 120, 122–3, 131, 138, 140, 143–4, 146–8, 150, 153–4, 156–65, 173–7, 195, 199, 211, 214, 216, 218, 220–32, 237–8 gender identities, 175 gender inequities, 156 Gender relations, 2, 40, 157–8, 163–5, 174–5, 177, 211, 214, 216
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gendered economic positions, 162 gendered identity, 156, 163 gendered terrain, 163 Gendering, iii, vii, 1–2, 6–7, 15, 54 Genderist, 30, 223 genderized economic venture, 155 generic training modules, 171 Ghana, xi, 5, 102–4, 109–10, 115–18, 222, 225 GBkCyC, 179, 184, 190 GBkCyC ethnicity, 182 GBkCyC female leaders, 185 GBkCyC identity formation, 181, 193 GBkCyC women, 190 Goorgoorlu, 163 group formation processes, 173 group identity, 167 Harvard, 11, 15–16, 22, 25, 27, 32 highly centralized, 169 historical feminism, 3, 30 homogenizing accounts, 5, 158, 167 Homogenizing design, 167 hope, 81, 178, 182 household consumption, 163 Husband, 42, 53, 55, 65, 68–70, 72, 75, 78–82, 104, 111, 135, 148, 204, 207, 220 Ifa, 3, 97, 99 Ife, 7, 43–4, 53, 59, 103, 226–30, 238 Ile Ife, 226 Income-generating activities, 164–5 indigenous culture, 120 indigenous practices, 155 Informal economy, 160–3, 165–6 informal traders, 155 inherent contradiction, 174 inherent strengths, 173 inhibiting, 167 institutional structures, 175 instrumental use, 172 Intellectual, vii, 1–2, 13, 145, 169 internal dynamics, 173–4
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Index
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interpretive meaning, 163 Irua, viii–ix, 6, 182, 184, 187 Irua ria atumia, 182, 184, 187 Irua ria atumia na anake, ix, 180, 182, 185–8, 191, 193 islam, vii, ix, 17, 74, 78, 85, 99 Islamic tradition, 17 Iya, viii, ix, 88, 97, 180, 182, 184, 186, 188, 190, 192, 194, 196 Iyamapo, 238 Iyawo ile, 228, 236 Jiggen Jiggenlu, 163 Jumat service, 94, 96 Kenya, 6, 119–21, 124, 126, 137, 144, 148, 152–5, 175–6, 179, 195–7 key stakeholders, 167 Kikuyu, 126, 152, 181, 184–6, 191, 194–6 Kikuyu Central Association (KCA), 185, 186 Kolda, 157, 165 Koulikoro, 157 l’art de la débrouille, 163 la dépense quotidienne, 163 Language, 3, 19, 35–6, 39–42, 44–6, 48, 50–2, 55, 58, 60, 62, 64–5, 105–6, 157, 167, 169, 171, 203, 219, 222, 233 legendary mobility, 155 Lineage, 44, 57, 70, 110, 211 local leaders, 172 long-distance traders, 155 Long-term profitability, 167 macro-level structures, 168 Mali, viii, 5, 155–60, 162–4, 168–9, 171, 175, 177 Malika, 164–5, 167, 170 Mamdani, Mahmood, 29, 33 mantra, 155
mark a difference, 167 Marketing strategies, 167 Matrix, 105 Mau Mau, 187, 190 Mau Mau oathing, 187, 188, 190 Mau Mau women, 191 meaning of survival, 163 Meanings, xii, 75, 108, 157–8, 163, 165 Microenterprises, 5, 155–61, 164, 166–7, 169–75, 177 microlending institutions, 169 migration, 109, 112 minister, 144, 171 Missionary, 42, 61 Mopti, 157 Motherhood, xii, 43, 46, 212–13, 215, 218, 225, 232, 234–5, 237 Muslim societies and associations, 88 Muslim women, 4, 85–88, 98, 192 mystic rituals, 163–4 name of a locality, 169 Naming Strategies, 157, 165, 173–4 Nank Nank, 163 new configuration, 155 Ngw˜ı ko, 180, 183–6, 194 Nietamusso, 155 Nigeria, xii, 3, 35–6, 39, 61–2, 85–90, 99, 155, 203, 216, 238 non-governmental organizations, 169 nuclear house, 104 nuclear household models, 104 Oathing, 187–91 Old Boys’ Network, 16 Oral tradition, 3, 205, 210 Organizing, 10, 68, 88, 162 Ori, 182, 233–4 Osun, 24, 99 overarching macroeconomic structure, 175 partners, 50, 168 Patriarchal system, 163, 165
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patronage, 86, 97, 169–72 Petty trade, 162 Pikine, 168 political arena, 7, 169, 172 political patronage, 169 politically evocative references, 171 politicization of women’s microenterprises, 171 politics of space, 5, 102, 103, 106 polygamy, 31, 69–70, 75 Positioning, 168–70 positive self-image, 166, 168, 173 positive signal, 168 power and socio-physical space, 101 power configurations, 170 pride, 122, 166, 168, 170, 220 Procreation, 7, 94 product differentiation, 167 Pronouns, 11, 19, 26, 28, 46 prophetic revelation, 91 rapid urbanization, 113 recognition and visibility, 167 ref lexivity, 175 regionalist architectural work, 105 Correa, Charles, 116 Fathy, Hassan, 105, 116 religio-cultural context, 89, 96 religious leadership, 89, 98 religious phenomena, 90 renegade architectural stance, 105, 106 reputation, 91, 167 resource allocation, 167 resource mobilization, 158, 167 resource-scarce, 167 Respectability, 167–8 rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs), 155 Saint-Louis, 157 savvy trading skills, 155 scale and sites, 157 Scholarship, 9–12, 19, 27, 31, 117 Segou, 157
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self-concept, 167 Self-conception, 173 self-differentiation, 167 Self-efficacy, 164, 168 Self-empowering behaviors, 169 Self-Image, viii, 155, 157, 166–8, 173, 177 Self-Naming, viii, 8–157, 177 self-positioning, 167, 169 Senegal, viii, 3, 5, 63–5, 67, 73–4, 82–3, 155–60, 162–6, 169, 171–2, 175, 177 Senegalese government, 171 separate sphere, 169 Sexist, 6, 42, 50–1, 54, 56, 61, 127, 135, 149, 151 Sexual atrocities, 192 shelter, 107 single–party regime, 169 small-scale, 111, 155 Social analysis, 5, 155, 177 Social embeddedness, 157 social expectations, 164–5 social interests, 167, 174 social positions, 159, 167 social pressures, 165 socio-spatial justice, 105, 107 solidarity, 162, 170 source language, 41 South Africa, 155 spatial configurations, 4, 101, 113, 114 stockkvel, 155 Strategies, 5–6, 116, 118, 152, 157, 162, 164–7, 169, 171, 173–4, 177 Street vending, 162 subjectivity, 167 Subordination, 5, 165 Superstition, 163 Superstructure, 166, 235 Susu, 155, 175–6 target language, 41 Terra-cotta, 226–8
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Index
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the art of making ends meet, 163 the evil tongue, 164 the f luidity and continuity, 157 the intellectual elite of Bamako, 169 the political history, 169 to counter reductionism, 173 tontine, 155, 159 Torture, 192 traditional Islam, 87 transformative narrative, 169 translation, 3, 16, 19–21, 25, 36, 39–41, 43–6, 49–51, 220 Trap of patronage, 171 un-Christian, 184 underperformance, 167 uniformity and fixity, 168 universal homo economicus, 173 West African women, 155, 174 Western feminism, 30 Western women’s liberation, 181 white settlers, 188, 192–3
white settlers and missionaries, 192 white supremacy, 182 Wolof, 63–74, 76–7, 81, 83, 160, 163–4 Wolof culture, 67, 70–1 Women, 1, 7, 10, 26, 33, 46, 58, 64–72, 74–83, 85–9, 92, 94, 97–9, 101–4, 107–19, 153–77, 179–85, 188–97, 201–3, 206–9, 211–18, 220–9, 231–2, 235, 237–8 women entrepreneurs, 156–8, 160–7, 169–77 women’s associative movement, 169 Women’s cognitive capabilities for self-promotion, 168 women’s microenterprises, 155–8, 160–1, 164, 166–7, 169–75, 177 women’s status, 170 Yengu Yengu, 163 Yoruba, xii, 3–4, 7, 21–2, 26, 46, 61, 83, 99, 238
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