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.

When putting these in context, it underscores that the very attack on the word ‘decolonization’ is reinforcing subhuman imaginaries and binding our bodies into ideological containment that is eerily similar to slave ships. Yet I am not lost on the irony that a white South African is one of the most intentionally algorithmically prominent voices in the battle against decolonization. My discussion in this article begins by exploring what a decolonial approach to gender and sexuality can look like in a world prioritizing singular truths, and finally, I explore a decolonial feminist approach to the digital and the very real effects of what Cognitive scientist and AI accountability activist, Abeba Birhane, amongst others have referred to as practices of today’s tech giants that mirror historical colonial exploitation of territories and resources.

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí offers a central argument in response to contemporary gender revolutions—Africans do not need to invent anything. Centring her deductions on the evidence within Oyo-Yorùbá that point to an inherent deference to seniority rather than gender and matrifocal namings of self and others ( ọmọ-ìyá), Oyěwùmí argues for a need to turn to African cultural epistemologies as extant truths that break Euro-American feminist epistemologies. Essentially, Western feminist thought deeply centres on a rigid, universal idea of gender as the dominant system of classification based on sexual differences, and the meanings and roles assigned to one and the other. With Oyo-Yorùbá culture, Oyěwùmí draws on the evidence in the language and the structure of social organizing to make the overarching statement: ‘Yorùbá don’t do gender.’ In primary school, we were often taught that the nuclear family is the smallest and most basic unit of the family. The nuclear family is that enclosed structure from which our understanding of political and moral agency is distilled: The man (the leader), the woman/wife/mother (the subjugated embodiment of reproductive and domestic labour, whom Oyěwùmí argues cannot be read independently of these mutually constituted labels), the children (boy and girl who grow up into a structure of gender sameness where the boy becomes the man and the girl becomes either the reproduced woman/wife/mother or becomes dissatisfied and agitated with this structure).

Oyěwùmí’s central argument is that the feminist figure that emerges from the dissatisfaction cannot see beyond the family as the ‘everything’ of her oppression, and because of that, she cannot see race or class as these exist beyond the realms of this structure. Therefore, the hyper-nuclear Eurocentric foundations of Western feminist thought alongside white colonizer logic disregard structures of many African societies, including what she describes as fluid, situationally-contingent relations that have little to do with human bodies or sexual differences; where a biological woman can be ọkọ to an in-marrying biological woman or a biological man can be ìyàwó to his deity, and where everyone’s pronouns are inherently non-binary: ‘òun’, ‘wọn’, ‘iwọ’ etc. I find Oyěwùmí’s arguments very subversive, especially for the alternative imagining that they offer us to dismantle the deeply rooted Eurocentric points of view and the NGO-developmental narratives claiming to transform Africa’s gender regression.

Yet I would argue that while some geographies of genderlessness or more appropriately gender fluidity are evident in the very convincing instances that Oyěwùmí centres, in conversation with Nigerian anthropologist, Ifi Amadiume and Ghanaian academic, Kwesi Yankah, there was nonetheless an overarching phallus signification, in the Jacques Lacanian sense. The concept of a body with a phallus was a privileged signifier that stabilized discourse within a Yorùbá context where the body without the phallus was perceived as not whole—the only marginally stabilizing factors for women being class and seniority. In the specific context of my paternal family in Esa-Oke, in-marrying wives were called ‘eru‘, meaning slaves, lending insights into traditions of rigid patriarchal dominance After years of silencing and within the tensions and limits of wifehood, oral traditions passed through generations of wives reveal that a kitchen performance called eré obìnrin-ilé began that gradually refuted the subject-object relations of the Faniyi men and their wives, beginning a hundred years ago and continuing till date. Using music and performance as channels of economic empowerment, radical care, and joy, they refused to negotiate their presence but insisted on it and dictated how they were remembered. To be part of that legacy of women refusing ‘subhumaness’ makes me proud beyond measure, and makes me recall the quote, ‘If they tell you, you are too feminist, show them who your mothers were.’ Othering at the level of language inevitably leads to othering at a deeper emotional level, and while Yorùbás might not do gender insofar as situationally contingent references and non-gendered pronouns, Yorùbá did gender in its positioning ọkọ as superior to ìyàwó, where even female ọkọ is superior to female ìyàwó, and reinforced the idea of woman as lacking or incomplete compared to man. What made Yorùbá the hyper-gendered culture and language it is today is expressed in Oyěwùmí’s arguments: coloniality. The imposition of Victorian patriarchy in a system where women nonetheless found visible spaces to create alternative conceptions of self despite the privilege and authority assigned to men, meant that these alternative geographies were catastrophically disrupted. Men were assigned apical privilege even though they were read as animals, thus effectively removing African women from the political category of humanness and womanhood. It is at this intersection that African feminist and literary scholar, Molara Ogundipe, would theorize the mountains inhibiting women in Africa as colonial oppression, traditional/cultural oppression, backwardness, men, colour/race, and herself. On the notion of sexuality, she tacitly wrote: ‘Africa does not know its sexuality.’