An African Feminist Manifesto

Support for this essay came from the Open Society Foundations Ideas Workshop.

Here, I must add that these thoughts I share here are collaborative speaking to/with foremothers, living and passed, and whose labour established the possibilities for counter-hegemonic feminisms and pockets of resistance to advance the stakes of an African feminist decolonial thought. My approach and thought specifically draw on the core areas that have driven my work and the directions of my political thought since I discovered the possibilities of a decolonial world sense. The very basic conception of decolonial feminism is built on a radical care approach to self-production and self-exploration—how we make sense of ourselves, and our relationship to our ancestors, land, and people. Nigerian gender scholar, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí’s work on Yorùbá knowledge systems insists that the modernity we have inherited is a product of history and culture, where the collision of time and space determined whose knowledge was imposed and whose knowledge was erased. The implication of this is that our modernity is hinged on coloniality that persists even after the physical signifiers of colonialism are long gone. Exploring the historical processes behind colonization and white universalizing epistemologies, Jamaican writer and cultural theorist, Sylvia Wynter, reveals the central imperatives behind the invention of man, that determine which bodies are acknowledged as human with boundless possibilities for social, creative and epistemic exchanges. On the one hand, the basis of a God-given right to occupy and punish irrational godless individuals was the charge driving the logic of settler colonialism across indigenous lands from Abya Yala to continental Africa. However, when the incoherence of a rational/irrational binary became obvious, especially in the face of indigenous resistance, a state-led ‘degodding’ emerged that split the church and the state into two entities, even though religion remained a significant instrument for the institution of colonialism.

The final invention of man, Wynter contends, was motivated by a colonial difference big bang event that produced a system of signification that essentially meant the further down the brown spectrum you are, the less human you were. And so, to be human was to be white, to be brown was to be subhuman, and to be Black was to be animal—the very basis of the ideologies that drove the transatlantic slave trade and persist in the Global North framing of continental Africa till date. What emerged from this construction was the erasure and epistemic disregard of existing truths of African as well as other Black and Brown bodies and mythology of dread at anything remotely African. Therefore, the outcome of over 500 years of trans-Atlantic slavery, colonization, and ongoing coloniality is that we have been compelled and socialized into privileging Euro-American truths, and what we have as a result is a climate-deficient, hyper-individualistic world without empathy...