My ɛna/awo (mother) taught me about the category of being called “woman.” She did so without talking about it. I watched her and mothers like her. And so by the time I came to this country I had an evolving sense of what we might call Africana womanhood, shaped by her and Maroon Jamaica, as she fought a fight between self-understanding and the interpolated category she ought to embrace as if it were her own. I am not sure she won. But I am sure she finds bemusing all this talk about “woman” when all I have known of mother was living and doing on her terms.
Any talk of womanhood, especially in grammatically gendered (neo)European languages, puts us into a colosseum of “Western” notions of gender and fe/male, where we lose because the fight is on their terrain, using their terms as faux weapons. Oyèrónké Oyèwùmí has successfully argued the categories of “gender” and “woman” are not cross-culturally inherent in social relations, and remarking how these social construct entering the English language in the late 19th and early 20th century have been used uncritically.[1] In the context of Oyèwùmí’s Yorùbá culture, the category of “woman,” as biologically determined, did not exist until British colonial rule. The Yorùbá language, like the Akan language of Ghana which I speak, are gender-neutral. They do not grammatically declare gender. Cultural context does.
The challenge for the African world is that European colonialism was global, and no part of the African world remained untouched by this inquisition. Discussions around womanhood for African women and women of African ancestry will, therefore, always confront their de-contextualized existence and the decontextualized knowledge produced about them. Viewed from this perspective, the more we talk and act in English, or French, or another decontextualizing language, about what it means to an African(a) woman the more we remain in the colosseum, fighting ourselves over which category, which borrowed imagination is best.
If we are open to leaving assured death in the colosseum, we have other ways of organizing social relations within communities, ways of understanding ourselves, ways of fighting against rather than on the terms set before us. An enslaved African named Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, from the city of Djugu in northwest Benin, wrote, “Great respect is paid to the aged; they never use the prefix mister or mistress, but always some endearing term, such as, when speaking to an aged person, they say Father or Mother, and an equal, they call brother or sister.” Mahommah was attentive to the distinct and overlapping roles performed by a range of individuals—father, mother, children, brother, sister, elder—but these were not “gendered,” hence, his shrewd rejection of “mister or mistress” and his preference for more “endearing term[s].”[2]
Identity, sexuality, gender, life, and the like are culturally constructed, themselves shaped intimately by specific ecological, linguistic, and historical contexts. Though we have human bodies, what it means to be a “woman/man,” “wife/husband,” “mother/father,” or “female/male” is never nor solely a function of biology. Their meanings remain culturally-coded, registering with speakers and thinkers of a culture. The problem, then, is translation, more precisely, translating culture. Indeed, ideas of gender and woman are not cross-culturally valid, as Mahommah has shown, and these constructs have used without much concern for how identity and belonging were based in African world communities less on biology and sexual organs (or feelings) than on having successfully completed specific rites of human development.[3] For African(a) womanhood, for peoples of the African world no less, motherhood remains the most critical of rites and thus a foundational basis for the placeholder, “womanhood.”
All women have a womb, but the origin of the English term woman is not from womb (or woe) + man. (Woman is a compound of wif + man, with the sense of “woman/female human being.”) Most in the category of women use their womb and become mothers; a few do not, while an even lesser cannot. But even the latter, especially in African world contexts, can still become mothers. Mothering, or what my colleague calls mothernity, seems the soundest basis for the broader placeholder, African(s) womanhood. And I see this placeholder as bridge to terms and knowledges that do not alienate, that do not evict African(a) women like my mother from their self-understanding. I also see that basis and this bridge as a launchpad in the fight against intersexuality and its political implications. While an individual’s experience is private—removed from inspection—it is also not and cannot be fully representative, for lived experience and personal history is particular, providing no unique source of revelation.
Intersectionality proposes a particular, subjective position as “black women” or as women’s way of knowing, which is to say (falsely) only such women can understand the category of women to which they belong. This core tenet of intersectionality is not an argument about (Africana) women’s experiences but rather an ideological position in search of theoretical justification. Instead of fulfilling the promise of redressing the limits of “race” and “gender,” the vogue and academic product called intersectionality fractures race and gender identities, creating yet other categories that explains extraordinarily little in real, practical ways. Indeed, it forces African(a) women to choose among these metastasizing categories, but sets up antagonisms with African(a) men—recalled the Why Black Men and Women Vote So Differently debacle—reducing potentialities for effective mothering, for stable families, for healthy communities, for any collectivist victory.[4]
Sources
[1] See Oyèrónkẹ Oyèwùmí, ed., Gender Epistemologies in Africa: Gendering Traditions, Spaces, Social Institutions, and Identities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), idem, ed., African Gender Studies: A Reader (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), idem, ed., African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2003), idem, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
[2] Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, Biography of Mahommah G. Baquaqua, a Native of Zoogoo… (Detroit: Geo. E. Pomeroy & Co., 1854), 17-18.
[3] On the “gender” debate in African and diaspora studies, see, for instance, Oyèwùmí, ed., Gender Epistemologies in Africa; idem, The Invention of Women; James Lorand Matory, Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
[4] https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/11/why-black-men-and-women-vote-so-differently/617134/