Gendering African Philosophy, or: African Feminism as Decolonizing Force

Abstract

Although feminist authors and publications abound in other disciplines on the continent, professional African philosophy is overwhelmingly male dominated, with a conspicuous absence of feminist and gender themes. To redress the situation, du Toit and Coetzee consider the choice between applying globally dominant feminist frameworks to issues and debates in the African context or outright immersion in the masculine field of African philosophy in order to open up spaces for feminist questions in dialogue with indigenous worldviews and philosophical positions. In this chapter the authors focus on the second option, in line with recent calls to more authentically contextualize philosophical practice on the continent. The chapter examines the themes of sexual agency and motherhood. Grounded in this way, African feminist philosophy emerges as a potentially powerful source of critique and partner in dialogue with the more established strands of feminist thought.

Introduction

Although the relative absence of both women and feminism from the canon, practice, and institutions of African philosophy is widely recognized, ¹ little has so far been undertaken to rectify or address the situation. ² The problem is compounded by facile yet pervasive assumptions that “feminism,” often viewed as a single (and moreover Western) movement or school of thought, is a Fremdkörper, a foreign import, in Africa. It is supposed to sit uneasily on the continent, posing a fundamental tension with Africa’s indigenous worldviews and authentic social arrangements. Put differently, one can say that “feminism,” thus understood, is often rejected on suspicion of acting as a colonizing force, an imposition of Western frameworks onto Africa . The result is unfortunately that the discipline of African philosophy remains largely silent on the issues of gender , sex , sexual difference, and women’s social and political status.

The position put forward in this chapter is that the African philosophical tradition should be interrogated on these points, for example, what do African worldviews and metaphysics imply with regards to sexual difference , women’s status, and masculinities ? If feminism is not narrowly equated with a certain Western philosophical tradition of deliberating women’s nature and status, but instead broadly conceived as the attempt to critically and creatively consider the shared world from the viewpoint of women, then surely African philosophy can and must enter into a fruitful dialogue with this endeavor. The kernel of truth in the rejection of “feminism” as foreign to Africa is thus that when modern Western feminist thinking parades as the highest culmination, or worse, the ahistorical or universal “truth” about women and gender, such claims easily lead to paternalism and other distortions and injustices from feminist thinkers vis-à-vis African societies. ³ And then indeed, feminist agendas may function in neocolonial and racist ways and suppress indigenous understandings and practices in unjustified ways. The rejection of such impositions has rightly been a core aspect of African feminist thinking from the start, ⁴ and this rejection has furthermore been well received and incorporated into mainstream feminist thinking. In the same breath, however, it has to be acknowledged that the male-dominated discipline of African philosophy betrays an ideological blind spot regarding its apparent refusal to engage more thoroughly with (African) feminist thinkers. The rejection of any simplistic transfer of Western-dominated paradigms of feminist thinking to the African continent (shared by Afro-centred thinkers) should serve to open up a different space, a self-consciously African space, for deliberation about gender and sex, rather than serve as an excuse to ignore these topics altogether.

It is thus our contention that one of the many fruitful ways in which the opening up of the field of African feminist philosophy may be pursued is by relating concepts, concerns, and critical perspectives that have already emerged in the work of African feminist scholars in other disciplines than philosophy to African philosophical perspectives. In other words, theory that springs from the lived experiences and material situations of African feminist thinkers must be placed within the context of, and in interactive conversation with, the broader metaphysical and ontological approaches that have been developed within African philosophy and that are viewed as central to African worldviews and traditions. This is the approach that we will follow in this chapter.

But we suggest there are also other ways in which feminist and gender concerns may be brought into discussion with African philosophy. The first that springs to mind is the philosophical exploration of artistic expressions from the continent, such as literature written from a feminist and/or women’s perspective. African women novelists are too numerous to list here and many of them create work that is highly pertinent to the development of an African feminist philosophy. ⁵ Secondly, a legal philosophical approach may be followed. Sylvia Tamale is an African legal scholar who brings her feminist lens to bear on the uneasy relationship between living custom and legal frameworks, including customary law and human rights frames. ⁶ In the process she contributes to decolonization by problematizing the racism involved in many Western interpretations of African custom, especially those related to sexuality . But in resisting racism and pursuing an Afro-centred understanding of women and law, she also makes sure to resist nostalgic reconstructions of authentic Africa as simplistically patriarchal . The result is exciting new ways of thinking about cultivating female sexual autonomy , made possible by living and dynamic African cultural practices.

In the third place, a fruitful conversation may be constructed between prominent figures within the African philosophical canon and the mainly Western feminist philosophical canon, since such conversations too seldom happen in fact. An example is exploring the similarities and dissimilarities between African moral theory and Western feminist care ethics , ⁷ or between the fundamental critiques of Western metaphysics formulated by thinkers as diverse as Kwame Nkrumah and Luce Irigaray . ⁸ A fourth way in which one may address the problem is by exploring through an African lens feminist work arising from other “postcolonial” contexts and informed by critiques of “coloniality,” such as the Caribbean philosophical world, India or the South American continent. ⁹ Also here, critical and creative comparative work will need to be done in order to make this a fruitful encounter.

Forging this discussion amongst Africans in a vigorous manner will help to ensure that African feminist philosophy will emerge as a more fully developed discipline, contextualized within living African philosophical traditions. It will then moreover be in a position to more robustly confront and dialogue with Western but also other feminist traditions having their roots in other parts of the world. Since African feminism is currently largely cut off from its philosophical roots, it is arguably lacking in theoretical depth and conceptual richness. Similarly, African philosophy regrettably remains cut off from African feminist perspectives, and stays all the poorer for that.

This chapter consists of two main sections. The first section considers the sexual dimension of colonial trauma, and how that has impacted and helped to shape a postcolonial Africa that wants to (even needs to) remember itself as purely patriarchal. The second section looks by way of one example at the work of Nigerian feminist sociologist Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí who urges us as Africans to remember ourselves and our pasts differently, for the sake of a better emancipatory practice in the present. Along with thinkers like Nkiru Nzegwu (2006) and Niara Sudarkasa (1996), Oyěwùmí invites us to re-member ourselves in new ways, in order to open up channels through which African feminist theory may start to act as a central decolonizing force, liberating both women and men from severely constricting gender scripts. In fact, what we hope to show through reading this non-philosophical author within and through the lenses of the African philosophical canon is that a decolonization project that ignores sex and gender and the sexual trauma of colonization will necessarily be unsuccessful in that it will repeat and reinforce the colonial logic of sexual wounding. By imagining/remembering an African past that was in gender terms totally at odds with the dominant, colonizing, metaphysical, Western sexual imaginary, these authors open up new possibilities for the social ordering of sex, sexual difference, and desire, beyond the wounds inflicted by colonial history.

Remembering the Sexual Trauma of Colonization

It is justice that turns memory into a project. ¹⁰

Aleida Assmann analyzes what she calls “the modern time regime,” that is, the modernist cultural regime, and by implication the time regime which undergirded the colonial project in Africa, into five elements. ¹¹ This regime’s first characteristic is the fragmentation of time ¹² : modern time rejects continuities with the past and future and requires that everything not serving self-fulfilment be rejected and discarded. Secondly, the modern time regime entertains the fiction of new beginnings. Whereas pre- or meta-modern times emphasized mythical origins that are forever reactivated and remembered in the present, the modern time regime proclaims the “new beginning” to always be right here and now. Authority and inspiration are no longer located in enduring traditions , customs, and the ancestors that went before, but rather in the creative actions of the self-determining individual who lives in the present, and is actively and independently shaping a better future. A third aspect of the modern time regime is creative destruction; this entails the idea that the destructions wrought by capitalism , technology , and innovation, for example, should finally be celebrated as powerful expressions of the system’s self-regeneration.

Fourthly, the modern epoch is characterized by its invention of the historical, in other words, of the creation of the academic discipline of history, where history is turned into an object of knowledge through museums , archives , and archaeological and historical research. The past is hereby alienated from the present and from the living as an alien, dead object confronting us over a distance, instead of serving as a living and creative source for identity formation and self-interpretation. The fifth aspect of the modern time regime for Assmann relates to the acceleration of processes of change which, together with the idea that time is money, leaves “modern” people feeling alienated and lost, and longing for a slower pace. Such is the nature of the time regime which violently interrupted, disrupted, and uprooted African precolonial self-understandings and treatments of time . For Assmann, the modern time regime is rapidly losing its hold on the world, noticeable especially in how the future for us has lost much of its former allure. Yet, this modern(ist) regime is also still with us, and it is not yet clear what will replace it either.

If “the past is a foreign country,” ¹³ several factors combine to render the search for Africa’s precolonial past particularly difficult, erasing its traces. Such factors include the particular logic of the colonial time regime which was violently imposed on African societies, with its emphasis on the fragmentation of time, new beginnings, supposedly “creative” destruction, its “scientific” study of African cultures as foreign objects frozen in time, and its capitalist impositions and alienations. But as Robert Vosloo also emphasizes, even though and maybe especially when and because memories are so vulnerable and fragile, marked by trauma , however we construct the past, it remains a powerful force in the present, shaping our sense of self and our hopes for the future. ¹⁴ Even though constructions of the past are forever contested, always at least partly fictional, and complex, we as humans are historical creatures, and will never cease drawing on descriptions of the past in order to imagine new futures for ourselves and our societies. Self-understanding, like collective understanding, can never be separated from stories about the past and of how “we” came to be in the here and now.

And yet, these stories are never satisfied with being mere stories; they aspire to truth . Thus, although all reconstructions of the past contain elements of narrative fiction, we must retain a fundamental respect for the realities of the past, at least in part because we owe respect to the dead and the particularity and singularity of their lives and experiences, their suffering and their existential meanings. ¹⁵ The fundamental foreignness of a world that is past should thus not be suspended; we do not have the right to impose our present world onto the past world and swallow it up whole, reducing it to what is useful for us in our present concerns and desires. Such remembrance strategies follow the logic of the modern time regime. Instead, in order to protect the otherness and integrity of the past means that we protect its complexity against our own need for simplistic, nostalgic, and romanticized versions of the past. Vosloo quotes Elizabeth Johnson in this regard who says “But memory that dares to connect with the pain, the beauty, the defeat, the victory of love and freedom, and the unfinished agenda of those who went before acts like an incalculable visitation from the past that energizes persons.” ¹⁶

A great deal is thus at stake in how Africans remember, reimagine, and reconstruct the past. Firstly we should fully acknowledge that the colonial project was aimed at substituting the modern time regime described by Assmann for a discredited, completely inferiorized African past, a past positioned by European philosophy outside of time and human history. ¹⁷ The precolonial African past was moreover systematically construed and framed in ways that made it function to epitomize “the primitive ” in contrast with the way in which Europe framed itself as “the civilized ,” in an elaborate attempt to justify slavery and colonization . These multiple traumas must be faced and their implications and consequences for today must be traced. ¹⁸ Yet, acknowledging all of this should nevertheless not lead us to retreat into a nostalgic remembrance. The temptation of nostalgia is the temptation to render Africa’s multiple, complex pasts separate from the present and moreover simple, and fully subservient to Africa’s present needs, assuming furthermore that we can fully know what we need, and know how to render the past serviceable to these needs. The main problem with nostalgic memory is that it stifles the imagination when it renders the past a mere function of the present.

When the past loses is foreignness and its power to surprise and disrupt, then it loses its capacity for opening up new possibilities in the present. In contrast, Justin Bisanswa calls upon Africans to exercise a “memory of crossing,” which for him is a practice of remembrance which is mobile and transgressive, aimed at opening a future which is a true alternative to the present. Bisanswa says: “The memory of the crossing rejects the nostalgia of identity issues because the past is the non-achieved whose possibilities are about to hatch. The crossing is not a return to the past but a detour through the past to the future….” ¹⁹ Bisanswa then links hope with the ever-present possibility of surpassing oneself which allows “something nascent” to happen, ²⁰ and here he echoes Hannah Arendt’s ²¹ idea of natality —the idea that with every new child who enters the world, the possibility for radical and unprecedented renewal, for new action, enters along with it. To reconnect past, present, and future after the fragmentations and “new beginnings” of the modern time regime does not entail that we remain within the same forever, but rather that the ways in which things persevere and repeat themselves, as well as the ways in which as yet unimagined and unhatched possibilities lurk in past, present, and future, be better appreciated.

Drawing on the critical work of thinkers such as Achille Mbembe , Greg Thomas , Frantz Fanon , Sylvia Wynter , Aimé Césaire , and Edouard Glissant , those prevalent claims on the continent—such as under the Mugabe and Museveni regimes ²² —that reject gay rights in the name of African identity appear as the culmination and triumph of European imperialism and domination rather than as expressions of authentic African decolonization. What these authors share is a critical understanding of the key role that sexual trauma played in the process of colonizing the African mind. In Black Skin, White Masks , Fanon pinpoints “Negrophobia as the culprit in the carnal violence of colonialism,” ²³ and this phobia was manifested most clearly in a double sexual fascination/abhorrence projected onto the black body. For Fanon, the sexual identities of white supremacy as expressed in empire are of necessity neurotic, and these neuroses infused its “civilising mission.” ²⁴ For Thomas, Fanon works towards a new humanity (“new attitudes, new modes of action, new ways”) which means that he propagates “a revolutionary new orientation toward gender and sexuality, mind and body, ecstasy and eroticism.” ²⁵

At the same time we need an unflinching exposure of the role the projection of white sexual neuroses onto black bodies played and still plays in the upholding of white supremacy. On this reading, when Africa professes to remember itself as heterosexual and patriarchal, what this betrays is its falling in with imperial and colonial demands, fleeing from racialized colonial images of Africa as a place of sexual savagery. For Cheryl Clarke, the black homophobia and sexism that she encounters are signs that the black middle classes have “absorbed the homophobia of their patriarchal slave-masters,” and have bought into the heterosexist dictates of the nuclear family as required by a capitalist labour market. ²⁶ Read together, these authors show how a certain ordering and racialization of sex and gender, a certain distribution of lusts and drives, lies at the heart of the projects of colony, slavery, empire , and white supremacy . Thus, for African philosophy to avoid engaging with these topics or to fail to take on board the insights of African thinkers working on sex and gender, is to miss a crucial aspect of the process of decolonization.

If one combines the above two conclusions, namely that a vilified view of African sexuality lies at the heart of the colonial project itself and that African nostalgia for a patriarchal, heterosexist past (and associated flight from anything more complex or ambiguous) should be read in light of this colonial history, then we are in a better position to appreciate the work of African feminists who radically challenge and reframe Western feminist theories at the same time as they challenge patriarchal and heterosexist reconstructions of Africa’s precolonial past.

Oyěwùmí on Gender and Relationality

The Colonial Creation of Gender in Yoruba Society

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí argues famously in The Invention of Women : Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses ²⁷ that sex/gender was not an organizing principle in precolonial Yoruba society and that “woman” as a social category did not exist. Gender was created in Yoruba society through the intertwined processes of colonial rule in Nigeria, the translation of Yoruba into English, ²⁸ and the continued hegemony of the West in the politics of knowledge production. Oyěwùmí argues that central to colonial domination in Yoruba society were two separate but interrelated sets of hierarchical dichotomies , first that of settler over and against native and second that of man over and against woman. ²⁹ She shows in detail how colonial practice in Nigeria not only operated through establishing the superiority of settler over the native, but also of the masculine over the feminine. ³⁰ She argues the colonial restructuring of society, religion, and history on the basis of sex/gender to be one of the central ways in which the colonized were “removed from their history” because it entailed such a deep transformation of “the state of things.” ³¹

Importantly, Oyěwùmí does not argue merely that colonialism or Western domination installed unequal gender relations in Yoruba society; she argues that woman was created in Yoruba society by colonialism and then systematically inferiorized, in line with her inferior status in the West. She claims that in precolonial Yoruba society “body type was not the basis of social hierarchy” and biology was not “the foundation for social ranking.” ³² As a result, prior to colonial contact with the West, women in Yoruba society did not form a preexisting group characterized by shared interests, desires, or social position ³³ because “the body [was] not always enlisted as the basis of social classification.” ³⁴ Instead, persons were classified into social groups depending on the roles they took up in society and the kind of people they were, in particular, depending on the relationships in which they stood, and these things were not determined by body type. In this sense, as Oyěwùmí writes, in Yoruba society you were not a man or a woman, but instead a trader, hunter, cook, farmer, or ruler—all these identities being equally accessible to all kinds of sexuate subjects. ³⁵ For Oyěwùmí the classic example is that in Yoruba society it would not be strange for a woman to occupy the roles of oba (ruler), omo (offspring), oko, aya, iya (mother), and alawo (diviner-priest) at the same time, “all in one body.” ³⁶

On this basis she writes that the words female/woman and male/man are mistranslations of the Yoruba obinrin and okunrin in so far as these words in Yoruba do not refer to categories that are either dichotomously opposed or hierarchical. ³⁷ Unlike the words “woman” and “man” that imply that there is an “original human type against which the other variety has to be measured,” “rin” the common suffix of obinrin and okunrin implies a common humanity inherent to two different kinds of anatomies. ³⁸ Oyěwùmí writes:

In the Yoruba conception, okunrin is not posited as the norm, the essence of humanity, against which obinrin is the Other. Nor is okunrin a category of privilege. Obinrin is not ranked in relation to okunrin; it does not have negative connotations of subordination and powerlessness, and, above all, it does not in and of itself constitute any social ranking. ³⁹

In precolonial Yoruba society, sexuate difference is therefore construed in a non-oppositional and non-dichotomous way in which man is not defined in opposition to his negative, woman. Instead of gender, seniority was the organizing principle in Yoruba society that determined access to power and social hierarchy. ⁴⁰ Because seniority as organizing principle, unlike sex, is context dependent and shifting so that “no one is permanently in a senior or junior position; it all depends on who is present in any given situation,” identity is fluid and relational in Yoruba society. ⁴¹ Oyěwùmí explains that seniority, unlike gender, is only comprehensible as part of relationships, and accordingly it is not “rigidly fixated on the body nor dichotomized.” ⁴²

In contrast to this, Oyěwùmí argues that in Western thought and society white/Western man represents the standard against which subjectivity is measured and woman/the feminine is the negative Other to subjectivity. She writes that in the West “[d]ifference is expressed as degeneration” or as “a deviation from the original type.” ⁴³ And “in the West, women/females are the Other, being defined in antithesis to men/males, who represent the norm.” ⁴⁴ Moreover, she argues that in the history of Western thought the body is understood to be a non-essential part of the essentially rational and disembodied subject. ⁴⁵ She writes that “in European thought, despite the fact that society was seen to be inhabited by bodies, only women were perceived to be embodied; men had no bodies—they were walking minds” and according to this scheme embodiment was therefore reserved for women. ⁴⁶ The result, for her, is that from European thought emerges two “social categories,” namely “man of reason” and “woman of the body” which are oppositionally constructed. ⁴⁷ Accordingly, men transcend the logic in terms of which their bodies determine their place in society, because their essence and worth are regarded to lie outside their bodies.

This gender dichotomy is embedded in a scheme of other hierarchical dichotomies beginning with mind/body, but also including others: “dualisms like nature/culture, public/private, and visible/invisible are variations on the theme of male/female bodies.” ⁴⁸ Oyěwùmí therefore objects to the way in which having a female body in Western society automatically also means that you are regarded as a private domestic being who represents the natural, who is invisible in public forums, who lacks rationality , and who therefore does not qualify as a full-blown subject .

The Sub-saharan Tradition of Relational Thought

There is a substantial body of work in African philosophy outlining and theorizing the relational or communalistic, fluid and non-dichotomous metaphysics underpinning sub-Saharan African cultures and thought. These philosophers assert in different ways and with regard to many different sub-Saharan African cultures the existence of a fluid/holistic/non-dichotomous order where identity is not constituted by excluding that which is other, but in relation to that which is other. Whereas in dominant Western thought identity (and I use the term in the broad sense, including personal identity, but also the identity of things generally) means “sameness” and refers generally to the relation that everything has to itself (A = A) and nothing else, in sub-Saharan thought identity is most often understood to emerge dynamically and tentatively in relation and in interaction with that which is other. Change, difference, and multiplicity are therefore understood to be at the heart of identity . An implication of this is that the majority of Sub-Saharan African philosophers reject the dichotomies that characterize Western thought, namely culture/nature, mind/body, self/other, public/private, and transcendence/immanence, among others.

This has major implications for how subjectivity is understood. Masolo for example writes that “[t]he idea that the metaphysics of individual identity is almost unimaginable without a community to make it possible is a crucial and distinguishing point of contrast between African and other philosophical traditions, especially the Western variety.” ⁴⁹ Kenyan philosopher John Mbiti , for example, famously writes in 1969 “I am, because we are; and since we are therefore I am.” ⁵⁰ Contrasting this to the axiom of Descartes reveals the difference in understanding of subjectivity in African and Western thought. Key to personal subjectivity in Africa is the capacity to enter into relations with others, rather than the rational mind. Accordingly, the sub-Saharan African communal subject is not defined with reference to a disembodied standard or ideal, and its essence is not a rational core or spirit which is posited in opposition to the body and to others. Rather, the subject is defined with reference to its embodied existence and interaction with other subjects, indeed its emergence from other subjects. Subjectivity is thus always intersubjectivity. This means also that, unlike the Western Cartesian subject, the coherence and self-understanding of the African subject is not dependent on an overcoming of materiality, particularity, interdependence, and flux insofar as subjectivity is constituted precisely through these things: through the interaction of vulnerable bodies in an ever-changing community . Other sub-Saharan African philosophers who describe subjectivity in such relational terms include Menkiti , Eze , Mbiti, and Murungi, among others.

In Conclusion: Decolonization and the Feminist Potential in African Relational Thought

It can be argued that underpinning Oyěwùmí’s theory on sex/gender is the understanding of the world in fluid, relational , and non-dichotomous terms which is so prominent in sub-Saharan African philosophy. It was seen that Oyěwùmí’s criticism of the Western gender scheme hinges on the idea that the Platonic-Cartesian split between mind and body is importantly also a sexed/gendered split and moreover functions to fix woman/the feminine as negative or Other to the male/masculine subject. Oyěwùmí argues sex/gender in this scheme to be an inevitably oppressive hierarchical dichotomy in which woman cannot be anything but the material negative to rational man. In contrast, in precolonial Yoruba, persons had no fixed and essentialized identities based on body type but were continuously determined and redetermined by their relationships to others. It was seen that in the world of the precolonial Yoruba people a person could live an ever-changing multiplicity of identities “all in one body.”

Oyěwùmí’s rejection of the existence of man/woman in precolonial Yoruba society can therefore be read as a rejection of the existence of a subject defined by sameness, stability, and dichotomy, in favor of one who was defined by difference, fluidity, and multiplicity. She can be argued to understand the colonial imposition of the Western sex/gender system as an imposition of a dichotomous approach to the world, which dichotomies include stabilized and contrasted one/other, human/non-human, mind/body, public/private. Oyěwùmí therefore highlights how the reordering of sex/gender relations was a crucial aspect of the workings of the logic of Western modernity and colonialism through which a racialized, hierarchical, patriarchal, and capitalist global social system was constructed. On this basis her work shows that African scholarship on decolonization which does not engage with the issue of sex/gender is missing a crucial aspect.

Reading Oyěwùmí’s work like this has two significant implications. The first implication is that her feminist position is directly in line with the sub-Saharan African relational approaches to subjectivity and identity. By challenging and relativizing the colonial/modern/Western matrix in which sex/gender is embedded in present-day postcolonial Yoruba society, as well as the way in which the existing sex/gender structures serve Western power and influence in African societies, it could be argued that she is doing crucial work in opening up a space for the reimagining of Yoruba culture and future beyond the colonial and neocolonial paradigm. By arguing that Yoruba people cannot be understood through the sex/gender framework of Western society and thought, which is a framework that creates certain kinds of subjects, and by challenging and undermining this framework, she is opening a space in which the re-subjectification of Yoruba people in line with their own histories, values, and cultures can happen.

Oyěwùmí therefore looks in the unconscious of African culture to create a counter-discourse of resistance and to reveal contradictory identities. It is thus also an act of regaining control over the self-definition of Yoruba people. It can thus be said that she creates a counter epistemology of alterity on the basis of memory. Yet her project does not imply that it is necessary to return to a precolonial past. What is more important is that she is activating or harnessing memory to create a space for creative imagining of new futures which are not possible in the still-lingering confines of the colonial power matrix. In this way she uses memory in a transgressive way that, in line with Bisanswa’s understanding of the notion of a “memory of crossing,” opens a future which is a true alternative to the present. Accordingly, even though various aspects of her construction of precolonial Yoruba history are contested by Nigerian scholars, ⁵¹ her use of memory and the past remains valuable and significant insofar as it ruptures our understanding of the present and past, and thereby opens a space from within which to imagine new futures.

The second implication is that it can be argued that sub-Saharan African relational thought has great feminist and more generally emancipatory potential around human sexuality, insofar as it supports a non-hierarchical and non-dichotomous approach to (sexuate) difference. It was seen that in terms of the relational metaphysics, concepts and subjectivity emerge through a dynamic interaction with that which is other, as well as a dynamic interaction between the intelligible and the material. It gives rise to an order in which difference is understood to be at the heart of identity instead of that which needs to be stripped for identity to be produced and maintained. This means that subjectivity is not produced through the sacrifice of that which is other or different. One subject (male) is not set up as standard for humanity while the other (female) acts as foil for its emergence.

The implication is that dismantling the Western sex/gender structures in African societies does not only mean that a space opens up to approach things in ways that are more true to African thought and history. It also means that embracing African relational ways of thinking offers huge potential for sex/gender equivalence, because African thought is underpinned by a metaphysics which allows for sexuate difference to emerge and for the feminine to be a legitimate subject position. In other words, the relationality of African thought is specifically conducive to the flourishing of sexuate difference which allows for persons with all kinds of bodies to claim full subjecthood and to take part in society as full subjects. These insights offer a deep critique on discourses that pit the pursuit of the transformation of sex/gender relations on the African continent against African culture and worldviews. An alliance between, on the one hand, sub-Saharan tradition of relational philosophy, and on the other hand, African feminist thought can therefore be valuable and productive for both sides. It bolsters African feminist thought because it embeds it in the African philosophical traditions, while, at the same time, it opens up new avenues to develop African philosophy by connecting it with feminist perspectives.

Notes

• 1. See Oluwole (1998: 96), Metz (2011).

• 2. In contrast, feminist authors and publications abound in other disciplines on the continent, e.g., in African theology, literature, anthropology, and sociology.

• 3. See Tamale (2008: 52).

• 4. For example, Collins (1991), hooks (1982).

• 5. Du Toit (2008: 413), Nnaemeka (1997: 1), Gagiano (2008).

• 6. Tamale (2008), Oloka-Onyango and Tamale (1995).

• 7. Metz (2013), Harding (1998: 360).

• 8. Du Toit (2015).

• 9. Quijano (2000).

• 10. Ricoeur (2004).

• 11. Assmann (2013).

• 12. I rely here on the reading of Assmann provided by Vosloo (2015).

• 13. Hartley (1953: 7).

• 14. Vosloo (2015: 10).

• 15. Ibid.

• 16. Johnson (1998: 165).

• 17. For example by Bernasconi (2003).

• 18. See Rob Nixon’s insightful discussion of how violence, and particularly neocolonial environmental violence, does not only entail a contest over space, bodies, labour, or resources, but importantly, also over time. In this context, the longer-term view of the inhabitants of a landscape clash with short-term considerations of large corporations, for example. Nixon (2011: 7–8).

• 19. Bisanswa (2010: 83).

• 20. Ibid., 86.

• 21. Arendt (1958: 267). See also Champlin (2013).

• 22. Tamale (2007).

• 23. Thomas (2007: 104).

• 24. Ibid., 105.

• 25. Ibid., 101.

• 26. Ibid., 171.

• 27. Oyěwùmí (1997).

• 28. In Yoruba, and in many other African languages, gender is not linguistically marked, in contrast with seniority, which is so marked or coded. See Bakare-Yusuf’s (2003) critique of Oyěwùmí’s linguistic determinism.

• 29. Oyěwùmí (1997: 121).

• 30. Ibid.

• 31. Ibid., 153.

• 32. Ibid., xii.

• 33. Ibid., ix.

• 34. Ibid., 13.

• 35. Motherhood is the exception here insofar as only women can give birth. Oyěwùmí explains however that this is only one area of life, and although the capacity of women to give birth was taken very seriously and celebrated, it did not determine and most definitely did not limit women’s positions and roles across other spheres of society.

• 36. Oyěwùmí (1997: 14).

• 37. Ibid., 32.

• 38. Ibid., 33.

• 39. Ibid.

• 40. Seniority refers to chronological age difference and also to the positioning of persons within the lineage structure on the basis of whether they were born into the lineage structure or joined through marriage, and if the latter is the case, at what point they joined. In Yoruba language there are terms for older siblings and younger siblings and not for male and female siblings.

• 41. Oyěwùmí (1997: 42).

• 42. Ibid.

• 43. Ibid., 1.

• 44. Ibid., 33.

• 45. Ibid., 3.

• 46. Ibid., 6.

• 47. Ibid.

• 48. Ibid., 7.

• 49. Masolo (2010: 134).

• 50. Mbiti (1969).

• 51. Bakare-Yusuf (2003), Matory (2005), Peel (2002), Olajubu (2004), and Mama (2001).