VU Research Portal African feminism as decolonising force: a philosophical exploration of the work of Oyeronke Oyewumi Coetzee, A.A. 2017 document version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Link to publication in VU Research Portal citation for published version (APA) Coetzee, A. A. (2017). African feminism as decolonising force: a philosophical exploration of the work of Oyeronke Oyewumi. 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Sep. 2021 INTRODUCTION I Preliminary remarks Sub-Saharan African feminist voices have been largely absent from philosophical discourse in the Western and African worlds, but also from global Western feminist debates and the discourses on the decolonisation of Africa. In this dissertation I present the work of Nigerian feminist sociologist Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí as having the power to disrupt sub- Saharan African philosophy, Western feminist thought and discourses on African decolonisation in highly significant and surprising ways. The idea is to show how Oyĕwùmí as African feminist, who is rendered inaudible and invisible in dominant processes and sites of knowledge production, occupies a unique epistemological position that is rich in resources to subvert, rupture and enrich the dominant systems of knowledge. In this introduction I will briefly introduce Oyĕwùmí’s work, the reception of her work, and the theoretical fields to which she contributes. I will also outline my main questions, explain my use of certain terms, and provide a chapter summary. II A brief introduction to Oyĕwùmí and the reception of her work Oyĕwùmí is a Nigerian feminist scholar who is an associate professor in sociology at Stony Brook University in the United States. She grew up in Nigeria, attended the University of Ibadan and later moved to the United States to study at Berkeley. Oyĕwùmí is one of the most famous figures in sub-Saharan African feminist thought. She was put on the map with the publication of her book The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (1997) in which she offers a postcolonial feminist critique of Western dominance in African knowledge production, focusing specifically on gender relations among the Yorùbá people of Nigeria. She has written numerous articles on African feminism and edited three other books, namely African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood (2003), African Gender Studies: A Reader (2005) and Gender Epistemologies in Africa: Gendering Traditions, Spaces, Social Institutions, and Identities (2010). In 2016 she published a new book, called What Gender is Motherhood? Changing Yorùbá Ideals of Power, Procreation and Identity in the Age of Modernity. Oyĕwùmí argues that gender is a colonial imposition in Yorùbá society which led to the fundamental distortion of all areas of life. She shows that the colonial systems imposed on Yorùbá entail more than a socio-political reordering of gender relations, but represent a different construction of the subject and the world. Oyĕwùmí (1997) famously argues that the category of ‘woman’ did not exist in precolonial Yorùbá thought and society and that its existence in present day Yorùbá society is a product of colonial rule in Nigeria. According to Oyĕwùmí the category of ‘woman’ operative in Western thought and also in Western feminism inevitably designates a subordinate position that is only defined in negative terms in relation to man. She claims that in precolonial Yorùbá society differences in sexed bodies did not translate into this kind of hierarchy. She also criticises Western feminism for assuming the existence of this hierarchical gender scheme when analysing Yorùbá society, thereby reproducing and perpetuating this foreign scheme in Yorùbá society. In her book Invention of Women Oyĕwùmí writes in general terms about the epistemic shift brought about by 1 the colonial imposition of gender on Yorùbá society. In her latest book What Gender is Motherhood? Changing Yorùbá Ideals of Power, Procreation, and Identity in the Age of Modernity she explains the exact nature of this shift as ‘a move away from the indigenous seniority-based matripotent ethos to a male-dominant, gender-based one’ (Oyĕwùmí 2016:7). In this book Oyĕwùmí regards the mother (or Iya) to occupy a central position in the precolonial epistemology of the Yorùbá people. She therefore explores the precolonial Yorùbá epistemology1 and the shift that was caused by colonialism with reference to the notion of motherhood and the concept of ‘matripotency’ (the supremacy of motherhood) (Oyĕwùmí 2016:7). As mentioned above, Oyĕwùmí is a sociologist, accordingly, to a large extent her analysis is ethnographical.. However, she deems her project to be first and foremost epistemological. In the opening line of the preface to her book Invention of Women she writes: ‘[t]his book is about the epistemological shift occasioned by the imposition of Western gender categories on Yorùbá discourse’ (Oyĕwùmí 1997: ix). She uses her ethnographical description and sociological understanding of the precolonial Yorùbá society as basis for making the philosophical argument that the dominant (Western) categories through which we understand the world are not universal, but culturally specific and therefore contingent. In this thesis I will demonstrate that her work is capable in the first instance of dethroning Western ‘Truths.’ My interest in Oyĕwùmí sprouts from the radicalism of the philosophical claims she is making and its significance from a feminist philosophical perspective. She goes further than other sub-Saharan feminist African scholars by not only arguing that sub-Saharan African societies had different ways of organising gender relations than the West, but that the very concept of gender is a Western construct. This has made her a very controversial and mostly unpopular voice in sub-Saharan African scholarship. Although Invention of Women won the American Sociological Associations’ 1998 Distinguished Book Award in the Gender and Sex category, the praise of Oyĕwùmí’s work seems to always have been overshadowed by the criticism. Scholars who praise her for the originality and interestingness of her work, mostly do not do that without expressing reservations about the way in which she generalises in her reading of both Yorùbá culture and Western feminism (See for example King [1998] and Geiger [1999]). Moreover, many scholars dispute the empirical veracity of her claims. Nigerian feminist philosopher Oyèrónké Olajubu (2004) argues simply that Oyĕwùmí’s claim that gender was not an organising principle in precolonial Yorùbá society is empirically wrong. She argues that gender played a significant role in Yorùbá society and illustrates this on various levels.2 African American scholar J. Lorand Matory (2005) makes the same point. Similarly, Nigerian feminist scholar Amina Mama accuses Oyĕwùmí of ‘inventing an imaginary precolonial community in which gender did not exist’ and that ‘there is ample evidence to suggest that gender, in all its diverse manifestations, has long been one of the central organising principles of African societies, past and present’ (Mama 2001:69).3 1 It will be seen in this dissertation that Oyĕwùmí argues that colonisation subjugated and marginalised the local epistemes of indigenous societies. In her rese arch she explores the endogenous knowledges and categories of precolonial Yorùbá society. 2 Olajubu does however concede that gender was different from the Western understanding thereof in so far as gender conceptions were not limited to sexual anatomy, but were configured in a complex and fluid manner (Olajubu 2004:42). 3 Oyĕwùmí is criticised also on theoretical and ideological grounds by Olupona (2002), Bakare-Yusuf (2003a) Peel (2002) and Olajubu (2004, 2003) among others. 2 However, as postcolonial feminist scholarship has been gaining momentum,4 more scholars from different parts of the world have been making the point that gender (as a system based on a binary and hierarchical division between man and woman) is a concept that is not indigenous to their cultures and was imposed in their societies through Western colonial rule. It is for example argued that before colonisation, all Native American societies acknowledged three to five genders (see Jacobs, S. Wesley, T and Lang, S. [eds.] 1997). Maria Lugones names Silberblatt (1990;1998), Dean (2001), Pozo (Pozo and Ledezma 2006), Calla and Laurie (2006), Marcos (2006) and de Ayala (2009) as feminis t scholars who show that gender is a colonial imposition in different South American societies. Also many precolonial Asian societies were characterised by gender pluralism that is not based on a binary division at all (see Wieringa 2010). The idea that gender