The modern understanding of knowledge evolution in the world has no doubt been dominated by what Oyeronke Oyewumi describes as ‘the Euro-American cultural hegemony’. In her book; “Conceptualizing gender: the Eurocentric foundations of feminist concepts and the challenge of African epistemologies,” Oyewumi asserts that knowledge proliferation all over the world has therefore taken the shape of what is deemed appropriate or acceptable in the European and American societies. The result of this is that the Euro-American social institutions, categories and prejudices have dictated the understanding of social behavior, because they (Euro-Americans) have been presented as the acceptable source of knowledge. It’s no surprise that the male hegemonic masculinity, which Oyewumi calls the ‘male gender privilege’, that forms the core of the Euro-American social setting is upheld as the ideal in modern culture.
The discourse of human conditioning and the understanding of gender relations have therefore been influenced by the narrative that they are the Euro-Americans are the source of superior knowledge and their description of social behavior takes precedent over all human social settings around the world. For example, the concept of the nuclear family is essentially European and was virtually alien to almost all non-European societies, yet it is presented as the model for universal knowledge about gender relations. In Africa for instance, European colonization included the demonization of African norms and practices as evil and representation of European ones as just and acceptable. The understanding of gender in African therefore, came to be modelled on what gender means in the Euro-American society.
Through this carefully designed cultural ‘whitewashing’, the African concepts of gender and socialization were gradually eroded and completely set aside, and from then on, all research on gender and cultural issues in Africa was informed by Euro-American ‘civilization’. According to Oyewumi, because the global foundations of gender knowledge have been anchored on the Euro-American experiences, this Eurocentric viewpoint must be taken under consideration when examining and studying gender relations in Africa. How Africans came to understand gender and gender relations within their surrounding was not informed by their internal social setting but rather, by the hugely Eurocentric influences proliferated from the experiences of gender evolution in Europe and America.
The feminist movement as it is understood today arose out of the challenges of male gender hegemony in Europe and American, and the desire by their women to get out of the trap of hegemonic male domination. By this, Oyewumi tries to point out the fact that whereas Africans are forced to understand feminist and gender relations from the viewpoint of its Eurocentric foundations, the challenges that gave rise to it, and ultimately came to define how it’s understood, were inherently foreign to Africa and had nothing to do with the African social setting. She (Oyewumi) therefore asserts that as Africans, much as our desire to understand feminist and gender relations in our societies cannot be separated from the western feminist undertones, we must nevertheless try to interrogate the social identities, intentions, and concerns the Euro-Americans in order to understand why they have defined for us the concept of feminism and gender the way they have.
Feminism evolved from the struggle by Euro-American women to rise up against the male hegemony by shining a light on the challenges that women were subjected to as a result of this hegemony, and highlight those challenges not as private troubles of women (as had been the narrative by men) but rather as issues of general public concern. The feminist movement has since succeeded in showing how what was perceived as private personal troubles of women were in fact issues that affected the public as a whole and were as a result of institutional and structural-social gender inequalities. Oyewumi correctly observes that the experiences of Euro-American women and their struggle to transform their societies provided a foundation upon which the theoretical and conceptual concerns and questions of global gender research have been anchored.
Oyewumi further observes that feminist research uses gender to explain the oppression and subordination of women all over the world, with the general assumption that what defines ‘women’ and their subordination was the same all over world. Yet, as Oyewumi rightly points out, gender is a social and cultural construct, and therefore the definition of ‘the woman’ cannot be universal but rather distinct in every society, and so are the other gender aspects such as inequality, oppression, subordination among others. For example, the Eurocentric concept of gender is anchored exclusively on the experiences of white women, which is devoid of the experiences of women from racial minorities within the American society itself. The Eurocentric feminist concept of gender excludes African American women, whose gender struggles could not be accurately presented without considering class and race relations.
The contradictions of ‘white-labeling’ women subordination are exposed throughout the history of colonization, where the Eurocentric gender narrative is equivocally silent on the struggles, oppression and violations on non-white women, even within the Euro-American societies themselves. Author Sanya Osha demonstrates these contradictions in her book collection “African Feminisms”, where she illustrates for example that while Euro-America perpetrated the narrative of liberating women from patriarchal chains and male oppression, the sexuality and nakedness of a black African woman (Sarah Baartman) who was put on display in European cities so as to show her large hips to the Europeans, still received no condemnation at all. Eurocentric feminism is exposed in its ambiguous silence in the face of colonial violence against women who were not white. Therefore as Sanya Osha puts it, this puts into contention the narrative of the universality of Eurocentric feminism.
The highly Eurocentric definition of gender and feminism, according to Sanya Osha, still struggles to fully and accurately represent the black (and other non-white) subjects in its philosophy and anthropology discourses, and how the African (non-white) women are contextualized. On this contradictions, Desree Lewis, in her essay “Discursive challenges of African feminisms”, discusses the feminist demands which she says have been heavily co-opted by neo-liberalism. She argues that because of globalization, the African context of feminism has been forced to shift to fit into the Eurocentric narrative, and in the process, the true African understanding of feminism has been hugely suppressed in gender research. Lewis emphasizes the need to re-evaluate the African viewpoint on what gender and feminism rally means to Africans and their culture because the western feminism is contrastingly different from the African feminism. She (Desree Lewis) argues that the post-colonial dominance of the western ideals on the gender and feminist knowledge space has become increasingly evident as a new form of injustice, by forcing Africans to understand and conceptualize feminism and gender with the same lenses as the euro-Americans.
It is therefore important to acknowledge the differences among women’s experiences so as to accurately theorize the various forms of their oppression, specifically with regards to race and class inequalities, not only in Anglo-American society, but also in Africa. Additionally, it must be pointed out that other regions outside the Euro-American society have other contributing experiences that have over time compounded their understanding of gender, including imperialism and colonialism as key dividing factors at national and global stages, which further illustrates that it’s impractical to separate gender from the other social and contextual hierarchies. For that reason therefore, Oyewumi argues that gender in Africa cannot be wholesomely defined from the Eurocentric perspective. She points out for example that Eurocentric feminist theory and it’s articulation of feminist values is founded on the basis of the nuclear family (a western concept), despite the fact that feminism has become a globalized concept.
The concept of the nuclear family is not universal but specific to Euro-Americans, and largely remains alien to Africa despite its widespread proliferation by colonialists and their neo-colonial agents, international agencies, feminist organizations and other non-government organizations. To the Euro-American concept, feminism can only be achieved within the nuclear family setting with clearly defined gender roles; a husband being the family head and breadwinner, and the wife being the bearer, carer and nurturer of the children. With this conceptualization, Euro-American feminism effectively defined the woman interchangeably as a ‘wife’, with every other defining factor becoming secondary to family identifiers. In many African societies, such as the Dahomey kingdom, women had other identifying roles beyond the ‘wife’ configuration, they could take on responsibilities in the military, in politics, in commerce and economics and in decision making, therefore their definition of gender or feminism is at odds with the nuclear family definition which literally reduces a woman to being a wife.
Pinkie Mekgwe, in her essay ‘Theorizing African feminism: the colonial question”, introduces the notion that since the last decade of the 20th century, the literal world has come to realize and acknowledge the existence of other forms of feminism which have been marginalized and for a long time remained unrepresented in the ‘mainstream’ Eurocentric feminism. She exposes the works of authors such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres, who in their seminal work; “Third world women and the politics of feminism”, try to define and detail ‘other’ or ‘emerging’ feminisms away from the dominant Eurocentric feminism canon. Mohanty queries the problematic attempts to define and contextualize feminism without considering the cross-cultural aspects of western values vis-à-vis African values, and how the western theories of feminism can apply to the third world women.
Mohanty also argues that the Eurocentric theories of feminism, by displacing the other forms of feminism, continue to perpetuate the narrative that the other (non-white) forms of feminism in the ‘third world’ are politically inferior and largely immaterial. According to Mohanty, the narrative universal feminism concerns is an attempt to cover up the obviously biased impositions of Eurocentric feminism on the rest of the world. And as has been observed by Oyewumi, trying to universalize feminism has proven to be problematic, because it introduces a new and alien concept of sisterhood to non-white audiences. The ‘sisterhood’ concept, according to Oyewumi, is only ascribed to white culture and is essentially foreign of alien to other cultures such as African and African-American, which emphasize motherhood rather than sisterhood. The Eurocentric experience of feminism, being predominantly white, often minimizes the importance of racial difference, therefore it’s necessary to develop a new feminism perspective based on Black experience which would accurately represent the cultural realities of Black women.
The cultural, racial and power differences between white and non-white (African) and the need to redefine feminism in a way that provides relevance to African context, remain very important in research about African feminism theory, and is reflected in the various different debates about African feminism. Feminism is defined in the African context to put emphasis on female cooperation and autonomy, on nature rather than culture, on the significance of children, as well as multifaceted mothering and kinship. This definition by Filomina Chioma Steady seems to suggest that African feminist literature is concerned with the liberty of all African people, since the challenges of exclusion, of exploitation, segregation and oppression were not exclusive to women, but all African peoples. By acknowledging this cross-gender aspects, African feminism, though anchored on Eurocentric feminism, endeavors to identify with the challenges that are common with the African situation.
In conclusion, various researchers have undertaken to study feminism as a global phenomenon and how it relates to the African situation. In an almost unanimous stance, all research on feminism in Africa has concluded that global feminism as proliferated with its Eurocentric ideals of universality, nuclear family unit and sisterhood, almost certainly does not align with the African situation. Whereas global feminism whose Euro-American roots were founded exclusively on the challenges faced by white women, the African situation is different since their challenges were almost the same challenges faced by society as a whole in the face of colonial domination, exploitation and oppression. Therefore, in a bid to develop relevant research on feminism in Africa, various authors have tried to redefine it within the context of the African situation, with the acknowledgement that the universal narrative of global feminism which is heavily biased towards Euro-American white women, does not accurately describe feminism and gender in Africa.
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