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.
Akan
African Diaspora Culture in the Americas
African History 360CommentCharles Ball (1781? – 1840s?) was born on a tobacco plantation in Maryland, eventually purchasing his legal freedom and serving as a naval officer in the war of 1812. Ball spent much of his live laboring and being sold and resold—and captured and re-enslaved—on plantations in South Carolina and Georgia, before resigning himself to Pennsylvania to escape recapture. While in South Carolina, Charles witnessed and participated in a funerary ritual brought from Africa. Since almost all enslaved Africans took death and funerary rites seriously, dedicating funds toward and undertaking such rites as community affairs, the funerary ritual Charles observed has therefore wider significance for understanding the continuity and transformation of African cultures in the Americas.