Gender Epistemologies in Africa: The Gendering of African Traditions, Spaces, Social Identities, and Institutions

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10.1057/9780230116276 - Gender Epistemologies in Africa, Oyeronke Oyewumi

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Gender Epistemologies in Africa



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Gendering Traditions, Spaces, Social Institutions, and Identities Edited by Oyèrónk Oywùmí



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.



All rights reserved.



For Leymah Gbowee Whose inspirational leadership reminds us that to act is to pray.




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

63

85

Engendering Critical Spatial Literacy: Migrant Asante Women and the Politics of Urban Space Epifania Amoo-Adare

101

Outsiders Within: Experiences of Women Academics in Kenya Njoki M. Kamau

119



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

155

179

NAKABUMBA: God Creates Humanity as a Potter Creates a Pot Christine Saidi

199

Beyond Gendercentric Models: Restoring Motherhood to Yorùbá Discourses of Art and Aesthetics Oyèrónk" Oy&wùmí

223

Index

239



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.



AC K NOW L E DGM E N T S

x

Acknowledgments


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.


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



CON T R I BU TOR S

xii

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).



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,



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



Gendering


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



Gendering


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.



Gendering




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



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



Decolonizing the Quotidian


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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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.



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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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



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





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



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:


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



The Language of Translation

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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



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





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



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





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





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



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.





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.







T WO

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



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 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



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





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





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?



236


237

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.



Conclusion: Anonymous Is Mother


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.



238

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



I N DE X

Index

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



240

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

241

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



Index

Index

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



242

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

243

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



Index

Index

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



244

Gender Epistemologies in Africa: The Gendering of African Traditions, Spaces, Social Identities, and Institutions

Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism (Thinking Gender)

Britain in Africa (African Arguments)

Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self

Social Protection in Africa

Gender, Land, and Livelihoods in East Africa

Institutions and Social Conflict (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions)

Spaces of Social Exclusion

Social Identities in Revolutionary Russia

Gender and Social Psychology

Africa After Gender?

Talk in Action: Interactions, Identities, and Institutions (Language in Society)

City Comp: Identities, Spaces, Practices

Social Causes of Psychological Distress (Social Institutions and Social Change)

Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance

Total Institutions and Reinvented Identities (Identity Studies in the Social Sciences)

Gender Epistemologies and Eurasian Borderlands (Comparative Feminist Studies)

Self, Identity, and Social Institutions

Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions)

The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora

African Intellectuals: Rethinking Politics, Language, Gender and Development (Africa in the New Millennium)

Social Identities: Multidisciplinary Approachs

African Pastoralism: Conflict, Institutions and Government

Intellectuals and African Development: Pretension and Resistance in African Politics (Africa in the New Millennium)

Handbook of Religion and Social Institutions

Spaces, Objects and Identities in Early Modern Italian Medicine

Religion Crossing Boundaries: Transnational Religious and Social Dynamics in Africa and the New African Diaspora

Gender and Social Equity in Primary Education

Sacred Spaces and Religious Traditions in Oriente Cuba

Morality, Hope and Grief: Anthropologies of AIDS in Africa (Epistemologies of Healing)

Gender Epistemologies in Africa: The Gendering of African Traditions, Spaces, Social Identities, and Institutions

Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism (Thinking Gender)

Britain in Africa (African Arguments)

Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self

Social Protection in Africa

Gender, Land, and Livelihoods in East Africa

Institutions and Social Conflict (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions)

Spaces of Social Exclusion

Social Identities in Revolutionary Russia

Gender and Social Psychology

Africa After Gender?

Talk in Action: Interactions, Identities, and Institutions (Language in Society)

City Comp: Identities, Spaces, Practices

Social Causes of Psychological Distress (Social Institutions and Social Change)

Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance

Total Institutions and Reinvented Identities (Identity Studies in the Social Sciences)

Gender Epistemologies and Eurasian Borderlands (Comparative Feminist Studies)

Self, Identity, and Social Institutions

Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions)

The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora

African Intellectuals: Rethinking Politics, Language, Gender and Development (Africa in the New Millennium)

Social Identities: Multidisciplinary Approachs

African Pastoralism: Conflict, Institutions and Government

Intellectuals and African Development: Pretension and Resistance in African Politics (Africa in the New Millennium)

Handbook of Religion and Social Institutions

Spaces, Objects and Identities in Early Modern Italian Medicine

Religion Crossing Boundaries: Transnational Religious and Social Dynamics in Africa and the New African Diaspora

Gender and Social Equity in Primary Education

Sacred Spaces and Religious Traditions in Oriente Cuba

Morality, Hope and Grief: Anthropologies of AIDS in Africa (Epistemologies of Healing)

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